October's Ghost

CHAPTER NINETEEN CONNECTIONS

General Walker finished relating what he had just been told a few minutes before. The story was met initially by silence from Marshal Kurchatov and Colonel Belyayev.

“You have just answered your own question, General Walker,” Kurchatov said. “I, too, would activate the Moscow ABM system if such a thing had been told to me.”

“Yes, but this appears to be an action taken not because of prudence, but because of mistrust,” Walker explained. “Your president’s tone was very provocative, I am told, and I say that not to challenge his motivation, but just as a point of concern.”

“Well, President Konovalenko, unfortunately, has more than just himself to answer to. And those who demand such satisfaction in times like this are not the most accommodating people.” Kurchatov smiled with the knowledge of one who had juggled both the political and military hats in his career, a process he knew was unfamiliar to CINCNORAD. “And distrust is their ally, not their enemy.”

“Your words are calming, Marshal. Possibly they can be for President Konovalenko as well.”

Gennadiy Timofeyevich would be feeling the pressure, Kurchatov knew, and he was well aware who from. Yakovlev and Shergin. The interior minister he could do nothing about, but Shergin was his subordinate and was at the end of the direct line temporarily connecting NORAD with the Voyska PVO. Neutering the commander of the Motherland’s air-defense forces, at least temporarily, would split him from that weasel of an ally of his. Yakovlev would then stand alone, without an inroad to the military. Gennadiy Timofeyevich could then eat him for breakfast.

“I will speak to my people, and then I will speak to the president,” Kurchatov said, thinking on what his words would be for the latter. “One of our missiles in Cuba, eh?”

“At least in part,” Walker expanded.

“Yes. The part that matters, apparently. It is not so hard to believe. I was but a young captain during that time. Things were very confused, and information was hoarded as if it were gold.” In these days as if bread, the marshal thought. “As I gained rank and experience, I learned that there are many impossible things that are actually realities cloaked in secrecy.” Kurchatov smiled knowingly. “Someday, possibly, I can tell you of such things.”

Walker returned the expression. “And I to you.”

“So such a thing as you tell it is not beyond my belief, but…” The pause was punctuated by concern. “Those who are not here, those who cannot see and feel that you are in no way trying to deceive us, well, to them such a happening could be seen as less than fact. Even as a threat.”

“That’s my concern,” Walker said straightforwardly.

Kurchatov nodded concurrence. “And mine. Let us try to calm any fears that may be developing. Colonel Belyayev.”

Kurchatov and Belyayev followed General Walker from their quarters to the force-monitoring console. A new duty officer was in the left seat and stood respectfully as the Russian defense minister took the seat to his right.

“This one?” Kurchatov asked, pointing to the handset lying in the unmarked cradle. A nod affirmed his question, and he picked it up. The pre-dialed sequence, routed through three secure voice communications switching centers, searched for a connection at Voyska PVO. After a first failure — which took less than a second — the switching computers tried again. Another failure.

“No connect,” a microchip reported in a disembodied male voice.

Kurchatov pulled the receiver away, looking at it in a reaction that was as natural as it was unproductive. Colonel Belyayev took the phone from him, pressed the cradle switch down, and waited for the connection again.

“No connect.”

“Something is wrong,” Belyayev said. His words were tinged with the barest amount of a question, and his eyes silently waited for CINCNORAD to answer.

The same result came from General Walker’s attempt. He picked up another phone and called NORAD’s communication center — its own switchboard. “I want an analysis on the direct line between the force-monitoring console and Russian Air Defense Headquarters…fast.”

Belyayev and Kurchatov alternately watched CINCNORAD and the displays, the tension obvious and growing. Everything so far had been as the Americans had said. Everything. Even the Cuban revelation, though unexpected, was not the thing to cause confident hearts to stir. But this. A malfunction at this time? In combination with all else? If this became known to the president’s enemies in Moscow… The defense minister isolated by a communications failure? That discovery could be very dangerous. Marshal Kurchatov hoped, simply, that the sarcasm in his thought would turn out to be baseless.

The phone buzzed, and Walker snatched it up. “Yes.” He listened for less than thirty seconds. “You’re certain?”

“General Walker?” Kurchatov said after CINCNORAD had hung up.

“The direct circuit has been disconnected. Cut at the source.”

