“Who could have leaked it?”
Jack barked out a laugh. “Could have? Ten or fifteen people on the Hill. Maybe five in the White House, twenty—maybe forty here.”
“So the other part could just be camouflage, or somebody who wants a score settled.” Murray did not make it a question. He figured at least a third of all press leaks were aimed at settling grudges in one way or another. “The source is sensitive?”
“This phone isn’t all that secure, remember?”
“Gotcha. Look, I can approach Holtzman quietly and informally. He’s a good guy, responsible, a pro. We can talk to him off the record and let him know that he may be endangering people and methods.”
“I have to go to Marcus for that.”
“And I have to talk to Bill, but Bill will play ball.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to my Director. I’ll be back.” Ryan hung up and walked again to the Director’s office.
“I’ve seen it,” Director Cabot said. “The Bureau doesn’t know about this investigation, and neither do our people. From that we can surmise that the scandal part of the story is pure bull, but somebody’s been leaking the take from SPINNAKER, and that sort of thing gets agents killed.”
“What do you suggest?” the DCI asked.
“Dan Murray and I approach Holtzman informally and let him know that he’s stepping on sensitive toes. We ask him to back off.”
“Ask?”
“Ask. You don’t give orders to reporters. Not unless you sign their paychecks, anyway,” Jack corrected himself. “I’ve never actually done this, but Dan has. It was his idea.”
“I have to go upstairs on this,” Cabot said.
“Goddamn it, Marcus, we are upstairs!”
“Dealing with the press—it has to be decided elsewhere.”
“Super—get in your car and drive down and make sure you ask very nicely.” Ryan turned and stormed out before Cabot had a chance to flush at the insult.
By the time he’d walked the few yards to his private office, Jack’s hands were quivering. Can’t he back me up on anything? Nothing was going right lately. Jack pounded once on his desk, and the pain brought things back under control. Clark’s little operation, that seemed to be heading in the right direction. That was one thing, and one thing was better than nothing.
Not much better. Jack looked at the photo of his wife and kids.
“Goddamn it,” he swore to himself. He couldn’t get that guy to back him up on anything, he’d become a lousy father to his kids, and sure as hell he was no great shakes as a husband lately.
Liz Elliot read the front-page article with no small degree of satisfaction. Holtzman had delivered exactly what she had expected. Reporters were so easy to manipulate. It opened a whole new world for her, she had belatedly realized. With Marcus Cabot being so weak, and no one within the CIA bureaucracy to back him up, she would have effective control of that, as well. Wasn’t that something?
Removing Ryan from his post was now more than a mere exercise in spite, as desirable as so simple a motive might have been. Ryan was the one who had said no to a few White House requests, who occasionally went directly to Congress on internal matters ... who prevented her from having closer contact with the Agency. With him out of the way, she could give orders—couched as “suggestions”—to Cabot, who would then carry them out with a total absence of resistance. Dennis Bunker would still have Defense and his dumb football team. Brent Talbot would have the State Department. Elizabeth Elliot would have control of the National Security apparatus—be—cause she also had the ear, and all the other important parts, of the President. Her phone beeped.
“Director Cabot is here.”
“Send him in,” Liz said. She stood and walked toward the door. “Good morning, Marcus.”
“Hello, Dr. Elliot.”
“What brings you down?” she asked, waving him to a seat on the couch.
“This newspaper article.”
“I saw it,” the National Security Advisor said sympathetically.
“Whoever leaked this might have endangered a valuable source.”
“I know. Somebody at your end? I mean, what is this about an in-house investigation?”
“It isn’t us.”
“Really?” Dr. Elliot leaned back and played with her blue silk cravat. “Who, then?”
“We don’t know, Liz.” Cabot looked even more uncomfortable than she had expected. Maybe, she thought playfully, he thought he was the target of the investigation ... ? There was an interesting idea. “We want to talk to Holtzman.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we and the FBI talk to him, informally of course, to let him know that he may be doing something irresponsible.”
“Who came up with that, Marcus?”
“Ryan and Murray.”
“Really?” She paused, as though considering the matter. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You know how reporters are. If you have to stroke them, you have to stroke them properly ... hmm. I can handle that if you wish.”
“This really is serious. SPINNAKER is very important to us.” Cabot tended to repeat himself when he got excited.
“I know it. Ryan was pretty clear in his briefing, back when you were ill. You still haven’t confirmed his reports?”
Cabot shook his head. “No. Jack went off to England to ask the Brits to nose around, but we don’t expect anything for a while.”
“What do you want me to tell Holtzman?”
“Tell him that he may be jeopardizing a highly important source. The man could die over this, and the political fallout might be very serious,” Cabot concluded.
“Yes, it could have undesired effects on their political scene, couldn’t it?”
“If SPINNAKER is right, then they’re in for a huge political shakeup. Revealing that we know what we know could jeopardize him. Remember that—”
Elliot interrupted. “That Kadishev is our main fallback position. Yes. And if he gets ‘burned,’ then we might have no fallback position. You’ve made yourself very clear, Marcus. Thank you. I’ll work on this myself.”
