Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [142]
B: VERY WELL. I WILL SET UP THE MEETING.
E: THANK YOU, PABLO.
END CALL. DISCONNECT SIGNAL. END INTERCEPT.
"What's this 'agitation' business?"
"I can't put 'pissed' in an official TWX," Antonio pointed out. "This one's hot. We have some operational intel here." He pressed the transmit key on his terminal. The signal was addressed to a code-word destination - CAPER - which was all anyone who worked in the van knew.
Bob Ritter had just left for home, and was only a mile up on the George Washington Parkway when his secure earphone made its distinctive and, to him, irritating noise.
"Yeah?"
"CAPER traffic," the voice said.
"Right," the Deputy Director (Operations) said with a suppressed sigh. To his driver: "Take me back."
"Yes, sir."
Getting back, even for a top CIA executive, meant finding a place to reverse course, and then fight the late D.C. rush-hour traffic which, in its majesty, allows rich, poor, and important to crawl at an equal twenty miles per hour. The gate guard waved the car through, and he was in his seventh-floor office five minutes after that. Judge Moore was already gone. There were only four watch officers cleared for this operation. That was the minimum number required merely to wait for and evaluate signal traffic on the operation. The current watch officer had just come on duty. He handed over the signal.
"We have something hot," the officer said.
"You're not kidding. It's Cortez," Ritter observed after scanning the message form.
"Good bet, sir."
"Coming here… but we don't know what he looks like. If only the Bureau had gotten a picture of the bastard when he was in Puerto Rico. You know the description we have of him." Ritter looked up.
"Black and brown. Medium height, medium build, sometimes wears a mustache. No distinguishing marks or characteristics," the officer recited from memory. It wasn't hard to memorize nothing, and nothing was exactly what they had on Félix Cortez.
"Who's your contact at the Bureau?"
"Tom Burke, middle-level guy in the Intelligence Division. Pretty good man. He handled part of the Henderson case."
"Okay, get this to him. Maybe the Bureau can figure a way to bag the bastard. Anything else?"
"No, sir."
Ritter nodded and resumed his trip home. The watch officer returned to his own office on the fifth floor and made his call. He was in luck this night; Burke was still at his office. They couldn't discuss the matter over the phone, of course. The CIA watch officer, Paul Hooker, drove over to the FBI Building at 10th and Pennsylvania.
Though CIA and FBI are sometimes rivals in the intelligence business, and always rivals for federal budget funds, at the operational level their employees get along well enough; the barbs they trade are good-natured ones.
"There's a new tourist coming into D.C. in the next few days," Hooker announced once the door was closed.
"Like who?" Burke inquired, gesturing to his coffee machine.
Hooker declined. "Félix Cortez." The CIA officer handed over a Xerox of the telex. Portions of it had been blacked out, of course. Burke didn't take offense at this. As a member of the Intelligence Division, charged with catching spies, he was accustomed to "need-to-know."
"You're assuming that it's Cortez," the FBI agent pointed out. Then he smiled. "But I wouldn't bet against you. If we had a picture of this clown, we'd stand a fair chance of bagging him. As it is…" A sigh. "I'll put people at Dulles, National, and BWI. We'll try, but you can guess what the odds are." If the Agency had gotten a photo of this mutt while he was in the field - or while he was at the KGB Academy - it would make our job a hell of a lot easier… "I'll assume that he's coming in over the next four days. We'll check all flights directly in from down there, and all connecting flights."
The problem was more one of mathematics than anything. The number of direct flights from Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and other nearby countries directly