Patriot games - Tom Clancy [223]
Owens was as furious as anyone had ever seen him. The surveillance of Cooley had been so easy, so routine-but that was no excuse, he told his men. That harmless-looking little poof, as Ashley had called him, had slipped away from his shadowers as adroitly as someone trained at Moscow Center itself. There were men at every international airport in Britain clutching pictures of Cooley, and if he used his credit card to purchase any kind of ticket, the computers would notify Scotland Yard at once, but Owens had a sickening feeling that the man was already out of the country. The Commander of C-13 dismissed his people.
Ashley was in the room, too, and his people had been caught equally off guard. He and Owens shared a look of anger mixed with despair.
A detective had left the tape of a phone call to Geoffrey Watkins made less than an hour after Cooley disappeared. Ashley played it. It lasted all of twenty seconds. And it wasn't Cooley's voice. If it had been, they would have arrested Watkins then and there. For all their effort, they still did not have a single usable piece of evidence on Geoffrey Watkins.
"There is a Mr. Titus in the building. The voice even gave the correct number. By all rights it could have been a simple wrong number."
"But it wasn't, of course."
"That is how it's done, you know. You have pre-set messages that are constructed to sound entirely harmless. Whoever trained these chaps knew what they were about. What about the shop?"
"The girl Beatrix knows absolutely nothing. We have people searching the shop at this moment, but so far they've found nothing but old bloody books. Same story at his flat." Owens stood and spoke in a voice full of perverse wonder. "An electrician Months of work, gone because he yanks the wrong wire."
"He'll turn up. He could not have had a great deal of cash. He must use his credit card."
"He's out of the country already. Don't say he isn't. If he's clever enough for what we know he's done-"
"Yes." Ashley nodded reluctant agreement. "One doesn't always win, James."
"It is so nice to hear that!" Owens snapped out his reply. "These bastards have outguessed us every step of the way. The Commissioner is going to ask me how it is that we couldn't get our thumbs out in time, and there is no answer to that question."
"So what's the next step, then?"
"At least we know what he looks like. We we share what we know with the Americans, all of it. I have a meeting scheduled with Murray this evening. He's hinted that they have something operating that he's not able to talk about, doubtless some sort of CIA op."
"Agreed. Is it here or there?"
"There." Owens paused. "I am getting sick of this place."
"Commander, you should measure your successes against your failures," Ashley said. "You're the best man we've had in this office in some years."
Owens only grunted at that remark. He knew it was true. Under his leadership, C-13 had scored major coups against the Provisionals. But in this job, as in so many others, the question one's superiors always asked was, What have you accomplished today? Yesterday was ancient history.
"Watkins' suspected contact has flown," he announced three hours later.
"What happened?" Murray closed his eyes halfway through the explanation and shook his head sadly. "We had the same sort of thing happen to us," he said after Owens finished. "A renegade CIA officer. We were watching his place, and let things settle into a comfortable routine, and