Yeah?

CAPER traffic, the voice said.

Right, the Deputy Director (Operations) said with a suppressed sigh. To his driver: Take me back.

Yes, sir.

Getting back, even for a top CIA executive, meant finding a place to reverse course, and then fight the late D.C. rush-hour traffic which, in its majesty, allows rich, poor, and important to crawl at an equal twenty miles per hour. The gate guard waved the car through, and he was in his seventh-floor office five minutes after that. Judge Moore was already gone. There were only four watch officers cleared for this operation. That was the minimum number required merely to wait for and evaluate signal traffic on the operation. The current watch officer had just come on duty. He handed over the signal.

We have something hot, the officer said.

Youre not kidding. Its Cortez, Ritter observed after scanning the message form.

Good bet, sir.

Coming here . . . but we dont know what he looks like. If only the Bureau had gotten a picture of the bastard when he was in Puerto Rico. You know the description we have of him. Ritter looked up.

Black and brown. Medium height, medium build, sometimes wears a mustache. No distinguishing marks or characteristics, the officer recited from memory. It wasnt hard to memorize nothing, and nothing was exactly what they had on Flix Cortez.

Whos your contact at the Bureau?

Tom Burke, middle-level guy in the Intelligence Division. Pretty good man. He handled part of the Henderson case.

Okay, get this to him. Maybe the Bureau can figure a way to bag the bastard. Anything else?

No, sir.

Ritter nodded and resumed his trip home. The watch officer returned to his own office on the fifth floor and made his call. He was in luck this night; Burke was still at his office. They couldnt discuss the matter over the phone, of course. The CIA watch officer, Paul Hooker, drove over to the FBI Building at 10th and Pennsylvania.

Though CIA and FBI are sometimes rivals in the intelligence business, and always rivals for federal budget funds, at the operational level their employees get along well enough; the barbs they trade are good-natured ones.

Theres a new tourist coming into D.C. in the next few days, Hooker announced once the door was closed.

Like who? Burke inquired, gesturing to his coffee machine.

Hooker declined. Flix Cortez. The CIA officer handed over a Xerox of the telex. Portions of it had been blacked out, of course. Burke didnt take offense at this. As a member of the Intelligence Division, charged with catching spies, he was accustomed to need-to-know.

Youre assuming that its Cortez, the FBI agent pointed out. Then he smiled. But I wouldnt bet against you. If we had a picture of this clown, wed stand a fair chance of bagging him. As it is . . . A sigh. Ill put people at Dulles, National, and BWI. Well try, but you can guess what the odds are. If the Agency had gotten a photo of this mutt while he was in the fieldor while he was at the KGB Academyit would make our job a hell of a lot easier. . . . Ill assume that hes coming in over the next four days. Well check all flights directly in from down there, and all connecting flights.

The problem was more one of mathematics than anything. The number of direct flights from Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and other nearby countries directly into the D.C. area was quite modest and easy to cover. But if the subject made a connecting flight through Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Mexico, or any number of other cities, including American ones, the number of possible connections increased by a factor of ten. If he made one more intermediary stop in the United States, the number of possible flights for the FBI to monitor took a sudden jump into the hundreds. Cortez was a KGB-trained pro, and he knew that fact as well as these two men did. The task wasnt a hopeless one. Police play for breaks all the time, because even the most skilled adversaries get careless or unlucky. But that was the game here. Their only real hope was a lucky break.

Which they would not get. Cortez caught an Avianca flight to Mexico City, then an American Airlines flight to DallasFort Worth, where he cleared customs and made yet another American connection to New York City. He checked into the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South. By this time it was three in the morning, and he needed some rest. He left a wakeup call for ten and asked the concierge to have him a first-class ticket for the eleven oclock Metroliner into Union Station, Washington, D.C. The Metroliners, he knew, had their own phones. Hed be able to call ahead if something went wrong. Or maybe . . . no, he decided, he didnt want to call her at work; surely the FBI tapped its own phones. The last thing Cortez did before collapsing onto the bed was to shred his plane-ticket receipts and the baggage tags on his luggage.

