“I know what you’re thinking.” Morrison’s voice took on a brittle edge. “Let’s just say even this little chat falls into the ‘Ultra Top Secret’ category.” Henna whistled softly. The government had no higher classification. In fact, several presidents had been denied access to UTS documents, most recently former President Clinton’s 1993 request to read the real file on the Roswell, New Mexico, incident. “Dick, you don’t know me well enough to know that I don’t make idle calls and that I never go outside the military unless absolutely necessary.”
Henna looked up at the Seth Thomas clock against the far wall of his office. “All right, I can give you an hour at about eleven.”
“This can’t wait. I’m calling from my car phone. We’ll be at the Hoover building in ten minutes.” Morrison hung up before Henna could protest.
Eleven minutes later, Henna’s secretary showed the two officers into his office.
Admiral Morrison’s black uniform, only a shade darker than his skin, was covered with gold braid, decorations, and a chestful of combat medals. He cut the perfect image of a sailor, hard and straight, with an imperious bearing that cracked into a smile when he strode across the room to shake Henna’s hand. Colonel Baines, in his Air Force blues, looked lusterless next to the Admiral, his uniform nearly bereft of commendations. Where Morrison was tall and good-looking, Baines was shrunken, his voice barely above an apologetic whisper. Only his eyes betrayed the shrewd mind beneath the unassuming exterior.
“Won’t you both sit down?” Henna decided his irritation of this intrusion wasn’t important. “And tell me what’s so secret and urgent.”
“Colonel?” Morrison said, indicating that Baines should take point in this conversation.
“Mr. Henna, I, ah,” Baines stammered, then paused for a moment as if to collect his thoughts. “Well, it started nearly three years ago when my office was tasked with stemming the flow of classified material streaming out of the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO is one of the most secret organizations in the government and was allowed to use their own internal security for the protection of sensitive material. They did an exemplary job for years. However, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, secrets began leaking. The Air Force has more personnel seconded to the NRO than any other branch, and we were instructed to put an end to the leaks.”
“Are we talking about another Aldrich Ames case here, like what happened at the CIA?” Henna interrupted.
“In a way, though there didn’t seem to be any political motivation behind the thefts. Our threat came from opportunistic employees using information for profit.”
“What kind of secrets are we talking about?”
“Let me give you an example of an arrest we made two years ago. A secretary for one of the NRO’s satellite photograph analysts had a husband who traded futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Using information from our Keyhole-11 spy bird, she was able to tell him that Argentina was about to suffer a severe loss of their winter wheat crop due to an insect infestation. Using that information, he made something like twenty-seven million dollars selling wheat futures short before the knowledge was made generally available.”
“So, we’re talking stock fraud?” Henna settled back in his seat. He’d been thinking that this had to do with Mercer and Harry White and was relieved that apparently it didn’t.
“In that case, yes. We brought in the Securities and Exchange Commission to handle the public side of the investigation. They made the arrest, keeping NRO’s involvement a secret. Both husband and wife will be out of prison sometime at the end of the next century.” Baines spoke more confidently now. “Anyway, that’s just one example. Other cases we found were perpetrated by military personnel, and arrests were handled through the Judge Advocate General’s office.”
Baines paused again and the FBI director knew that the colonel was getting to the heart of the matter. “Six weeks ago, a case came across our desk, one that took us until the day before yesterday to crack. We made an arrest and learned the case has much wider implications than any previous. I felt it prudent to include civilian authorities, notably your office, as soon as possible. My commanding officer agreed and subsequently briefed Admiral Morrison. It was the Admiral’s idea that you and I meet before I continue with my investigations.”
Morrison interrupted the younger man. “Some material was stolen from an archive at the NRO. The Air Force major who perpetrated the theft, Donald Rosen, was arrested last night and is looking at about five hundred years in prison for his crime. The materials were photographs that had been sent to his office by mistake. He recognized their ‘Ultra Top Secret’ classification and stole them. Heads have already rolled for the screw-up that put the pictures on his desk in the first place, but that’s an internal matter.”
Baines took up the story again. “He held on to the pictures for only a week before finding a buyer, selling them for a mere five hundred thousand dollars. You have to realize we’re talking about military secrets that could compromise a very delicate ongoing program. Their potential value is incalculable.”
Henna suddenly knew precisely where the conversation was headed. “Let me guess. You want us to handle the investigation into Undersecretary of State Prescott Hyde and determine exactly what he did with the Medusa photographs?”
He could have thrown a live cobra on the floor and gotten a more relaxed reaction from the two men.
“How much more do you know?” Morrison was the first to find his voice, though he could not hide his astonishment. He had jumped to his feet.
“Tom, sit down, for Christ’s sake,” Henna said. “Your secret is still safe. As far as I know, only a handful of people are aware of the Medusa pictures.”
“You don’t understand. There are three Medusas orbiting the earth as we speak. Do you think a nation like China would sit idle knowing the capabilities of our newest-generation spy satellite? Shit, the pictures Hyde bought were from the first prototype, and that thing was a dinosaur compared to the latest ones. There’s a lot more at stake than a handful of photographs of the Sahara Desert!”
“Yeah, there is.” Henna saw that the conspiracy around Harry’s kidnapping was taking another turn for the worse. Stolen pictures from the NRO, Jesus! “We’ll get to that in a minute. Tell me what happened next.”
“Rosen must have realized his asking price was too low after selling them to Hyde,” Baines continued. “Between the sale and his apprehension, he contacted someone in Europe; we have no way of knowing exactly who because the calls went to an encryption exchange, but we narrowed the field to Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia or Albania.”
“I’ll be damned,” Henna interrupted, thinking about the religious wars raging in Albania and the former Yugoslav states. Was this another connection to Islamic terrorists, like the charter flight to Beruit?
“What?”
“Finish your story and I’ll tell you mine.”
“There were a dozen calls of various durations, the final one only hours before Rosen was arrested,” Morrison said. “That is one side of the investigation that we’ll handle ourselves, possibly using the CIA and INTERPOL if anything shows promise, but we wanted to come to you with Prescott Hyde. He works for the government, but he’s a civilian so we’re going to need your office to spearhead the investigation.”
“The investigation is already underway,” Henna snorted. “In fact, I think we’ve got enough to bring the son of a bitch in for formal questioning. Do you remember Philip Mercer?”