“You know this for a fact?” the President asked.
McGarvey nodded. “Yes, sir. NSA monitored some of his telephone conversations with MITI in Tokyo.”
“CNN is doing a piece on the launch right now,” Secor said indicating the television. An aerial view of the space launch facility could have been taken from above Kennedy Space Center. Tanegashima was a miniature version of the Cape.
“Our satellite pictures are better,” McGarvey said.
“I’m sure they are,” the President said. “But I wasn’t aware that we were monitoring them so closely.”
“You need hard intelligence, Mr. President. Not guesswork. Especially with what’s going on over there right now.”
“Harold, could you leave us alone for a few minutes? There’s something I’d like to say to Mr. McGarvey in private.”
Secor gave the President a look of surprise, but then left the room, closing the door softly.
The President touched a button on his telephone console, then looked at McGarvey standing in front of his desk like a principal might look at a student in trouble.
“Okay, mister. We’re alone, and I’ve switched off the digital recorder. Obviously you have something to say to me. Well, now’s your chance.” The President sat back in his leather chair.
“I don’t have everything yet, but I do have enough to know that at the very least you are a liar and a fool. At worst you’re a traitor.” McGarvey had psyched himself up for this moment, but now he wasn’t so sure he was doing the right thing. But Lindsay reacted about the way McGarvey thought he would.
“You can’t talk to me that way, McGarvey. Not even in private.”
“I sincerely wish I didn’t have to, sir. But a lot of very good people are dead either because of you directly, or because you allowed your staff to do it for you. And the hell of it is, when the heat was turned up, you let your friends like Tony Croft take the fall for you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the President said angrily. His face was red.
“Croft was in direct contact with Joseph Lee not only to accept payments to your campaign fund, but to pass along information which made its way to the Japanese government.”
“No secrets were passed.”
“That’s up to a congressional review committee to decide, Mr. President. And there will be an investigation when I turn over what I know. But besides trading information for cash, and allowing Croft to kill himself for your sake, why come after me and my family?”
“I had nothing to do with any of that,” Lindsay said shaking his head. Most of his anger had dissipated. He seemed numb. “I swear to you.”
“Are you still holding a grudge against me after all these years?”
A puzzled look came over the President. “What are you talking about?”
“Santiago,” McGarvey said. “You were on the Senate watchdog committee that withdrew authorization for my assignment to kill General Paolo. Do you remember that?”
“I remember serving on the Senate Subcommittee on Central Intelligence. But no specific incident.”
“I have the file, Mr. President. You were the senator who was supposed to inform the Agency about the decision to pull me out. But you waited until you knew it was too late for me. Why?”
The President shook his head again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“How about New Year’s Day, nineteen seventy? Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie.”
The President’s jaw tightened.
“I probably saved your life, Mr. President, but I embarrassed you in front of your friends. Made you look like a fool.”
“What’s your point?”
Out of the corner of his eye McGarvey noticed that CNN was displaying a cutaway model of a launchpad gantry at Tanegashima.
“The Japanese have no love for me, but Lee had no reason to order my assassination simply because I had been appointed to head the Directorate of Operations.”
“Do you honestly think that I ordered your death because of some incident that supposedly happened thirty years ago?”
“I think that in discussions with your staff about Joseph Lee and what you and he were doing for each other, the fact that he was connected with the Japanese government, and not Taiwan, came up. As did anything that could possibly hurt your arrangement, such as my appointment.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Not on the surface. But you knew from past experience all about me, and Lee was told. Your people may even have told him about Berlin and Santiago, and he made the decision on his own to have me killed. Maybe he was concerned that if I started snooping around as DDO, I might uncover your real connection with him. And his actual agenda.”
McGarvey glanced again at the television screen. The various parts of the launch gantry were being labeled and their functions explained. He could just make out the newsman’s words.
“What do you think that agenda is?”
A large, enclosed elevator ran up the outside of the gantry to a sealed chamber at the top, opposite the rocket’s payload section. As the announcer continued to talk a label appeared beside the chamber: The White House.
The bottom dropped out from beneath McGarvey. He turned back to the President and looked at the man in amazement. Lindsay was not a traitor, McGarvey had been wrong about that part. But the President had been manipulated, as had the twenty or thirty senators and congressmen who Joseph Lee had bought. They had given him exactly what he had wanted to buy when he came to Washington. The incredible part of the entire affair was that it was completely out in the open. It had been from the start.
McGarvey looked at the TV screen again. Japan had been awarded a bigger slice of the international space station than it had been previously awarded at the behest of Lindsay and a group of senators and congressmen paid for by Lee. This, despite the fact Japan’s economy was nearly in shambles and building and launching the bigger module was straining their financial abilities to the breaking point.
Was it simply for a space station module? McGarvey didn’t think so. Whatever the Japanese were about to put into orbit would have nothing to do with Freedom, and Tony Croft knew or guessed something about it. According to the call girl he’d been sleeping with, his biggest worry was the white house. But not the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was worried about the one at Tanegashima. And whatever the Japanese were going to launch also had something to do with North Korea’s nuclear capability and the explosion at Kimch’aek. He could think of a number of possibilities, none of them very comforting because Lee was willing not only to suborn a U.S. President, he was willing to assassinate a deputy director of CIA Operations, no matter what the cost or political fallout might be.
“I asked what you think that agenda is,” the President said.
“Mr. President, I owe you an apology, sir,” McGarvey said.
Lindsay gave him a wry smile. “Yes?”
“You’re not a traitor, sir, but your people are guilty of murder, or at least complicity to murder. A stink goes all the way back to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan. Your foreign policy is a joke. And you’ve unwittingly made a lot of questionable deals because of it.” McGarvey shook his head. “But no, Mr. President, you’re no traitor. You’re a fool.”
“You’re fired,” the President shouted, enraged. “You’re finished. If I can arrange it, and I think I can, you’re going to jail for a very long time.”