The phone awoke him at 9:56. Almost seven hours sleep, he thought. It seemed like only a few seconds, but there was no time to dawdle. Half an hour later he appeared at the desk, tossed in his express check-out form, and collected his train ticket. The usual Manhattan midtown traffic nearly caused him to miss the train, but he made it, taking a seat in the last row of the three-across club-car smoking section. A smiling, redvested attendant started him off with decaffeinated coffee and a copy of USA Today, followed by a breakfast that was no differentthough a little warmerfrom what hed have gotten on an airliner. By the time the train stopped in Philadelphia, he was back asleep. Cortez figured that hed need his rest. The attendant noted the smile on his sleeping face as he collected the breakfast tray and wondered what dreams passed through the passengers head.

At one oclock, while Metroliner 111 approached Baltimore, the TV lights were switched on in the White House Press Room. The reporters had already been prepped with a deep background, not for attribution briefing that there would be a major announcement from the Attorney General, and that it would have something to do with drugs. The major networks did not interrupt their afternoon soap operasit was no small thing to cut away from The Young and the Restlessbut CNN, as usual, put up their Special Report graphic. This was noticed at once by the intelligence watch officers in the Pentagons National Military Command Center, each of whom had a TV on his desk tuned into CNN. That was perhaps the most eloquent comment possible on the ability of Americas intelligence agencies to keep its government informed, but one on which the major networks, for obvious reasons, had never commented.

The Attorney General strode haltingly toward the lectern. For all his experience as a lawyer, he was not an effective public speaker. You didnt need to be if your practice was corporate law and political campaigning. He was, however, photogenic and a sharp dresser, and always good for a leak on a slow news day, which explained his popularity with the media.

Ladies and gentlemen, he began, fumbling with his notes. You will soon be getting handouts concerning Operation TARPON. This represents the most effective operation to date against the international drug cartel. He looked up, trying to see the reporters faces past the glare of the lights.

Investigation by the Department of Justice, led by the FBI, has identified a number of bank accounts both in the United States and elsewhere which were being used for money-laundering on an unprecedented scale. These accounts range over twenty-nine banks from Liechtenstein to California, and their deposits exceed, at our current estimates, over six hundred fifty million dollars. He looked up again as he heard a Goddamn! from the assembled multitude. That elicited a smile. It was never easy to impress the White House press corps. The autowind cameras were really churning away now.

In cooperation with six foreign governments, we have initiated the necessary steps to seize all of those funds, and also to seize eight real-estate joint-venture investments here in the United States which were the primary agency in the actual laundering operation. This is being done under the RICOthe Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizationstatute. I should emphasize on that point that the real-estate ventures involve the holdings of many innocent investors; their holdings will notI repeat notbe affected in any way by the governments action. They were used as dupes by the Cartel, and they will not be harmed by these seizures.

Excuse me, Associated Press interrupted. You did say six hundred fifty million dollars?

That is correct, more than half a billion dollars. The AG described generally how the information had been found, but not the way in which the first lead had been obtained, nor the precise mechanisms used to track the money. As you know, we have treaties with several foreign governments to cover cases such as this. Those funds identified as drug-related and deposited in foreign banks will be confiscated by the governments in question. In Swiss accounts, for example, are approximately . . . He checked his notes again. It looks like two hundred thirty-seven million dollars, all of which now belongs to the Swiss government.

Whats our take? The Washington Post asked.

We dont know yet. Its difficult to describe the complexity of this operationjust the accounting is going to keep us busy for weeks.

What about cooperation from the foreign governments? another reporter wanted to know.

You gotta be kidding, the journalist next to him thought.

The cooperation weve received on this case is simply outstanding. The Attorney General beamed. Our friends overseas have moved with dispatch and professionalism.

Not every day you can steal this much money and call it something for the Public Good, the quiet journalist told herself.