The defense minister’s eyebrows arched to the center of his forehead. It cannot be… “Why would you do this? Why would you isolate us?”

Walker’s head shook. “Not us. Marshal. You. The link was severed at your end. In Moscow.”

The thick black lines of hair over Kurchatov’s eyes shot upward, ending the expression of anger. The emotion now was plain fear. “Dear God.”

Greg Drummond stood personally by the secure fax and took the pages as soon as they came out. He made a duplicate copy and was in his office a minute later. Mike Healy was waiting for him.

“Here,” the DDI said, handing the copy to his Operations counterpart.

“Sam Garrity?” Healy said skeptically before reading the word-for-word wiretap transcripts just sent from the Bureau. Drummond had given him only what he had learned from Gordon Jones’s quick call, namely that they had a suspect in the leak, and, the big twist, that the leak’s contact was also directing two men wanted in the killing of Francisco Portero — the keeper of the tape.

Drummond ignored the question and read through the conversation, picking out important details first. “ ‘Off the director’s desk’? ‘Scribbles’? What the hell is he saying? There’s no way to get anything written off this floor. Security would have caught it in their sweep. Anything Anthony left on his desk would have gone in the burn bag.”

“Well, he got something,” the DDO said. “ ’Cause he knows about the missile. And so does his contact — whoever that is.”

“Gordy’s guys down in Miami are setting to take him real soon,” Drummond said with pleasure. Only nailing the man who’d caused his directorate to become suspect would bring greater joy.

Healy scanned farther down the transcript, his mind seizing on two passages. “Greg, look halfway down. You see that?”

“ ‘This isn’t like before,’ ”Drummond read.

“And then: ‘…that guy a while back wasn’t just making it up’.” Healy looked up. “You don’t think…”

Deputy Director, Intelligence, Greg Drummond, not a man prone to violent urges, knew exactly what he’d like done to the man filling his thoughts at the moment. “He had to know, Mike. The asshole had to.”

The DDO glanced back down. “You’re right. If this is accurate, then it’s the only way Garrity would have known.” His eyes looked right, to the wall that separated them from the DCI’s office.

“But how?” Drummond wondered aloud.

Healy thought for a moment, which was all the time he needed to make the decision. “I don’t know, but we sure as hell are going to find out. First step is to find out more on the man who brought the knowledge into the country.”

“Portero?”

“Exactly. We’re gonna check with our INS liaison in Florida and see just what he did when he came over.”

“Anthony won’t like us talking to his people,” Drummond countered, though the conviction behind his words was less than halfhearted.

“Fuck what he thinks. From where I see it, he is on assignment,” Healy said. “Deputy director is out of the country. That makes me acting director.”

The DDO had a few years service on the DDI, but Drummond didn’t mind the hierarchy one damn bit. Not for this. “Let’s do it, boss.”

“I’ll check with Florida,” Healy said. “And I assume you want to handle Garrity.”

“You assume correctly,” Drummond confirmed, nodding emphatically. “I’m going with the FBI team that’s going to pick him up. There are a few things I want to ask good old Sam.”

“Do it right, Greg. We need connections here to tie this all together.”

“We’ll get them,” the DDI said. And him, he added hopefully, referring to the man whose empty chair sat but a room away.

Three floors below the office of the deputy director, Intelligence, in a roughly square room with no windows and lighting that never dimmed, the first connections Mike Healy had desired were being made without him even knowing it. And those connections came in the form of ones and zeros.

DIOMEDES, the Science & Technology Directorate’s computer link to the world’s financial institutions, had been sorting through trillions of bits of binary code (ones and zeros), searching for links between accounts controlled by Coseros and those belonging to known criminal types, namely drug cartels or their fronts. The process was much like following a multigenerational family tree that branched out in all directions. Once a link to a certain account in bank X located in country Y was found, then an attempt was made to identify the owner of those funds. With the strict financial-security laws of some countries, this was not always a direct task. Other links had to be determined that might point to the ownership, and more links to verify those. It was a tedious, time-consuming exercise in electronic investigation, pseudo illegal, and quite suited to the twin Cray computers dedicated to Project DIOMEDES.

“Got a cross-link,” a technician announced, the data freezing on her screen. Her supervisor came over to see.

“Where?”

