Six months later, newly elected President Reagan invited Dutcher for a weekend at Camp David to “shoot the breeze.” There in a cabin in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, Reagan outlined the idea of a detached intelligence organization, chartered by NSC directive and controlled by the executive branch. By the end of the weekend, Dutcher was sold. In trademark Reagan-esque fashion, the president simply shook Dutcher’s hand and said, “I’ll give you what you need. You make it work.”
In the years that followed, Dutcher did just that. He and his people had fixed more “unfixable” problems than the American public ever knew, or would know, existed. Now Dutcher was wondering where this latest problem would take them.
“Tell me about the key,” he said to Tanner. “We’ll do some digging.”
Tanner described the key in detail.
Dutcher asked, “Walt, what’s the embassy’s role in something like this?”
In addition to keeping all the gears at Holystone turning, Walter Oaken was their resident encyclopedia. The running joke at the office was that the game show Jeopardy! had settled out of court to keep him off their show lest he break the bank. For all his knowledge, though, Oaken was unpretentious and keenly aware that people, not information, made the world go ’round.
“By now, the Prefectural Police will have already contacted the legal attaché. It’s standard procedure.”
“Then what?”
“Not much. At most, a routine message to State.”
“Good,” said Dutcher. “Do we have any in-country assets we can tap?”
“Maybe,” Oaken said. I’ll make some calls.
Dutcher said, “Briggs, tell me about this woman you met.”
Tanner told them what he knew about Camille.
“We’d best check her, too. How about these folks following you?”
“Right now it looks like simple curiosity. I’m okay.”
“Stay that way. Whoever they are, don’t give them any more reason to be interested in you.”
5
The CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) is a nondescript concrete building with tinted windows surrounded by a barbed-wire fence at the intersection of First and M Streets. Inside, two thousand analysts and technicians go about the business of making sense of the thousands of radar, thermal, and visual images produced by satellites with names like Keyhole, Lacrosse, and Vortex. Despite such James Bondian technology that includes computers costing more than the average citizen makes in a lifetime, most of the NPIC’s analysts are devotees of the plain old eyeball.
This was the case with Rudy Grayson, the chief interpreter on duty when the latest KH-14 images from the Golan Heights came off the printer.
He aligned the strips vertically on his light table, then scanned them with a magnifying glass. He liked to get a feel for what he was seeing before moving on to a complex dissection, using the computer to manipulate the millions of pixels that comprised the image.
Pixels are individual cells of varying grayscale contrast, each carrying dark and light values ranging from 1 to 10,000, each of which a computer can adjust to highlight selected features. While the human eye cannot detect the difference between, say, a value of 12 and 14, a computer can, making millions of such adjustments until an image reaches optimal resolution.
Today, as he had been for the past four months, Grayson’s job was to confirm that both Israeli and Syrian troop strengths on the Golan matched the agreed limits.
The nearer the date for the UN-managed buffer expansion on the Golan came, the more skittish the involved parties became. UN troops on the Golan was not a new idea, but this expansion was to begin a disengagement of both Israeli and Syrian forces that would eventually demilitarize this greatly contested chunk of land.
The theory behind the plan was two-pronged: As long as Israel occupied the Golan, Syria would not engage in the peace process, and as long as Syria planned to militarize a repatriated Golan, Israel would not give it back. Israel remembered too well the years of Katyusha bombardment its northern kibbutzes suffered from Syrian positions before the Golan was captured during the ’war.
Grayson was scanning the last strip when something near the border caught his eye. It was not on the Golan, but to its north and east, in the deserts of Syria.
What the hell is that?
He turned to his computer, double-clicked a file, then ran his finger down the screen. He frowned and picked up the phone. “Hey Linda, is Jerry around? I’ve got something he should take a look at.”
At dusk Tanner took a taxi into Tanabe and found a secluded shokudo, or neighborhood restaurant. At the front door he was greeted by a smiling hostess who bowed, offered him a pair of cloth slippers, and led him to a table overlooking a small garden. Paper lanterns lined the roof’s overhang.
He started with ocha, or green tea, then had an appetizer of chawan-mushi, a dish of vegetables and steamed shrimp. For the main course he ordered tempura and mizu-taki, a dish of chicken, leeks, and vermicelli boiled in a fish stock. It took all his willpower not to order a second course and simply settle for a pot of hot saki.
He was savoring his second cup when the hostess approached and handed him a small white card:
SATO IEYASU
INSPECTOR, (RETIRED)
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIVE BUREAU
Tanner looked up at the hostess, who merely smiled.
Interesting. The CEB was the Japanese equivalent of the FBI. He shrugged. “Ask the inspector to join me, please.”
She returned with a Japanese man in his early sixties. “Mr. Tanner?”
“Inspector Ieyasu.”
Ieyasu nodded and bowed. He was a short man with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“What can I do for you?” Tanner asked, gesturing for him to sit.
“It is not what you can do for me, but what I can do for you.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“We have a mutual friend: Walter Oaken. He thought I might be of some help. As I understand it, you found yourself in a bit of trouble last night.”
“I see. At the risk of sounding paranoid—”
Ieyasu raised his hand. “I understand. Call him if you wish. I will wait here.”
Tanner went to the lobby and borrowed the house phone. He waited through two minutes of clicks before Oaken answered.
“Oaks, its me.”
“Funny you should call,” Oaken said.
“I’ll bet. Guess who I’m having dinner with?”
“Sato. Sorry I didn’t have time to warn you.”
“No harm done. Describe him.”
Oaken did so, and Tanner said, “That’s him.”
“If there’s anybody who might have some answers, it’s him. Talk to him, then call me. One piece of advice, though: Don’t get into a saki drinking contest with him. He’s dangerous.”
Tanner laughed. “Okay.”
He hung up and returned to the table.
“Well?” Ieyasu asked.
“Oaks told me not to drink with you.”
For the first time, Inspector Ieyasu smiled. “A wise man, Walter.”
After a second pot of tea, Ieyasu came to business. “What did Walter tell you about me?”