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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Critical Mass
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OTTO RENCKE THOUGHT IN COLORS. HE HAD BEEN DOING SO for seven years, ever since he'd stumbled across a series of tensor calculus transformations concerning bubble memories that he could not visualize.
He'd hit on the notion of thinking of his calculations in a real-world fashion, coming up at length with the question of how to explain color to a person who'd been born blind.
With mathematics, of course. And he'd devised the system, which turned out to be his bubble memory transformations. If it worked in one direction, there was no reason to think it couldn't work in the other.
Lavender, for example, was among the simplest of all. In his mind's eye he could visualize an entire multidimensional array of complex calculations that described a many-tiered and interlocking series of traps leading into the CIA's computer system.
Someone had found and negated his old screen door program, which would have allowed him fairly easy access, replacing it with a complex system of fail-safes. Enter the program from the outside, or in an improper manner, and the incoming circuit would be seized, traced to its source, and an alarm automatically issued … all without the intruder knowing he'd been discovered.
A few minutes after ten in the morning, Rencke suddenly smiled.
On his main monitor, which glowed lavender, the CIA's
logo appeared in the upper left hand corner, beneath which the agency's computer asked him:
WELCOME TO ARCHIVES
DO YOU WISH TO SEE A MENU?
He jumped up and went into the kitchen where a half-dozen cats swarmed around him, meowing insistently. “Yes, my little darlings, I hear you,” he cried. “Patience. The color is lavender and you dears must have patience.”
Opening several cans of cat food and distributing them around the kitchen floor, he took a nearly full half-gallon carton of skim milk back into the living room, drinking from it as he went, milk spilling down his front and soaking his sweatshirt. But he didn't give a damn.
“The sonsabitches thought they could fuck me,” he shouted, dancing around the lavender screen. “But they were wrong. Hoo, boy, they were wrong!”
 
McGarvey paid off his cabby and stood for a moment or two at the end of the long driveway leading up to his ex-wife's house in Chevy Chase. The country club was across the street, and in the distance he heard someone shout: “Fore!”
The house was an expensive two-story colonial set well back on a half-acre of manicured lawn. A half-dozen white pillars supported a broad overhang protecting a long front veranda.
Whatever Kathleen was or was not, he thought, starting up the walk, she was a classy woman. They'd been divorced for eight years now, after a twelve-year marriage, and it was often difficult for McGarvey to remember clearly what their life together had been like, but it had been stylish.
Stormy at the end, though, in those days when he was gone more than he was at home. She'd guessed, in an offhanded way, that he actually worked for the CIA, that he was, in her words, a macho James Bond spy. But she'd fortunately never guessed the true extent of what he did, the fact that he had killed people in the line of his assignments.
But she'd always maintained a lovely, proper home (she
had come into their marriage not wealthy, but certainly independent), and in public she presented a self-assured, dignified image. Not aloof, or snobbish, simply well put together.
It had come to a showdown: He'd had to choose either her, or his career. He'd just returned from Santiago where'd he'd taken out a Chilean general who would have probably taken over the country by coup. But his orders had been changed in midstream. The general was not to be killed. Even though the change in orders reached McGarvey too late, he'd been fired from the CIA.
On that night, not knowing what had happened, Kathleen had issued him the ultimatum. Even though her demand that he quit the business had been a moot point at that moment, he'd turned her down.
“We cannot have a marriage in which one of us dictates the other's life,” he told her.
“You're right,” she said, and he'd turned around and walked out, not even bothering to unpack his bag from his trip.
He'd been younger then, more sure of himself, more arrogant, and yet in some respects more frightened that something out of his past would be coming after him now that he no longer had the backing of the Agency.
What he hadn't counted on was the loneliness, and the missing his daughter, who when he had left was eleven years old.
Kathleen answered the door almost immediately. She was dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt, her feet bare, her hair pinned up in back, and no makeup, yet she looked like a model out of a fashion magazine. Her neck was long and delicate, her features precise yet not hard. But it was her eyes that most people noticed first. They were large beneath highly arched eyebrows, and were a startling, almost unreal shade of green.
She smiled. “Hello, Kirk. When did you get back?”
“Last night. But it was too late to call.”
She stepped back. “Come in,” she said.
He followed her through the house to the large kitchen
overlooking the swimming pool. The sliding glass doors were open, the odor of chlorine sharp.
“Sorry about the awful smell, but the poolman was just here,” she said. “Coffee?”
“Sure,” McGarvey said, sitting at the counter. “What have you heard from Liz lately?”
