THERE WERE TANKS IN the streets, and tanks were «sexy» things for the "overhead imagery" people to look at and count. There were three KH-11-class reconnaissance satellites in orbit. One of them, eleven years old, was dying slowly. Long since out of maneuvering fuel, and with one of its solar panels degraded to the point that it could barely power a flashlight, it could still take photos through three of its cameras and relay them to the geosynchronous communications bird over the Indian Ocean. Less than a second later they were downlinked and forwarded to various interpretation offices, one of them at CI A.
"That ought to cut down on pursesnatchings." The analyst checked his watch and added eight hours. Okay, approaching ten A.M. "Lima," or local time. People should have been out on the streets, working, moving around, socializing at the many sidewalk restaurants, drinking the awful local version of coffee. But not today. Not with tanks in the streets. A few individuals were moving around, mainly women by the look of them, probably shopping. A main battle tank was parked about every four blocks on the main thoroughfares—and one at every traffic circle, of which there were many—supported by lighter vehicles on the side streets. Little knots of soldiers stood at every intersection. The photos showed that all of them carried rifles, but couldn't determine rank or discern unit patches.
"Get a count," his supervisor instructed.
"Yes, sir." The analyst didn't grumble. Counting the tanks was something they always did. He'd even type them, mainly by checking the main gun. By doing this they'd be able to determine how many of the tanks regularly counted in their regimental laagers had turned their engines over and moved from one place to another. The information had importance to someone or other, though for the past ten years they'd been doing the same thing, generally to learn that whatever the faults and flaws of the Iraqi military, it did its maintenance well enough to keep the engines running. It was rather less diligent about its gunnery, which they'd learned in the Persian Gulf War, but as the analyst had already noted, you look at a tank and assume that it works. It was the only prudent course. He hunched down over the viewer and saw that a white car, probably a Mercedes from the shape, was driving up National Route 7. A more detailed look at the photos would have showed it heading toward the Sibaq' al Mansur racetrack, where he would have seen more automobiles of the same type, but he'd been told to count the tanks.
IRAQIS CLIMATIC VARIATIONS are more striking than in most places in the world. This February morning, with the sun high in the sky, it was barely above freezing, though in the summer 115 degrees Fahrenheit attracted little in the way of notice. The assembled officers, Badrayn saw, were in their winter wool uniforms, with high collars and voluminous gold braid; most of them were smoking, and all of them were worried. His host introduced the visitor to those who didn't know him. He didn't bother wishing peace unto them. They weren't in the mood for the traditional Islamic greeting. These men were surprisingly Western and totally secular in their outlook and demeanor. Like their departed leader, they gave mere lip service to their religion, though at the moment they all wondered if the teachings of eternal damnation for a sinful life were true or not, knowing that some of them would probably find out soon enough. That possibility worried them enough that they had left their offices and come to the racetrack to hear him speak.
The message Badrayn had to deliver was a simple one. This he did.
"How can we believe you?" the army chief asked when he'd finished.
"It is better for everyone this way, is it not?"
"You expect us to abandon our motherland to… him?" a corps commander demanded, disguising frustration as anger.
"What you decide to do is your concern, General. If you desire to stand and fight for what is yours, the decision is clearly yours as well. I was asked to come here and deliver a message as an honest broker. This I have done," Badrayn replied evenly. There was no sense getting excited about things like this, after all.
"With whom are we supposed to negotiate?" This was the chief of the Iraqi air force.
"You may make your reply to me, but as I have already told you, there really is nothing to negotiate. The offer is a fair one, is it not?" Generous would be a better term. In addition to saving their own skins, and the skins of those close to them, they would all emerge from their country wealthy. Their president had salted away huge sums of money, little of which had ever actually been detected and seized. They all had access to travel documents and passports from any country in the known world. In that particular area the Iraqi intelligence service, assisted by the engraving bureau of its treasury, had long since established its expertise. "You have his word before God that you will not be harassed, wherever you may go." And that was something they had to take seriously. Badrayn's sponsor was their enemy. He was as bitter and spiteful as any man on earth. But he was also a man of God, and not one to invoke His name lightly.
