by Tom Clancy
“Five-five-two-nine,” the voice answered.
“Oh, excuse me, I was trying to get six-six-three-zero. Sorry.” There followed two seconds of hesitation on the other side of the connection.
“Oh ... That’s quite all right,” the voice assured him in a tone that was anything but all right.
Cooley replaced the phone and walked to a train. It was everything he could do not to look over his shoulder.
“This is Geoffrey Watkins,” he said as he lifted the phone.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” the voice said. “I was trying to get Mr. Titus. Is this six-two-nine-one?” All contacts are broken until further notice, the number told him. Not known if you are in danger. Will advise if possible.
“No, this is six-two-one-nine,” he answered. Understood. Watkins hung the phone up and looked out his window. His stomach felt as though a ball of refrigerated lead had materialized there. He swallowed twice, then reached for his tea. For the rest of the morning, it was hard to concentrate on the Foreign Office white paper he was reading. He needed two stiff drinks with lunch to settle himself down.
By noon, Cooley was in Dover, aboard a cross-channel ferry. He was fully alert now, and sat in a corner seat on the upper deck, looking over the newspaper in his hands to see if anyone was watching him. He’d almost boarded the hovercraft to Calais, but decided against it at the last moment. He had enough cash for the Dover-Dunkerque ferry, but not the more expensive hovercraft, and he didn’t want to leave a paper trail behind. It was only two and a quarter hours in any case. Once in France, he could catch a train to Paris, then start flying. He started to feel secure for the first time in hours, but was able to suppress it easily enough. Cooley had never known this sort of fear before, and it left a considerable aftertaste. The quiet hatred that had festered for years now ate at him like an acid. They had made him run. They had spied on him! Because of all his training, all the precautions that he’d followed assiduously, and all the professional skill that he’d employed, Cooley had never seriously considered the possibility that he would be turned. He had thought himself too skillful for that. That he was wrong enraged him, and for the first time in his life, he wanted to lash out himself. He’d lost his bookshop and with it all the books he loved, and this, too, had been taken from him by the bloody Brits! He folded the paper neatly and set it down in his lap while the ferry pulled into the English Channel, placid with the summer sun overhead. His bland face stared out at the water with a gaze as calm as a man in contemplation of his garden while he fantasized images of blood and death.
Owens was as furious as anyone had ever seen him. The surveillance of Cooley had been so easy, so routine—but that was no excuse, he told his men. That harmless-looking little poof, as Ashley had called him, had slipped away from his shadowers as adroitly as someone trained at Moscow Center itself. There were men at every international airport in Britain clutching pictures of Cooley, and if he used his credit card to purchase any kind of ticket, the computers would notify Scotland Yard at once, but Owens had a sickening feeling that the man was already out of the country. The Commander of C-13 dismissed his people.
Ashley was in the room, too, and his people had been caught equally off guard. He and Owens shared a look of anger mixed with despair.
A detective had left the tape of a phone call to Geoffrey Watkins made less than an hour after Cooley disappeared. Ashley played it. It lasted all of twenty seconds. And it wasn’t Cooley’s voice. If it had been, they would have arrested Watkins then and there. For all their effort, they still did not have a single usable piece of evidence on Geoffrey Watkins.
“There is a Mr. Titus in the building. The voice even gave the correct number. By all rights it could have been a simple wrong number. ”
“But it wasn’t, of course.”
“That is how it’s done, you know. You have pre-set messages that are constructed to sound entirely harmless. Whoever trained these chaps knew what they were about. What about the shop?”
“The girl Beatrix knows absolutely nothing. We have people searching the shop at this moment, but so far they’ve found nothing but old bloody books. Same story at his flat.” Owens stood and spoke in a voice full of perverse wonder. “An electrician.... Months of work, gone because he yanks the wrong wire. ”
“He’ll turn up. He could not have had a great deal of cash. He must use his credit card.”
“He’s out of the country already. Don’t say he isn’t. If he’s clever enough for what we know he’s done—”
“Yes.” Ashley nodded reluctant agreement. “One doesn’t always win, James.”
“It is so nice to hear that!” Owens snapped out his reply. “These bastards have outguessed us every step of the way. The Commissioner is going to ask me how it is that we couldn’t get our thumbs out in time, and there is no answer to that question.”
“So what’s the next step, then?”
“At least we know what he looks like. We ... we share what we know with the Americans, all of it. I have a meeting scheduled with Murray this evening. He’s hinted that they have something operating that he’s not able to talk about, doubtless some sort of CIA op.”
“Agreed. Is it here or there?”
“There.” Owens paused. “I am getting sick of this place.”
“Commander, you should measure your successes against your failures,” Ashley said. “You’re the best man we’ve had in this office in some years.”
Owens only grunted at that remark. He knew it was true. Under his leadership, C-13 had scored major coups against the Provisionals. But in this job, as in so many others, the question one’s superiors always asked was, What have you accomplished today? Yesterday was ancient history.
“Watkins’ suspected contact has flown,” he announced three hours later.
