by Tom Clancy
Ritter had a pair of television sets in his office, each with its own VCR. He watched them alone, cueing the tapes until they were roughly synchronized. The one from the aircraft didn’t show very much. You could see the laser dot and the rough outline of the house, but little else until the flash of the detonation. Clark’s tape was far better. There was the house, its lighted windows flaring in the light-amplified picture, and the guards wandering about—those with cigarettes looked like lightning bugs; each time they took a drag their faces were lit brightly by the glow. Then the bomb. It was very much like watching a Hitch-cock movie, Ritter thought. He knew what was happening, but those on the screen did not. They wandered around aimlessly, unaware of the part they played in a drama written in the office of the Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency. But—
“That’s funny ...” Ritter said to himself. He used his remote control to back up the tape. Seconds before the bomb went off, a new car appeared at the gate. “Who might you be?” he asked the screen. Then he fast-forwarded the tape past the explosion. The car he’d seen driving up—a BMW—had been flipped over by the shock wave, but seconds later the driver got out and pulled a pistol.
“Cortez ...” He froze the frame. The picture didn’t tell him much. It was a man of medium dimensions. While everyone else around the wrecked house raced about without much in the way of purpose, this man just stood there for a little while, then revived himself at the fountain—wasn’t it odd that it still worked! Ritter thought—and next went to where the bomb had gone off. He couldn’t have been a retainer of one of the Cartel members. They were all plowing through the rubble by this time. No, this one was already trying to figure out what had happened. It was right before the tape changed over to blank noise that he got the best picture. That had to be Félix Cortez. Looking around, already thinking, already trying to figure things out. That was a real pro.
“Damn, that was close,” Ritter breathed. “One more minute and you would have parked your car over with the others. One more damned minute!” Ritter pulled both tapes and tucked them in his office safe along with all of the EAGLE EYE, SHOWBOAT, and RECIPROCITY material. Next time, he promised the tape cassette. Then he started thinking. Was Cortez really involved in the assassination?
“Gawd,” Ritter said aloud in his office. He’d assumed that, but ... Would he have set up the crime and then come to America ... ? Why do such a thing? According to the statement that secretary had made, he’d not even pumped her very hard for information. Instead it had been a basic get-away-with-your-lover weekend. The technique was a classic one. First, seduce the target. Second, determine if you can get information from her (usually him the way Western intelligence services handled sexual recruitments, but the other way around for the Eastern bloc). Third, firm up the relationship—and then use it. If Ritter understood the evidence properly, Cortez hadn’t yet gotten to the point ...
It wasn’t Cortez at all, was it? He’d probably forwarded what information he had as a matter of course, not knowing about the FBI operation against the Cartel’s money operations. He hadn’t been there when the decision to whack the Director had been made. And he would have recommended against it. Why lash out when you have just developed a good intel source? No, that wasn’t professional at all.
So, Félix, how do you feel about all this? Ritter would have traded much for the ability to ask that question, though the answer was plain enough. Intelligence officers were regularly betrayed by their political superiors. It wouldn’t be the first time for him, but he’d be angry just the same. Just as angry as Ritter was with Admiral Cutter.
For the first time, Ritter found himself wondering what Cortez was really doing. Probably he had simply defected away from Cuba and made a mercenary of himself. The Cartel had hired him on for his training and experience, thinking that they were buying just another mercenary—a very good one to be sure, but a mercenary nonetheless. Just like they bought local cops—hell, American cops—and politicians. But a police officer wasn’t the same thing as a professional spook educated at Moscow Center. He was giving them his advice, and he’d think they had betrayed him—well, acted very stupidly, because killing Emil Jacobs had been an act of emotion, not of reason.
Why didn’t I see that before! Ritter growled at himself. The answer: because not seeing had given him an excuse to do something he’d always wanted to do. He hadn’t thought because somehow he’d known that thinking would have prevented him from taking action.
