As with any other government agency, CIA had regular business hours. By 3:30, those who came in early on “flex-time” were already filing out to beat the traffic, and by 5:30 even the seventh floor was quiet. Outside Jack’s office, Nancy Cummings put the cover over her IBM typewriter – she used a word processor, too, but Nancy still liked typewriters – and hit a button on her intercom.
“Anything else you need me for, Dr. Ryan?”
“No, thank you. See you in the morning.”
“Okay. Good night, Dr. Ryan.”
Jack turned in his chair, back to staring out at the trees that walled the complex off from outside view. He was trying to think, but his mind was a blank void. He didn’t know what he’d find. Part of him hoped that he’d find nothing. He knew that what he would do was going to cost him his career at the Agency, but he didn’t really give much of a damn anymore. If this was what his job required, then the job wasn’t really worth having, was it?
But what would the Admiral say about that?
Jack didn’t have that answer. He pulled a paperback out of his desk drawer and started reading. A few hundred pages later it was seven o’clock.
Time. Ryan lifted his phone and called the floor security desk. When the secretaries were gone home, it was the security guys who ran errands.
“This is Dr. Ryan. I need some documents from central files.” He read off three numbers. “They’re big ones,” he warned the desk man. “Better take somebody else to help.”
“Yes, sir. We’ll head down in a minute.”
“Not that much of a hurry,” Ryan said as he hung up. He already had a reputation as an easygoing boss. As soon as the phone was back in its cradle, he jumped to his feet and switched on his personal Xerox machine. Then he walked out his door to Nancy’s outer office space, listening for the diminishing sound of the two security officers walking out to the main corridor.
They didn’t lock office doors up here. There was no point. You had to pass through about ten security zones to get here, each guarded by armed officers, each supervised by a separate central security office on the first floor. There were also roving patrols. Security at CIA was tighter than at a federal prison, and about as oppressive. But it didn’t really apply to the senior executives, and all Jack had to do was walk across the corridor and open the door to Bob Ritter’s office.
The DDO’s office safe-vault was a better term – was set up the same way as Ryan’s, behind a false panel in the wall. It was less for secrecy – any competent burglar would find it in under a minute – than for aesthetics. Jack opened the panel and dialed the combination for the safe. He wondered if Ritter knew that Greer had the combination. Perhaps he did, but certainly he didn’t know that the Admiral had written it down. It was so odd a thing for the Agency, so odd that no one had ever considered the possibility. The smartest people in the world still had blind spots.
The safe doors were all alarmed, of course. The alarm systems were foolproof, and worked the same way as the safety locks on nuclear weapons – and they were the best kind available, weren’t they? You dialed in the right combination or the alarm went off. If you goofed doing it the first time, a light would go on above the dial, indicating that you had ten seconds to get it right or another light would go on at two separate security desks. A second goof would set off more alarms. A third would put the safe in lock-down for two hours. Several CIA executives had learned to curse the system and become the subject of jokes in the security department. But not Ryan, who was not intimidated by combination locks. The computer that kept track of such things decided that, well, it must be Mr. Ritter, and that was that.
Jack’s heart beat faster now. There were over twenty files in here, and his time was measured in minutes. But again Agency procedures came to his rescue. Inside the front cover of each file was a summary sheet telling what “Operation WHATEVER” was all about. He didn’t really pay attention to what they said, but used the summary sheets only to identify items of interest. In less than two minutes, Jack had files labeled EAGLE EYE, SHOWBOAT-I and SHOWBOAT-II, CAPER, and RECIPROCITY. The total stack was nearly eighteen inches high. Jack made careful note of where the folders went, then closed the safe door without locking it. Next he returned to his office, setting the papers on the floor behind his desk. He started reading EAGLE EYE first of all.
“Holy Christ!” “Detection and interdiction of incoming drug flight,” he saw, meant… shooting them down. Someone knocked on his door.
“Come on in.” It was the security guys with the files he’d requested. Ryan had them set the files on a chair and dismissed them.
Jack figured he had an hour, two at most, to do what he had to do. That meant he had time to scan, not to read. Each operation had a more detailed summary of objectives and methods plus an event log and daily progress report. Jack’s personal Xerox machine was a big, sophisticated one that organized and collated sheets, and most importantly, zipped them through very rapidly. He started feeding sheets into the hopper. The automatic feed allowed him to read and copy at the same time. Ninety minutes later he had copied over six hundred sheets, maybe a quarter of what he’d taken. It wasn’t enough, but it would have to do. He summoned the security guards to return the files they’d brought up – he took the time to ruffle them up first. As soon as they were gone, he assembled the files he’d…
… stolen? Jack asked himself. It suddenly dawned on him that he’d just violated the law. He hadn’t thought of that. He really hadn’t. As he loaded the files back in the safe, Ryan told himself that really he hadn’t violated anything. As a senior executive, he was entitled to know these things, and the rules didn’t really apply to him… but that, he remembered, was a dangerous way to think. He was serving a higher cause. He was doing What Was Right. He was –
“Shit!” Ryan said aloud when he closed the safe door. “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” He was back in his office a minute later.
It was time to leave. First he made a notation on the Xerox count sheet. You didn’t make Xerox copies anywhere in this building without signing off for them, but he’d thought ahead on that. Roughly the right number of sheets were assembled in a pile and placed in his safe, ostensibly a copy of the OSWR report that Nancy had retrieved. Making such copies was something that directorate chiefs were allowed to do fairly freely. Inside his safe, he found, was the manual for its operation. The copies he’d made went into his briefcase. The last thing Ryan did before leaving was to change his combination to something nobody would ever guess. He nodded to the security officer at the desk next to the elevator on his way out. The Agency Buick was waiting when he got to the basement garage.
“Sorry to make you stay in so late, Fred,” Jack said as he got in. Fred was his evening driver.
“No problem, sir. Home?”
“Right.” It required all of his discipline not to start reading on the way. Instead he leaned back and commanded himself to take a nap. It would be the only sleep he would get tonight, he was sure.
Clark got into Andrews just after eight. His first call was to Ritter’s office, but it was shortstopped elsewhere and he learned that the DDO was unavailable until morning. With nothing better to do, Clark and Larson checked into a motel near the Pentagon. After picking up shaving gear and a toothbrush from the Marriott’s gift shop, Clark again went to sleep, again surprising the younger officer, who was far too keyed up to do so.
“How bad is it?” the President asked.
“We’ve lost nine people,” Cutter replied. “It was inevitable, sir. We knew going in that this was a dangerous operation. So did they. What we can do -”
“What we can do is shut this operation down, and do it at once. And keep a nice tight lid on it forever. This one never happened. I didn’t bargain for any of this, not for the civilian casualties, and sure as hell not for losing nine of our own people. Damn it, Admiral, you told me that these kids were so good -“