by Tom Clancy
"No, it's Ishaq!" he cried. "It's Ishaq!"
They lowered their weapons and continued ahead without waiting for their teammate. Sharab was in front with the girl. Nanda was being urged forward at gunpoint.
That was not like Sharab.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
FIFTEEN
Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, 10:51 A.M.
Bob Herbert was usually a pretty happy man.
To begin with, Herbert loved his work. He had a good team working beside him. He was able to give Op-Center personnel the kind of heads-up intelligence he and his wife never had in Lebanon. He was also happy with himself. He was not a Washington bureaucrat. He put truthfulness above diplomacy and the well-being of the NCMC above the advancement of Bob Herbert. That meant he could sleep at night. He had the respect of the people who mattered, like Paul Hood and Mike Rodgers.
But Bob Herbert was not happy right now.
Hank Lewis had phoned from the NSA to say that the latest information e-mailed from Ron Friday was being processed by decryption personnel. It would be forwarded to Herbert within minutes. While Herbert waited for the intel he did something he had been meaning to do since the Striker recon mission was okayed by the CIOC. He pulled up Ron Friday's NSA file on his computer. Until now, Herbert and his team had been too busy helping Mike Rodgers and Striker prepare for the mission to do anything else.
Herbert did not like what he saw in Ron Friday's dossier. Or rather, what he did not see there.
As a crisis management center, Op-Center did not keep a full range of military maps and intelligence in what they called their "hot box." The only files that were reviewed and updated on a four-times-daily basis were situations and places where American personnel or interests were directly involved or affected. Kashmir was certainly a crisis zone. But if it exploded, it was not a spot with which Op-Center would automatically be involved. In fact, that was the reason Striker had been asked to go into the region and look for Pakistani nuclear weapons. Pakistani intelligence would not be expecting them.
Ron Friday was a very late addition to the mission. His participation had been requested over the weekend by Satya Shankar, minister of state, Department of Atomic Energy. Officially, one of Shankar's duties was the sale of nuclear technology to developing nations. Unofficially, he was responsible for helping the military keep track of nuclear technology within enemy states. Shankar and Friday had worked together once before, when Shankar was joint secretary, Exploration, of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. Friday had been called in by a European oil concern to assess legal issues involving drilling in disputed territory between Great Indian Desert in the Rajasthan Province of India and the Thar Desert in Pakistan. Shankar had obviously been impressed by the attorney.
Since Op-Center was stuck with Friday, reading his file had not been a high priority for Herbert. Especially since the CIOC had already okayed Friday based on his Blue Shield rating. That meant Ron Friday was cleared to take part in the most sensitive fieldwork in foreign countries. Red Shield meant that an agent was trusted by the foreign government. White Shield meant that he was trusted by his own government, that there was no evidence of double-agent activity. Yellow Shield meant that he had been revealed to be a double agent and was being used by his government to put out disinformation, often without his knowledge or occasionally with his cooperation in exchange for clemency. Blue Shield meant he was trusted by both nations.
What the Red, White, and Blue rankings really meant was that no data had ever come up to suggest the agent was corrupt. That was usually good enough for a project overseer to rubber-stamp an individual for a mission. Especially an overseer who was new on the job and overworked, like Hank Lewis at the National Security Agency. But the Shield system was not infallible. It could simply mean that the agent had been too careful to be caught. Or that he had someone on the inside who kept his file clean.
Friday's file was extremely skimpy. It contained very few field reports from Azerbaijan, where he had most recently been stationed at the United States embassy in Baku as an aide to Deputy Ambassador Dorothy Williamson. There were zero communications at all from him during the recent crisis in the former Soviet Republic. That was unusual. Herbert had a look at the files of the two CIA operatives who had been stationed at the embassy. They were full of daily reports. Coincidentally, perhaps, both of those men were killed.
