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By Root 1785 0

through CIA like Dorothy Hamill at Innsbruck, done it for years. Congress loves him. Why? He comes across as the most straightforward guy this side of Honest Abe. Except he's killed people. The man's name was Paul Webb, and he was a senior official in the Directorate of Intelligence, but not senior enough to prevent his whole unit from ending up on the RIF list. He should have been DDI now, Webb thought, and he would have been except for the way Ryan had gotten James Greer's ear and never let go of it. And so his career had ended as an entry-level supergrade at CIA, and now that was being taken away from him. He had his retirement. Nobody could take that away-well, if it became known that he'd smuggled these files out of Langley, he'd be in very deep trouble or maybe not. What really happened to whistle-blowers, after all? The media protected them pretty well, and he had his time in service, and he didn't like being part of a reduction-in-force exercise. In another age, though he didn't admit it even to himself, his anger might have prompted him to make contact with-no, not that. Not to an enemy. But the media wasn't an enemy, was it? He told himself that it was not, despite an entire career of thinking otherwise.

You've been rolled, Tom, Kealty said again over the phone line. Welcome to the club. I don't even know all the stuff he can pull off. Paul, tell him about Colombia.

There's no file on that one that I can find, Webb admitted. Wherever it is-well, there are special files, the ones with date-stamps on them. Like 2050 at the earliest. Nobody sees those.

How does that happen? Donner demanded. I've heard that before, but I've never been able to confirm-

How they keep those off the books? It's a deal that has to go through Congress, an unwritten part of the oversight process. The Agency goes there with a little problem, asks for special treatment, and if Congress agrees, off the file goes into the special vault-hell, for all I know, the whole thing's been shredded and turned into compost, but I can give you a few verifiable facts, Webb concluded with an elegant dangle.

I'm listening, Donner replied. And so was his tape recorder.

How do you suppose the Colombians broke up the Medellin cartel? Webb asked, drawing Donner in further. It wasn't all that hard. These people thought they knew about intrigue, Webb thought with a benign smile.

Well, they had some sort of internal faction fight, a couple of bombs went off and-

They were CIA bombs. Somehow-I'm not sure exactly how, we initiated the faction fight. This I do know: Ryan was down there. His mentor at Langley was James Greer-they were like father and son. But when James died, Ryan wasn't there for the funeral, and he wasn't at home, and he wasn't away on CIA business-he'd just come back from a NATO conference in Belgium. But then he just dropped off the map, like he's done any number of times. Soon thereafter the President's National Security Advisor, Jim Cutter, is accidentally run down by a D.C. transit bus on the G.W., right? He didn't look? He just ran in front of a bus. That's what the FBI said, but the guy running that was Dan Murray, and what job does he have now? FBI Director, right? It just so happens he and Ryan go back more than ten years. Murray was the 'special' guy for both Emil Jacobs and Bill Shaw. When the Bureau needed something done quietly, they called in Murray. Before that he was legal attaché in London-that's a spook post, lots of contacts with the intelligence communities over there; Murray's the black side of FBI, big time and well connected. And he picked Pat Martin to advise Ryan on Supreme Court appointments. Is the picture becoming clear?

Wait a minute. I know Dan Murray. He's a tough son of a bitch, but he's an honest cop-

He was in Colombia with Ryan, which is to say, he was off the map at exactly the same time. Okay, remember, I do not have the file on this operation, okay? I can't prove any of this. Look at the sequence of events. Director Jacobs and all the others were killed, and right after that we have bombs going off in