by Tom Clancy
“Maybe,” he admitted reluctantly. It wasn’t that he minded associating with these men, but Clark worried about the circumstances that might make it necessary, later on. Can you still cut it, Johnny boy?
“So?” Director Jacobs asked. Bill Shaw was there, too.
“So he did it, sure as hell,” Murray replied as he reached for his coffee. “But taking it to trial would be nasty. He’s a clever guy, and his crew backed him up. If you read up on his file, you’ll see why. He’s some officer. The day I went down, he rescued the crew of a burning fishing boat—talk about perfect timing. There were scorch marks on the hull, he went in so close. Oh, sure, we could get them all apart and interview them, but just figuring out who was involved would be tricky. I hate to say this, but it probably isn’t worth the hassle, especially with the senator looking over our shoulder, and the local U.S. Attorney probably won’t spring for it either. Bright wasn’t all that crazy about it, but I calmed him down. He’s a good kid, by the way.”
“What about the defense for the two subjects?” Jacobs asked.
“Slim. On the face of it the case against them is pretty damned solid. Ballistics has matched the bullet Mobile pulled out of the deck to the gun recovered on the boat, with both men’s fingerprints on it—that was a real stroke of luck. The blood type around where the bullet was found was AB-positive, which matches the wife. A carpet stain three feet away from that confirms that she was having her period, which along with a couple of semen stains suggests rape rather strongly. Right now they’re doing the DNA match downstairs on semen samples recovered from the rug—anybody here want to bet against a positive match? We have a half-dozen bloody fingerprints that match the subjects ten points’ worth or more. There’s a lot of good physical evidence. It’s more than enough to convict already,” Murray said confidently, “and the lab boys haven’t got halfway through their material yet. The U.S. Attorney is going to press for capital punishment. I’ll think he’ll get it. The only question is whether or not we allow them to trade information for a lighter sentence. But it’s not exactly my case.” That earned Murray a smile from the Director.
“Pretend it is,” Jacobs ordered.
“We’ll know in a week or so if we need anything they can tell us. My instincts say no. We ought to be able to figure out who the victim was working for, and that’ll be the one who ordered the hit—we just don’t know why yet. But it’s unlikely that the subjects know why either. I think we have a couple of sicarios who hoped to parlay their hit into an entrée to the marketing side of the business. I think they’re throwaways. If that’s correct, they don’t know anything that we can’t figure out for ourselves. I suppose we have to give them a chance, but I would recommend against mitigation of sentence. Four murders—bad ones at that. We have a death-penalty statute, and to this brick-agent, I think the chair would fit them just fine.”
“Getting nasty in your old age?” Shaw asked. It was another inside joke. Bill Shaw was one of the Bureau’s leading intellectuals. He had won his spurs cracking down on domestic terrorist groups, and had accomplished that mission by carefully rebuilding the FBI’s intelligence-gathering and analysis procedures. A quintessential chess player with a quiet, organized demeanor, this tall, spare man was also a former field agent who advocated capital punishment in a quiet, organized, and well-reasoned way. It was a point on which police opinion was almost universal. All you had to do to understand capital punishment was to see a crime scene in all its vile spectacle.
“The U.S. Attorney agrees, Dan,” Director Jacobs said. “These two druggies are out of the business for keeps.”
As if it matters, Murray thought to himself. What mattered to him was that two murderers would pay the price. Because a sufficiently large stash of drugs had been found aboard the yacht, the government could invoke the statute that allowed the death penalty in drug-related murders. The relationship was probably a loose one in this case, but that didn’t matter to the three men in the room. The fact of murder—brutal and premeditated—was enough. But to say, as both they and the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama would tell the TV cameras, that this was a fight against the drug trade, was a cynical lie.
Murray’s education had been a classical one at Boston College, thirty years before. He could still recite passages in Latin from Virgil’s Aeneid, or Cicero’s opening salvo against Catiline. His study of Greek had been only in translation—foreign languages were one thing to Murray; different alphabets were something else—but he remembered the legend of the Hydra, the mythical beast that had seven or more heads. Each time you cut one off, two would grow to take its place. So it was with the drug trade. There was just too much money involved. Money beyond the horizon of greed. Money to purchase anything a simple man—most of them were—could desire. A single deal could make a man wealthy for life, and there were many who would willingly and consciously risk their lives for that one deal. Having decided to wager their lives on a toss of the dice—what value might they attach to the lives of others? The answer was the obvious one. And so they killed as casually and as brutally as a child might stamp down his foot on an anthill. They killed their competitors because they didn’t wish to have competition. They killed their competitors’ families whole because they didn’t want a wrathful son to appear five, ten, twenty years later with vendetta on his mind; and also because, like nation-states armed with nuclear weapons, the principle of deterrence came into play. Even a man willing to wager his own life might quail before the prospect of wagering those of his children.