“Here,” she said, pointing to the display. “Coseros transferred seven hundred grand into this account in the Bern Central Bank. It’s another CFS account.” They were finding more and more offshore accounts belonging to the Cuban Freedom Society, though there was nothing patently illegal about that. Nothing that could be proved, that is. Yet. “Then look who transferred into the same account. Victor Feodr.”

“Feodr?” the supervisor said aloud. The name rang a bell, but not loudly. He had heard it before in his time with DIOMEDES, some years back, but exactly when he couldn’t… Him? “The Bulgarian?”

“The same one who the KGB used as a money funnel,” the technician reported.

“Who’s paying his bills now?”

She pointed lower on the screen. “An account controlled by the Russian Foreign Ministry. Usually used for diplomatic travel expenses.”

The supervisor scratched his head. “Any back transfers from those funds to Coseros?”

“Nope, but look at these.” She scrolled the information slowly. Account after account flowed upward from the bottom of the screen, all of them listed as “depositors” to the CFS account in Bern. “These accounts are all controlled by different agencies in over forty governments. Look. This one is controlled by a front for Israeli Intelligence.”

“Mossad?”

“Never get them to admit that. This one by the PRC. This one by an Iraqi with liaison duties to the UN. The list goes on, and on.”

“I still don’t get this. Nothing back-transferred to Coseros?”

The technician willed her supervisor to see the real discovery, but he didn’t put the obvious together. “We have been looking at the wrong bad guy. Coseros isn’t in the shit up to his elbows. The CFS is. He hasn’t been funding them. The whole fucking world has. For what reason I don’t know, but these are not just donations. Not from these folks.”

The supervisor looked down at the young lady who’d just proved that the best damn computers were worth diddly-squat without a human brain to look at what was spit out and cull the diamond from the coal. “Damn good work. I know some people who are going to be very happy with what you’ve found.”

There would also be some who would not.

“Sir, one can’t just pick up a phone and dial Russian Air Defense Headquarters,” Bud explained. “Whoever cut Marshal Kurchatov off knew that.”

“But why, Bud?”

“We can’t be certain.” The NSA was standing. He had too much energy built up to sit. “But it cannot be good.”

“You would think they’d want someone watching our missiles at a time like this,” the President said. “I guess this means I wasn’t too convincing.”

“You were at a disadvantage.”

“And just how did Konovalenko know about Kneecap, and about Granger on board?”

Bud knew the question was not directed at him. It was simply asked in wonder. But he felt compelled to offer some sort of explanation, or a supposition of such. “Mr. President, when things happen as fast as they have been on this, things get said. Things are overheard. The press digs things up, just like the Post and ABC have today. Leaks happen, and all it would take is some ‘agricultural officer’ from the Russian embassy to be in the right place at an opportune time.”

“So I get waylaid by the Russians, and everything I tell them then sounds like an after-the-fact rebuttal to their concerns.” The President turned his chair left and right as he thought. “This is beginning to scare me, Bud. I thought when we figured that Castro’s target would be Moscow, we could breathe a little, but now I’m not so sure. If the Russians don’t believe us about this…”

“Sir, President Konovalenko would not do anything rash,” Bud said with confidence. “He is not a reactionary. But he is cautious. He did not walk into the modernization program without questions, and he did not proceed without answers that he found satisfactory. He is not who we have to be concerned about.”

The President scowled as he thought of the men his NSA was referring to. “Those people never see the writing on the wall, do they? They just keep looking to the past for some kind of salvation from the hardships of undoing the damage done over three-fourths of a century. I’ll tell you, Bud. I have more respect for Konovalenko each and every damn day he keeps pushing ahead, despite the polls and the threats from the hard-liners.”

“He may need you to cheerlead very soon, sir.”

The President wasn’t sure that would be the right thing to do. Or the timely thing. “No, Bud. We did that for him once before, but he didn’t have his defense minister over here incommunicado then. This is more serious, meaning we have to step further in if he needs and wants it.” He caught sight of the tan desk phone. “Maybe we can do something to reverse the situation.”

Bud saw the beginnings of a satisfied smile as the President picked up the phone.

“And this may be the way to do it,” the President said, twisting the receiver in his hand. “Bud, get the translator in here.”

Sean found Joe giving his equipment a final check in the privacy of an empty office off the hangar the Pave Hawk had been rolled into. For the work that lay ahead, and for any work involving the kind of shit that Anderson dealt with, for that matter, the major had expected to see the type of highly sophisticated, hideously expensive equipment that the physicist had used during the previous pairing of their talents. What he saw was quite the opposite.