"When do you need your reply?" the army chief asked, more politely than the others.
"Tomorrow would be sufficient, or even the day after. Beyond that, I cannot say. My instructions," Badrayn went on, "go only that far."
"And the arrangements?"
"You may set them yourselves, within reason." Badrayn wondered how much more they could possibly expect from him, or his sponsor.
But the decision he demanded was harder than one might imagine. The patriotism of the assembled general officers was not of the usual sort. They loved their country, largely because they controlled it. They had power, genuine life-and-death power, a far greater narcotic than money, and one of the things for which a man would risk his life and his soul. One of their number, many of them thought—hoped—just might pull it off. One of them just might assume the presidency of their country successfully, and together they just might calm things down and continue as before. They'd have to open their nation up somewhat, of course. They'd have to allow U.N. and other inspectors to see everything, but with the death of their leader they'd have the chance to start anew, even though everyone would know that nothing new at all was happening. Such were the rules of the world. A promise here or there, a few remarks about democracy and elections, and their former enemies would fall all over themselves giving them and their nation a chance. A further incentive was the sheer opportunity of it. Not one of them had felt truly secure in years. Everyone knew of colleagues who had died, either at the hands of their dead leader, or under circumstances euphemistically called "mysterious" — helicopter crashes had been a favorite ploy of their fallen and beloved President. Now they had a chance to live lives of power with much greater confidence, and against that was a life of indolence in some foreign place. Each of them already had a life of every luxury a man could imagine—plus power. Each could snap his fingers and the people who jumped were not servants but soldiers….
Except for one thing. To stay would be the greatest and most dangerous gamble of their lives. Their country was now under the strictest control they could remember, and there was a reason for it. The people who'd roared their love and affection for the dead one—what did they really think? It hadn't mattered a week before, but it mattered now. The soldiers they commanded came from the same human sea. Which of them had the charisma to assume the leadership of the country? Which of them had the keys to the Ba'ath Party? Which of them could rule by the force of will? Because only then could they look into the future, if not without fear, then with a small enough quantity of it that their experience and courage could deal with the chances they would be taking. Each of them, standing at the racetrack, looked around the assembly of brother officers and wondered the same question: Which one?
That was the problem, because if there had been one of their number to do it, he would already have been dead, probably in a tragic helicopter mishap. And a dictatorship was not operated by a committee. Strong as they all felt themselves to be, each looked at the others and saw potential weakness. Private jealousies would destroy them. Jockeying and rivalries would, probably, cause such internal turmoil that the iron hand needed to control the people would weaken. And in a few months, probably, it would come apart. They had all seen it happen before, and the ultimate result was foretold in their deaths, standing before a line of their own soldiers, and a wall to their backs.
There was no ethos for these men other than power and its exercise. That sufficed for one man, but not for many. Many needed to be unified around something, whether it be the rule imposed by one superior, or a commonly held idea, but it had to be something that imposed a common outlook. No one of them' could do the former, and collectively they lacked the latter. Powerful as they each might be, they were also weak in a fundamental way, and as the officers stood there, looking around at one another, they all knew it. At base, they believed in nothing. What they enforced with weapons they could not impose with will. They could command from behind, but not lead from the front. At least most of them were intelligent enough to know it. That was why Badrayn had flown to Baghdad.
He watched their eyes and knew what they were thinking, however impassive their faces might have been. A bold man would have spoken up with confidence, and thus assumed leadership of the group. But the bold ones were long since dead, cut down by one bolder and more ruthless, only to be cut down by the unseen hand of someone more patient and more ruthless still—enough so that he could now make a generous offer. Badrayn knew what the answer had to be, and so did they. The dead Iraqi President had left nothing behind to replace himself, but that was the way of men who believed in nothing except themselves.
