Cortez had been gone only an hour when a telex came in, informing him that last night's courier flight had failed to arrive at its destination in southwestern Georgia. The amusement that invariably accompanies receipt of top-secret information changed at once to anger. El jefe thought to call Cortez on his mobile phone, but remembered that his hireling refused to discuss substantive matters over what he called a "nonsecure" line. Escobedo shook his head. This colonel of the DGI - he was an old woman! El jefe's phone twittered its own signal.

"Bingo," a man said in a van, two thousand miles away, vox IDENT, his computer screen announced: SUBJECT BRAVO

INIT CALL TO SUBJECT ECHO FRQ 848.970MHZ CALL INIT 2349Z INTERCEPT IDENT 345.

"We may have our first big one here, Tony."

The senior technician, who'd been christened Antonio forty-seven years earlier, put on his headphones. The conversation was being taken down on high-speed tape - it was actually a three-quarter-inch videotape because of the nature of the system used to intercept the signal. Four separate machines recorded the signal. They were Sony commercial recorders, only slightly modified by the NSA technical staff.

"Ha! Se or Bravo is pissed!" Tony observed as he caught part of the conversation. "Tell Meade that we finally caught a frozen rope down the left-field line." A "frozen rope" was the current NSA nickname for a very important signal intercept. It was baseball season, and the Baltimore Orioles were coming back.

"How's the signal?"

"Clear as a church bell. Christ, why don't I ever buy TRW stock?" Antonio paused, struggling not to laugh. "God, is he pissed!"

The call ended a minute later. Tony switched his headphone input to one of the tape machines and crab-walked his swivel chair to a teleprinter, where he started typing.

FLASH

TOP SECRET ***** CAPER

2358Z

SIGINT REPORT

INTERCEPT 345 INIT 2349Z FRQ 836.970 MHZ

INIT: SUBJECT BRAVO

RECIP: SUBJECT ECHO

B: WE'VE LOST ANOTHER DELIVERY. [AGITATION]

E: WHAT HAPPENED?

B: THE CURSED THING DIDN'T APPEAR. WHAT DO YOU THINK? [AGITATION].

E: THEY'RE DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT, I TOLD YOU THAT. WE'RE TRYING TO FIND OUT WHAT IT is.

B: SO WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO KNOW?

E: WE'RE WORKING ON THAT. OUR MAN is TRAVELING TO WASHINGTON TO FIND OUT. THERE ARE SOME OTHER THINGS HAPPENING ALSO.

B: WHAT? [AGITATION]

E: I PROPOSE WE MEET TOMORROW TO DISCUSS IT.

B: THE REGULAR MEETING IS TUESDAY.

E: THIS IS IMPORTANT, EVERYONE MUST HEAR IT, PABLO.

B: CAN'T YOU TELL ME ANYTHING?

E: THEY ARE CHANGING THE RULES, THE NORTH AMERICANS. EXACTLY HOW THEY ARE CHANGING THEM WE DO NOT YET KNOW.

B: WELL, WHAT ARE WE PAYING THAT CUBAN RENEGADE FOR? [AGITATION]

E: HE IS DOING VERY WELL. PERHAPS HE WILL LEARN MORE ON HIS TRIP TO WASHINGTON. BUT WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED TO THIS POINT WILL BE THE SUBJECT OF OUR MEETING.

B: VERY WELL. I WILL SET UP THE MEETING.

E: THANK YOU, PABLO.

END CALL. DISCONNECT SIGNAL. END INTERCEPT.

"What's this 'agitation' business?"

"I can't put 'pissed' in an official TWX," Antonio pointed out. "This one's hot. We have some operational intel here." He pressed the transmit key on his terminal. The signal was addressed to a code-word destination - CAPER - which was all anyone who worked in the van knew.

Bob Ritter had just left for home, and was only a mile up on the George Washington Parkway when his secure earphone made its distinctive and, to him, irritating noise.

"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.

"You're not kidding. It's Cortez," Ritter observed after scanning the message form.

"Good bet, sir."

"Coming here... but we don't 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.