“You ready for another run with us, Anderson?” Sean asked. It was an idle question, breaking the inherent seriousness of the moment. And a moment was about all they had for such luxuries. Delta and their special passenger would be departing very shortly.

Joe rolled his two pieces of electronic equipment into padded cloths and placed them carefully in the rigid black case, filling half its volume. The tools that would take the remainder of the space lay in a neat row before him. “I’d rather be fishin’.”

“Yeah, we all would,” Sean said honestly. His eyes studied the odd mix of hardware lying in front of the kneeling Anderson. “Pretty low tech.”

Joe looked up. “I don’t need lasers to do what I’ve gotta do.”

“I guess not, but a hammer? A handpick?”

“You forgot the pry bar,” Joe said. “Look, any physicist worth his salt could sit you down and go into the most excruciating detail on how to design and build a nuclear bomb. There is nothing magical about it. It’s just hard to do. But ask one of those same brainiacs what to do if the thing goes haywire and has to be defused, and you know what their reaction would be? They’d try and over engineer what needs to be done. Every damn gadget they had access to would somehow find its way into the process. But RSP ain’t that difficult.”

“RSP?” Sean inquired.

“That’s right. You mainly play with guns and little things that go boom. Render Safe Procedures. It’s EOD — that’s explosive ordnance detail — acrospeak. And RSP for the thing we’re going after does not need any fancy gadgets. I’ve got an ammeter to show me where the current is flowing, a high-speed saw to cut through anything getting in my way, and these babies.”

Sean snickered. “You look like you’re better set up for demolition than defusing.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Huh?”

Joe paused, thinking of what he was about to do very quickly. “I’m going to tell you something that I would definitely go to prison for, but then that would be a waste of space. I’ve already got a death sentence.”

Sean lowered himself to the floor.

“Nineteen Eighty-four, Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, Hotel Flight, Missile number ten.”

“This is the one you told me about on the plane last year,” Sean said.

“I didn’t tell you anything,” Joe corrected him. “You came to your own conclusions from some innocent remarks on my part. This is the real thing, from the old mare’s mouth.”

“ ‘Need to know,’ Anderson,” Sean said with a joking wariness. “The walls might have ears.”

“Then hear this, walls,” Joe said loudly, his tone coming down to continue. “We damn near had a Minuteman Three warhead go off. The LCC got a nonresponsive ‘launch enable’ report, then, before they could check the circuits, they received a ‘launch execute’ light. Now these blue suits were really starting to sweat. The commander of the Ninetieth Strategic Missile Wing called in one of his emergency response teams and sent them, in their APC, to the silo and had them park the damn thing on the lid. If a launch actually occurred, the APC would have fallen in when the blast door slid away and disabled the missile…or so they hoped.

“But there was no launch. The press reported it as a ‘computer malfunction.’ Believable enough, but not the truth.”

“What was?”

“The truth was that the arming package on one of the three warheads zapped out for some reason. Bad inspection and maintenance procedures, we figured out later. About a minute after the APC was parked on top of the silo, the LCC got a ‘missile away’ report. Talk about shitting your pants. Well, there was no missile away, but the computers wouldn’t believe that. You see, our ICBMs have a downlink-only telemetry package on them that transmits back to the LCC, and through them to the associated headquarters, a diagnostic on the warheads for two minutes after launch. By that time the thing should be armed. If it isn’t, then the boys who target the things have to scratch one set of MIRVs from their roster. Not that I ever thought it would matter. I mean, in a nuclear war, a few misses really don’t mean much except to the bean counters who keep track of the megatons.”

“Sustainable war,” Sean said.

“Exactly. They want to know if they have to retarget something if the thing doesn’t arm. Anyway, the computers kept saying that the thing was armed. Well, guess what? It was.”

“No shit, Anderson. You’re serious?”

Joe laughed, thinking back to it. “Those were my words when CINCSAC filled me in on the ‘problem.’ So, I had to go into the silo through an access tunnel and, well, use a little reverse engineering.” Joe spread his hands across the line of hand tools.

“You mean you just took it apart?”

