Clear and Present Danger

  “Perhaps,” Moira replied after a moment. Already part of her was thinking that the Director would come to her wedding. It wasn’t too much to hope for, was it?

  “What did he travel to Colombia for, anyway?” he asked while his fingertips did some more exploring over what was now very familiar ground.

  “Well, it’s public information now. They called it Operation TARPON.” Moira explained on for several minutes during which Juan’s caresses didn’t miss a beat.

  Which was only due to his experience as an intelligence officer. He actually found himself smiling lazily at the ceiling. The fool. I warned him. I warned him more than once in his own office, but no—he was too smart, too confident in his own cleverness to take my advice. Well, maybe the stupid bastard will heed my advice now.... It took another few moments before he found himself asking how his employer would react. That was when the smiling and the caresses stopped.

  “Something wrong, Juan?”

  “Your director picked a dangerous time to visit Bogotá. They will be very angry. If they discover that he is there—”

  “The trip is a secret. Their attorney general is an old friend— I think they went to school together, and they’ve known each other for forty years.”

  The trip was a secret. Cortez told himself that they couldn’t be so foolish as to—but they could. He was amazed that Moira didn’t feel the chill that swept over his body. But what could he do?

  As was true of the families of military people and sales executives, Clark’s family was accustomed to having him away at short notice and for irregular intervals. They were also used to having him reappear without much in the way of warning. It was almost a game, and one, strangely enough, to which his wife didn’t object. In this case he took a car from the CIA pool and made the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Yorktown, Virginia, by himself to think over the operation he was about to undertake. By the time he turned off Interstate 64, he’d answered most of the procedural questions, though the exact details would wait until he’d had a chance to go over the intelligence package that Ritter had promised to send down.

  Clark’s house was that of a middle-level executive, a four-bedroom split-foyer brick dwelling set in an acre of the long-needled pines common to the American South. It was a ten-minute drive from The Farm, the CIA’s training establishment whose post-office address is Williamsburg, Virginia, but which is actually closer to Yorktown, adjacent to an installation in which the Navy keeps both submarine-launched ballistic missiles and their nuclear warheads. The development in which he lived was mainly occupied by other CIA instructors, obviating the need for elaborate stories for the neighbors’ benefit. His family, of course, had a pretty good idea what he did for a living. His two daughters, Maggie, seventeen, and Patricia, fourteen, occasionally called him “Secret Agent Man,” which they’d picked up from the revival of the Patrick McGoohan TV series on one of the cable channels, but they knew not to discuss it with their schoolmates—though they would occasionally warn their boyfriends to behave as responsibly as possible around their father. It was an unnecessary warning. On instinct, most men watched their behavior around Mr. Clark. John Clark did not have horns and hooves, but it seldom took more than a single glance to know that he was not to be trifled with, either. His wife, Sandy, knew even more, including what he had done before joining the Agency. Sandy was a registered nurse who taught student nurses in the operating rooms of the local teaching hospital. As such she was accustomed to dealing with issues of life and death, and she took comfort from the fact that her husband was one of the few “laymen” who understood what that was all about, albeit from a reversed perspective. To his wife and children, John Terence Clark was a devoted husband and father, if somewhat overly protective at times. Maggie had once complained that he’d scared off one prospective “steady” with nothing more than a look. That the boy in question had later been arrested for drunken driving had only proved her father correct, rather to her chagrin. He was also a far easier touch than their mother on issues like privileges and had a ready shoulder to cry on, when he was home. At home, his counsel was invariably quiet and reasoned, his language mild, and his demeanor relaxed, but his family knew that away from home he was something else entirely. They didn’t care about that.

  He pulled into the driveway just before dinnertime, taking his soft two-suiter in through the kitchen to find the smells of a decent dinner. Sandy had been surprised too many times to overreact on the matter of how much food she’d prepared.

  “Where have you been?” Sandy asked rhetorically, then went into her usual guessing game. “Not much work done on the tan. Someplace cold or cloudy?”

  “Spent most of my time indoors,” Clark replied honestly. Stuck with a couple of clowns in a damned commo van on a hilltop surrounded by jungle. Just like the bad old days. Almost. For

  all her intelligence, she almost never guessed where he’d been. But then, she wasn’t supposed to.

  “How long ... ?”

  “Only a couple of days, then I have to go out again. It’s important.”

  “Anything to do with—” Her head jerked toward the kitchen TV.

  Clark just smiled and shook his head.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “From what I see, the druggies got real lucky,” he said lightly.

  Sandy knew what her husband thought of druggies, and why. Everyone had a pet hate. That was his—and hers; she’d been a nurse too long, had too often seen the results of substance abuse, to think otherwise. It was the one thing he’d lectured the girls on, and though they were as rebellious as any pair of healthy adolescents, it was one line they didn’t approach, much less cross.

  “The President sounds angry.”

  “How would you feel? The FBI Director was his friend—as far as a politician has friends.” Clark felt the need to qualify the statement. He was wary of political figures, even the ones he’d voted for.

  “What is he going to do about it?”

  “I don’t know, Sandy.” I haven’t quite figured it out yet. “Where are the kids?”

