Clear and Present Danger

  What do people expect of me? she asked herself in sudden anguish. I still have a life. I still have needs.

  What would Rich say?

  He hadn’t had time to say anything at all. He’d died on his way to work, two months after a routine physical that had told him that he should lose a few pounds, that his blood pressure was a touch high, but nothing to worry about really, that his cholesterol was pretty good for somebody in his forties, and that he should come back for the same thing next year. Then, at 7:39 in the morning, his car had just run off the road into a guardrail and stopped. A policeman only a block away had come and been puzzled to see the driver still in the car, and wondered whether or not someone might be driving drunk this early in the morning, then realized that there was no pulse. An ambulance had been summoned, its crew finding the officer pounding on Rich’s chest, making the assumption of a heart attack that they’d made themselves, doing everything they’d been trained to do. But there had never been a chance. Aneurysm in the brain. A weakening in the wall of a blood vessel, the doctor had explained after the postmortem. Nothing that could have been done. Why did it happen ... ? Maybe hereditary, probably not. No, blood pressure had nothing to do with it. Almost impossible to diagnose under the best of circumstances. Did he complain of headaches? Not even that much warning? The doctor had walked away quietly, wishing he could have said more, not so much angry as saddened by the fact that medicine didn’t have all the answers, and that there never was much you could say. (Just one of those things, was what doctors said among themselves, but you couldn’t say that to the family, could you?) There hadn’t been much pain, the doctor had said—not knowing if it were a lie or not—but that hardly mattered now, so he’d said confidently that, no, she could take comfort in the fact that there would not have been much pain. Then the funeral. Emil Jacobs there, already anticipating the death of his wife; she’d come from the hospital herself to attend the event with the husband she’d soon leave. All the tears that were shed....

  It wasn’t fair. Not fair that he’d been forced to leave without saying goodbye. A kiss that tasted of coffee on the way to the door, something about stopping at the Safeway on the way home, and she’d turned away, hadn’t even seen him enter the car that last time. She’d punished herself for months merely because of that.

  What would Rich say?

  But Rich was dead, and two years was long enough.

  The kids already had dinner going when she got home. Moira walked upstairs to change her clothes, and found herself looking at the phone that sat on the night table. Right next to the picture of Rich. She sat down on the bed, looking at it, trying to face it. It took a minute or so. Moira took the paper from her purse, and with a deep breath began punching the number into the phone. There were the normal chirps associated with an international call.

  “Díaz y Díaz,” a voice answered.

  “Could I speak to Juan Diaz, please?” Moira asked the female voice.

  “Who is calling, please?” the voice asked, switching over to English.

  “This is Moira Wolfe.”

  “Ah, Seiiora Wolfe! I am Consuela. Please hold for a momento.” There followed a minute of static on the line. “Señora Wolfe, he is somewhere in the factory. I cannot locate him. Can I tell him to call you?”

  “Yes. I’m at home.”

  “Sí, I will tell him—Señora?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please excuse me, but there is something I must say. Since the death of his María—Señor Juan, he is like my son. Since he has met you, Señora, he is happy again. I was afraid he would never—please, you must not say I tell you this, but, thank you for what you have done. It is a good thing you have done for Señor Juan. We in the office pray for both of you, that you will find happiness.”

  It was exactly what she needed to hear. “Consuela, Juan has said so many wonderful things about you. Please call me Moira.”

  “I have already said too much. I will find Señor Juan, wherever he is.”

  “Thank you, Consuela. Goodbye.”

  Consuela, whose real name was María—from which Félix (Juan) had gotten the name for his dead wife—was twenty-five and a graduate of a local secretarial school who wanted to make better money than that, and who, as a consequence, had smuggled drugs into America, through Miami and Atlanta, on half a dozen occasions before a close call had decided her on a career change. Now she handled odd jobs for her former employers while she operated her own small business outside Caracas. For this task, merely waiting for the phone to ring, she was being paid five thousand dollars per week. Of course, that was only one half of the job. She proceeded to perform the other half, dialing another number. There was an unusual series of chirps as, she suspected, the call was skipped over from the number she’d dialed to another she didn’t know about.

  “Yes?”

  “Señor Diaz? This is Consuela.”

  “Yes?”

  “Moira called a moment ago. She wishes for you to call her at home.”

  “Thank you.” And the connection broke.

  Cortez looked at his desk clock. He’d let her wait ... twenty-three minutes. His place was yet another luxury condominium in Medellin, two buildings down from that of his boss. Was this the call? he wondered. He remembered when patience had come hard to him, but it was a long time since he’d been a fledgling intelligence officer, and he went back to his papers.

  Twenty minutes later he checked the time again and lit a cigarette, watching the hands move around the dial. He smiled, wondering what it was like for her to have to wait, two thousand miles away. What was she thinking? Halfway through the cigarette, it was time to find out. He lifted the phone and dialed in the number.

  Dave got to the phone first. “Hello?” He frowned. “We have a bad connection. Could you repeat that? Oh, okay, hold on.” Dave looked over to see his mother’s eyes on him. “For you, Mom.”