THE PHONE RANG at 6:05 this time. Ryan didn't mind awakening before 7:00. It had been his custom for years, but back then he'd had to drive in to work. Now the job was an elevator ride away, and he'd expected that the time previously spent in a car could now be spent in bed. At least he'd been able to doze in the back of his official car.
"Yes?"
"Mr. President?" Jack was surprised to hear Arnie's voice. Even so, he was tempted to demand who the hell else would pick the phone up.
"What is it?"
"Trouble."
VICE PRESIDENT EDWARD J. Kealty had not slept all night, but one would not have known it from looking at him. Shaved pink, clear of eye, and straight of back, he strode into the CNN building with his wife and his aides, there to be met by a producer who whisked him into an elevator for the trip upstairs. Only the usual pleasantries were exchanged. The career politician just stared forward, as though trying to convince the stainless-steel doors that he knew what he was about. And succeeding.
The preparatory calls had been made over the previous three hours, starting with the head of the network. An old friend, the TV executive had been thunderstruck for the first time in his career. One halfway expected airplane crashes, train wrecks, violent crimes—the routine disasters and sorrows from which the media made its living—but something like this was the occurrence of a lifetime. Two hours earlier, he'd called Arnie van Datnm, another old friend, because one had to cover one's bases as a reporter; besides, there was also a love of country in him that he rarely expressed but it was there nonetheless, and the CNN president didn't have a clue where this story would go. He'd called on the network's legal correspondent, a failed trial attorney, who in turn was now on the phone with a professor friend at Georgetown University Law School. Even now, the CNN president called into the green room.
"Are you really sure, Ed?" was all he had to ask.
"I don't have a choice. I wish I didn't have to." Which was the expected answer.
"Your funeral. I'll be watching." And the line went dead. At the far end there was a form of rejoicing. It would be a hell of a story, and it was CNN's job to report the news, and that was that.
"ARNIE, IS THIS totally crazy or am I still dreaming?" They were in an upstairs sitting room.
Jack had thrown on some casual clothes. Van Damm didn't have his tie on yet, and his socks were mismatched, Ryan noticed. Worst of all, van Damm looked rattled, and he'd never seen that before. "I guess we'll just have to wait and see." Both men turned when the door opened.
"Mr. President?" A fiftyish man came in, properly dressed in a business suit. He was tall and harried-looking. Andrea followed him in. She, too, had been briefed, insofar as that was possible.
"This is Patrick Martin," Arnie said.
"Criminal Division at Justice, right?" Jack rose to shake hands and waved him to the coffee tray.
"Yes, sir. I've been working with Dan Murray on the crash investigation."
"Pat's one of our better trial lawyers. He also lectures at George Washington on constitutional law," the chief of staff explained.
"So, what do you think of all this?" the President asked, his voice still somewhere between whimsy and outright disbelief.
"I think we need to see what he has to say." The quintessential lawyer's reply.
"How long at Justice?" Jack asked next, returning to his seat.
"Twenty-three years. Four years in the FBI before that." Martin poured a cup and decided to stand.
"Here we go," van Damm observed, unmuting the TV.
"Ladies and gentlemen, with us here in our Washington bureau is Vice President Edward J. Kealty." CNN's chief political correspondent also looked as though he'd been dragged from his bed and genuinely shaken. Ryan noted that, of all the people he'd seen that day, Kealty looked the most normal. "Sir, you have something unusual to say."
"Yes, I do, Barry. I probably need to start by saying that this is the most difficult thing I've ever had to do in over thirty years of public life." Kealty's voice was quiet and restrained, speaking in the tone of an essay by Emerson, slow and clear, and painfully earnest. "As you know, President Durling asked me to resign from my post. The reason for this was a question of my conduct while a senator. Barry, it's no secret that my personal conduct has not always been as exemplary as it should have been. That's true of many people in public life, but it's no excuse, and I do not claim that it is. When Roger and I discussed the situation, we agreed that it would be best for me to resign my office, allowing him to select a new running mate for the elections later this year. It was his further intention to have John Ryan fill my post as interim Vice President.
