The Cabal (14 page)

“He was a good man, Mac.”

“Too good,” McGarvey had said, and after a moment Whittaker had turned away to stare out the window at nothing.

After a dinner of lobster, a light salad, and French bread with a good pino grigio, and coffee and brandy, McGarvey had gotten a few hours of sleep, waking only briefly when they’d landed at Prestwick, Scotland, to refuel, the sun chasing them as they headed west.

Standing now in the hangar at Andrews, McGarvey turned to tell Whittaker that none of this was the CIA’s fault, but the DDCI had walked away to an armored Cadillac limousine, at least in a symbolic way washing his hands of the entire affair for the moment.

“Sir?” Ansel said, politely.

McGarvey went with the two deputy marshals and got into the backseat of a Cadillac Escalade SUV, with no access to the door locks, which snapped into place once they headed out.

The base was fairly busy this afternoon, and Air Force One had been trundled out to the apron, where people were beginning to gather. Mellinger was driving and he stayed well away from the security zone around the blue and white 747.

“Where’s the president heading off to?” McGarvey asked.

Ansel half-turned in his seat and looked back. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. But then he shook his head, his face long as if he’d just thought of something disturbing. “Some of us had a lot of faith in you.”

“Maybe the charges against me are wrong.”

“Personally, I hope so. But the consensus is otherwise.”

“Guilty till proved innocent, that it?” McGarvey asked. He was on the verge of lashing out, but he held himself in check. Consensus was almost always more important than just about anything else. It was the basis for nearly all the principles of a democratic government. Except that an important lawyer of the sixties and seventies once said that the Constitution hadn’t been written to protect the masses from the individual, be he a criminal or not, but to protect the individual from the masses.

“We’re just doing our jobs,” Ansel said, and turned forward.

And that was the problem, McGarvey thought, too many people just doing their jobs and nothing more. It was a philosophy he’d never understood. It was, in his estimation, a coward’s way out.

They were admitted through the sublevel sally port into the booking and holding area of the courthouse, where McGarvey was taken directly
into a small room where a technician took his fingerprints with an electronic reader under the watchful eyes of Ansel and Mellinger who were behind a bulletproof window.

Afterward he was stood against a wall with inches and feet marked on a scale and photographed in right profile, face on, and left profile.

In an adjacent room he turned out his pockets onto a counter where a uniformed clerk inventoried his things—wallet, watch, some money, and a compact, razor-sharp knife in an ankle holster, which the Germans had not caught, and which raised an eyebrow here. His things were bagged in a large manila envelope, but instead of being logged into the property room the bag was turned over to Ansel.

“Anything else we should know about?” the deputy marshal asked.

“I gave you my word, and that’ll have to be enough, unless you want to do a full cavity search,” McGarvey said.

“No, sir,” Ansel said, but he was wary and it was obvious he wanted nothing better than to get rid of his prisoner.

Mellinger had stood to one side through all this, his hand inside his jacket.

McGarvey looked over at him. “Tell your partner to take his hand off his pistol. It makes me nervous.” He looked into Ansel’s eyes.

“Listen here, pal—” Mellinger said, but Ansel cut him short.

“We don’t want any trouble, believe me.”

“No, you don’t.”

Twenty minutes after they arrived, they were back downtown and headed across the Roosevelt Bridge and north up the busy Parkway toward the entrance to the CIA campus.

“What have you heard?” McGarvey asked, breaking the silence once they were across the river.

“Treason,” Ansel said. “Something to do with an incident in North Korea a few months ago. Apparently you went head-to-head with President Haynes over it, and he may have backed down, but President Langdon doesn’t agree.”

“No, I didn’t expect he would,” McGarvey said. “What else?”

“The word on the street is that your people are going to the mat for you.”

“You mean the CIA?”

“Yes, sir,” Ansel said. “We were given word that you were to be treated with kid gloves, and that was at the request of Langley. Specially Mr. Adkins.”

Dick Adkins had been promoted to DCI by President Haynes after McGarvey had left, and he’d been kept on an interim basis by the new president until a replacement could be found. In the past six months no one suitable had been named. And in fact a lot of high-level staff positions in Washington had yet to be filled.

“It’s shaping up to be a fight between the CIA and the White House.”

“Right,” McGarvey said. “And we know who’ll win that one.”

They were stopped at the main gate where the CIA’s general counsel Carleton Patterson was waiting in the parking lot with his white Mercedes S550. He got out when the U.S. marshals pulled up, and walked over.

“I’ll take it from here,” he said. He’d been the Company top legal beagle for almost ten years, coming down to Washington from a prestigious New York law firm to help out three presidents ago, strictly on a temporary basis. He was tall, slender, silver-haired, and as well put together as one would expect for a man in his position. He and McGarvey had respect, if not friendship, toward each other.

“Good luck,” Ansel said.

But Mellinger shook his head. “Prick,” he said half under his breath, and Ansel shot him a dirty look but said nothing, and the two of them got back in the Escalade and drove off.

“I don’t think he likes me,” McGarvey said, getting in Patterson’s car.

“A lot of people in this town don’t care for you,” Patterson said. “You’re old school. Hell, you even approved of Guantánamo.”

“I even participated,” McGarvey said. “We gave them a better chance than they gave us on nine/eleven.”