“Took it apart?” Joe parroted, surprised at the question but knowing that he shouldn’t be. The major dealt with precision in his operating methods and was assuming that Joe did the same. “Hell, no. I tore the fucker apart. Cut the wires, broke the explosive lenses into little chunks. Man, I did a job on that thing. And CINCSAC wanted to know why I ‘messed up’ one of his three-hundred-and-thirty-five-KT bombs. Can you believe that? I told him to shove it. He thought he’d have my ass in a sling for destroying his warhead and talking to him like that, but I got a presidential citation — classified, of course — for it, and he got the boot for letting the maintenance schedule on his birds get so slipshod that this could happen.”

Sean laughed quietly, his head shaking and his arms wrapped around his knees where he sat. If anyone could talk to a CINC like that, there was no better candidate for it than Anderson. Only a civilian had a chance of surviving such an egregious breach of etiquette and decorum. Military men, particularly career officers like the major, hated the upper-echelon bullshit that frequently interfered in the execution of what was necessary, but few were willing to trade their uniforms for a few choice words with a bozo wearing brass.

“I would have loved to see that,” Sean said, the last bit of laughter trailing off. “So you figure this one will be armed.”

“It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Joe answered. He began rolling the tools into the black cloth they lay on. “I’ve got to get to the pit in any case.”

“The pit?”

“The plutonium,” Joe explained, setting the remainder of his gear in the hard case and snapping the lid shut.

“Old Soviet warheads were what we called ‘sealed-pit’ designs. That means there’s no access to the sphere of Plutonium that’s the first-stage core of the thing. The explosive lenses that focus the implosion on it to compress it to supercriticality are sealed, meaning I have to cut or break through them to get the thing out.”

“Out?” Sean said warily.

“Yeah. What did you think, we’d just bring the whole warhead back with us? That thing weighs at least a ton and a half, and from what you’ve told me, I won’t have time to do a surgical removal of the whole thing. This is going to be a crude extraction with no anesthesia, Major.”

The reality of what to do with the thing once it had been neutralized hadn’t hit Sean completely until right then. “And it’s coming back with us.”

“You got it. Just think of it as a big nickel-plated basketball that weighs about as much as ten bowling balls,” Joe said. “The rest of the stuff we leave. It’s of little use without the first stage.”

“I guess I should have taken one of those physics lessons you mentioned,” Sean said.

Joe decided a quick one was in order. “Stage one is the plutonium bomb, in simple terms. Running from stage one is a rod of uranium surrounded by lithium-deuteride and an outer skin of more uranium. Neutrons released when stage one goes supercritical ignite the uranium rod and skin, causing a massive flood of neutrons into the lithium-deuteride assembly. Voila! Fusion. A thermonuclear explosion. That’s the basic course, so don’t go out and try to build your own without more instruction.”

“No problem there,” Sean said. “So you leave the second stage?”

“Right. One reason is that it’s too dangerous to get in to remove the uranium. You see, lithium deuteride is pyrophoric, which means it ignites spontaneously in contact with oxygen. Plutonium is also, but the pit is encased in another material, usually nickel, which isolates it from any pyrophoric reaction. To get to the uranium initiator rod, I’d have to go through the lithium deuteride, and unless you can get me and it into a vacuum chamber, then it ain’t gonna happen. We don’t need that stuff burning.”

Visions of Chernobyl came to Sean. “No, I guess we can do without the fallout.”

Joe chuckled at the dual meaning of the major’s observation. “A comedian and a killer. Man, you’re talented.”

“Maj, time to boogie,” Lieutenant Duc said as he walked through the slightly parted hangar doors.

“Need a hand with that?” Sean asked.

Joe gladly put the handle of the forty-pound case into the major’s outstretched hand. “You young ‘uns is so polite.”

“Gotta be nice to our elders,” Sean said with a smile.

Joe returned the expression and walked to the Pave Hawk with Delta’s XO. Ten minutes later, after loading and securing their gear, the nine Delta troopers and their civilian specialist joined the four crewmen aboard the MH-60K. With no reason for delay the black-and-green bird, which bore no external markings, lifted into the warm afternoon air and headed out over the rippling blue surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Ten miles out the Pave Hawk turned southeast. The first leg of its journey would take it north of the Bahamas before it turned due south to meet up with its tanker east of Cuba.

Once again, the real thing had begun.

“We are ready, General,” the Cuban lieutenant reported smartly, his hand jerking up and down in an overdone salute.