  “I’ll take it upstairs,” she said at once, and moved toward the stairs as slowly as she could manage.

  Dave put his hand over the receiver. “Guess who?” There were knowing looks around the dining room.

  “Yes,” Dave heard her say on the other phone. He discreetly hung up. Good luck, Mom.

  “Moira, this is Juan.”

  “Are you free this weekend?” she asked.

  “This weekend? Are you sure?”

  “I’m free from lunch Friday to Monday morning.”

  “So ... let me think ... ” Two thousand miles away, Cortez stared out the window at the building across the street. Might it be a trap? Might the FBI Intelligence Division ... might the

  whole thing be a ... ? Of course not. “Moira, I must talk to someone here. Please hold for another minute. Can you?”

  “Yes!”

  The enthusiasm in her voice was unmistakable as he punched the hold button. He let her wait two minutes by his clock before going back on the line.

  “I will be in Washington Friday afternoon.”

  “You’ll be getting in about the time—about the right time.”

  “Where can we meet? At the airport. Can you meet me at the airport?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know what flight I’ll be on. I’ll meet you at ... at the Hertz counter at three o’clock. You will be there, yes?”

  “I will be there.”

  “As will I, Moira. Goodbye, my love.”

  Moira Wolfe looked again at the photograph. The smile was still there, but she decided it was not an accusing smile.

  Cortez got up from his desk and walked out of the room. The guard in the hall stood when he came out of the door.

  “I am going to see el jefe,” he said simply. The guard lifted his cellular phone to make the call.

  The technical problems were very difficult. The most basic one was power. While the base stations cranked out about five hundred watts, the mobile stations were allowed less than seven, and the battery-powered hand-held sets that everyone likes to use were three hundred milliwatt
s, and even with a huge parabolic dish receiving antenna, the signals gathered were like whispers. But the Rhyolite-J was a highly sophisticated instrument, the result of uncounted billions of research-and-development dollars. Supercooled electronics solved part of the problem. Various computers worked on the rest. The incoming signals were broken down into digital code—ones and zeroes—by a relatively simple computer and downlinked to Fort Huachuca, where another computer of vastly greater power examined the bits of raw information and tried to make sense of them. Random static was eliminated by a mathematically simple but still massively repetitive procedure—an algorithm—that compared neighboring bits to one another and through a process of averaging numerical values filtered out over 90 percent of the noise. That enabled the computer to spit out a recognizable conversation from what it had downloaded from the satellite. But that was only the beginning.

  The reason the Cartel used cellular phones for its day-to-day communications was security. There were roughly six hundred separate frequencies, all in the UHF band from 825 to 845 and 870 to 890 megahertz. A small computer at the base station would complete a call by selecting an available frequency at random, and in the case of a call from a mobile phone, changing that frequency to a better one when performance wavered. Finally, the same frequency could be used simultaneously for different calls on neighboring “cells” (hence the name of the system) of the same overall network. Because of this operating feature, there was not a police force in the world that could monitor phone calls made on cellular-phone equipment. Even without scrambling, the calls could be made in the clear, without even the need for code.

  Or that’s what everyone thought.

  The United States government had been in the business of intercepting foreign radio communications since the days of Yardley’s famous Black Chamber. Technically known as comint or sigint—for communications or signals intelligence—there was no better form of information possible than your enemy’s own words to his own people. It was a field in which America had excelled for generations. Whole constellations of satellites were deployed to eavesdrop on foreign nations, catching snippets of radio calls, side-lobe signals from microwave relay towers. Often encoded in one way or another, the signals were most often processed at the headquarters of the National Security Agency, on the grounds of Fort Meade, Maryland, between Washington and Baltimore, whose acres of basement held most of the supercomputers in the world.

  The task here was to keep constant track of the six hundred frequencies used by the cellular phone net in Medellin. What was impossible for any police agency in the world was less than a light workout for NSA, which monitored literally tens of thousands of radio and other electronic channels on a continuous basis. The National Security Agency was far larger than CIA, far more secretive, and much better funded. One of its stations was on the grounds of Fort Huachuca, Arizona. It even had its own supercomputer, a brand-new Cray connected by fiberoptic cable to one of many communications vans, each of which performed functions that those in the loop knew not to ask about.

  The next problem was making the computer work. The names and identities of many Cartel figures were fully known to the U.S. government, of course. Their voices had been recorded, and the programmers had started there. Using voiceprints of the known voices, they established an algorithm to recognize those voices, whichever cellular frequency they used. Next, those who called them had their voices electronically identified. Soon the computer was automatically keying and recording over thirty known voices, and the number of known voice-targets was expanding on a daily basis. Source-power considerations made voice identification difficult on occasion, and some calls were inevitably missed, but the chief technician estimated that they were catching over 60 percent, and that as their identification data-base grew larger, that their performance would grow to 85 percent.

