CHAPTER NINE
PARRY AND THRUST
“You’re going over when, Thursday next week?” Bud asked.
“Leaving late Wednesday,” Secretary of State James Coventry answered. He lifted his briefcase onto the coffee table in the NSA’s office and opened it. Pieces of furniture meant for more congenial purposes had been warped into usage as map tables, surrogate desks during crises, and, most commonly, as feeding troughs for the assorted visiting non-dignitaries. Bud’s dark cherry model was piled with stacks of briefing and position papers on the proposed retargeting agreements. “Here,” Coventry said, unloading another stack for the wide-eyed NSA.
“Thanks,” Bud said, running his hand over his head to the back of his neck, where he pressed tightly on the muscles. A quick neck rotation completed the attempt at relief.
“This is everything I have on the British side of this. There’s some interesting stuff going back to parliamentary discussions about the initial Polaris deployment.” Coventry was well known for his level of preparedness, a process he seemingly accomplished with ease. Bud knew better. The man worked his ass off, rarely relying solely on his staff to research important matters. As such, he expected that everyone else would be as prepared. It was motivating, and, at times, maddening.
“You want me to look it over?” It was an unnecessary question, Bud knew. But at least he could hope.
“If you could. Let me know if there’s anything you think should be—”
The NSA’s phone buzzed. He stood from the small couch and went around the desk, sitting before picking it up. “DiContino.”
“Bud, it’s Gordy. I’ve got a call you better take.” FBI Director Gordon Jones sounded out of breath.
“Sure. What is it?”
“One of my agents in Los Angeles has something you had better hear. His name’s Art Jefferson.”
Jefferson. Yeah. Bud remembered from the debriefing conferences after the Flight 422 hijacking. He was the guy in L.A. who found the person who helped the assassins and… Had a heart attack after his partner was shot. Went back to street duty. Supposed to be a pit bull when it came to investigations. “Yeah, I remember him.” Bud checked his watch. It was already after ten on the East Coast, nearing the end of another nineteen-hour day. “Urgent?”
“I’m afraid so, Bud.” Jones went very quiet. “We may have big trouble in Cuba.”
Cuba? Bud looked at the phone. The call had come in on a secure line. “What the hell is going on?”
Coventry perked up and was waved over by Bud. The NSA reached into his desk drawer and retrieved a plug-in headset for the phone. He attached it and handed it to the secretary.
“Jefferson’s on another line. I’m going to put him through.”
“Okay. I’ve got Jim Coventry here on the extension.”
“What’s up?” Coventry asked.
Cuba, Bud mouthed, for which he got an appropriate Oh, shit in response.
“Hello?”
“Jefferson? This is Bud DiContino. How is the connection?”
“Fine, sir. I’m in the Los Angeles field off—”
“Director Jones told me where you are. What is going on?”
“You’re not going to believe it.”
Five minutes later, after a call to the White House Library to soothe his doubts, Bud had no choice but to believe that which he would rather have dreamed.
Art Jefferson sealed the original cassette in a security pouch and handed it to two agents. “LAX fast. A plane is waiting.”
The investigation was no longer only the search for the murderers of a federal officer. It was now much more, though only the three agents who had heard the tape and the Deputy A-SAC were privy to what was actually happening. All the others knew was that the Melrose Hit was now something beyond even a priority-one investigation.
Art turned to the eight teams remaining around his cubicle. The rest had already been dispatched on various assignments. “Okay. We don’t have much time. We have to find the shooters, and we have to find Sullivan. You all have a picture of him, and Frankie passed around the computer sketches of our perps. But the best thing we have on them right now is the car. License is no good, but they had to get it somewhere. If it’s a stolen, there’s probably a report. No one with a new car would not miss it if it was gone this long.”
“Unless they were quieted, too,” one of the agents surmised.
“We’ll deal with that if we come to it. If it’s not a stolen, then it probably was a rental. We have a good description, so the rental agencies might give us something on that front. What we need are names. Names.” Art’s stare was motivating and somewhat frightening. “We need to know who these guys are.”
“What about the van you saw at the hit?”
“Nothing there,” Frankie answered. “Haven’t been able to locate the R.O. of it. Your thought about a dead owner not saying anything may be true on this one, but we just don’t know.”
The time was slipping away. Art knew the bureaucrats in D.C. would be playing their games, wasting time before acting, but he was not about to let that happen here. He had heard the tape. It was real to him. Let them debate its authenticity, he thought. He had better things to do. “You have your assignments. Let’s get to it.”
Within a minute the teams were gone from Art and Frankie’s area. Two would be going directly to Parker Center, headquarters of the LAPD, to begin running computer checks on stolen vehicles that might match the one they were after. The other six would be hitting the phones, contacting every car-rental company in the county and some outside of it.
Art and his partner had another avenue to follow.
“Did Bill give it to you?”
Frankie handed it over. “Quite a list. Sullivan is the consummate bar-hopper.”
The list was twenty names long, denoting every watering hole or lounge Sullivan was known to frequent by his co-workers. “We won’t make it any shorter by sitting here.” Art took the keys from the desk. “I’ll drive.”
“Good,” Frankie said. “Not my favorite thing, you know.”
“Driving?”
“No. Looking for some drunk at a bar.” Frankie put her coat on. “Did enough of that shit with my ex.”
“Well, you don’t have to take this one home with you.”
Thank God for small miracles, Aguirre thought.
“What does he want?” Merriweather asked, noting that it was ten minutes past the time he had planned to leave for his late flight down to Florida to meet with the CFS representatives.
Greg Drummond sat across the room from his boss, the long fingers of clouds backlit by the moon visible through the DCI’s seventh-floor office window. “He said it was urgent. He can make calls like this.”
The DCI grunted. He had little time for men like DiContino, and afforded even less to those lower on the political totem pole. His office, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, was a Cold War relic that could be done away with in Merriweather’s estimation.
“Pete’s back tomorrow?” The DCI inquired. Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Pete Miner, the Agency’s number-two man, was in Seoul to brief the new South Korean president on the elusive, but very real, nuclear weapons program in the North. Miner was the occupant of an equally unnecessary position in the DCI’s mind. An agency properly run could do with fewer layers at the top. Oh, well. He still had plenty of time to turn Langley’s 1950s-vintage machinery into a more efficient operation for the turn of the century.
“A week from tomorrow,” Drummond corrected. So he’s no use to you, either. “He’s stopping off in Japan after Seoul.”