Divide and conquer - Tom Clancy [15]
The president's short speech had pleased some people, most notably delegates who were targets for acts of terrorism.
But it struck some other attendees as odd. Vice president Cotten appeared surprised, as did Secretary of State Dean Can" and America's United Nations Ambassador Meriwether. And Mala Chatteijee had been openly bothered by the comment. So much so that she'd actually turned to Hood and asked if she had understood the president correctly. He told her that he believed she had.
What he didn't tell her was that Op-Center would almost certainly have been involved in or briefed about any such arrangement. Something might have been arranged during the time that he was away, but Hood doubted it.
When he visited his office the day before to catch up on business he had missed, he saw no reference to a multinational intelligence effort.
Hood didn't bother talking to anyone after the dinner.
He left promptly and went to Op-Center, where he did additional digging into the matter. This was the first time he had seen the weekend night crew since his return.
They were glad to see him, especially weekend night director Nicholas Grille. Grille was a fifty-three-year-old former Navy SEAL intelligence expert who had moved over from the Pentagon around the same time Hood had first joined Op-Center. Grille congratulated him on the fine job he and General Rodgers had done in New York and asked how his daughter was.
Hood thanked him and told him that Harleigh would be all right.
Hood began by accessing the files of the DCI-the Director of Central Intelligence. This independent body was a clearinghouse of information for four other intelligence departments: the Central Intelligence Agency;
Op-Center; the Department of Defense, which included the four branches of the military, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency; and Department Intelligence, which consisted of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of State, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Treasury.
Once Hood was into the DCI database, he asked for recent agreements or initiatives pertaining to the United Nations. There were nearly five thousand listings. He eliminated those that did not involve intelligence gathering for the United Nations and its members. That reduced the list to twenty-seven. Hood browsed those quickly. The last was filed a week before, a preliminary report about the failure of the CIA field office to catch Annabelle Hampton's terrorist-support activities in New York. Blame was placed on New York field office head David Battat and his supervisor in Washington, Deputy Assistant Director Wong. Wong was given a written warning, which was not entered into his record. Battat was given a sterner reprimand, which did not become part of his permanent dossier. But Battat would be hung out to dry for a while, doing what Bob Herbert had once described as "sewer rat-a-tat" jobs-dirty work in the line of fire. The kind of work that freshmen agents usually had to perform.
There was nothing about a United Nations operation involving any of the fourteen intelligence agencies.
Given the new detente the president was trying to establish with the United Nations, it wasn't surprising that Lawrence would look for a way to help them. But presenting a desire or opportunity as a done deal was mystifying.
The president would have needed the cooperation of the head of at least one of these agencies just to undertake a study for such a proposition, and that wasn't anywhere in the files. There wasn't even any correspondence, electronic or otherwise, requesting such a study.
The only answer Hood could think of was a handshake deal between the president and the CIA, FBI, or one of the other groups. But