The Cardinal of the Kremlin - Tom Clancy [174]
"My father was the twenty-ninth pilot shot down over North Vietnam. They got him alive-there were pictures of him, alive-but he never came out."
"I didn't know."
She spoke as evenly as though discussing the weather. "You didn't know a lot of things, Mr. Henderson. They won't let me fly airplanes like Daddy did, but in the Bureau I make life as hard on the bastards as I can. They let me do that. I just hope that it hurts 'em like they've hurt me." She smiled again. "That's not very professional, is it?"
"I'm sorry. I'm afraid I don't know what else to say."
"Sure you do. You'll tell your contact what I told you to say." She tossed him a miniature tape recorder. It had a special computerized timer and an antitamper device. While in the taxicab, he'd be under intermittent surveillance. If he tried to warn his contact in any way, there was a chance- how great or small he did not know-that he'd be detected. They didn't like him and they didn't trust him. He knew that he'd never earn affection or trust, but Henderson would settle for getting out.
He left his apartment a few minutes later and walked downstairs. There was the usual number of cabs circulating about. He didn't gesture, but waited for one to come to him. They didn't start talking until it pulled into the traffic on Virginia Avenue.
The cab took him to the General Accounting Office headquarters on G Street, Northwest. Inside the building, he handed the tape recorder over to another FBI agent. Henderson suspected that it was a radio as well, though actually it was not. The recorder went to the Hoover Building. Loomis was waiting when it got there. The tape was rewound and played.
"CIA got it right for once," she observed to her supervisor. Someone even more senior was here. This was more important than she'd thought, Loomis knew at once.
"It figures. A source like Ryan doesn't come along real often. Henderson got his lines down pretty good."
"I told him that this may be his ticket out." Her voice said more than that.
"You don't approve?" the Assistant Director asked. He ran all of the FBI's counterintel operations.
"He hasn't paid enough, not for what he did."
"Miss Loomis, after this is all over, I'll explain to you why you're wrong. Put that aside, okay? You've done a beautiful job handling this case. Don't blow it now."
"What'll happen to him?" she asked.
"The usual, into the witness-protection program. He may end up running the Wendy's in Billings, Montana, for all I know." The AD shrugged. "You're getting promoted and sent to the New York Field Office. We have another one we think you're ready for. There's a diplomat attached to the UN who needs a good handler."
"Okay." The smile this time was not forced.
"They bit. They bit hard," Ritter told Ryan. "I just hope you're up to it, sonny boy."
"No danger involved." Jack spread his hands. "This ought to be real civilized."
Only the parts you know about. "Ryan, you are still an amateur so far as field ops are concerned. Remember that."
"I have to be for this to work," Jack pointed out.
"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make proud," the DDO said.
"That's not the way Sophocles said it." Jack grinned.
"My way's better. I even had a sign put up at the Farm that quotes me."
Ryan's idea for the mission had been a simple one-too simple, and Ritter's people had refined it over a period of ten hours into a real operation. Simple in concept, it would have its complications. They all did, but Ritter didn't like that fact.
Bart Mancuso had long since gotten used to the idea that sleeping wasn't included in the list of things that submarine skippers were expected to do, but what he especially hated was a knock on the door fifteen minutes after he was able to lie down,
"Come!" And die! he didn't say.
"FLASH traffic, eyes-only-captain," the Lieutenant said apologetically.
"It better be good!" Mancuso snarled, snapping the covers off the bunk. He walked aft in his skivvies to the communications room, to port and just aft of the attack center. Ten minutes later he emerged