Ryan gazed down at the ocean, forty-two thousand feet below him. The VIP treatment wasn’t hard to get used to. As a directorate chief he also rated a special flight from Andrews direct to a military airfield outside of the NATO headquarters at Mons, Belgium. He was representing the Agency at a semiannual conference with his intelligence counterparts from the European Alliance. It would be a major performance. He had a speech to give, and favorable impressions to make. Though he knew many of the people who’d be there, he’d always been an upscale gofer for James Greer. Now he had to prove himself. But he’d succeed. Ryan was sure of that. He had three of his own department heads along, and a comfortable seat on a VC-20A to remind him how important he was. He didn’t know that it was the same bird that had taken Emil Jacobs to Colombia. That was just as well. For all his education, Ryan remained superstitious.
As Executive Assistant Director (Investigations), Bill Shaw was the Bureau’s senior official, and until a new Director was appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, he’d be acting Director. That might last for a while. It was a presidential election year, and with the coming of summer, people were thinking about conventions, not appointments. Perversely, Shaw didn’t mind a bit. That meant that he’d be running things, and for a case of this magnitude, the Bureau needed an experienced cop at the helm. “Political realities” were not terribly important to William Shaw. Crime cases were something that agents solved, and to him the case was everything. His first act on learning of the death of Director Jacobs had been to recall his friend, Dan Murray. It would be Dan’s job to oversee the case from his deputy assistant director’s office, since there were at least two elements to it: the investigation in Colombia and the one in Washington. Murray’s experience as legal attaché in London gave him the necessary political sensitivity to understand that the overseas aspect of the case might not be handled to the Bureau’s satisfaction. Murray entered Shaw’s office at seven that morning. Neither had gotten much sleep in the previous two days, but they’d sleep on the plane. Director Jacobs would be buried in Chicago today, and they’d be flying out on the plane with the body to attend the funeral.
“Well?”
Dan flipped open his folder. “I just talked to Morales in Bogotá. The shooter they bagged is a stringer for M-19, and he doesn’t know shit. Name is Hector Buente, age twenty, college dropout from the University of the Andes – bad marks. Evidently the locals leaned on him a little bit – Morales says they’re pretty torqued about this – but the kid doesn’t know much. The shooters got a heads-up for an important job several days ago, but they didn’t know what or where until four hours before it actually took place. They didn’t know who was in the car aside from the ambassador. There was another team of shooters, by the way, staked out on a different route. They have some names, and the local cops’re taking the town apart looking for them. I think that’s a dead end. It was a contract job, and the people who know anything are long gone.”
“What about places they fired from?”
“Broke in both apartments. They undoubtedly had the places surveyed beforehand. When the time came, they got in, tied up – actually cuffed – the owners, and sat it out. A real professional job from beginning to end,” Murray said.
“Four hours’ warning?”
“Correct.”
“That makes it after the time the plane lifted off Andrews,” Shaw observed.
Murray nodded. “That makes it clear that the leak was on our side. The airplane’s flight plan was filed for Grenada – where the bird actually ended up. That was changed two hours out from the destination. The Colombian Attorney General was the only guy who knew that Emil was going down, and he didn’t spread the word until three hours before the landing. Other senior government members knew that something was up, and that could explain the alert order to our M-19 friends, but the timing just isn’t right. The leak was here unless their AG himself blew the cover off. Morales says that’s very unlikely. The man is supposed to be the local Oliver Cromwell, honest as God and the balls of a lion. No mistress to blab to or anything like that. The leak was on our end, Bill.”
Shaw rubbed his eyes and thought about some more coffee, but he had enough caffeine in his system already to hyperactivate a statue. “Go on.”
“We’ve interviewed everyone who knew about the trip. Needless to say, nobody claims to have talked. I’ve ordered a subpoena to check phone records, but I don’t expect anything there.”
“What about -”
“The guys at Andrews?” Dan smiled. “They’re on the list. Maybe forty people, tops, who could have known that the Director was taking a flight. That includes people who found out up to an hour after the bird lifted off.”
“Physical evidence?”
“Well, we have one of the RPG launchers and assorted other weapons. The Colombian Army troops reacted damned well – Christ, running into a building where you know there’s heavy weapons, that’s real balls. The M-19ers were carrying Soviet-bloc light weapons also, probably from Cuba, but that’s incidental. I’d like to ask the Sovs to help us identify the RPG lot and shipment.”
“You think we’ll get any cooperation?”
“The worst thing they can say is no, Bill. We’ll see if this glasnost crap is for-real or not.”
“Okay, ask.”
“The rest of the physical side is pretty straightforward. It’ll confirm what we already know, but that’s about it. Maybe the Colombians will be able to work their way back through M-19, but I doubt it. They’ve been working on that group for quite a while, and it’s a tough nut.”
“Okay.”
“You look a little punked out, Bill,” Murray observed. “We got young agents to burn both ends of the candle. Us old farts are supposed to know about pacing ourselves.”
“Yeah, well, I have all this other stuff to get current with.” Shaw waved at his desk.
“When’s the plane leave?”
“Ten-thirty.”
“Well, I’m going to go back to my office and grab a piece of the couch. I suggest you do the same.”
Shaw realized that it wasn’t such a bad idea. Ten minutes later, he’d done the same, asleep despite all the coffee he’d drunk. An hour after that, Moira Wolfe came to his door minutes ahead of the time his own executive secretary showed up. She knocked but got no answer. She didn’t want to open the door, didn’t want to disturb Mr. Shaw, even though there was something important that she wanted to tell him. It could wait until they were all on the airplane.
“Hi, Moira,” Shaw’s secretary said, catching her on the way out. “Anything wrong?”
“I wanted to see Mr. Shaw, but I think he’s asleep. He’s been working straight through since -”
“I know. You look like you could use some rest, too.”
“Tonight, maybe.”
“Want me to tell him -”
“No, I’ll see him on the airplane.”
There was a mixup on the subpoena. The agent who’d made the arrangements had gotten the name of the wrong judge from the U.S. Attorney, and found himself sitting in the anteroom until 9:30 because the judge was also late coming in this Monday morning. Ten minutes after that, he had everything he needed. The good news was that it was but a short drive to the phone company, and that the local Bell office could access all the billing records it needed. The total list was nearly a hundred names, with over two hundred phone numbers and sixty-one credit cards, some of which were not AT&T. It took an hour to get a hard copy of all the records, and the agent rechecked the numbers he had written down to make sure that there hadn’t been any garbles or overlooks. He was a new agent, only a few months out of the Academy, on his first assignment to the Washington Field Division, essentially running an important errand for his supervisor as he learned the ropes, and he hadn’t paid all that much attention to the data he’d just received. He didn’t know, for example, that a 58 prefix on a certain telephone number denoted an overseas call to Venezuela. But he was young, and he’d know that before lunch.
The aircraft was a VC-135, the military version of the old 707. It was windowless, which the passengers always enjoyed, but had a large cargo door that was necessary for loading Director Jacobs aboard for his last trip to Chicago. The President was in another aircraft, scheduled to arrive at O’Hare International a few minutes ahead of this one. He would speak both at the temple and the graveside.