Clear and Present Danger

  “We gotta get somebody there,” Shaw observed. “But how, for God’s sake?”

  “Why not the Panama legal attaché?” Murray asked. “I know him. Solid guy.”

  “He’s out doing something with DEA. Won’t be back in the office for a couple of days. His number-two’s not up to it. Too inexperienced to run this himself.”

  “Morales is available in Bogotá—but somebody’d notice.... We’re playing catch-up again, Bill, and that guy is flying down there at five hundred miles per hour.... How about Mark Bright? Maybe he can steal a jet from the Air Guard.”

  “Do it!”

  “Special Agent Bright,” he said as he picked up the phone.

  “Mark, this is Dan Murray. I need you to do something. Start taking notes, Mark.” Murray kept talking. Two minutes later Bright muttered a mild obscenity and pulled out his phone book. The first call went to Eglin Air Force Base, the second to the local Coast Guard, and the third to his home. He sure as hell wouldn’t be home for dinner. Bright grabbed a few items on his way out the door and had another agent drive him to the Coast Guard yard, where a helicopter was already waiting. It took off a minute after he got aboard and headed east to Eglin Air Force Base.

  The Air Force had only three F-15E Strike-Eagles, all prototypes for a ground-attack version of the big, twin-engined fighter, and two of those were at Eglin for technical tests while Congress decided if the service would actually put the aircraft into serial production. Aside from some training birds located elsewhere, this was the only two-seat version of the Air Force’s prime air-superiority fighter. The major who’d be flying him was standing at the side of the aircraft when Bright stepped out of the helicopter. A couple of NCOs assisted the agent into his flight suit, parachute harness, and life vest. The helmet was sitting on the top of the rear ejection seat. In ten minutes the aircraft was ready to roll.

  “What gives?” the pilot asked.

  “I need to be at Panama, just as fast as you can arrange it.”

  “Gee, you mean you’re going to make me fly fast?” the major responded, then laughed. “Then there’s no rush.”

  “Say again?”

  “The tanker took off three minutes ago. We’ll let him get up to thirty thousand before we lift off. He’ll top us off up there, and we go balls to the wall. Another tanker is taking off from Panama to meet us—so we’ll have enough fuel to land, sir. That way we can go supersonic most of the flight. You did say you were in a hurry?”

  “Uh-huh.” Bright was struggling to adjust his helmet. It didn’t fit very well. It was also quite warm in the cockpit, and the air-conditioning system hadn’t taken hold yet. “What if the other tanker doesn’t show up?”

  “The Eagle is a very good glider,” the major assured him. “We won’t have to swim too far.”

  A radio message crackled in Bright’s ears. The major answered it, then spoke to his passenger. “Grab your balls, sir. It is now post time.” The Eagle taxied to the end of the runway, where it sat still for a moment while the pilot brought the engines to full, screaming, vibrating power, and then slipped his brakes. Ten seconds later Bright wondered if a catapult shot off a carrier could be more exciting than this. The F-15E held a forty-degree angle of climb and just kept accelerating, leaving Florida’s gulf coast far behind. They tanked a hundred miles offshore—Bright was too fascinated to be frightened, though the buffet was noticeable—and after separating, the Eagle climbed to forty thousand feet and the pilot punched burners. The aft cockpit was mainly concerned with delivering bombs and missiles on target, but did have a few instruments. One of them told the agent that they had just topped a thousand miles per hour.

  “What’s the hurry?” the pilot asked.

  “I want to get to Panama ahead of somebody.”

  “Can you give me some details? Might help, you know.”

  “One of those business jets—G-Three, I think. Left Andrews eighty-five minutes ago.”

  The pilot laughed. “Is that all? Hell, you can check into a hotel ’fore he gets down. We’re already ahead of him. We’re wasting fuel going this fast.”

  “So waste it,” Bright said.

  “Fine with me, sir. Mach-2 or sittin’ still, they pay me the same. Okay, figure we’ll get in ninety minutes ahead of your guy. How do you like the ride?”

