Cortez looked at his desk clock. He'd let her wait... twenty-three minutes. His place was yet another luxury condominium in Medell n, two buildings down from that of his boss. Was this the call? he wondered. He remembered when patience had come hard to him, but it was a long time since he'd been a fledgling intelligence officer, and he went back to his papers.
Twenty minutes later he checked the time again and lit a cigarette, watching the hands move around the dial. He smiled, wondering what it was like for her to have to wait, two thousand miles away. What was she thinking? Halfway through the cigarette, it was time to find out. He lifted the phone and dialed in the number.
Dave got to the phone first. "Hello?" He frowned. "We have a bad connection. Could you repeat that? Oh, okay, hold on." Dave looked over to see his mother's eyes on him. "For you, Mom."
"I'll take it upstairs," she said at once, and moved toward the stairs as slowly as she could manage.
Dave put his hand over the receiver. "Guess who?" There were knowing looks around the dining room.
"Yes," Dave heard her say on the other phone. He discreetly hung up.
"Moira, this is Juan."
"Are you free this weekend?" she asked.
"This weekend? Are you sure?"
"I'm free from lunch Friday to Monday morning."
"So... let me think..." Two thousand miles away, Cortez stared out the window at the building across the street.
"Yes!"
The enthusiasm in her voice was unmistakable as he punched the hold button. He let her wait two minutes by his clock before going back on the line.
"I will be in Washington Friday afternoon."
"You'll be getting in about the time - about the right time."
"Where can we meet? At the airport. Can you meet me at the airport?"
"Yes."
"I don't know what flight I'll be on. I'll meet you at... at the Hertz counter at three o'clock. You will be there, yes?"
"I will be there."
"As will I, Moira. Goodbye, my love."
Moira Wolfe looked again at the photograph. The smile was still there, but she decided it was not an accusing smile.
Cortez got up from his desk and walked out of the room. The guard in the hall stood when he came out of the door.
"I am going to see
The technical problems were very difficult. The most basic one was power. While the base stations cranked out about five hundred watts, the mobile stations were allowed less than seven, and the battery-powered hand-held sets that everyone likes to use were three hundred milliwatts, and even with a huge parabolic dish receiving antenna, the signals gathered were like whispers. But the Rhyolite-J was a highly sophisticated instrument, the result of uncounted billions of research-and-development dollars. Supercooled electronics solved part of the problem. Various computers worked on the rest. The incoming signals were broken down into digital code - ones and zeroes - by a relatively simple computer and downlinked to Fort Huachuca, where another computer of vastly greater power examined the bits of raw information and tried to make sense of them. Random static was eliminated by a mathematically simple but still massively repetitive procedure - an algorithm - that compared neighboring bits to one another and through a process of averaging numerical values filtered out over 90 percent of the noise. That enabled the computer to spit out a recognizable conversation from what it had downloaded from the satellite. But that was only the beginning.
The reason the Cartel used cellular phones for its day-to-day communications was security. There were roughly six hundred separate frequencies, all in the UHF band from 825 to 845 and 870 to 890 megahertz. A small computer at the base station would complete a call by selecting an available frequency at random, and in the case of a call from a mobile phone, changing that frequency to a better one when performance wavered. Finally, the same frequency could be used simultaneously for different calls on neighboring "cells" (hence the name of the system) of the same overall network. Because of this operating feature, there was not a police force in the world that could monitor phone calls made on cellular-phone equipment. Even without scrambling, the calls could be made in the clear, without even the need for code.
Or that's what everyone thought.