  “They went to Busch Gardens with their friends. There’s a new coaster, and they’re probably screaming their brains out.”

  “Do I have time to shower? I’ve been traveling all day.”

  “Dinner in thirty minutes.”

  “Fine.” He kissed her again and headed for the bedroom with his bag. Before entering the bathroom, he emptied his dirty laundry into the hamper. Clark would give himself one restful day with the family before starting on his mission planning. There wasn’t that much of a hurry. For missions of this sort, haste made death. He hoped the politicians would understand that.

  Of course, they wouldn’t, he told himself on the way to the shower. They never did.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Moira told him. “You’re tired. I’m sorry I’ve worn you out.” She cradled his face to her chest. A man was not a machine, after all, and five times in just over one day’s time ... what could she fairly expect of her lover? He had to sleep, had to rest. As did she, Moira realized, drifting off herself.

  Within minutes, Cortez gently disengaged himself, watching her slow, steady breathing, a dreamy smile on her placid face while he wondered what the hell he could do. If anything. Place a phone call—risk everything for a brief conversation on a nonsecure line? The Colombian police or the Americans, or somebody had to have taps on all those phones. No, that was more dangerous than doing nothing at all.

  His professionalism told him that the safest course of action was to do nothing. Cortez looked down at himself. Nothing was precisely what he had just accomplished. It was the first time that had happened in a very long time.

  Team KNIFE, of course, was completely—if not blissfully—unaware of what had transpired the previous day. The jungle had no news service, and their radio was for official use only. That made the new message all the more surprising. Chavez and Vega were again on duty at the observation post, enduring the muggy heat that followe
d a violent thunderstorm. There had been two inches of rain in the previous hour, and their observation point was now a shallow puddle, and there would be more rain in the afternoon before things cleared off.

  Captain Ramirez appeared, without much in the way of warning this time, even to Chavez, whose woodcraft skills were a matter of considerable pride. He rationalized to himself that the captain had learned from watching him.

  “Hey, Cap’n,” Vega greeted their officer.

  “Anything going on?” Ramirez asked.

  Chavez answered from behind his binoculars. “Well, our two friends are enjoying their morning siesta.” There would be another in the afternoon, of course. He was pulled away from the lenses by the captain’s next statement.

  “I hope they like it. It’s their last one.”

  “Say again, Cap’n?” Vega asked.

  “The chopper’s coming in to pick us up tonight. That’s the LZ right there, troops.” Ramirez pointed to the airstrip. “We waste this place before we leave.”

  Chavez evaluated that statement briefly. He’d never liked druggies. Having to sit here and watch the lazy bastards go about their business as matter-of-factly as a man on a golf course hadn’t mitigated his feelings a dot.

  Ding nodded. “Okay, Cap’n. How we gonna do it, sir?”

  “Soon as it’s dark, you and me circle around the north side. Rest of the squad forms up in two fire teams to provide fire support in case we need it. Vega, you and your SAW stay here. The other one goes down about four hundred meters. After we do the two guards, we booby-trap the fuel drums in the shack, just as a farewell present. The chopper’ll pick us up at the far end at twenty-three hundred. We bring the bodies out with us, probably dump ’em at sea.”

  Well, how about that, Chavez thought. “We’ll need like thirty-forty minutes to get around to them, just to play it safe and all, but the way those two fuckers been actin’, no sweat, sir.” The sergeant knew that the killing would be his job. He had the silenced weapon.

  “You’re supposed to ask me if this is for-real,” Captain Ramirez pointed out. He had done just that over the satellite radio.

  “Sir, you say do it, I figure it’s for-real. It don’t bother me none,” Staff Sergeant Domingo Chavez assured his commander.

  “Okay—we’ll move out as soon as it’s dark.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain patted both men on the shoulder and withdrew to the rally point. Chavez watched him leave, then pulled out his canteen. He unscrewed the plastic top and took a long pull before looking over at Vega.

  “Fuck!” the machine-gunner observed quietly.

  “Whoever’s runnin’ this party musta grown a pair o’ balls,” Ding agreed.

  “Be nice to get back to a place with showers and air conditioning,” Vega said next. That two people would have to die to make that possible was, once it was decided, a matter of small consequence. It bemused both men somewhat that after years of uniformed service they were finally being told to do the very thing for which they’d trained endlessly. The moral issue never occurred to them. They were soldiers of their country. Their country had decided that those two dozing men a few hundred meters away were enemies worthy of death. That was that, though both men wondered what it would actually be like to do it.

  “Let’s plan this one out,” Chavez said, getting back to his binoculars. “I want you to be careful with that SAW, Oso. ”

  Vega considered the situation. “I won’t fire to the left of the shack unless you call in.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll come in from the direction of that big-ass tree. Shouldn’t be no big deal,” he thought aloud.

  “Nah, shouldn’t be.”

  Except that this time it was all real. Chavez stayed on the glasses, examining the men whom he would kill in a few hours.

