It wasn’t fair. Not fair that he’d been forced to leave without saying goodbye. A kiss that tasted of coffee on the way to the door, something about stopping at the Safeway on the way home, and she’d turned away, hadn’t even seen him enter the car that last time. She’d punished herself for months merely because of that.
What would Rich say?
But Rich was dead, and two years was long enough.
The kids already had dinner going when she got home. Moira walked upstairs to change her clothes, and found herself looking at the phone that sat on the night table. Right next to the picture of Rich. She sat down on the bed, looking at it, trying to face it. It took a minute or so. Moira took the paper from her purse, and with a deep breath began punching the number into the phone. There were the normal chirps associated with an international call.
“Díaz y Díaz,” a voice answered.
“Could I speak to Juan Díaz, please?” Moira asked the female voice.
“Who is calling, please?” the voice asked, switching over to English.
“This is Moira Wolfe.”
“Ah, Señora Wolfe! I am Consuela. Please hold for a momento.” There followed a minute of static on the line. “Señora Wolfe, he is somewhere in the factory. I cannot locate him. Can I tell him to call you?”
“Yes. I’m at home.”
“Sí, I will tell him – Señora?”
“Yes?”
“Please excuse me, but there is something I must say. Since the death of his Maria – Señor Juan, he is like my son. Since he has met you, Señora, he is happy again. I was afraid he would never – please, you must not say I tell you this, but, thank you for what you have done. It is a good thing you have done for Señor Juan. We in the office pray for both of you, that you will find happiness.”
It was exactly what she needed to hear. “Consuela, Juan has said so many wonderful things about you. Please call me Moira.”
“I have already said too much. I will find Señor Juan, wherever he is.”
“Thank you, Consuela. Goodbye.”
Consuela, whose real name was Maria – from which Félix (Juan) had gotten the name for his dead wife – was twenty-five and a graduate of a local secretarial school who wanted to make better money than that, and who, as a consequence, had smuggled drugs into America, through Miami and Atlanta, on half a dozen occasions before a close call had decided her on a career change. Now she handled odd jobs for her former employers while she operated her own small business outside Caracas. For this task, merely waiting for the phone to ring, she was being paid five thousand dollars per week. Of course, that was only one half of the job. She proceeded to perform the other half, dialing another number. There was an unusual series of chirps as, she suspected, the call was skipped over from the number she’d dialed to another she didn’t know about.
“Yes?”
“Señor Díaz? This is Consuela.”
“Yes?”
“Moira called a moment ago. She wishes for you to call her at home.”
“Thank you.” And the connection broke.
Cortez looked at his desk clock. He’d let her wait … twenty-three minutes. His place was yet another luxury condominium in Medellín, two buildings down from that of his boss. Was this the call? he wondered. He remembered when patience had come hard to him, but it was a long time since he’d been a fledgling intelligence officer, and he went back to his papers.
Twenty minutes later he checked the time again and lit a cigarette, watching the hands move around the dial. He smiled, wondering what it was like for her to have to wait, two thousand miles away. What was she thinking? Halfway through the cigarette, it was time to find out. He lifted the phone and dialed in the number.
Dave got to the phone first. “Hello?” He frowned. “We have a bad connection. Could you repeat that? Oh, okay, hold on.” Dave looked over to see his mother’s eyes on him. “For you, Mom.”
“I’ll take it upstairs,” she said at once, and moved toward the stairs as slowly as she could manage.
Dave put his hand over the receiver. “Guess who?” There were knowing looks around the dining room.
“Yes,” Dave heard her say on the other phone. He discreetly hung up. Good luck, Mom.
“Moira, this is Juan.”
“Are you free this weekend?” she asked.
“This weekend? Are you sure?”
“I’m free from lunch Friday to Monday morning.”
“So… let me think…” Two thousand miles away, Cortez stared out the window at the building across the street. Might it be a trap? Might the FBI Intelligence Division… might the whole thing be a… ? Of course not. “Moira, I must talk to someone here. Please hold for another minute. Can you?”
“Yes!”
The enthusiasm in her voice was unmistakable as he punched the hold button. He let her wait two minutes by his clock before going back on the line.
“I will be in Washington Friday afternoon.”
“You’ll be getting in about the time – about the right time.”
“Where can we meet? At the airport. Can you meet me at the airport?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what flight I’ll be on. I’ll meet you at… at the Hertz counter at three o’clock. You will be there, yes?”
“I will be there.”
“As will I, Moira. Goodbye, my love.”
Moira Wolfe looked again at the photograph. The smile was still there, but she decided it was not an accusing smile.
Cortez got up from his desk and walked out of the room. The guard in the hall stood when he came out of the door.
“I am going to see el jefe,” he said simply. The guard lifted his cellular phone to make the call.
The technical problems were very difficult. The most basic one was power. While the base stations cranked out about five hundred watts, the mobile stations were allowed less than seven, and the battery-powered hand-held sets that everyone likes to use were three hundred milliwatts, and even with a huge parabolic dish receiving antenna, the signals gathered were like whispers. But the Rhyolite-J was a highly sophisticated instrument, the result of uncounted billions of research-and-development dollars. Supercooled electronics solved part of the problem. Various computers worked on the rest. The incoming signals were broken down into digital code – ones and zeroes – by a relatively simple computer and downlinked to Fort Huachuca, where another computer of vastly greater power examined the bits of raw information and tried to make sense of them. Random static was eliminated by a mathematically simple but still massively repetitive procedure – an algorithm – that compared neighboring bits to one another and through a process of averaging numerical values filtered out over 90 percent of the noise. That enabled the computer to spit out a recognizable conversation from what it had downloaded from the satellite. But that was only the beginning.
The reason the Cartel used cellular phones for its day-to-day communications was security. There were roughly six hundred separate frequencies, all in the UHF band from 825 to 845 and 870 to 890 megahertz. A small computer at the base station would complete a call by selecting an available frequency at random, and in the case of a call from a mobile phone, changing that frequency to a better one when performance wavered. Finally, the same frequency could be used simultaneously for different calls on neighboring “cells” (hence the name of the system) of the same overall network. Because of this operating feature, there was not a police force in the world that could monitor phone calls made on cellular-phone equipment. Even without scrambling, the calls could be made in the clear, without even the need for code.
Or that’s what everyone thought.
The United States government had been in the business of intercepting foreign radio communications since the days of Yardley’s famous Black Chamber. Technically known as comint or sigint – for communications or signals intelligence – there was no better form of information possible than your enemy’s own words to his own people. It was a field in which America had excelled for generations. Whole constellations of satellites were deployed to eavesdrop on foreign nations, catching snippets of radio calls, side-lobe signals from microwave relay towers. Often encoded in one way or another, the signals were most often processed at the headquarters of the National Security Agency, on the grounds of Fort Meade, Maryland, between Washington and Baltimore, whose acres of basement held most of the supercomputers in the world.
The task here was to keep constant track of the six hundred frequencies used by the cellular phone net in Medellín. What was impossible for any police agency in the world was less than a light workout for NSA, which monitored literally tens of thousands of radio and other electronic channels on a continuous basis. The National Security Agency was far larger than CIA, far more secretive, and much better funded. One of its stations was on the grounds of Fort Huachuca, Arizona. It even had its own supercomputer, a brand-new Cray connected by fiberoptic cable to one of many communications vans, each of which performed functions that those in the loop knew not to ask about.