“How long now?” Asunción asked. Looking at the grotesque tangle of newly welded pipes, he would not have been surprised to hear a year as an estimate.

“Six hours,” the lieutenant answered. “Possibly slightly more, but I do not think so.”

The crack of several explosions reverberated from between the buildings. These did not come from across the bay, however. They were emanating from the north.

“Go ahead. And quickly. I want no more delays.”

The lieutenant waited for the general to walk away before summoning the crew of the pump-equipped tank truck. “You will see to the pumping of all the NTO. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” the crewmen responded willingly, though why they had to be responsible for every driver’s load was beyond them.

“Come on,” the second crewman said as soon as their commander was out of earshot. “The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll be done.”

“You’re too much of an optimist.” He pulled the fueling hose over to the newly installed inflow valve and twisted to the locked position. After he did so, his eyes followed the length of pipe that left the tree and dived underground a few yards away. “Are we pumping that way?”

“No. That way. There must be a tank near those towers.” It was a big game of shuffling fuel supplies to safer storage areas until the yanqui-inspired coup was crushed. The damned Americans! Thinking they could control anyone who did not fall in line with their imperialist ways!

“Well, how far does this line go the other way? There’s no cutoff valve on this side,” the first crewman complained.

The second crewman walked off the distance to the underground tank, noting where the outlet valve was before returning to his partner. “I estimate forty-five meters.”

“You mean we’re going to backfill forty-five meters of empty pipe? And what do we do with the remainder? Huh? This tree is above flow level, and it is going to act like a trap.” The crewman’s knowledge of chemicals might not be to the level that those who made the devilish substances was, but he knew that you never left a line full of cryogenically cooled nitrogen tetroxide. That liquid had to go into a similarly refrigerated tank. “Is there enough room to drain the leftover back into that other tank?”

“No, the lieutenant said it’s full, remember,” the second crewman said. “That’s why we’re not pumping to it.”

“Well, how are we supposed to do this?” He surveyed the tree. The work was adequate, but no one had thought to install a backflow valve to prevent what he was trying to figure a way around. Forty-five meters of empty line! Empty? “Aha!”

“What?”

“Is there a fill pump on the outlet of the full tank?”

“Yes,” the second crewman answered without knowing what his partner was thinking.

“There! We have it. Just prime the line with some of what is in that tank. It’s the same chemical. Then, when we fill the empty, we drain the line back into the full tank.”

“I may be the optimist, but you are the genius.”

The crewman nodded acceptingly. “Of course I am. Now start that pump and prime this line so we can get out of here.” Another explosion thundered through the complex from a distance. Someone must want something around here, he thought, with no knowledge that his “genius” had just altered the value of that desired by an appreciable degree.

Gennadiy Timofeyevich Konovalenko set the handset easily and slowly into its cradle. It was a forced calm, one with rage behind its tranquil facade, as the foreign minister could readily see.

“The line from Air Defense to Marshal Kurchatov has been severed,” the president said, relaying that which his American counterpart had just informed him of. The rest of the conversation took just seconds to relate.

Yakovlev shared his leader’s stone-like expression and let out a breath, one equal in both relief and dread. “So, it is happening.”

“Georgiy Ivanovich and his cohorts could not let such an opportunity pass,” the president observed. “We knew this would happen eventually.”

The interior minister looked to the clock behind the president. A gift from the American ambassador, it blended perfectly with the Spartan decor that the president preferred. Once owned by the great American Benjamin Franklin, the timepiece, an intricate set of springs and gears inside a polished maple case, now held a place of honor in the office of the president of the Russian Federation. It was a reminder of what was possible when a people were sailing the uncharted waters of history, as the Russian people now were. And of the perils. The making of America had not been without its challenges. Neither would be the making of the new Russia. Anticipation of those challenges was the first step in overcoming them. The rest required only determination…and some luck.

“It will not be long, then, until there is some movement,” Yakovlev said, mentally noting the time. “Either a missile at dawn or rifles before.”

The president picked up the phone. Enough time had passed for the Americans to complete the switching that was required, and which they had offered. “The Americans will handle the missile, Georgiy Ivanovich.” He pressed a single button, making the connection immediately. “And we have a few rifles ourselves… Yes, Mr. President. We are ready.”

Art left room 106 and walked into the parking lot. Already there were three dozen agents, and half as many officers of the LAPD, milling about the area. The streets were shut down for two blocks in all directions, and the nearest crowd of ghouls was a full football field away up Vermont.

