Critical Mass (15 page)

Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Critical Mass

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MCGARVEY CALLED RENCKE'S NUMBER FROM A PAY PHONE downtown near the White House a few minutes before eight in the morning. He'd expected it to ring a long time, because Rencke would be in bed asleep by now. But it was answered immediately.

“Yes!”

“It's me,” McGarvey said. Rencke had sounded breathless.

“Listen, Mac. All hell is breaking loose. I mean the shit has really happened. So it's up to you, but I say run and don't look back. The bastards want you. And listen, if you want my guess, I'd say it has something to do with Tokyo. They're killing people out there.”

“Is your line still clear?”

“They're killing people out there, aren't you listening?”

“Is your line clear?” McGarvey repeated the question slowly. He could envision Rencke bouncing off the walls.

“Yes, yes! Clear, clear! But I don't know for how long.”

“Calm down, Otto, and tell me what's going on. Did you pick something off the computer?”

“Hoo, boy, you betcha I did. The jackpot. On Friday, Tokyo time, which makes it â¦ I don't know, Thursday or Saturday or something here, the friggin' chief of Tokyo Station was assassinated. Everybody went bananas over there and over here and everywhere. They red-lighted the thing.”

“Who killed him?”

“Nobody knows. The Japs, apparently. Two of them in masks and hardhats. We got the masks and one of the hats at
Yokosuka doing a DNA search. But now it looks as if the assistant chief of station has been targeted. Operations has evidently fielded a blind asset who got cold feet, or something.”

“Is anyone making a connection between Tokyo and K-1?” McGarvey asked.

“If they are, they're not logging it in operational files. But the situation has definitely got their attention. Nuclear triggers from the Swiss. K-1's Swiss bank account loaded with yen. It's got to make somebody wonder. Operations has nixed your Swiss trip. It's already in housekeeping. I'd say, run.”

“I can't. I'm already in too deep.”

“Aren't we all,” Rencke said.

“I'm going to need more help from you, Otto. If you're willing to stick with it.”

“Tall orders or short orders?”

“Very tall.”

“May have to go to pink,” Rencke said, but McGarvey didn't catch the meaning.

“I need to find out two things. First if there have been any incidents involving the theft of fissionable material, enough to make a bomb, or the theft of initiators. Anywhere in the world.”

“At any given time there's a half ton or more of plutonium missing. And it only takes seventy pounds or so to make a big bang. But you want to know if any of these incidents have any ties, however remote, with K-1, or especially with the Japanese. Right?”

“Right,” McGarvey said. “And secondly â¦ I don't know how you're even going to get started on this one, but, assuming that the Japanese are interested in getting their hands on nuclear weapons technology, or better yet the actual item, and assuming that the Japanese government itself is not involved, I want to know what Japanese interest group, military faction, or even private concern or corporation, would have the most to gain from such a project.”

“We're talking big bucks. Major yen.”

“That could be a start. Whoever it is would have to have the expertise to make contact with Spranger and his group. Maybe someone with East German ties.”

“Or from the War,” Rencke suggested. “Germany and Japan were allies.”

“Yes,” McGarvey said. “See what you can do.”

“Okay. And thanks for the Twinkies.”

One of Carrara's people met McGarvey downstairs and escorted him up to Operations on the third floor. There was a buzz of activity, and everyone seemed more animated than usual; on edge, in a hurry.

The DDO was just emerging from the briefing auditorium and he led McGarvey the rest of the way into his office. “We're putting Switzerland on the back burner for the moment. We'll let our assets already in place handle it. The general wants to know if you're interested in taking on an assignment in Japan.”

“I don't know. I'll have to talk to him, and then think it over.”

“No time,” Carrara said. “I've got a private jet standing by at Andrews for you. It'll get you to Tokyo via Seattle and then the Aleutians first thing this morning â¦ Tokyo time. You can catch up on your reading on the way over.”

“Does this have any connection with the STASI group? I asked about the Japanese connection yesterday.”

“Frankly I don't know, Kirk. And that's the truth. I just hope to God it doesn't have a connection. The Japanese and nuclear weapons is a thought I'd rather not dwell on.”

McGarvey held off for a long moment. Carrara was agitated. He wanted the man to focus his attention on what was being said.

“I'll probably take your assignment, Phil, but of course I'll need to know what's expected of me, and I still want to know what you were holding back yesterday.”

Carrara looked at him bleakly, as if he were a man who knew he'd just been backed into a corner. “The two things may be mutually exclusive.”

McGarvey said nothing.

The DDO started to reach for the phone, but then stayed his hand. “Which do you want first?”

“Orly.”

Carrara nodded, as if he'd known that subject would be first. “DuVerlie was a snitch. He was going to show us where a fellow ModTec engineer was buried so that we would believe the fantastic story he was trying to sell us. He wanted a lot of money. I mean a
lot
of money.”

“We're still talking about nuclear switches?”

“Yes,” Carrara said. “The STASI group, which we're calling K-1, had approached another ModTec engineer with an offer to buy the switches. When the engineer held out for more money they killed him and hid his body. But DuVerlie found out about it, and figured he would be safer dealing with us than them, and probably make just as much money in the bargain.”

“You knew about this K-1 group before DuVerlie approached you?”

