October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  “Why the CFS, Greg?”

  The DDI gestured futility at trying to decipher any of his boss’s decisions.

  “Hmm,” Healy grunted. His enthusiasm level with the men supposed to fill the void once Castro was gone had barely reached the low threshold maintained by his Intelligence counterpart. “I can’t figure him out, Greg. Those guys he’s championing are bad news, and the company they keep doesn’t do anything for their social standing. Anthony can’t dispute that their benefactor is hooked up with the druggies, can he?”

  “He sure can, plus he refuses to believe that the CFS is mixed up in it.” Drummond gave a “Go figure” shrug. “The tooth fairy is putting bags of hundreds under their pillows.”

  “Still no luck on figuring out who’s signing the checks?”

  “Zip. S and T is still trying with DIOMEDES,” the DDI answered, referring to the Science and Technology Directorate’s section that was linked to Federal Reserve computers and those of foreign banks with holdings in the United States. It was all very quiet, and borderline illegal. “He hates it, but as long as Coseros is in the equation, I can look wherever I want to find my leak. If something turns up on the CFS in looking, too bad. Anthony can’t stop me on that, despite what he believes.”

  “His head’s in a hole,” Healy commented with disdain.

  “Evidence, Mike. He wants evidence. Short of an indictment, I don’t know what will convince him. He doesn’t trust the Bureau, he doesn’t trust you or me. I don’t know who he trusts.”

  “Himself.” Healy’s chest heaved with a suppressed chuckle. “The worst possible person.”

  “I know.” The DDI’s secure line buzzed before he could depress himself anymore. “Drummond.”

  “Greg, it’s Seth.” Seth Feirstein was roughly the DDI’s equal in the National Security Agency, the super-secret government monolith based at Fort Meade that did wonderful things with communications and cryptographics. “Listen, remember the watch we put up for you on the satellite lines out of Panama?”

  “Yeah,” Drummond confirmed, his mind silently praying for good news. “Please tell me you’ve got something.”

  “We’ve got something.”

  The DDI gave a thumbs-up to Healy and mouthed the name “Coseros.” He got a beaming smile in return. “Go on.”

  “Three groups of lines were finally pegged as his primary nonsecure international links. Once we nailed those down, we ran back on the U.S. long-distance calls to them.”

  “I don’t want to know how,” the DDI said. He already did know how. The National Security Agency had the best electronic witch doctors on their staff, men and women who knew how to skirt the bounds of legality with the deftness of a ballerina and how to cross it with the stealth of an apparition.

  “I’ve got two numbers for you. Both have called at least five times in the past month, and one over twenty.”

  “Where’s the higher one located?”

  “Area code three-zero-five.”

  “Miami,” Drummond said. “Give them both to me.”

  The DDI noted both but circled the Miami one. Immediately after hanging up with Feirstein, he hit the speed-dial button for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  “Think you may have something?” Healy asked before the DDI’s call was picked up.

  “I damn sure hope so.” The DDI tapped his pencil nervously. “Gordy?”

  “Yeah. Greg, is that you? You sound kind of pumped up,” the FBI director commented.

  “I am. Hey, you feel like helping me with some plumbing?”

  “Is this about that little drip you think you had?”

  “Exactly, except I have a possible stateside contact now. Just a phone number. Think you can manage?”

  “I’ll need a wiretap warrant, but we can do that quietly.” The Justice Department, of which the Bureau was part, had a regularly assigned liaison judge from one of the federal courts whose responsibility, in addition to adjudicating cases, was to provide swift warrant processing in matters with potential national-security concerns. The present situation fit that profile to a T. “Two-way street on this. If anything incriminating toward or by Coseros is said...”

  “It’s yours.” Drummond nodded with satisfaction. Coseros was a prize to be had, but the DDI had a greater desire. “I want the ass of whoever is wasting water.”

  “I hear you. Oh, and isn’t Cuba interesting this time of year?”

  The DDI smiled. It was a secure line, and Gordon Jones was not known to be a dummy. “Weather’s looking up a bit here, too.”

  * * *

  Frankie slowed the Chevy along the street, checking house numbers. “There.”

  Art undid his belt as Frankie swung into the driveway. “Bingo.”

  The car was twenty feet ahead, nosed toward the closed garage door.

  “That’s the partial I got,” Frankie said. “Guess he’s home.”

  “Let’s go have a talk.”

  The two agents walked quietly toward the front of the house, their eyes instinctively searching for that which was out of the ordinary.

  “Nice morning,” Frankie observed. “Would you have all your shades drawn?”

  “Hmm.” Art stepped up onto the porch, his partner staying in the driveway with her eyes alternating between the front and side of the house.

  Art stood listening for a moment, hearing nothing, looking to Frankie for ideas. She shrugged. If Sullivan wasn’t home, then why was his car still there? And where was he? They were questions that would not be answered by them just standing there.

  Art tapped on the screen-door frame four times, his body reflexively standing to one side of the opening. “Mr. Sullivan. This is the FBI. We need to speak to you.”

  “FBI, my ass!”