“What happened?” Murray closed his eyes halfway through the explanation and shook his head sadly. “We had the same sort of thing happen to us,” he said after Owens finished. “A renegade CIA officer. We were watching his place, and let things settle into a comfortable routine, and then—zip! He snookered the surveillance team. He turned up in Moscow a week later. It happens, Jimmy.”
“Not to me,” Owens almost snarled. “Not until now, that is.”
“What’s he look like?” Owens handed a collection of photographs across the desk. Murray flipped through them. “Mousy little bastard, isn’t he? Almost bald.” The FBI man considered this for a moment, then lifted his phone and punched in four numbers. “Fred? Dan. You want to come down to my office for a minute?”
The man arrived a minute later. Murray didn’t identify him as a member of the CIA and Owens didn’t ask. He didn’t have to. He’d given over two copies of each photo.
Fred—one of the men from “down the hall”—took his photos and looked at them. “Who’s he supposed to be?”
Owens explained briefly, ending, “He’s probably out of the country by now.”
“Well, if he turns up in any of our nets, we’ll let you know,” Fred promised, and left.
“Do you know what they’re up to?” Owens asked Murray.
“No. I know something is happening. The Bureau and the Agency have a joint task force set up, but it’s compartmented, and I don’t need to know all of it yet.”
“Did your chaps have a part in the raid on Action-Directe?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Murray said piously. How the hell did you hear about that, Jimmy?
“I thought as much,” Owens replied. Bloody security! “Dan, we are concerned here with the personal safety of—”
Murray held his hands up like a man at bay. “I know, I know. And you’re right, too. We ought to cut your people in on this. I’ll call the Director myself.”
The phone rang. It was for Owens.
“Yes?” The Commander of C-13 listened for a minute before hanging up. “Thank you.” A sigh. “Dan, he’s definitely on the continent. He used a credit card to purchase a railway ticket.
Dunkerque to Paris, three hours ago.”
“Have the French pick him up?”
“Too late. The train arrived twenty minutes ago. He’s completely gone now. Besides, we have nothing to arrest him for, do we?”
“And Watkins has been warned off.”
“Unless that was a genuinely wrong number, which I rather doubt, but try to prove that in a court of law!”
“Yeah.” Judges didn’t understand any instinct but their own.
“And don’t tell me that you can’t win them all! That’s what they pay me to do.” Owens looked down at the rug, then back up. “Please excuse me for that.”
“Aah!” Murray waved it off. “You’ve had bad days before. So have I. It’s part of the business we’re in. What we both need at a time like this is a beer. Come on downstairs, and I’ll treat you to a burger.”
“When will you call your Director?”
“It’s lunchtime over there. He always has a meeting going over lunch. We’ll let it wait a few hours.”
Ryan had lunch with Cantor that day in the CIA cafeteria. It could have been the eating place in any other government building. The food was just as unexciting. Ryan decided to try the lasagna, but Marty stuck with fruit salad and cake. It seemed an odd diet until Jack watched him take a tablet before eating. He washed it down with milk.
“Ulcers, Marty?”
“What makes you say that?”
“I’m married to a doc, remember? You just took a Tagamet. That’s for ulcers.”
“This place gets to you after a while,” Cantor explained. “My stomach started acting up last year and didn’t get any better. Everyone in my family comes down with it sooner or later. Bad genes, I guess. The medication helps some, but the doctor says that I need a less stressful environment.” A snort.
“You do work long hours,” Ryan observed.
“Anyway, my wife got offered a teaching position at the University of Texas—she’s a mathematician. And to sweeten the deal they offered me a place in the Political Science Department. The pay’s better than it is here, too. I’ve been here twelve years,” he said quietly. “Long time.”
“So what do you feel bad about? Teaching’s great. I love it, and you’ll be good at it. You’ll even have a good football team to watch. ”
“Yeah, well, she’s already down there, and I leave in a few weeks. I’m going to miss this place.”
“You’ll get over it. Imagine being able to walk into a building without getting permission from a computer. Hey, I walked away from my first job.”
“But this one’s important.” Cantor drank his milk and looked across the table. “What are you going to do?”
“Ask me after the baby is born.” Ryan didn’t want to dwell on this question.
“The Agency needs people like you, Jack. You’ve got a feel for things. You don’t think and act like a bureaucrat. You say what you think. Not everyone in this building does that, and that’s why the Admiral likes you.”
“Hell, I haven’t talked to him since—”
“He knows what you’re doing.” Cantor smiled.
“Oh.” Ryan understood. “So that’s it.”
“That’s right. The old man really wants you, Jack. You still don’t know how important that photo you tripped over was, do you?”
“All I did was show it to you, Marty,” Ryan protested. “You’re the one who really made the connection.”
“You did exactly the right thing, exactly what an analyst is supposed to do. There was more brains in that than you know. You have a gift for this sort of work. If you can’t see it, I can.” Cantor examined the lasagna and winced. How could anybody eat that greasy poison? “Two years from now you’ll be ready for my job.”
“One bridge at a time, Marty.” They let it go at that.
An hour later Ryan was back in his office. Cantor came in.
“Another pep talk?” Jack smiled. Full-court press time ...
“We have a picture of a suspected ULA member and it’s only a week old. We got it in from London a couple of hours ago.”
