“Not this truck, señor, I – ”
It was just one more thing to surprise him, but it would be the last. Clark’s hand came up and fired into the man’s forehead at a range of five feet. Before the leader had even started to fall, the second was also dead from the same cause. Without pause he moved around the right side of the truck. He hopped up on the running board and saw that there was just a driver. He, too, took a silenced round in the head. By this time Larson was out of the car. Approaching Clark from the rear, he came close to getting a round for his trouble.
“Don’t do that!” Clark said as he safed his pistol.
“Christ, I just -”
“You announce your presence in a situation like this. You almost died ’cause you didn’t. Remember that. Come on.” Clark hopped onto the back of the truck and pulled back the tarp.
Most of the dead were locals, judging by their clothes, but there were two faces that Clark vaguely recognized. It took a moment for him to remember …
“Captain Rojas. Sorry, kid,” he said quietly to the body.
“Who?”
“He had command of Team BANNER. One of ours. These fuckers killed some of our people.” His voice seemed quite tired.
“Looks like our guys did all right, too -”
“Let me explain something to you about combat, kid. There are two kinds of people in the field: your people and other people. The second category can include noncombatants, and you try to avoid hurting them if you have the time, but the only ones who really matter are your own people. You got a handkerchief?”
“Two.”
“Give ’em to me, then load those two in the truck.”
Clark pulled the cap of the gas tank that hung under the cab. He tied the handkerchiefs together and fed them in. The tank was full and the cloth was immediately saturated with gasoline.
“Come on, back to the car.” Clark disassembled his pistol and put it back in the rock box, then closed the back hatch and got back into the front seat. He punched the cigarette lighter. “Pull up close.”
Larson did so, getting there about the time the lighter popped out. Clark took it out and touched it to the soaked handkerchiefs. They ignited at once. Larson didn’t have to be told to take off. They were around the next bend before the fire started in earnest.
“Back to the city, fast as you can,” Clark ordered next. “What’s the fastest way to get to Panama?”
“I can have you there in a couple of hours, but it means -”
“Do you have the radio codes to get onto an Air Force base?”
“Yes, but -”
“You are now out of country. Your cover is completely blown,” Mr. Clark said. “Get a message to your girl before she gets back. Have her desert, or jump ship, or whatever you call it with an airline so that she doesn’t have to come back here. She’s blown, too. Both your lives are in danger – no-shit danger. There might have been somebody watching us. Somebody might have noticed that you drove me down here. Somebody might have noticed that you borrowed this car twice. Probably not, but you don’t get old in this business by taking unnecessary chances. You have nothing more to contribute to this operation, so get your asses clear.”
“Yes, sir.” They reached the highway before Larson spoke again. “What you did…”
“What about it?”
“You were right. We can’t let people do that and -”
“You’re wrong. You don’t know why I did that, do you?” Clark asked. He spoke like a man teaching a class, but gave only one of the reasons. “You’re thinking like a spy, and this is no longer an intelligence operation. We have people, soldiers, running and hiding up in those hills. What I did was to create a diversion. If they think our guys came down to avenge their dead, it may pull some of the bad guys down off the mountain, get them to look in the wrong place, take some of the heat off our guys. Not much, but it’s the best I could do.” He paused for a moment. “I won’t say it didn’t feel good. I don’t like seeing our people killed, and I fucking well don’t like not being allowed to do anything about it. That’s been happening for too many years – Middle East, everywhere – we lose people and don’t do a goddamned thing about it. This time I just had an excuse. It’s been a long time. And you know something – it did feel good,” Clark admitted coldly. “Now shut up and drive. I have some thinking to do.”
Ryan was in his office, still quiet, still thinking. Judge Moore was finding all sorts of excuses to be away. Ritter was spending a lot of time out of the office. Jack couldn’t ask questions and demand answers if they weren’t here. That also made Ryan the senior executive present, and gave him all sorts of extraneous paper to shuffle and telephone calls to return. Maybe he could make that work for him. Of one thing he was certain. He had to find out what the hell was happening. It was also plain that Moore and Ritter had made two mistakes of their own. First, they thought that Ryan didn’t know anything. They ought to have known better. He’d only gotten this far in the Agency because he was good at figuring things out. Their second mistake was in their likely assumption that his inexperience would prevent him from pressing too hard even if he did start figuring things out. Fundamentally they were both thinking like bureaucrats. People who spent their lives in bureaucracies were typically afraid of breaking rules. That was a sure way to get fired, and it cowed people to think of tossing their careers away. But that was an issue Jack had decided on long before. He didn’t know what his profession was. He’d been a Marine, a stockbroker, an assistant professor of history, and then joined CIA. He could always go back to teaching. The University of Virginia had already talked to Cathy about becoming a full professor at their medical school, and even Jeff Pelt wanted Ryan to come and liven up the history department as a visiting lecturer. It would be nice to teach again, Jack thought. It would certainly be easier than what he was doing here. Whatever he saw in his future, he didn’t feel trapped by his job. And James Greer had given him all the guidance he needed: Do what you think is right.
“Nancy.” Jack keyed his intercom. “When is Mr. Ritter going to be back?”
“Tomorrow morning. He had to meet with somebody down at The Farm.”
“Okay, thanks. Could you call my wife and leave a message that I’m going to be pretty late tonight?”
“Surely, Doctor.”
“Thanks. I need the file on INF verification, the OSWR preliminary report.”
“Dr. Molina is out at Sunnyvale with the Judge,” Nancy said. Tom Molina was the head of the Office of Strategic Weapons Research, which was back-checking two other departments on the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty verification procedures.
“I know. I just want to look the report over so I can discuss it with him when he gets back.”
“Take about fifteen minutes to get it.”
“No rush,” Jack replied and killed the intercom. That document could tie up King Solomon himself for three days, and it gave him a wholly plausible excuse for staying late. Congress had gotten antsy about some technical issues as both sides worked to destroy the last of their launchers. Ryan and Molina would have to testify there in the next week. Jack pulled the writing panel out from the side of his desk, knowing what he’d do after Nancy and the other clerical people left.
Cortez was a very sophisticated political observer. That was one reason he’d made colonel so young in an organization as bureaucratized as the DGI. Based on the Soviet KGB model, it had already grown a collection of clerks and inspectors and security officers to make the American CIA look like a mom-and-pop operation – which made the relative efficiencies of the agencies all the more surprising. For all their advantages, the Americans lacked political will, always fighting over issues that ought to have been quite clear. At the KGB Academy, one instructor had compared them to the Polish parliament of old, a collection of over five hundred barons, all of whom had had to agree before anything happened – and because of which nothing ever happened, allowing Poland to be raped by anyone with the ability to make a simple decision.
The Americans had acted in this case, however, acted decisively and well. What had changed?
What had changed – what had to have changed in this case – was that the Americans were breaking their own laws. They had responded emotionally… no, that wasn’t fair, Félix told himself. They had responded forcefully to a direct and arrogant challenge, just as the Soviets would have reacted, though with minor tactical differences. The emotional aspect to the reaction was that they had done the proper thing only by violating their incredible intelligence-oversight laws. And it was an election year in America…