Clear and Present Danger

point...

It wasn't Cortez at all, was it? He'd probably forwarded what information he had as a matter of course, not knowing about the FBI operation against the Cartel's money operations. He hadn't been there when the decision to whack the Director had been made. And he would have recommended against it. Why lash out when you have just developed a good intel source? No, that wasn't professional at all.

So, F lix, how do you feel about all this? Ritter would have traded much for the ability to ask that question, though the answer was plain enough. Intelligence officers were regularly betrayed by their political superiors. It wouldn't be the first time for him, but he'd be angry just the same. Just as angry as Ritter was with Admiral Cutter.

For the first time, Ritter found himself wondering what Cortez was really doing. Probably he had simply defected away from Cuba and made a mercenary of himself. The Cartel had hired him on for his training and experience, thinking that they were buying just another mercenary - a very good one to be sure, but a mercenary nonetheless. Just like they bought local cops - hell, American cops - and politicians. But a police officer wasn't the same thing as a professional spook educated at Moscow Center. He was giving them his advice, and he'd think they had betrayed him - well, acted very stupidly, because killing Emil Jacobs had been an act of emotion, not of reason.

Why didn't I see that before! Ritter growled at himself. The answer: because not seeing had given him an excuse to do something he'd always wanted to do. He hadn't thought because somehow he'd known that thinking would have prevented him from taking action.

Cortez wasn't a terrorist, was he? He was an intelligence officer. He'd worked with the Macheteros because he'd been assigned to the job. Before that his experience had been straight espionage, and merely because he'd worked with that loony Puerto Rican group, they'd just assumed... That was probably one reason why he'd defected.

It was clearer now. The Cartel had hired Cortez for his expertise and experience. But in doing so they had adopted a pet wolf. And wolves made for dangerous pets, didn't they?

For the moment there was one thing he could do. Ritter summoned an aide and instructed him to take the best frame they had of Cortez, run it through the photo-enhancing computer, and forward it to the FBI. That was something worth doing, so long as they isolated the figure from the background, but that was just another task for the imaging computer.

Admiral Cutter remained at his White House office while the President was away in the western Maryland hills. He'd fly up every day for his usual morning briefing - delivered at a somewhat later hour while the President was on his 'vacation' regime - but for the most part he'd stay here. He had his own duties, one of which was being 'a senior administration official.' ASAO, as he thought of the title, was his name when he gave off-the-record press briefings. Such information was a vital part of presidential policymaking, all part of an elaborate game played by the government and the press: Official Leaking. Cutter would send up 'trial balloons,' what people in the consumer- products business called test-marketing. When the President had a new idea that he was not too sure about, Cutter - or the appropriate cabinet secretary, each of whom was also an ASAO - would speak on background, and a story would be written in the major papers, allowing Congress and others to react to the idea before it was given an official presidential imprimatur . It was a way for elected officials and other players in the Washington scene to dance and posture without the need for anyone to lose face - an Oriental concept that translated well inside the confines of the Capital Beltway.

Bob Holtzman, the senior White House correspondent for one of the Washington papers, settled into his chair opposite Cutter for the deep-background revelations. The rules were fully understood by both sides. Cutter could say anything he wished without fear that his name, title, or the location of his office would be used. Holtzman would feel free to write the story any way he wished, within reason, so long as he did not compromise his source to anyone except his editor. Neither man especially liked the other. Cutter's distaste for journalists was about the only thing he still had in common with his fellow military officers, though he was certain that he concealed it. He thought them all, especially the one before him now, to be lazy, stupid people who couldn't write and didn't think. Holtzman felt that Cutter was the wrong man in the wrong place - the reporter didn't like the idea of having a military officer giving such intimate advice to the President; more importantly, he thought Cutter was a shallow, self-serving apple-polisher with delusions of grandeur, not to mention an arrogant son of a bitch who looked upon reporters as a semiuseful form of domesticated vulture. As a result of such thoughts, they got along rather well.

'You going to be watching the convention next week?' Holtzman asked.

'I try not to concern myself with politics,' Cutter replied. 'Coffee?'

Right! the reporter told himself. 'No, thanks. What the hell's going on down in coca land?'

'Your guess is as good as - well, that's not true. We've had the bastards under surveillance for some time. My guess is that Emil was killed by one faction of the Cartel - no surprise - but without their having made a really official decision. The bombing last night might be indicative of a faction fight inside the organization.'

'Well, somebody's pretty pissed,' Holtzman observed, scribbling notes on his pad under his personal heading for Cutter. 'A Senior Administration Official' was transcribed as ASO'l . 'The word is that the Cartel contracted M-19 to do the assassination, and that the Colombians really worked over the one they caught.'

'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 TARPON, 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?