"Barry, I was content with that. I've been in public life for a very long time, and the idea of retiring to play with my grandchildren and maybe teach a little bit actually looked pretty attractive. And so I agreed to Roger's request in the interests of—well, really for the good of the country.
"But I never actually resigned."
"Okay," the correspondent said, holding his hands up as though to catch a baseball. "I think we need to be really clear on this, sir. What exactly did happen?"
"Barry, I drove over to the State Department. You see, the Constitution specifies that when the President or Vice President resigns, the resignation is presented to the Secretary of State. I met with Secretary Hanson privately to discuss the issue. I actually had a letter of resignation prepared, but it was in the wrong form, and Brett asked me to redraft it. So I drove back, thinking that I could have it done and resubmitted the following day.
"None of us expected the events of that evening. I was badly shaken by them, as were many. In my case, as you know, well, so many of the friends with whom I'd worked for years were just snuffed out by that brutal and cowardly act. But I never actually resigned my office." Kealty looked down for a moment, biting his lip before going on. "Barry, I would have been content even with that. I gave my word to President Durling, and I had every intention of keeping it.
"But I can't. I just can't," Kealty went on. "Let me explain.
"I've known Jack Ryan for ten years. He's a fine man, a courageous man, and he's served our country honorably, but he is, unfortunately, not the man to heal our country. What he said last night, trying to speak to the American people, proves it. How can we possibly expect our government to work under these circumstances without experienced, capable people to fill the offices left vacant?"
"But he is the President—isn't he?" Barry asked, scarcely believing what he was doing and what he was hearing.
"Barry, he doesn't even know how to do a proper investigation. Look at what he said last night about the plane crash. Hardly a week has passed and already he says he knows what happened. Can anyone believe that?" Kealty asked plaintively. "Can anyone really believe that? Who has oversight over this investigation? Who's actually running it? To whom are they reporting? And to have conclusions in a week? How can the American people have confidence in that? When President Kennedy was assassinated, it took months. The investigation was run by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Why? Because we had to be sure, that's why."
"Excuse me, Mr. Vice President, but that really doesn't answer my question."
"Barry, Ryan was never Vice President, because I never resigned. The post was never vacant, and the Constitution allows only one Vice President. He never even took the oath associated with the office."
"But—"
"You think I want to do this? I don't have a choice. How can we rebuild the Congress and the executive branch with amateurs? Last night Mr. Ryan told the governors of the states to send him people with no experience in government. How can laws be drafted by people who don't know how?
"Barry, I've never committed public suicide before. It's like being one of the people, one of the senators at the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson. I'm looking down into my open political grave, but I have to place the country first. I have to." The camera zoomed in on his face, and the anguish there was manifest. One could almost see tears in his eyes as his voice proclaimed his selfless patriotism.
"He always was good on TV," van Damm noted.
"I do have trouble believing all this," Ryan said after a moment.
"Believe it," Arnie told him. "Mr. Martin? We could use some legal guidance."
"First of all, get someone over to State and check the Secretary's office out."
"FBI?" van Damm asked.
"Yes." Martin nodded. "You won't find anything, but that's how it has to start. Next, check phone logs and notes. Next, we start interviewing people. That's going to be a problem. Secretary Hanson's dead, along with his wife, and President and Mrs. Durling, of course. Those are the people most likely to have knowledge on the facts of the issue. I would expect that we will develop very little hard evidence, and not very much useful circumstantial evidence."
"Roger told me that—"
Martin cut him off.
"Hearsay. You're telling me that someone said to you what he was told by somebody else—not much use in any court of law."
"Go on," Arnie said.
"Sir, there really is no constitutional or statutory law on this question."
"And there's no Supreme Court to rule on the issue," Ryan pointed out. To that pregnant pause, he added: "What if he's telling the truth?"
"Mr. President, whether or not he's telling the truth is really beside the point," Martin replied. "Unless we can prove that he's lying, which is unlikely, then he has a case of sorts. By the way, on the issue of the Supreme Court, assuming that you get a new Senate and make your nominations, all of the new Justices would ordinarily have to recuse themselves because you selected them. That probably leaves no legal solution possible."
