by Tom Clancy
“Doctor Ryan.” A man approached. He looked vaguely familiar, but Jack couldn’t put a name on the face. “I’m Marty Cantor—I work upstairs.”
The name came back as they shook hands. Cantor was Admiral Greer’s executive assistant, a preppy type from Yale. He gave Jack a security pass.
“I don’t have to go through the visitor room?” Jack waved to his left.
“All taken care of. You can follow me.”
Cantor led him to the first security checkpoint. He took the pass from the chain around his neck and slid it into a slot. A small gate with orange and yellow stripes, like those used for parking garages, snapped up, then down again as Ryan stuck his card in the slot. A computer in a basement room checked the electronic code on the pass and decided that it could safely admit Ryan to the building. The gate went back up. Already Jack was uncomfortable here. Just like before, he thought, like being in a prison—no, security in a prison is nothing compared to this. There was something about this place that made Jack instantly paranoid.
Jack slung the pass around his neck. He gave it a quick look. It had a color photograph, taken the previous year, and a number, but no name. None of the CIA passes had names on them. Cantor led off at a brisk walk to the right, then left toward the elevators. Ryan noticed the kiosk where you could buy a Coke and a Snickers bar. It was staffed by blind workers, yet another of the oddly sinister things about the CIA. Blind people were less likely to be security risks, he supposed, though he wondered how they drove in to work every day. The building was surprisingly shabby, the floor tile never quite shiny, the walls a drab shade of yellow-beige ; even the murals were second-rate. It surprised a lot of people that the Agency spent little on the outward trappings of importance. The previous summer Jack had learned that the people here took a perverse pride in the place’s seediness.
Everywhere people walked about with anonymous haste. They walked so fast in the building that most corners had hubcapshaped mirrors to warn you of possible collision with a fellow spook ... or to alert you that someone might be lurking and listening around the corner.
Why did you come here?
Jack shook the thought off as he entered the elevator. Cantor pushed the button for the seventh floor. The door opened a minute later to expose yet another drab corridor. Ryan vaguely remembered the way now. Cantor turned left, then right, as Ryan watched people walking about with a speed that would impress a recruiter for the Olympic Team’s heel-and-toe crew. He had to smile at it until he realized that none of them were smiling. A serious place, the Central Intelligence Agency.
The executive row of CIA had its own private corridor—this one had a rug—that paralleled the main one and led to offices facing the east. As always, there were people just standing about and watching. They inspected Ryan and his pass, but showed no reaction, which was good enough news for Jack. Cantor took his charge to the proper door and opened it.
Admiral James Greer was in civilian clothes, as usual, leaning back in a high-backed swivel chair, reading an inevitable folder and sipping at inevitable coffee. Ryan had never seen him otherwise. He was in his middle sixties, a tall, patrician-looking man whose voice could be as courtly or harsh as he wished. His accent was that of Maine, and for all his sophistication, Ryan knew him to be a farmer’s son who’d earned his way into the Naval Academy, then spent forty years in uniform, first as a submarine officer, then as a full-time intelligence specialist. Greer was one of the brightest people Ryan had ever met. And one of the trickiest. Jack was convinced that this gray-haired old gentleman could read minds. Surely that was part of the job description for the Deputy Director, Intelligence, of the Central Intelligence Agency. All the data gathered by spies and satellites, and God only knew what else, came across his desk. If Greer didn’t know it, it wasn’t worth knowing. He looked up after a moment.
“Hello, Doctor Ryan.” The Admiral rose and came over. “I see you’re right on time.”
“Yes, sir. I remembered what a pain the commute was last summer.” Without being asked, Marty Cantor got everyone coffee as they sat on chairs around a low table. One nice thing about Greer was that he always had good coffee, Jack remembered.
“How’s the arm, son?” the Admiral asked.
“Almost normal, sir. I can tell you when it’s going to rain, though. They say that may go away eventually, but it’s like arthritis.”
“And how’s your family?”
The man doesn’t miss a trick, Jack thought. But Jack had one of his own. “A little tense at the moment, sir. I broke the news to Cathy last night. She’s not real happy about it, but then neither am I.” Let’s get down to business, Admiral.
“So what exactly can we do for you?” Greer’s demeanor changed from pleasant old gentleman to professional intelligence officer.
“Sir, I know this is asking a lot, but I’d like to see what the Agency has on these ULA characters.”
“Not a hell of a lot.” Cantor snorted. “These boys cover their tracks like real pros. They’re being bankrolled in a pretty big way—that’s inferred, of course, but it has to be true.”
“Where does your data come from?”
Cantor looked over to Greer and got a nod. “Doctor, before we go any further, we have to talk about classification.”
Resignedly: “Yeah. What do I have to sign?”
“We’ll take care of that before you leave. We’ll show you just about everything we’ve got. What you have to know now is that this stuff is classified SI-codeword.”
