Blue Gold

"Say, Jack, do you have a second to look at something really weird?"

The sallow-faced man at the cluttered desk put aside the Russian newspaper he had been marking up and rubbed his deep-set eyes.

"Sex, crime, and more sex. I don't know what could be weirder than the Russian press," said John Rowland, a respected translator who had joined the CIA after the agency's dark Nixon days. "It's like U.S. supermarket tabloids on hormones. I almost miss the tractor production statistics." He rose from his work station and came around into Browning's cubicle. "What's the problem, young man?"

"This crazy message on my computer," Browning replied with a shake of his head. "I was scrolling some historical material on the Soviet Union, and this popped up on the screen."

Rowland leaned forward and read the words: "PROTOCAL ACTIVATED FOR SANCTION WITH EXTREME PREJU DICE."

Rowland tugged his pepper-and-salt goatee. "Extreme prejudice? Nobody uses language like that anymore."

"What's it mean?"

"It's a euphemism. Goes way back to the cold war and Vietnam. It's a polite way of referring to a hit."

"Huh?"

"Don't they teach you anything at Yale?" Rowland said with a grin. "Sanctioning someone is setting him up for assassination. Real James Bond stuff."

"Oh, I get it," Barrett said, looking around the room at the other cubicles. "Let's guess which of our esteemed colleagues is the practical joker."

Rowland was in deep thought and didn't reply. He slid into Browning's chair and studied the underlined file number at the end of the message. He highlighted the number and hit the enter key. A series of digits appeared.

"If this is a joke, it's a good one," he muttered. "No one has used this encoding since Allen Dulles was agency director after World War II."

Rowland hit the print button and took the copy of the message to his cubicle with his puzzled colleague right behind him. He made a quick phone call, then fed the code into his computer and tapped the keys. "I'm sending this down to a pal in the decoding division. It's pretty antiquated stuff. He can decipher it in a matter of minutes with the programs available today."

"Where do you suppose it came from?" Browning said.

"What were you reading when the message appeared?"

"Archives material. Mostly diplomatic reports. One of the Senate staff guys needed it for his boss who's on the armed ser vices committee. He was looking for patterns of Soviet behavior, probably so he could jack up the defense budget."

"What was the context of these reports?"

"They were from field agents to the director. It had to do with Soviet nuclear development. They were in the old files that Clinton ordered declassified."

"Interesting. That tells us that that the material was meant for eyes only at the highest level."

"Sounds plausible. But what's this business with the protocol?"

Rowland sighed. "I don't know what the agency is going to do when old war horses like me get put out to pasture. Let me tell you how the protocols worked back in the old covert action days. First a policy would be approved, usually at the highest levels, with the director, NSA, joint chiefs all signing on. The president would be kept out of the loop officially, for purposes of deniability. The policy would generate a course of action in response to a given threat or threats. That was the protocol. The action was distilled into an order. The order was broken down into a number of parts."

"Makes sense. That way those who carried out the order only knew their small part of it. You preserve secrecy."

'Aha, I guess they did teach you something in the halls of Eli, even if it's all wrong. Those nutty plans like whacking Castro or Iran-contra were set up that way, and they all fell apart."

"So why have a protocol at all?"

"The prime reason is so the guys at the top can disallow responsibility. A protocol was usually reserved for the most serious type of action. In this case, we're talking about a political assassination. It was not something taken lightly. Heads of state are not supposed to plot the demise of other heads of state or people in their own government. It makes for bad precedent. So the order would be multilevel. It was designed not to leave finger prints. No one gave orders that could be traced back. A number of predetermined circumstances had to come about for the command to be followed through to its end."

"It sounds like the fail-safe system they used with the nuclear bombers. There were several steps involved, and the mission could be aborted up until the very last."

"Something like that. Let me give you another analogy. A threat is perceived. One hand takes out the gun. The threat grows. Another hand loads the bullet. The threat escalates. A

third hand cocks the hammer. Next, the trigger is pulled and the threat is eliminated. All those action-reaction steps would be necessary for the gun to fire."

Browning nodded. "I understand what you're saying, but I can't figure out how the bloody thing got onto my computer."

"Maybe that's not as mysterious as it seems." Most of Row land's days were spent in the boring task of reading and analyzing newspapers, and he relished the chance for intellectual exercise. He leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling.

"The protocol originally would have been recorded on paper, probably broken down into parts. It is never carried out. Then the agency goes from paper to computers. The protocol becomes encoded in the agency's database. It sits there for decades, until all the triggering mechanisms are in place to activate it. The director is supposed to be notified automatically, only the files have been declassified and the computer doesn't know that a lowly analyst will be reading a file meant only for the director."

"Brilliant," Browning said. "Now we have to figure out what could have set a fifty-year-old protocol in motion. I was looking at these same files yesterday. This was not there."

"That means the protocol was activated in the last twenty four hours. Wait-" The e-mail was blinking. Rowland retrieved the message.

"Dear Rowland. Here's your message. Ho-hum. Please send something more challenging next time."

The words on the screen simply said, "Sanction under way."

"It's a coded reply from the hit man," Rowland said. Browning shook his head. "I wonder who the poor bastard was."

"I don't think we have to worry about the past; it's the future I'm concerned about."

"Hey, c'mon, Jack, it's been half a century since this protocol was approved. Everyone involved must be long dead. Hit man and victim alike."

"Maybe," Rowland said. "Maybe not." He tapped the words on the screen. "This reply has just been sent. It means the hit man is still alive, and so is his victim. At least for now."

"What do you mean?"

Rowland reached for the phone, a grave expression carved into the usual cheery face.

"The director didn't countermand the order, so it goes to the next step. The killing." Rowland held his hand up to cut off Browning's question. "Please put me through to the director," he barked into the phone. "Yes, it's urgent," he said, his voice rising in a rare display of emotion. "Damned urgent!"

Chapter 22

The blaze had been extinguished and the firefighters were mopping up when Zavala re turned to Hanley's office building. Zavala bluffed his way past the yellow police tape with officious flashes of his NUMA identification card. He waved the laminated card with his picture close to the arson investigator's nose, then quickly tucked it back into his billfold. He didn't want to explain why someone from a federal ocean science agency was at a San Diego disaster scene.