“Yeah,” Sullivan said, wiping his mouth and eyes with the back of his hand. He leaned to one side, aiming for the doorjamb, but missed. Art caught him, and lowered him to the porch floor.
“Take it easy. You hurt?”
Sullivan looked up at Art, his picture of the dark figure fuzzy. “I knew it couldn’t be the guys, ‘cause I heard a woman. Where…?”
“Right here,” Frankie said, stepping closer.
“Yeah. I mean, I thought they might come back, so I had to, you know…” His face went blank, the alcohol and terror combining to turn his stomach into a cauldron of boiling fluids. He rolled to the right and vomited heavily, sitting back up after a few dry heaves. “Sorry.”
“I think whatever you filled your belly with is better off on the porch,” Art observed. “Did you see who did this?”
“No. No.” Sullivan spit the taste from his mouth. “I found it like this. Man, I don’t want to end up like that guy at Clampett’s.”
“How do we know it was them?” Frankie asked her partner.
“We don’t, but this fits too neatly. Better roll a forensic team out here and get LAPD to string us a crime scene. I’m going to try and sober him up a little.”
Ten minutes later the first of two LAPD units turned the comer. One officer began stringing “banana tape” to cordon off the house, as the other started his own report that would explain why the Bureau was in charge of this scene although in LAPD jurisdiction. The first forensic team would not arrive for another half hour, at which time Art hoped there would be something worthwhile found that they could use to identify and locate the perpetrators. Leads, after all, did not just walk up and bite you. Well, almost never.
“George,” the elderly woman called from behind the police line.
Art noticed that Sullivan, after two cups of straight black provided by a neighbor, was still a bit wobbly. “I’ll help you.” They were at the end of the driveway a few seconds later.
“Mrs. Carroll.”
“George, what happened? I saw the police cars. Are you all right?” Her tiny hand reached across the police line and touched his chin. She knew what part of his problem was, just like she could tell when her late husband stopped off at the bar on his way home from work.
“I’m okay. Someone broke in, that’s all. I came home and found it.”
“Broke in?” Her hand recoiled from its comforting touch and pressed against her lips. “Oh, dear. I should have called, but I wasn’t sure. My stars!”
Art’s sensibilities told him not to read past what had been said to what he wanted to hear, but… “Mrs. Carroll, is it?”
“Louise Carroll,” she affirmed, her eyes falling upon his ID as he held it out. FBI?
“Did you see something?”
“Well, yes, but it didn’t seem like an emergency, so I didn’t want to bother the police.”
Art’s head nodded acceptance. “I understand. Can you tell me what you saw?”
“Yes,” she began. “There were two men. They got out of a very nice car early this morning, right after Good Morning America started. I watch it every morning. They walked around the corner, and then I didn’t see them anymore. I guess I didn’t see them leave because I started my wash for the day.”
“That’s very helpful,” Art told her, easing into the questioning. “Can you describe either of the men?”
She looked downward momentarily, thinking carefully back the few hours. “They were well dressed. Both wore sport coats, but no ties, I believe. I think they were both Mexican, and one had a very thin hairline and a bit of a waist. He was the driver. The other had short, curly hair— it was black — and a mustache. It was quite a distance away, so I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”
Art could have kissed her. He looked to Sullivan, and, by his expression, he knew that the men Mrs. Carroll had described were the men who had popped Portero. “Mrs. Carroll, I can’t tell you enough how helpful what you just gave us is. Extremely helpful.”
“I’m a neighborhood-watch chairperson, so I try to keep an eye open for strangers,” she explained. “I just wish I’d called the police right then, darn it!”
“I’d like to have my partner talk to you to write down what you’ve told me, if that would be all right?” Art’s head dipped slightly as he finished the request.
“Of course, but would you like this also?” Mrs. Carroll asked, holding a small slip of notepaper out to the FBI agent.
“What is this?” Art asked.
“The license number of the car.”
This time, the rules and all else be damned, Art Jefferson bent forward and gave the senior citizen a much-deserved peck on the cheek.
They were high-tech dispatchers, directing the movement of billions of dollars of equipment thousands of miles from where they sat. When a customer requested a move, the technicians at the Consolidated Space Operations Center in Colorado Springs carried it out through a series of computer commands that were beamed up to a Milstar communications relay satellite that “bounced” the commands to the intended recipient. Sometimes several bounces were required between the ground and two or three relay satellites before the commands could be acted upon.
The customers, almost exclusively the CIA and the DOD, then were free to use their people to control the activities of the newly positioned satellites and to interpret whatever data was retrieved. CSOC’s job was done at that point, until another move from any planned orbital path was required. It was all very routine.
“Goddammit!” the senior watch technician swore, his section’s routine broken by the single flashing light on his console. He switched his intercom to the channel for the Air Force duty officer for his watch, a two-star general.
“What’s the problem?”
“We’ve got a reactive rotation on number 5604,” the technician reported, referring to the twenty-ton KH-12 just beginning its pass over western Cuba. “As soon as NPIC started shootin’ pictures, we got a warning.”
The National Photographic Interpretation Center, a complex of windowless cubes on the grounds of the Washington Navy Yard, was the arm of the CIA and other governmental intelligence agencies that collected and analyzed imagery from the array of reconnaissance satellites orbiting the globe. Their actions this morning, though quite ordinary, had initiated something unexpected. More than that, actually, something was terribly wrong with number 5604.
“How bad?” the major general, located a hundred feet away in a separate section of CSOC’s modest facility, asked.
The technician checked his status panel for the satellite. “Bad. It’s off eighteen degrees on the lateral, and we’re getting indications of an end-to-end shift.”
“Damn.” The KH-12 was now pointed uselessly off to one side, a problem that could have been dealt with had the satellite not also begun a slow end-over-end spin. Though only minute in relative terms — an expected revolution every three hours, the sensors were showing — it effectively put the bird out of commission. “Any ideas on what happened?”
The technician stared furiously at his status panel, which, other than the attitude and motion-warning indicators, gave him not a clue as to why the malfunction had occurred. “Not a light to tell me shit, sir.” A civilian, the technician was a bit more free to color his language around the staff officer. His thirty years of government service didn’t hurt, either. “My best guess is the stabilizer for the real-time sensors. NPIC was starting to shoot some video, doing a half-degree lens sweep, when the bird started to tilt. I’ll bet the dampers failed, and the lens assembly locked up. When it spun, the bird just spun with it.”