But he had to keep going. The tape from L.A. would be there within the hour, and there was a Bureau translator waiting to give it a close scrutiny. From there it would go to Technical Services for further analysis. Both written and verbal transcripts would then be given to the director so that he could deliver the same to the President in the morning.
Morning. That was just hours away. Jones had a spare change of clothes for occasions just like this, though he had only needed them once in his two years at the helm of the Bureau. They were definitely going to get a second use before the sun was fully up.
His head was swimming now. There’s no way. He had to get some rest. It would look great if the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation collapsed while briefing the President. Jones’s office had no place to he down; he had removed the couches to make room for some fine chairs given to the Bureau by Scotland Yard as a gesture of appreciation for assistance in a multiple-murder investigation some months before. There was a long, soft couch in the lounge a floor below. Great! The director sleeping in the coffee room!
But first he had to check on the status of the tape.
“Operations.” There would only be two agents on duty in the Bureau’s operations center at this time of the morning.
“This is the director. Any word on the delivery from L.A.?”
There was a delay while the agent checked his log. “Not yet. There is an OpRep from Miami.”
That would have to be the first operations report from the wiretap team. “Any flag on it?”
“No, sir.” A flag — nothing more than a UID (Urgent-Immediate Delivery) stamp on the report’s cover sheet — would indicate that the OpRep needed the director’s quick attention. Such a flag would also tell Jones that the tap team had gotten information directly related to the CIA leak they were hoping to identify. Without such, and considering that the tap was less than a day old, it was probably no more than an initial report of the operation’s beginning.
“I’ll grab that in the morning,” Jones said. “Secure it until then. I’ll be in the lounge.”
The director hung up and fiddled with the array of buttons on his watch, setting the alarm to go off in three-and-a-half hours. A full night for some old geezer, he thought, amused at the fact that his state of tiredness might somehow be indicative of his hidden youth.
His memory made him special.
At the age of six, he memorized the capital cities of all fifty states, and ten years later earned his summer money performing “mind magic” at the county fair in the rural Oklahoma town he grew up in. For Patrick Tunney it was second nature. People said things; he remembered them. People did things; he remembered what. People committed things to paper; he stored visual images for later recall.
The last aspect of his amazing talent had helped him get into the University of Oklahoma, and later the Central Intelligence Agency.
He had already burned the twenty-eight names into his brain, in both English and Cyrillic characters, though he was certain if he found them, they would be in the latter. After that simple exercise, which he accomplished using an indescribable form of numerical pneumonics he had somehow stumbled upon as a child, he joined his fellow archivists for the short trip from the embassy to the Defense Ministry annex north of the Moscow Ring Road.
It was a beautiful morning, the sun low in the southeastern sky, and the few wisps of clouds high enough to catch the light and turn it into shades of the rainbow only God could have imagined. Truly beautiful, Tunney observed, knowing he would remember this sight forever.
He closed the door behind as always. There was little need for obvious security. Anything of importance in the Director of Central Intelligence’s Office was alarmed. To accidentally trip one of the sensors would bring a contingent of armed security officers, and would result in a night of explaining and paperwork.
But Sam Garrity knew from the minute he entered the office that this time would be as simple as all the others. It was sitting right there, after all. For the taking. No effort at all. The spy in Garrity smiled at the simplicity of it. The criminal in him proceeded to do it.
He walked to the director’s desk, a generally neat workspace that was not his responsibility, and laid his clipboard down. Next he picked up the blank legal pad sitting square in the middle and tore the top three sheets off, which he then clipped under the stack of cleaning requests on his clipboard. With that, it was done, except for that which he would do later.
That and, of course, the spit-and-polish shine he would give the director’s office.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MASTERS
“Son of a bitch,” Antonelli commented.
“Maj, I’m gettin’ tired of this nuke shit,” Quimpo commented. “I signed on to smoke bad guys, not play H-bomb.”
It was true, Sean thought. Delta’s mission, aside from having changed in the last ten minutes, had evolved over the previous years to one beyond the mere rescuing of hostages. They had to adapt. They had to excel. The rescue aboard the 747 a year earlier had been familiar in one respect and alien in many others. This thing was beyond even that.
“So what’s the plan?” Captain Buxton inquired.
“First we clear away from these boneheads,” Sean responded, motioning with his eyes to the trailer accommodations where the Cubans had finally gone to sleep. “Their Air Force’s problem again. Then we run some contingencies through.”
“Mission?” Buxton probed. He was a leader of men and, therefore, wanted to know what the goals of any action were before thinking on the operational details.
Sean gave a quick rundown of the scenario as envisioned by the desk jockeys. “Simple, boys.”
The collective stares were not accepting of the mock analysis. “And nebulous,” Goldfarb added.
Sean couldn’t argue with that characterization with little to go on at the moment. It was akin to knowing you were going to fire at a target, but no one had yet revealed what the target looked like or where it was. Or even if it was. “First the spooks have to do some digging to give us an aim point,” Graber said. “Can’t very well go around grabbing just anybody’s nuke.”
“After we grab it, can we shove it up old Fidel’s you-know-what?” Jones wondered aloud, his strict Baptist upbringing coming back to temper his descriptive wordage.
“Unfortunately…” Sean heard the Pave Hawk approaching. “Captain, we’re going to need some stuff from Wally World. I anticipate that this will need to be done fast and in the dark.”
“Quiet, too,” Buxton added. “What do we do with it once we have it?”
“First it has to be found, then we have to do our end, Captain,” Sean said. “Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way first.” He didn’t say that he’d been asking himself the same thing since the colonel’s call.
“Those things scare me,” Buxton admitted.
“Scares everybody,” the major agreed. “They’re supposed to. MAD, remember.”
“Good name,” Buxton commented. Bad idea.
Joe Anderson followed his escort from the west parking lot adjacent to Old Executive. The Secret Service agent had first validated his identification by pure visual recognition, and a second agent did a more thorough check of Joe’s driver’s license and Social Security number before he was led to the northwest corner of the West Wing. He had been there before. He had been many places. And it appeared he was going to add one new stamp to his mental passport.