  Frankie dropped low first, bringing her gun out during the motion. Art did the same, stepping farther aside from the doorway and clear of the windows.

  “I’ve got a gun, and I’ll use it!”

  The words were strong but slurred. Art and Frankie noticed another thing in them: real fear.

  “Listen, George, this is the FBI,” Art said loudly without shouting. He didn’t want to appear to be giving commands. This wasn’t a suspect, after all, just an apparently juiced guy who was afraid for some reason. Seeing someone get wasted could do that, the agents knew.

  Art looked to his partner. In barricade situations it was standard to not reveal the locations of all agents on the scene for purposes of security and response potential. In this case, though, doing just the opposite might be the way to go.

  “Sullivan, this is Special Agent Aguirre of the FBI. My partner and I just want to talk to you. We know what happened yesterday. We were there. Think...you drove right by us in the alley. You almost creamed my partner.”

  The doorknob clicked soon after Frankie’s plea ended. Art cringed, remembering the event that had sent his former partner to the hospital, and nearly to the grave. But this was different, he told himself, repeatedly, as the man behind the door came into view. His hands were empty.

  “Frankie,” Art said calmly, his Smith now pointed at the floor and held one-handed.

  “The gun’s on the floor,” George Sullivan said, his eyes red and moist. He looked up at Art. “Sorry about yesterday.”

  Frankie walked past Art and Sullivan, checking the interior to ensure that all was clear. She was back on the porch a minute later. “Quite a mess in there.”

  “Yeah,” Sullivan said, wiping his mouth and eyes with the back of his hand. He leaned to one side, aiming for the doorjamb, but missed. Art caught him, and lowered him to the porch floor.

  “Take it easy. You hurt?”

  Sullivan looked up at Art, his picture of the dark figure fuzzy. “I knew it couldn’t be the guys, ‘cause I heard a woman. Where...?”

  “Right here,” Frankie said, stepping closer.

  “Yeah. I mean, I thought they might come back, so I had to, you know...” His face went blank, the alcohol and terror combining to turn
his stomach into a cauldron of boiling fluids. He rolled to the right and vomited heavily, sitting back up after a few dry heaves. “Sorry.”

  “I think whatever you filled your belly with is better off on the porch,” Art observed. “Did you see who did this?”

  “No. No.” Sullivan spit the taste from his mouth. “I found it like this. Man, I don’t want to end up like that guy at Clampett’s.”

  “How do we know it was them?” Frankie asked her partner.

  “We don’t, but this fits too neatly. Better roll a forensic team out here and get LAPD to string us a crime scene. I’m going to try and sober him up a little.”

  Ten minutes later the first of two LAPD units turned the comer. One officer began stringing “banana tape” to cordon off the house, as the other started his own report that would explain why the Bureau was in charge of this scene although in LAPD jurisdiction. The first forensic team would not arrive for another half hour, at which time Art hoped there would be something worthwhile found that they could use to identify and locate the perpetrators. Leads, after all, did not just walk up and bite you. Well, almost never.

  “George,” the elderly woman called from behind the police line.

  Art noticed that Sullivan, after two cups of straight black provided by a neighbor, was still a bit wobbly. “I’ll help you.” They were at the end of the driveway a few seconds later.

  “Mrs. Carroll.”

  “George, what happened? I saw the police cars. Are you all right?” Her tiny hand reached across the police line and touched his chin. She knew what part of his problem was, just like she could tell when her late husband stopped off at the bar on his way home from work.

  “I’m okay. Someone broke in, that’s all. I came home and found it.”

  “Broke in?” Her hand recoiled from its comforting touch and pressed against her lips. “Oh, dear. I should have called, but I wasn’t sure. My stars!”

  Art’s sensibilities told him not to read past what had been said to what he wanted to hear, but... “Mrs. Carroll, is it?”

  “Louise Carroll,” she affirmed, her eyes falling upon his ID as he held it out. FBI?

  “Did you see something?”

  “Well, yes, but it didn’t seem like an emergency, so I didn’t want to bother the police.”

  Art’s head nodded acceptance. “I understand. Can you tell me what you saw?”

  “Yes,” she began. “There were two men. They got out of a very nice car early this morning, right after Good Morning America started. I watch it every morning. They walked around the corner, and then I didn’t see them anymore. I guess I didn’t see them leave because I started my wash for the day.”

  “That’s very helpful,” Art told her, easing into the questioning. “Can you describe either of the men?”

  She looked downward momentarily, thinking carefully back the few hours. “They were well dressed. Both wore sport coats, but no ties, I believe. I think they were both Mexican, and one had a very thin hairline and a bit of a waist. He was the driver. The other had short, curly hair— it was black—and a mustache. It was quite a distance away, so I’m sorry I can’t tell you more.”

  Art could have kissed her. He looked to Sullivan, and, by his expression, he knew that the men Mrs. Carroll had described were the men who had popped Portero. “Mrs. Carroll, I can’t tell you enough how helpful what you just gave us is. Extremely helpful.”

  “I’m a neighborhood-watch chairperson, so I try to keep an eye open for strangers,” she explained. “I just wish I’d called the police right then, darn it!”

