Without remorse - Tom Clancy [319]
'Sir, that is not true. There are certain cases. This is one of them. The file was taken out and will be returned, but I do not know when.'
'Who has it?'
'I'm not allowed to say, sir.' The tone of the bureaucrat's voice showed her intensity of interest, too. The file was gone, and until it came back it was no longer part of the known universe as far as she was concerned.
'I can get a court order, you know.' That usually worked on people, few of whom enjoyed the attention of a note from somebody's bench.
'Yes, you can. Is there any other way I can help you, sir?' She was also used to being blustered at. The call was from Baltimore, after all, and a letter from some judge eight hundred miles away seemed a distant and trivial thing. 'Do you have our mailing address, sir?'
Actually, he couldn't. He still didn't quite have enough to take to a judge. Matters like this were handled more as a matter of courtesy than as actual orders.
'Thank you, I'll get back'
'Have a good day.' The well-wish was in fact the bland dismissal of one more forgettable irrelevance in the day of a file clerk.
Out of the country. Why? For whom? What the hell's so different about this case? Ryan knew that it had many differences. He wondered if he'd ever have them all figured out.
'That's what they did to her,' Kelly told them. It was the first time he'd actually said it all out loud, and in recounting the details of the pathology report it was as though he were listening to the voice of another person. 'Because of her background the cops never really assigned much of a priority to the case. I got two more girls out. One they killed. The other one, well ...' He waved at the newspaper.
'Why did you just turn her loose?'
'Was I supposed to murder her, Mr Ritter? That's what they were planning to do,' Kelly said, still looking down. 'She was more or less sober when I let her go. I didn't have the time to do anything else. I miscalculated.'
'How many?'
'Twelve, sir,' he answered, knowing that Ritter wanted the total number of kills.
'Good Lord,' Ritter observed. He actually wanted to smile. There was talk, actually, of getting CIA involved in antidrug operations. He opposed that policy - it wasn't important enough to divert the time of people who should be protecting their country against genuine national-security threats. But he couldn't smile. This was far too serious for that. 'The article says twenty kilograms of the stuff. Is that true?'
'Probably.' Kelly shrugged. 'I didn't weigh it. There's one other thing. I think I know how the drugs come in. The bags smell like - embalming fluid. It's Asian heroin.'
'Yes?' Ritter asked.
'Don't you see? Asian stuff. Embalming fluid. Comes in somewhere on the East Coast. Isn't it obvious? They're using the bodies of out KIAs to bring the fucking stuff in.
All this, and analytical ability too?
Ritter's phone rang. It was the intercom line.
'I said no calls,' the field spook growled.
'It's "Bill," sir. He says it's important.'
The timing was just perfect, the Captain thought. The prisoners were brought out in the darkness. There was no electricity, again, and the only illumination came from battery-powered flashlights and a few torches that his senior sergeant had cobbled together. Every prisoner had his feet hobbled; in each case the hands and elbows were bound behind their backs. They all walked slightly bent forward. It wasn't just to control them. Humiliation was important, too, and every man had in close attendance a conscript to chivvy him along, right to the center of the compound. His men were entitled to this, the Captain thought. They'd trained hard, were about to begin their long march south to complete the business of liberating and reuniting their country. The Americans were disoriented, clearly frightened at this break in their daily routine. Things had gone easy for them in the past week. Perhaps his earlier assembly of the group had been a mistake. It might have fostered some semblance of solidarity among them, but the object lesson to his troops was more than worth that.