  Those voices that did not have names attached were assigned numbers. Voice 23 had just called Voice 17. Twenty-three was a security guard. He had been identified because he had called 17, who was also known to be a security guard for Subject ECHO, as Escobedo was known to the comint team. “He’s coming over to see him,” was all the recorded signal told them. Exactly who “he” was they didn’t know. It was a voice they had either not yet heard or, more likely, not yet identified. The intelligence specialists were patient. This case had gone a lot quicker than normal. For all their sophistication, the targets never dreamed that someone could tap in on them in this way and as a consequence had taken no precautions against it. Within a month the comint team would have enough experience with the targets to develop all sorts of usable tactical intelligence. It was just a matter of time. The technicians wondered when actual operations would begin. After all, setting up the sigint side was always the precursor to putting assets in the field.

  “What is it?” Escobedo asked as Cortez entered the room.

  “The American FBI Director will be flying to Bogotá tomorrow. He leaves Washington sometime after noon. It is to be a covert visit. I would expect him to be using an official aircraft. The Americans have a squadron of such aircraft at Andrews Air Force Base. There will be a flight plan filed, probably covered as something else. Anything from four tomorrow afternoon to eight in the evening could be the flight. I expect it to be a twin-engine executive jet, the G-Three, although another type is possible. He will be meeting with the Attorney General, undoubtedly to discuss something of great importance. I will fly to Washington immediately to find out what I can. There is a flight to Mexico City in three hours. I’ll be on it.”

  “Your source is a good one,” Escobedo observed, impressed for once.

  Cortez smiled. “Sí, jefe. Even if you are unable to determine what is being discussed here, I hope to find out over the weekend. I make no promises, but I will do my best.”

  “A woman,” Escobedo observed. “Young and beautiful, I am sure.”

  “As you say. I must be off.”

  “Enjoy your weekend, Colonel. I will enjoy mine.”

  Cortez had been gone only an hour when a telex came in, informing him that last night’s courier flight had failed to arrive at its destination in southwestern Georgia. The amusement that invariably accompanies receipt of top-secret information changed at once to anger. El jefe thought to call Cortez on his mobile phone, but remembered that his hireling refused to discuss substantive matters over what he called a “nonsecure” line. Escobedo shook his head. This colonel of the DGI—he was an old woman! El jefe’s phone twittered its own signal.

  “Bingo,” a man said in a van, two thousand miles away.

  VOX IDENT, his computer screen announced: SUBJECT BRAVO INIT CALL TO SUBJECT ECHO FRQ 848.970MHZ CALL INIT 2349z INTERCEPT IDENT 345.

  “We may have our first big one here, Tony.”

  The senior technician, who’d been christened Antonio forty-seven years earlier, put on his headphones. The conversation was being taken down on high-speed tape—it was actually a three-quarter-inch videotape because of the nature of the system used to intercept the signal. Four separate machines recorded the signal. They were Sony commercial recorders, only slightly modified by the NSA technical staff.

  “Ha! Señor Bravo is pissed!” Tony observed as he caught part of the conversation. “Tell Meade that we finally caught a frozen rope down the left-field line.” A “frozen rope” was the current NSA nickname for a very important signal intercept. It was baseball season, and the Baltimore Orioles were coming back.

  “How’s the signal?”

  “Clear as a church bell. Christ, why don’t I ever buy TRW stock?” Antonio paused, struggling not to laugh. “God, is he pissed!”

  The call ended a minute later. Tony switched his headphone input to one of the tape machines and crab-walked his swivel chair to a teleprinter, where he started typing.

  “What’s this ‘agitation’ business?”

  “I can’t put ‘pissed’ in an official TWX,” Antonio pointed out. “This one’s hot. We have some operational intel here.” He press
ed the transmit key on his terminal. The signal was addressed to a code-word destination—CAPER—which was all anyone who worked in the van knew.

  Bob Ritter had just left for home, and was only a mile up on the George Washington Parkway when his secure carphone made its distinctive and, to him, irritating noise.

  “Yeah?”

  “CAPER traffic,” the voice said.

  “Right,” the Deputy Director (Operations) said with a suppressed sigh. To his driver: “Take me back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Getting back, even for a top CIA executive, meant finding a place to reverse course, and then fight the late D.C. rush-hour traffic which, in its majesty, allows rich, poor, and important to crawl at an equal twenty miles per hour. The gate guard waved the car through, and he was in his seventh-floor office five minutes after that. Judge Moore was already gone. There were only four watch officers cleared for this operation. That was the minimum number required merely to wait for and evaluate signal traffic on the operation. The current watch officer had just come on duty. He handed over the signal.

  “We have something hot,” the officer said.

  “You’re not kidding. It’s Cortez,” Ritter observed after scanning the message form.

  “Good bet, sir.”

  “Coming here ... but we don’t know what he looks like. If only the Bureau had gotten a picture of the bastard when he was in Puerto Rico. You know the description we have of him.” Ritter looked up.

  “Black and brown. Medium height, medium build, sometimes wears a mustache. No distinguishing marks or characteristics,” the officer recited from memory. It wasn’t hard to memorize nothing, and nothing was exactly what they had on Félix Cortez.