Cortez wasn’t a terrorist, was he? He was an intelligence officer. He’d worked with the Macheteros because he’d been assigned to the job. Before that his experience had been straight espionage, and merely because he’d worked with that loony Puerto Rican group, they’d just assumed ... That was probably one reason why he’d defected.
It was clearer now. The Cartel had hired Cortez for his expertise and experience. But in doing so they had adopted a pet wolf. And wolves made for dangerous pets, didn’t they?
For the moment there was one thing he could do. Ritter summoned an aide and instructed him to take the best frame they had of Cortez, run it through the photo-enhancing computer, and forward it to the FBI. That was something worth doing, so long as they isolated the figure from the background, but that was just another task for the imaging computer.
Admiral Cutter remained at his White House office while the President was away in the western Maryland hills. He’d fly up every day for his usual morning briefing—delivered at a somewhat later hour while the President was on his “vacation” regime—but for the most part he’d stay here. He had his own duties, one of which was being “a senior administration official.” ASAO, as he thought of the title, was his name when he gave off-the-record press briefings. Such information was a vital part of presidential policymaking, all part of an elaborate game played by the government and the press: Official Leaking. Cutter would send up “trial balloons,” what people in the consumer-products business called test-marketing. When the President had a new idea that he was not too sure about, Cutter—or the appropriate cabinet secretary, each of whom was also an ASAO—would speak on background, and a story would be written in the major papers, allowing Congress and others to react to the idea before it was given an official presidential imprimatur. It was a way for elected officials and other players in the Washington scene to dance and posture without the need for anyone to lose face—an Oriental concept that translated well inside the confines of the Capital Beltway.
Bob Holtzman, the senior White House correspondent for one of the Washington papers, settled into his chair opposite Cutter for the deep-background revelations. The rules were fully understood by both sides. Cutter could say anything he wished without fear that his name, title, or the location of his office would be used. Holtzman would feel free to write the story any way he wished, within reason, so long as he did not compromise his source to anyone except his editor. Neither man especially liked the other. Cutter’s distaste for journalists was about the only thing he still had in common with his fellow military officers, though he was certain that he concealed it. He thought them all, especially the one before him now, to be lazy, stupid people who couldn’t write and didn’t think. Holtzman felt that Cutter was the wrong man in the wrong place—the reporter didn’t like the idea of having a military officer giving such intimate advice to the President; more importantly, he thought Cutter was a shallow, self-serving apple-polisher with delusions of grandeur, not to mention an arrogant son of a bitch who looked upon reporters as a semiuseful form of domesticated vulture. As a result of such thoughts, they got along rather well.
“You going to be watching the convention next week?” Holtzman asked.
“I try not to concern myself with politics,” Cutter replied. “Coffee?”
Right! the reporter told himself. “No, thanks. What the hell’s going on down in coca land?”
“Your guess is as good as—well, that’s not true. We’ve had the bastards under surveillance for
some time. My guess is that Emil was killed by one faction of the Cartel—no surprise—but without their having made a really official decision. The bombing last night might be indicative of a faction fight inside the organization.”
“Well, somebody’s pretty pissed,” Holtzman observed, scribbling notes on his pad under his personal heading for Cutter. “A Senior Administration Official” was transcribed as ASO‘l. “The word is that the Cartel contracted M-19 to do the assassination, and that the Colombians really worked over the one they caught.”
“Maybe they did.”
“How’d they know that Director Jacobs was going down?”
“I don’t know,” Cutter replied.
“Really? You know that his secretary tried to commit suicide. The Bureau isn’t talking at all, but I find that a remarkable coincidence.”
“Who’s running the case over there? Believe it or not, I don’t know.”
“Dan Murray, a deputy assistant director. He’s not actually doing the field work, but he’s the guy reporting to Shaw.”
“Well, that’s not my turf. I’m looking at the overseas aspects of the case, but the domestic stuff is in another office,” Cutter pointed out, erecting a stone wall that Holtzman couldn’t breach.
