Patriot games - Tom Clancy [185]
Jack handed the picture back. "What a waste."
"Sure is." Cantor pocketed the photo and the issue. "How's it going with your data?"
"So far I have a whole lot of nothing. The people who do this full-time "
"Yeah, for a while there they were working around the clock. We had to make them stop, they were burning out. Computerizing it was a little helpful. Once we had the head of one group turn up at six airports in one day, and we knew the data was for crap, but every so often we get a live one. We missed that guy by a half-hour outside Beirut last March. Thirty goddamned minutes," Cantor said. "You get used to it."
Thirty minutes, Jack thought. If I'd left my office thirty minutes earlier, I'd be dead. How am I supposed to get used to that?
"What would you have done to him?"
"We wouldn't have read him his constitutional rights," Cantor replied. "So, any connections that you've been able to find?"
Ryan shook his head. "This ULA outfit is so goddamned small. I have sixteen suspected contacts between the IRA and other groups. Some of them could be our boys, but how can you tell? The reports don't have pictures, the written descriptions could be anybody. Even when we have a reported IRA contact with a bunch they're not supposed be talking to-one that might actually be the ULA-then, A, our underlying information could easily be wrong, and B, it could be the first time they talked with the IRA! Marty, how in the hell is somebody supposed to make any sense out of this garbage?"
"Well, the next time you hear somebody ask what the CIA is doing about terrorism-you won't be able to tell him." Cantor actually smiled at that. "These people we're looking for aren't dumb. They know what'll happen if they get caught. Even if we don't do it ourselves-which we might not want to do-we can always tip the Israelis. Terrorists are tough, nasty bastards, but they can't stand up to real troops and they know it.
"That's the frustrating part. My brother-in-law's an Army major, part of the Delta Force down at Fort Bragg. I've seen them operate. They could take out this camp you looked at in under two minutes, kill everybody there, and be gone before the echo fades. They're deadly and efficient, but without the right information, they don't know where to be deadly and efficient at. Same with police work. Do you think the Mafia could survive if the cops knew exactly where and when they did their thing? How many bank robberies would be successful if the SWAT team was waiting inside the doors? But you gotta know where the crooks are. It's all about intelligence, and intelligence comes down to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats sifting through all this crap. The people who gather the intel give it to us, and we process it and give it to the operations teams. The battle is fought here, too. Jack. Right here in this building, by a bunch of GS-9s and -10s who go home to their families every night."
But the battle is being lost. Jack told himself. It sure as hell isn't being won.
"How's the FBI doing?" he asked.
"Nothing new. The black guy-well, he might as well not exist so far as anyone can tell. They have a crummy picture that's several years old, an alias with no real name or prints to check, and about ten lines of description that mainly says he's smart enough to keep his mouth shut. The Bureau's checking through people who used to be in the radical groups-funny how they have mostly settled down-without any success so far."
"How about the bunch who flew over there two years back?" Not so long ago members of several radical American groups had flown to Libya to meet with "progressive elements" of the third-world community. The echoes of that event still reverberated through the antiterrorism community.
"You've noticed that we don't have any pictures from Benghazi, right? Our agent got picked up-one of those horrible accidents. It cost us the photos and it cost him his neck. Fortunately they never found out he was working for us. We know some of the