“That should be quite satisfactory,” Cabot said after a moment’s pause.
“Fine. Anything else I need to know this morning?”
“No, that’s why I came down.”
“I think it’s time to show you something. Something we’ve been working on here. Pretty sensitive,” she added. Marcus got the message.
“What is it?” the DCI asked guardedly.
“This is absolutely confidential.” Elliot pulled a large manila envelope from her desk. “I mean absolutely, Marcus. It doesn’t leave the building, okay?”
“Agreed.” The DCI was already interested.
Liz opened the envelope and handed over some photographs. Cabot looked them over.
“Who’s the woman?”
“Carol Zimmer. She’s the widow of an Air Force crewman who got himself killed somehow or other.” Elliot filled in some additional details.
“Ryan, screwing around? I’ll be damned.”
“Any chance we could get more information from inside the Agency?”
“If you mean accomplishing that without any suspicion on his part, it would be very difficult.” Cabot shook his head. “His two SPOs, Clark and Chavez, no way. They’re very tight. Good friends, I mean.”
“Ryan’s friendly with bodyguards? You serious?” Elliot was surprised. It was like being solicitous toward furniture.
“Clark’s an old field officer. Chavez is a new kid, working as a SPO while he finishes his college degree, looking to be a field officer. I’ve seen the files. Clark’ll retire in a few more years, and keeping him around as a SPO is just a matter of being decent. He’s done some really interesting things. Good man, good officer.”
Elliot didn’t like that, but from what Cabot said, it seemed that it couldn’t be helped. “We want Ryan eased out.”
“That might not be easy. They really like him on the Hill.”
r /> “You just said he’s insubordinate.”
“It won’t wash on the Hill. You know that. You want him fired, the President just has to ask for his resignation.”
But that wouldn’t wash on the Hill either, Liz thought, and it seemed immediately clear that Marcus Cabot wouldn’t be much help. She hadn’t really expected that he would be. Cabot was too soft.
“We can handle it entirely from this end if you want.”
“Probably a good idea. If it became known at Langley that I had a hand in this, it might look like spite. Can’t have that,” Cabot demurred. “Bad for morale.”
“Okay.” Liz stood, and so did Cabot. “Thanks for coming down.”
Two minutes later she was back in her chair, her feet propped up on a drawer. This was going so well. Exactly as planned. I’m getting good at this....
“So?”
“This was published in a Washington paper today,” Golovko said. It was seven in the evening in Moscow, the sky outside dark and cold as only Moscow could get cold. That he had to report on something in an American newspaper did not warm the night very much.
Andrey Il’ych Narmonov took the translation from the First Deputy Chairman and read through it. Finished, he tossed the two pages contemptuously onto his desk top. “What rubbish is this?”
“Holtzman is a very important Washington reporter. He has access to very senior officials in the Fowler Administration.”
“And he probably writes a good deal of fiction, just as our reporters do.”
“We think not. We think the tone of the report indicates that he was given the data by someone in the White House.”
“Indeed?” Narmonov pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, cursing the cold that the sudden weather change had brought with it. If there was anything for which he did not have time, it was an illness, even a minor one. “I don’t believe it. I’ve told Fowler personally about the difficulty with the missile destruction, and the rest of this political twaddle is just that. You know that I’ve had to deal with uniformed hotheads—those fools who went off on their own in the Baltic region. So do the Americans. It’s incredible to me that they should take such nonsense seriously. Surely their intelligence services tell them the truth—and the truth is what I’ve told Fowler myself!”
“Comrade President.” Golovko paused for a beat. Comrade was too hard a habit to break. “Just as we have political elements who distrust the Americans, so they have elements who continue to hate and distrust us. Changes between us have come and gone very rapidly. Too rapidly for many to assimilate. I find it plausible that there might be American political officials who believe this report.”
“Fowler is vain, he is far weaker as a man than he would like people to know, he is personally insecure—but he is not a fool, and only a fool would believe this, particularly after meeting me and talking with me.” Narmonov handed the translation back to Golovko.
“My analysts believe otherwise. We think it possible that the Americans really believe this.”
“Thank them for their opinion. I disagree.”
“If the Americans are getting a report saying this, it means that they have a spy within our government.”
“I have no doubt that they have such people—after all, we do also, do we not?—but I do not believe it in this case. The reason is simple, no spy could have reported something which I did not say, correct? I have not said this to anyone. It is not true. What do you do to a spy who lies to us?”
“My President, it is not something we look upon kindly,” Golovko assured him.
“That is doubtless true of the Americans also.” Narmonov paused for a moment, then smiled. “Do you know what this could be?”
“We are always open to ideas.”
“Think like a politician. This could easily be a sign of some sort of power play within their government. Our involvement would then be merely incidental. ”We have heard that there
Golovko thought about that. “We have heard that there is—that Ryan, their Deputy Director, is unloved by Fowler. . . .”
“Ryan, ah, yes, I remember him. A worthy adversary, Sergey Nikolay’ch?”
“He is that.”
“And an honorable one. He gave his word to me that one time, and he kept his word.”
