“Sounds good to me, Cap’n.” Guerra took off to get things organized. Chavez left at once to sweep the area while the rest of the squad moved to its new RON site – except, Chavez thought, this was an ROD – remain-over-day-site. It was a bleak attempt at humor, but it was all he could manage under the circumstances.
“My God,” Ryan breathed. It was four in the morning, and he was awake only because of coffee and apprehension. Ryan had uncovered his share of things with the Agency. But never anything like this. The first thing he had to do was… what?
Get some sleep, even a few hours, he told himself. Jack lifted the phone and called the office. There was always a watch officer on duty.
“This is Dr. Ryan. I’m going to be late. Something I ate. I’ve been throwing up all night… no, I think it’s over now, but I need a few hours of sleep. I’ll drive myself in tomorr – today,” he corrected himself. “Yeah, that’s right. Thanks. ‘Bye.”
He left a note on the refrigerator door for his wife and crawled into a spare bed to avoid disturbing her.
Passing the message was the easiest part for Cortez. It would have been hard for anyone else, but one of the first things he’d done after joining the Cartel was to get a list of certain telephone numbers in the Washington, D.C., area. It hadn’t been hard. As with any task, it was just a matter of finding someone who knew what you needed to know. That was something Cortez excelled at. Once he had the list of numbers – it had cost him $10,000, the best sort of money well spent, that is to say, someone’s else’s well-spent money – it was merely a matter of knowing schedules. That was tricky, of course. The person might not be there, which risked disclosure, but the right sort of eyes – only prefix would probably serve to warn off the casual viewer. The secretaries of such people typically were disciplined people who risked their jobs when they showed too much curiosity.
But what really made it easy was a new bit of technology, the facsimile printer. It was a brand-new status symbol. Everyone had to have one, just as everyone, especially the important, had to have a direct private telephone line that bypassed his secretary. That and the fax went together. Cortez had driven to Medellín to his private office and typed the message himself. He knew what official U.S. government messages looked like, of course, and did his best to reproduce it here. EYES-ONLY NIMBUS was the header, and the name in the FROM slot was bogus, but that in the To place was quite genuine, which ought to have been sufficient to get the attention of the addressee. The body of the message was brief and to the point, and indicated a coded reply-address. How would the addressee react? Well, there was no telling, was there? But this, too, Cortez felt was a good gamble. He inserted the single sheet in his fax, dialed the proper number, and waited. The machine did the rest. As soon as it heard the warbling electronic love-call of another fax machine, it transmitted the message form. Cortez removed the original and folded it away into his wallet.
The addressee turned in surprise when he heard the whir of his fax printing out a message. It had to be official, because only half a dozen people knew that private line. (It never occurred to him that the telephone company’s computer knew about it, too.) He finished what he was doing before reaching over for the message.
What the hell is NIMBUS? he wondered. Whatever it was, it was eyes-only to him, and therefore he started to read the message. He was sipping his third cup of morning coffee while he did so, and was fortunate that his cough deposited some of it onto his desk and not his trousers.
Cathy Ryan was nothing if not punctual. The phone in the guest room rang at precisely 8:30. Jack’s head jerked off the pillow as though from an electric shock, and his hand reached out to grab the offensive instrument.
“Hello?”
“Good morning, Jack,” his wife said brightly. “What’s the problem with you?”
“I had to stay up late with some work. Did you take the other thing with you?”
“Yes, what’s the -”
Jack cut her off. “I know what it says, babe. Could you just make the call? It’s important.” Dr. Caroline Ryan was also bright enough to catch the meaning of what he said.
“Okay, Jack. How do you feel?”
“Awful. But I have work to do.”
“So do I, honey. ‘Bye.”
“Yeah.” Jack hung up and commanded himself to get out of the bed. First a shower, he told himself.
Cathy was on her way to Surgery, and had to hurry. She lifted her office phone and called the proper number on the hospital’s D.C. line. It rang only once.
“Dan Murray.”
“Dan, this is Cathy Ryan.”
“Morning! What can I do for you this fine day, Doctor?”
“Jack said to tell you that he’d be in to see you just after ten. He wants you to let him park in the drive-through, and he said to tell you that the folks down the hall aren’t supposed to know. I don’t know what that means, but that’s what he told me to say.” Cathy didn’t know whether to be amused or not. Jack did like to play funny little games – she thought they were pretty dumb little games – with people who shared his clearances, and wondered if this was some sort of joke or not. Jack especially liked to play games with his FBI friend.
“Okay, Cath’, I’ll take care of that.”
“I have to run off to fix somebody’s eyeball. Say hi to Liz for me.”
“Will do. Have a good one.”
Murray hung up with a puzzled look on his face. Folks down the hall aren’t supposed to know. “The folks down the hall” was a phrase Murray had used the first time they’d met, in St. Thomas’s Hospital in London when Dan had been the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy on Grosvenor Square. The folks down the hall were CIA.
But Ryan was one of the top six people at Langley, arguably one of the top three.
What the hell did that mean?
“Hmph.” He called his secretary and had her notify the security guards to allow Ryan into the driveway that passed under the main entrance to the Hoover Building. Whatever it meant, he could wait.
Clark arrived at Langley at nine that morning. He didn’t have a security pass – not the sort of thing you carry into the field – and had to use a code-word to get through the main gate, which seemed very conspiratorial indeed. He parked in the visitors’ lot – CIA has one of those – and walked in the main entrance, heading immediately to the left where he quickly got what looked like a visitor’s badge which, however, worked just fine in the electronically controlled gates. Now he angled off to the right, past the wall murals that looked as though some enormous child had daubed mud all over the place. The decorator for this place, Clark was sure, had to have been a KGB plant. Or maybe they’d just picked the lowest bidder. An elevator took him to the seventh floor, and he walked around the corridor to the executive offices that have their own separate corridor on the face of the building. He ended up in front of the DDO’s secretary.
“Mr. Clark to see Mr. Ritter,” he said.
“Do you have an appointment?” the secretary asked.
“No, I don’t, but I think he wants to see me,” Clark said politely. There was no sense in abusing her. Besides, Clark had been raised to show deference to women. She lifted her phone and passed the message. “You can go right in, Mr. Clark.”
“Thank you.” He closed the door behind him. The door, of course, was heavy and soundproof. That was just as well.
“What the hell are you doing here?” the DDO demanded.
“You’re going to have to shut SHOWBOAT down,” Clark said without preamble. “It’s coming apart. The bad guys are hunting those kids down and -”
“I know. I heard late last night. Look, I never figured this would be a no-loss operation. One of the teams got clobbered pretty good thirty-six hours ago, but based on intercepts, looks like they gave better than they took, and then they got even with some others who -”
“That was me,” Clark said.
“What?” Ritter asked in surprise. ”
“Larson and I took a little drive about this time yesterday, and I found three of those – whatevers. They were just finished loading up the bodies into the back of a truck. I didn’t see any point in letting them live,” Mr. Clark said in a normal tone of voice. It had been a very long time since anyone at CIA had said something like that.