“Elizabeth,” Kathleen corrected automatically. “Everything is fine. She loves school, but she misses home a little. That I got between the lines.”
“Does she need anything?”
“No,” Kathleen said, bringing their coffee over. “She called Saturday. Said everyone at school was talking about the Swissair flight that was shot down …” She stopped in mid-sentence.
“Everybody in Paris was talking about it too,” McGarvey said, sidestepping Kathleen's next question. “There'll always be crazies out there.”
“The news said that the terrorist had been cornered by an unidentified American.”
“So I heard.”
Kathleen was staring at him. “Are you home for good this time?” she asked stiffly.
“Almost.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Almost?” she asked. “Almost, as in, not yet?”
“There's something I have to take care of first …”
“No,” Kathleen said simply.
“I'm sorry, Katy, but it's important.”
Kathleen reared back. “My name is Kathleen,” she screeched. “Not Katy.”
The doorbell rang.
“I want you to leave,” she said. “Now! I want you out of my house, and I don't ever want to see you back here!”
The doorbell rang again.
“All right,” she screamed. She spun on her heel and stormed back out to the stairhall.
McGarvey got up and went to the kitchen door as Kathleen opened the front door, and he just caught a glimpse of two
men dressed in light slacks and sportcoats standing on the veranda.
Kathleen said something that he couldn't quite catch.
McGarvey ducked back. They definitely were Company. The Agency would have to know that he would show up here sooner or later. They'd merely misjudged their timing, but not by very much. Whatever Murphy wanted, it had to be important to go to these lengths.
In the old days, Kathleen had always kept the car keys on a hook by the garage door. It was tidy, she said, and the keys would never be misplaced.
He hurried silently across the kitchen and into the laundry room. A set of car keys was hanging on a hook next to the door into the garage. Snatching them, he slipped into the garage and got behind the wheel of Kathleen's 460 SL. With one hand he started the car, while with the other he hit the garage door opener.
As the service door slowly rumbled open, he watched the door from the laundry room.
It was snatched open a couple of seconds later, and McGarvey got a brief glimpse of a man in a sport coat. He dropped the gearshift into drive and slammed the gas pedal to the floor, the low-slung car shooting out of the garage, just clearing the still-opening main door by no more than two inches.
At the bottom of the driveway, he turned east, the opposite direction that the plain gray government Chevrolet was facing, and was around the corner at the end of the block before the two men who'd come after him even had a chance to cross the street.
The Agency knew for sure now that he was in Washington, and that he was on the run from them. They would be pulling out all the stops to find him. Nobody said no to the general.
McGarvey parked the Mercedes near Union Station, leaving the keys under the floor mat, then walked a half-dozen blocks down to Constitution Avenue where he caught a cab,
ordering the driver to take him back to Georgetown. The police would find the car and would return it to Kathleen.
“I want you to stop at a grocery store, or corner market on the way,” McGarvey said.
“Sir?”
“I need to pick up some Twinkies.”
MCGARVEY HAD A FAIRLY HIGH DEGREE OF CONFIDENCE THAT Rencke's intrusion into the CIA's computer system would not be detected. Nevertheless he approached the house in Holy Rood Cemetery with precautions, passing twice from different directions to make certain the place wasn't being watched.
There were a few people visiting graves, and a groundskeeper was mowing the lawn near the Whitehaven Parkway entrance, but no one seemed interested in the house. Nor was anyone stationed at the entrance so far as McGarvey was able to determine.
He crossed the gravel driveway, mounted the three steps to the porch and knocked on the front door. Without waiting for Rencke to answer it, he let himself in.
The house was very still. The odors of Rencke's cats mingled in the air with the odors of electronics equipment. But nothing moved. It was as if the place had been abandoned.
He'd brought a bag of Twinkies for Rencke. Laying them on the hall table, he took out his Walther, eased the safety catch on the off position, and moved silently to the archway into the living room.
Nothing seemed out of place except that only one computer monitor seemed to be working. Everything else had apparently been shut off. The one screen that was lit showed nothing but the color lavender.
Turning back into the stairhall, McGarvey stopped and
cocked an ear to listen. Still there were no sounds from anywhere in the house.
It was possible that Rencke's computer hacking had been detected and he'd been arrested, but McGarvey doubted it.
“Otto?” he called out.
There was no answer. He went to the foot of the stairs and stopped again to listen. Had there been a movement on the second floor?
“It's me. It's Mac.”
