High Flight

by David Hagberg

He stood, smoking a cigarette at the window of his eleventh-floor apartment, looking toward the river and the sparse early morning traffic on the Burnside Bridge. During the day the city was pretty, the views toward the mountains spectacular. But at night Portland was like any other city with its shadows and secrets, most of its people safely locked away against harm.

  But there really were monsters in the world. Creatures that could hurt you even if you were securely hidden.

  He knew about them. He’d been dealing with them for most of his adult life. But had he made any difference, he wondered? Most of the time he thought he had. But on nights like these he wasn’t so sure. McGarvey got the cordless phone from the kitchenette and entered Dominique Kilbourne’s Washington number as he walked back to the living room window. As it started to ring he lit another cigarette.

  For instance, was the world any safer for people like Dominique because of him? He thought not. In fact because of him the sanctity of her apartment had been violated, and she would carry that fear with her for the rest of her life. In Detroit she’d looked haunted, angry.

  “Hello?” she answered, her voice thick with sleep.

  “It’s me.”

  “Are you here in Washington?”

  “Portland,” McGarvey said. “How are you?”

  The line was silent.

  “Dominique?”

  “Leave me alone,” she said, her voice strangled. “Just do your job and keep me out of it. I’ve spoken to David, and he agrees.”

  “I’m sorry. I wish it were different. But I’m worried about you.”

  Again the line was silent.

  “Dominique?”

  She didn’t answer, and a second later he had a dial tone.

  It would be morning soon, and he would have to make a decision. Stay or go. Maybe, he thought, he’d finally gotten involved with something beyond his abilities.

  The telephone rang, and he answered it. “Yes?”

  “This is David Kennedy.”

  McGarvey looked toward the river. “Good morning.”

  “We’re terminating your services.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “Too much,” Kennedy said, his voice strange and distant. “We’ll send a check to you care of the college at Milford. I’m sorry it didn’t … . work out.”

  “David?”

  “What?”

  “Be careful,” McGarvey said. “And good luck.”

  THIRTY

  The winds and seas had risen all afternoon and into the evening from the northwest, so that by 10:00 P.M. the Fair Winds, her rail buried, was making six knots on a long tack to the northeast. They’d left their anchorage off the Island of Yoron at midmorning hoping to make the one hundred twenty miles to the city of Naze on Amami-O-Shima by the next morning, but what the locals called the Kuroshio—Black Current—had set them farther to the south than Stan Liskey had expected and had sharply reduced their speed of advance. All he was hoping for now was to make the lee of Okinerabu Island, barely thirty miles from their morning anchorage, and take shelter from the storm.

  The companionway hatch banged open, and Carol Moss, dressed in yellow foul-weather gear, deftly hoisted herself up on deck. She slammed the hatch shut and clipped her safety harness to the jack line that ran from the cockpit forward to the bow, before slumping down next to Liskey on the low side. “Some show,” she shouted over the shrieking wind.

  “What’s the SatNav say?”

  Carol glanced at the compass. “Three miles on this course and we’ll be home free. Okinawa weather predicts the winds will top forty-five sustained, with gusts above that.”

  The Aires windvane was still managing to hold the boat on course, so despite the noise, and the violent motion, which made life below decks nearly impossible, they were in no immediate danger. And within a half-hour, if the Magellan GPS satellite navigation unit was doing its job, they would be in the island’s wind shadow. By midnight they would be anchored safely out of the building storm.

  “How are you doing, kid?” He studied her eyes. She looked nervous but not frightened.

  She grinned. “I’d feel safer walking on Times Square. But what the hey, a girl only lives once.”

  Howard Ryan was on a witch hunt, but he’d been strangely aloof for the past two days. Phil Carrara was getting concerned. He knew the Agency’s counsel well enough to understand that when the noise from the seventh floor stopped, something big was on the wind. As Deputy Director of Operations he figured it was his business to know what was going on. There was no other way he could do his job. Rumor was that Internal Affairs had come up with a phone intercept involving McGarvey. He called upstairs to Ryan’s secretary who said he was with the General, but that he’d be back at his desk in a couple of minutes. It was a very busy day, though, she warned.