  “I’d like to have my partner talk to you to write down what you’ve told me, if that would be all right?” Art’s head dipped slightly as he finished the request.

  “Of course, but would you like this also?” Mrs. Carroll asked, holding a small slip of notepaper out to the FBI agent.

  “What is this?” Art asked.

  “The license number of the car.”

  This time, the rules and all else be damned, Art Jefferson bent forward and gave the senior citizen a much-deserved peck on the cheek.

  * * *

  They were high-tech dispatchers, directing the movement of billions of dollars of equipment thousands of miles from where they sat. When a customer requested a move, the technicians at the Consolidated Space Operations Center in Colorado Springs carried it out through a series of computer commands that were beamed up to a Milstar communications relay satellite that “bounced” the commands to the intended recipient. Sometimes several bounces were required between the ground and two or three relay satellites before the commands could be acted upon.

  The customers, almost exclusively the CIA and the DOD, then were free to use their people to control the activities of the newly positioned satellites and to interpret whatever data was retrieved. CSOC’s job was done at that point, until another move from any planned orbital path was required. It was all very routine.

  “Goddammit!” the senior watch technician swore, his section’s routine broken by the single flashing light on his console. He switched his intercom to the channel for the Air Force duty officer for his watch, a two-star general.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “We’ve got a reactive rotation on number 5604,” the technician reported, referring to the twenty-ton KH-12 just beginning its pass over western Cuba. “As soon as NPIC started shootin’ pictures, we got a warning.”

  The National Photographic Interpretation Center, a complex of windowless cubes on the grounds of the Washington Navy Yard, was the arm of the CIA and other governmental intelligence agencies that collected and analyzed imagery from the array of reconnaissance satellites orbiting the globe. Their actions this morning, though quite ordinary, had initiated something unexpected. More than that, actually, something was terribly wrong with number 5604.

  “How bad?” the major general, located a hundred feet away in a separate section of CSOC’s modest facility, asked.

  The technician checked his status panel for the satellite. “Bad. It’s off eighteen degrees on the lateral, and we’re getting indications of an end-to-end shift.”

  “Damn.” The KH-12 was now pointed uselessly off to one side, a problem that could have been dealt with had the satellite not also begun a slow end-over-end spin. Though only minute in relative terms—an expected revolution every three hours, the sensors were showing—it effectively put the bird out of commission. “Any ideas on what happened?”

  The technician stared furiously at his status panel, which, other than the attitude and motion-warning indicators, gave him not a clue as to why the malfunction had occurred. “Not a light to tell me shit, sir.” A civilian, the technician was a bit more free to color his language around the staff officer. His thirty years of government service didn’t hurt, either. “My best guess is the stabilizer for the real-time sensors. NPIC was starting to shoot some video, doing a half-degree lens sweep, when the bird started to tilt. I’ll bet the dampers failed, and the lens assembly locked up. When it spun, the bird just spun with it.”

  “But why no indicator?”

  “Ask the boys at Lockheed,” the technician suggested, his morning now screwed up beyond repair.

  The major general would be doing precisely that, through accepted channels and otherwise. But first came the necessity to report to his “customers” at Langley that one of his birds, one they had depended heavily upon during the previous weeks, was now out of the show.

  * * *

  It was quiet in the West Wing, the majority of the staff attending a pre-lunch cake party for the departing secretary of the Vice President. Bud DiContino had stopped in quickly to say a farewell before returning to his office to square things away on the military end of the Cuba operation and await word from the Navy on its overdue boomer. It was troublesome, but at least the Russians weren’t letting it become a wrench in the works. Even General Walker seemed to be more in synch with the plan after the test shot. The charm Kurchatov had laid on couldn�
��t have hurt either, Bud thought.

  The NSA had just dropped a stack of files on his desk when the phone buzzed. “DiContino.”

  “Bud, it’s Greg.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not happy to hear from me?” the DDI said playfully.

  “Hoping to hear from Granger.” He explained about the Pennsylvania.

  “And they’re still on board? Wow. I guess there is something to be said for this trust thing. You’ll have to teach me it sometime,” Drummond joked. “We don’t do much of that here.”

  “It’s a correspondence course. What can I do you for?”

  “We have a little problem.”

  The DDI’s voice didn’t betray anything beyond the “little” label in his sentence. “I’m listening.”

  “Our satellite tasked to get the intel on Cuba just went down.”

  “Down as in malfunctioned?” the NSA asked, hopeful that it wasn’t more like succumbing to gravity and burning up in the atmosphere. Bye-bye nine hundred million.

  “Yeah. CSOC says it’s a major one.” The DDI took a drink of something on the other end of the line. “Guess there’ll be a shuttle mission for this.”

  “Yeah, and who’s gonna pay for it?” The budget battle had stretched to all agencies and departments, choking off contingency funds that had once been earmarked for instances like this. “Greg, we’ve only got two more functioning birds up there, and we can’t pull them off their missions. No way.”

  “I know that, but we do have other options.” The DDI let that hang without further exposition. He knew none was necessary.