Critical Mass

by David Hagberg

  From there he’d enlisted in the army, as a computer specialist, but he’d been given a bad conduct discharge nine months later, because he also liked boys if there were no girls immediately available.

  For a year he’d dropped out of sight, but then had shown up on the CIA’s payroll, his Jesuit and Army records apparently wiped completely clean, so that he passed the vetting process with ease.

  McGarvey had run into the man on several occasions at Langley, where Rencke had taken charge of the Agency’s archives section, bringing it into the computer age.

  They’d worked together again in Germany, and once in South America where Rencke had come to straighten out the station’s electronic equipment.

  In his spare time, Rencke had updated the Company’s entire communications system, standardized their spy satellite input and analysis systems (so that CIA machines could crosstalk, thus share information, with NSA equipment), and devised a field officer’s briefing system whereby pertinent, up-to-date information could be funneled directly to the officer on assignment when and as he needed it.

  His past had caught up with him a few years ago, and like McGarvey, he’d become a pariah across the river.

  It was after ten by the time McGarvey had reassembled his pistol (the Swiss had returned it to him on condition he show them how he’d gotten it through Cointrin’s X-ray equipment) and he walked across the street into the cemetery. The evening was dark, the sky overcast and the air extremely humid. A light fog had formed from the river, muffling sounds and forming halos around the streetlights. It was a Sunday night; nothing much was moving in Washington.

  The small, two-story house at the rear of the cemetery looked to be in reasonable condition, but deserted. There were no curtains or blinds in any of the windows, except one large bay window on the ground floor, nor was there a car in the carport, or a lawnmower, or paint cans, or anything else that would indicate Rencke was still in residence.

  McGarvey stood in the shadows across a narrow lane watching the front of the house for any signs of life. As he remembered, Rencke had been a night person, preferring to sleep during the day. Of course there was no reason to believe that he was still here, or that something else in his past hadn’t caught up with him and landed him in jail. But there also was no reason to believe he wasn’t still here.

  “Boo,” someone said softly behind him.

  McGarvey, startled, reached for his pistol, but then relaxed and turned around. It was Rencke; he’d recognized the voice, even in that one word.

  The computer whiz looked like a twenty-year-old kid, with long, out-of-control frizzy red hair, wild eyebrows, and a gaunt, almost ascetic frame. He was dressed in Nikes, ragged blue jeans and a Moscow State University sweatshirt, its sleeves cut off at the shoulders. He was grinning.

  “So, Mac, what’re you doing wandering about in a cemetery in the middle of the night?” Rencke asked. “Let me guess. You’re looking for bad guys. You’re working freelance, still. And you’ve come to ask for my help. Is that about it?”

  McGarvey had to smile. “You could have gotten yourself shot, you stupid bastard.”

  Rencke’s head bobbed as if it were on springs. “Your control is better than that. I’m not stupid. And I’m not a bastard. Oh, well, I figure one out of three isn’t so bad under the circumstances.”

  “I am here to ask for help, but what were you doing sneaking around in the cemetery at this hour? I thought you’d be at your computers.”

  “I had a Twinkie attack.” Rencke wasn’t carrying a bag. He grinned sheepishly. “Couldn’t wait, so I ate them already. Bad me.”

  “I need to get into Langley archives, and maybe an operational file or two,” McGarvey said. “Possible?”

  Again Rencke’s head bobbed up and down. “Anything is possible, Mac. Weren’t you taught that in school? Come on, let’s see how tough they’ve made it these days.” He winked. “Of course it depends on whether they’ve discovered my screen door.”

  “Screen door?” McGarvey asked, as he followed Rencke across to the house and inside. The front door wasn’t locked.

  “We can put a screen door into a computer program … most of them leak like a sieve, you’d be surprised … but no one’s figured out how to successfully install a screen door in a submarine. Especially a Los Angeles class boat. Right? Right?”

  Rencke was almost bursting with suppressed humor and enthusiasm.

  “So you’ve kept up with me,” McGarvey said. He’d been involved with an incident over a hijacked Los Angeles-class sub a couple years ago. “Why?”

  Rencke led them into the living room, packing paper taped up over the bay windows. Soft lights automatically came on, as did a half-dozen monitor screens. He stopped and turned back to McGarvey.

  “Do you want me to tell you something, Mac?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay. I find you endlessly fascinating. You’re like a computer, only I can’t figure out the CPU. I haven’t even got your clock speed yet. So I keep watching. It’s better than the Dodgers used to be.”

  “The man’s name is Karl Boorsch. He was the shooter at Orly on Friday. Did you hear about it?”

  “The Swissair flight. It was in all the newspapers. I’m not a hermit here.”

  “He’s ex-STASI, I recognized him, and the SDECE made him as well. They suggested that he might be working for a well-funded organization of ex-STASI officers on the run from the new German government.”

  “Just like the Odessa,” Rencke said. “The organization of former Nazi SS officers, you know. Big thing in the fifties and sixties. They mostly all died off, though.”

  “There were a couple of Agency types aboard that flight. Probably Boorsch’s target.”