“Yes,” Carrara answered. “And we'd picked up rumors that one-four-five would be shot down.”

“Because of DuVerlie?”

“We didn't know that.”

“But you made the connection.”

“Yes.”

“But did nothing,” McGarvey said, his stomach knotting up. “You didn't warn Swissair. Hell, you didn't even hold your own people from taking the flight.”

“We warned Interpol that there might be trouble on an international flight out of France.”

McGarvey could no longer sit down. He got to his feet. “That was fucking big of you. The public be damned.”

“I don't set policy, McGarvey.”

“Who does?”

Carrara looked away.

“You sonsofbitches ignored it all, and because of it more than a hundred fifty innocent people are dead.” McGarvey went to the window and looked outside at the beautiful day.
“There were other considerations, weren't there? Sources that would have been revealed if you'd warned the public.” He turned back. “Christ, to what end, Phil? Tell me, have you or I or the entire CIA made even the slightest difference on how events have turned out over the past fifty years?”

Carrara looked up at him. “I have to believe we have, McGarvey. Else why do we do our jobs?”

The conviction that his entire life had been nothing but an exercise in futility suddenly welled up in McGarvey's breast. “Christ,” he said softly, Mati's face rising up in his mind's eye. It took everything within his control not to turn on Carrara.

“Jim Shirley, our chief of station in Tokyo, was murdered on Friday by two as yet unidentified Japanese,” the DDO said. “We learned overnight that Ed Mowry, our acting chief of station, may be next on their list.”

McGarvey was listening with one part of his mind, while with another he was still thinking about Marta. Her mistake had been falling in love with him. It had cost her her life.

“Shirley had apparently been conducting a series of meetings with a man by the name of Armand DunÃ©e, who supposedly was a spy for a Belgian bank operating in Tokyo. But he was an imposter.”

In the beginning, in Lausanne, Mati had been a diversion. His real work had been the bookstore and his research on the French writer-philosopher Voltaire. But he'd been deluding her and everyone else, including himself. Once a spy, always a spy. Hadn't he heard that line somewhere?

“We have a blind source there who may have spotted one of Shirley's assassins following Mowry.”

Mati had wanted him to give it up, as did Kathleen. But neither of them understood the thing inside of him that was his driving force. His sister had come close a number of years ago when she'd pleaded with him not to sell their parents' ranch in western Kansas after they had died. She'd inherited the cash and securities, but he had been given the land. “There's nothing wrong with being tied to the land,” she'd argued. “A piece of ground cannot be tainted. Not that way.”

But he'd disagreed, and had sold his parents' property without going back to see it. Daughters are not guilty of the sins of their fathers, he'd told another of his women. But what about the sons?

“We have a team in Tokyo, but no doubt they've been spotted. You might have a better chance of not only protecting Mowry, but finding out who wants to kill him and why.”

McGarvey turned around. “Have you warned him?”

“He's been told that he may be a target. I sent over some help from Technical Services. But you've got to understand that we're limited in what we can overtly do just now. The Japanese authorities are very touchy.”

“Have you told him about your blind source?”

Carrara looked uncomfortable. “Of course not.”

“So Mowry doesn't specifically know that he's being tailed?”

“No.”

“How about the Technical Services team?”

“We're keeping the need-to-know list to a minimum.”

McGarvey shook his head. “What the hell is going on, Phil? The Company never did this sort of thing before.”

“The world has changed,” Carrara replied tightly.

“And that's it? The world has changed?”

Carrara said nothing.

“What's going on in Tokyo? Why was your chief of station killed, and why the blind asset?”

“I'm sending a briefing book with you so that you can familiarize yourself on the flight over. But in broad strokes we were asked to investigate the possibility that a Japanese corporation, or consortium of corporations, were going to institute an all-out technological-economic war on us. Specificially in the military-aerospace electronics field. First they would mount an espionage operation against U.S. companies doing research and development in order to find out to what point we'd taken the technology. And then they would simply better it.”

“To what end?”

“Economic blackmail. Either we buy their new developments or they'd sell them on the world market.”

“Shirley was killed because he was on to them?”

“It may not be that simple, Kirk. It may be that Shirley was involved in kickbacks. We're just not sure. But what's at stake here amounts to billions of dollars.”

“Maybe they're after improvements in nuclear technology as well.”

“ModTec is not the only manufacturer of those switches, nor are they the best.”

“Assuming Shirley got caught in the middle, why target Mowry?” McGarvey asked.

“I don't know. Perhaps he was involved as well, or they think he was. Either way we'd like you to find out.”

“What about your blind asset?”

Carrara handed McGarvey a photograph of Kelley Fuller. “She works as an interpreter for the USIA at our embassy under the name Yaeko Hataya. She was Jim Shirley's lover.”

“Shit,” McGarvey mumbled half under his breath as he studied the photograph. She was a good-looking woman.

“You're going to have to stay out of the way of the Tokyo police. Needless to say they won't be sympathetic.”

“Do you think the government is involved?”

“I don't know. I hope not, but I don't know.”

“What's the girl's situation? How will we make contact?”

“Mowry has put her up in one of our safehouses. Once you're settled in Tokyo she'll get word to your hotel. She knows you're coming.”