And then there were the bodies. They lay where they had fallen, no attempt yet made to cover them. Those formalities would come after the Bureau photographers arrived to memorialize the crime scene on hundreds of rolls of film. Art walked past the pair of bodies, the foretold “visitors” from wherever, probably Florida, and to where his partner stood a dozen feet away. The two agents who had stayed with her politely drifted away.

“How are you?”

Frankie looked up from her focus point on the cracked black asphalt, but not at her partner. Not at anyone. “I could have killed him, Art.”

“I know.” Something in him wanted to reach out and put a hand on her shoulder, or even to pull her close and hug her, telling her that it was okay, that he understood. But he didn’t understand. And he couldn’t do the other. It wasn’t what she needed at the moment.

“But I didn’t,” she said. It was almost an admission, as though there was something unnatural in not blowing the guy’s brains out. “Why? I could have done it. I’ve even dreamed of it, of having the scum in my sights and he doesn’t have a gun and I shoot him over, and over, and over. I was craving the chance, but I…”

“You what?” Art asked obligingly. The thought needed to be completed, but by her.

“I realized it was real. It wasn’t some fantasy that I could play over and over until I got it right, because it never got right.” Frankie finally looked at him. “Doing it wouldn’t have been any more right than dreaming it.”

Art smiled a bit and nodded. “I told you I had faith in you.”

It was Frankie’s turn to smile, her first true one in days. “So, what does he have to say?”

Art glanced back at the room. “He suddenly became mute. You know the type.”

“Won’t rat on his familia, huh?” Frankie asked, her gaze traveling down to the bodies of the first two to die.

“His loyalty may be a bit in excess, considering,” Art commented, the idea coming simultaneously. “Hmm. Maybe we should fill him in on just how loyal his employer was to him and his buddy.”

“I think he has a right to know,” Frankie agreed with a bigger smile.

They were back in 106 a few seconds later. Omar Espinosa cleared the room for Art, leaving just the two agents and their suspect.

“Still don’t want to tell us your name, ‘Flavio’?” Art inquired, knowing the chance was unlikely to be seized by the perp.

Jorge rolled a bit and cocked his head to look up. The spade and the broad were there, standing over him. The door leading out was open, and lying in it was… Tomás. “Go fuck yourself, nigger.”

Art just laughed it off softly. He’d been called “nigger” by more dangerous and influential people than this pile of human waste. “Tough. That’s a good thing to be. Tough and loyal. Never rat on your buddies. That’s a good code.” He stepped back and sat on the second bed, staring into the eyes of the man he wanted to break like a matchstick. Beating him mentally, though, would be more satisfying. “It’s a bitch when your buddies don’t think the same way.”

Jorge looked again to Tomás, then to the lady pig. She was the one who had shot him. She had to be the one. So what was this nigger talking about? “Don’t play head games with me, boy. It won’t work.”

Art gave a single, slow nod, then bolted from his sitting position and grabbed the perp by one arm, jerking him off the bed to a standing position. There was a muffled cry of pain, but Art ignored it and dragged him to the door, inches from his partner’s body, and directed his face with a strong hand on the chin to look out the door.

“There is your fucking loyalty, asshole! Look!”

Jorge looked down once more to Tomás, moving only his eyes, then out to the parking lot at the two bodies lying together as one. There were…guns?…on the blacktop near the corpses. Two guns, shiny stainless-steel revolvers. Revolvers. The tool of…his trade, and of theirs.

“Quite a well-armed pickup service,” Art said, the perp’s head swiveling to look at him. “Oh, yeah. We know that you were expecting someone to pick up a tape. Only I don’t think they were coming just for that. Do you?”

The motherfuckers! He had done everything to bring the job off perfectly, just like he had for them before, and they were going to repay him with this?

“You owe us your life, boy, ’cause these fellas were coming to smoke you.” Art pulled him back to the bed and lowered him against the headboard. “My partner here saved your ass.”

“But she killed Tomás,” Jorge said, his voice wavering as it had when the guns were pointed at him.

Art mentally noted the name. “And he was going to kill her. She was faster. The point is that you are alive not because of any of your so-called friends. Your buddy over there would have been dead anyway. And so would you.”