  Colonel Johns got his stand-to order at roughly the same time as all of the field teams, along with a whole new set of tactical maps that were for further study. He and Captain Willis went over the plan for this night in the privacy of their room. There was a snatch-and-grab tonight. The troops they’d inserted were coming back out far earlier than scheduled. PJ suspected that he knew why. Part of it, anyway.

  “Right on the airfields?” the captain wondered.

  “Yeah, well, either all four were dry holes, or our friends are going to have to secure them before we land for the snatch-and-grab.”

  “Oh.” Captain Willis understood after a moment’s thought.

  “Get ahold of Buck and have him check the miniguns out again. He’ll get the message from that. I want to take a look at the weather for tonight.”

  “Pickup order reverse from the drop-off?”

  “Yeah—we’ll tank fifty miles off the beach and then again after we make the pickup.”

  “Right.” Willis walked out to find Sergeant Zimmer. PJ went in the opposite direction, heading for the base meteorological office. The weather for tonight was disappointing: light winds, clear skies, and a crescent moon. Perfect flying weather for everyone else, it was not what special-ops people hoped for. Well, there wasn’t much you could do about that.

  They checked out of The Hideaway at noon. Cortez thanked whatever fortune smiled down on him that it had been her idea to cut the weekend short, claiming that she had to get back to her children, though he suspected that she had made a conscious decision to go easy on her weary lover. No woman had ever felt the need to take pity on him before, and the insult of it was balanced against his need to find out what the hell was going on.

  They drove up Interstate 81, in silence as usual. He’d rented a car with an ordinary bench seat, and she sat in the center, leaning against him with his right arm wrapped warmly around her shoulder. Like teenagers, almost, except for the silence, and again he found himself appreciating her for it. But it wasn’t for the quiet passion now. His mind was racing far faster than the car, which he kept exactly at the posted limit. He could have turned on the car radio, but that would have been out of character. He couldn’t risk that, could he? If his employer had only exercised intelligence—and he had plenty of that, Cortez compelled himself to admit—then he still had his arm draped over a supremely valuable source of strategic intelligence. Escobedo took an appropriately long view of his business operations. He understood—but Cortez remembered the man’s arrogance, too. How easily he took offense—it wasn’t enough for him to win, Escobedo also felt the need to humiliate, crush, utterly destroy those who offended him in the slightest way. He had power, and the sort of money normally associated only with governments, but he lacked perspective. For all his intelligence, he was a man ruled by childish emotions, and that thought merely grew in Cortez’s mind as he turned onto I-66, heading east now, for Washington. It was so strange, he mused with a thin, bitter smile, that in a world replete with information, he was forced to speculate like a child when he could have all he needed merely from the twist of a radio knob, but he commanded himself to do without.

  They reached the airport parking lot right on time. He pulled up to Moira’s car and got out to unload her bags.

  “Juan ...”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t feel badly about last night. It was my fault,” she said quietly.

  He managed a grin. “I already told you that I am no longer a young man. I have proved it true. I will rest for the next time so that I will do better.”

  “When—”

  “I don’t know. I will call you.” He kissed her gently. She drove off a minute later, and he stood there in the parking lot watching her leave, as she would have expected. Then he got into his car. It was nearly four o’clock, and he flipped on the radio to get the hourly news broadcast. Two minutes after that he’d driven the car to the return lot, taken out his bags, and walked into the terminal, looking for the first plane anywhere. A United flight to Atlanta was the next available, and he knew that he could make the necessary connections at that busy terminal. He barely squeezed aboard at the last call.

  Moira Wo
lfe drove home with a smile tinged with guilt. What had happened to Juan the previous night was one of the most humiliating things a man could experience, and it was all her fault. She’d demanded too much of him and he was, as he’d said himself, no longer young. She’d let her enthusiasm take charge of her own judgment, and hurt a man whom she—loved. She was certain now. Moira had thought she’d never know the emotion again, but there it was, with all the carefree splendor of her youth, and if Juan lacked the vigor of those years, he more than compensated with his patience and fantastic skill. She reached down and turned on her radio to an oldies FM channel, and for the remainder of her drive basked in the glow of the most pleasant of emotions, her memories of youthful happiness brought further to the fore by the sounds of the teenage ballads to which she’d danced thirty years before.

  She was surprised to see what looked like a Bureau car parked across the street from her house, but it might just as easily have been a cheap rental or something else—except for the radio antenna, she realized. It was a Bureau car. That was odd, she thought. She parked against the curb and got out her bags, walking up the sidewalk, but when the door was opened, she saw Frank Weber, one of the Director’s security detail.

  “Hi, Frank.” Special Agent Weber helped her with the bags, but his expression was serious. “Something wrong?”

  There wasn’t any easy way of telling her, though Weber felt guilty for spoiling what must have been a very special weekend for her.

  “Emil was killed Friday evening. We’ve been trying to reach you since then.”

  “What?”

  “They got him on the way to the embassy. The whole detail—everybody. Emil’s funeral’s tomorrow. The rest of’em are Tuesday.”

  “Oh, my God.” Moira sat on the nearest chair. “Eddie—Leo?” She thought of the young agents on Emil’s protection detail as her own kids.