Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (58 page)

“Maybe they did.”

“How'd they know that Director Jacobs was going down?”

“I don't know,” Cutter replied.

“Really?  You know that his secretary tried to commit suicide.  The Bureau isn't talking at all, but I find that a remarkable coincidence.”

“Who's running the case over there?  Believe it or not, I don't know.”

“Dan Murray, a deputy assistant director.  He's not actually doing the field work, but he's the guy reporting to Shaw.”

“Well, that's not my turf.  I'm looking at the overseas aspects of the case, but the domestic stuff is in another office,” Cutter pointed out, erecting a stone wall that Holtzman couldn't breach.

“So the Cartel was pretty worked up about Operation T
ARPON
, and some senior people acted without the approval of the whole outfit to take Jacobs out.  Other members, you say, think that their action was precipitous and decided to eliminate those who put out the contract?”

“That's the way it looks now.  You have to understand, our intel on this is pretty thin.”

“Our intel is always pretty thin,” Holtzman pointed out.

“You can talk to Bob Ritter about that.” Cutter set his coffee mug down.

“Right.” Holtzman smiled.  If there were two people in Washington whom you could trust never to leak anything, it was Bob Ritter and Arthur Moore. “What about Jack Ryan?”

“He's just settling in.  He's been in
Belgium
all week anyway, at the NATO intel conference.”

“There are rumbles on The Hill that somebody ought to do something about the Cartel, that the attack on Jacobs was a direct attack on—”

“I watch C-SPAN, too, Bob.  Talk is cheap.”

“And what Governor Fowler said this morning . . . ?”

“I'll leave politics to the politicians.”

“You know that the price of coke is up on the street?”

“Oh?  I'm not in that market.  Is it?” Cutter hadn't heard that yet.  Already . . .

“Not much, but some.  There's word on the street that incoming shipments are off a little.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“But no comment?” Holtzman asked. “You're the one who's en saying that this is a for-real war and we ought to treat it such.”

Cutter's smile froze on his face for a moment. “The President decides about things like war.”

“What about Congress?”

“Well, that, too, but since I've been in government service there hasn't been a congressional declaration along those lines.”

“How would you feel personally if we were involved in that bombing?”

“I don't know.  We weren't involved.” The interview wasn't going as planned.  What did Holtzman know?

“That was a hypothetical,” the reporter pointed out.

“Okay.  We go off the record—completely—at this point.  Hypothetically, we could kill all the bastards and I wouldn't shed many tears.  How about you?”

Holtzman snorted. “Off the record, I agree with you.  I grew up here.  I can remember when it was safe to walk the streets.  Now I look at the body count every morning and wonder if I'm in D.C. or
Beirut
.  So it wasn't us, then?”

“Nope.  Looks more like the Cartel is shaking itself out.  That's speculation, but it's the best we have at the moment.”

“Fair enough.  I suppose I can make a story out of that.”

Discoveries

I
T WAS AMAZING
.  But it was also true.  Cortez had been there for over an hour.  There were six armed men with him, and a dog that sniffed around for signs of the people who had assaulted this processing site.  The empty cartridge cases were mostly of the 5.56mm round now used by most of the NATO countries and their surrogates all over the world, but which had begun as the .223 Remington sporting cartridge.  In
America
.  There were also a number of 9mm cases, and a single empty hull from a 40mm grenade launcher.  One of the attackers had been wounded, perhaps severely.  The method of the attack was classic, a fire unit uphill and an assault group on the same level, to the north.  They'd left hastily, not booby-trapping the bodies as had happened in two other cases.  Probably because of the injured man, Cortez judged.  Also because they knew—suspected?  No, they probably knew—that two men had gotten away to summon help.

Definitely more than one team was roaming the mountains.  Maybe three or four, judging by the number and location of sites had so far been attacked.  That eliminated M-19.  There weren't enough trained men in that organization to do something like this—not without his hearing of it, he corrected himself.  The Cartel had done more than suborn the local guerrilla factions.  It also had paid informants in each unit, something the Colombian government had signally failed to do.

So
, he told himself, now you have probable American covert-action teams working in the hills.  Who and what are they?  Probably soldiers, or very high-quality mercenaries.  More likely the former.
 The international mercenary community wasn't what it had once been—and truthfully had never been especially effective.  Cortez had been to
Angola
and seen what African troops were like.  Mercenaries hadn't had to be all that effective to defeat them, though that was now changing along with everything else in the world.

Whoever they were, they'd be far away—far enough that he didn't feel uncomfortable at the moment, though he'd leave the hunting to others.  Cortez was an intelligence officer, and had no illusions about being a soldier.  For now, he gathered his evidence almost like a policeman.  The rifle and machine-gun cartridges, he saw, came from a single manufacturer.  He didn't have such information committed to memory, but he noted that the 9mm cases had the same lot codes-stamped on the case heads as those he'd gotten from one of the airfields on
Colombia
's northern coast.  The odds against that being a coincidence were pretty high, he thought.  So whoever had been watching the airfields had moved here . . . ?  How would that have been done?  The simple way would be by truck or bus, but that was a little too simple; that's how M-19 would have done it.  Too great a risk for Americans, however.  The yanquis would use helicopters.  Staging from where?  A ship, perhaps, or more likely one of their bases in
Panama
.  He knew of no American naval exercises within helicopter range of the coast.  Therefore a large aircraft capable of midair refueling.  Only the Americans did that.  And it would have to be based in
Panama
.  And he had assets in
Panama
.  Cortez pocketed the cartridges and started walking down the hill.  Now he had a starting place, and that was all someone with his training needed.

