“Yeah?” He looked again at the photographs, and at the two men with Fang and Noortman. Something nudged at his memory and he chased it down, a report in from another field agent a week, ten days before. He looked up at Arlene. “What were they doing in London?”
“Passing through.”
“Where were they headed?”
She looked a little embarrassed. “I lost them at Heathrow.”
“Come on.”
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“How do you mean?”
She pulled out a Visa card and held it out. “My company card was refused at the ticket counter.”
He took it automatically. “You’re kidding me.”
She shook her head.
He could feel his face getting red, the curse of his mother’s Scandinavian ancestry. He hit the intercom button with unnecessary force. “Marie? Get Arlene a new Visa card, will you? Ready for her by the time she leaves. No credit limit and no expiration date. My authorization, priority one. If you have any trouble with accounting, route it through miscellaneous operating expenses, Asian desk.”
Marie kept the books for his office and knew as well as he did that his operating expenses were maxed out, but she didn’t even consider arguing. “Okay, boss.”
“Thanks,” Arlene said. “I was able to see where they were going.”
“The Koreans? Where?”
“Moscow.”
“Moscow?” Hugh said. “Moscow, Russia?”
“It wasn’t Moscow, Idaho.”
“And this was in- What day was the bombing?”
“October fifth. Why?”
“No reason,” he said, and added with real feeling, “Dammitall, any-way.
She knew what he meant. “Yeah. I tried to bribe their names out of the ticket agent, but I must not have had enough money. She called them Smith and Jones.”
“Ha-ha,” Hugh said.
“Yeah. She tapped the photos. ”I don’t have anything to back me up here, Hugh, but I’ve got a nasty feeling about these two guys. I think they did it.“
“What?” Hugh said, but he already knew.
“I think they’re the ones who set the bomb on Soi Cowboy.”
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
HUGH ARRANGED FOR ARLENE to dictate her report in full, had it transcribed, and the next morning presented himself at the office of the director. He was shown in almost immediately. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency served at the pleasure of the president of the United States. Appointees in the past had run the gamut of ability from intelligent, experienced bureaucrat with time served either in one of the services or the agency itself to clueless sycophant with deep pockets, the better to give large campaign donations.
The current occupant of the big office had some pretence to experience, having been deputy director during the last Republican administration, but he was also a very rich man who had contributed heavily to the reelection of the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and he tended to trim the sails of his agency to a course somewhere between political expediency and effective operations. His employees made ruthless use of his ready access to the Oval Office and largely ignored him the rest of the time. He was perfectly aware of this, and so long as they made him look good he was willing to tolerate it, generating an atmosphere of mutually assured disdain.
Hugh’s view was more cautious. This was a man who had survived the fallout of 9/11, which had rained down a great deal of grief on the intelligence community in the form of departmental inquiries, internal investigations, and congressional hearings, not to mention the scrutiny of the press and the wrath of the public. The director had the ear of a president who to all appearances was about to be reelected by a respectable majority. Further, he had served four terms in the House of Representatives in administrations both red and blue, during which he had made connections he maintained to the present day over a series of breakfast meetings. At these breakfasts he presided over a judicious distribution of titillating tidbits of information concerning the personal peccadilloes of various heads of state. If that wasn’t enough, he played tennis with the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee twice a week when they were both in town.
No, what the director lacked in experience and ability he more than made up for in moxie. Hugh treated him with a deference he kept sincere enough to allay any suspicions the director might have that Hugh was actually more in charge of his section of the agency than the director was. In his turn the director appreciated Hugh’s intelligence, ability, and tact. They both got a lot more done that way.
“Hugh,” the director said as Hugh came in, and stepped around his desk to give Hugh a warm handshake and a hearty slap on the shoulder. “I haven’t seen you since you got back. I read your report, of course. Well done, well done, indeed.”
In truth it had been a nightmare of a trip, thirty briefings in FBI field offices around the nation in fourteen days, the last of which had been Anchorage. He’d written the report on the plane home, so it was nice to know it was coherent. “A series of briefings on the Asian political scene to other agencies merely, sir,” Hugh said.
“A dispensing of information, rather than a gathering of it?” the director said with an avuncular twinkle. Hugh agreed to this without wincing, and they disposed themselves respectively in an overstuffed couch and a matching easy chair, both in soft brown leather that was as comfortable as it had been costly, and chatted about various matters while they waited for the coffee to be brought. When it arrived the director poured, not forgetting to add cream and sugar to Hugh’s cup. No small measure of his success was due to his capacity for remembering details.
“Well, what can I do for you today, Hugh, my boy?”
No one called Hugh “my boy,” not even his own parents. Especially not his own parents. “I’ve just had a report, sir, from one of our operatives. It concerns the October bombing in Pattaya Beach.”
The paternal attentiveness on the director’s face didn’t change. “Tell me all about it, my boy.”
Hugh did, beginning with a recap of the experts’ best reconstruction of the bomb itself, going on to the death and destruction of which it had been the direct and proximate cause, the body count, with American casualties a separate category, and ended with Arlene’s sighting of the four men in the beach-side cafe.
“Arlene Harte?” the director said. “The Associated Press reporter?” The director kept close tabs on the Washington press corps.
“Retired,” Hugh said.
“She’s still a reporter.”
“A column for an international travel magazine,” Hugh said. “Reporters are by definition trained observers, sir. This wouldn’t be the first time the agency has made use of their skills, and I have every confidence in Harte. We’ve had her on the payroll for some time now, freelance, and she has brought us a great deal of quality product.”
He hated using the word “product” but it was the current director’s determination to scrub the intelligence vocabulary clean of anything that might give off the even slightest aroma of actual spying. Hugh supposed it was marginally better than humint, agency speak for human source intelligence.
“Still, my boy, a reporter,” the director said, a little reprovingly.
Hugh inclined his head, acknowledging the indisputable fact of Arlene’s chosen profession, and moved on. “Harte tailed the two Koreans she observed meeting with Fang and Noortman to London, where she further observed them boarding a plane for Moscow.”