Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [297]
"You're right, of course," Ritter said after a moment. "I can't do it on my own. I have to inform - well, you know. I'll take care of that. We'll pull them out as quickly as we can."
"Good." Clark relaxed. Ritter was a sharp operator, often too sharp in his dealings with subordinates, but he was a man of his word. Besides, the DDO was too smart to cross him on a matter like this. Clark was sure of that. He had made his own position pretty damned clear, and Ritter had caught the signal five-by-five.
"What about Larson and his courier?"
"I've pulled them both out. His plane's at Panama, and he's at the Marriott down the road. He's pretty good, by the way, but he's probably blown as far as Colombia is concerned. I'd say they could both use a few weeks off."
"Fair enough. What about you?"
"I can head back tomorrow if you want. You might want me to help with the extraction."
"We may have a line on Cortez."
"Really?"
"And you're the guy who got the first picture of him."
"Oh. Where - the guy at the Untiveros house, the guy we just barely missed?"
"The same. Positive ID from the lady he seduced. He's running the people they have in the field from a little house near Anserma."
"I'd have to take Larson back for that."
"Think it's worth the risk?"
"Getting Cortez?" Clark thought for a moment. "Depends. It's worth a look. What do we know about his security?"
"Nothing," Ritter admitted, "just a rough idea where the house is. We got that from an intercept. Be nice to get him alive. He knows a lot of things we want to find out. We bring him back here and we can hang a murder rap over his head. Death-penalty kind."
Clark nodded thoughtfully. Another element of spy fiction was the canard about how people in the intelligence business were willing to take their cyanide capsules or face a firing squad with a song in their hearts. The facts were to the contrary. Men faced certain death courageously only when there was no attractive alternative. The trick was to give them such an alternative, which didn't require the mind of a rocket scientist, as the current aphorism went. If they got Cortez, the normal form would be take him all the way through a trial, sentence him to death - just a matter of picking the right judge, and in national-security matters, there was always lots of leeway - and take it from there. Cortez would crack in due course, probably even before the trial started. Cortez was no fool, after all, and would know when and how to strike a bargain. He'd already sold out on his own country. Selling out on the Cartel was trivial beside that.
Clark nodded. "Give me a few hours to think about it."
Ryan turned left off 10th Street, Northwest, into the drive-through. There were uniformed and plainclothes guards, one of whom held a clipboard. He approached the car.
"Jack Ryan to see Dan Murray."
"Could I see some ID, please?"
Jack pulled out his CIA pass. The guard recognized it for what it was and waved to another guard. This one punched the button to lower the steel barrier that was supposed to prevent people with car bombs from driving under the headquarters of the FBI. He pulled over it and found a place to park the car. A young FBI agent met him in the lobby and handed him a pass that would work the Bureau's electronic gate. If someone invented the right sort of computer virus, Jack thought, half of the government would be prevented from going to work. And maybe the country would be safe until the problem was fixed.
The Hoover Building has a decidedly unusual layout, a maze of diagonal corridors intersecting with squared-off corridors. It is even worse than the Pentagon for the uninitiated to find their way about. In this case, Ryan was well and truly disoriented by the time they found the right office. Dan was waiting for him and led him into his private office. Jack closed the door behind him.
"What gives?" Murray asked.
Ryan set his briefcase