Ryan's VC-20A—thinking of it as his airplane still required a stretch of the imagination—lifted off from the airfield outside
Mons
in the early afternoon.  His first official foray into the big leagues of the international intelligence business had gone well.  His paper on the Soviets and their activities in
Eastern Europe
had met with general approval and agreement, and he'd been gratified to learn that the analysis chiefs of all the NATO intelligence agencies held exactly the same opinion of the changes in their enemy's policies as he did: nobody knew what the hell was going on.  There were theories ranging all the way from the peace-is-breaking-out-and-now-what-do-we-do? view to the equally unlikely it's-all-a-trick opinion, but when it came down to doing a formal intelligence estimate, people who'd been in the business since before Jack was born just shook their heads and muttered into their beer—exactly what Ryan did some of the time.  The really good news for the year, of course, was the signal success that the counterintelligence groups had had turning KGB operations throughout Europe, and while CIA had not told anyone (except Sir Basil, who'd been there when the plan had been hatched) exactly how that had come about, the Agency enjoyed considerable prestige for its work in that area.  The bottom line that Jack had often cited in the investment business was fairly clear: militarily NATO was in its best-ever condition, its security services were riding higher than anyone thought possible—it was just that the alliance's overall mission was now in doubt politically.  To Ryan that looked like success, so long as politicians didn't let things go to their heads, which was enough of a caveat for anyone.

So there was a lot to smile about as the Belgian countryside fell farther and farther below him until it looked like a particularly attractive quilt from Pennsylvania Dutch country.  At least on the actual NATO side.

Possibly the truest testimony to NATO's present happy condition, however, was that talk around the banquet tables and over coffee in the break periods between the plenary sessions was not on “business” as most of the conference attendees normally viewed it.  Intelligence analysts from
Germany
and
Italy
,
Britain
and
Norway
,
Denmark
and
Portugal
, all of them expressed their concern at the growing problems of drugs in their countries.  The Cartel's activities were expanding eastward, no longer content with marketing their wares to
America
alone.  The intelligence professionals had noted the assassination of Emil Jacobs and the rest and wondered aloud if international narcoterrorism had taken a wholly new and dangerous turn—and what had to be done about it.  The French, with their history of vigorous action to protect their land, were especially approving of the bomb blast outside Medellín, and nonplussed by Ryan's puzzled and somewhat exasperating response:  No comment.  I don't know anything.  Their reaction to that was predictable, of course.  Had an equivalent French official been so publicly murdered, DGSE would have mounted an immediate operation.  It was something the French were especially good at.  It was something that the French media and, more to the point, the French people understood and approved.  And so the DGSE representatives had expected Ryan to respond with a knowing smile to accompany his lack of comment, not blank embarrassment.  That wasn't part of the game as it was played in
Europe
, and just another odd thing about the Americans for their
Old World
allies to ponder.  Must they be so unpredictable? they would ask themselves.  Being that way to the Russians had strategic value, but not to one's allies.

And not to its own government officials
, Ryan thought.  What the hell is going on?

Being three thousand miles from home had given Jack a properly detached perspective to the affair.  In the absence of a viable legal mechanism to deal with such crimes, maybe direct action was the right thing to do.  Challenge directly the power of a nation-state and you risked a direct response from that nation-state.  If we could bomb a foreign country for sponsoring action against American soldiers in a
Berlin
disco, then why not -

- kill people on the territory of a fellow American democracy?

What about that political dimension?

That was the rub, wasn't it? 
Colombia
had its own laws.  It wasn't
Libya
, ruled by a comic-opera figure of dubious stability.  It wasn't
Iran
, a vicious theocracy ruled by a bitter testimonial to the skill of gerontologists. 
Colombia
was a country with real democratic traditions, one that had put its own institutions at risk, fighting to protect the citizens of another land from themselves.

What the hell are we doing?

Right and wrong assumed different values at this level of statecraft, didn't they?  Or did they?  What were the rules?  What was the law?  Were there any of either?  Before he could answer those questions, Ryan knew that he'd have to learn the facts.  That would be hard enough.  Jack settled back into his comfortable seat and looked down at the
English Channel
, widening out like a funnel as the aircraft headed west toward
Land's End
.  Beyond that lonely point of ship-killing rocks lay the
North Atlantic
, and beyond that lay home.  He had seven hours to decide what he should do once he got there.  Seven whole hours, Jack thought, wondering how many times he could ask himself the same questions, and how many times he'd only come up with new questions instead of answers.