  “Where’s the drink cart?”

  “Should be a bottle down by your right knee. A nice domestic vintage, good nose, but not the least pretentious.”

  Bright got it and had a drink out of sheer curiosity.

  “Salt and electrolytes, to keep you alert,” the pilot explained a few seconds later. “You’re FBI, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “What gives?”

  “Can’t say. What’s that?” He heard a beeping sound in his headphones.

  “SAM radar,” the major said.

  “What?”

  “That’s Cuba over there. There’s a SAM battery on that point that doesn’t like American military aircraft. I can’t imagine why. We’re out of range anyway. Don’t sweat it. It’s normal. We use them to calibrate our systems, too. Part of the game.”

  Murray and Shaw were reading over the material Jack had dropped off. Their immediate problems were, first, to determine what was supposed to be going on; next, to determine what was actually going on; next, to determine if it was legal or not; next, if not, then to take appropriate action, once they could figure what appropriate action was. This wasn’t a mere can of worms. It was a can of poisonous snakes that Ryan had spilled over Murray’s desk.

  “You know how this might end up?”

  Shaw turned away from the desk. “The country doesn’t need another one.” Not by my hands, he didn’t say.

  “We got one whether we need it or not,” Murray said. “I admit, part of me says, ‘Right on!’ about why they’re doing it, but from what Jack tells me, we have at the very least a technical violation of the oversight laws, and definitely a violation of the Executive Order.” .

  “Unless there’s a classified codicil that we don’t know about. What if the AG knows?”

  “What if he’s part of it? The day Emil got hit, the AG flew to Camp David along with the rest of ’em, remember?”

  “What I want to know is, what the hell our friend is going to Panama for?”

  “Maybe we’ll find out. He’s going down alone. No security troops, everybody sworn to secrecy. Who’d you send over to Andrews to choke it out of ’em?”

  “Pat O’Day,” Murray answered. That explained matters. “I want him to handle the liaison with the Secret Service guys, too. He’s done a lot of work with them. When the time comes, that is. We’re a mile away from being ready for that.”

  “Agreed. We have eighteen people working ODYSSEY. That’s not enough.”

  “We have to keep it tight for the moment, Bill. I think the next step is getting somebody over from Justice to cover our asses for us. Who?”

  “Christ, I don’t know,” Shaw replied in exasperation. “It’s one thing to run an investigation that the AG knows about but is kept out of, but I can’t remember ever running one completely unknown to him.”

  “Let’s take our time, then. The main thing right now is to figure out what the plan was, then branch out from there.” It was a logical observation from Murray. It was also wrong. It was to be a day of errors.

  The F-15E touched down at Howard Field right on time, eighty minutes before the scheduled arrival of the flight from Andrews. Bright thanked the pilot, who refueled and took off at once for a more leisurely return to Eglin. The base intelligence officer met Bright, along with the most senior agent from the legal attaché’s office in Panama City, who was young, sharp, but too new in his post for a case of this sensitivity. The arriving agent briefed his two colleagues on what little he knew and swore both to secrecy. It was enough to get things going. His first stop was the post exchange, where he got some nondescript clothing. The intelligence officer supplied a very plain automobile with local
tags that they left outside the gate. On base they’d use an anonymous blue Air Force sedan. The Plymouth sat near the flight line when the VC-20A landed. Bright pulled his Nikon out of the bag and attached a 1000mm telephoto lens. The aircraft taxied to a stop at one of the hangars, and the stairs folded down with the hatch. Bright snugged his camera in and started shooting close-ups from several hundred yards away as the single passenger stepped out of the plane and into a waiting car.

  “Jesus, it’s really him.” Bright rewound and removed the film cassette. He handed it to the other FBI agent and reloaded another thirty-six-frame spool.

  The car they followed was a twin to their Air Force sedan. It drove straight off post. Bright and the rest barely had time to switch cars, but the Air Force colonel driving had ambitions to race the NASCAR circuit and took up a surveillance position a hundred yards behind it.

