“Your daughter will recover fully,” he told the parents,
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confirming their hopes and crushing their fears with five quiet words and a warm smile.
The mother gasped as though punched, her mouth open, tears exploding from her eyes as she covered her face with her hands. The father took the news in what he deemed a more manly way, his face impassive–but not his eyes, which relaxed and looked up to the ceiling in relief. Then he seized the doctor’s hand, and his dark eyes came back down to bore in on MacGregor’s.
“I will not forget,” the general told him.
Then it was time to see Saleh, something he’d consciously delayed. MacGregor left the room and walked down the corridor. Outside he changed into a different set of clothing. Inside he saw a defeat. The man was under restraints. The disease had entered his brain. Dementia was yet another symptom of Ebola, and a merciful one. Saleh’s eyes were vacant and stared at the water marks on the ceiling. The nurse in attendance handed him the chart, the news on which was uniformly bad. MacGregor scanned it, grimaced, and wrote an order to increase the morphine drip. Supportive care in this case hadn’t mattered a damn. One victory, one loss, and if he’d had the choice of which to save and which to lose, this was how he’d have written the story, for Saleh was grown and had had a life of sorts. That life had but five days to run, and MacGregor could do nothing now to save it, only a few things to make its final passage less gruesome for the patient–and the staff. After five minutes he left the room, stripped off his protective garb, and walked to his office, his face locked in a frown of thought.
Where had it come from? Why would one survive and one die? What didn’t he know that he needed to know? The physician poured himself a cup of tea and tried to think past the victory and the defeat in order to find the information that had decided both issues. Same disease, same time. Two very different outcomes. Why?
32
RERUNS
I CAN’T GIVE THIS TO YOU, and I can’t let you copy any of it, but I can let you look at it.” He handed the photo over. He had light cotton gloves on, and he’d already given a pair to Donner. “Fingerprints,” he explained quietly.
“Is this what I think it is?” It was a black-and-white photograph, eight-by-ten glossy, but there was no classification stamp on it, at least not on the front. Donner didn’t turn it over.
“You really don’t want to know, do you?” It was a question and a warning.
“I guess not.” Donner nodded, getting the message. He didn’t know how the Espionage Act–18 U.S.C. §793E–interacted with his First Amendment rights, but if he didn’t know that the photo was classified, then he didn’t have to find out.
“That’s a Soviet nuclear missile submarine, and that’s Jack Ryan on the gangway. You’ll notice he’s wearing a Navy uniform. This was a CIA operation, run in cooperation with the Navy, and that’s what we got out of it.” The man handed over a magnifying glass to make sure that the identifications were positive. “We conned the Soviets into thinking she’d exploded and sunk about halfway between Florida and Bermuda. They probably still think that.”
“Where is it now?” Donner asked.
“They sank her a year later, off Puerto Rico,” the CIA official explained.
“Why there?”
“Deepest Atlantic water close to American territory, about five miles down, so nobody will ever find her, and nobody can even look without us knowing.”
“This was back–I remember!” Donner said. “The Russians had a big exercise going and we raised hell about it, and they actually lost a submarine, didn’t–”
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“Two.” Another photo came out of the folder. “See the damage to the submarine’s bow? Red October rammed and sank another Russian sub off the Carolinas. It’s still there. The Navy didn’t recover that one, but they sent down robots and stripped a lot of useful things off the hulk. Lt was covered as salvage activity on the first one, that sank from a reactor accident. The Russians never found out what happened to the second Alfa.”
“And this never leaked?” It was pretty amazing to a man who’d spent years extracting facts from the government, like a dentist with an unwilling patient.
“Ryan knows how to hush things up.” Another photo. “That’s a body bag. The person inside was a Russian crewman. Ryan killed him–shot him with a pistol. That’s how he got his first Intelligence Star. I guess he figured we couldn’t risk having him tell–well, isn’t too hard to figure, is it?”
“Murder?”
