Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (64 page)

“Okay, moving on,” Adler said. “The FBI will be back tomorrow to talk to us about the purloined letter. And guess what they'll be bringing?”

“Not the Box again,” someone groaned. Nobody noticed the way Rutledge's head turned.

“Just think of it as a routine test for our security clearances,” SecState told his principal subordinates. Polygraphs weren't exactly unknown for the senior people here.

“God damn it, Scott,” Cliff said, speaking for the others. “Either we're trusted or we're not. I've already wasted hours with those people.”

“You know, they never found Nixon's letter of resignation, either,” another said.

“Maybe Henry kept it,” a third joked.

“Tomorrow. Starting at
ten o'clock
. Myself included,” Adler told them. He thought it a waste of time as well.

H
IS SKIN WAS
very fair, his eyes gray, and his hair had a reddish tinge, the result, he thought, of an Englishwoman somewhere in his ancestry, or such was the family joke. One advantage was his ability to pass for any Caucasian ethnicity. That he could still do so was the result of his caution. On his few “public” operations, he'd tinted his hair, worn dark glasses, and let his beard grow—that was black—which resulted in jokes within his own community: “Movie star,” they said. But many of the jokers were dead, and he was not. Perhaps the Israelis had photos of him— one never knew about them, but one did know that they rarely shared information with anyone, even their American patrons, which was foolish. And you couldn't worry about everything, even photographs in some Mossad file cabinet.

He came through
Dulles
International
Airport
after the flight from
Frankfurt
, with the requisite two bags of the serious businessman he was, with nothing more to declare than a liter of Scotch purchased in a German duty-free store. Purpose of his visit to
America
? Business and pleasure. Is it safe to move around
Washington
now? Terrible thing, saw the replay on the TV news, must be a thousand times, dreadful. It is? Really? Things are back to normal now? Good. His rental car was waiting. He drove to a nearby hotel, tired from the long flight. There he purchased a paper, ordered dinner in, and switched on the TV. That done, he plugged his portable computer into the room's phone—they all had data jacks now—and accessed the Net to tell Badrayn that he was safely in-country for his reconnaissance mission. A commercial encryption program transformed what was a meaningless code phrase into total gibberish.

“W
ELCOME ABOARD.
My name is
Clark
,” John told the first class of fifteen. He was turned out much better than was his custom, wearing a properly tailored suit, button-down shirt, and a striped tie. For the moment, he had to impress in one way. Soon he'd do it in another. Getting the first group in had been easier than expected. The CIA,
Hollywood
notwithstanding, is an agency popular among American citizens, with at least ten applications for every opening, and it was just a matter of doing a computer search of the applications to find fifteen which fit the parameters of
Clark
's P
LAN
B
LUE
. Every one was a police officer with a college degree, at least four years of service, and an unblemished record which would be further checked by the FBI. For the moment, all were men, probably a mistake, John thought, but for the moment it wasn't important. Seven " ere white, two black, and one Asian. They were, mainly from big-city police forces. All were at least bilingual.

“I am a field intelligence officer. Not an 'agent,' not a 'spy,' not an 'operative.' An officer,” he explained. “I've been in the business for quite some time. I'm married and I have two children. If any of you have ideas about meeting a sleek blonde and shooting people, you can leave now. This business is mainly dull, especially if you're smart enough to do it right. You're all cops, and therefore you already know how important this job is. We deal with high-level crime, and the job is about getting information so that those major crimes can be stopped before people get killed. We do that by gathering information and passing it on to those who need it. Others look at satellite pictures or try to read the other guy's mail. We do the hard part. We get our information from people. Some are good people with good motives. Some are not such good people who want money, who want to get even, or who want to feel important. What these people are doesn't matter. You've all worked informants on the street, and they're not all Mother Teresa, are they? Same thing here. Your informants will often be better educated, more powerful people, but they won't be very different from the ones you've been working with. And just like your street informants, you have to be loyal to them, you have to protect them, and you'll have to wring their scrawny little necks from time to time. If you fuck up, those people die, and in some of the places you'll be working, their wives and children will die, too. If you think I'm kidding on that, you're wrong, people. You will work in countries where due process of law means whatever somebody wants it to mean. You've seen that on television just in the last few days, right?” he asked. Some of the Ba'ath officials shot in
Baghdad
had made world news telecasts, with the usual warnings about children and the sensitive, who invariably watched anyway. The heads nodded soberly.