  He was always busy. The question this afternoon was busy with what? Ryan was in his office when Carrara came up. He didn’t look happy to see the DDO.

  “A minute of your time, Howard,” Carrara said.

  “Can whatever you have wait until later?” Ryan asked. “I’m simply stacked to my ears here.”

  “No, it can’t wait. But I’ll make it short.” Carrara closed the door.

  Ryan eyed him coldly for a second or two, then withdrew a file from his drawer and handed it across. “You want to see this?”

  It was the Internal Affairs telephone transcript of a conversation between McGarvey, who’d called from Portland, and Viktor Yemlin at his blind number here in Washington. It was brief and to the point.

  “Confirms what we’re getting from the satellites,” Carrara said.

  “I’ll tell you what it confirms, mister. It confirms our suspicions that McGarvey has become a wild card and he’s waging a one-man war on Japan. He’s got the goddamned Russians so riled up they don’t know whether to shit or go blind. He’s got Guerin convinced they’re under attack. And he’s got the Japanese government screaming for blood. They don’t even know what’s going on in their own backyard, and they’ve got their fingers on the triggers of a whole bunch of military hardware. I’d say he’s done a pretty fair job of screwing us. Don’t you agree?”

  “That’s not the way I read this,” Carrara said, keeping his voice even.

  “I didn’t expect you would.”

  “Tokyo is my operation.”

  “True, but this is an Internal Affairs investigation in cooperation with the FBI’s Counterespionage Division.”

  “We’ll see what the DCI has to say.”

  “The General is on his way to the White House. If you want to wait for him, that’s your prerogative. But as of this moment you are to consider yourself on administrative leave. And that, Mr. Carrara, comes directly from the man. Dick Adkins will take over your duties for the moment.”

  “Puta,” Carrara said softly, every muscle in his body screaming to leap across the desk and beat the sonofabitch to a pulp.

  “What does that mean?” Ryan shouted, but Carrara turned on his heel and left.

  Downstairs in his office he telephoned John Whitman at FBI headquarters. It took a minute for the call to go through. Internal Affairs probably had a monitor on his phone, but he didn’t give a shit.

  “I just hung up with Howard Ryan. He said you’d probably be calling,” Whitman said. He and Carrara went back a few years.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t really talk about this with you, Phil. But McGarvey is heading for a big fall this time.”

  “He’s been set up.”

  “That’s not how we’re seeing it,” the FBI special investigator said.

  “Come on. He wouldn’t have been involved in the first place if Guerin hadn’t come to him. He didn’t go looking for this.”

  “Well, that’s a moot point. Guerin fired him this morning. So now he’s on his own.”

  Mueller arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport a few minutes after one in the afternoon. After he retrieved his bag, he went upstairs to the main f
loor of the terminal to book his late-night flight to Minneapolis and from Minneapolis back to Washington first thing in the morning. As he headed across the main concourse to the Northwest ticket counters he passed a large display showing the proposed new airport expansion for completion in 2010. “Chicago Metropolitan Airports Commission working for you.” Alongside the display were maps and photographs showing a history of the airport, including the present-day layout. The Airport Commission was located near the terminal, on this side of the airport. But something else caught his eye. The commission was to be headquartered in a new building when the expansion was completed. Color-coded tags corresponded with the functions that the commission was responsible for. A yellow tag, representing the noise-management program, wasn’t on this side of the airport with the commission’s other offices. Mueller searched for it on the present-day map, finding it in a building adjacent to the control tower. Security would be more difficult here than it had been at Oakland, Los Angeles, and Portland. But not impossible, he decided.

  He rode a shuttle over to the Airport Marriott Hotel, where he took a shower and tried to get some sleep. But another thought intruded, and after a while he got dressed and called the Sterling farmhouse from a pay phone in the Holiday Inn lobby a quarter-mile away. He was worried about Zerkel.