CNN is a worldwide service. The broadcast was monitored in Colombia by two men whose job it was to keep track of the American news media. They were journalists themselves, in fact, who worked for the Colombian TV network, Inravision. One of them excused himself from the control room and made a telephone call before returning.

Tony and his partner had just come back on duty in the van, and there was a telex clipped to the wall, telling them to expect some activity on the cellular-phone circuits at about 1800 Zulu time. They werent disappointed.

Can we talk to Director Jacobs about this? a reporter asked.

Director Jacobs is taking a personal interest in the case, but is not available for comment, the AG answered. Youll be able to talk to him next week, but at the moment he and his team are all pretty busy. That didnt break any rules. It gave the impression that Emil was in town, and the reporters, recognizing exactly what the Attorney General had said and how he had said it, collectively decided to let it slide. It fact, Emil had taken off from Andrews Air Force Base twenty-five minutes earlier.

Madre de Dios! Escobedo observed. The meeting had barely gotten past the usual social pleasantries so necessary for a conference of cutthroats. All the members of the Cartel were in the same room, which happened rarely enough. Even though the building was surrounded with a literal wall of security people, they were nervous about their safety. The building had a satellite dish on the roof, and this was immediately tuned in to CNN. What was supposed to have been a discussion of unexpected happenings in their smuggling operations was suddenly sidetracked onto something far more troubling. It was especially troubling for Escobedo, moreover, since hed been one of the three Cartel members who had urged this money-laundering scheme on his colleagues. Though all had complimented him on the efficiency of the arrangement over the last two years, the looks he was getting now were somewhat less supportive.

There is nothing we can do? one asked.

It is too early to tell, replied the Cartels equivalent of a chief financial officer. I remind you that the money we have already taken completely through the arrangements nearly equals what our normal returns would be. So you can say that we have lost very little other than the gain we expected to reap from our investments. That sounded lame even to him.

I think we have tolerated enough interference, Escobedo said forcefully. The Director of the American federales will be here in Bogot later today.

Oh? And how did you discover this?

Cortez. I told you that hiring him would be to our benefit. I called this meeting to give you the information that he has gotten for us.

This is too much to accept, another member agreed. We should take action. It must be forceful.

There was general agreement. The Cartel had not yet learned that important decisions ought never to be taken in anger, but there was no one to counsel moderation. These men were not known for that quality in any case.

Train 111, Metroliner Service from New York, arrived a minute early at 1:48 P.M. Cortez walked off, carrying his two bags, and walked at once to the taxi stand at the front of the station. The cabdriver was delighted to have a fare to Dulles. The trip took just over thirty minutes, earning the cabbie what for Cortez was a decent tip: $2.00. He entered the upper level, walked to his left, took the escalator down, where he found the Hertz counter. Here he rented another large Chevy and took the spare time to load his bags. By the time he returned inside, it was nearly three. Moira was right on time. They hugged. She wasnt one to kiss in so public a place.

Where did you park?

In the long-term lot. I left my bags in the car.

Then we will go and get them.

Where are we going?

There is a place on Skyline Drive where General Motors occasionally holds important conferences. There are no phones in the rooms, no televisions, no newspapers.

I know it! How did you ever get a reservation at this late notice?

Ive been reserving a suite for every weekend since we were last together, Cortez explained truthfully. He stopped dead in his tracks. That sounds . . . that sounds improper? He had the halting embarrassment down pat by this time.

Moira grabbed his arm. Not to me.

I can tell that this will be a long weekend. Within minutes they were on Interstate 66, heading west toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Four embassy security officers dressed in airline coveralls gave the area a final look, then one of them pulled out a sophisticated satellite-radio phone and gave the final clearance.

