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