The DCI looked at the DDI, pouting uncertainty and caution. “If you think it’s the best course, it’s your op.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“All right.” The director felt some sense of relief knowing that DONNER was soon going to come out. “Who’s going to receive the last message? Logan will be on the Vinson I presume.”
“I’ll brief the station chief on the whole thing. I think having him receive and relay it to us will be the best.”
Herb thought of the time. It was 11:45 on the East Coast. He did some quick addition to figure the time in Italy. “Maybe we should move up the warning to the station. I’d hate to have something happen where DONNER would have to leave sooner than we planned, and Logan not be in position.”
“Then let’s notify Rome as soon as we’re done here,” Drummond proposed. The others agreed.
“Good. Anything else?” Landau asked.
The DDI and DDO signaled that there was nothing, and the meeting ended. Everything would now begin. Alone in his office Herb Landau took the DONNER file from his safe. He wanted to read once again about the man who had done so much for a country he knew little about, and would now be called upon to finally turn his back on the land of his birth in one last act of treachery against it.
It was just a fact of life, Francine Aguirre told herself. Her questioning of the desk clerk and motel manager — their twenty-seventh so far — had taken nearly twenty minutes because of the language barrier. L.A. being the melting pot that it was, the agents had to be prepared for communication difficulties. Francine—‘Frankie’—could joust in her native Spanish with the best of them, but Korean was as foreign to her as any language other than English was to her partner, Thom Danbrook. She knew it had to be amusing to any spectator who might have seen the two of them writing the words out and using hand gestures to get their messages across.
“Thank God this is the right time for blue jeans,” Frankie said. She had ‘graduated’ out of business suits three years before and now wore casual street clothes nine days out of ten. Court days were different. She hated them. “Can you chew quieter?” she asked her partner, rubbing her foot through the Reeboks.
Thom swung the car around the comer. There was another motel down the street. “Sorry. I’ll smack softer.”
Talk about vague… So the director wanted answers fast. No, the wording was needed. There was no elaboration. Art found that puzzling. The director was pushing him from three thousand miles away. Someone had to be pushing hard. The boss was a decent guy. His message said more than its wording implied. Something was up.
The seventy agents had so far struck out, even looking for just a sighting of any one of the three men. It was early still, though, Art kept reminding himself.
He looked around his office, forgetting the investigation for a moment. In a way he wanted to be out of there. Back at the Hilton there was activity, decreasing though it was, and thus more to occupy his body. He could do things there. That would occupy his mind. The latter rarely came alone for Art. Lately he had had to keep his body busy to check the endless wandering his mind wanted to do.
But self-discipline was a goal of Art’s, as suggested by his shrink. He straightened up in the chair to focus on the matters at hand. Eddie could handle things at the Hilton. Art was going to review all that was known…from the top.
Dick Logan, the economic liaison officer at the United States embassy in Rome, was packed in under ten minutes. As a habit he kept a bag packed except for his everyday essentials. What he felt would be best described as overwhelming apprehension. He didn’t consider himself a chicken, but on his best day he knew that he was basically a paper-pushing case officer with a standard cover assignment. He had all the training: surveillance, counter surveillance, personal combat (hah!), and all the other skills, whose mastery was supposed to keep him alive.
Behind a desk. The pay was good and the job was interesting. Those were pluses, he told himself. And DONNER. His agent. His man, insofar as one man could control another. As scared as he was about choppering into a hostile country — scenes from Apocalypse Now kept flashing through his mind — he was more excited that he was finally going to meet the agent face-to-face. Only the chief of station years ago had met the man. It would be an honor. DONNER was not the mystical agent of spy novels; he didn’t reveal top government or military secrets, or give any high-technology items over for security. His traitorous deeds were simple, yet hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, mostly Americans, owed their lives to this man.
And all he did was give us pictures. Logan knew it wasn’t as cut and dry as that. There had been a long road, one that DONNER had traveled alone. He wondered what gave a man the strength to live day after day with the knowledge that death at the hands of his countrymen was but a slip of the tongue away. Men, and women, of all nationalities were spies, all with their own reasons. Some were motivated by financial considerations, pure and simple. Others wanted to fight conflicting ideologies and feel the power that came from never being known to those they betrayed. Logan believed that a good number of spies were motivated by a sense of vengeance. He wondered often what motivated DONNER, trying not to classify him in any of the molds. The best he could do was try to keep an open mind, being aware that his agent’s motives might be less than honorable. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know that
Logan plopped the native fedora on his head before leaving the office. He left the key with the desk officer before exiting the embassy. His car was in the courtyard and he would drive himself to the airfield. On the way he planned to think through all the questions he would ask DONNER, sure that some would seem rather strange to him. Maybe not. After all, he was a human being, not just a code name, and Logan couldn’t care less about the debriefing the agent would surely go through in the months to come. The Agency diehards could handle that. Logan wanted to know the man.
There are three distinct sections of the White House. What tourists see, at least partly, is the center section, where official receptions and dinners take place. The private living quarters of the first family are also located there, on a higher floor. The west wing houses the power center of the executive branch, namely, the Oval Office. Offices and working spaces for the president’s advisers are also in this wing, along with the Cabinet room. At the opposite end, just past the president’s private theater, lies the east wing. Here his military advisers maintain offices and a pseudo command post.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept a desk there, though he felt more at home in the Pentagon. General Granger found it an inconvenience at times that he was tied so closely with the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address. He was a soldier, and the nation’s top military commander, which complemented and conflicted with each other. In his heart he longed for his turf: the battlefield, or at least where soldiers were. Like most professional soldiers he found the thought of war infuriating. To prevent war was the military’s premiere reason for existence. It was that that gave him purpose in the midst of politicians.
His phone buzzed. “Granger.. Sure, come on over.”
Bud walked through the general’s door a few minutes later. He sat in one of the high-back colonials that Granger had ‘transferred’ from his old Colorado Springs office, but he couldn’t get comfortable and ended up standing behind it.