The VC-20A, the military version of the G-III executive jet, flew in with a commercial setting on its radar transponder, landing at 5:39 in the afternoon at El Dorado International Airport, about eight miles outside of Bogot. Unlike most of the VC-20As belonging to the 89th Military Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, this one was specially modified to fly into high-threat areas and carried jamming gear originally invented by the Israelis to counter surface-to-air missiles in the hands of terrorists . . . or businessmen. The aircraft flared out and made a perfect landing into gentle westerly winds, then taxied to a distant corner of the cargo terminal, the one the cars and jeeps were heading for. The aircrafts identity was no longer a secret to anyone whod bothered to look, of course. It had barely stopped when the first jeeps formed up on its left side. Armed soldiers dismounted and spread out, their automatic weapons pointed at threats that might have been imaginary, or might not. The aircrafts door dropped down. There were stairs built into it, but the first man off the plane didnt bother with them. He jumped, with one hand hidden in the right side of a topcoat. He was soon joined by another security guard. Each man was a special agent of the FBI, and the job of each was the physical safety of their boss, Director Emil Jacobs. They stood within the ring of Colombian soldiers, each of whom was a member of an elite counterinsurgency unit. Every man there was nervous. There was nothing routine about security in this country. Too many had died proving otherwise.

Jacobs came out next, accompanied by his own special assistant, and Harry Jefferson, Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The last of the three stepped down just as the ambassadors limousine pulled up. It didnt stop for long. The ambassador did step out to greet his guests, but all of them were inside the car a minute later. Then the soldiers remounted their jeeps, which moved off to escort the ambassador. The aircrafts crew chief closed the Gulfstreams door, and the VC-20A, whose engines had never stopped turning, immediately taxied to take off again. Its destination was the airfield at Grenada, thoughtfully built for the Americans by the Cubans only a few years before. It would be easier to guard it there.

How was the flight, Emil? the ambassador asked.

Just over five hours. Not bad, the Director allowed. He leaned back on the velvet seat of the stretch limo, which was filled to capacity. In front were the ambassadors driver and bodyguard. That made a total of four machine guns in the car, and he was sure Harry Jefferson carried his service automatic. Jacobs had never carried a gun in his life, didnt wish to bother with the things. And besides, if his two bodyguards and his assistantanother crack shotdidnt suffice to protect him, what would? It wasnt that Jacobs was an especially courageous man, just that after nearly forty years of dealing with criminals of all sortsthe Chicago mob had once threatened him quite seriouslyhe was tired of it all. Hed grown as comfortable as any man can be with such a thing: it was part of the scenery now, and like a pattern in the wallpaper or the color of a rooms paint, he no longer noticed it.

He did notice the altitude. The city of Bogot sits at an elevation of nearly 8,700 feet, on a plain among towering mountains. There was no air to breathe here and he wondered how the ambassador tolerated it. Jacobs was more comfortable with the biting winter winds off Lake Michigan. Even the humid pall that visited Washington every summer was better than this, he thought.

Tomorrow at nine, right? Jacobs asked.

Yep. The ambassador nodded. I think theyll go along with nearly anything we want. The ambassador, of course, didnt know what the meeting was about, which did not please him. Hed worked as charge daffaires at Moscow, and the security there wasnt as tight as it was here.

Thats not the problem, Jefferson observed. I know they mean welltheyve lost enough cops and judges proving that. Question is, will they play ball?

Would we, under similar circumstances? Jacobs mused, then steered the conversation in a safer direction. You know, weve never been especially good neighbors, have we?

How do you mean? the ambassador asked.

I mean, when it suited us to have these countries run by thugs, we let it happen. When democracy finally started to take root, we often as not stood at the sidelines and bitched if their ideas didnt agree fully with ours. And now that the druggies threaten their governments because of what our own citizens want to buywe blame them.

Democracy comes hard down here, the ambassador pointed out. The Spanish werent real big on If wed done our job a hundred years agoor even fifty years agowe wouldnt have half the problems we have now. Well, we didnt do it then. We sure as hell have to do it now.

If you have any suggestions, Emil Jacobs laughed. Hell, Andy, Im a copwell, a lawyernot a diplomat. Thats your problem. Hows Kay?

Just fine. Ambassador Andy Westerfield didnt have to ask about Mrs. Jacobs. He knew Emil had buried his wife nine months earlier after a courageous fight with cancer. Hed taken it hard, of course, but there were so many good things to remember about Ruth. And he had a job to keep him busy. Everyone needed that, and Jacobs more than most.

