Clear and Present Danger

  “Who are you?”

  “Your regular briefing officer was taken ill, sir. I have the duty today,” the man said. Forties, looked like one tough old field officer.

  “Okay, come on.” Cutter waved him into the study. The man sat down, glad to see that the Admiral had a TV and VCR in here.

  “Okay, where do we start today?” Cutter asked after the door was closed.

  “Gitmo, sir,” the man said.

  “What’s happening in Cuba?”

  “Actually, I have it on videotape, sir.” The field officer inserted it in the unit and punched “play.”

  “What is this ... ?” Jesus Christ! The tape played on for several minutes before the CIA officer stopped it.

  “So what? That’s the word of a traitor to his own country,” Cutter said to answer the man’s expectant smile.

  “There’s this, too.” He held up a photograph of the two of them. “Personally, I’d love to see you in federal prison. That’s what the FBI wants. They’re going to arrest you later today. You can imagine the charges. Assistant Deputy Director Murray is running the case. He’s probably meeting with a U.S. Magistrate right now—whatever the mechanics are. Personally I don’t care about that.”

  “Then why—?”

  “I’m a bit of a movie buff. Used to be in the Navy, too. In the movies at times like this, they always give a guy a chance to handle things himself—‘for the good of the service,’ they usually say. I wouldn’t try running away. There’s a team of FBI agents watching you, in case you haven’t noticed. Given the way things work in this town—how long things take to get done—I don’t suppose you’ll be meeting them until ten or eleven. If you do, Admiral, then God help you. You’ll get life. I only wish they could do something worse, but you’ll get life in a federal pen, with some career hood sticking it up that tight little ass of yours when the guards aren’t around. I wouldn’t mind seeing that either. Anyway.” He retrieved the videotape, tucking it in the briefcase along with the photograph that the Bureau really shouldn’t have given him—and they’d told Ryan that he’d only use it to identify Cortez. “Good day, sir.”

  “But you’ve—”

  “Done what? Nobody swore me to secrecy over this. What secrets have I revealed, Admiral? You were there for all of them.”

  “You’re Clark, aren’t you?”

  “Excuse me? Who?” he said on his way out. Then he was gone.

  Half an hour later, Pat O‘Day saw Cutter jogging down the hill toward the George Washington Parkway. One nice thing about having the President out of town, the inspector thought, was that he didn’t have to shake out of the rack at 4:30 to meet the bastard. He’d been here only forty minutes, spending a lot of time with his stretching exercises, and there he was. O’Day let him pass, then moved out, keeping up easily since the man was quite a bit older. But that wasn’t all....

  O‘Day followed him for a mile, then two, approaching the Pentagon. Cutter followed the jogging path between the road and the river. Perhaps he didn’t feel well. He alternately jogged and walked. Maybe he’s trying to see if he has a tail, O’Day thought, but ... Then he started moving again.

  Just opposite the beginning of the northern parking lot, Cutter got off the path, heading toward the road as though to cross it. The inspector had now closed to within fifty yards. Something was wrong. He didn’t know what. It was ...

  ... the way he was looking at the traffic. He wasn’t looking for openings, O’Day realized too late. A bus was coming north, a D.C. transit bus, it had just come off the 14th Street Bridge and—

  “Look out!” But the man wasn’t listening for that sort of warning.

  Brakes screeched. The bus tried to avoid the man, slamming into another car, then five more added their mass to the pileup. O’Day approached only because he was a cop, and cops are expected to do such things. Vice Admiral James A. Cutter, Jr., USN, was still in the road, thrown fifty feet by the collision.

  He’d wanted it to look like an accident, O’Day thought, but it wasn’t. The agent didn’t notice a passerby in a cheap-bodied government car who came down the other side of the parkway, rubbernecking at the accident scene like many others, but with a look of satisfaction instead of horror at the sight.

  Ryan was waiting at the White House. The President had flown home because of the death of his aide, but he was still President, and there was still work to be done, and if the DDI said that he needed to meet with the President, then it had to be important. The President was puzzled to see that along with Ryan were Al Trent and Sam Fellows, co-chairmen of the House Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight.

  “Come on in,” he said, guiding them regally into the Oval Office. “What’s so important?”

  “Mr. President, it has to do with some covert operations, especially one called SHOWBOAT.”

  “What’s that?” the President asked, on guard. Ryan explained for a minute or so.

  “Oh, that. Very well. SHOWBOAT was given to these two men personally by Judge Moore under his hazardous-operations rule.”

  “Dr. Ryan tells us that there are some other things we need to know about also. Other operations related to SHOWBOAT,” Congressman Fellows said.

  “I don’t know about any of that.”

  “Yes, you do, Mr. President,” Ryan said quietly. “You authorized it. It is my duty under the law to report on these matters to Congress. Before I do so, I felt it necessary to notify you. I asked the two congressmen here to witness my doing so.”

  “Mr. Trent, Mr. Fellows, could you please excuse me for a moment? There are some things going on that I don’t know about. Will you allow me to question Dr. Ryan in private for a moment?”