Friday's thin file and his apparent silence during the crisis was troubling. One of his superiors at the NSA, Jack Fenwick, was the man who had hired the terrorist known as the Harpooner to precipitate the Caspian Sea confrontation between Azerbaijan, Iran, and Russia. Herbert had not read all the postmortems about the situation. There had not been time. But Friday's silence before and during the showdown led Herbert to wonder: was he really inactive or were his reports made directly to someone who destroyed them?
Jack Fenwick, for example.
If that were true it could mean that Ron Friday had been working with Jack Fenwick and the Harpooner to start a war. Of course, there was always the possibility that Friday had been helping Fenwick without knowing what the NSA chief was up to. But that seemed unlikely. Ron Friday had been an attorney, a top-level oil rights negotiator, and a diplomatic advisor. He did not seem naive. And that scared the hell out of Herbert.
The decrypted NSA e-file arrived and Herbert opened it. The folder contained Friday's observations as well as relevant data about the previous antiterrorist functions of both the National Security Guard and the Special Frontier Force. It did not seem strange to Herbert that SFF had replaced the Black Cats after this latest attack. Maybe the SFF had jurisdiction over strikes against religious sites. Or maybe the government had grown impatient with the ineffectiveness of the Black Cats. There was obviously a terrorist cell roaming Kashmir. Any security agency that failed to maintain security was not going to have that job for very long.
Either he or Paul Hood could call their partners in Indian intelligence and get an explanation for the change. Herbert's concerns about Ron Friday would not be so easy to dispel.
Herbert entered the numbers 008 on his wheelchair phone. That was Paul Hood's extension. Shortly before Op-Center opened its doors Matt Stoll had hacked the computer system to make sure he got the 007 extension. Herbert had not been happy about Stoll's hacking but Hood had appreciated the man's initiative. As long as Stoll limited his internal sabotage to a one-time hack of the phone directory Hood had decided to overlook it.
The phone beeped once. "Hood here."
"Chief, it's Bob. Got a minute?"
"Sure," Hood said.
"I'll be right there," Herbert said. He typed an address in his computer and hit "enter." "Meanwhile, I'd like you to have a quick look at the e-files I'm sending over. One's a report from the NSA about this morning's attack in Srinagar. Another is Ron Friday's very thin dossier."
"All right," Hood said.
Herbert hung up and wheeled himself down the corridor to Hood's office. As Herbert was en route he got a call from Matt Stoll.
"Make it quick," Herbert said.
"I was just reviewing the latest number grabs from the Bellhop," Stoll told him. "That telephone number we've been watching, the field phone in Srinagar? It's making very strange calls."
"What do you mean?" Herbert said.
"The field phone keeps calling the home phone in Jammu, the police station," Stoll said. "But the calls last for only one second."
"That's it?"
"That's it," Stoll told him. "We read a connect, a one-second gap, then a disconnect."
"Is it happening regularly?" Herbert asked.
"There's been a blip every minute since four P.M. local time, six thirty A.M. our time," Stoll told him.
"That's over four hours," Herbert said. "Short, regular pulses over a long period. Sounds like a tracking beacon."
"It could be that," Stoll agreed, "or it could mean that someone hit the autoredial button by accident. Voice mail an
swers nonemergency calls at the police station. The field phone may have been programmed to read that as a disconnect so it hangs up and rings the number again."
"That doesn't sound likely," Herbert said. "Is there any way to tell if the field phone is moving?"
"Not directly," Stoll said.
"What about indirectly?" Herbert asked as he reached Paul Hood's office. The door was open and he knocked on the jamb. Hood was studying his computer monitor. He motioned Herbert in.
"If the phone calls are a beacon, then the police in Kashmir are almost certainly following them, probably by ground-based triangulation," Stoll told Herbert. "All of that would be run through their computers. It will take some time but we can try breaking into the system."
"Do it," Herbert said.
"Sure," Stoll said. "But why don't we just call over and ask them what's going on? Aren't they our allies? Aren't we supposed to be running this operation with them?"
"Yes," Herbert replied. "But if there's some way we can accomplish this without them knowing I'd be happier. The police are going to want to know why we're asking. The Black Cats and selected government officials are the only ones who are supposed to know that Striker is coming over."
