Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [231]
"Maybe they did."
"How'd they know that Director Jacobs was going down?"
"I don't know," Cutter replied.
"Really? You know that his secretary tried to commit suicide. The Bureau isn't talking at all, but I find that a remarkable coincidence."
"Who's running the case over there? Believe it or not, I don't know."
"Dan Murray, a deputy assistant director. He's not actually doing the field work, but he's the guy reporting to Shaw."
"Well, that's not my turf. I'm looking at the overseas aspects of the case, but the domestic stuff is in another office," Cutter pointed out, erecting a stone wall that Holtzman couldn't breach.
"So the Cartel was pretty worked up about Operation TARPON, and some senior people acted without the approval of the whole outfit to take Jacobs out. Other members, you say, think that their action was precipitous and decided to eliminate those who put out the contract?"
"That's the way it looks now. You have to understand, our intel on this is pretty thin."
"Our intel is always pretty thin," Holtzman pointed out.
"You can talk to Bob Ritter about that." Cutter set his coffee mug down.
"Right." Holtzman smiled. If there were two people in Washington whom you could trust never to leak anything, it was Bob Ritter and Arthur Moore. "What about Jack Ryan?"
"He's just settling in. He's been in Belgium all week anyway, at the NATO intel conference."
"There are rumbles on The Hill that somebody ought to do something about the Cartel, that the attack on Jacobs was a direct attack on -"
"I watch C-SPAN, too, Bob. Talk is cheap."
"And what Governor Fowler said this morning… ?"
"I'll leave politics to the politicians."
"You know that the price of coke is up on the street?"
"Oh? I'm not in that market. Is it?" Cutter hadn't heard that yet. Already…
"Not much, but some. There's word on the street that incoming shipments are off a little."
"Glad to hear it."
"But no comment?" Holtzman asked. "You're the one who's en saying that this is a for-real war and we ought to treat it such."
Cutter's smile froze on his face for a moment. "The President decides about things like war."
"What about Congress?"
"Well, that, too, but since I've been in government service there hasn't been a congressional declaration along those lines."
"How would you feel personally if we were involved in that bombing?"
"I don't know. We weren't involved." The interview wasn't going as planned. What did Holtzman know?
"That was a hypothetical," the reporter pointed out.
"Okay. We go off the record - completely - at this point. Hypothetically, we could kill all the bastards and I wouldn't shed many tears. How about you?"
Holtzman snorted. "Off the record, I agree with you. I grew up here. I can remember when it was safe to walk the streets. Now I look at the body count every morning and wonder if I'm in D.C. or Beirut. So it wasn't us, then?"
"Nope. Looks more like the Cartel is shaking itself out. That's speculation, but it's the best we have at the moment."
"Fair enough. I suppose I can make a story out of that."
20. Discoveries
IT WAS AMAZING. But it was also true. Cortez had been there for over an hour. There were six armed men with him, and a dog that sniffed around for signs of the people who had assaulted this processing site. The empty cartridge cases were mostly of the 5.56mm round now used by most of the NATO countries and their surrogates all over the world, but which had begun as the .223 Remington sporting cartridge. In America. There were also a number of 9mm cases, and a single empty hull from a 40mm grenade launcher. One of the attackers had been wounded, perhaps severely. The method of the attack was classic, a fire unit uphill and an assault group on the same level, to the north. They'd left hastily, not booby-trapping the bodies as had happened in two other cases. Probably because of the injured man, Cortez judged. Also because they knew