“Very well, Major. If you insist.”
The elevator went up the last ten feet, and Ripley stepped onto the steel mesh catwalk. The door to the empty clean room was open, but the rocket’s payload hatch was closed, and two technicians were finishing with the last flush fasteners.
“I want to see inside.”
“If you insist,” Kimura said. The technicians looked over their shoulders. “But since you are not clean, we will have to return the satellite to the payload building where it will be disassembled and sterilized. Since that procedure will take at least thirty days, you and your team will be returned home. A new team would be requested in that case. One that would work with us, not against us.”
Ripley weighed his options. He wasn’t quite so sure of what he’d seen after all. And their final inspection of the satellite in the clean room had turned up no anomalies. There was nothing to be worried about. Yet he could not shake the feeling of the unease.
“Major?” Kimura prompted.
“You have a point. I’ll meet you at launch control.” Ripley stepped back aboard the elevator.
“Very well.”
The rocket was being cleared, stage by stage, from the top down for launch. Once the final preparations were completed and each system signed for, the countdown clock would start at T-minus forty-eight hours. From this point he and his Tiger team would actually have very little to do. They would remain as observers. Theoretically they would answer questions if some critical problem were to arise for which the Japanese had little or no experience. It was unlikely, but possible.
At the bottom, he walked across the launch platform toward the ramp to ground level where a dozen vehicles were parked. At one point he stopped and looked back up the wall of the rocket rising above him. He wasn’t sure what he had seen in the payload compartment, but he was certain of one thing at least. What he did catch a glimpse of was definitely not gold foil. The outer skin of the satellite they had checked in the clean room was gold. The one in the rocket was black. He took off his paper head cover and went to his car.
McGarvey hadn’t known what he was going to accomplish by coming out here this morning. But looking back across the parking lot at the shattered front of the old Kmart store as the first of the tagged and bagged bodies were being wheeled out, he figured his mission had been a total failure. He’d wanted to strike back at the monsters who had tried to hurt his family and who had killed his friends, but he’d needed information more than revenge. As it stood now, he had neither.
Fred Rudolph broke away from a group of reporters and television people he’d been talking to and came over to where McGarvey leaned against a Maryland Highway Patrol cruiser smoking a cigaretee.
“Here we are again,” he said sharply, obviously having trouble keeping his anger and disgust in check. “Four more bodies, no answers.” He glanced toward the ambulances. “You knew they were here and you ordered your people to keep their mouths shut. Cute.”
“I thought I could take at least one of them alive,” McGarvey said. It was a lie, but it was better for Rudolph just now than the truth.
“What the hell am I supposed to do with a statement like that? From a high-ranking officer of the Central Intelligence Agency? Is that how our government is supposed to conduct business? I thought that’s what we hated about the Nazis and the Soviets.”
“I didn’t have much of a choice, Fred.”
“Yes, you did,” Rudolph shouted. “You find out about a crime, you call the cops. That’s how it works.”
“Tell that to the families in Georgetown, and to the families of my people at Cropley,” McGarvey shot back. He was tired and fed up with himself. It was hard to keep on track. A part of him wanted to run now, find a safe hole in which to crawl and pull the dirt over his head. You’re just like a dog, Katy had once told him. When you get hurt you don’t want anyone tending to your wounds. You just want to crawl under a porch somewhere and be left alone. But it wasn’t over yet. The hard parts were yet to come. He was beginning to seriously doubt if he was up to the challenge. Run, something inside his head nagged. Run. Run.
Rudolph looked over to one of the Maryland Highway Patrol cruisers where Sandy Patterson was sitting in the back. “What about her?”
“She wants a lawyer, but she says she’ll cooperate,” McGarvey said. He told Rudolph what she had done this evening.
“The odds were against her, so she switched sides when she figured it would do her the most good.” Rudolph shrugged.
“There were a couple of times when she could have had me. They would have gotten away clean by the time Otto blew the whistle. She realized that she was in way over her head, and she wanted out.”
“You have to admire her sense of timing.”
“I think it’s more complicated than that,” McGarvey said. “Billionaires have a way of hypnotizing people. And Lee had her, just like he has half of Washington.”
“Did she make the connection?”
“She doesn’t know the specifics. Just that Lee has been working on some project for at least five years, which includes campaign funding for the White House and a bunch of congressmen. But whatever he’s up to is supposed to happen very soon.”
“Is that why they came after you?”
“She didn’t know. Except that Tony Croft and I were their priority targets.”
“Croft, because he knew too much, and you, because you were in a position to learn too much,” Rudolph said. “But what? And what now?”
“I’m going to continue doing what they wanted to stop me from doing.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
“I don’t have anything concrete to tell you—”
“Bullshit,” Rudolph exploded. A couple of cops nearby looked over. Rudolph lowered his voice. “You know exactly what’s going on, goddammit.” He was pissed off. “I’m in this investigation right up to my neck, and so far everything leads back to the White House. Am I wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t give me that, McGarvey. I’ve stuck my neck way out on this one, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to end up a scapegoat.” McGarvey didn’t look away. “Give me something. Anything.”
“It goes to the President.”
“Are you telling me that the President of the United States is a traitor? That he’s sold us out to Joseph Lee and the Japanese for money, or for whatever reason? Because if that’s what you really think is going on and you can prove that Lindsay was behind the Georgetown bombing and the attack on you and your family, then I quit. I’ll just get out of the Bureau and say the hell with everything.” Rudolph’s lips compressed as if he wanted to stop himself from going on. But he couldn’t help himself. “We’ve had some crooks occupying the Oval Office. But no one ever believed that they loved themselves more than they loved the country. Egotists, cocksmen, liars, bastards, but not traitors.” He shook his head and gave McGarvey a bleak look. “I refuse to believe it.”
“They’re just about finished buttoning up,” Ripley said in the gallery above launch control. The center was busy and would remain that way until launch.
“Did you see Kimura?” Maggie asked. They were keeping their voices conversational so they would not attract undue attention.
“Yeah, he was there. He all but kicked me out.”
“Why?”
“The elevator locked out just below the clean room. Kimura claimed it was because I hadn’t gone through sterile procedures. But that was a crock of shit. He could see I had done it.”
They glanced at the status boards. The clock, stopped at 48:00:00, would begin to count down as soon as Kimura acknowledged that the satellite was secured in the rocket.