Patriot Games

'Of course.' The Duke turned and looked rather curious.

Ryan grinned. 'Sir, I work at Annapolis. The Academy crawls with naval officers, and remember I used to be a Marine. If I let myself get intimidated by every swabbie who crossed my path, the Corps would come and take my sword back.'

'You cheeky bugger!' They both had a laugh.

Ryan had expected to be impressed by the Palace. Even so, it was all he could manage to keep from being overwhelmed. Half the world had once been run from this house, and in addition to what the Royal Family had acquired over the centuries had come gifts from all over the world. Everywhere he looked the wide corridors were decorated with too many masterpieces of painting and sculpture to count. The walls were mainly covered with ivory-colored silk brocaded with gold thread. The carpets, of course, were imperial scarlet over marble or parquet hardwood. The money manager that Jack had once been tried to calculate the value of it all. He overloaded after about ten seconds. The paintings alone were so valuable that any attempt to sell them off would distort the world market in fine art. The gilt frames alone… Ryan shook his head, wishing he had the time to examine every painting. You could live here five years and not have time to appreciate it all. He almost fell behind, but managed to control his gawking and kept pace with the older man. Ryan's discomfiture was growing. To the Duke this was home—perhaps one so large as to be something of a nuisance, but nonetheless home, routine. The Rubens masterpieces on the wall were part of the scenery, as familiar to him as the photographs of wife and kids on any man's office desk. To Ryan the impact of where he was, an impact made all the more crushing by the trappings of wealth and power, made him want to shrink away to nothingness. It was one thing to take his chance on the street—the Marines, after all, had prepared and trained him for that—but… this.

Get off it, Jack, he told himself. They're a royal family, but they're not your royal family. This didn't work. They were a royal family. That was enough to lacerate most of his ego.

'Here we are,' the Duke said after turning right through an open door. 'This is the Music Room.'

It was about the size of the living/dining room in Ryan's house, the only thing he had seen thus far that could be so compared with any part of his $300,000 home on Peregrine Cliff. The ceiling was higher here, domed with gold-leaf trim. There were about thirty people, Ryan judged, and the moment they entered all conversation stopped. Everyone turned to stare at Ryan—Jack was sure they'd seen the Duke before—and his grotesque cast. He had a terrible urge to slink away. He needed a drink.

'If you'll excuse me for a moment, Jack, I must be off. Back in a few minutes.'

Thanks a lot, Ryan thought as he nodded politely. Now what do I do?

'Good evening, Sir John,' said a man in the uniform of a vice admiral of the Royal Navy. Ryan tried not to let his relief show. Of course, he'd been handed off to another custodian. He realized belatedly that lots of people came here for the first time. Some would need a little support while they got used to the idea of being in a palace, and there would be a procedure to take care of them. Jack took a closer look at the man's face as they shook hands. There was something familiar about it. 'I'm Basil Charleston.'

Aha! 'Good evening, sir.' His first week at Langley he'd seen the man, and his CIA escort had casually noted that this was 'B.C.' or just 'C,' the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, once known as MI-6. What are you doing here?

'You must be thirsty.' Another man arrived with a glass of champagne. 'Hello. I'm Bill Holmes.'

'You gentlemen work together?' Ryan sipped at the bubbling wine.

'Judge Moore told me you were a clever chap,' Charleston observed.

'Excuse me? Judge who?'

'Nicely done, Doctor Ryan,' Holmes smiled as he finished off his glass. 'I understand that you used to play football—the American kind, that is. You were on the junior varsity team, weren't you?'

'Varsity and junior varsity, but only in high school. I wasn't big enough for college ball,' Ryan said, trying to mask his uneasiness. 'Junior Varsity' was the project name under which he'd been called in to consult with CIA.

'And you wouldn't happen to know anything about the chap who wrote Agents and Agencies? ' Charleston smiled. Jack went rigid.

'Admiral, I cannot talk about that without—'

'Copy number sixteen is sitting on my desk. The good judge told me to tell you that you were free to talk about the 'smoking word-processor.''

Ryan let out a breath. The phrase must have come originally from James Greer. When Jack had made the Canary Trap proposal to the Deputy Director, Intelligence, Admiral James Greer had made a joke about it, using those words. Ryan was free to talk. Probably. His CIA security briefing had not exactly covered this situation.

'Excuse me, sir. Nobody ever told me that I was free to talk about that.'

Charleston went from jovial to serious for a moment. 'Don't apologize, lad. One is supposed to take matters of classification seriously. That paper you wrote was an excellent bit of detective work. One of our problems, as someone doubtless told you, is that we take in so much information now that the real problem is making sense of it all. Not easy to wade through all the muck and find the gleaming nugget. For the first time in the business, your report was first-rate. What I didn't know about was this thing the Judge called the Canary Trap. He said you could explain it better than he.' Charleston waved for another glass. A footman, or some sort of servant, came over with a tray. 'You know who I am, of course.'

'Yes, Admiral. I saw you last July at the Agency. You were getting out of the executive elevator on the seventh floor when I was coming out of the DDI's office, and somebody told me who you were.'

'Good. Now you know that all of this remains in the family. What the devil is this Canary Trap?'

'Well, you know about all the problems CIA has with leaks. When I was finishing off the first draft of the report, I came up with an idea to make each one unique.'

'They've been doing that for years,' Holmes noted. 'All one must do is misplace a comma here and there. Easiest thing in the world. If the newspeople are foolish enough to print a photograph of the document, we can identify the leak.'

'Yes, sir, and the reporters who publish the leaks know that, too. They've learned not to show photographs of the documents they get from their sources, haven't they?' Ryan answered. 'What I came up with was a new twist on that. Agents and Agencies has four sections. Each section has a summary paragraph. Each of those is written in a fairly dramatic fashion.'

'Yes, I noticed that,' Charleston said. 'Didn't read like a CIA document at all. More like one of ours. We use people to write our reports, you see, not computers. Do go on.'

'Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The reason the summary paragraphs are so—well, lurid, I guess—is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it. They've got an even more refined version of the trap working now. You can do it by computer. You use a thesaurus program to shuffle through synonyms, and you can make every copy of the document totally unique.'

'Did they tell you if it worked?' Holmes asked.

'No, sir. I had nothing to do with the security side of the Agency.' And thank God for that.

'Oh, it worked.' Sir Basil paused for a moment. 'That idea is bloody simple—and bloody brilliant! Then there was the substantive aspect of the paper. Did they tell you that your report agreed in nearly every detail with an investigation we ran last year?'

'No, sir, they didn't. So far as I know, all the documents I worked with came from our own people.'

'Then you came up with it entirely on your own? Marvelous.'

'Did I goof up on anything?' Ryan asked the Admiral.

'You should have paid a bit more attention to that South African chap. That is more our patch, of course, and perhaps you didn't have enough information to fiddle with. We're giving him a very close look at the moment.'

Ryan finished off his glass and thought about that. There had been a good deal of information on Mr.