And now, he hoped, so would be Anthony Merriweather’s career.
“Did Moscow acknowledge everything okay?”
“Yep,” Healy said. “Hopefully we’ll have something today. God, I hope it’s today.”
So did the DDI. All the coincidental data — the tape, Vishkov’s presence, disappearance of key Cubans — was leading directly to the conclusion that none of them truly wanted to accept, much less deal with. But that they would, regardless of their boss’s read on the situation.
“Now it’s back to desk days,” Drummond said, referring to his time as a “desk” in the Intelligence Directorate’s Soviet section. “You and me.”
Healy took one of the doughnuts from the box that had been picked up on a junk-food run by one of his night-watch people. He knew he didn’t need it. Neither did his waist. “So we’re assuming that it’s real.”
“Have to.” Drummond ignored the pastries and took a sip from his Diet Coke. “Now, two things to be done. Response is one, but that’s not ours to worry about right now.” He knew Bud would be doing enough of that. “Our thing is to find it.”
“Forget the old haystack comparison,” the DDO said, taking a big bite of the soft, sugary maple bar. “We’ve got forty-four thousand square miles to play with.”
Too true. Also too self-defeating to ponder for any length of time, Drummond reasoned. They had to go with what they could do. “What about Vishkov?”
“What about him? I agree that it’s a good bet he’s somewhere near the thing, but where is he?” The Agency had been unable to pinpoint the location of the apparently imprisoned physicist, mostly because to do such had not been a high priority until now.
There was a gentle knock at the door, which opened a second later. “Sir.”
“Hi, Sam. Late night,” Drummond said. “You can skip my office tonight.”
“Okay,” Garrity acknowledged. “What about Director Merriweather?”
Drummond looked down to the left of his desk to see if the security detail had come through already to take the burn bags. His basket was empty. “Yeah, you can do his.”
“Fine.” Great!
Healy waited for the soundproof door to close completely. “He sure isn’t old Harry,” he observed, passing judgment on the new man’s somewhat aloof demeanor. “Heard anything about him?”
“Enjoying retirement, I hear,” the DDI answered, recalling Langley’s former janitor of the seventh floor. King of it, some had said. The old guy had come with the building in ‘63, making him the longest continuously employed person on staff. That said something about longevity in a town where jobs were passed out and taken away depending on which way the political winds were blowing. “Just running his boat around.”
“That’s me in a few,” Healy said. He had done just a short stint in the Navy in the sixties, though he would say that was too long. The confinement of sea duty hadn’t agreed with him, but the open ocean did. A sixty-foot sloop had caught his eye a year back, and he was well on his way to procuring it for the day when he hung up his cloak and dagger.
“So where is Vishkov?” Drummond asked the air, bringing the conversation back on course.
“The only thing we have on the prison population comes from our exile contacts, and their folks on the island can’t be contacted now.”
Drummond frowned crookedly at that. “I don’t know if that would help anyway. Vishkov can’t be with a general prison population, even in one of the gulags.” The Communist regime, despite attempts to deny its existence, had operated several political prisons for decades. Only the media seemed to fall for the denials completely, particularly after Fidel himself gave a guided tour of what he said had once been a political reeducation facility. The Agency knew better. Soon the world would also, the DDI hoped.
“What about Paredes?” Healy asked and suggested at the same time.
“I don’t know. I thought of that, too, but the security…”
“If anyone knows, at least anyone we have access to, it would have to be Ojeda and his staff.”
The DDI rubbed his chin, a single finger reaching up to massage the stubble above his lip. “I chewed Anthony out about the reality of secure com links. This would push what he did into the minor infraction box on the scorecard.” It was part Murphy’s Law and part realization that the least opportune time for the worst to happen was likely the time it would. “But it may be our only way.”
Healy nodded. “I’ll get in touch with him. You going over to the White House?”
“Yep. Leaving in a few.”
“See you back here.”
The DDO left quickly. Time might be critical, or it might not. The problem really was that they had no idea what sort of schedule they were on to resolve this. It was still a possibility, even though they thought it probable, and that was somehow removing a sense of immediacy from the situation. A man standing with a loaded pistol in front of you got much more attention if you knew the gun was loaded. Is this one? the DDI wondered, almost afraid to accept it. Nukes were passé these days, at least to the press and the public. The Cold War was over. Pantex was taking bombs apart now, he knew, referring to the Department of Energy’s former weapons-fabrication plant in Texas. One weapon? Just one? Was one stray nuke, though potentially devastating, a real threat? Ask the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He wondered if they really were taking this much too lightly. He wondered that, and he suddenly felt very much the way he had at the height of some of the more recent periods of tension between the former Soviet Union and his country. At those times he had decided that, knowing he’d never make it home to his wife and little boy if a first strike was launched from halfway around the world, he’d simply join the Agency’s bank of communications antennae on the roof and watch as man-made suns came to life in the heavens. Of course, he would never have time to register the visual images. He would simply not be. It was actually a very agreeable way to go, if one had to, akin to being shot in the back of the head. You never hear it coming, the DDI thought, afraid that the same reality on a grander scale might be but a breath away.
He pondered that all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, even though, just after entering the GW Parkway, the musing began to scare him half to death.
FBI Director Gordon Jones slipped his glasses off and tossed them haphazardly on his desk, letting his head fall back against his chair. Twenty hours, eighteen of those on the job, had been his day so far — and his night. Things were supposed to slow down once you reached fifty, he thought. Weren’t old people supposed to need less sleep? Now would be the perfect time for that benefit of aging to manifest itself.
It had been a bad couple of days in a generally bad year. The agent killed the previous day—Or was it two days ago? — had brought to three the number of his people killed so far that year. He hated himself for thinking of it in terms of “so far.” It was sheer lunacy. Good people dying for doing their job. The stress of that reality, combined with what was now partially on his plate, was pushing his endurance to the limit.