"But if there's no law on this issue?" the President—was he? — asked.
"Exactly. This is a beauty," Martin said quietly, trying to think. "Okay, a President or Vice President stops holding office when he or she resigns. Resignation happens when the office holder conveys the instrument of resignation—a letter suffices—to the proper official. But the man who accepted the instrument is dead, and we will doubtless find that the instrument is missing. Secretary Hanson probably called the President to inform him of the resignation—"
"He did," van Damm confirmed.
"But President Durling is also dead. His testimony would have had evidentiary value, but that isn't going to happen, either. That puts us back to square one." Martin didn't like what he was doing, and he was having enough trouble trying to talk and think about the law at the same time. This was like a chessboard with no squares, just the pieces arrayed at random.
"But—"
"The phone logs will show there was a call, fine. Secretary Hanson might have said that the letter was poorly worded and would be fixed the following day. This is politics, not law. So long as Durling was President, Kealty had to leave, because—"
"Of the sexual harassment investigation." Arnie was getting it now.
"You got it. His TV statement even covered that, and he did a nice job of neutralizing the issue, didn't he?"
"We're back to where we started," Ryan observed.
"Yes, Mr. President." That elicited a wry smile.
"Nice to know that somebody believes."
INSPECTOR O'DAY AND three other agents from Headquarters Division left their car right in front of the building. When a uniformed guard came over to object, O'Day just flashed his ID and kept on going. He stopped at the main security desk and did the same.
"I want your chief to meet me on the seventh floor in one minute," he told the guard. "I don't care what he's doing. Tell him to come up right now." Then he and his team walked to the elevator bank.
"Uh, Pat, what the hell—" The other three had been picked more or less at random from the Bureau's Office of Professional Responsibility. That was the FBI's own internal-affairs department. All experienced investigators with supervisory rank, their job was to keep the Bureau clean. One of them had even investigated a former Director. OPR's charter was to respect nothing but the law, and the surprising thing was that, unlike similar organizations in city police forces, it retained, for the most part, the respect of the street agents.
The lobby guard had called ahead to the guard post on the top floor. It was George Armitage this morning, working a different shift from the previous week. "FBI," O'Day announced as the elevator door opened. "Where's the Secretary's office?"
"This way, sir." Armitage led them down the corridor.
"Who's been using the office?" the inspector asked.
"We're getting ready to move Mr. Adler in. We've just about got Mr. Harison's things out and—"
"So people have been going in and out?"
"Yes, sir." O'Day hadn't expected that it would be much use bringing in the forensics team, but that would be done anyway. If there had ever been an investigation that had to go strictly by the book, this was the one.
"Okay, we need to talk to everyone who's been in or out of the office since the moment Secretary Hanson left it. Every single one, secretaries, janitors, everybody."
"The secretarial staff won't be in for another half hour or so."
"Okay. You want to unlock the door?" Armitage did so, letting them into the secretaries' room, and then through the next set of doors into the office itself. The FBI agents stopped cold there, the four of them just looking at first. Then one of them took post at the door to the main corridor.
"Thank you, Mr. Armitage," O'Day said, reading the name tag. "Okay, for the moment, we're treating this as a crime scene. Nobody in or out without our permission. We need a room where we can interview people. I'd like you to make a written list of everyone you know to have been in here, with date and time if that's possible."
"Their secretaries will have that."
"We want yours, too." O'Day looked up the corridor and was annoyed. "We asked for your department chief to join us. Where do you suppose he is?"
"He usually doesn't get in until eight or so."
"Could you call him, please? We need to talk to him right now."
"You got it, sir." Armitage wondered what the hell this was all about. He hadn't seen the TV this morning, nor heard what was going on yet. In any case, he didn't care all that much. Fifty-five and looking forward to retirement after thirty-two years of government service, he just wanted to do his job and leave.
