computer simply erased them electronically. That left energy sources that were not towns, villages, and individual farmsteads. Of these, some were regular or fairly so. It had been arbitrarily decided that anything that appeared more than twice in a week was too obvious to be of real interest, and these, too, were erased. That left sixty or so locations that appeared and disappeared in accordance with a chart next to the map and photographs. Each was a possible site where raw coca leaves began the refining process. They were not encampments for the Colombian Boy Scouts.
'You can't track in on them chemically,' Ritter said. 'I checked. The ether and acetone concentrations released into the air aren't much more than you'd expect from the spillage of nail-polish remover, not to mention the usual biochemical processes in this sort of environment. It's a jungle, right? Lots of stuff rots on the ground, and they give off all sorts of chemicals when they do. So all we have off the satellite is the usual infrared. They still do all their processing at night? I wonder why?'
Larson grunted agreement. 'It's a carry-over from when the Army was actively hunting them. They still do it mainly from habit, I suppose.'
'Well, it gives us something, doesn't it?'
'What are we going to do with it?'
Murray had never been to a Jewish funeral. It wasn't very different from a Catholic one. The prayers were in a language he couldn't understand, but the message wasn't very different.
The soldiers watched the TV coverage in relative silence. A few men worked knives across sharpening stones, but mainly they just sat there, listening to their President speak, knowing who had killed the man whose name few had heard until after he was dead. Chavez had been the first to make the correct observation, but it hadn't been all that great a leap of imagination, had it? They accepted the as-yet-unspoken news phlegmatically. Here was merely additional proof that their enemy had struck out directly against one of the most important symbols of their nation. There was their country's flag, draped across the coffin. There was the banner of the man's own agency, but this wasn't a job for cops, was it? So the soldiers traded looks in silence while their Commander-in-Chief had his say. When it was all over, the door to the squad bay opened, and there was their commander.
'We're going back in tonight. The good news is, it's going to be cooler where we're going,' Captain Ramirez told his men. Chavez cocked an eyebrow at Vega.
USS
Clark arrived in Bogot late that afternoon. No one met him, and he rented a car as he usually did. One hour out of the airport he stopped to park on a secondary road. He waited several annoying minutes for another car to pull up alongside. The driver, a CIA officer assigned to the local station, handed him a package and drove off without a word. Not a large package, it weighed about twenty pounds, half of which was a stout tripod. Clark set it gently on the floor of the passenger compartment and drove off. He'd been asked to 'deliver' quite a few messages in his time, but never quite so emphatically as this. It was all his idea. Well, he thought, mostly his idea. That made it somewhat more palatable.
The VC- 135 lifted off two hours after the funeral. It was too bad they didn't have a wake in Chicago. That was an Irish custom, not one for the children of Eastern European Jews, but Emil would have approved, Dan Murray was sure. He would have understood that many a beer or whiskey would be lifted to his memory tonight, and somewhere, in his quiet way he'd laugh in the knowledge of it. But not now. Dan had gotten his wife to maneuver Mrs. Shaw onto the other side of the airplane so that he could sit next to Bill. Shaw noticed that immediately, of course, but waited until the aircraft leveled off to make the obvious question.
'What is it?'
Murray handed over the sheet he pulled off the aircraft's facsimile printer a few hours earlier.
'Oh, shit!' Shaw swore quietly. 'Not Moira. Not her.'
16. Target List
'I'M OPEN TO suggestions,' Murray said. He regretted his tone at once.
'Christ's sake, Dan!' Shaw's face had gone gray for a moment, and his expression was now angry.
'Sorry, but - damn it, Bill, do we handle it straight or do we candy-ass our way around the issue?'
'Straight.'
'One of the kids from WFO asked her the usual battery of questions, and she said that she didn't tell anybody... well, maybe so, but who the hell did she call in Venezuela? They re-checked going back a year, no such calls ever before. The boy I left behind to run things did some further checking - the number she called is an apartment, and the phone there rang someplace in Colombia within a few minutes of Moira's call.'
'Oh, God.' Shaw shook his head. From anyone else he would merely have felt anger, but Moira had worked with the Director since before he'd returned to D.C., from his command of the New York Field Division.
'Maybe it's an innocent thing. Maybe even a coincidence,' Murray allowed, but that didn't improve Bill's demeanor very much.
'Care to do a probability assessment of that statement, Danny?'
'No.'
'Well, we're all going back to the office after we land. I'll have her into my place an hour after we get back. You be there, too.'
'Right.' It was time for Murray to shake his head. She'd shed as many tears at the graveside as anyone else. He'd seen a lifetime's worth of duplicity in his law-enforcement career, but to think that of Moira was more than he could stomach. It has to be a coincidence.
The detectives searching Sergeant Braden's home found what they were looking for. It wasn't much, just a camera case. But the case had a Nikon F-3 body and enough lenses that the entire package had to be worth eight or nine thousand dollars. More than a Mobile detective sergeant could afford. While the rest of the officers continued the search, the senior detective called Nikon's home office and checked the number on the camera to see if the owner had registered it for warranty purposes. He had. And with the name that was read off to him, the officer knew that he had to call the FBI office as well. It was part of a federal case, and he hoped that somehow they could protect the name of a man who had certainly been a dirty cop. Dirty or not, he did leave kids behind. Perhaps the FBI would understand that.
He was committing a federal crime to do this, but the attorney considered that he had a higher duty to his clients. It was one of those gray areas which decorate not so much legal textbooks, but rather the volumes of written court decisions. He was sure a crime had been committed, was sure that nothing was being done to investigate it, and was sure that its disclosure was important to the defense of his clients on a case of capital murder. He didn't expect to be caught, but if he were, he'd have something to take to the professional ethics panel