  Rencke’s head was bobbing. “You want to know about this STASI outfit. You want to know who funds it. You want to know who they are, where they’re hiding these days, and who their leaders are.” He took a deep breath. “And, you want to peek at operations to see what they had cooked up. That about it, Mac?”

  McGarvey nodded. “The general wants to see me, and I wanted to be prepared before I went over there. I don’t like surprises.”

  “I see what you mean,” Rencke said knitting his eyebrows. His complexion was very pale, his lips red. “Surprises are fun unless they start shooting at you.” He dropped into a chair in front of a terminal and pulled up a telephone line.

  “Can you help?”

  “Go away,” Rencke said, his voice already distant. “Come again another day.” The Central Intelligence Agency’s logo, a shield topped by an eagle’s head, appeared on the screen. “Bring some Twinkies when you come back. A lot of Twinkies.”

  18

  “I HATE PIGEONS. THEY SHIT OVER EVERYTHING AND YET THE city protects them.”

  Tom Lynch looked up from where he was seated on a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg as a heavily built, swarthy man approached and sat down next to him. It was a few minutes after nine in the morning, the day already pleasant. It was Monday so there weren’t any children around.

  “Squab.”

  “Nothing but an overpriced dead pigeon,” Phillipe Marquand said. He’d brought a small paper bag of cracked corn and he tossed out a handful for the birds who immediately flocked around.

  “I thought Frenchmen were all gourmands.”

  “I’m a Corsican,” Marquand flared. “And I didn’t come here to discuss food.”

  “I didn’t think you had,” Lynch said mildly. He didn’t like the SDECE colonel, but this was a friendly country in which the CIA had to walk with care. His instructions from Langley were to meet with the man, but give him nothing. The official line was that our people were making a routine trip to Switzerland, and that the terrorist attack had been nothing more than just that … a random act of violence.

  The U.S. State Department’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force was working hand-in-hand with the French, which was as far as the White House wanted it to go for the moment.

  “The Swiss kicked McGarve
y out yesterday, did you know that?” Marquand asked. “We tracked him through London as far as Dulles, but then lost him. You wouldn’t happen to know where he is now?”

  “No,” Lynch said. “Should I?”

  “I would think that someone would want to ask him a few questions about Friday.”

  “I understand you and he spoke.”

  Marquand nodded.

  “Is that why you knew he’d gone to Switzerland? It was an old flame of his aboard that flight. He’d known her from Lausanne. Said he was going to pay his respects.”

  “He is apparently a generous man, your McGarvey. But it was not the only reason he went to Switzerland.”

  “No?” Lynch said quietly.

  “He was showing his face, hoping that the friends of Karl Boorsch might show themselves.”

  “Should I know this name?”

  “He’s the man who shot down one-four-five,” Marquand said. “Former East German STASI hitman. Belongs to an organization of ex-STASI thugs who’ve gone freelance.”

  The information given so freely was breathtaking, but Lynch managed to maintain his control. “Have you any other names?”

  “Not for now. But obviously Boorsch and his people want to stop your inquiries in Switzerland. Would you care to share anything with me?”

  “Not at this moment,” Lynch said looking the Frenchman straight in the eye.

  Marquand’s jaw tightened. “There were Frenchmen aboard that flight. Vacationers, most of them. Some with their families. In one case it was the mother and father, twin five-year-old girls, and the old grandmother. They will be buried in a common grave, what bits of their bodies were found, that is.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, we all are. But it was no random act of terrorism, as you would like us all to believe.”

  Lynch started to object but Marquand held him off.

  “Two of your people were escorting a Swiss citizen to Geneva. It is our belief that the STASI group wanted them stopped. We simply want to know why. What are you investigating?”

  “I can’t say, Phillipe,” Lynch replied carefully, realizing by even telling the SDECE colonel that much he was giving away more than Langley had wanted him to give away.

  Marquand nodded. “I told McGarvey this …”

  “He is a civilian.”

  “But a special man. I also told him that we believe the ex-STASI group is well financed, maintaining its bank in Switzerland. Did you know this?”

  Lynch held his silence, but he was seething inside. McGarvey should have told him about his meeting with Marquand. But he had lied.

  “What we didn’t know … or I should say suspect … is who has provided the bulk of their financing.” Marquand looked away. “In the old days we might have suspected the Soviet Union. Perhaps the PLO, they sometimes fund outside groups. But it was none of these.”

  “No?” Lynch said.

  Marquand turned back. “No,” he said. “Our sources in Switzerland tell us that the currency paid into those accounts was in the form of yen. Japanese money. Now, what do you think about that?”

  Seventy-five yards away, a man dressed in a French police uniform stood at an open window on the second floor of the School of Mines main building. He’d followed Marquand from Action Service Headquarters off the Boulevard Mortier, and it was only by happenstance that he spotted Lynch seated alone on the park bench in time to get into position.

  He’d put it together that Marquand had come here to meet with the American CIA chief of station, and he knew that whatever those two men had to say would be of extreme importance.

  He had missed the opening chitchat, but not the meat of their conversation. Lowering the four-inch parabolic antenna, which he’d carried in a leather haversack, he watched as Lynch walked off.

