The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [28]
"You planning a book on the subject, Jerry?" Sam asked lightly. The chief analyst was taking a single factoid of hard information and spinning it into a complete soap opera.
Rounds just tapped his nose and smiled. "Since when do you believe in coincidences? Something smells about this one."
"What's Langley think?"
"Nothing yet. They've assigned it to the Southern Europe Desk for evaluation. I expect we'll see something in a week or so, and it won't say much. I know the guy who runs that shop."
"Dumb?"
Rounds shook his head. "No, that's not fair. He's smart enough, but he doesn't stick his neck out. Nor is he especially creative. I bet this doesn't even go as far as the Seventh Floor."
A new CIA Director had replaced Ed Foley, who was now retired and reportedly doing his own "I Was There" book, along with his wife, Mary Pat. In their day, they'd been pretty good, but the new DCI was a politically attractive judge beloved of President Kealty. He didn't do anything without Presidential approval, which meant it had to be run through the mini-bureaucracy of the National Security Council team in the White House, which was about as leaky as RMS Titanic, and hence beloved of the press. The Directorate of Operations was still growing, still training new field officers at The Farm in Tidewater, Virginia, and the new DDO wasn't a bad man at all-Congress had insisted on someone who knew how to work the field, somewhat to Kealty's dismay, but he knew how to play the game with Congress. The Directorate of Operations might be growing back into proper shape, but it would never do anything overtly bad under the current administration. Nothing to make Congress unhappy. Nothing to make the freelance haters of the intelligence community get loud about anything other than their routine complaints about historical wives' tales and grand conspiracy theories, and how CIA had caused Pearl Harbor and the San Francisco Earthquake.
"So, nothing will come of this, you figure?" Granger asked, knowing the answer.
"Mossad will look around, tell its troops to stay awake, and that'll work for a month or two, and then most of them will settle down to their normal routines. Same with other services. Mainly, the Israelis will try to figure how their guy got fingered. Hard to speculate on that with the information at hand. Probably something simple. Usually is. Maybe he recruited the wrong guy and it bit him, maybe their ciphers got cracked-a bribed cipher clerk at the embassy, for example-maybe somebody talked to the wrong guy at the wrong cocktail party. The possibilities are pretty wide, Sam. It only takes one little slip to get a guy killed out there, and the best of us can make that sort of error."
"Something to put in the manual about what to do on the street, and what not to do." He'd done his own street time, of course, but mainly in libraries and banks, rooting around for information so dry as to make dust look moist, and finding the occasional diamond in a pile of it. He'd always maintained a cover and stuck to it until it had become as real to him as his birthday.
"Unless some other spook craps out on the street somewhere," Rounds observed. "Then we'll know if there really is a ghost out there."
The Avianca flight from Mexico touched down at Cartagena five minutes early. He'd flown Austrian Air to London Heathrow, and then a British Airways flight to Mexico City before taking Colombia's flag carrier to the South American country. It was an old American Boeing, but he was not one to worry about the safety