  “Why no security?” he asked.

  “He generally doesn’t bother, they told me,” Bright told him. “Sounds odd, doesn’t it?”

  “Hell, yes, given who he is, what he knows, and where the hell he happens to be at the moment.”

  The trip into town was unremarkable. The Air Force sedan dropped Cutter off at a luxury hotel on the outskirts of Panama City. Bright hopped out and watched him check in, just like a man on a business trip. The other agent came in a few minutes later while the colonel stayed with the car.

  “Now what?”

  “Anybody you can trust on the local PD?” Bright asked.

  “Nope. I know a few, some of them pretty good guys. But trust? Not down here, man.”

  “Well, there’s always the old-fashioned way,” Bright observed.

  “’kay.” The assistant legal attaché reached for his wallet and walked to the registration desk. He came back two minutes later. “The Bureau owes me twenty bucks. He’s registered as Robert Fisher. Here’s the American Express number.” He handed over a crumpled carbon sheet that also had the scrawled signature.

  “Call the office and run it. We need to keep an eye on his room. We need—Christ, how many assets do we have?” Bright waved him outside.

  “Not enough for this.”

  Bright’s face twisted into an ugly shape for a moment. This was no easy call to make. ODYSSEY was a code-word case, and one thing that Murray had impressed on him was the need for security, but—there was always a “but,” wasn’t there?—this was something that needed doing. So he was the senior man on the scene and he had to make the call. Of such things, he knew, careers were made and broken. It was murderously hot and humid, but that wasn’t the only reason Mark Bright was sweating.

  “Okay, tell him we need a half-dozen good people to help us with the surveillance.”

  “You sure—”

  “I’m not sure of anything right now! The man we’re supposed to be shadowing—if we suspect him—Christ Almighty, if we suspect him—” Bright stopped talking. There wasn’t much else to say, was there?

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll hang out here. Tell the colonel to get things organized.”

  It turned out that they needn’t have hurried. The subject—that’s what he was now, Bright told himself—appeared in the lobby three hours later, looking fresh and scrubbed in his tropical-weight suit. Four cars waited outside for him, but Cutter only knew about the small, white Mercedes into which he climbed and which drove off to the north. The other three kept it in visual contact.

  It was getting dark. Bright had shot only three frames on his second roll of film. He ejected that one and replaced it with some super-high-speed black and white film. He shot a few pictures of the car just to make sure that he got the license number. The driver at this point wasn’t the colonel, but a sergeant from the criminal-investigation detachment who knew the area and was impressed as hell to be working a code-word case with the Bureau. He identified the house the Mercedes pulled into. They ought to have guessed it.

  The sergeant knew a place that overlooked the house, not a thousand yards away, but they were too late getting there and the car couldn’t stay on the highway. Bright and the local FBI representative jumped out and found a wet, smelly place to lie down and wait. The sergeant left them a radio with which to summon him and wished them luck.

  The owner of the house was away attending to matters of state, of course, but he had been kind enough to give them free use of it. That included a small but discreet staff which served light snacks and drinks, then withdrew, leaving the tape recorders, both men were sure, to record events. Well, that didn’t matter, did it?

  The hell it doesn’t! Both men realized the sensitivity of the conversation that was about to take place, and it was Cortez who surprised his guest by graciously suggesting that they speak outside, despite the weather. Both men dropped off their suitcoats and went through the French doors to the garden. About the only good news was the impressive collection of blue bug-lights which crackled and sparkled as they attracted and electrocuted thousands of insects. The noise would make hash out of most recording attempts, and who would have expected either of them to eschew the house’s air conditioning?

  “Thank you for responding to my message,” Cortez said pleasantly. It was not a time for bluster or posturing. It was time for business, and he’d have to appear appropriately humble before this man. It didn’t bother him. Dealing with people of his rank required it, and it was something he’d have to get used to, Félix expected. They needed deference. It made surrendering all the easier.