  Reid answered out of breath. “Get back here as soon as possible,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Carrara had a drink alone in town at the Grand Hyatt. He telephoned his wife to say that he would be late and then phoned David Kennedy at Guerin Airplane Company in Portland. He got Kennedy’s secretary, who after Carrara identified himself said that her boss was in Washington at the Hay Adams. He called the hotel, but although Mr. Kennedy had checked in an hour before, he did not answer his phone. Next he telephoned Dominique Kilbourne’s office, but her secretary said that Ms. Kilbourne had gone home. Back at the bar he tried to work out his feelings. All his life he had fought to control his Hispanic temper. He sparked easily, and he hoped that Ryan would never know how close he had come to physical harm this afternoon. Now Carrara’s anger had lost its edge, but it had deepened. It was his overblown sense of justice. Ryan and Murphy were dead wrong about McGarvey. They all were. And Carrara found that wrapped like a poisonous snake around his anger was fear. He’d never known his old friend to exaggerate. Never. If McGarvey was concerned, he told himself, then they all should be concerned. He drove over to the Watergate complex, parked in one of the visitor’s slots, and took the elevator up to Dominique’s apartment. She answered her door only after Carrara held his CIA photo ID up to the camera lens.

  “If he’s left Portland, I don’t know where he is,” Dominique said. “You people are going to have to find him on your own, and leave me out of it.”

  “If you’re talking about Kirk McGarvey, Ms. Kilbourne, I’ll find him. Right now I’m trying to catch up with David Kennedy.”

  “What makes you think he’s here?” she flared. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

  “Kirk told me that you and Mr. Kennedy often worked together. He’s here in the city, and I thought you might know where he was. I’d like to talk to him about Kirk.”

  “David fired him. So he’s no longer our concern.”

  “You’re wrong about him,” Carrara said, reading the hurt in Dominique’s eyes.

  “Don’t tell me,” she snapped. “He’s a goddamned saint.”

  Carrara couldn’t suppress a grin. “He’s anything but that. But he’s not a traitor. And he genuinely wants to help Guerin.”

  “You’re not trying to arrest him?”

  “No, but the Bureau might try to bring him in. If that happens someone might get hurt.”

  “So what?”

  “He needs friends, Ms. Kilbourne. More than just me. He can’t fight the whole world alone. But he’ll try. I’ll guarantee it. He’s done it before and almost gotten himself killed.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Dominique said, turning away in anguish.

  “Just tell me how to get in touch with David Kennedy and I’ll leave you alone.”

  The door opened the rest of the way, and David Kennedy, in shirt sleeves, his tie loose, stood there. “You’d better come in. This can’t get any worse.”

  “I’m afraid it can, Mr. Kennedy.”

  Carrara followed them into the living room, where drinks were laid out on the coffee table in front of the long white couch. They offered him nothing. Dominique sat alone at one end of the couch, Kennedy at the other end, Carrara in a thick leather chair across from them. He could see the deepening afternoon sky out the big windows. The Watergate was an expensive address, but the airplane business involved very big money—so big that many governments couldn’t afford to maintain viable airlines. The stakes were high, but Carrara reminded himself that for the most part it was ordinary men and women who operated the world’s institutions; from the President in the White House to the janitors in the Kremlin, all were born, lived their lives the best they knew how, and then died.

  “I’ve talked to you on the phone,” Dominique said. “Just who are you?”

  “I’m the Deputy Director of Operations for the CIA. I’ve known Kirk McGarvey for a long time. He’s a good man. He’s done a lot for this country.”

  “Why are you here, Mr. Carrara?” Kennedy asked. “What do you want from me? It was you people who recommended McGarvey to us, and now I’m finding out that the FBI has him under investigation. What the hell do you want?”

  “I have a pretty fair idea why you hired him. He talked to me about it. As a matter of fact he asked for my help. But why did you fire him?”