So in this case they’d cut off two heads from the Hydra. In three months or so the government would present its case in Federal District Court. The trial would probably last a week. The defense would do its best, but as long as the feds were careful with their evidence, they’d win. The defense would try to discredit the Coast Guard, but it wasn’t hard to see what the prosecutor had already decided: the jury would look at Captain Wegener and see a hero, then look at the defendants and see scum. The only likely tactic of the defense would almost certainly be counterproductive. Next, the judge had to make the proper rulings, but this was the South, where even federal judges were expected to have simple, clear ideas about justice. Once the defendants had been found guilty, the penalty phase of the trial would proceed, and again, this was the South, where people read their Bibles. The jury would listen to the aggravating circumstances : mass murder of a family, probability of rape, murder of children, and drugs. But there was a million dollars aboard, the defense would counter. The principal victim was involved in the drug trade. What proof of that is there? the prosecutor would inquire piously—and what of the wife and children? The jury would listen quietly, soberly, almost reverently, would get their instructions from the same judge who had told them how to find the defendants guilty in the first place. They’d deliberate a reasonable period of time, going through the motions of thorough consideration for a decision made days earlier, and report back: death. The criminals, no longer defendants, would be remanded to federal custody. The case would automatically be appealed, but a reversal was unlikely so long as the judge hadn’t made any serious procedural errors, which the physical evidence made unlikely. It would take years of appeals. People would object to the sentence on philosophical grounds—Murray disagreed but respected them for their views. The Supreme Court would have to rule sooner or later, but the Supremes, as the police called them, knew that, despite earlier rulings to the contrary, the Constitution clearly contemplated capital punishment, and the will of the People, expressed through Congress, had directly mandated death in certain drug-related cases, as the majority opinion would make clear in its precise, dry use of the language. So, in about five years, after all the appeals had been heard and rejected, both men would be strapped into a wooden chair and a switch would be thrown.
That would be enough for Murray. For all his experience and sophistication, he was before all things a cop. He was an adult-hood beyond his graduation from the FBI Academy, when he’d t
hought that he and his classmates—mostly retired now—would really change the world. The statistics said that they had in many ways, but statistics were too dry, too remote, too inhuman. To Murray the war on crime was an endless series of small battles. Victims were robbed alone, kidnapped alone, or killed alone, and were individuals to be saved or avenged by the warrior-priests of the FBI. Here, too, his outlook was shaped by the values of his Catholic education, and the Bureau remained a bastion of Irish-Catholic America. Perhaps he hadn’t changed the world, but he had saved lives, and he had avenged deaths. New criminals would arise as they always did, but his battles had all ended in victories, and ultimately, he had to believe, there would be a net difference for his society, and the difference would be a positive one. He believed as truly as he believed in God that every felon caught was probably a life saved, somewhere down the line.
In this case he had helped to do so again.
But it wouldn’t matter a damn to the drug business. His new post forced him to assume a longer view that ordinary agents contemplated only over drinks after their offices closed. With these two out of circulation, the Hydra had already grown two new heads, Murray knew, perhaps more. His mistake was in not pursuing the myth to its conclusion, something others were already doing. Heracles had slain the Hydra by changing tactics. One of the people who had remembered that fact was in this room. What Murray had not yet learned was that at the policymaking level, one’s perspective gradually changed one’s views.
Cortez liked the view also, despite the somewhat thinner air of this eyrie. His newly acquired boss knew the superficial ways to communicate his power. His desk faced away from the wide window, making it hard for those opposite the massive desk to read the expression on his face. He spoke with the calm, quiet voice of great power. His gestures were economical, his words generally mild. In fact he was a brutal man, Cortez knew, and despite his education a less sophisticated man than he deemed himself to be, but that, Félix knew, was why he’d been hired. So the former colonel trained in Moscow Center adjusted the focus of his eyes to examine the green vista of the valley. He allowed Escobedo to play his eye-power games. He’d played them with far more dangerous men than this one.
“So?”
“I have recruited two people,” Cortez replied. “One will feed us information for monetary considerations. The other will do so for other reasons. I also examined two other potential prospects, but discarded them as unsuitable.”
“Who are they—who are the ones you will use?”
“No.” Cortez shook his head. “I have told you that the identity of my agents must remain secret. This is a principle of intelligence operations. You have informers within your organization, and loose talk would compromise our ability to gather the information which you require. Jefe,” he said fawningly. This one needed that sort of thing. “Jefe, you have hired me for my expertise and experience. You must allow me to do my work properly. You will know the quality of my sources from the information which I give you. I understand how you feel. It is normal. Castro himself has asked me that question, and I gave him the same answer. It must be so.”
That earned Cortez a grunt. Escobedo liked to be compared with a chief of state, better still one who had defied the yanquis so successfully for a generation. There would be a satisfied smile now on the handsome face, Félix knew without bothering to check for it. His answer was a lie for two reasons: Castro had never asked the question, and neither Félix nor anyone else on that island would ever have dared to deny him the information.
“So what have you learned?”