"I see," Stoll said. "Okay. We'll try hacking them."
"Thanks," Herbert said and hung up as he wheeled into Hood's office. He locked his brakes and shut the door behind him.
"Busy morning?" Hood asked.
"Not until some lunatic decided to set off fireworks in Srinagar," Herbert replied.
Hood nodded. "I haven't finished these files," he said, "but Ron Friday is obviously concerned about us having anything to do with the Black Cats. And you're apparently worried about having anything to do with Ron Friday."
Paul Hood had not spent a lot of time working in the intelligence community and he had a number of weaknesses. However, one of Hood's greatest strengths was that his years in politics and finance had taught him to intuit the concerns of his associates, whatever the topic.
"That's about the size of it," Herbert admitted.
"Tell me about this police line blip," Hood said, still reading.
"The last home phone-to-field phone communication came a moment before the explosion," Herbert said. "But Matt just told me that the regular pulses from field to home started immediately after that. In ELINT we want three things to happen before we posit a possible connection to a terrorist attack: timing, proximity, and probable source. We've got those."
"The probable source being a cell that's apparently been working in Srinagar," Hood said.
"Correct," Herbert said. "I just asked Matt to try and get more intel on the continuing blips."
Hood nodded and continued reading. "The problem you have with Friday is a little dicier."
"Why?" Herbert asked.
"Because he's there at the request of the Indian government," Hood said.
"So is Striker," Herbert pointed out.
"Yes, but they've worked with Friday," Hood said. "They'll give Striker more freedom because they trust Friday."
"There's an irony in there somewhere," Herbert said.
"Look, I see where you're coming from," Hood acknowledged. "Friday worked for Fenwick. Fenwick betrayed his country. But we have to be careful about pushing guilt by association."
"How about guilt by criminal activity?" Herbert said. "Whatever Friday was doing in Baku was removed from his file."
"That's assuming he was working for the NSA," Hood said. "I just put in a call to Deputy Ambassador Williamson in Baku. Her personal file says that Friday worked as her aide. He was on loan from the NSA to collect intelligence on the oil situation. There's no reason to assume the CIA involved him in the hunt for the Harpooner. And Jack Fenwick was playing with fire. He may not have told Friday what the NSA was really doing in the Caspian."
"Or Fenwick may have sent him there," Herbert pointed out. "Friday's oil credentials made him the perfect inside man."
"You'll need to prove that one," Hood said.
Herbert didn't like that answer. When his gut told him something he listened to it. To him, Hood's habit of being a devil's advocate was one of his big weaknesses. Still, from the perspective of accountability Hood was doing the right thing. That was why Hood was in charge of Op-Center and Herbert was not. They could not go back to the CIOC and tell them they called off the mission or were concerned about Friday's role in it because of Herbert's intuition.
The phone beeped. It was Dorothy Williamson. Hood put the phone on speaker. He was busy typing something on his keyboard as he introduced himself and Herbert. Then he explained that they were involved in a joint operation with Ron Friday. Hood asked if she would mind sharing her impressions of the agent.
"He was very efficient, a good attorney and negotiator, and I was sorry to lose him," she said.
"Did he interact much with the two Company men, the ones who were killed by the Harpooner's man?" Hood asked.
"Mr. Friday spent a great deal of time with Mr. Moore and Mr. Thomas," Williamson replied.
"I see," Hood said.
Herbert felt vindicated. Friday's interaction with the men should have shown up in his reports to the NSA. Now he knew the file had been sanitized.
"For the record, Mr. Hood, I do want to point out one thing," Williamson said. "The Company agents were not killed by one assassin but by two."
That caught Herbert by surprise.
"There were two assassins at the hospital," the deputy ambassador went on. "One of them was killed. The other one got away. The Baku police department is still looking for him."
"I did not know that," Hood said. "Thank you."
