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 en saying that this is a for-real war and we ought to treat it 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 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.