The Cabal (43 page)

The helicopter finally came into full view as it flared over the landing pad, and Boberg recognized it as an Italian-built AgustaWestland AW-139 VIP machine. The CIA had recently purchased three of them.

He pulled the binoculars from his bag, and when the chopper came to rest on the pad he trained them on the hatch as it opened.

A tall man wearing a dark Windbreaker and plain dark baseball cap got out, and hunching over moved away from the slowly rotating main blades.

A golf cart came from behind the house and headed to the helipad at the same moment the man turned so that Boberg could see his face. It was David Whittaker, the interim director of the CIA.

No real surprise there, except that McGarvey had seriously stirred the pot at the highest level, as he’d done before. And Boberg settled back to see how the evening turned out. At the very least it would be interesting, he thought.

David Whittaker had been running on pure adrenaline ever since Admin’s shooter had taken Todd Van Buren and the
Washington Post
reporter down. He’d warned Foster that if McGarvey got involved, and he certainly would, the dynamics would change and there’d be no way to predict the outcome.

Foster’s bodyguard, Sergeant Schilling, had driven out to the helipad with a golf cart and brought Whittaker over to the house, where Foster waited drinking a cognac in the living room.

“Your visit is not totally unexpected this evening. Have you brought news? Good, I hope.”

“Not good,” Whittaker said. “And remember, I warned you that the situation could get out of hand.”

Foster shrugged. “Nothing that can’t be dealt with. Would you care for a drink?”

“I don’t believe I’ll be having anything to drink until this business is resolved and we can get back on schedule. McGarvey has been a thorn in our side ever since Mexico City.”

“We all agree, just as we all agree that he is to be dealt with, which is exactly what Administrative Solutions is doing for us at this moment.”

“Evidently you’ve not heard the latest.”

“Roland and some of his people were shot to death in Baghdad. Yes, I have. And the FBI has a warrant for McGarvey’s arrest. But Gordon assures me that he would not live to be taken in.”

“Remington was shot to death in front of his house, not two hours ago,” Whittaker said, and he was satisfied to see that he’d finally gotten to Foster, whose lips tightened. “McGarvey was almost certainly involved but it’s not entirely clear how it all played out.”

“Meaning what?” Foster asked.

“Remington may have been gunned down by two of his own people, who were in turn shot to death on the street. His bodyguard was found shot to death inside the house.”

Foster turned stiffly and poured another cognac. “Are you sure you won’t join me? It’s Black Pearl, brand new from Rémy Martin. Frightfully expensive, but definitely better than Rémy’s Louis XIII.”

“Goddamnit, Bob, you’re not listening to me,” Whittaker shouted. “This has the potential to ruin everything we’ve worked for.”

“Don’t raise your voice, David,” Foster warned. “Nothing will be
ruined. We had Mexico City and Pyongyang, despite Mr. McGarvey’s interference. And our last step, the Taiwan initiative, will go as planned. China
will
take the fall. The United States will not be brought down by a nation of rice-eating peasants who are merely clever at flooding the market with cheap products.”

Whittaker had heard all of this many times before; it had been Foster’s mantra from the very beginning eight years ago when the Friday Club first came into prominence. The United States had only two enemies: the old Soviet Union, which lost the economic race because of Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and now China, which seemed to be winning. Something had to be done before being American became synonymous with being a second-class citizen. Spain, Portugal, Great Britain all had their empires, and now it was America’s rightful time in history.

We had the nuclear weapons, the missiles, the submarines, the aircraft carriers—more aircraft carriers in our fleet than every other nation combined. But even more than that, Foster argued, the U.S. had the industrial might, the resources, the facilities, and the most highly skilled workers in the world. It was something the Japanese hadn’t fully understood in 1941 when they attacked Pearl Harbor. The sleeping giant had indeed been awakened.

And it would happen again. Given the right conditions, the right push in the right direction, China would fall by the wayside as the last real enemy of the United States.

But after eight years, Whittaker wasn’t so sure that he believed in the message as strongly as he had at the beginning. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to help with the business of empire building. That tack had nearly embroiled the country in a global thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union, in part because of Kennedy’s stand over the Cuban missile business.

And now China had an even more potent weapon to use against us: money. Beijing didn’t need bombs and rockets because it practically owned us. Besides the growing trade deficit, we were nearly one trillion
dollars in debt to China. That was more than four times the money we owed all the oil exporters in the world.

What China held were mostly Treasury securities, which they could call due or simply dump. Either way the U.S. economy would take the biggest hit it had ever taken—much bigger than the Great Depression—and it would literally bring us to our knees. Factory closings; bankruptcies, for which there would be no money available for help; unemployment lines, for which there were no jobs and no unemployment checks.

“Worst-case scenario,” Foster had pounded home his point. “Social Security and Medicare would fail. That cannot be allowed to happen. At all costs.”