“So the Cartel was pretty worked up about Operation TARPON, and some senior people acted without the approval of the whole outfit to take Jacobs out. Other members, you say, think that their action was precipitous and decided to eliminate those who put out the contract?”
“That’s the way it looks now. You have to understand, our intel on this is pretty thin.”
“Our intel is always pretty thin,” Holtzman pointed out.
“You can talk to Bob Ritter about that.” Cutter set his coffee mug down.
“Right.” Holtzman smiled. If there were two people in Washington whom you could trust never to leak anything, it was Bob Ritter and Arthur Moore. “What about Jack Ryan?”
“He’s just settling in. He’s been in Belgium all week anyway, at the NATO intel conference.”
“There are rumbles on The Hill that somebody ought to do something about the Cartel, that the attack on Jacobs was a direct attack on—”
“I watch C-SPAN, too, Bob. Talk is cheap.”
“And what Governor Fowler said this morning ... ?”
“I’ll leave politics to the politicians.”
“You know that the price of coke is up on the street?”
“Oh? I’m not in that market. Is it?” Cutter hadn’t heard that yet. Already ...
“Not much, but some. There’s word on the street that incoming shipments are off a little.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“But no comment?” Holtzman asked. “You’re the one who’s been saying that this is a for-real war and we ought to treat it as such.”
Cutter’s smile froze on his face for a moment. “The President decides about things like war.”
“What about Congress?”
“Well, that, too, but since I’ve been in government service there hasn’t been a congressional declaration along those lines.”
“How would you feel personally if we were involved in that bombing?”
“I don’t know. We weren’t involved.” The interview wasn’t going as planned. What did Holtzman know?
“That was a hypothetical,” the reporter pointed out.
“Okay. We go off the record—completely—at this point. Hypothetically, we could kill all the bastards and I wouldn’t shed many tears. How about you?”
Holtzman snorted. “Off the record, I agree with you. I grew up here. I can remember when it was safe to walk the streets. Now I look at the body count every morning and wonder if I’m in D.C. or Beirut. So it wasn’t us, then?”
“Nope. Looks more like the Cartel is shaking itself out. That’s speculation, but it’s the best we have at the moment.”
“Fair enough. I suppose I can make a story out of that.”
20.
Discoveries
IT WAS AMAZING. But it was also true. Cortez had been there for over an hour. There were six armed men with him, and a dog that sniffed around for signs of the people who had assaulted this processing site. The empty cartridge cases were mostly of the 5.56mm round now used by most of the NATO countries and their surrogates all over the world, but which had begun as the .223 Remington sporting cartridge. In America. There were also a number of 9mm cases, and a single empty hull from a 40mm grenade launcher. One of the attackers had been wounded, perhaps severely. The method of the attack was classic, a fire unit uphill and an assault group on the same level, to the north. They’d left hastily, not booby-trapping the bodies as had happened in two other cases. Probably because of the injured man, Cortez judged. Also because they knew—suspected? No, they probably knew—that two men had gotten away to summon help.
Definitely more than one team was roaming the mountains. Maybe three or four, judging by the number and location of sites that had so far been attacked. That eliminated M-19. There weren’t enough trained men in that organization to do something like this—not without his hearing of it, he corrected himself. The Cartel had done more than suborn the local guerrilla factions. It also had paid informants in each unit, something the Colombian government had signally failed to do.
So, he told himself, now you have probable American covert-action teams working in the hills. Who and what are they? Probably soldiers, or very high-quality mercenaries. More likely the former. The international mercenary community wasn’t what it had once been—and truthfully had never been especially effective. Cortez had been to Angola and seen what African troops were like. Mercenaries hadn’t had to be all that effective to defeat them, though that was now changing along with everything else in the world.