“Dennis Cooley.” Ryan examined it and laughed. “He looks like a real wimp. What’s the story?”
Cantor explained. “Bad luck for the Brits, but maybe good luck for us. Look at the picture again and tell me something important.”
“You mean ... he’s lost most of his hair. Oh! We can ID the guy if he turns up at one of the camps. None of the other people are bald.”
“You got it. And the boss just cleared you for something. There’s an op laid on for Camp -18.”
“What kind?”
“The kind you watched before. Is that still bothering you?”
“No, not really.” What bothers me is that it doesn’t bother me, Ryan thought. Maybe it should.... “Not with these guys, I don’t. When?”
“I can’t tell you, but soon.”
“So why did you let me know—nice one, Marty. Not very subtle, though. Does the Admiral want me to stay that bad?”
“Draw your own conclusions.”
An hour after that the photo expert was back. Another satellite had passed over the camp at 2208 local time. The infrared image showed eight people standing at line on the firing range. Bright tongues of flame marked two of the shapes. They were firing their weapons at night, and there were now at least eight of them there.
“What happened?” O’Donnell asked. He’d met Cooley at the airport. A cutout had gotten word out that Cooley was on the run, but the reason for it had had to wait until now.
“There was a bug in my shop.”
“You’re sure?” O’Donnell asked.
Cooley handed it over. The wire had been in his pocket for thirty hours. O’Donnell pulled the Toyota Land Cruiser over to examine it.
“Marconi make these for intelligence use. Quite sensitive. How long might it have been there?”
Cooley could not remember having anyone go into his back room unsupervised. “I’ve no idea.”
O’Donnell put the vehicle back into gear, heading out into the desert. He pondered the question for over a mile. Something had gone wrong, but what ... ?
“Did you ever think you were being followed?”
“Never.”
“How closely did you check, Dennis?” Cooley hesitated, and O’Donnell took this for an answer. “Dennis, did you ever break tradecraft—ever?”
“No, Kevin, of course not. It isn’t possible that—for God’s sake, Kevin, it’s been weeks since I’ve been in contact with Watkins.”
“Since your last trip to Cork.” O’Donnell squinted in the bright sun.
“Yes, that’s right. You had a security man watching me then—was there anyone following me?”
“If there were, he must have been a damnably clever one, and he could not have been too close....” The other possibility that O’Donnell was considering, of course, was that Cooley had turned traitor. But if he’d done that, he wouldn’t have come here, would he? the chief of the ULA thought. He knows me, knows where I live, knows McKenney, knows Sean Miller, knows about
the fishing fleet at Dundalk. O’Donnell realized that Cooley knew quite a lot. No, if he’d gone tout, he wouldn’t be here. Cooley was sweating despite the air conditioning in the car. Dennis didn’t have the belly to risk his life that way. He could see that.
“So, Dennis, what are we to do with you?”
Cooley’s heart was momentarily irregular, but he spoke with determination. “I want to be part of the next op.”
“Excuse me?” O’Donnell’s head came around in surprise.
“The fucking Brits—Kevin, they came after me!”
“That is something of an occupational hazard, you know.”
“I’m quite serious,” Cooley insisted.
It wouldn’t hurt to have another man.... “Are you in shape for it?”
“I will be.”
The chief made his decision. “Then you can start this afternoon.”
“What is it, then?”
&nbs
p; O’Donnell explained.
“It would seem that your hunch was correct, Doctor Ryan,” the man with the rimless glasses said the next afternoon. “Maybe I will take you to the track.”
He was standing outside one of the huts, a dumpy little man with a head that shone from the sunlight reflecting off his sweaty, hairless dome. Camp -18 was the one.
“Excellent,” Cantor observed. “Our English friends have really scored on this one. Thanks,” he said to the photo expert.
“When’s the op?” Ryan asked after he left.
“Early morning, day after tomorrow. Our time ... eight in the evening, I think.”
“Can I watch in real time?”
“Maybe. ”
“This is a secret that’s hard to keep,” he said.
“Most of the good ones are,” Cantor agreed. “But—”
“Yeah, I know.” Jack put his coat on and locked up his files. “Tell the Admiral that I owe him one.”
Driving home, Ryan thought about what might be happening. He realized that his anticipation was not very different from ... Christmas? No, that was not the right way to think about this. He wondered how his father had felt right before a big arrest after a lengthy investigation. It was something he’d never asked. He did the next best thing. He forgot about it, as he was supposed to do with everything that he saw at Langley.
There was a strange car parked in front of the house when he got there, just beyond the nearly completed swimming pool. On inspection he saw that it had diplomatic tags. He went inside to find three men talking to his wife. He recognized one but couldn’t put a name on him.
“Hello, Doctor Ryan, I’m Geoffrey Bennett from the British Embassy. We met before at—”
“Yeah, I remember now. What can we do for you?”
“Their Royal Highnesses will be visiting the States in a few weeks. I understand that you offered an invitation when you met, and they wish to see if it remains open.”
“Are you kidding?”
“They’re not kidding, Jack, and I already said yes,” his wife informed him. Even Ernie was wagging his tail in anticipation.