Refills were free here, and his arrived on schedule. He took a scant six minutes, which was about right, everyone noted. Finished, he picked up his papers and left some money on the table. When he moved away from the plate, they could all see that he’d crumpled his paper napkin to a ball and set it in the saucer next to the empty coffee cup.
Business, Loomis noted at once. Butch took his bill to the register at the end of the counter, paid it, and left. He was good, Loomis noted yet again. She knew where and how he made the drop, but still she rarely caught him planting it.
Another regular came in. He was a cabdriver who usually got a cup of coffee before beginning his day, and sat alone at the end of the counter. He opened his paper to the sports page, looking around the café as he usually did. He could see the napkin on the saucer. He wasn’t quite as good as Butch. Setting the paper in his lap, he reached under the counter and retrieved the message, tucking it in the Style section.
After that, it was pretty easy. Loomis paid her bill and left, hopping into her Ford Escort and driving to the Watergate apartments. She had a key to Henderson’s apartment.
“You’re getting a message today from Butch,” she told Agent Cassius.
“Okay.” Henderson looked up from his breakfast. He didn’t at all enjoy having this girl “running” him as a double agent. He especially didn’t like the fact that she was on the case because of her looks, that the “cover” for their association was a supposed affair which, of course, was pure fiction. For all her sweetness, her syrupy Southern accent—and her stunning good looks! he grumped—Henderson knew all too well that Loomis viewed him as half a step above a microbe. “Just remember,” she’d told him once, “there’s a room waiting for you.” She was referring to the United States Penitentiary—not “correctional facility”—at Marion, Illinois, the one that had replaced Alcatraz as the home of the worst offenders. No place for a Harvard man. But she’d only done that once, and otherwise treated him politely, even occasionally grabbing his arm in public. That only made it worse.
“You want some good news?” Loomis asked.
“Sure.”
“If this one goes through the way we hope, you might be clear. All the way out.” She’d never said that before.
“What gives?” Agent Cassius asked with interest.
“There’s a CIA officer named Ryan—”
“Yeah, I heard the SEC’s checking him out—well, they did, a few months back. You let me tell the Russians about that . . .”
“He’s dirty. Broke the rules, made half a million dollars on insider information, and there’s a grand jury meeting in two weeks that’s going to burn his ass, big-time.” Her profanity was all the more vivid from the sweet, Southern-Belle smile. “The Agency’s going to hang him out to dry. No help from anybody. Ritter hates his guts. You don’t know why, but you heard it from Senator Fredenburg’s aide. You get the impression that’s he’s a sacrificial goat for something that went wrong, but you don’t know what. Something a few months back in Central Europe, maybe, but that’s all you heard. Some of it you tell right off. Some you make them wait till this afternoon. One more thing—you’ve heard a rumor that SDI may actually be on the table. You think it’s bad information, but you heard a senator say something about it. Got it?”
“Yeah.” Henderson nodded.
“Okay.” Loomis walked off to the bathroom. Butch’s favorite coffee shop was too greasy for her system.
Henderson went to his bedroom and selected a tie. Out? he wondered as he knotted it partway, then changed his mind. If that were true—he had to admit that she’d never lied to him. Treated me like scum, but never lied to me, he thought. Then I can get out. . . ? Then what? he asked himself. Does it matter?
It mattered, but it mattered more that he’d get out.
“I like the red one better,” Loomis observed from the door. She smiled sweetly. “A ‘power’ tie for today, I think.”
Henderson dutifully reached for the red one. It never occurred to him to object. “Can you tell me … ?”
“I don’t know—and you know better. But they wouldn’t let me say this unless everybody figured that you paid some back, Mr. Henderson.”
“Can’t you call me Peter, just once?” he asked.
“My father was the twenty-ninth pilot shot down over North Vietnam. They got him alive—there were pictures of him, alive—but he never came out.”
“I didn’t know.”
She spoke as evenly as though discussing the weather. “You didn’t know a lot of things, Mr. Henderson. They won’t let me fly airplanes like Daddy did, but in the Bureau I make life as hard on the bastards as I can. They let me do that. I just hope that it hurts ’em like they’ve hurt me.” She smiled again. “That’s not very professional, is it?”
“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t know what else to say.”
“Sure you do. You’ll tell your contact what I told you to say.” She tossed him a miniature tape recorder. It had a special computerized timer and an antitamper device. While in the taxicab, he’d be under intermittent surveillance. If he tried to warn his contact in any way, there was a chance—how great or small he did not know—that he’d be detected. They didn’t like him and they didn’t trust him. He knew that he’d never earn affection or trust, but Henderson would settle for getting out.
He left his apartment a few minutes later and walked downstairs. There was the usual number of cabs circulating about. He didn’t gesture, but waited for one to come to him. They didn’t start talking until it pulled into the traffic on Virginia Avenue.
The cab took him to the General Accounting Office headquarters on G Street, Northwest. Inside the building, he handed the tape recorder over to another FBI agent. Henderson suspected that it was a radio as well, though actually it was not. The recorder went to the Hoover Building. Loomis was waiting when it got there. The tape was rewound and played.
“CIA got it right for once,” she observed to her supervisor. Someone even more senior was here. This was more important than she’d thought, Loomis knew at once.
“It figures. A source like Ryan doesn’t come along real often. Henderson got his lines down pretty good.”
“I told him that this may be his ticket out.” Her voice said more than that.
“You don’t approve?” the Assistant Director asked. He ran all of the FBI’s counterintel operations.
“He hasn’t paid enough, not for what he did.”
“Miss Loomis, after this is all over, I’ll explain to you why you’re wrong. Put that aside, okay? You’ve done a beautiful job handling this case. Don’t blow it now.”
“What’ll happen to him?” she asked.
“The usual, into the witness-protection program. He may end up running the Wendy’s in Billings, Montana, for all I know.” The AD shrugged. “You’re getting promoted and sent to the New York Field Office. We have another one we think you’re ready for. There’s a diplomat attached to the UN who needs a good handler.”
“Okay.” The smile this time was not forced.
“They bit. They bit hard,” Ritter told Ryan. “I just hope you’re up to it, sonny boy.”
“No danger involved.” Jack spread his hands. “This ought to be real civilized.”
Only the parts you know about. “Ryan, you are still an amateur so far as field ops are concerned. Remember that.”
“I have to be for this to work,” Jack pointed out.
“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud,” the DDO said.
“That’s not the way Sophocles said it.” Jack grinned.
“My way’s better. I even had a sign put up at the Farm that quotes me.”
Ryan’s idea for the mission had been a simple one—too simple, and Ritter’s people had refined it over a period of ten hours into a real operation. Simple in concept, it would have its complications. They all did, but Ritter didn’t like that fact.
Bart Mancuso had long since gotten used to the idea that sleeping wasn’t included in the list of things that submarine skippers were expected to do, but what he especially hated was a knock on the door fifteen minutes after he was able to lie down,
“Come!” And die! he didn’t say.
“FLASH traffic, eyes-only-captain,” the Lieutenant said apologetically.
“It better be good!” Mancuso snarled, snapping the covers off the bunk. He walked aft in his skivvies to the communications room, to port and just aft of the attack center. Ten minutes later he emerged and handed a slip of paper to the navigator.
“I want to be there in ten hours.”
“No sweat, Cap’n.”