“Sounds to me like you did the right thing,” Murray said. “I don’t suppose you had much choice in the matter. It happens like that sometimes.”
Bright acknowledged the official forgiveness. “Thanks.”
They had to wait five more minutes for the photographs. Decks had been cleared for this case, but even priority cases took time, much to the annoyance of everyone. The technician – actually a section chief – arrived with the moist prints.
“I figured you’d want these babies in a hurry.”
“You figured right, Marv – Holy Christ!” Murray exclaimed. “Marv, this is code-word.”
“You already told me, Dan. Lips are zipped. We can enhance them some, but that’ll take another hour. Want me to get that started?”
“Fast as you can.” Murray nodded, and the technician left. “Christ,” Murray said again when he reexamined the photos. “Mark, you take a mean picture.”
“So who the hell is it?”
“Félix Cortez.”
“Who’s that?”
“Used to be a DGI colonel. We missed him by a whisker when we bagged Filiberto Ojeda.”
“The Macheteros case?” That didn’t make any sense.
“No, not exactly.” Murray shook his head. He spoke almost reverently, thought for a minute, and called for Bill Shaw to come down. The acting Director was there within a minute. Agent Bright was still in the dark when Murray pointed his boss to the photographs. “Bill, you ain’t going to believe this one.”
“So who the hell is Félix Cortez?” Bright asked.
Shaw answered the question. “After he skipped out of Puerto Rico, he went to work for the Cartel. He had a piece of Emil’s murder, how much we don’t know, but he sure as hell was involved. And here he is, sitting with the President’s National Security Adviser. Now what do you suppose they had to talk about?”
“It’s not with this batch, but I got a picture of them shaking hands,” the junior agent announced.
Shaw and Murray just stared at him when he said that. Then at each other. The President’s head national-security guy shook hands with somebody who works for the drug Cartel… ?
“Dan,” Shaw said, “what the hell is going on? Has the whole world just gone crazy?”
“Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Put a call in to your friend Ryan. Tell him… Tell his secretary that there’s a terrorism thing – no, we can’t risk that. Pick him up on the way home?”
“He’s got a driver.”
“That’s a big help.”
“I got it.” Murray lifted his phone and dialed a Baltimore number. “Cathy? Dan Murray. Yeah, we’re fine, thanks. What time does Jack’s driver usually get him home? Oh, he didn’t? Okay, I need you to do something, and it’s important, Cathy. Tell Jack to stop off at Danny’s on the way home to, uh, to pick the books up. Just like that, Cathy. This isn’t a joke. Can you do that? Thanks, doc.” He replaced the phone. “Isn’t that conspiratorial?”
“Who’s Ryan – isn’t he CIA?”
“That’s right,” Shaw answered. “He’s also the guy who dumped this case in our laps. Unfortunately, Mark, you are not cleared for it.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Why don’t you see how quick you can fly home and find out how much that new baby’s grown. Damned nice work you did here. I won’t forget,” the acting Director promised him.
Pat O’Day, a newly promoted inspector working out of FBI Headquarters, watched from the parking lot as a subordinate stood on the flight line in the soiled uniform of an Air Force technical sergeant. It was a clear, hot day at Andrews Air Force Base, and a D.C. Air National Guard F-4C landed right ahead of the VC-20A. The converted executive jet taxied to the 89th’s terminal on the west side of the complex. The stairs dropped and Cutter walked out wearing civilian clothes. By this time – through Air Force intelligence personnel – the Bureau knew that he’d visited a helicopter crew and a communications van in the morning. So far no one had approached either of them to find out why, because headquarters was still trying to figure things out, and, O’Day thought, failing miserably – but that was headquarters for you. He wanted to go back out to the field where the real cops were, though this case did have its special charm. Cutter walked across to where his personal car was parked, tossed his bag in the back seat, and drove off, with O’Day and his driver in visual pursuit. The National Security Adviser got onto Suitland Parkway heading toward D.C., then, after entering the city, onto I-395. They expected him to get off at the Maine Avenue exit, possibly heading toward the White House, but instead the man just kept going to his official residence at Fort Myer, Virginia. A discreet surveillance didn’t get more routine than that.
“Cortez? I know that name. Cutter met with a former DGI guy?” Ryan asked.
“Here’s the photo.” Murray handed it over. The lab troops had run it through their computerized enhancement process. One of the blackest of the Bureau’s many forensic arts, it had converted a grainy photographic frame to glossy perfection. Moira Wolfe had again verified Cortez’s identity, just to make everyone sure. “Here’s another.” The second one showed them shaking hands.
“This’ll look good in court,” Ryan observed as he handed the frames back.
“It’s not evidence,” Murray replied.
“Huh?”
Shaw explained. “High government officials meet with… with strange people all the time. Remember the time when Kissinger made the secret flight to China?”
“But that was -” Ryan stopped when he realized how dumb his objection sounded. He remembered a clandestine meeting with the Soviet Party chairman that he couldn’t tell the FBI about. How would that look to some people?
“It isn’t evidence of a crime, or even a conspiracy, unless we know that what they talked about was illegal,” Murray told Jack. “His lawyer will argue, probably successfully, that his meeting with Cortez, while appearing to be irregular, was aimed at the execution of sensitive but proper government policy.”
“Bullshit,” Jack observed.
“The attorney would object to your choice of words, and the judge would have it stricken from the record, instruct the jury to disregard it, and admonish you about your language in court, Dr. Ryan,” Shaw pointed out. “What we have here is a piece of interesting information, but it is not evidence of a crime until we know that a crime is being committed. Of course, it is bullshit.”
“Well, I met with the guy who guided the ‘car bombs’ into the targets.”
“Where is he?” Murray asked at once.
“Probably back in Colombia by now.” Ryan explained on for a few minutes.
“Christ, who is this guy?” Murray asked.
“Let’s leave his name out of it for a while, okay?”
“I really think we should talk to him,” Shaw said.
“He’s not interested in talking to you. He doesn’t want to go to jail.”
“He won’t.” Shaw rose and paced around the room. “In case I never told you, I’m a lawyer, too. In fact, I have a J.D. If we were to attempt to try him, his lawyer would throw Martinez-Barker at us. You know what that is? A little-known result of the Watergate case. Martinez and Barker were Watergate conspirators, right? Their defense, probably an honest one, was that they thought the burglary was sanctioned by properly constituted authority as part of a national-security investigation. In a rather wordy majority opinion, the appeals court ruled that there had been no criminal intent, the defendants had acted in good faith throughout, and therefore no actual crime had been committed. Your friend will say on the stand that once he’d heard the ‘clear and present danger’ pronouncement from his superiors, and been told that authorization came from way up the chain of command, he was merely following orders given by people who had sufficient constitutional authority to do so. I suppose Dan already told you, there really isn’t any law in a case like this. Hell, the majority of my agents would probably like to buy your guy a beer for avenging Emil’s death.”
“What I can tell you about this guy is that he’s a serious combat vet, and as far as I could tell, he’s a very straight guy.”
“I don’t doubt it. As far as the killing is concerned – we’ve had lawyers say that the actions of police snipers come awfully close to cold-blooded murder. Drawing a distinction between police work and combat action isn’t always as easy as we would like. In this case, how do you draw the line between murder and a legitimate counterterrorist operation? What it’ll come down to – hell, it will mainly reflect the political beliefs of the judges who try the case, and the appeal, and every other part of the proceeding. Politics. You know,” Shaw said, “it was a hell of a lot easier chasing bank robbers. At least then you knew what the score was.”