A toilet flushed, and Rencke, still wearing the same clothes from last night, appeared at the head of the stairs.
“Did you bring my Twinkies?” He asked, yawning as he came down.
McGarvey smiled and nodded. The man was incredible. “I brought them,” he said, putting away his gun. “The house was quiet, I thought something was wrong.”
“What were you intending on doing, shooting my cats?” Rencke asked. “They're outside. Now, my Twinkies, I'm starving.”
McGarvey gave Rencke the bag and followed him back to the kitchen. Unwashed dishes were piled in the sink, and a pot of something had been allowed to cook down to a charred mass on the stove. The burner had been turned off, but the pan had been left as is. Empty cat food cans littered the floor, and in a back hallway, several litter boxes were full to overflowing.
Rencke got a carton of milk from the refrigerator. “Did you see it?”
“What?”
“My beautiful lavender. Or are you color-blind?”
“I saw it,” McGarvey said. “Did you get in?”
“Just like raping a willing virgin,” Rencke said, brushing past McGarvey and heading back to the front of the house. “With ease. With ease.”
“What did you find out?” McGarvey asked, following him.
Rencke plunked down in front of the lavender terminal.
“It's a scary world out there, Mac. And it's getting scarier, if you know what I mean.”
He opened a package of Twinkies, ate them both and then drank nearly half the milk, some of it spilling down his front. No crumbs or milk, however, got anywhere near the equipment.
“Some Company hotshot evidently found my rear-entry program and replaced it with a fairly sophisticated system of interlocks. They're finally starting to use their heads over there. A day late and in this case a dollar short, but they're thinking.” Rencke drank some more milk. “I don't think there are more than three people in the world besides me who could have gotten in like I did.”
“Were you detected?”
“No,” Rencke said. “At least I don't think so. But this is hot stuff, Mac. I mean short of Russian tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, the hottest.”
“Did you make printouts?”
Rencke was eating another Twinkie. He nodded. “But when I was done I shredded the lot,” he said, his mouth full. “I didn't want that kind of shit lying around here. I'd rather have a hundred ks of blow with a sign on it on my front porch.”
McGarvey had pulled up a chair. “Tell me what you found out.”
“First I want something from you.”
“Name it.”
“You said Karl Boorsch was the rocket man at Orly last week. What were you doing there? What was your relationship with him and this STASI group?”
McGarvey told Rencke everything, including his history with Marta and the Swiss Federal Police, Colonel Marquand's information, and about the pair who'd showed up at Kathleen's house this morning.
“You're certain they were Company muscle?” Rencke asked.
“It was a Company car. I have no reason at this point to suspect they were anything but Murphy's people.”
“You would have been leaving your ex in a hell of a jam otherwise,” Rencke said thoughtfully.
McGarvey had had the same thought.
“You weren't followed here? By anyone?”
“No.”
Rencke looked at the lavender screen. “They're busy over there this morning, so it's too dangerous to get back in. If you want to wait until tonight, I'll show you what I came up with. But if you're in a hurry—and I think you should be in one hell of a hurry—you'll have to rely on my memory as well as my veracity.”
“I trust you, or else I wouldn't have come here in the first place,” McGarvey said.
“What are your intentions? You said you'd meet with Murphy.”
“It might depend on what you've come up with. Marta was a good friend.”
Rencke was silent for a long moment or two. McGarvey thought he could hear the cats mewing at the door.
“I dipped into your file while I was at it,” Rencke said. “You've been up against the best, and survived, though not without injury. A couple of times you almost bought it.”
McGarvey said nothing.
“This one is bigger, or at least I think it could be. Maybe more important. But you'd be up against a highly trained and well-motivated group. Not just one Russian hitman.”
“Then there is a group of ex-STASI field officers?”
“They're called K-1, but what the significance of that is, or even if it's true, isn't clear. You have to remember that all I'm giving you is what came out of CIA archives, and out of one Operations file. Any of that could be in error. You know the drill.”
“Do you know where they're headquartered?”
“There've been rumors that they went to ground somewhere in the south of France. Provence. Maybe even Monaco. But no one down there is talking, even to the SDECE.”
“If the Action Service involves itself that might change. Anything on the leadership?”
“There were about three dozen names on the possibles list, which I think is nothing more than a list of STASI goons still missing. Boorsch was on the list, and so was General Ernst Spranger.”
“The butcher of the Horst Wessel,” McGarvey said. He'd been number three in the STASI, in charge of Department Viktor, modeled after the KGB's assassination, kidnapping and sabotage section. His intelligence was outdone only by his ruthlessness.
