by Tom Clancy
The addressee turned in surprise when he heard the whir of his fax printing out a message. It had to be official, because only half a dozen people knew that private line. (It never occurred to him that the telephone company’s computer knew about it, too.) He finished what he was doing before reaching over for the message.
What the hell is NIMBUS? he wondered. Whatever it was, it was eyes-only to him, and therefore he started to read the message. He was sipping his third cup of morning coffee while he did so, and was fortunate that his cough deposited some of it onto his desk and not his trousers.
Cathy Ryan was nothing if not punctual. The phone in the guest room rang at precisely 8:30. Jack’s head jerked off the pillow as though from an electric shock, and his hand reached out to grab the offensive instrument.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, Jack,” his wife said brightly. “What’s the problem with you?”
“I had to stay up late with some work. Did you take the other thing with you?”
“Yes, what’s the—”
Jack cut her off. “I know what it says, babe. Could you just make the call? It’s important.” Dr. Caroline Ryan was also bright enough to catch the meaning of what he said.
“Okay, Jack. How do you feel?”
“Awful. But I have work to do.”
“So do I, honey. ’Bye.”
“Yeah.” Jack hung up and commanded himself to get out of the bed. First a shower, he told himself.
Cathy was on her way to Surgery, and had to hurry. She lifted her office phone and called the proper number on the hospital’s D.C. line. It rang only once.
“Dan Murray.”
“Dan, this is Cathy Ryan.”
“Morning! What can I do for you this fine day, Doctor?” “Jack said to tell you that he’d be in to see you just after ten. He wants you to let him park in the drive-through, and he said to tell you that the folks down the hall aren’t supposed to know. I don’t know what that means, but that’s what he told me to say.” Cathy didn’t know whether to be amused or not. Jack did like to play funny little games—she thought they were pretty dumb little games—with people who shared his clearances, and wondered if this was some sort of joke or not. Jack especially liked to play games with his FBI friend.
“Okay, Cath’, I’ll take care of that.”
“I have to run off to fix somebody’s eyeball. Say hi to Liz for me.”
“Will do. Have a good one.”
Murray hung up with a puzzled look on his face. Folks down the hall aren’t supposed to know. “The folks down the hall” was a phrase Murray had used the first time they’d met, in St. Thomas’s Hospital in London when Dan had been the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy on Grosvenor Square. The folks down the hall were CIA.
But Ryan was one of the top six people at Langley, arguably one of the top three.
What the hell did that mean?
“Hmph.” He called his secretary and had her notify the security guards to allow Ryan into the driveway that passed under the main entrance to the Hoover Building. Whatever it meant, he could wait.
Clark arrived at Langley at nine that morning. He didn’t have a security pass—not the sort of thing you carry into the field—and had to use a code-word to get through the main gate, which seemed very conspiratorial indeed. He parked in the visitors’ lot—CIA has one of those—and walked in the main entrance, heading immediately to the left where he quickly got what looked like a visitor’s badge which, however, worked just fine in the electronically controlled gates. Now he angled off to the right, past the wall murals that looked as though some enormous child had daubed mud all over the place. The decorator for this place, Clark was sure, had to have been a KGB plant. Or maybe they’d just picked the lowest bidder. An elevator took him to the seventh floor, and he walked around the corridor to the executive offices that have their own separate corridor on the face of the building. He ended up in front of the DDO’s secretary.
“Mr. Clark to see Mr. Ritter,” he said.
“Do you have an appointment?” the secretary asked.
“No, I don’t, but I think he wants to see me,” Clark said politely. There was no sense in abusing her. Besides, Clark had been raised to show deference to women. She lifted her phone and passed the message. “You can go right in, Mr. Clark.”
“Thank you.” He closed the door behind him. The door, of course, was heavy and soundproof. That was just as well.
“What the hell are you doing here?” the DDO demanded.
“You’re going to have to shut SHOWBOAT down,” Clark said without preamble. “It’s coming apart. The bad guys are hunting those kids down and—”
“I know. I heard late last night. Look, I never figured this would be a no-loss operation. One of the teams got clobbered pretty good thirty-six hours ago, but based on intercepts, looks like they gave better than they took, and then they got even with some others who—”
“That was me,” Clark said.
“What?” Ritter asked in surprise.
“Larson and I took a little drive about this time yesterday, and I found three of those—whatevers. They were just finished loading up the bodies into the back of a truck. I didn’t see any point in letting them live,” Mr. Clark said in a normal tone of voice. It had been a very long time since anyone at CIA had said something like that.
“Christ, John!” Ritter was even too surprised to blast Clark for violating his own security by stepping into a separate operation.
“I recognized one of the bodies,” Clark went on. “Captain Emilio Rojas, United States Army. He was a hell of a nice kid, by the way.”
“I’m sorry about that. Nobody ever said this was safe.”