“Well, that’s no surprise.” Ryan sighed. Special-Intelligence-Codeword was a level of classification higher than top secret. People had to be individually cleared for the data, which was identified by a special codeword. Even the codeword itself was secret. Ryan had only twice before seen data of this sensitivity. But now they’re going to lay it all out in front of me, he thought as he looked at Cantor. Greer must really want me back to open a door like this. “So, like I said, where does it come from?”
“Some from the Brits—actually from the PIRA via the Brits. Some new stuff from the Italians—”
“Italians?” Ryan was surprised for a moment, then realized what the implications of that were. “Oh. Okay, yeah, they have a lot of people down in sand-dune country, don’t they?”
“One of them ID’d your friend Sean Miller last week. He was getting off a certain ship that was, miraculously enough, in the English Channel on Christmas Day,” Greer said.
“But we don’t know where he is?”
“He and an unknown number of associates headed south.” Cantor smiled. “Of course the whole country is south of the Med, so that’s not much of a help.”
“The FBI has everything we have, and so do the Brits,” Greer said. “It’s not much to go on, but we do have a team sifting through it. ”
“Thanks for letting me take a look, Admiral.”
“We’re not doing this out of charity, Doctor Ryan,” the Admiral pointed out. “I’m hoping that you might find something useful. And this thing has a price for you, too. If you want in, you will be an Agency employee by the end of the day. We can even arrange for you to have a federal pistol permit.”
“How did you know—”
“It’s my job to know, sonny.” The old man grinned at him. Ryan didn’t think this situation was the least bit funny, but he granted the Admiral his points.
“When can I start?”
“How does your schedule look?”
“I can work on that,” Jack said cautiously. “I can be here Tuesday morning, and maybe work one full day per week, plus two half-days. In the mornings. Most of my classes are in the afternoon. Semester break is coming up, and then I can give you a full week.”
“Very well. You can work out the details with Marty. Go take care of the paperwork. Nice to see you again, Jack.”
Jack shook his hand once more. “Thank you, sir.”
Greer watched the door close before he went back to the desk. He waited a few seconds for Ryan and
Cantor to clear the corridor, then walked out to the comer office that belonged to the Director of Central Intelligence.
“Well?” Judge Arthur Moore asked.
“We got him,” Greer reported.
“How’s the clearance procedure going?”
“Clean. He was a little too sharp doing his stock deals a few years back, but, hell, he was supposed to be sharp.”
“Nothing illegal?” Judge Moore asked. The Agency didn’t need someone who might be investigated by the SEC. Greer shook his head.
“Nah, just very smart.”
“Fine. But he doesn’t see anything but this terrorist stuff until the clearance procedures are complete.”
“Okay, Arthur!”
“And I don’t have Deputy Directors to do our recruiting,” the DCI pointed out.
“You’re taking this awfully hard. Does a bottle of bourbon put that much of a dent in your bank account?”
The Judge laughed. The day after Miller had been sprung from British custody, Greer had made the gentlemanly wager. Moore didn’t like losing at anything—he’d been a trial lawyer before becoming a jurist—but it was nice to know that his DDI had a head for prognostication.
“I’m having Cantor get him a gun permit, too,” Greer added.
“You sure that’s a good idea?”
“I think so.”
“So it’s decided, then?” Miller asked quietly.
O’Donnell looked over at the younger man, knowing why the plan had been formulated. It was a good plan, he admitted to himself, an effective plan. It had elements of brilliance in its daring. But Sean had allowed personal feelings to influence his judgment. That wasn’t so good.
He turned toward the window. The French countryside was dark, thirty thousand feet below the airliner. All those peaceful people, sleeping in their homes, safe and secure. They were on a red-eye flight, and the plane was nearly empty. The stewardess dozed a few rows aft, and there was no one about to hear what they were saying. The whine of the jet engines would keep any electronic listening device from working, and they’d been very careful to cover their tracks. First the flight to Bucharest, then to Prague, then to Paris, and now the flight home to Ireland, with only French entry stamps on their passports. O‘Donnell was a careful man, to the point of carrying notes on his fictitious business meetings in France. They’d get through customs easily enough, O’Donnell was sure. It was late, and the clerks at passport control were scheduled to go home right after this flight arrived.
Sean had a completely new passport, with the proper stamps, of course. His eyes were now brown, courtesy of some contact lenses, his hair changed in color and style, a neatly trimmed beard changing the shape of his face. Sean hated the beard for its itching. O’Donnell smiled at the darkness. Well, he’d have to get used to that.
Sean didn’t say anything else. He sat back and pretended to read through the magazine he’d found in the seat pocket. The pretended patience was gratifying to his chief. The young man had gone through his refresher training (O’Donnell thought in military terms for this sort of thing) with a passion, trimming off the excess weight, reacquainting himself with his weapons, conferring with the intelligence officers from other fair-skinned nations, and living through their critique of the failed operation in London. These “friends” had not acknowledged the luck factor, and pointed out that another car of men had been needed to ensure success. Through all of it, Sean had kept his peace and listened politely. And now he waited patiently for the decision on his proposed operation. Perhaps the young man had learned something in that English jail.