In the terminal, a man with a 35mm Nikon and a long lens had been snapping pictures for the past two hours. When the limousine and its escorts started moving off the airport grounds, he removed the lens from the body, set both in his camera case, and walked off to a bank of telephones.

The limousine moved quickly, with one jeep in front and another behind. Expensive cars with armed escorts were not terribly unusual in Colombia, and they moved out from the airport at a brisk clip. You had to spot the license plate to know that the car was American. The four men in each jeep had not known of their escort job until five minutes before they left, and the route, though predictable, wasnt a long one. There shouldnt have been time for anyone to set up an ambushassuming that anyone would be crazy enough to consider such a thing.

After all, killing an American ambassador was crazy; it had only happened recently in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan. . . . And no one had ever made a serious attempt on an FBI Director.

The car they drove in was a Cadillac Fleetwood chassis. Its special equipment included thick windows that could stop a machine-gun bullet, and Kevlar armor all around the passenger compartment. The tires were foam-filled against flattening, and the gas tank of a design similar to that used on military aircraft as protection against explosion. Not surprisingly, the car was known in the embassy motor pool as the Tank.

The driver knew how to handle it as skillfully as a NASCAR professional. He had engine power to race at over a hundred miles per hour; he could throw the three-ton vehicle into a bootlegger turn and reverse directions like a movie stunt driver. His eyes flickered between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. There had been one car following them, for two or three miles, but it turned off. Probably nothing, he judged. Somebody else coming home from the airport. . . . The car also had sophisticated radio gear to call for help. They were heading to the embassy. Though the ambassador had a separate residence, a pretty two-story house set on six sculpted acres of garden and woodland, it wasnt secure enough for his visitors. Like most contemporary American embassies, this one looked to be a cross between a low-rise office block and part of the Siegfried Line.

VOX IDENT, his computer screen read, two thousand miles away: VOICE 34 INIT CALL TO UNKNOWN RECIP FRQ 889.980MHZ CALL INIT 2258z INTERCEPT IDENT 381.

Tony donned the headphones and listened in on the tapedelay system.

Nothing, he said a moment later. Somebodys taking a drive.

At the embassy, the legal attach paced nervously in the lobby. Special Agent Pete Morales of the FBI should have been at the airport. It was his director coming in, but the security pukes said only one car because it was a surprise visitand surprise, everyone knew, was better than a massive show of force. The every-bodies who knew did not include Morales, who believed in showing force. It was bad enough having to live down here. Morales was from California; though his surname was Hispanic, his family had been in the San Francisco area when Major Frmont had arrived, and hed had to brush up on his somewhat removed mother tongue to take his current job, which job also meant leaving his wife and kids behind in the States. As his most recent report had told headquarters, it was dangerous down here. Dangerous for the local citizens, dangerous for Americans, and very dangerous indeed for American cops.

Morales checked his watch. About two more minutes. He started moving to the door.

Right on time, a man noted three blocks from the embassy. He spoke into a hand-held radio.

Until recently, the RPG-7D had been the standard-issue Soviet light antitank weapon. It traces its ancestry to the German Panzerfaust, and was only recently replaced by the RPG-18, a close copy of the American M-72 LAW rocket. The adoption of the new weapon allowed millions of the old ones to be disposed of, adding to the already abundant supply in arms bazaars all over the world. Designed to punch holes in battle tanks, it is not an especially easy weapon to use. Which was why there were four of them aimed at the ambassadors limousine.

The car proceeded south, down Carrera 13 in the district known as Palermo, slowing now because of the traffic. Had the Directors bodyguards known the name of the district and designation of the street, they might have objected merely on grounds of superstition. The slow speed of the traffic here in the city itself made everyone nervous, especially the soldiers in the escort jeeps who craned their necks looking up into the windows of various buildings. It is a fact so obvious as to be misunderstood that one cannot ordinarily look into a window from outside. Even an open window is merely a rectangle darker than the exterior wall, and the eye adjusts to ambient light, not to light in a specific place. There was no warning.