All true, Whittaker agreed. Especially now when the U.S. was in the midst of the biggest bailout in history. Something had to be done.

“McGarvey could stop us,” he said, but Foster shook his head.

“One man, David.”

“Look what he’s done to us already.”

Sergeant Schilling came to the door. “Admin’s man has shown up, sir,” he said.

“Where is he at this moment?”

“Just within the woods about ten meters west of the driveway.”

“What is he doing?”

“Surveillance, I would imagine, sir. Waiting. I have his cell phone number, shall I make contact?”

“Yes, tell him we know he’s here,” Foster said. “It’s possible that Mr. McGarvey may show up tonight. Mr. Boberg can watch from outside, and you can monitor the situation from inside. Shouldn’t be too difficult to catch him in a cross fire.”

“Yes, sir. Shall I prepare your safe room?”

“Not necessary,” Foster said, and the sergeant left.

“A safe room wouldn’t do you any good, because if McGarvey somehow gets his hands on the proof of what we’ve been doing, even a shred of proof, all of us will take the fall.”

“But there’s no proof to be had, David. It simply doesn’t exist. We
don’t have a manifesto, nothing has been written. All we have is an agreement among gentlemen that something needs to be done to save America. What fault can be found with that?”

“No manifesto, I agree,” Whittaker said. “But what if he actually manages to get to you, and holds a pistol to your head, will you take a bullet to defend your idealism?”

“It won’t come to that.”

“It’s why I flew down here tonight. I have a CIA jet standing by at Andrews to fly you to a safe house on La Croix in the U.S. Virgins. And you’ll have plenty of people down there to take care of you until McGarvey is resolved.”

Foster looked amused. “While I’m scurrying off to the tropics, where will you be?”

“At home tonight, and in my office first thing in the morning as usual. He has no reason to suspect that I’m involved in any of this. We’ll let the FBI and the U.S. Marshal Service take care of him.”

Foster sipped his cognac. “Are you carrying a pistol tonight?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Good. Then stay with me. If McGarvey does get this far, you can shoot him dead. You’ll be a national hero. I’ll see to it, personally.”

Whittaker shook his head. “I’m not getting into a shooting match with that man. You have no idea what he’s capable of doing.”

But Foster merely smiled. “You have no choice, David. Call your helicopter pilot and tell him to leave.”

“I’ll tell him to stand by.”

McGarvey and Louise stood looking over Otto’s shoulder as he hacked into the CIA’s feed from the latest generation of Keyhole surveillance satellite systems, this one the KH-15, designated Romulus, with a full range of optical abilities from infrared to near ultraviolet with a resolution under good conditions of less than 0.04 meters, in the range of less than one hundredth of an inch, about the thickness of a piece of paper.

“I have the bird, receive only,” he said.

“Right,” Louise said, and she sat down at another keyboard and in a few keystrokes brought up the logo for the National Reconnaissance Office. As chief of the NRO’s imagery analysis section she had her own set of passwords that not only allowed her to tap into the product any surveillance satellite in orbit was producing, she could also, supposedly if she had with proper orders, reposition any satellite and change its values and modes.

She brought up the North American KH-15 that Otto had captured and then looked up at McGarvey.

“Your call, Louise,” he told her. “Could mean your job, maybe even jail time.”

“But we need this, right? To rescue the fair maiden and save the planet?”

McGarvey had to smile. “It’d help.”

“What the hell,” she said, and she entered a series of passwords, which brought her past a number of security messages against unauthorized use, each warning of harsh penalties including fines and imprisonment.

The KH-15 technical page logo came up followed by a split screen, one half showing what the bird was looking at and the other a control
panel. At present the satellite was looking at an inbound ship off the U.S. East Coast about two hundred miles southeast of New York City.

“Just need to borrow you for a minute or two,” Louise muttered. She touched the command and control tab on the screen, and a drop-down box appeared asking for a password, which she entered.

“Okay, you’re in,” Otto said.

“And we’re near enough so I don’t have to reposition, just change the angle.”

On the current setting the satellite was showing a swatch of Earth less than five hundred meters on a side. She increased the view to fifty kilometers then touched another tab that lit up a small icon in the middle of the map, which she dragged with her finger toward the northwest, picking up the coast just south of Atlantic City, lit up like a sparkling diamond in a sea of jewels. Farther southwest she picked up the upper Chesapeake, then straight across the Maryland peninsula to the Potomac.

“Alexandria,” Otto said.

Louise reduced the area to a five-kilometer square and now they could pick out lights on I-495 and other highways as she followed the river south. At the town of Fort Hunt she reduced the area to one kilometer and followed the GW Memorial Parkway west, about a mile.

“That’s his place,” Otto said.

They were looking at Foster’s house all lit up in the middle of a lot of darkness. Louise started to move the icon away from the road, but McGarvey stopped her.