“No, sir.”
“I want his frequency monitored for the next seventy-two hours, no matter what this may look like.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re not giving up on him. Not yet.”
“Yes, sir,” Josten said.
Powers sighed deeply. He was tired. He nodded. “Thanks for coming up here, but let’s not give in so easily. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Can we do that?”
“Of course, sir,” Josten said glumly. He nodded, then turned and left the office. They watched him go. In the anteroom, Flagler settled back to his magazine.
Powers came around his desk, crossed his huge office, and from a sideboard behind a bookcase, he poured two stiff shots of brandy.
“A little water in mine, Mr. Director,” Danielle said.
Powers poured water in both and brought them back to his desk. They looked at each other as they drank. Powers put down his glass and went back behind his desk.
“I think we should call the president,” Danielle said softly.
Powers nodded. He leaned his weight into his fists, which were bunched up on the desktop. “Nicols is scheduled to transmit his first status report in an hour or so.”
“Give it up. You can’t believe he survived that.” Danielle gestured at the infrared satellite photos.
“We’ve been in this business long enough, Lawrence, to know not to jump at the obvious. This could have been a snoopy rancher straying someplace he didn’t belong. A drug runner looking for someplace to stash a future load. It would be a perfect place for a drug operation; close to our border, flat ground for a landing strip, the protection of the mountains, almost no population center anywhere nearby.”
“You’re clutching at straws, if you permit me to say so.”
Powers thrust his hands into his pockets, as if the action would stay him from picking up the telephone. The pieces were beginning to fall into some kind of a pattern, though he still could not recognize it. This had the earmarks of a Baranov operation. That much he did recognize. It had begun last October with the hijacking of the Aeromexico flight out of Miami and the assassination of Jules and Asher on the taxiway at Havana. They had been on their way into place in Mexico, and it was very possible they would have uncovered the incoming Soviet construction equipment and missile-base supplies, which would have alerted us to the situation when there could have been time for a political solution. Baranov had known. He was smart. And he was back in Mexico. Powers could feel the man’s presence as a powerful, electromagnetic force that caused his hair to stand on end.
“We’re not going to have time to send another man down there,” Danielle was saying. “And this time is different from Cuba. Back then we had time for a blockade. This time all six of their installations are nearly operational.”
“I should have seen it,” Powers mumbled, his mind still on Baranov, the charmer, Baranov, the magic man, the Houdini.
“You’re talking about Jules and Asher last year? We’ve gone over it before, but I just don’t see the connection. It’s too farfetched. He’d have to have someone here. Someone either within the agency or certainly here in Washington with top-level sources.” Danielle had said it all before. “Trotter found nothing in the hijacking to suggest a larger plan. And he’s a damned good man. One of the best. Something would have shown up. We would have gotten at least a glimmer in Mexico City.”
That in itself was the most surprising, Powers thought. An operation this big would have had some fallout somewhere. Too many people would have to be involved for no leaks to occur. But where were they? No one had yet invented an airtight operation. But there’d been nothing. Not so much as a hint except for Jules and Asher. And except for the fact that eighteen months ago Baranov had allowed himself to be seen. Just once, in public. And Powers thought of it as “allowed” because Baranov never made mistakes. He was incapable of that kind of error. No, something else was missing. Powers could feel it. The battle was mounting, but he still had no idea what the final weapons might be, or even where the battlefield would be located except that an ugly dark cloud seemed to be rising in the south. Christ, Baranov had never, not ever, been as obvious as he was being now. There was more. But what did he want?
“Donald?” Danielle said gently.
Powers looked up and nodded. “I’ll see the president first thing in the morning. I want to get past Nicols’s broadcast schedule and then I want to see what the KH-10 picks up at dawn before I rush off half-cocked.”
“We know what will show up.”
“Yes, we do, Lawrence. And I’m afraid it’s going to get a lot worse than even we can imagine.”
21
Washington seemed empty and somehow very dangerous now to McGarvey. Dangerous for himself, dangerous for his ex-wife and daughter, dangerous in fact for anyone connected with this business. It was midafternoon by the time he arrived, rented a car at National Airport, and then fetched his few things from the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel in the lee of Yarnell’s office building. Driving back across the river he could see the Capitol on the hill in his rearview mirror. The buildings, he thought, were fine and sturdy, but the institution — despite the fact it had survived for more than two hundred years — was in fact nearly as fragile as its weakest link. The thought gave him very little confidence about what might be coming. But, he tried to console himself, we had survived the Kennedy years, the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban missile crisis; we’d even survived Nixon’s downfall.
He checked into the huge Marriott Hotel directly across from the Pentagon, where he took a shower, changed his clothes, and had a quick meal in the dining room. He kept seeing Owens’s palsied, thin hands, kept hearing the old man’s voice, kept smelling the rising sea wind; and finally he could see clearly in his mind’s eye the flames and sparks rising into the night sky.
Plónski and Owens were dead. Who would be next? And why? There was someone else involved here in Washington other than Yarnell. McGarvey could feel it. A sixth sense, a premonition, whatever.
The night was dark. A chill rain was falling. He had taken a taxi down to Arlington and had walked from St. Mary’s Academy in Monticello Park, watching over his shoulder, making absolutely certain that he was not being tailed. Since Long Island he had become very jumpy. There was absolutely no pedestrian traffic tonight on these streets which made him somewhat conspicuous. But so, too, would be a follower.
Reaching a curved avenue in Braddock Heights, he stayed well away from the streetlights, keeping as far into the shadows of the tall shrubberies and thick trees as possible. A car came up the street and turned into a driveway halfway up the block, the garage doors opening silently. He hung back until the car was inside and the garage doors closed before he continued. He heard a television playing in one of the houses and voices raised in anger. A window was open, or perhaps a door was ajar; he couldn’t see in the darkness.
A carriage light illuminated the driveway to number 224. It was a large, two-story brick house set well back from the street, and most of the ground-floor windows were lit up. McGarvey stopped a moment to make sure he wasn’t being observed, then he crossed the lawn and pushed open a gate in the tall wooden fence, following a walkway that led around back. Once inside he felt a lot safer. It wasn’t likely he’d be seen back here. The patio was bricked, the rear door was Dutch, with curtained windows in the upper half. He pushed the bell. From inside he could hear a chime. A moment later the patio lights came on.
The door opened and Trotter stood there peering out into the night. McGarvey stepped back a little, directly under the light so that there would be absolutely no mistaking who it was. He thought about double agents, about traitors, about murders, and liars, but Trotter, he thought, was the one person in the world he felt he could trust. Completely. At times the man was a fool, but he was honest.