“Something is afoot,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice that was almost taunting. After all, he had to justify his salary. “The American government is putting together a new program designed to enhance their interdiction efforts. My sources have no specifics as yet, though what they have heard has come from multiple sources and is probably true. My other source will be able to confirm what information I receive from the first.” The lesson was lost on Escobedo, Félix knew. Recruiting two complementary sources on a single mission would have earned him a flowery commendation letter from any real intelligence service.
“What will the information cost us?”
Money. It is always money with him, Cortez told himself with a stifled sigh. No wonder he needed a professional with his security operations. Only a fool thinks that he can buy everything. On the other hand, there were times when money was helpful, and though he didn’t know it, Escobedo paid more money to his American hirelings and traitors than the entire Communist intelligence network.
“It is better to spend a great deal of money on one person at a high level than to squander it on a large number of minor functionaries. A quarter of a million dollars will do nicely to get the information which we require.” Cortez would be keeping most of that, of course. He had expenses of his own.
“That is all?” Escobedo asked incredulously. “I pay more than that to—”
“Because your people have never used the proper approach, jefe. Because you pay people on the basis of where they are, not what they know. You have never adopted a systematic approach to dealing with your enemies. With the proper information, you can utilize your funds much more efficiently. You can act strategically instead of tactically,” Cortez concluded by pushing the proper button.
“Yes! They must learn that we are a force to be reckoned with!”
Not for the first time, Félix thought that his main objective was to take the money and run ... perhaps a house in Spain ... or, perhaps, to supplant this egomaniacal buffoon. That was a thought.... But not for now. Escobedo was an egomaniac, but he was also a shrewd one, capable of rapid action. One difference between this man and those who ran his former agency was that Escobedo wasn’t afraid to make a decision, and-do it quickly. No bureaucracy here, no multiplicity of desks for messages to pass. For that he respected El Jefe. At least he knew how to make a decision. KGB had probably been that way once, maybe even the American intelligence organs. But no longer.
“One more week,” Ritter told the National Security Adviser.
“Nice to hear that things are moving,” the Admiral observed. “Then what?”
“Why don’t you tell me? Just to keep things clear,” the DDO suggested. He followed it with a reminder. “After all, the operation was your idea in the first place.”
“Well, I sold Director Jacobs on the idea,” Cutter replied with a smile at his own cleverness. “When we’re ready to proceed—and I mean ready to push the button—Jacobs will fly down there to meet with their Attorney General. The ambassador says that the Colombians will go along with almost anything. They’re even more desperate than we are and—”
“You didn’t—”
“No, Bob, the ambassador doesn’t know. Okay?” I’m not the idiot you take me for, his eyes told the CIA executive. “If Jacobs can sell the idea to them, we insert the teams ASAP. One change I want to make.”
“What’s that?”
“The air side of it. Your report says that practice tracking missions are already turning up targets.”
“Some,” Ritter admitted. “Two or three per week.”
“The wherewithal to handle them is already in place. Why not activate that part of the operation? I mean, it might actually help to identify the areas we want to send the insertion teams to, develop operational intelligence, that sort of thing.”
“I’d prefer to wait,” Ritter said cautiously.
“Why? If we can identify the most frequently used areas, it cuts down on the amount of moving around they’ll have to do. That’s your greatest operational risk, isn’t it? This is a way to develop information that enhances the entire operational concept.”
The problem with Cutter, Ritter told himself, was that the bastard knew just enough about operations to be dangerous. Worse, he had the power to enforce his will—and a memory of the Operations Directorate’s recent history. What was it he’d said a few months back? Your best operations in the last couple of
years actually came out of Greer’s department.... By which he meant Jack Ryan, James’s bright rising star—possibly the new DDI the way things looked. That was too bad. Ritter was genuinely fond of his counterpart at the head of the Intelligence Directorate, but less so of Greer’s ingratiating protégé. But it was nevertheless true that the Agency’s two best coups in recent years had begun in the “wrong” department, and it was time for Operations to reassert its primacy. Ritter wondered if Cutter was consciously using that as a prod to move him to action. Probably not, he decided. Cutter didn’t know enough about infighting yet. Not that he wouldn’t learn, of course.
“Going too early is a classic error in field operations,” the DDO offered lamely.
“But we’re not. Essentially we have two separate operations, don’t we?” Cutter asked. “The air part can operate independently of the in-country part. I admit it’ll be less effective, but it can still operate. Doesn’t this give us a chance to check out the less tricky side of the plan before we commit to the dangerous part? Doesn’t it give us something to take to the Colombians to show that we’re really serious?”
Too soon, the voice in Ritter’s head said urgently, but his face showed indecision.
“Look, do you want me to take it to the President?” Cutter asked.
“Where is he today—California?”
“Political trip. I would prefer not to bother him with this sort of thing, but—”
It was a curious situation, the DDO thought. He had underestimated Cutter, while the National Security Adviser seemed quite able to overestimate himself. “Okay, you win. EAGLE EYE starts day after tomorrow. It’ll take that long to get everyone up and running.”
“And SHOWBOAT?”
“One more week to prep the teams. Four days to get them to Panama and meet up with the air assets, check communications systems and all that.”