Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [108]
“Before our time, Jimmy. Did you talk to Judge Moore about it? I think he had a piece of that operation.”
Hardesty nodded. “He was in last Friday. The judge must have been a handful in his younger days, before he took that seat behind the bench. Him and Ritter both.”
“What’s Bob Ritter doing now?”
“You didn’t hear? Shit. Died three months ago down in Texas, liver cancer.”
“How old was he?” Chavez asked.
“Seventy-five. He was at MD Anderson Cancer Center, down in Texas, so he had the best treatment available, but it didn’t work.”
“Everybody dies of something,” Clark observed. “Sooner or later. Nobody told us about Ritter over in England. I wonder why.”
“The current administration didn’t like him much.”
That made sense, John thought. He was a warrior from the worst of the bad old days who’d worked in Redland against the main enemy of the time, and cold warriors died hard. “I’ll have to hoist a drink to his memory. We butted heads occasionally, but he never back-shot me. I wonder about that Alden guy.”
“Not our kind of people, John. I’m supposed to do a full report on people we whacked along the way, what laws might have been violated, that sort of thing.”
“So what can I do for you?” Clark asked his host.
“Alden pitched retirement to you?”
“Twenty-nine years. And I’m still alive. Kinda miraculous when you think about it,” John observed with a moment’s sober reflection.
“Well, if you need something to do, I have a number for you to call. Your knowledge is an asset; you can make money off it. Buy Sandy a new car, maybe.”
“What sort of work?”
“Something you will find interesting. Don’t know if it’ll be your kind of thing, but what the hell. Worst case, they’ll buy lunch.”
“Who is it?”
Hardesty didn’t answer the question. Instead he handed over another slip of paper with a phone number on it. “Give ’em a call, John. Unless you want to write your memoirs and get it through the people on the seventh floor.”
Clark had himself a laugh. “No way.”
Hardesty stood up, extended his hand. “Sorry to cut this short, but I have a ton of work to do. Give ’em a call—or don’t, if you don’t feel like it. Up to you. Maybe retirement will agree with you.”
Clark stood. “Fair enough. Thanks.”
With that, it was one more elevator ride and out the front door. For their part, John and Ding did stop and look at the wall. For some of the people at the CIA, those stars did represent the Honored Dead, no less than Arlington National Cemetery, though tourists were allowed to go there.
“What number, John?” Chavez asked.
“Some place in Maryland, judging by the area code.” He checked his watch and pulled out his new cell phone. “Let’s find out where. …”
Jack’s daily electronic traffic scan took up the first ninety minutes of his day and provided nothing of substance, so he grabbed his third cup of coffee, picked through the bagels, then returned to his office and began what he’d come to call his “morning troll” of the myriad intercepts the campus received from the U.S. intelligence community. Forty minutes into what was amounting to an exercise in frustration, a Homeland Security intercept caught his eye. Now, that was interesting, he thought, then picked up the phone.
He was in Jerry Rounds’s office five minutes later. “Whatcha got?” Rounds asked.
“DHS/FBI/ATF intercept. They’re looking for a missing plane.”
This got Rounds’s attention. The Department of Homeland Security had something of an event threshold system in place that generally did a good job of keeping trivial inquiries off its intelligence plate. The fact that such an inquiry had climbed this high on the food chain suggested that another agency had already done the routine legwork and confirmed that the plane in question hadn’t simply been misplaced by a sloppy charter company in an administrative shuffle.
“ATF, huh?” Rounds muttered. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms also specialized in explosive-related investigations. Combine