  Say no! Ryan wished as hard as he could, but one does not deny such requests to the President, and in a moment he and Ryan were alone.

  “What are you hiding, Ryan?” the President asked. “I know you’re hiding some things.”

  “Yes, sir, I am and I will. The identities of some of our people, CIA and military, who acted on what they thought was proper authority.” Ryan explained further, wondering what of it the President knew and what he didn’t. It was something he was sure he’d never fully know. Most of the really important secrets Cutter had taken to his grave. Ryan suspected what had happened there, but ... but had decided to let that sleeping dog lie, too. Was it possible to be connected with something like this, he asked himself, and not be corrupted by it?

  “What Cutter did, what you say he did—I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I’m especially sorry about those soldiers.”

  “We got about half of them out, sir. I was there. That’s the part I cannot forgive. Cutter deliberately cut them off with the intention of giving you a political—”

  “I never authorized that!” he almost screamed.

  “You allowed it to happen, sir.” Ryan tried to look him straight in the eye, and on the moment of wavering, it was the President who looked away. “My God, sir, how could you do it?”

  “The people want us to stop the flow of drugs.”

  “Then do it, do just what you tried to do, but do it in accordance with the law.”

  “It won’t work that way.”

  “Why not?” Ryan asked. “Have the American people ever objected when we used force to protect our interests?”

  “But what we had to do here could never be public.”

  “In that case, sir, all you needed to do was make the appropriate notification of the Congress and do it covertly. You got partial approval for the operation, politics would not necessarily have come into play, but in breaking the rules, sir, you tcok a national-security issue and made it into a political one.”

  “Ryan, you’re smart and clever and good at what you do, but you’re naïve.”

  Jack wasn’t that naive: “What are you asking me to do, sir?”

  “How much does the Congress really need to know?”

  “Are you asking me to lie for you, sir? You called me naive, Mr. President. I had a man die in my
arms two days ago, a sergeant in the Air Force who left seven children behind. Tell me, sir, am I naive to let that weigh upon my thinking?”

  “You can’t talk to me that way.”

  “I take no pleasure in it, sir. But I will not lie for you.”

  “But you are willing to conceal the identities of people who—”

  “Who followed your orders in good faith. Yes, Mr. President, I am willing to do that.”

  “What happens to the country, Jack?”

  “I agree with you that we do not need another scandal, but that is a political question. On that, sir, you have to talk to the men outside. My function is to provide information for the government, and to perform certain tasks for the government. I am an instrument of policy. So were those people who died for their country, sir, and they had a right to expect that their lives would be given greater value by the government they served. They were people, Mr. President, young kids for the most part who went off to do a job because their country—you, sir—thought it important that they do so. What they didn’t know was that there were enemies in Washington. They never suspected that, and that’s why most of them died. Sir, the oath our people take when they put the uniform on requires them to bear ‘true faith and allegiance’ to their country. Isn’t it written down somewhere that the country owes them the same thing? It’s not the first time this has happened, but I wasn’t part of it before, and I will not lie about it, sir, not to protect you or anyone else.”

  “I didn’t know that, Jack. Honestly, I didn’t know.”

  “Mr. President, I choose to believe that you are an honorable man. What you just said, sir, is that really an excuse?” Jack paused, and was fully answered by silence.

  “Do you wish to meet with the congressmen before I brief them, sir?”

  “Yes. Why don’t you wait outside for us.”

  “Thank you, Mr. President.”

  Jack waited for an hour of discomfort before Trent and Fellows reappeared. They drove with him to Langley in silence, and the three walked into the office of the Director of Central Intelligence.

  “Judge,” Trent said, “that may have been the greatest service you have ever done your country.”

  “Under the circumstances—” Moore paused. “What else could I have done?”

  “You could have left them to die, you could have warned the opposition that we were coming in,” Jack said. “In that case I wouldn’t be here. And for that, Judge, I am in your debt. You could have stuck with the lie.”

  “And live with myself?” Moore smiled in a very strange way and shook his head.

  “And the operations?” Ryan asked. Exactly what had been discussed in the Oval Office he didn’t know, and he told himself not to make any guesses.

  “Never happened,” Fellows said. “Under the hazardous-operations rule, you have done what you needed to do—granted, a little late, but we have been notified. We don’t need another scandal like this, and with the way things are going, the situation will settle itself. Politically it’s shaky, but legally you can argue that it’s all according to Hoyle.”

  “The craziest part of all is, it almost worked,” Trent observed. “Your CAPER operation was brilliant, and I assume it’ll be kept going.”

  “It will. The whole operation did work,” Ritter said for the first time. “It really did. We did start a war within the Cartel, and Escobedo’s killing was just the last act—or maybe not if it goes on further. With that many chieftains gone, maybe Colombia will be able to do a little better. We need that capability. We can’t have it stripped away from us.”

  “I agree,” Ryan said. “We need the capability, but you don’t make public policy this way, damn it!”