“I’m sure his family, if any, will appreciate that. This operation is blown. It’s time to cut our losses. What are we doing to get them out?” Clark asked.
“I’m looking at that. I have to coordinate with somebody. I’m not sure that he’ll agree.”
“In that case, sir,” Clark told his boss, “I suggest that you make your case rather forcefully.”
“Are you threatening me?” Ritter asked quietly.
“No, sir, I would prefer not to have you read me that way. I am telling you, on the basis of my experience, that this operation must be terminated ASAP. It is your job to make that necessity plain to the people who authorized the operation. Failing to get such permission, I would advise you to terminate the operation anyway.”
“I could lose my job for that,” the DDO pointed out.
“After I identified the body of Captain Rojas, I set fire to the truck. Couple reasons. I wanted to divert the enemy somewhat, and, of course, I also wanted to render the bodies unrecognizable. I’ve never burned the body of a friendly before. I did not like doing that. Larson still doesn’t know why I did it. He’s too young to understand. You’re not, sir. You sent those people into the field and you are responsible for them. If you are telling me that your job is more important than that, I am here to tell you that you are wrong, sir.” Clark hadn’t yet raised his voice above the level of a reasonable man discussing ordinary business, but for the first time in a very long time, Bob Ritter feared for his personal safety.
“Your diversion attempt was successful, by the way. The opposition has forty people looking in the wrong place now.”
“Good. That will make the extraction effort all the easier to accomplish.”
“John, you can’t give me orders like this.”
“Sir, I am not giving you orders. I am telling you what has to be done. You told me that the operation was mine to run.”
“That was RECIPROCITY, not SHOWBOAT.”
“This is not a time for semantics, sir. If you do not pull those people out, more—possibly all of them—will be killed. That, sir, is your responsibility. You can’t put people in the field and not support them. You know that.”
“You’re right, of course,” Ritter said after a moment. “I can’t do it on my own. I have to inform—well
, you know. I’ll take care of that. We’ll pull them out as quickly as we can.”
“Good.” Clark relaxed. Ritter was a sharp operator, often too sharp in his dealings with subordinates, but he was a man of his word. Besides, the DDO was too smart to cross him on a matter like this. Clark was sure of that. He had made his own position pretty damned clear, and Ritter had caught the signal five-by-five.
“What about Larson and his courier?”
“I’ve pulled them both out. His plane’s at Panama, and he’s at the Marriott down the road. He’s pretty good, by the way, but he’s probably blown as far as Colombia is concerned. I’d say they could both use a few weeks off.”
“Fair enough. What about you?”
“I can head back tomorrow if you want. You might want me to help with the extraction.”
“We may have a line on Cortez.”
“Really?”
“And you’re the guy who got the first picture of him.”
“Oh. Where—the guy at the Untiveros house, the guy we just barely missed?”
“The same. Positive ID from the lady he seduced. He’s running the people they have in the field from a little house near Anserma.”
“I’d have to take Larson back for that.”
“Think it’s worth the risk?”
“Getting Cortez?” Clark thought for a moment. “Depends. It’s worth a look. What do we know about his security?”
“Nothing,” Ritter admitted, “just a rough idea where the house is. We got that from an intercept. Be nice to get him alive. He knows a lot of things we want to find out. We bring him back here and we can hang a murder rap over his head. Death-penalty kind.”
Clark nodded thoughtfully. Another element of spy fiction was the canard about how people in the intelligence business were willing to take their cyanide capsules or face a firing squad with a song in their hearts. The facts were to the contrary. Men faced certain death courageously only when there was no attractive alternative. The trick was to give them such an alternative, which didn’t require the mind of a rocket scientist, as the current aphorism went. If they got Cortez, the normal form would be take him all the way through a trial, sentence him to death—just a matter of picking the right judge, and in national-security matters, there was always lots of leeway—and take it from there. Cortez would crack in due course, probably even before the trial started. Cortez was no fool, after all, and would know when and how to strike a bargain. He’d already sold out on his own country. Selling out on the Cartel was trivial beside that.
Clark nodded. “Give me a few hours to think about it.”
Ryan turned left off 10th Street, Northwest, into the drive-through. There were uniformed and plainclothes guards, one of whom held a clipboard. He approached the car.
“Jack Ryan to see Dan Murray.”
“Could I see some ID, please?”
Jack pulled out his CIA pass. The guard recognized it for what it was and waved to another guard. This one punched the button to lower the steel barrier that was supposed to prevent people with car bombs from driving under the headquarters of the FBI. He pulled over it and found a place to park the car. A young FBI agent met him in the lobby and handed him a pass that would work the Bureau’s electronic gate. If someone invented the right sort of computer virus, Jack thought, half of the government would be prevented from going to work. And maybe the country would be safe until the problem was fixed.