“You know the name?”
McGarvey nodded. “If he's on the loose he'll be the one in charge. And in fact it was probably Spranger who formed the group. But what about their finances? They couldn't have gotten much out of East Germany. There wasn't much there to get at the end.”
“We'll come back to that. First, do you know why Boorsch shot that airliner out of the sky?”
“It had to do with a couple of CIA case officers aboard. But the Paris COS wouldn't tell me a thing.”
“Don Cladstrup and Bob Roningen,” Rencke said. “They were on their way to Lausanne with a Swiss national by the name of Jean-Luc DuVerlie. Do any of those names tickle your funnybone?”
“Roningen was a weapons expert at the Farm, I think,” McGarvey replied. “But who was DuVerlie?”
“An engineer with the Swiss firm of ModTec.”
There was something in Rencke's eyes. Something, suddenly, in his voice. McGarvey sat forward.
“What is it, Otto?”
“Do you know what ModTec is into? Among other things.”
“No.”
“In order to construct a nuclear weapon these days you only need three high-tech elements. The rest of the components are of the hardware store variety. You need a critical mass of weapons-grade fuel—plutonium or enriched uranium, for instance. You need an initiator, which is nothing more than a tiny source of high energy particles to get the
chain reaction going. Sort of like the lighted match tossed into a pile of firewood. And you need a number of electronic triggering devices to ignite the dynamite or whatever other explosive you use to force the plutonium together. ModTec builds the triggers, and DuVerlie was one of the trigger engineers.”
“Spranger's group went after the triggers, is that what you're telling me?”
“Evidently. Which our Deputy Director of Intelligence Tommy Doyle believes is only the tip of the iceberg. It's his theory that K-1 is after the whole enchilada. A working nuclear weapon … or the parts to build one.”
“Did they get the triggers?”
“Unknown.”
“How about the other components … the initiator and the fuel?”
“Unknown.”
“What else?”
“There were two new entries in the file, generated in the Paris Station. Tom Lynch was the signatory, and his source was your Action Service Colonel Marquand.”
“About finances. Marquand told me that the SDECE believed the STASI group maintained bank accounts in at least two Swiss cities, Bern and Zurich.”
Rencke nodded. “The currency paid into at least one of those accounts was in yen.”
“Japan?” McGarvey said, stunned.
“The source was unknown, but the currency was Japanese. Makes for some interesting speculation, doesn't it.”
“Jesus, I guess,” McGarvey said sitting back. “What else?”
“That's it except for one little item concerning you. Seems as if you knew Karl Boorsch.”
McGarvey nodded. “We had a run-in a few years ago.”
“Did you recognize him at the airport?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn't report it. That may have generated some
suspicion. You have some enemies at Langley, among them the Company's general counsel.”
“Ryan.”
“Right,” Rencke said. “Listen, Mac, I may be reading between the lines, but I think they might be on a witch-hunt out there, and you may be one of their primary targets.”
“I can take care of myself. But I want you to destroy your enter and search program. If someone gets wind of the fact that you've been …”
“Dallying in the valley they'll put me in jail and throw away the key.” Rencke smiled. “Before they did that I'd unleash Ralph.”
“Ralph?”
“He's a super-virus. Wouldn't be a computer program or memory load in the entire defense-intelligence community left intact. And I don't even need my computer to activate it. I only need access to a telephone.” Rencke was grinning maliciously. “They won't fuck with me and get away with it.”
 
It was after one in the afternoon when McGarvey showed up at the main gate to the CIA's headquarters at Langley. He'd rented a car from Hertz, and he waited behind the wheel while one of the civilian contract guards notified Phil Carrara that he had a guest. The reaction was almost immediate.
The guard came back out, a tense expression on his face. “Do you have any identification, Mr. McGarvey?”
McGarvey handed out his passport, and the guard took it back inside. Two other guards came out, but they remained across the road, watching him.
A half minute later the first guard came out and returned McGarvey's passport, as well as a visitor's pass for the car and a plastic lapel pass.
“Drive straight up under the entry canopy, sir. Mr. Carrara is coming down.”
“Thanks,” McGarvey said, and he drove the quarter mile up through the woods and out into the broad clearing where the headquarters building stood.
It'd been a while since he'd been here last, and the old wounds, both mental as well as physical, gave him a twinge. He'd given a lot of himself to this place, or to its ideal, yet he never had been able to clearly answer his own question: Why?

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