Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [325]
"I just did," Larson said as he rejoined the group. "Adele is heading west again, and she made hurricane an hour ago. Core winds are now seventy-five."
"Oh, shit," Colonel Johns observed. "How fast is she moving?"
"It's going to be close for tomorrow night, but no problem for our flight this evening."
"What flight is that, now?"
"Larson and I are going to hop down to locate the teams." Clark pulled a radio out of what had been Murray's bag. "We fly up and down the valley, talking on these. With luck we'll get contact."
"You must really believe in luck, son," Johns said.
O'Day reflected that the life of an FBI agent wasn't always as glamorous as people thought. There was also the little problem that with less than twenty agents on the case he couldn't assign this distasteful task to a junior agent. But the case had enough of those problems. They hadn't even considered getting a search warrant yet, and sneaking into Cutter's quarters without legal authorization - something that the Bureau seldom did anymore - was impossible. Cutter's wife had just gotten back and was bossing her staff of stewards around like a woman to the manor born. On the other hand, the Supreme Court had ruled a few years before that trash-searching didn't require the sanction of a court. That fact enabled Pat O'Day to get the best upper-body workout he'd had in years. Now he could barely raise his arms after having loaded a few tons of malodorous garbage bags into the back of a white-painted trash truck. It might have been one of several cans. The VIP section of Fort Myer was still a military post; even the trash cans had to be set up just so, and in this case, two homes shared each stopping place for the equally well-organized trash contractor. O'Day had marked the bags before loading them into the back of the truck, and as a result, fifteen garbage bags were now sitting in one of the Bureau's many laboratories, though not one that was part of the tourist route, since the FBI shows only its best face to those who tour the Hoover Building, the nice, clean, antiseptic labs. The only good news was that the ventilation system was good, and there were several cans of air freshener around to disguise the smells that got past the technicians' surgical masks. O'Day himself felt as though a squadron of bluebottle flies would follow him for the rest of his life. The search took an hour as the garbage was processed across a white tabletop of imitation marble, about four days' worth of coffee grinds and half-eaten croissants, decomposing meringue, and several diapers - those were from the wrong house: the officer next door to the Cutters had his new granddaughter visiting.
"Bingo," a technician said. His gloved hand held up a computer disk. Even with the gloves, he held it on opposite corners and dropped it into an extended plastic baggie. O'Day took the bag and walked upstairs to latent prints.
Two senior technicians were working overtime tonight. They'd cheated somewhat, of course. They already had a copy of Admiral Cutter's fingerprints from the central print index - all military personnel are printed as a matter of course upon their enlistment - along with their entire bag of tricks, which included a laser.
"What was it in?" one of them asked.
"On top of some newspapers," O'Day replied.
"Aha! No extraneous grease, and good insulation against the heat. There may be a chance." The technician removed the disk from the clear bag and went to work. It took ten minutes, while O'Day paced the room.
"I got a thumbprint with eight points on the front side, and what is probably a smudged ring finger on the back side with one good point and one very marginal one. There is one completely different set, but it's too smudged to identify. It's a different pattern, though, has to be a different person."
O'Day figured that that was more than he'd had the right to expect under the circumstances. A fingerprint identification ordinarily required ten individual points - the irregularities that constituted the