He didn't know what was wrong, nor did he know what to do about it. What he ought to have done, of course, was get home at a decent hour, maybe take her out to dinner at a nice place and — but that was not possible with two kids in school. Getting a sitter in the middle of the week and this far out of town was impractical. Another option was simply to get home and pay closer attention to his wife, leading to a—
But he couldn't depend on his ability to do that, and one more failure could only make things worse.
He looked up from his desk, out at the pines that lay beyond the CIA boundary fence. The symmetry was perfect. His work was messing up his family life, and now his family life was messing up his work. So, now, he had nothing at all that he could do properly. Wasn't that nice? Ryan got up from his desk and left the office, wandering to the nearest kiosk. Once there he purchased his first pack of cigarettes in… five years? Six? Whatever, he stripped off the cellophane top and tapped one out. One luxury of having a private office was that he could smoke without interference — CIA had become just like all government offices in that respect; for the most part, people could only smoke in the rest rooms. He pretended not to see the disapproving look on Nancy's face on his way back in, then went rooting in his desk for an ashtray before lighting up.
It was, he decided a minute later — just as the initial dizziness hit him — one of the dependable pleasures of life. Alcohol was another. You ingested these substances and you got the desired result, which explained their popularity, in spite of the dangers to health that everyone knew about. Alcohol and nicotine, the two things that make intolerable life into something else. While they shortened it.
Wasn't that just great? Ryan almost laughed at his incredible stupidity. Just what else of himself would he destroy? But did it matter?
His work mattered. That he was sure of. That was what had landed him in this mess, one way or another. That was the prime destructive factor in his life, but he could no more leave that than he could change anything else.
“ Nancy, please ask Mr. Clark to come in.”
John appeared two minutes later. “Aw, hell, Doc!” he observed almost immediately. “Now, what's the wife gonna say?”
“Not a thing.”
“Bet you're wrong on that.” Clark turned to open a window for ventilation. He'd quit a long time before. It was the one vice that he feared. It had killed his father. “What do you want?”
“How's the hardware?”
“Waiting for your go-ahead to build it.”
“Go,” Jack said simply.
“You got a go-mission order?”
“No, but I don't need it. We'll call it part of the feasibility study. How long to slap things together?”
“Three days, they say. We'll need some cooperation from the Air Force.”
“What about the computer side?”
“That program has already been validated. They've taken tapes from six different aircraft, and smoothed out the noise. It's never taken them more than two or three hours to do an hour of tape.”
“ Mexico City to D.C. is…”
“Depending on weather, just under four hours, max. Doing the full tape will be an overnighter,” Clark estimated. “The President's schedule is what?”
“Arrival ceremony is Monday afternoon. The first business session is the following morning. State dinner Tuesday night.”
“You going?”
Ryan shook his head. “No, we're going to the one a week earlier — geez, that's not too far off, is it? I'll call the 89th Wing at Andrews. They do training hops all the time. Getting your team aboard won't be hard.”
“I have three capture teams selected. They're all ex-Air Force and Navy elint spooks,” Clark said. They know the business."
“Okay, run with it.”
“You got it, Doc.”
Jack watched him leave and lit up another.
29
CROSSROADS
MV Carmen Vita cleared the Straits of Gibraltar right on schedule, her Pielstick diesels driving her at a constant nineteen knots. The crew of forty officers and men (this ship did not have any women in the crew, though three of the officers had their wives with them) settled down for the normal sailing routine of watch-keeping and maintenance. They were seven days out from the Virginia Capes. On her deck and stowed below were a goodly number of standard-sized container boxes. These actually came in two sizes, and they were all loaded with various types of cargo which the captain and crew neither knew nor cared very much about. The whole point of containerization was that the ship was used exclusively as a contract-hauler, much as a trucker was used by various businesses. All the ship's crew needed to worry about was the weight of the containers, and that always seemed to work out rather uniformly, since the containers themselves were always loaded to reflect what a commercial truck could legally pull along a public highway.
The ship's southerly routing also made for a fairly sedate and uneventful passage. The really bitter winter storms followed a more northerly track, and the ship's master, a native of India, was happy for it. A youngish man for such a substantial command — he was only thirty-seven — he knew that good weather made for a fast and fuel-efficient voyage. He aspired to a larger and more sumptuous ship, and by keeping Carmen Vita on schedule and under budget, he'd get that in due course.
It was the tenth day in a row that Clark hadn't seen Mrs. Ryan. John Clark had a good memory for such things, honed by years of field operations of one sort or another, in which one stayed alive by keeping track of everything, whether it seemed important or not. He'd never seen her more than twice in a row. Jack worked an inconvenient schedule — but so did she, with early-morning surgery at least twice a week… and she was awake this morning. He saw her head through the kitchen window, sitting at a table, probably drinking coffee and reading the paper or watching TV. But she hadn't even turned her head to look at her husband when he left, had she? Ordinarily she got up to kiss him goodbye like any wife. Ten days in a row.
Not a good sign, was it? What was the problem? Jack came out to the car, his face dark and looking down. There was the grimace again.
“Morning, Doc!” Clark greeted him cheerily.
“Hi, John,” was the subdued reply. He hadn't brought his paper again, either. He started reading from the dispatch box as usual, and by the time they reached the D.C. Beltway, he'd just be staring, a grim thousand-yard stare in his eyes as he lit a continuous chain of cigarettes. Clark decided that he just couldn't stand it anymore:
“Problem at home, Doc?” he asked quietly, watching the road.
“Yeah, but it's my problem.”
“Guess so. The kids are okay?”
“It's not the kids, John. Leave it, okay?”
“Right.” Clark concentrated on his driving while Ryan went through the message traffic.
What the hell is the problem. Be analytical, Clark told himself, think it through.
His boss had been depressed for over a month now, but it had really gotten worse — the news article, that thing from Holtzman? A family problem, not involving the kids. That meant trouble with the wife. He made a mental note to recheck that piece and any subsequent pieces when he got into the office. Seventy minutes after picking Ryan up — traffic was light this morning — he headed for CIA's rather impressive library and got the staff there busy. It wasn't hard for them. The Agency kept a special file for all the pieces that concerned it, arranged in folders by the authors' by-lines. The problem, Clark thought, was immediately clear.
Holtzman had talked about financial and sexual misconduct. Right after that article came out…