  Spranger would pay well for this information, especially because it was the worst of all news.

  19

  THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE’S CHAUFFEURED Cadillac limousine headed down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House a few minutes before 9:30 A.M. As usual, Monday morning traffic was heavy, but the day promised to be beautiful.

  Murphy was in a puzzled, almost pensive mood. For the first time in his long government service career he was running up against a situation for which he had no clear answers. They could provide the President with the data—speculations, actually, because that’s all they really had to this point—but it would be up to him to make the decisions.

  In the transition period between the Cold War and what the politicians were now starting to call the “new world order,” there was no predicting what could and would happen.

  “Look at the war with Iraq and the subsequent fallout in the Gulf region,” he’d told a gathering of U.S. military intelligence chiefs at the Pentagon. “There was no way in which we as an intelligence-gathering service could have foreseen even in broad strokes what came to pass.

  “We can provide the raw data. We can provide spot analysis. And we can even point out what we believe are the current trends. But when the leadership of a foreign power we’re monitoring doesn’t even know where it is going, there is no chance for us to provide any realtime recommendations.”

  The unspoken crux of the situation, however, as all of them that day knew, was that their customers—the leaders who made use of the intelligence information they were provided—wanted the realtime advice.

  As the President would today, he thought. Only this time there were no answers, not even any clear speculation.

  Murphy’s limo was passed through the White House gate to the West Portico, where he was ushered immediately upstairs to the Oval Office, his bodyguard waiting downstairs.

  It was precisely 9:30. The President rose when Murphy came in and went around to the serving cart. He poured two cups of coffee and handed one to his DCI.

  “You know, whenever you come in here with that look on your face, Roland, I automatically brace for the worst,” the President said. He was a tall man whose face showed the strain of the office. But his eyes were penetratingly sharp, and he seldom if ever missed a beat. His staff had to keep up with his schedule, not the other way around.

  “You haven’t had the messenger shot yet,” Murphy said, setting down his coffee cup. He took a leather-covered folder from his briefcase and handed it to the President. “This is the latest from Paris.”

  “Have a seat,” the President said, putting down his coffee and sitting in his rocking chair. Murphy settled onto the leather couch across the coffee table.

  “My chief of Paris Station met this morning with a colonel in the SDECE’s Action Service, and was given some information. What I would call startling information.”

  “You’ve not pussyfooted before, General, don’t start now,” the President said, not yet opening the report. “Spell it out for me.”

  “The terrorist attack on the Swissair flight out of Orly on Friday may have some deeper, more ominous significance than we first suspected. The French intelligence service has identified the attacker as a man by the name of Karl Boorsch. An officer in the old East German intelligence service. We have him in our files as missing, and presumed still at large somewhere in Europe.”

  “You don’t think he went to the Soviet Union?”

  “No, sir,” Murphy said. “But he wasn’t working alone. The French found a walkie-talkie of an unusually advanced design in the van Boorsch used to penetrate Orly security.”

  “Go on.”

  “We haven’t been able to figure out exactly how it works yet, but we know that it encrypts the signal, compresses it into an incredibly brief duration, and sends it out. Virtually undetectable by any equipment we currently have in the field.”

  “Who built it?”

  Murphy shook his head. “There are no manufacturing plates or marks anywhere on the device.”

  “German?”

  “Possibly. But it means that Boorsch had help.”

  “Which tends to verify the Swiss engineer�
�s story,” the President said.

  “The French believe that an organization of ex-STASI members has been formed, presumably somewhere in Europe, perhaps even Switzerland, which tends to confirm the reports we’ve been hearing.”

  “Just what we need.” The President shook his head and looked away for a moment. His presidency had been a successful one to date, but definitely anything but quiet. Someone in the media had begun calling him “America’s crisis president,” and the moniker seemed to be catching on.

  “Apparently they’re organized well enough to maintain at least two bank accounts; one in Zurich, and the other in Bern.”

  “What do they think they’re trying to do? Retake East Germany? What’s their purpose?”

  “It’s unknown at this point, Mr. President,” Murphy said.

  “Where are they getting their money? Who is supplying it?”

  “Also unknown,” Murphy said, girding himself. “But the French Action Service officer told my Chief of Station that they had identified the currency in which payments had been made into at least one of the STASI organization’s accounts.”

  The President’s left eyebrow rose. “Is this fact significant?”

  Murphy sighed. “Well, Mr. President, if it is, I think we’re in big trouble.”

  “As I said, spell it out.”

  “The payments were made in yen. Japanese yen.”

  “It’s a stable currency,” the President said. “I’m told that there’s a small but growing movement to suspend trade on the international marketplace in dollars. The yen might be the next logical choice.”

  “Japan may be the country of origin for the payments into the STASI accounts.”

  “Could also be a ploy to throw off the investigation.”

  “I don’t believe so, Mr. President, although it’s a possibility.”

  “Because, Roland, God help us if what I think you’re suggesting has even the slightest grain of truth.”

  Murphy said nothing, allowing the President to come to the same conclusions he’d come to earlier.