Félix rose from his desk and walked over to his office bar. This called for serious contemplation, and that meant a good brandy. He poured a triple portion into a balloon glass, swirling it around, letting his hand warm the liquid so that the aromatic vapors would caress his senses even before he took the first sip.
The Chinese language was ideographic – Cortez had met his share of Chinese intelligence types as well – and its symbol for “crisis” was a combination of the symbols denoting “danger” and “opportunity.” The dualism had struck him the first time he’d heard it, and he’d never forgotten it. Opportunities like this one were exceedingly rare, and equally dangerous. The principal danger, he knew, was the simple fact that he didn’t know how the Americans were developing their intelligence information. Everything he knew pointed to a penetration agent within the organization. Someone high up, but not as high as he wished to be. The Americans had compromised someone just as he had so often done. Standard intelligence procedure, and that was something CIA excelled at. Someone. Who? Someone who had been deeply offended, and wanted to get even while at the same time acquiring a seat around the table of chieftains. Quite a few people fell into that category. Including Félix Cortez. And instead of having to initiate his own operation to achieve that goal, he could now depend on the Americans to do it for him. It struck him as very odd indeed that he was trusting the Americans to do his work, but it was also hugely amusing. It was, in fact, almost the definition of the perfect covert operation. All he had to do was let the Americans carry out their own plan, and stand by the sidelines to watch it work. It would require patience and confidence in his enemy – not to mention the degree of danger involved – but Cortez felt that it was worth the effort.
In the absence of knowing how to get the information to the Americans, he decided, he’d just have to trust to luck. No, not luck. They seemed to be getting the word somehow, and they’d probably get it this time, too. He lifted his phone and made a call, something very uncharacteristic for him. Then, on reflection, he made one other arrangement. After all, he couldn’t expect that the Americans would do exactly what he wanted exactly when he wanted. Some things he had to do for himself.
Ryan’s plane landed at Andrews just after seven in the evening. One of his assistants – it was so nice having assistants – took custody of the classified documents and drove them back to Langley while Jack tossed his bags in the back of his XJS and drove home. He’d get a decent night’s sleep to slough off the effects of jet lag, and tomorrow he’d be back at his desk. First order of business, he told himself as he took the car onto Route 50, was to find out what the Agency was up to in South America.
Ritter shook his head in wonder and thanksgiving. CAPER had come through for them again. Cortez himself this time, too. They just hadn’t twigged to the fact that their communications were vulnerable. It wasn’t a new phenomenon, of course. The same thing had happened to the Germans and Japanese in World War II, and had been repeated time and again. It was just something that Americans were good at. And the timing could hardly have been better. The carrier was available for only thirty more hours, barely time enough to get the message to their man on Ranger. Ritter typed up the orders and mission requirements on his personal computer. They were printed, sealed in an envelope, and handed to one of his senior subordinates, who caught an Air Force supply flight to Panama.
Captain Robby Jackson was feeling a little better. If nothing else, he thought he could just barely feel the added weight of the fourth stripe on the shoulders of his undress white shirt, and the silver eagle that had replaced the oak leaf on the collar of his khakis was so much nicer a symbol for a pilot, wasn’t it? The below-the-zone promotion meant that he was seriously in the running for CAG, command of his own carrier air wing – that would be his last real flying job, Jackson knew, but it was the grandest of all. He’d have to check out in several different types of aircraft, and would be responsible for over eighty birds, their flight crews, and the maintenance personnel, without which the aircraft were merely attractive ornaments for a carrier’s flight deck. The bad news was that his tactical ideas hadn’t worked out as well as planned, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that all new ideas take time. He’d seen that a few of his original ideas were flawed, and the fixes suggested by one of Ranger’s squadron commanders had almost worked – had actually improved the idea markedly. And that, too, was normal. The same could also be said of the Phoenix missiles, whose guidance-package fixes had performed fairly well; not quite as well as the contractor had promised, but that wasn’t unusual either, was it?
Robby was in the carrier’s Combat Information Center. No flight operations were underway at the moment. The battle group was in some heavy weather that would clear in a few hours, and while the maintenance people were tinkering with their airplanes, Robby and the senior air-defense people were reviewing tapes of the fighter engagements for the sixth time. The “enemy” force had performed remarkably well, diagnosing Ranger’s defense plans and reacting to them quickly and effectively to get its missile-shooters within range. That Ranger’s fighters had clobbered them on the way out was irrelevant. The whole point of the Outer Air Battle was to clobber the Backfires on the way in.
The tape recording had been made from the radar coverage of the E-2C Hawkeye which Robby had ridden for the first engagement, but six times really were enough. He’d learned all he could learn, and his mind was wandering now. There was the Intruder again, mating up with the tanker, then heading off toward Ecuador and disappearing off the screen just before it made the coast. Captain Jackson settled back in his chair while the discussion went on around him. They fast-forwarded the tape for the approach phase, spent over an hour replaying the actual battle – what there had been of it, Jackson noted with a frown – then fast-forwarded it again. Ranger’s CAG was particularly annoyed with the lackadaisical manner in which his squadrons had reformed for the return to the carrier. The poor organization of the fighters elicited some scathing comments from the captain who had the title that Robby now looked forward to. Listening to his remarks was a good education, though it was a touch profane. The ensuing discussion kept the tape running until – there, again, the A-6 reappeared, heading into the carrier after having done whatever the hell it had done. Robby knew that he was making an assumption, and for professional officers assumptions were dangerous things. But there it was.
“Cap’n Jackson, sir?”
Robby turned to see a yeoman with a clipboard. It was an action message for which he had to sign, which he did before accepting the form and reading it.
“What gives, Rob?” the carrier’s operations officer asked.
“Admiral Painter is flying out to the PG School. He wants me to meet him there instead of flying back to D.C. I s’pose he wants an early reading on how my wonderful new tactics worked out,” Jackson replied.
“Don’t sweat it. They ain’t going to take the shoulder boards back.”
“I didn’t think this all the way through,” Robby replied, gesturing at the screen.
“Nobody ever does.”
Ranger cleared the bad weather an hour later. The first plane off was the COD, which headed off to Panama to drop off mail and pick up various things. It returned in four hours. The “tech-rep” was waiting for it, already propped by an innocuous signal over a clear channel. When he’d finished reading the message, he called Commander Jensen’s stateroom.
Copies of the photo were being taken to The Hideaway, but the closest witness was in Alexandria, and he took it there himself.
Murray knew better than to ask where the photo had come from. That is, he knew that it came from CIA, and that it was some sort of surveillance photo, but the circumstances that surrounded it were things he didn’t need to know – or so he would have been told had he asked, which he hadn’t. It was just as well, since he might not have accepted the “need-to-know” explanation in this case.
Moira was improving. The restraints were off, but she was still being treated for some side effects of the sleeping pills she’d taken. Something to do with her liver function, he’d heard, but she was responding well to treatment. He found her sitting up, the motorized bed elevated at the command of a button. Visiting hours were over – her kids had been in tonight, and that, Murray figured, was the best treatment she could possibly get. The official story was an accidental OD. The hospital knew different, and that had leaked, but the Bureau took the public position that it had been an accident since she hadn’t quite taken a lethal dose of the drug. The Bureau’s own psychiatrist saw her twice a day, and his report was optimistic. The suicide attempt, while real, had been based on impulse, not prolonged contemplation. With care and counseling, she’d come around and would probably fully recover. The psychiatrist also thought that what Murray was about to do would help.