Ed and May Pat Foley, John Clark, Dan Murray, and his own father. Damned Skippy, he’s had some pretty good teachers, Hendley thought.
“What exactly do you think you’d do here?”
“Sir, I’m pretty smart, but not that smart. I’ll have to learn a lot. I know that. So do you. What do I want to do? I want to serve my country,” Jack said evenly. “I want to help get things done that need doing. I don’t need money. I have trust funds set up from Dad and Granddad—Joe Muller, Mom’s dad, I mean. Hell, if I wanted, I could get a law degree and end up like Ed Kealty, working my way toward the White House on my own, but my dad isn’t a king and I’m not a prince. I want to make my own way and see how things play out.”
“Your dad can’t know about this, at least not for a while.”
“So? He kept a lot of secrets from me.” Jack thought that was pretty funny. “Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it?”
“I’ll think about it. You have an e-mail address?”
“Yes, sir.” Jack handed across a card.
“Give me a couple of days.”
“Yes, sir. Thanks for letting me in to see you.” He stood, shook hands, and made his way out.
The boy had grown up in a hurry, Hendley thought. Maybe having a Secret Service detail helped with that—or hurt, depending on what sort of person you happened to be. But this boy had come from good stock, as much from his mother as his father. And clearly he was smart. He had a lot of curiosity, usually a sign of intelligence.
And intelligence was the only thing there was never enough of, anywhere in the world.
“SO?” Ernesto asked.
“It was interesting,” Pablo replied, lighting a Dominican cigar.
“What do they want of us?” his boss asked.
“Mohammed began by talking about our common interests, and our common enemies.”
“If we tried to do business over there, we would lose our heads,” Ernesto observed. With him, it was always business.
“I pointed that out. He replied that theirs is a small market, hardly worth our time. They merely export raw materials. And that is true. But he can help us, he said, with the new European market. Mohammed tells me that his organization has a good base of operations in Greece, and with the demise of international borders in Europe that would be the most logical point of entry for our consignments. They will not charge us for their technical assistance. They say they wish to establish goodwill only.”
“They must want our help very badly,” Ernesto observed.
“They have their own considerable resources, as they have demonstrated, jefe. But they seem to need some expertise for smuggling weapons in addition to people. In any case, they ask little, and they offer much.”
“And what they offer will make our business more convenient?” Ernesto wondered.
“It will certainly make the Yanquis devote their resources to different tasks.”
“It could create havoc in their country, but the political effects could be serious . . .”
“Jefe, the pressure they put upon us now can scarcely get worse, can it?”
“This new norteamericano president is a fool, but dangerous even so.”
“And so, we can have our new friends distract him, jefe,” Pablo pointed out. “We will not even use any of our assets to do so. We have little risk, and the potential reward is large, isn’t it?”
“I see that, but, Pablo, if it is traced to us, the cost could be serious.”
“That’s true, but again, how much additional pressure can they put on us?” Pablo asked. “They’re attacking our political allies through the Bogotá government, and if they succeed in producing the effect they desire then the harm to us will be very serious indeed. You and the other members of the Council might become fugitives in our own land,” the Cartel’s intelligence chief warned. He didn’t have to add that such an eventuality would take much of the fun out of the immense riches the Council members enjoyed. Money has little utility without a comfortable place to spend it. “There is an adage in that part of the world: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Jefe, if there is a major downside to this proposal venture, I do not see it.”
“You think I should meet with this man, then?”
“Sí, Ernesto. There should be no harm. He is more wanted by the gringos than we are. If we fear betrayal, then he should fear it even more so, shouldn’t he? And in any case, we will take proper precautions.”
“Very well, Pablo. I will discuss this with the Council with a recommendation that we hear him out,” Ernesto conceded. “How difficult would it be to set up?”
“I would expect him to fly through Buenos Aires. Surely he knows how to travel safely. He probably has more false passports than we do, and he truly does not look conspicuously Arabian.”
“His language skills?”
“Adequate,” Pablo answered. “Speaks English like an Englishman, and that is a passport all its own.”
“Through Greece, eh? Our product?”
“His organization has used Greece as a sally port for many years. Jefe, it’s easier to smuggle our product than a group of men, and so on first inspection their methods and assets seem to be adaptable to our purposes. Our own people will have to examine them, of course.”
“Any idea what his plans for North America might be?”
“I did not ask, jefe. It does not really concern us.”
“Except insofar as it tightens border security. That could be an inconvenience”—Ernesto held up his hand—”I know, Pablo, not a serious one.
“As long as they help us out, I don’t care what they want to do to America.”
CHAPTER 3
GRAY FILES
ONE OF Hendley’s advantages was that most of his assets worked elsewhere. They didn’t have to be paid, housed, or fed. The taxpayers paid all of the overhead without knowing it, and, indeed, the “overhead” itself didn’t know exactly what it was. Recent evolution in the world of international terrorism had caused America’s two principal intelligence agencies, CIA and NSA, to work even more closely than they had in the past, and since they were an inconvenient hour’s drive apart—negotiating the northern part of the D.C. Beltway can be like driving through a shopping mall parking lot during Christmas week—they did most of their communication via secure microwave links, from the top of NSA’s headquarters building to the top of CIA’s. That this sight line transited the roof of Hendley Associates had gone unnoticed. And it ought not to have mattered anyway, since the microwave link was encrypted. It had to be, since microwaves leaked off their line of transmission due to all manner of technical reasons. The laws of physics could be exploited, but not changed to suit the needs of the moment.
The bandwidth on the microwave channel was immense, due to compression algorithms that were little different from those used on personal computer networks. The King James Version of the Holy Bible could have flown from one building to another in seconds. These links were always up and running, most of the time swapping nonsense and random characters in order to befuddle anyone who might try to crack the encryption—but since this system was TAPDANCE encrypted, it was totally secure. Or so the wizards at NSA claimed. The system depended on CD-ROMs stamped with totally random transpositions, and unless you could find a key to atmospheric RF noise, that was the end of that. But every week, one of the guard detail from Hendley, accompanied by two of his colleagues—all of them randomly chosen from the guard force—drove to Fort Meade and picked up the week’s encryption disks. These were inserted in the jukebox attached to the cipher machine, and when each was ejected after use, it was hand-carried to a microwave oven to be destroyed, under the eyes of three guards, all of them trained by years of service not to ask questions.
This somewhat laborious procedure gave Hendley access to all of the activity of the two agencies, since they were government agencies and they wrote everything down, from the “take” from deep-cover agents to the cost of the mystery meat served in the cafeteria.
Much—even most—of the information was of no interest to Hendley’s crew, but nearly all of it was stored on high-density media and cross-referenced on a Sun Microsystems mainframe computer that had enough power to administer the entire country, if need be. This enabled Hendley’s staff to look in on the stuff the intelligence services were generating, along with the top-level analysis being done by experts in a multitude of areas and then cross-decked to others for comment and further analysis. NSA was getting better at this sort of work than CIA, or so Hendley’s own top analyst thought, but many heads on a single problem often worked well—until the analysis became so convoluted as to paralyze action, a problem not unknown to the intelligence community. With the new Department of Homeland Security—for whose authorization Hendley thought he would have voted “Nay”—in the loop, CIA and NSA were both recipients of FBI analysis. That often just added a new layer of bureaucratic complexity, but the truth of the matter was the FBI agents took a slightly different take on raw intelligence. They thought in terms of building a criminal case to be put before a jury, and that was not at all a bad thing when you got down to it.