“You’ve been rolled, Tom,” Kealty said again over the phone line. “Welcome to the club. / don’t even know all the stuff he can pull off. Paul, tell him about Colombia.”
“There’s no file on that one that 1 can find,” Webb admitted. “Wherever it is–well, there are special files, the ones with date-stamps on them. Like 2050 at the earliest. Nobody sees those.”
“How does that happen?” Donner demanded. “I’ve heard that before, but I’ve never been able to confirm–”
“How they keep those off the books? It’s a deal that has to go through Congress, an unwritten part of the oversight process. The Agency goes there with a little problem, asks for special treatment, and if Congress agrees, off the file goes into the special vault–hell, for all I know, the whole thing’s been shredded and turned into compost, but I can give you a few verifiable facts,” Webb concluded with an elegant dangle.
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“I’m listening,” Donner replied. And so was his tape recorder.
“How do you suppose the Colombians broke up the Medellin cartel?” Webb asked, drawing Donner in further. It wasn’t all that hard. These people thought they knew about intrigue, Webb thought with a benign smile.
“Well, they had some sort of internal faction fight, a couple of bombs went off and–”
“They were CIA bombs. Somehow–I’m not sure exactly how, we initiated the faction fight. This I do know: Ryan was down there. His mentor at Langley was James Greer–they were like father and son. But when James died, Ryan wasn’t there for the funeral, and he wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t away on CIA business–he’d just come back from a NATO conference in Belgium. But then he just dropped off the map, like he’s done any number of times. Soon thereafter the President’s National Security Advisor, Jim Cutter, is accidentally run down by a D.C. transit bus on the G.W., right? He didn’t look? He just ran in front of a bus. That’s what the FBI said, but the guy running that was Dan Murray, and what job does he have now? FBI Director, right? It just so happens he and Ryan go back more than ten years. Murray was the ‘special’ guy for both Emil Jacobs and Bill Shaw. When the Bureau needed something done quietly, they called in Murray. Before that he was legal attache in London–that’s a spook post, lots of contacts with the intelligence communities over there; Murray’s the black side of FBI, big time and well connected. And he picked Pat Martin to advise Ryan on Supreme Court appointments. Is the picture becoming clear?”
“Wait a minute. I know Dan Murray. He’s a tough son of a bitch, but he’s an honest cop–”
“He was in Colombia with Ryan, which is to say, he was off the map at exactly the same time. Okay, remember, I do not have the file on this operation, okay? I can’t prove any of this. Look at the sequence of events. Director Jacobs and all the others were killed, and right after that we have bombs going off in Colombia, and a lot of the cartel boys go to talk it over with God–but a lot of innocent people got killed, too. That’s the problem with
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bombs. Remember how Bob Fowler made an issue of that? So what happens then? Ryan disappears. Murray does, too. I figure they went down to turn the operation off before it got totally out of hand–and then Cutter dies at a very convenient moment. Cutter didn’t have the balls for wet work, he probably knew that, and people probably were afraid he’d crack because he just didn’t have the nerve. But Ryan sure as hell did–and still does. Murray–well, you kill the FBI Director, and you piss off a very serious organization, and I can’t say I disapprove. Those Medellin bastards stepped way over the line, and they did it in an election year, and Ryan was in the right place to play a little catch-up ball, and so somebody issued him a hunting license, and maybe things got a little out of hand–it happens–and so he goes down there to shut it down. Successfully,” Webb emphasized. “In fact, the whole operation was a success. The cartel came apart–”
“Another one took its place,” Donner objected. Webb nodded with an insider’s smile.
“True, and they haven’t killed any American officials, have they? Somebody explained to them what the rules are. Again, I will not say that what Ryan did was wrong, except for one little thing.”
“What’s that?” Donner asked, disappointing Webb, though he was fully caught up in the story now.
“When you deploy military forces into a foreign country, and kill people, it’s called an act of war. But, again, Ryan skated. The boy’s got some beautiful moves. Jim Greer trained him well. You could drop Ryan in a septic tank and he’ll come out smelling like Old Spice.”
“So, what’s your beef with him?”
“You finally asked,” Webb observed. “Jack Ryan is probably the best intelligence operator we’ve had in thirty years, the best since Alien Dulles, maybe the best since Bill Donovan. Red October was a brilliant coup. Getting the chairman of KGB out was even better. The thing in Colombia, well, they twisted the tiger’s tail, and they forgot that the tiger has great big claws. Okay,” Webb allowed. “Ryan’s a king spook–but he needs somebody to tell him what the law is, Tom.”
“A guy like this would never get elected,” Kealty ob-
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served, straining himself to say as little as possible. Three miles away his own chief of staff almost pulled the phone away from him, they were so close to getting the message across. Fortunately, Webb carried on.
“He’s done a great job at the Agency. He was even a good adviser for Roger Durling, but that’s not the same as being President. Yeah, he rolled you, Mr. Donner. Maybe he rolled Durling–probably not, but who can say? But this guy is rebuilding the whole fucking government, and he’s building it in his image, in case you didn’t notice. Every appointment he’s made, they’re all people he’s worked with, some for a long time–or they were selected for him by close associates. Murray running the FBI. Do you want Dan Murray in charge of America’s most powerful law enforcement agency? You want these two people picking the Supreme Court? Where will he take us?” Webb paused, and sighed. “I hate doing this. He’s one of us at Langley, but he isn’t supposed to be President, okay? I have an obligation to my country, and my country isn’t Jack Ryan.” Webb collected the photos and tucked them back in the folders. “I gotta get back. If anyone finds out what I’ve done, well, look what happened to Jim Cutter…”
“Thank you,” Donner said. Then he had some decisions to make. His watch said three-fifteen, and he had to make them fast. Driving that decision would be a well-understood fact. There was something in creation even more furious than a woman scorned. It was a reporter who’d discovered that he’d been rolled.
ALL NINE WERE dying. It would take from five to eight days, but they were all doomed, and they all knew it. Their faces stared at the overhead cameras, and they had no illusions now. Their executions would be even crueller than the courts had decided for them. Or so they thought. This group promised to be more dangerous than the first– they just knew more of what was going on–and as a result they were more fully restrained. As Moudi watched, the army medics went in to draw blood samples from the subjects, which would be necessary to confirm and then
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to quantify the degree of their infection. On their own, the medics had come up with a way to keep the “patients” from struggling during the process–a jerked arm at the wrong moment could make one of the medical corpsmen stab the needle into the wrong body, and so while one man did the sample, the other held a knife across the subject’s throat. Doomed though the criminals believed themselves to be, they were criminals, and cowards, and therefore unwilling to hasten their deaths. It wasn’t good medical technique, but then nobody in the building was practicing good medicine. Moudi watched the process for a few minutes and left the monitoring room.
They’d been overly pessimistic on many things, and one of them was the quantity of virus that would be needed. In the culturing tank, the Ebola had consumed the monkey kidneys and blood with a gusto whose results chilled even the director. Though it happened fundamentally at the molecular level, overall it was like seeing ants going after dead fruit, seeming to come from nowhere and then covering it, turning it black with their bodies. So it was with the Ebola virus; even though it was too small to see, there were literally trillions of them eating and displacing the tissue offered them as food. What had been one color was now another, and you didn’t have to be a physician to know that the contents of the chamber were hateful beyond words. It chilled his blood merely to look at the dreadful “soup.” There were liters of it now, and they were growing more, using human blood taken from the Tehran central blood bank.