“You will, for the most part, not be armed in the field. You will survive by your wits. You will sometimes be at risk of your life. I've lost friends in the field, some in places you know about, and some in places you don't. The world may be kinder and gentler now, but not everywhere. You're not going to be going to the nice places, guys,” John promised them. In the back of the room, Ding Chavez was struggling hard not to smile. That little greasy guy is my partner and he's engaged to my little girl. No sense, Domingo knew, in scaring them all away.

“What's good about the job? Well, what's good about being a cop? Answer: every bad guy you put away saves lives on the street. In this job, getting the right information to the right people saves lives, too. Lots,”
Clark
emphasized. "When we do the job right, wars don't happen.

“Anyway, welcome aboard. I am your supervising teacher. You will find the training here stimulating and difficult. It starts at eight-thirty tomorrow morning.” With that John left the podium and walked to the back of the room. Chavez opened the door for him and they walked out into the fresh air.

“Gee, Mr. C., where do I sign up?”

“God damn it, Ding, I had to say something.” It had been John's longest oration in some years.

“So, to get these rookies aboard, what did Foley have to do?”

“The RIFs have begun, m'boy. Hell, Ding, we had to get things started, didn't we?”

“I think you should have waited a few weeks. Foley isn't confirmed by the Senate yet. Better to wait,” Chavez thought. “But I'm just a junior spook.”

“I keep forgetting how smart you've gotten.”

“S
O WHO THE
hell is Zhang Han San?” Ryan asked.

“Somewhere in his fifties, but young looking for his age, ten kilos overweight, five four or so, medium everything, so says our friend,” Dan Murray reported from his written notes. “Quiet and thoughtful, and he stiffed Yamata.”

“Oh?” Mary Pat Foley said. “How so?”

“Yamata was on
Saipan
when we got control of things. He placed a call to
Beijing
, looking to bug out to a safe place. Mr. Zhang reacted as though it were a cold call. 'What deal? We don't have any deal,' ” the FBI Director mimicked. “And after that, the calls didn't go through at all. Our Japanese friend regards that as a personal betrayal.”

“Sounds as though he's singing like a canary,” Ed Foley observed. “Does that strike anybody as suspicious?”

“No,” Ryan said. “In World War Two, what Japanese prisoners we took talked plenty.”

“The President's right,”
Murray
confirmed. “I asked Tanaka about that myself. He says it's a cultural thing. Yamata wants to take his own life—the honorable way out in their cultural context—but they've got him on suicide watch—not even shoestrings. The resulting disgrace is so great for the guy that he has no particular reason to keep secrets. Hell of an interrogation technique. Anyway, Zhang is supposedly a diplomat—Yamata said he was titularly part of a trade delegation—but State's never heard of him. The Japanese have no records of the name on any diplomatic list. That makes him a spook, as far as I'm concerned, and so . . .” He looked over at the Foleys.

“I ran the name,” Mary Pat said. “Zippo. But who's to say it's a real name?”

“Even if it were,” her husband added, “we don't know that much about their intelligence people. If I had to guess”— and he did —“he's political. Why? He cut a deal, a quiet one but a big one. Their military is still on an increased readiness and training regime because of that deal, which is why the Russians are still nervous. Whoever this guy is, best guess, he's a very serious player.” Which wasn't exactly an earth-shaking revelation.

“Anything you can do to find out?”
Murray
inquired delicately.