The Hoover Building has a decidedly unusual layout, a maze of diagonal corridors intersecting with squared-off corridors. It is even worse than the Pentagon for the uninitiated to find their way about. In this case, Ryan was well and truly disoriented by the time they found the right office. Dan was waiting for him and led him into his private office. Jack closed the door behind him.
“What gives?” Murray asked.
Ryan set his briefcase on Murray’s desk and opened it.
“I need some guidance.”
“About what?”
“About what is probably an illegal operation—several of them, as a matter of fact.”
“How illegal?”
“Murder,” Jack said as undramatically as he could manage.
“The car bombs in Colombia?” Murray asked from his swivel chair.
“Not bad, Dan. Except they weren’t car bombs.”
Oh? Dan sat down and thought for a few seconds before speaking. He remembered that whatever was being done was retribution for the murder of Emil and the rest. “Whatever they were, the law on this is fairly muddled, you know. The prohibition against killing people in intelligence operations is an Executive Order, promulgated by the President. If he writes except in this case on the bottom of the order, then it’s legal—sort of. The law on this issue is really strange. More than anything else, it’s a constitutional matter, and the Constitution is nice and vague where it has to be.”
“Yeah, I know about that. What makes it illegal is that I’ve been told to give incorrect information to Congress. If the oversight people were in on it, it wouldn’t be murder. It would be properly formulated government policy. In fact, as I understand the law, it would not be murder even if we did it first and then told Congress, because we have a lead time to start a covert op if the oversight folks are out of town. But if the DCI tells me to give false information to Congress, then we’re committing murder, because we’re not following the law. That’s the good news, Dan.”
“Go on.”
“The bad news is that too many people know what’s going on, and if the story gets out, some people we have out in the field are in a world of hurt. I’ll set the political dimension aside for the moment except to say that there’s more than one. Dan, I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do.” Ryan’s analysis, as usual, was very accurate. He’d made only a single mistake. He didn’t know what the real bad news was.
Murray smiled, not because he wanted to, but because his friend needed it. “What makes you think I do?”
Ryan’s tension eased a bit. “Well, I could go to a priest for guidance, but they ain’t cleared SI. You are, and the FBI’s the next best thing to the priesthood, isn’t it?” It was an inside joke between the two. Both were Boston College graduates.
“Where’s the operation being run out of?”
“Guess. It isn’t Langley, not really. It’s being run out of a place exactly six blocks up the street.”
“That means I can’t even go to the AG.”
“Yeah, he just might tell his boss, mightn’t he?”
“So I get in trouble with my bureaucracy,” Murray observed lightly.
“Is government service really worth the hassle?” Jack asked bleakly, his depression returning. “Hell, maybe we can retire together. Who can you trust?”
That answer came easily. “Bill Shaw.” Murray rose. “Let’s go see him.”
“Loop” is one of those computer words that has gained currency in society. It identifies things that happen and the people who make them happen, an action- or decision-cycle that exists independently of the things around it. Any government has a virtually infinite collection of such loops, each defined by its own special set of ground rules, understood by the players. Within the next few hours a new loop had been established. It included selected members of the FBI, but not the U.S. Attorney General, who had authority over the Bureau. It would also include members of the Secret Service, but not their boss, the Secretary of the Treasury. Investigations of this sort were mainly exercises in paper-chasing and analysis, and Murray—who was also tasked to head this one up—was surprised to see that one of his “subjects” was soon on the move. It didn’t help him at all to learn that he was driving to Andrews Air Force Base.
By that time, Ryan was back at his desk, looking slightly wan, everyone thought, but everyone had heard that he’d been sick the night before. Something he ate. He now knew what to do: nothing. Ritter was gone, and the Judge still wasn’t back. It wasn’t easy to do nothing. It was harder still to do things that didn’t ma
tter a damn right now. He did feel better, however. Now the problem wasn’t his alone. He didn’t know that this was nothing to feel better about.
25.
The ODYSSEY File
MURRAY HAD A senior agent drive to Andrews immediately, of course, and he got there just in time to watch the small jet taxi off to the end of runway One-Left. The agent used his ID to get himself into the office of the colonel who commanded the 89th Military Airlift Wing. That got the agent the flight plan for the aircraft that had just taken off. He used the colonel’s phone to call Murray, then admonished the colonel that he, the agent, had never been there, had never made an official inquiry; that this was part of a major criminal investigation and was code-word material. The code-word for the case was ODYSSEY.
Murray and Shaw were together within a minute of taking the call. Shaw had found that he could handle the duties of acting Director. He was sure that it was not a permanent job, and after the proper political figurehead was found, he’d revert to Executive Assistant Director (Investigations). Part of him thought that too bad. What was wrong with having a career cop running the Bureau? Of course, that was politics, not police work, and in over thirty years of police work he’d discovered that politics was not his cup of tea.