Severe Clear

19

Holly hung around London for another three days with-out hearing anything from Hamish McCallister. Finally, after having toured the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and seeing the Degas exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art, and having gained two pounds on Connaught room service, she called the pilot who had flown her to London.

“Hello?”

“It’s Holly Barker. Are you still on this side of the Atlantic?”

“We are,” the man replied, “in Zurich. Are you ready to return to D.C.?”

“I am.”

“Will tomorrow morning be good enough?”

“That will be fine.”

“We’ll be ready to depart Biggin Hill at noon.”

“I’ll be there. See you then.” She hung up and called her office. Grace answered her phone, since Holly hadn’t had time to choose her own secretary.

“Ms. Barker’s office.”

“It’s Holly, Grace.”

“Good morning, Ms. Barker.”

“You’re going to have to get used to calling me Holly, Grace, since I hardly know who Ms. Barker is.”

“I’ll try, Ms… Holly.”

“I’m departing London at noon tomorrow, and I expect to be in the office between three and four.”

“Would you like me to arrange ground transportation?”

“No, my car is at Dulles. Has anything of importance come up?”

“The director is anxious to hear your report.”

“Tell her I haven’t heard anything yet. My friend is out of town.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“See you tomorrow.” Holly ended the call. Almost immediately, the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Encrypt,” a man’s voice said.

Holly entered the code. “Encrypted.”

“It’s your jet-setting colleague.” The transmission was scratchy. “Can you hear me all right?”

“You break up now and then, but I can make you out.”

“I have something for you.”

“Go ahead.”

“The Nod reference is to a nursery rhyme: ‘Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.’ Do you know it?”

“I was a child, once,” Holly replied.

Hamish chuckled. “My information is that there are three operatives somewhere on the West Coast of the United States. I couldn’t learn where or how long they’ve been there or what they are planning. Did you get that?”

“I got it,” Holly said. “I don’t like it, but I got it. Is there any connection with the hotel?”

“I think that’s a reasonable inference,” Hamish said, “but I couldn’t learn anything specific to support it. I’ll keep contacting people for another day or two, though.”

“Where did you get this information?”

“I can’t talk about my sources.”

“Not who-where?”

“I got that much in Lebanon, but I couldn’t trace it further back than that.”

“All right; I’ll be in London until ten tomorrow, then I’m headed back to my office. You can contact me here or there.”

“If I come up with anything else, I’ll be in touch,” Hamish said. “If I hear nothing, you won’t hear from me at all.”

“Got it. Thanks for dinner. I look forward to working with you.”

“Thank you for dinner,” Hamish said, “and same here. Good-bye.” He ended the call.

The G-450 landed at Dulles ahead of schedule, encountering only light headwinds. Holly walked into the director’s suite at three-thirty.

“Welcome home,” Grace said. “The director asked that you see her as soon as you get in.”

“Right now is good for me,” Holly said. She put her briefcase on her desk and knocked on the door between her office and the director’s.

“Come in, Holly!” Kate Lee called.

Holly came in and took the seat across the desk from her boss.

“Good trip, I hope.”

“I hope so, too,” Holly replied. “I saw Hamish as planned, the evening of my arrival.”

“What did you think of him?”

“Smart and charming. I asked him to find out what he could about The Arrington and Nod, and we agreed he shouldn’t do it on the phone, so he borrowed an airplane and took off the following morning for parts unknown to me. I heard nothing from him for three days, then he called late yesterday afternoon.”

“And what did he have to say?”

“He said that, from what he was told by his sources, there are three al Qaeda operatives on the West Coast. Their code names are Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. He couldn’t find out where they are or how long they’ve been there or what they were there for.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Although he wouldn’t reveal his sources, I asked him where he got the information, and he said in Lebanon.”

“He said he went to Lebanon?”

“He said over dinner that he wanted to speak to his sources face-to-face, so I took him to mean that he was or had been in Lebanon. The reception on the call was not great.”

“Did he say he was still in Lebanon?”

“No, but he said he would keep at it for another day or two, and that if he got anything more, he’d be in touch.”

“Was the call from Hamish encrypted?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting. Well, I heard not half an hour ago that an NSA computer had picked up two more messages from California, one signed ‘Wynken,’ the other, ‘Blynken.’”

“So I might as well have stayed at home.”

“Your trip wasn’t for nothing. You got to know Hamish, and he got us confirmation on the three operatives. That’s worth a lot. It will make Scott Hipp at NSA very happy to know that his people’s work was confirmed.”

“Who is Scott Hipp?”

“A deputy director, in charge of electronic surveillance and cryptology. Very political. I expect to hear from the White House tonight that he has told them about Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.”

“I expect the Secret Service will be interested in that information.”

“Yes, they will,” Kate replied. “One thing troubles me, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Remember when Grace issued you your credentials and the two phones?”

“Yes?”

“Remember that we have constant GPS tracking on some of our phones?”

“Yes.”

“Hamish has one of those phones, one of those with the facility of encrypting, and the tracking on that phone indicates that he never left London.”

Holly stared at her boss blankly.

“Also, that Citation Mustang that he occasionally borrows from his friend, a London entrepreneur, has not been out of its hangar at Blackbushe Airport for the past ten days.”

“So Hamish lied to me?”

“Exactly,” Kate replied. “Now I want to see if he claims reimbursement for the airplane’s fuel usage. He can always say that he found another way to contact his sources and changed his mind about flying, but if he claims for the fuel, I’ll have his head.”

“But what about the information he said he got from his sources? Can we trust that?”

“Yes, because it has already been confirmed by the NSA-also, because Hamish has always been very careful not to overstate the quality of the information he passes to us, and he has never been wrong.”

“Somehow, I feel had,” Holly said.

“You haven’t been had, Hamish has just blown in your ear, that’s all. Now, don’t you have secretaries to interview?”

Holly stood up. “Yes, ma’am.” She went to her office, where the first candidate awaited her.