“No.” The CIA man wasn’t willing to go that far. “The official story is that it was a real shoot-out, that other people got hurt also. That’s how the documents read in the file, but…”
“Yeah. You have to wonder, don’t you?” Donner nodded, staring down at the photos. “Could this possibly be faked?”
“Possibly, yes,” he admitted. “But it’s not. The other people in the photo: Admiral Dan Foster, he was Chief of Naval Operations back then. This one is Commander Bar-tolomeo Mancuso. Back then he commanded USS Dallas. He was transferred to Red October to facilitate the defection. He’s still on active duty, by the way, an admiral now. He commands all the submarines in the Pacific. And that one is Captain Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius of the Soviet navy. He was the captain of Red October. They’re all still alive. Ramius lives in Jacksonville, Florida, now. He works at the Navy’s base at Mayport under the name Mark Ramsey. Consulting contract,” he explained. “The usual thing. Got a big stipend from the government, too, but God knows he earned it.”
Donner noted the details, and he recognized one of the extraneous faces. Sure as hell this wasn’t faked. There
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were rules for that, too. If somebody lied to a reporter, it wasn’t all that hard to make sure the right people found out who had broken the law–worse yet, that person became a target, and the media was in its way a crueler prosecutor than anyone in the Justice Department could ever hope to be. The court system, after all, required due process of law.
“Okay,-” the journalist said. The first set of photos went back in their folder. Another folder appeared, and from it a photograph.
“Recognize this guy?”
“He was–wait a minute. Gera-something. He was–”
“Nikolay Gerasimov. He was chairman of the old KGB.”
“Killed in a plane crash back in–”
Another photo went down. The subject was older, grayer, and looking far more prosperous. “This picture was taken in Winchester, Virginia, two years ago. Ryan went to Moscow, covered as a technical adviser to the START talks. He got Gerasimov to defect. Nobody’s exactly sure how. His wife and daughter got out, too. That op was run directly out of Judge Moore’s office. Ryan worked that way a lot. He was never really part of the system. Ryan knows–well, look, in fairness to the guy, he’s one hell of a spook, okay? He supposedly worked directly for Jim Greer as part of the DI, not the DO. A cover within a cover. Ryan’s never made an operational mistake that I know of, and that’s some record. Not too many others can claim that, but one reason for it is he’s one ruthless son of a bitch. Effective, yes, but ruthless. He cut through all the bureaucracy whenever he wanted. He does it his way every time, and if you get in his way–well, there’s one dead Russian we buried off the Red October, and a whole Alfa crew off the Carolinas, to keep that op a secret. This one, I’m not sure. Nothing in the file, but the file has a lot of blanks. How the wife and daughter got out, it’s not in the file. All I have for that are rumors, and they’re pretty thin.”
“Damn, I wish I’d had this a few hours ago.”
“Rolled you, did he?” This question came from Ed Kealty over a speaker phone.
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“I know the problem,” the CIA official said. “Ryan is slick. I mean, slick. He’s skated through CIA like Dorothy Hamill at Innsbruck, done it for years. Congress loves him. Why? He comes across as the most straightforward guy this side of Honest Abe. Except he’s killed people.” The man’s name was Paul Webb, and he was a senior official in the Directorate of Intelligence, but not senior enough to prevent his whole unit from ending up on the RIF list. He should have been DDI now, Webb thought, and he would have been except for the way Ryan had gotten James Greer’s ear and never let go of it. And so his career had ended as an entry-level supergrade at CIA, and now that was being taken away from him. He had his retirement. Nobody could take that away–well, if it became known that he’d smuggled these files out of Langley, he’d be in very deep trouble… or maybe not. What really happened to whistle-blowers, after all? The media protected them pretty well, and he had his time in service, and . . . he didn’t like being part of a reduction-in-force exercise. In another age, though he didn’t admit it even to himself, his anger might have prompted him to make contact with–no, not that. Not to an enemy. But the media wasn’t an enemy, was it? He told himself that it was not, despite an entire career of thinking otherwise.