Читаем Clear and Present Danger полностью

"Our field guy called me at home. VARIABLE has been shut down, and the helicopter crew that was supposed to bring them out has been pulled. He thinks they're going to be - hell, he thinks -"

"Yeah," Shaw observed. "If so, we now have a probable violation of the law. Conspiracy to commit murder. Proving it might be a little tough, though."

"Stuff your law - what about those soldiers?"

"How do we get them out?" Murray asked. "Get help from - no, we can't get the Colombians involved, can we?"

"How do you think they'd react to an invasion from a foreign army?" Shaw noted. "About the same way we would."

"What about confronting Cutter?" Jack asked. Shaw answered.

"Confront him with what? What do we have? Zip. Oh, sure, we can get those communications guys and the helicopter crews and talk to them, but they'll stonewall for a while, and then what? By the time we have a case, those soldiers are dead."

"And if we can bring them out, then what case do we have?" Murray asked. "Everybody runs for cover, papers get shredded..."

"If I may make a suggestion, gentlemen, why don't we forget about courtrooms for the moment and try to concentrate on getting those grunts the hell out of Indian country?"

"Getting them out is fine, but -"

"You think your case will get better with thirty or forty new victims?" Ryan snapped. "What is the objective here?"

"That was a cheap shot, Jack," Murray said.

"Where's your case? What if the President authorized the operation, with Cutter as his go-between, and there's no written orders? CIA acted in accordance with verbal orders, and the orders are arguably legal, except that I got told to mislead Congress if they ask, which they haven't done yet! There's also that little kink in the law that says we can start a covert operation without telling them, no matter what it is - the limits on our covert ops come from a White House Executive Order, remember - as long as we do get around to telling them. Therefore a killing authorized by the guy who puts out the Executive Order can only become a murder retroactively if something extraneous to the murder itself does not happen! What bonehead ever set these statutes up? Have they ever really been tested in court?"

"You left something out," Murray observed.

"Yeah, the most obvious reply from Cutter is that this isn't a covert operation at all, but a paramilitary counterterrorist op. That evades the whole issue of intelligence-oversight. Now we come under the War Powers Resolution, which has another lead-time factor. Have any of these laws ever been tested in court?"

"Not really," Shaw answered. "There's been a lot of dancing around, but nothing actually on point. War-Powers especially is a constitutional question that both sides are afraid to put in front of a judge. Where are you coming from, Ryan?"

"I got an agency to protect, don't I? If this adventure goes public, the CIA reverts back to what it was in the seventies. For example, what happens to your counterterrorist programs if the info we feed you dries up?" That one scored points, Jack saw. CIA was the silent partner in the war on terrorism, feeding most of its data to the Bureau, as Shaw had every reason to know. "On the other hand, from what we've talked about the last couple of days, what real case do you have?"

"If by withdrawing support for SHOWBOAT, Cutter made it easier for Cortez to kill them, we have a violation of the District of Columbia law against conspiracy to commit murder. In the absence of a federal law, a crime committed on federal property can be handled by the municipal law that applies to the violation. Some part of what he did was accomplished here or on other federal property, and that's where the jurisdiction comes from. That's how we investigated the cases back in the seventies."

"What cases were they?" Jack asked Shaw.

"It spun out of the Church Committee hearings. We investigated assassination plots by CIA against Castro and some others - they never came to trial. The law we would have used was the conspiracy statute, but the constitutional issues were so murky that the investigation died a natural death, much to everyone's relief."

"Same thing here, isn't it? Except while we fiddle..."

"You've made your point," the acting Director said. "Number one priority is getting them out, any way we can. Is there a way to do it covertly?"

"I don't know yet."

"Look, for starters let's get in touch with your field officer," Murray suggested.

"He doesn't -"

"He gets immunity, anything he wants," Shaw said at once. "My word on it. Hell, far as I can tell he hasn't really broken any laws anyway - because of Martinez-Barker - but you have my word, Ryan, no harm comes to him."

"Okay." Jack pulled the slip of paper from his shirt pocket. The number Clark had given him wasn't a real number, of course, but by adding and subtracting to the digits in a prearranged way, the call went through.