and the rental car counters where Rencke had arranged for a car under the same work name—Joshua Taylor—but with no reference to him as anyone other than a private citizen.
He was out of there by midnight heading down I-4 to Tampa and the Gulf Coast, where he would take I-75 south to his home on Casey Key. But it didn’t seem like coming home to him. All of Florida was empty now, devoid of any life, or any purpose of any happiness. It was just another place he was traveling through, because when this business was finally over and done he would never come back.
Traffic was light at this hour and he made good time. Once he reached the outskirts of Sarasota he called Rencke on the sat phone.
“Any trouble?” Rencke asked.
“None so far. Have you heard anything from the seventh floor?”
“Dick Adkins was fired. Apparently he and Langdon had it out, and on Shapiro’s strong recommendation, Dick was given the boot.”
“Has anyone been appointed interim DCI?”
“Dave Whittaker. The White House doesn’t want to put someone new in place until you’re brought in.”
“Is anyone looking for you and Louise?” McGarvey asked. It was the only thing left he had to worry about, except for his granddaughter. But whatever happened she was safe at the Farm.
“Not officially, but Tommy Doyle has sent out a number of posts on a couple blogs I check out from time to time.”
Doyle had been the deputy director of intelligence when McGarvey was DCI. He retired a few years ago, so it was tough to figure if he was trying to make contact with Otto on his own in order to find McGarvey, or if Whittaker or someone at Langley had put him up to it. Either way it would be too dangerous to respond to his queries and Otto agreed.
“The Bureau has two guys at your house, three teams rotating every eight hours. The off-duty guys are staying at a Holiday Inn up in Venice. I didn’t get any names, but their shifts start at oh six hundred, so if you mean to get in sometime this morning the guys on the twenty-two hundred shift should be getting bored and tired around four in the morning. It’d give you two hours to get in and get back out.”
“The timing’s right,” McGarvey said, thinking ahead. The closer he got the odder it seemed to him that he was going to break into his own house. It wasn’t real. When it was over he would go back to Greece, at least for the interim, until he healed. If ever.
“Honest injun, Mac, these are the good guys. Louise is right, you can’t go in there and do something . . . stupid.”
“Don’t worry,” McGarvey said. “I won’t hurt anything but their pride.”
“That’s bad enough.”
The village section of Siesta Key with its restaurants, bars, and nightspots, one barrier island north of Casey Key, was lit up and busy as normal on an evening, but the residential areas, especially south of the village, were dark and quiet as was also usual for this time of night.
It was past the tourist season, and many of the houses on the Gulf side of the island as well as the Intracoastal Waterway side were closed down, no one in residence until sometime around Thanksgiving. McGarvey had no trouble finding a stretch of half a dozen such houses on the ICW that were dark, and he shut off his headlights and pulled into one of the driveways.
The house next door had a small inboard/outboard powerboat on a lift out of the water. McGarvey jimmied the lock on the back door of the house, first making sure there wasn’t an alarm system, and in the kitchen found the boat’s keys, and in the garage found a couple of jerry cans of gas and after a couple of minutes searching a roll of duct tape.
Ten minutes later he had the boat cover removed, had lowered the boat into the water, had gassed it up and started the engine, which kicked into life on the third try. Since it was an I/O, its exhaust and engine noises were quieter than those of an outboard motor hanging on the transom. It was a small bit of luck.
Easing away from the lift, he gingerly made his way across the shallow water of Little Sarasota Bay to the green 57 ICW marker and turned south in the middle of the channel before he turned on the boat’s navigation lights and