  “What do you want to talk about?” Admiral Cutter asked.

  “Your operations against the Cartel, of course.” Cortez waved toward a cane chair. He disappeared for a moment, then returned with the tray of drinks and glasses. For tonight, Perrier was the drink of choice. Both men left the alcohol untouched. For Félix, that was the first good sign.

  “What operations are you talking about?”

  “You should know that I had nothing personally to do with the death of Mr. Jacobs. It was an act of madness.”

  “Why should I believe that?”

  “I was in America at the time. Didn’t they tell you?” Cortez filled in some details. “An information source like Mrs. Wolfe,” he concluded, “is worth far more than stupid, emotional revenge. It is more foolish still to challenge a powerful nation in so obvious a way. Your response was quite well done. In fact, the operations you are running are most impressive. I didn’t even suspect your airport-surveillance operations until after they were terminated, and the way you simulated the car bomb—a work of art, if I may say so. Can you tell me what the strategic objective of your operation is?”

  “Come now, Colonel.”

  “Admiral, I have the power to expose the totality of your activities to the press,” Félix said almost sadly. “Either you tell me or you tell the members of your own Congress. You will find me far more accommodating. We are, after all, men of the same profession.”

  Cutter thought for a moment, and told him. He was greatly irritated to see his interlocutor start laughing.

  “Brilliant!” Cortez said when he was able to. “One day I would wish to meet this man, the one who proposed this idea. Truly he is a professional!”

  Cutter nodded as though accepting the compliment. For a moment Félix wondered if that might be true ... it was easy enough to find out.

  “You must forgive me, Admiral Cutter. You think I am making light of your operation. I say to you honestly that I am not. You have, in fact, accomplished your goal.”

  “We know. We know that somebody tried to kill you and Escobedo.”

  “Yes,” Félix replied. “Of course. I would also like to know how you are developing such fine intelligence on us, but I know that you will not tell me.”

  Cutter played the card for all he thought it was worth. “We have more assets than you think, Colonel.” It wasn’t worth that much.

  “I am sure,” Cortez allowed. “I think we have an area of agreement.”

  “What might that be?”

  “You w
ish to initiate a war within the Cartel. So do I.”

  Cutter betrayed himself by the way he stopped breathing. “Oh? How so?”

  Already Cortez knew that he had won. And this fool was advising the American President?

  “Why, I will become a de facto part of your operation and restructure the Cartel. That means eliminating some of the more offensive members, of course.”

  Cutter wasn’t a total fool, but made the further mistake of stating the obvious as a question: “With yourself as the new head?”

  “Do you know what sort of people these ‘drug lords’ are? Vicious peasants. Barbarians without education, drunk with power, yet they complain like spoiled children that they are not respected. ” Cortez smiled up at the stars. “They are not people to be taken seriously by men such as ourselves. Can we agree that the world will be better when they have left it?”

  “The same thought has occurred to me, as you have already pointed out.”

  “Then we are in agreement.”

  “Agreement on what?”

  “Your ‘car bombs’ have already eliminated five of the chieftains. I will further reduce the number. Those eliminated will include all who approved the murder of your ambassador and the others, of course. Such actions cannot go unpunished or the world is plunged into chaos. Also, to show good faith, I will unilaterally reduce cocaine shipments to your country by half. The drug trade is disordered and overly violent,” the former DGI colonel said judiciously. “It needs restructuring.”

  “We want it stopped!” Even as he said it, Cutter knew that it was a foolish thing to say.

  Cortez sipped at his Perrier and continued to speak reasonably. “It will never be stopped. So long as your citizens wish to destroy their brains, someone will make this possible. The question, then, is how do we make the process more orderly? Your education efforts will eventually reduce the demand for drugs to tolerable levels. Until then, I can regularize the trade to minimize the dislocation of your society. I will reduce exports. I can even give you some major arrests so that your police can take credit for the reductions. This is an election year, is it not?”