"GOOD MOVE, DAN," Martin said into the phone. They were in the Oval Office now. "Back to you." The attorney hung up and turned.
"Murray sent one of his roving inspectors over, Pat O'Day. Good man, troubleshooter. He's being backed up by OPR guys" — Martin explained briefly what that meant— "another smart move. They're apolitical. With that done, Murray has to back away from things."
"Why?" Jack asked, still trying to catch up.
"You appointed him acting Director. I can't be involved much with this, either. You need to select someone to run the investigation. He has to be smart, clean, and not the least bit political. Probably a judge," Martin thought. "Like a Chief Judge of a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. There's lots of good ones."
"Any ideas?" Arnie asked.
"You have to get that name from somebody else. I can't emphasize enough, this has to be clean in every possible respect. Gentlemen, we're talking about the Constitution of the United States here." Martin paused. He had to explain things. "That's like the Bible for me, okay? For you, too, sure, but I started off as an FBI agent. I worked mainly civil-rights stuff, all those sheet-heads in the South. Civil rights are important, I learned that looking at the bodies of people who died trying to secure those rights for other people they didn't even know. Okay, I left the Bureau, entered the bar, did a little private practice, but I guess I never stopped being a cop, and so I came back in. At Justice, I've worked OC, I've worked espionage, and now I just started running the Criminal Division. This is important stuff to me. You have to do it the right way."
"We will," Ryan told him. "But it would be nice to know how."
That evoked a snort. "Damned if I know. On the substance of the issue, anyway. On the form, it has to appear totally clean, no questions at all. That's impossible, but you have to try anyway. That's the legal side. The political side I leave to you."
"Okay. And the crash investigation?" Ryan was slightly amazed with himself. He'd actually turned away from the investigation to something else. Damn.
This time Martin smiled. "That pissed me off, Mr. President. I don't like having people to tell me how to run a case. If Sato were alive, I could take him into court today. There won't be any surprises. The thing Kealty said about the JFK investigation was pretty disingenuous. You handle one of these cases by running a thorough investigation, not by turning it into a bureaucratic circus. I've been doing that my whole life. This case is pretty simple—big, but simple—and for all practical purposes it's already closed. The real help came from the Mounties. They did a nice job for us, a ton of corroborative evidence, time, place, fingerprints, catching people from the plane to interview. And the Japanese police—Christ, they're ready to eat nails, they're so angry about what happened. They're talking to all of the surviving conspirators. You, and we, don't want-to know their interrogation methods. But their due process is not our problem. I'm ready to defend what you said last night. I'm ready to walk through everything we know."
"Do that, this afternoon," van Damm told him. "I'll make sure you get the press coverage."
"Yes, sir."
"So you can't be part of the Kealty thing?" Jack asked.
"No, sir. You cannot allow the process to be polluted in any way."
"But you can advise me on it?" President Ryan went on. "I need legal counsel of some sort."
"That you do, and, yes, Mr. President, I can do that."
"You know, Martin, at the end of this—"
Ryan cut his chief of staff off cold, even before the attorney could react. "No, Arnie, none of that. God damn it! I will not play that game. Mr. Martin, I like your instincts. We play this one absolutely straight. We get professionals to run it, and we trust them to be pros. I am sick and fucking tired of special prosecutors and special this and special that. If you don't have people you can trust to do the job right, then what the hell are they doing there in the first place?"
Van Damm shifted in his seat. "You're a naif, Jack."
"Fine, Arnie, and we've been running the government with politically aware people since before I was born, and look where it's gotten us!" Ryan stood to pace around the room. It was a presidential prerogative. "I'm tired of all this. What ever happened to honesty, Arnie? What ever happened to telling the goddamned truth? It's all a fucking game here, and the object of the game isn't to do the right thing, the object of the game is to stay here. It's not supposed to be that way! And I'll be damned if I'll perpetuate a game I don't like." Jack turned to Pat Martin. "Tell me about that FBI case."