Mrs. Foley shook her head. “No assets in place, at least nothing we can use for this. We have a good husband-wife team in
Hong Kong
, setting up a nice little network. We have a couple of assets in
Shanghai
. In
Beijing
we have some low-level agents in the defense ministry, but they're long-term prospects and using them on this issue wouldn't accomplish much more than to endanger them. Dan, the problem we have with
China
is that we don't really know how their government works. It has levels of complexity that we can only guess at. The Politburo members, we know who they are—we think. One of the biggies might be dead now, and we've been fishing for that tidbit for over a month. Even the Russians let us know when they buried people,” the DDO noted, as she sipped her wine. Ryan had come to like bringing his closest advisers in for drinks after the close of regular office hours. It hadn't quite occurred to him that he was extending their working day. He was also short-circuiting his own National Security Advisor, but as loyal and clever as Ben Goodley was, Jack Ryan still wanted to hear it directly when he could.

Ed took up the explanation. “You see, sure, we think we know the political varsity over there, but we've never had a real handle on the second-string players. The dynamic is simple when you think about it, but it took us long enough to twig to it. We're talking elderly folks over there. They can't get around all that well. They need mobile eyes and ears, and over the years those gofers have accumulated a lot of power. Who's really calling the shots? We don't know for sure, and without ID'ing people, we can't find out.”

“I can dig it, guys.”
Murray
grunted, and reached for his beer. “When I was working OC—organized crime— sometimes we ID'd Mafia capi by who held the car door open for whom. Hell of a way to do business.” It was the friendliest thing the Foleys remembered hearing from the FBI about CIA. “Operational security really isn't all that hard if you think about it a little.”

“Makes a good case for P
LAN
B
LUE
,” Jack said next.

“Well, then you might be pleased to know the first fifteen are in the pipeline even as we speak. John should have given them their welcoming speech a few hours ago,” the DCI announced.

Ryan had gone over Foley's reduction-in-force plan for CIA. Ed planned to swing a mean ax, ultimately reducing the Agency budget by $500 million over five years while increasing the field force. It was something to make people on the Hill happy, though with much of CIA's real budget in the black part of federal expenditures, few would ever know. Or maybe not, Jack thought. That was likely to leak.

Leaks. He'd hated them over his entire career. But now they were part of statecraft, weren't they? the President reflected. But what was he supposed to think? That leaks were okay now that he was the one doing it or allowing it? Damn. Laws and principles weren't supposed to work that way, were they? What exactly, what idea or ideal or principle or rock was he supposed to hold on to?

T
HE BODYGUARD
'
S NAME
was Saleh. He was a physically robust individual, as his work demanded, and, as such, one who tried to deny illness or discomfort of any sort. A man of his station in life simply did not admit to difficulty. But when discomfort didn't go away as he'd expected and as the doctor had told him—Saleh knew that all men were vulnerable to stomach problems—and then he saw blood in the toilet. . . it was that, really. The body isn't supposed to issue blood except from a shaving cut or a bullet wound. Not in any case from moving one's bowels, and it was the sort of indicator certain to shake any man, all the more so a strong and otherwise confident one. Like many, he delayed somewhat, asking himself if it might be a temporary problem that would go away, that the discomfort would peak and abate, as flu symptoms always did. But these kept getting worse, and finally his fear got the better of him. Before dawn he left the villa, taking the car and driving to the hospital. Along the way he had to stop the car to vomit, deliberately not looking to see what he'd left on the street before heading on, his body weakening with every minute, until the walk from the car to the door seemed to take every bit of energy he had. In what passed here for an emergency room, he waited while people searched for his records. It was the smell of hospitals which frightened him, the same disinfectant odor which makes a dog stop dead and strain backward at the leash and whimper and pull away, because the smell is associated with pain, until finally a black nurse called his name, and then he rose, assembled his dignity and composure, and walked into the same examining room he'd visited before.

T
HE SECOND GROUP
often criminals was little different from the first, except that in this one there was not a condemned apostate. It was easy to dislike them, Moudi thought, looking at the group with their sallow faces and slinking mannerisms. It was their expressions most of all. They looked like criminals, never quite meeting his eyes, glancing this way and that, always, it seemed, searching for a way out, a trick, an angle, something underhanded. The combination of fear and lingering brutality on their faces. They were not just men, and while that seemed to the doctor a puerile observation, it did mark them as different from himself and the people he knew, and therefore as the bearers of lives which were unimportant.