“Yes.”
Ryan signed the form, acknowledging receipt of the cartful of information. He was back in the same cubbyhole office he’d had the previous summer, a windowless, closet-sized room on the third floor of CIA’s main building. His desk was about the smallest size made—in federal prison workshops—for office use, and the swivel chair was a cheap one. CIA chic.
The messenger stacked the documents on the comer of Ryan’s desk and wheeled the cart back out of the room. Jack went to work. He took the top off a Styrofoam cup of coffee bought at the kiosk around the corner, dumped in the whole container of creamer and two envelopes of sugar, and stirred it with a pencil as he often did. It was a habit his wife loathed.
The pile was about nine inches high. The files were in oversized envelopes, each of which had an alpha-numeric code stamped on in block figures. The file folders he removed from the top envelope were trimmed with red tape so as to look important—the visual cues were designed to be noticed, to stand out visually. Such files had to be locked up in secure cabinets every night, never left on a desk where someone might take an unauthorized look at them. The papers inside each were held in place with Acco fasteners, and all had numbers. The cover of the first file had its codeword neatly typed on a paper label: FIDELITY. Ryan knew that the code names were assigned at random by a computer, and he wondered how many such files and names there were, if the dictionary of the English language that resided in the computer’s memory had been seriously depleted by the elimination of words for the thousands of secret files that sat in cabinets throughout the building. He hesitated for a moment before opening it, as though doing so would irrevocably commit him to employment at CIA; as though the first step on that path had not already been taken....
Enough of that, he told himself, and opened the file. It was the first official CIA report on the ULA, barely a year old.
“Ulster Liberation Army,” the title of the report read. “Genesis of an Anomaly.”
“Anomaly.” That was the word Murray had used, Ryan remembered. The first paragraph of the report stated with disarming honesty that the information contained in the following thirty single-spaced pages was more speculation than fact, based principally on data gotten from convicted PIRA members—specifically on denials they’d made. That wasn’t our operation, some of them had said after being caught for another. Ryan frowned. Not exactly the most reliable of evidence. The two men who’d done the report, however, had done a superb job of cross-referencing. The most unlikely story, heard from four separate sources, changed to something else. It was particularly true since the PIRA was, technically speaking, a professional outfit. Jack knew from his own research the previous year that the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army was superbly organized, along the classic cellular lines. It was just like any intelligence agency. With the exception of a handful of top people, the specifics of any particular operation were compartmentalized: known only to those who really needed to know. “Need-to-know” was the catch phrase in any intelligence agency.
Therefore, if the details of an operation are widely known, the report argued, it can only be because it was not a PIRA op. Otherwise they would not have known or talked about the details, even among themselves. This was twisted logic, Jack thought, but fairly convincing nonetheless. The theory held insofar as the PIRA’s main rival, the less well organized Irish National Liberation Army, the gang that had killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, had often had its operations identified in the same way. The rivalry between PIRA and INLA had turned vicious often enough, though the latter, with its lack of internal unity and generally amateurish organization, was not nearly as effective.
It was barely a year since the ULA had emerged from the shadows to take some kind of shape. For the first year they’d operated, it was thought by the British that they were a PIRA Special Action Group, a Provo hit squad, a theory broken when a captured PIRA member had indignantly denied complicity in what had turned out to be a ULA assassination. The authors of the report then examined suspected ULA operations, pointing to operational patterns. These, Ryan saw, were quite real. For one thing, they involved more people, on average, than PIRA ops.
That’s interesting.... Ryan walked out of the room, heading down the corridor to the kiosk, where he bought a pack of cigarettes. In under a minute he was back to his office, fumbling with the cipher lock on the door.
More people p
er operation. Ryan lit one of the low-tar smokes. That was a violation of ordinary security procedures. The more people involved in an operation, the greater the risk of its being blown. What did this mean? Ryan examined three separate operations, looking for his own patterns.
It was clear after ten minutes of examination. The ULA was more of a military organization than PIRA. Instead of the small, independent groups typical of urban terrorists, the ULA organized itself more on classic military lines. The PIRA often depended on a single “cowboy” assassin, less often on the special action groups. There were many cases Ryan knew of, where the one “designated hitter”—a term popular in CIA the previous year—had his own special gun, and lay in wait like a deer hunter, often for days, to kill a specific target. But the ULA was different. For one thing they didn’t generally go for individual targets. They relied, it seemed, on a reconnaissance team and an assault team that worked in close cooperation—the operative word here was “seemed,” Ryan read, since this, again, was something inferred from scanty evidence. When they did something, they usually got away cleanly. Planning and resources.
Classic military lines. That implied a great deal of confidence by the ULA in its people—and in its security. Jack started making notes. The actual facts in the report were thin—he counted six—but the analysis was interesting. The ULA showed a very high degree of professionalism in its planning and execution of operations, more so than the PIRA, which was itself proficient enough. Instead of a small number of really sharp operatives, it appeared that weapons expertise was uniform throughout the small organization. The uniformity of expertise was interesting.