Martin blinked, not knowing why that had come up, but he told the story anyway. "They even made a bad movie about it. Some civil-rights workers got popped by the local Klukkers. Two of them were local cops, too, and the case wasn't going anywhere, so the Bureau got involved under interstate commerce and civil rights statutes. Dan Murray and I were rookies back then. I was in Buffalo at the time. He was in Philly. They brought us down to work with Big Joe Fitzgerald. He was one of Hoover's roving inspectors. I was there when they found the bodies. Nasty," Martin said, remembering the sight and the horrid smell. "All they wanted to do was to get citizens registered to vote, and they got killed for it, and the local cops weren't doing anything about it. It's funny, but when you see that sort of thing, it isn't abstract anymore. It isn't a document or a case study or a form to fill out. It just gets real as hell when you look at bodies that've been in the ground for two weeks. Those Klukker bastards broke the law and killed fellow citizens who were doing something the Constitution says isn't just okay—it's a right. So, we got 'em, and put 'em all away."
"Why, Mr. Martin?" Jack asked. The response was exactly what he expected.
"Because I swore an oath, Mr. President. That's why."
"So did I, Mr. Martin." And it wasn't to any goddamned game.
THE CUEING WAS somewhat equivocal. The Iraqi military used hundreds of radio frequencies, mainly FM VHP bands, and the traffic, while unusual for the overall situation, was routine in its content. There were thousands of messages, as many as fifty going at any given moment, and STORM TRACK didn't begin to have enough linguists to keep track of them all, though it had to do just that. The command circuits for senior officers were well known, but these were encrypted, meaning that computers in KKMC had to play with the signals in order to make sense of what sounded like static. Fortunately a number of defectors had come across with examples of the encryption hardware, and others trickled over various borders with daily keying sequences, all to be handsomely rewarded by the Saudis.
The use of radios was more now rather than less. The senior Iraqi officers were probably less concerned with electronic intercepts than with who might be listening in on a telephone line. That simple fact told the senior watch officers a lot, and a document was even now being prepared to go up the ladder to the DCI for delivery to the President.
STORM TRACK looked like most such stations. One huge antenna array, called an Elephant Cage for its circular configuration, both detected and localized signals, while other towering whip antennas handled other tasks. The listening station had been hastily built during the buildup for DESERT STORM as a means of gathering tactical intelligence for allied military units, then to be expanded for continuing interest in the region. The
Kuwaitis had funded the sister station, PALM BOWL, for which they were rewarded with a good deal of the "take." "That's three," a technician said at the latter station, reading off his screen. "Three senior officers heading to the racetrack. A little early in the day to play the ponies, isn't it?"
"A meet?" his lieutenant asked. This was a military station, and the technician, a fifteen-year sergeant, knew quite a bit more about the job than his new boss. At least the elltee was smart enough to ask questions.
"Sure looks like it, ma'am."
"Why there?"
"Middle of town, not in an official building. If you're out to meet your honey, you don't do it at home, do you?" The screen changed. "Okay, we cracked another one. The Air Force chief is there, too—was, probably. Traffic analysis seems to show that the meet broke up an hour or so ago. I wish we could crack their crypto gear faster…"
"Content?"
"Just where to go and when, ma'am, nothing substantive, nothing about what they're meeting for."
"When's the funeral, Sergeant?"
"Sunset."
"YES?" RYAN LIFTED the phone. You could pretty much tell how important the call was from the line that was lit. This one was Signals.
"Major Canon, sir. We're getting feed from Saudi. The intel community is trying to make sense of it now. They told me to cue you on that."
"Thank you." Ryan replaced the phone. "You know, it would be nice to have 'em come in one at a time. Something happening in Iraq, but they're not sure what yet," he told his guests. "I guess I have to start paying attention. Anything else I have to do now?"
"Put Secret Service protection on Vice President Kealty," Martin suggested. "He's entitled to it anyway under the law as a former VP—for six months?" the attorney asked Price.
"That's correct."
Martin thought about that. "Did you have any discussions on that issue?"
"No, sir."
"Pity," Martin thought.