Herbert's gut growled a little. The two CIA operatives were killed getting medical attention for a visiting agent who had been poisoned by the Harpooner. Fenwick's plan to start a Caspian war had depended upon killing all three men at the hospital. Fenwick certainly would have asked Friday for information regarding the movements of the CIA operatives. And just as certainly that information would have been deleted from Friday's files. But after the two men were killed, Friday had to have suspected that something was wrong. He should have confided in Williamson or made sure he had a better alibi.
Unless he was a willing part of Fenwick's team.
"Bob Herbert here, Madam Deputy Ambassador," Herbert said. "Can you tell me where Mr. Friday was on the night of the murders?"
"In his apartment, as I recall," Williamson informed him.
"Did Mr. Friday have anything to say after he learned about the killings?" Herbert pressed.
"Not really," she said.
"Was he concerned for his own safety?" Herbert asked.
"He never expressed any worries," she said. "But there was not a lot of time for chat. We were working hard to put down a war."
Hood shot Herbert a glance. The intelligence chief sat back, exasperated, as Hood complimented her on her efforts during the crisis.
That was Paul Hood. Whatever the situation he always had the presence of mind to play the diplomat. Not Herbert. If the Harpooner was killing U.S. agents, he wanted to know why it did not occur to Ms. Williamson to find out why Friday had not been hit.
The deputy ambassador had a few more things to say about Friday, especially praising his quick learning curve on the issues they had to deal with between Azerbaijan and its neighbors. Williamson asked Hood to give him her regards if he spoke with Friday.
Hood said he would and clicked off. He regarded Herbert. "You wouldn't have gotten anywhere hammering her," Hood said.
"How do you know?" Herbert asked.
"While we were talking I looked at her c.v.," Hood said. "Williamson's a political appointee. She ran the spin-doctoring for Senator Thompson during his last Senate campaign."
"Dirty tricks?" Herbert asked disgustedly. "That's the whole of her intelligence experience?"
"Pretty much," Hood said. "With two CIA agents on staff in Baku I guess the president thought he was safe scoring points with the majority whip. More
to the point, I'm guessing this whole thing sounds too clean to you."
"Like brass buttons on inspection day."
"I don't know, Bob," Hood said. "It's not just Williamson. Hank Lewis trusted Friday enough to send him to India."
"That doesn't mean anything," Herbert said. "I spoke with Hank Lewis earlier this morning. He's making decisions like a monkey in a space capsule."
Hood made a face. "He's a good man—"
"Maybe, Chief, but that's the way it is," Herbert insisted. "Lewis gets a jolt of electricity and pushes a button. He hasn't had time to think about Ron Friday or anyone else. Look, Hank Lewis and Dorothy Williamson shouldn't be the issues right now—"
"Agreed," Hood said. "All right. Let's assume Ron Friday may not be someone we want on our team. How do we vet him? Jack Fenwick's not going to say anything to anyone."
"Why not?" Herbert asked. "Maybe the rat-bastard will talk in exchange for immunity—"
"The president got what he wanted, the resignations of Fenwick and his coconspirators," Hood said. "He doesn't want a national trial that will question whether he was actually on the edge of a mental breakdown during the crisis, even if it means letting a few underlings remain in the system. Fenwick got off lucky. He's not going to say anything that might change the president's mind."
"That's great," Herbert said. "The guilty go free and the president's psyche doesn't get the examination it may damn well need."
"And the stock market doesn't collapse and the military doesn't lose faith in its commander-in-chief and a rash of Third World despots don't start pushing their own agendas while the nation is distracted," Hood said. "The systems are all too damn interconnected, Bob. Right and wrong don't matter anymore. It's all about equilibrium."
"Is that so?" Herbert said. "Well, mine's a little shaky right now. I don't like risking my team, my friends, to keep some Indian nabob happy."
"We aren't going to," Hood said. "We're going to protect the part of the system we've been given." He looked at his watch. "I don't know if Ron Friday betrayed his country in Baku. Even if he did it doesn't mean he's got a side bet going in India. But we still have about eighteen hours before Striker reaches India. What can we do to get more intel on Friday?"