Frankie watched in silence as her partner wore the guy down. His manner was reverting to that which it had been when death was staring at him from the barrel of a gun. He wasn’t able to handle the fear of his own mortality. He was a coward, as most bad guys were when confronted with something they could not seize the initiative on. When killing Portero and Thom, this guy and his partner had been in control. Now the surviving member of the duo was completely without that human need, and he was coming apart.

“What’s your name?” Art asked directly, his clear, steady eyes staring into the tear-filled ones of his prisoner.

“Jorge.”

“Jorge what?” Behind, Frankie had removed her notepad.

“Jorge Alarcon, and it’s…it’s behind the dresser.”

“It?” Art asked, Frankie was already looking for whatever “it” was.

“This, partner,” Frankie said, holding up the cassette. A simple radio/tape player sat on the dresser. She opened the tape deck and dropped the cassette in.

“It’s Portero and some guy,” Jorge said with a sniffle. “That’s not what we came for.”

Well, you had the right to remain silent. Art didn’t care if the guy hanged himself with his words. “We have that one.”

Jorge’s face showed complete surprise at the revelation. “But how?”

Frankie smiled as the tape rewound. “Wrong pocket, buddy.”

Jorge’s head dropped until his chin rested against his chest. They had blown it. Now he had also. He was broken. Having always seen himself as smarter than the cops who were his de facto enemies, he had learned that the reality was quite the opposite. Whatever lay ahead, he considered his life to be over here and now.

A loud click signaled the end of the rewind. Frankie pressed the Play button and adjusted the volume.

The first sound after the opening static was the ringing of a phone as it would be heard through the receiver. Art knew the sound. “Phone mic.”

Frankie nodded. The sound was a telltale indicator that someone was using a simple microphone, attached by suction cup to the listening end of the receiver, to record a call.

The ringing ceased, and a voice answered with the customary “Hello,” though thickly accented.

“That’s Portero,” Jorge said. He had no reason not to tell them.

“His voice is clear,” Frankie observed. “He’s the one recording this.” Her eyes narrowed as she listened to the other voice, obviously at the opposite end of the line. “But who is that?”

The voice was familiar, but Art couldn’t place it. He had heard it. His mind traced backward for familiar links. It was in a group of people. That was it. A speech. His ears strained to match the sound with a visual image tucked away somewhere among the trillions of neurons. A speech. Where? When? Who?

The progressing conversation began to steer Art’s mental search on a narrower path. Certain words and the way they were spoken caused brief images to flash in his mind, but he could not seize on any one. Who are you?

“Mr. Portero…”

“No, please, señor. Francisco. We are speaking as friends. Francisco.”

“Yes. As I was saying, Mr. Portero…”

That was it! What was being said was important, but who was saying it, and to whom, was what mattered most. “The son of a bitch.”

“Who?” Frankie asked. “That’s nothing new. Portero was just telling some guy what he knew. And whoever it was didn’t sound like he believed him.”

“Or didn’t want to believe him,” Art countered. “You don’t know who that was, do you?”

“No.” Frankie pressed Stop and ejected the tape. “Who?”

Art looked over his shoulder at their prisoner. “I’ll have to tell you later. Give me the tape. I’ve got to get this to someone.”

“Art?”

“You give your statements. I’ll fill you in later.”

Her partner was on his way out the door, instructing Omar Espinosa to take charge until Lou got there. Frankie watched him jump into King Six — his own car, King Eight, had a flat from skidding to a stop over the curb — and pull out of the lot with haste. She saw the blue and red rear deck lights come on before he turned and disappeared from view and heard the Chevy’s underhood siren come to life just after that.

“Frankie,” Omar said. “We should start on your statements.”

“Yeah,” she answered, the wail of the siren fading with each second. Her partner was pushing it fast, real fast, which only made her wonder more just what was so important about who he had recognized on the tape. But wonder was all she could do for the moment. There were three bodies scattered across the $22.50 Motel, all brought down by her hand. And she would have to justify each and every shot. Killing within the law, unlike the handiwork done by the whimpering perp they had just busted, was not so easily set aside, professionally or personally. Special Agent Francine Aguirre would answer the questions, write the narrative, dot every i and cross every t, and then, at some time in the foreseeable future, she would go home to her little girl and try to explain why Mommy had to kill three people. If only that were as instantly easy as the six pulls on the trigger. “Let’s get this done.”