They were waved through the gate and headed up the drive in the direction of the Old Headquarters Building, but turned off before they reached the OHB’s circular drive and parking lot.

“Say that in front of a judge and you’ll be dead in the water,” Patterson said, eyeing him.

“If it gets that far,” McGarvey said. “You putting me up in a safe house here on the Campus?”

Patterson hesitated a moment. “If you promise not to run. Green and Boylan want to finish your debriefing, and Dick would like to have a word.”

“My son-in-law’s funeral is tomorrow. I’m going nowhere.”

Until afterward, was the unspoken finish to the sentence, but McGarvey didn’t amplify and Patterson thought it better not to pursue the matter. McGarvey was cooperating, and for now that was enough.

The safe house was a small, two-story colonial in the woods away from the OHB, the white paint on the exterior peeling in places, and some weeds growing in spots in the gravel driveway indicating either that the place hadn’t seen much use lately, or that even the Company was lacking in nonessential maintenance tasks because of the economy. McGarvey expected both.

“Will I have minders?” McGarvey asked when they pulled up.

“Green and Boylan will be bunking with you for the time being,” Patterson said, and as he said it Pete opened the front door of the house, and smiled.

“Pretty girl,” McGarvey said.

“Yes, she is. And bright.” Patterson turned to him. “They have your jacket, your
entire
file from day one, so it won’t do any good to try to hide some of your . . . more disagreeable . . . outcomes.”

McGarvey got out of the car but hung back for a moment. “They were called assignments, and the outcomes were what I had been ordered to accomplish. You might want to get that idea straight in your head, Carleton. Could be important. Soon.”

Carleton gave him a bleak look, and started to say something, but then thought better of it and drove off.

“Mr. Director,” Pete said. “They sent your things over from the airport, and we brought some spare clothes for you from your suitcase at the Farm. We want you to be comfortable.”

“How are my wife and daughter?” McGarvey asked on the broad porch.

Pete stepped aside to let him go into the house, then followed him and closed the door, making a show of not locking it, which wouldn’t have mattered in any case. “As well as can be expected, sir.”

“May I call them?”

“We’d appreciate it if you would hold off. Just until tonight. Dr. Sampson is with them this afternoon.”

Leonard Sampson was the company’s chief shrink, a bright, dedicated man. McGarvey couldn’t think of many people he’d rather have with Katy and Liz just now. “Anything from Otto yet?”

Pete’s eyebrows knitted. “We were hoping you might be able to shed a little light on his whereabouts.”

“I’ve been out of the country.”

“Yes, sir,” Pete said not pushing the query.

The house was in much better shape inside than out, with nice furnishings, but it smelled unused and musty, closed in for a long time. To the left was a living room with a river rock fireplace that someone had stupidly painted white, an enlarged inauguration photograph of President Langdon above the mantel, surprisingly with no halo. A dining room to the right was furnished with a cherrywood table, seating eight, and a breakfront filled with nice stemware. A
number of thick files had been placed at the head of the table. Beyond the dining room, McGarvey assumed, was the kitchen through swinging half-doors. A guest bathroom was tucked into the stair hall that led back to perhaps the den.

Dan Green showed up at the head of the stairs and came down, a curious expression on his face, as if he had just heard something that he’d never even guessed at, likely something he’d read in McGarvey’s file that he was having a little trouble reconciling with what he’d thought he’d known.

“Good afternoon, Mr. McGarvey,” he said, and shook hands. “I trust you had a reasonably pleasant flight back. A spot of trouble in Frankfurt, or so I heard.”

“Nothing much,” McGarvey said.

Green’s left eyebrow rose, and he was about to speak, when Pete stepped in.

“Well, would you like some coffee, before we begin, Mr. Director,” she asked. “Are you hungry? Maybe you’d like to get a couple hours of sleep. Flying through time zones can wear a person to a frazzle.”

“Let’s just get started.”

“A beer?” Green asked.

“Sure,” McGarvey said, and he followed Pete into the dining room as Green went back to the kitchen.

“Would you like to clean up, splash some water on your face?” she asked. “Your things are in the front bedroom upstairs, first door on the left.”

“No,” McGarvey said. He took off his jacket, hung it over the back of a chair, and sat down at the opposite end of the table from Pete and the stack of files.

She hesitated for just a beat, but then sat down. Like Green she was dressed in jeans and a light pullover. They could have been coordinated, but the look was meant to be relaxing, not intimidating:
“Hey, we’re just ordinary people who’ve dropped in for a chat. No reason to be intimidated by us. Really.”

Green came back with the beer but no glass, again an old pal over
for a barbecue in the backyard, and did a slight double take when he saw that McGarvey had chosen to put as much distance between himself and his interrogators.

He handed McGarvey the beer, and went to the window where he looked out at the driveway and the wooded hill in the distance on top of which one could see the antennas and satellite dishes on the roof of the OHB.

“Could we begin with the circumstances that led you to accept a job of work for North Korean intelligence?” Pete said. “It’s not quite clear from the incident file you provided us.”

“I’m under indictment for treason,” McGarvey said, but Pete waved him off, a horrified expression on her pleasantly round face.

“Heaven forbid, Mr. Director, it’s nothing like that at all. You’ve been charged, but certainly not indicted. This is merely a fact-finding session. I mean, we have most of the details, we’re simply trying to put everything into some sort of perspective. You understand.”