  “Jack, tell me what right and wrong is?” Moore asked. “You seem to be the expert today,” he added without very much irony.

  “This is supposed to be a democracy. We let the people know something, or at least we let them know.” He waved at the congressmen. “When a government decides to kill people who threaten its interests or its citizens, it doesn’t have to be murder. Not always. I’m just not sure where the line is. But I don’t have to be sure. Other people are supposed to tell us that.”

  “Well, come January, it won’t be us,” Moore observed. “It’s agreed, then? It stays here. No political footballs?”

  Trent and Fellows could scarcely have been further apart politically, the gay New Englander and the tough-minded Mormon from Arizona. They nodded agreement.

  “No games on this,” Trent said.

  “It would just hurt the country,” Fellows concurred.

  “And what we’ve just done ...” Ryan murmured. Whatever the hell it was ...

  “You didn’t do it,” Trent said. “The rest of us did.”

  “Right,” Jack snorted. “Well, I’m gone soon, too.”

  “Think so?” Fellows asked.

  “Not so, Dr. Ryan. We don’t know who Fowler is going to appoint, probably some political lawyer he likes. I know the names on the list,” Trent said.

  “It sure as hell won’t be me. He doesn’t like me,” Ryan said.

  “He doesn’t have to like you, and you’re not going to be Director. But you will be here,” Trent told him. Deputy Director, maybe, the congressman thought to himself.

  “We’ll see.” Fellows said. “What if things turn out differently in November? Fowler may just screw it up yet.”

  “You have my word, Sam,” Trent replied. “If that happens, it happens.”

  “There is one wild card, though,” Ritter pointed out.

  “I’ve already discussed that with Bill Shaw,” Moore said. “It’s funny. The only law he actually broke was illegal entry. None of the data he got out of her was technically classified. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  Ryan shook his head and left work early. He had an appointment with his attorney, who would soon be establishing an educational trust for seven kids living in Florida.

  The infantrymen were cycled through Fort MacDill’s special-operations center. Told that their operation had been a success, they were sworn to secrecy, given their promotions, and sent on to new postings. Except for one.

  “Chavez?” a voice called.

  “Yo, Mr. Clark.”

  “Buy you dinner?”

  “There a good Mexican place around here?”

  “Maybe I can find one.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Let’s talk jobs,” Clark said. “There’s an opening where I work. It pays better than what you do now. You’ll have to go back to school for a couple of years, though.”

  “I’ve been thinkin’ about that,” Chavez replied. He’d been thinking that he was officer material. If he’d been in command instead of Ramirez, maybe—or maybe not. But he did want to find out.

  “You’re good, kid. I want you to work with me.”

  Chavez thought about that. At least he’d get a dinner out of the idea.

  Captain Bronco Winters was dispatched to an F-15 squadron in Germany, where he distinguished himself and was soon a flight leader. He was a calmer young man now. He’d exorcised the demons of his mother’s death. Winters would never look back. He’d had a job, and done it.

  It was a cold, dismal fall after a hot, muggy summer in Washington. The political city emptied out for the presidential election, which shared that November with all of the House seats and a third of the Senate, plus hundreds of political-appointment slots in the executive branch. In the early fall, the FBI broke several Cuban-run spy rings, but strangely that was politically neutral. Although arresting a drug ring was a police success, arresting a spy ring was seen as a failure because of the existence of a spy ring in the first place. There was no political advantage except in the Cuban refugee community, whose votes might as well already have been cast anyway, since Fowler was talking about “opening a dialogue” with the Cuba they had left. The President regained the lead after his own convention, but ran a lackluster campaign and fired two key political advisers. But mo
st of all, it was time for a change, and though it was close, J. Robert Fowler carried the election with a bare 2 percent advantage in the popular vote. Some called it a mandate; others called it a sloppy campaign on both sides. The latter was closer to the truth, Ryan thought after it was all over.

  All over the city and its environs, displaced appointees made preparations to move home—wherever home was—or to move into law offices so that they could stay in the area. Congress hadn’t changed very much, but Congress rarely did. Ryan remained in his office, wondering if he’d be confirmed as the next DDI. It was too soon to tell. One thing he did know was that the President was still President, and still a man of honor, whatever mistakes he’d made. Before he left, pardons would be issued to those who needed them. They’d go on the books, but no one was expected to notice, and after things were explained to the Fowler people—Trent would handle that—it wasn’t expected that anyone ever would.

  On the Saturday after the election, Dan Murray drove Moira Wolfe to Andrews Air Force Base, where a jet was waiting for them. It took just over three hours before they landed at Guantánamo. A leftover from the Spanish-American War, Gitmo, as it’s called, is the only American military installation on Communist soil, a thorn stuck in Castro’s side that rankled him as much as he rankled his oversized neighbor across the Florida Strait.

  Moira was doing well at the Department of Agriculture, executive secretary to one of the department’s top career executives. She was thinner now, but Murray wasn’t concerned about that. She’d taken up walking for exercise, and was doing well with her psychological counseling. She was the last of the victims, and he hoped that this trip would help.