Definitely something a politician would remember, Golovko thought.
“Why are they unhappy with him?” Narmonov asked.
“Reportedly a clash of personalities.”
“That I can believe. Fowler and his vanity.” Narmonov held up his hands. “There you have it. Perhaps I might have made a good intelligence analyst?”
“The finest,” Golovko agreed. He had to agree, of course. Moreover, his President had said something that his own people had not examined fully. He left the august presence of his chief of state with a troubled expression. The defection of KGB Chairman Gerasimov a few years ago—an event that Ryan had himself engineered, if Golovko read the signs correctly—had inevitably crippled KGB’s overseas operations. Six complete networks in America had collapsed, along with eight more in Western Europe. Replacement networks were only now beginning to take their place. That left major holes in KGB’s ability to penetrate American government operations. The only good news was that they were starting to read a noteworthy fraction of American diplomatic and military communications—as much as four or five percent in a good month. But code-breaking was no substitute for penetration agents. There was something very strange going on here. Golovko didn’t know what it was. Perhaps his President was right. Perhaps this was merely the ripples from an internal power-play. But it could also have been something else. The fact that Golovko didn’t know what it was did not help matters.
“Just made it back in time,” Clark said. “Did they sweep the wheels today?”
“If it’s Wednesday. . . .” Jack replied. Every week his official car was examined for possible electronic bugs.
“Can we talk about it, then?”
“Yes.”
“Chavez was right. It’s easy, just a matter of dropping a nice little mordida on the right guy. The regular maintenance man will be taken sick that day, the two of us get tapped to service the 747. I get to play maid, scrub the sinks and the crappers, replenish the bar, the whole thing. You’ll have the official evaluation on your desk tomorrow, but the short version is, yeah, we can do it, and the likelihood of discovery is minimal.”
“You know the downside?”
“Oh, yeah. Major International Incident. I get early retirement. That’s okay, Jack. I can retire whenever I want. It would be a shame for Ding, though. That kid is showing real promise.”
“And if you’re discovered?”
“I say in my best Spanish that some Japanese reporter asked me to do it, and paid me a lot of pesos to do it. That’s the hook, Jack. They won’t make a big deal about it if they think it’s one of their own. Looks too bad, loss of face and all that.”
“John, you’re a tricky, underhanded son of a bitch.”
“Just want to serve my country, sir.” Clark started laughing. A few minutes later he took the turn. “Hope we’re not too late.”
“It was a long one at the office.”
“I saw that thing in the paper. What are we doing about it?”
“The White House will be talking to Holtzman, telling him to lay off.”
“Somebody dipping his pen in the company inkwell?”
“Not that we know about, same with the FBI.”
“Camouflage for the real story, eh?”
“Looks that way.”
“What bullshit,” Clark observed as he pulled into the parking place.
It turned out that Carol was in her home, cleaning up after dinner. The Zimmer family Christmas tree was up. Clark began ferrying the presents in. Jack had picked some of them up in England; Clark and Nancy Cummings had helped to wrap them—Ryan was hopeless at wrapping presents. Unfortunately, they’d walked into the house just in time to hear crying.
??
?No problem, Dr. Ryan,” one of the kids told him in the kitchen. “Jackie had a little accident. Mom’s in the bathroom.”
“Okay.” Ryan walked that way, careful to announce his presence.
“Okay, okay, come in,” Carol said.
Jack saw Carol leaning over the bathtub. Jacqueline was crying in the piteous monotone of a child who knows that she has misbehaved. There was a pile of kids’ clothes on the tile floor, and the air positively reeked of crushed flowers. “What happened?”
“Jackie think my perfume is same as her toy perfume, pour whole bottle.” Carol looked up from scrubbing.
Ryan lifted the little girl’s shirt. “You’re not kidding.”
“Whole bottle—expensive! Bad girl!”
Jacqueline’s crying increased in pitch. She’d probably had her backside smacked already. Ryan was just as happy not to have seen that. He disciplined his own kids as necessary, but didn’t like to see other people smack theirs. That was one of several weak spots in his character. Even after Carol lifted her youngest out of the tub, the smell had not gone away.
“Wow, it is pretty strong, isn’t it?” Jack picked Jackie up, which didn’t mute her crying very much.
“Eighty dollar!” Carol said, but her anger was now gone. She had ample experience with small children, and knew that they were expected to do mischief. Jack carried the little one out to the living room. Her attitude changed when she saw the stack of presents.
“You too nice,” her mother noted.
“Hey, I just happened to be doing some shopping, okay?”
“You no come here Christmas, you have you own family.”
“I know, Carol, but I can’t let Christmas go by without stopping in.” Clark came in with a final pile. These were his, Jack saw. Good man, Clark.
“We have nothing for you,” Carol Zimmer said.
“Sure you do. Jackie gave me a good hug.”
“What about me?” John asked.
Jack handed Jackie over. It was funny. Quite a few men were wary of John Clark on the basis of looks alone, but the Zimmer kids thought of him as a big teddy bear. A few minutes later they drove away.