“You look a hell of a lot better,” he told her. “How are the kids?”
“I’ll never do this to them again,” Moira Wolfe replied. “What a stupid, selfish thing to do.”
“I keep telling you, you got hit by the truck.” Murray took the chair by her bedside and opened the manila envelope he’d carried in. “Is this the truck?”
She took the photo from his hand and stared at it for a moment. It wasn’t a very good photograph. Taken at a distance of over two miles, even with the high-power lens and computer enhancement of the image, it didn’t show anything approaching the detail of an amateur photographer’s action shot of his child. But there is more to a picture than the expression on a person’s face. The shape of the head, the style of the hair, the posture, the way he held his hands, the tilt of the head…
“It’s him,” she said. “That’s Juan Díaz. Where did you get it?”
“It came from another government agency,” Murray replied, his choice of words telling her nothing – the exact nothing that meant CIA. “They had a discreet surveillance of some place or other – I don’t know where – and got this. They thought it might be our boy. For your information, this is the first confirmed shot we have of Colonel Félix Cortez, late of the DGI. At least now we know what the bastard looks like.”
“Get him,” Moira said.
“Oh, we’ll get him,” Murray promised her.
“I know what I’ll have to do – testify and all that. I know what the lawyers will do to me. I can handle it. I can, Mr. Murray.”
She isn’t kidding, Dan realized. It wasn’t the first time that revenge had been part of saving a life, and Murray was glad to see it. It was one more purpose, one more thing Moira had to live for. His job was to see that she and the Bureau got their revenge. The approved term at the FBI was retribution, but the hundreds of agents on the case weren’t using that word now.
Jack arrived at his office early the next morning to find the expected pile of work, on top of which was a note from Judge Moore.
“The convention closes tonight,” it read. “You’re booked on the last flight to Chicago. Tomorrow morning you will brief Gov. Fowler. This is a normal procedure for presidential candidates. Guidelines for your briefing are attached, along with a copy of the national-security brief done in the 1984 presidential campaign. ‘Restricted’ and ‘Confidential’ information may be discussed, but nothing ‘Secret’ or higher. I need to see your written presentation before five.”
And that completely blew the day away. Ryan called home to let his family know that he’d be gone yet another night. Then he got to work. Now he wouldn’t be able to quiz Ritter and Moore until the following Monday. And Ritter, he learned, would be spending most of the day over at the White House anyway. Jack’s next call was to Bethesda, to check in with Admiral Greer and get some guidance. He was surprised to learn that Greer had done the last such briefing personally. He wasn’t surprised that the old man’s voice was measurably weaker than the last time they’d talked. The good cheer was still there, but, welcome sound that it was, the image in Jack’s mind was of an Olympic skater giving a medal-winning performance on thin, brittle ice.
21. Explanations
HE’D NEVER THOUGHT of the COD as the busiest aircraft in the carrier’s air wing. It was, of course, and he’d always known it, but the machinations of the ugly, slow, prop-driven aircraft had hardly been a matter of interest to a pilot who’d been “born” in an F-4N Phantom-II and soon thereafter moved up in class to the F-14A Tomcat. He hadn’t flown a fighter in weeks, and as he walked out toward the COD-officially the C-2A Greyhound, which was almost appropriate since it did indeed fly like a dog – he resolved that he’d sneak down to Pax River for a few hours of turnin’ and burnin’ in a proper airplane just as soon as he could. “I feel the need,” he whispered to himself with a smile. “The need for speed.” The COD was spotted for a shot off the starboard bow catapult, and as Robby headed toward it he again saw an A-6E Intruder, again the squadron commander’s personal aircraft, parked next to the island. Outboard from the structure was a narrow area called the Bomb Farm, used for ordnance storage and preparation. It was a convenient spot, too small an area for airplanes to be parked and agreeably close to the edge of the deck so that bombs could easily be jettisoned over the side if the need arose. The bombs were moved about on small, low-slung carts, and just as he boarded the COD, he saw one, carrying a blue “practice” bomb toward the Intruder. On the bomb were the odd attachments for laser guidance.
So, another Drop-Ex tonight, eh? It was something else to smile about. You put that one right down the pickle barrel, too, Jensen, Robby thought. Ten minutes later he was off, heading for Panama, where he’d hop a ride with the Air Force for California.
Ryan was over West Virginia on a commercial flight, sitting in coach on an American Airlines DC-9. It was quite a comedown from the Air Force VIP group, but there hadn’t been sufficient cause for that sort of treatment this time. He was accompanied by a security guard, which Jack was gradually getting used to. This one was a case officer who’d been injured on duty – he’d fallen off something and badly injured his hip. After recovering, he’d probably rotate back to Operations. His name was Roger Harris. He was thirty or so and, Jack thought, pretty smart.
“What did you do before you joined up?” he asked Harris.
“Well, sir, I -”
“Name’s Jack. They don’t issue a halo along with the job title.”
“Would you believe? A street cop in Newark. I decided that I wanted to try something safer, so I came here. And then look what happened,” he chuckled.
The flight was only half booked. Ryan looked around and saw that no one was close, and listening devices invariably had trouble with the whine of the engines.
“Where’d it happen?”
“Poland. A meet went down bad – I mean, something just felt bad and I blew it off. My guy got away clean and I boogied the other way. Two blocks from the embassy I hopped over a wall. Tried to. There was a cat, just a plain old alley cat. I stepped on it, and it screeched, and I tripped and broke my fucking hip like some little old lady falling in the bathtub.” A rueful smile. “This spy stuff ain’t like the movies, is it?”
Jack nodded. “Sometime I’ll tell you about a time when the same sort of thing happened to me.”
“In the field?” Harris asked. He knew that Jack was Intelligence, not Operations.
“Hell of a good story. Shame I can’t tell it to anyone.”
“So what are you gonna tell J. Robert Fowler?”
“That’s the funny part. It’s all stuff he can get in the papers, but it isn’t official unless it comes from one of us.”
The stewardess came by. It was too short a flight for a meal, but Ryan ordered a couple of beers.
“Sir, I’m not supposed to drink on duty.”
“You just got a dispensation,” Ryan told him. “I don’t like drinking alone, and I always drink when I fly.”
“They told me you don’t like it up here,” Harris observed.
“I got over that,” Jack replied, almost truthfully.
“So what is going on?” Escobedo asked.
“Several things,” Cortez answered slowly, carefully, speculatively, to show el jefe that he was still somewhat in the dark, but working hard to use his impressive analytical talents to find the correct answer. “I believe the Americans have two or perhaps three teams of mercenaries in the mountains. They are, as you know, attacking some of the processing sites. The objective here would appear to be psychological. Already the local peasants have shown reluctance to assist us. It is not hard to frighten such people. Do it enough and we have problems producing our product.”
“Mercenaries?”
“A technical term, jefe. A mercenary, as you know, is anyone who performs services for money, but the term most often denotes paramilitary services. Exactly who are they? We know that they speak Spanish. They could be Colombian citizens, disaffected Argentines – you know that the norteamericanos used people from the Argentine Army to train the contras, correct? Dangerous ones from the time of the Junta. Perhaps with all the turmoil in their home country, they have decided to enter American employ on a semipermanent basis. That is only one of many possibilities. You must understand, jefe, that operations such as this must be plausibly deniable. Wherever they come from, they may not even know that they are working for the Americans.”