  “Unless you’re here officially, which I doubt, that’s company business.”

  “No doubt someone from the Bureau talked to you, but is that the only reason, Mr. Kennedy?”

  “Why is the FBI investigating him?” Kennedy asked.

  “Kirk has his enemies at the Bureau and at Langley. Especially at Langley. People he’s crossed before, and who’ll believe what they want to believe.”

  “Murphy?”

  “No,” Carrara answered, which wasn’t quite accurate. “But it’s someone who has access to him. The point is that whatever evidence they think they have against him, will never hold up in court. All that’ll happen is they’ll pull him away from what he’s working on until it’s too late.”

  Kennedy shook his head. “It may already be too late. If McGarvey is right they’re going to hit us again on Sunday.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’s convinced that the American Airlines crash in 1990 and our crash last week at Dulles were engineered by a Japanese consortium of businesses working under the banner of Mintori Assurance.”

  “The American Airlines crash was probably engineered by Mintori, but not Dulles. That was either an accident, or caused by someone else trying to bring you down.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Kirk got it from his Russian contact.”

  “He never told me.”

  “Not until he had the proof, Mr. Kennedy. The Russians are working on it.”

  “But not us?” Dominique asked. “Not the CIA?”

  “No.” Carrara turned back to Kennedy. “What’s this about Sunday? Are you talking about the Honolulu flight?”

  “That’s right. McGarvey thinks that whatever is going to happen, will happen then.”

  “Like bringing that flight down?”

  “And maybe some others. Enough to wipe us off the map.” Kennedy sat forward. “But Dulles was no accident. McGarvey is convinced of it, and so am I. We just can’t find out how it happened.”

  “Ground the fleet. The FAA could be convinced to issue the order. At least our carriers would have to comply.”

  “The net effect would be the same,” Kennedy said tiredly. He was strung out. “And I don’t know what I would tell the FAA, not to mention my board of directors and stockholders. All that, providing McGarvey is right. He could be wron
g. Hell, even my own government doesn’t believe it.”

  “I do,” Carrara said quietly. “Why’d you fire him?”

  “There was a lot of dissension because of him, which we don’t need. But McGarvey’s a dangerous man. He’s an assassin. We build airplanes, not sniper rifles.”

  “Excuse me for saying that firing McGarvey because he’s dangerous is like pulling the lightning rods off the barn because they attract lightning. If anybody is going to find out who’s after you, it’s him.”

  “Our real troubles didn’t start until after we hired him.”

  “You’re wrong. Otherwise why’d Al Vasilanti ask the General for help? And why’d you hire Mac in the first place? You understood what you were getting into. You were told about him, about what he does, and how he goes about his business. You must also have been told that he doesn’t give up so easily.”

  “We hired him, we can fire him,” Kennedy said doggedly. “He’s caused us no end of trouble. One of our airplanes went down for Christ’s sake. We lost some very good people at Dulles. There’s no end to it.”

  “Not the way you want to go at it.”

  “I’m here in Washington to officially ask the FBI for help. Hiring some maverick sharpshooter was a bad idea at best. It should never have happened. Whether or not he’s guilty of anything, the man is bad business.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the Bureau for help in the first place?” Carrara asked, although he already knew the answer.

  Kennedy seemed a little uncomfortable. “Without evidence there was nothing they could do for us.”

  “Do you have the evidence now?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Where did you get it, Mr. Kennedy? Who supplied it to your company? Because if you tell the Bureau that McGarvey came up with it, I don’t think they’ll be very impressed. After all, they think he’s a bad apple.”

  “He’s innocent until proven guilty.”

  “The Bureau doesn’t investigate people they believe are innocent. And I don’t suspect you fire them.”

  “I didn’t fire McGarvey because I thought he was guilty of any crime. I fired him because I can no longer justify keeping a murderer on the payroll. My job is to build and sell safe airplanes, nothing more. I don’t need someone like McGarvey to fuck us up.”