Whoever they were, they’d be far away—far enough that he didn’t feel uncomfortable at the moment, though he’d leave the hunting to others. Cortez was an intelligence officer, and had no illusions about being a soldier. For now, he gathered his evidence almost like a policeman. The rifle and machine-gun cartridges, he saw, came from a single manufacturer. He didn’t have such information committed to memory, but he noted that the 9mm cases had the same lot codes—stamped on the case heads—as those he’d gotten from one of the airfields on Colombia’s northern coast. The odds against that being a coincidence were pretty high, he thought. So whoever had been watching the airfields had moved here ... ? How would that have been done? The simple way would be by truck or bus, but that was a little too simple; that’s how M-19 would have done it. Too great a risk for Americans, however. The yanquis would use helicopters. Staging from where? A ship, perhaps, or more likely one of their bases in Panama. He knew of no American naval exercises within helicopter range of the coast. Therefore a large aircraft capable of midair refueling. Only the Americans did that. And it would have to be based in Panama. And he had assets in Panama. Cortez pocketed the cartridges and started walking down the hill. Now he had a starting place, and that was all someone with his training needed.
Ryan’s VC-20A—thinking of it as his airplane still required a stretch of the imagination—lifted off from the airfield outside Mons in the early afternoon. His first official foray into the big leagues of the international intelligence business had gone well. His paper on the Soviets and their activities in Eastern Europe had met with general approval and agreement, and he’d been gratified to learn that the analysis chiefs of all the NATO intelligence agencies held exactly the same opinion of the changes in their enemy’s policies as he did: nobody knew what the hell was going on. There were theories ranging all the way from the peace-is-breaking-out-and-now-what-do-we-do? view to the equally unlikely it’s-all-a-trick opinion, but when it came down to doing a formal intelligence estimate, people who’d been in the business since before Jack was born just shook their heads and muttered into their beer—exactly what Ryan did some of the time. The really good news for the year, of course, was the signal success that the counterintelligence groups had h
ad turning KGB operations throughout Europe, and while CIA had not told anyone (except Sir Basil, who’d been there when the plan had been hatched) exactly how that had come about, the Agency enjoyed considerable prestige for its work in that area. The bottom line that Jack had often cited in the investment business was fairly clear: militarily NATO was in its best-ever condition, its security services were riding higher than anyone thought possible—it was just that the alliance’s overall mission was now in doubt politically. To Ryan that looked like success, so long as politicians didn’t let things go to their heads, which was enough of a caveat for anyone.
So there was a lot to smile about as the Belgian countryside fell farther and farther below him until it looked like a particularly attractive quilt from Pennsylvania Dutch country. At least on the actual NATO side.
Possibly the truest testimony to NATO’s present happy condition, however, was that talk around the banquet tables and over coffee in the break periods between the plenary sessions was not on “business” as most of the conference attendees normally viewed it. Intelligence analysts from Germany and Italy, Britain and Norway, Denmark and Portugal, all of them expressed their concern at the growing problems of drugs in their countries. The Cartel’s activities were expanding eastward, no longer content with marketing their wares to America alone. The intelligence professionals had noted the assassination of Emil Jacobs and the rest and wondered aloud if international narcoterrorism had taken a wholly new and dangerous turn—and what had to be done about it. The French, with their history of vigorous action to protect their land, were especially approving of the bomb blast outside Medellín, and nonplussed by Ryan’s puzzled and somewhat exasperating response: No comment. I don’t know anything. Their reaction to that was predictable, of course. Had an equivalent French official been so publicly murdered, DGSE would have mounted an immediate operation. It was something the French were especially good at. It was something that the French media and, more to the point, the French people understood and approved. And so the DGSE representatives had expected Ryan to respond with a knowing smile to accompany his lack of comment, not blank embarrassment. That wasn’t part of the game as it was played in Europe, and just another odd thing about the Americans for their Old World allies to ponder. Must they be so unpredictable? they would ask themselves. Being that way to the Russians had strategic value, but not to one’s allies.