What made the deaths of the Americans inevitable was something as prosaic as a traffic light. A technician was working on a balky signalpeople had been complaining about it for a weekand while checking the timing mechanism, he flipped it to red. Everyone stopped on the street, almost within sight of the embassy. From third-floor windows on both sides of the street, four separate RPG-7D projectiles streaked straight down. Three hit the car, two of them on the roof.

The flash was enough. Morales was moving even before the noise reached the embassy gates, and he ran with full knowledge of the futility of the gesture. His right hand wrenched his Smith & Wesson automatic from the waist holster, and he carried it as training prescribed, pointed straight up. It took just over two minutes.

The driver was still alive, thrown from the car and bleeding to death from holes that no doctor could ever patch in time. The soldiers in the lead jeep were nowhere to be seen, though there was blood on a rear seat. The trail jeeps driver was still at the wheel, his hands clutching at a face shredded with broken glass, and the man next to him was dead, but again the other two were gone Then Morales knew why. Automatic weapons fire erupted in a building to his left. It started, stopped, then began again. A scream came from a window, and that also stopped. Morales wanted to race into the building, but he had no jurisdiction, and was too much a professional to risk his life so foolishly. He moved up to the smashed limousine. He knew that this, too, was futile.

Theyd all died instantly, or as quickly as any man might die. The Directors two bodyguards had worn Kevlar armor. That would stop bullets, but not fragments from a high-explosive warhead, and had proven no more effective than the armor in the Tank. Morales knew what had hit the carweapons designed to destroy tanks. Real ones. For those inside, the only remarkable thing was that you could tell that they had once been human. There was nothing anyone could do, except a priest . . . or rabbi. Morales turned away after a few seconds.

He stood alone in the street, still operating on his professional training, not letting his humanity affect his judgment. The one living soldier in view was too injured to moveprobably had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. None of the people on the sidewalk had come to help . . . but some of them, he saw, were hurt, too, and their injuries occupied the attention of the others. Morales realized that the damage to the car told everyone else in view where they might best spend their efforts. The agent turned to scan up and down the street. He didnt see the technician at the light-control box. The man was already gone.

Two soldiers came out of a building, one carrying what looked like an RPG-7 launcher unit. Morales recognized one of them, Captain Edmundo Garza. There was blood on his khaki shirt and pants, and in his eyes the wild look that Morales hadnt seen since his time in the Marine Corps. Behind him, two more men dragged yet another whod been shot in the arms and the groin. Morales bolstered his automatic before going over, slowly, his hands visible until he was sure hed been recognized.

Capitn . . . Morales said.

One more dead upstairs, and one of mine. Four teams. Getaway cars in the alleys. Garza looked at the blood on his upper arm with annoyance that was rapidly changing to appreciation of his wounds. But there was something more than shock to postpone the pain. The captain looked at the car for the first time in several minutes, hoping that his immediate impression might have been wrong and knowing that it could not be. His handsome, bloody face looked at the American and received a shake by way of reply. Garza was a proud man, a professional soldier dedicated to his country as thoroughly as any man could be, and hed been chosen for this assignment for his combination of skill and integrity. A man who did not fear death, he had just suffered the thing all soldiers fear more. He had failed in his mission. Not knowing why only made it worse.

Garza continued to ignore his wounds, turning to their one prisoner. We will talk, the captain promised him just before he collapsed into Morales arms.

Hi, Jack! Dan and Liz Murray had just arrived at the Ryan house. Dan had to remove his automatic and holster, which he set on the shelf in the closet with something of a sheepish look.

I figured you for a revolver, Jack said with a grin. It was the first time that theyd had the Murrays over.

I miss my Python, but the Bureaus switching over to automatics. Besides, I dont chase bad guys anymore. I chase memos, and position papers, and budget estimates. A rueful shake of the head. What fun.

I know the feeling, Ryan agreed, leading Murray to the kitchen. Beer?

Sounds good to me.