*     *     *

Law was a trap,
Murray
told himself.  It was a goddess to worship, a lovely bronze lady who held up her lantern in the darkness to show one the way.  But what if the way led nowhere?  They now had a dead-bang case against the one “suspect” in the assassination of the Director.  The Colombians had gotten the confession and its thirty single-spaced pages of text were lying on his desk.  There was ample physical evidence, which had been duly processed through the Bureau's legendary forensic laboratories.  There was just one little problem.  The extradition treaty the
United States
had with
Colombia
was not operative at the moment.  Colombia's Supreme Court—more precisely, those justices who remained alive after twelve of their colleagues had been murdered by M-19 raiders not so long ago; all of whom, coincidentally, had been supporters of the extradition treaty before their violent deaths—had decided that the treaty was somehow in opposition to their country's constitution.  No treaty.  No extradition.  The assassin would be tried locally and doubtless sent away for a lengthy prison term, but at the very least Murray and the Bureau wanted him caged in Marion, Illinois—the maximum-security federal prison for really troublesome offenders; Alcatraz without the ambience—and the Justice Department thought it could make a case for invoking the death statute that related to drug-related murders.  But—the confession the Colombians had gotten hadn't exactly followed with American rules of evidence, and, the lawyers admitted, might be thrown out by an American judge; which would eliminate the death penalty.  And the guy who took out the Director of the FBI might actually become something of a celebrity at
Marion
,
Illinois
, most of whose prisoners did not regard the FBI with the same degree of affection accorded by most
U.S.
citizens.  The same thing, he'd learned the day before, was true of the Pirates Case.  Some tricky bastard of a defense lawyer had uncovered what the Coast Guard had pulled, blowing that death case away also.  And the only good news around was that Murray was sure his government had struck back in a way that was highly satisfying, but fell under the general legal category of cold-blooded murder.

It worried Dan Murray that he did view that development as good news.  It wasn't the sort of thing that they'd lectured him—and he had later lectured others—about during his stint as a student and later an instructor at the
FBI
Academy
, was it?  What happened when governments broke the law?  The textbook answer was anarchy—at least that's what happened when it became known that the government was breaking its own laws.  But that was the really operative definition of a criminal wasn't it—one who got caught breaking the law.

“No,”
Murray
told himself quietly.  He'd spent his life following that light because on dark nights that one beacon of sanity was all society had.  His mission and the Bureau's was to enforce the laws of his country faithfully and honestly.  There was leeway—there had to be, because the written words couldn't anticipate everything—but when the letter of the law was insufficient one was guided by the principle upon which the law was based.  Maybe the situation wasn't always a satisfying one, but it beat the alternative, didn't it?  But what did you do when the law didn't work?  Was that just part of the game, too?  Was it, after all was said and done, just a game?

Clark
held a somewhat different view.  Law had never been his concern—at least not his immediate concern.  To him “legal” meant that something was “okay,” not that some legislators had drafted a set of rules, and that some President or other had signed it.  To him it meant that the sitting President had decided that the continued existence of someone or something was contrary to the best interests of his country.  His government service had begun in the United States Navy as part of the SEALs, the Navy's elite, secretive commandos.  In that tight, quiet community he'd made himself a name that was still spoken with respect:  Snake, they'd called him, because you couldn't hear his footsteps.  To the best of his knowledge, no enemy had ever seen him and lived to tell the tale.  His name had been different then, of course, but only because after leaving the Navy he'd made the mistake—he truly thought of it as a mistake, but only in the technical sense—of applying his skills on a free-agent basis.  And done quite well, of course, until the police had discovered his identity.  The lesson from that adventure was that while people didn't really investigate happenings on the battlefield, they did elsewhere, requiring far greater circumspection on his part.  A foolish error in retrospect, one result of his almost-discovery by a local police force was that he'd come to the attention of CIA, which occasionally needed people with his unique skills.  It was even something of a joke: “When there's killing to be done, get someone who kills for a living.” At least it had been funny back then, almost twenty years earlier.

Others decided who needed to die.  Those others were the properly selected representatives of the American people, whom he'd served in one way or another for most of his adult life.  The law, as he'd once bothered to find out, was that there was no law.  If the President said “kill,” then
Clark
was merely the instrument of properly defined government policy, all the more so now, since selected members of Congress had to agree with the executive branch.  The rules which from time to time prohibited such acts were Executive Orders from the President's office, which orders the President could freely violate—or more precisely, redefine to suit the situation.  Of course,
Clark
did very little of that.  Mainly his jobs for the Agency involved his other skills—getting in and out of places without being detected, for example, at which he was the best guy around.  But killing was the reason he'd been hired in the first place, and for Clark, who'd been baptized John Terrence Kelly at St. Ignatius Parish in
Indianapolis
,
Indiana
, it was simply an act of war sanctioned both by his country and also by his religion, about which he was moderately serious. 
Vietnam
had never been granted the legal sanction of a declared war, after all, and if killing his country's enemies back then had been all right, why not now?  Murder to the renamed John T. 
Clark
was killing people without just cause.  Law he left to lawyers, in the knowledge that his definition of just cause was far more practical, and far more effective.