election, but as of now the job is yours on a provisional basis. If James recovers, well and good. The additional seasoning you get from working under him won't hurt. But even if he recovers, it will soon be time for him to leave. We are all replaceable, and James thinks you're ready. So do I.'
Ryan didn't know what to say. Still short of forty, he now had one of the premiere intelligence posts in the world. As a practical matter, he'd had it for several months - even for several years, some might say - but now it was official, and somehow that made it different. People would now come to him for opinions and judgments. That had been going on for a long time, but he'd always had someone to fall back on. Now he would not. He'd present his information to Judge Moore and await final judgment, but from this moment the responsibility for being right was his. Before, he'd presented opinions and options to his superiors. Beginning now, he'd present policy decisions directly to the ultimate decision-makers. The increase in responsibility, though subtle, was vast.
'Need- to-know still applies,' Ritter pointed out.
'Of course,' Ryan said.
'I'll tell Nancy and your department heads,' Moore said. 'James ginned up a letter I'll read. Here's your copy.'
Ryan stood to take it.
'I believe you have work to do, Dr. Ryan,' Moore said.
'Yes, sir.' Jack turned and left the room. He knew that he should have felt elated, but instead felt trapped. He thought he knew why.
'Too soon, Arthur,' Ritter said after Jack had left.
'I know what you're saying, Bob, but we can't have Intelligence go adrift just because you don't want him in on SHOWBOAT. We'll keep him out of that, at least isolated from what Operations is doing. He'll have to get in on the information that we're developing. For Christ's sake, his knowledge of finance will be useful to us. He just doesn't have to know how the information gets to us. Besides, if the President says 'go' on this, and he gets approval from The Hill, we're home free.'
'So when do you go to The Hill?'
'I have four of them coming here tomorrow afternoon. We're invoking the special- and hazardous-operations rule.'
SAHO was an informal codicil of the oversight rules. While Congress had the right under law to oversee all intelligence operations, in a case two years earlier, a leak from one of the select committees had caused the death of a CIA station chief and a high-ranking defector. Instead of going public, Judge Moore had approached the members of both committees and gotten written agreement that in special cases the chairman and co-chairman of each committee would alone be given access to the necessary information. It was then their responsibility to decide if it should be shared with the committees as a whole. Since members of both political parties were present, it had been hoped that political posturing could be avoided. In fact, Judge Moore had created a subtle trap for all of them. Whoever tried to decide that information had to be disseminated ran the risk of being labeled as having a political agenda. Moreover, the higher selectivity of the four SAHO-cleared members had already created an atmosphere of privilege that mitigated directly against spreading the information out. So long as the operation was not politically sensitive, it was a virtual guarantee that Congress would not interfere. The remarkable thing was that Moore had managed to get the committees to agree to this. But bringing the widow and children of the dead station chief to the executive hearings hadn't hurt one bit. It was one thing to carp abstractly about the majesty of law, quite another to have to face the results of a mistake - the more so if one of them was a ten-year-old girl without a father. Political theater was not solely the domain of elected officials.
'And the Presidential Finding?' Ritter asked.
'Already done. 'It is determined that drug-smuggling operations are a clear and present danger to U.S. national security. The President authorizes the judicious use of military force in accord with established operational guidelines to protect our citizens,'
'The political angle is the one I don't like.'
Moore chuckled. 'Neither will the people from The Hill. So we have to keep it all secret, don't we? If the President goes public to show that he's 'really doing something,' the opposition will scream that he's playing politics. If the opposition burns the operation, then the President can do the same thing. So both sides have a political interest in keeping this one under wraps. The election-year politics work in our favor. Clever fellow, that Admiral Cutter.'
'Not as clever as he thinks,' Ritter snorted. 'But who is?'
'Yeah. Who is? You know, it's a shame that James never got in on this.'
'Gonna miss him,' Ritter agreed. 'God, I wish there was something I could take him, something to make it a little easier.'
'I know what you mean,' Judge Moore agreed. 'Sooner or later, Ryan has to get in on this.'
'I don't like it.'
'What you don't like, Bob, is the fact that Ryan's been involved in two highly successful field operations in addition to all the work he's done at his desk. Maybe he did poach on your territory, but in both cases he had your support when he did so. Would you like him better if he'd failed? Robert, I don't have Directorate chiefs so that they can get into pissing contests like Cutter and those folks on The Hill.'
Ritter blinked at the rebuke. 'I've been saying for a long time that we brought him along too fast - which we have. I'll grant you that he's been very effective. But it's also true that he doesn't have the necessary political savvy for this sort of thing. He's yet to establish the capacity needed for executive oversight. He has to fly over to Europe to represent us at the NATO intel conference. No sense dropping SHOWBOAT on him before he leaves, is there?'
Moore almost replied that Admiral Greer was out of the loop because of his physical condition, which was mainly, but only partly, true. The presidential directive mandated an extremely tight group of people who really knew what the counter-drug operations were all about. It was an old story in the intelligence game: sometimes security was so tight that people who might have had something important to offer were left out of the picture. It was not unknown, in fact, for those left out to have had knowledge crucial to the operation's successful conclusion. But it was equally true that history was replete with examples of the disasters that resulted from making an operation so broadly based as to paralyze the decision-making process and compromise its secrecy. Drawing the line between operational security and operational efficiency was historically the most difficult task of an intelligence executive. There were no rules, Judge Moore knew, merely the requirement that such operations must succeed. One of the most persistent elements of spy fiction was the supposition that intelligence chiefs had an uncanny, infallible sixth sense of how to run their ops. But if the world's finest surgeons could make mistakes, if the world's best test pilots most often died in crashes - for that matter, if a pro-bowl quarterback could throw interceptions - why should a spymaster be any different? The only real difference between a wise man and a fool, Moore knew, was that the wise man tended to make more serious mistakes - and only because no one trusted a fool with really crucial decisions; only the wise had the opportunity to lose battles, or nations.
'You're right about the NATO conference. You win, Bob. For now.' Judge Moore frowned at his desk. 'How are things going?'
'All four teams are within a few hours' march of their surveillance points. If everything goes according to plan, they'll be in position by dawn tomorrow, and the following day they'll begin feeding us information. The flight crew we bagged the other day coughed up all the preliminary information we need. At least two of the airfields we staked out are 'hot.' Probably at least one of the others is also.'
'The President wants me over tomorrow. It seems that the Bureau has tumbled to something important. Emil's really hot about it. Seems that they've identified a major money-laundering operation.'
'Something we can exploit?'
'It would seem so. Emil's treating it as code-word material.'
'Sauce for the goose,' Ritter observed with a smile. 'Maybe we can put a real crimp in their operations.'
Chavez awoke from his second sleep period an hour before sundown. Sleep had come hard. Daytime temperatures were well over a hundred, and the high humidity made the jungle seem an oven despite being in shade. His first considered act was to drink over a pint of water - Gatorade - from his canteen to replace what he'd sweated off while asleep. Next came a couple of Tylenol. Light-fighters lived off the things to moderate the aches and pains that came with their normal physical regimen of exertion. In this case, it was a heat-induced headache that felt like a low-grade hangover.
