Burr agreed. Catching crooks is no different from catching spies, he said: all you need is a well-lit street corner, your cameras in position, one man in a trench coat with the plans, the other in a bowler with the suitcase full of used bills. Then, if you're very lucky, you've got a case. The problem with Operation Limpet was: Whose street? Whose city? Whose sea? Whose jurisdiction? For one thing was already clear: neither Richard Onslow Roper nor his Colombian trading partners had the smallest intention of completing their business on American soil.
* * *
Another source of support and satisfaction was the new Federal Prosecutor who had been assigned to the case. His name was Prescott, and he was more exalted than the usual federal prosecutor: he was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General, and everybody whom Strelski checked him out with said Ed Prescott was the best Deputy Assistant Attorney General there was. Just the best, Joe, take it from me. The Prescotts were old Yale people, of course, and a couple of them had Agency connections ― how could they not have? ― and there was even a rumour, which Ed had never specifically denied, that he was in some way related to old Prescott Bush, George Bush's father. But Ed ― well, Ed had never bothered with that stuff, he wanted you to know. He was a serious Washington player with his own agenda, and when he went to work he left his parentage outside the door.
"What happened to the fellow we had till last week?" Burr asked.
"Guess he got tired of waiting," Strelski replied. "Those guys don't hang around."
Bemused as ever by the American pace of hiring and firing, Burr said no more. Only when it was too late did he realise that he and Strelski were harbouring the same reservations but, out of deference to each other, refusing to express them. Meanwhile, like everybody else, Burr and Strelski flung themselves upon the impossible task of persuading Washington to sanction an act of interdiction on the high seas against the SS Lombardy, registered in Panama, sailing out of Curaçao and bound for the Free Zone of Colón, known to be carrying fifty million dollars' worth of sophisticated weaponry described in the ship's manifest as turbines, tractor parts and agricultural machinery.
Here again Burr afterwards blamed himself ― as he blamed himself for pretty much everything ― for spending too many hours succumbing to the tweedy charm and old-boy manners of Ed Prescott in his grand offices downtown, and too few in the joint planning team's operations room, attending to his responsibilities as a case officer.
Yet what else was he to do? The secret airwaves between Miami and Washington were busy day and night. A procession of legal and less legal experts had been mustered, and it was not long before familiar British faces started to appear among them: Darling Katie from the Washington embassy, Manderson from naval liaison staff, Hardacre from Signals Intelligence and a young lawyer from the River House who, according to rumour, was being groomed to replace Palfrey as legal adviser to the Procurement Studies Group.
Some days Washington seemed to empty itself into Miami; on others, the prosecutor's office was reduced to two typists and a switchboard operator, while Deputy Assistant Attorney General Prescott and his staff decamped to do battle on the Hill. And Burr, determinedly ignorant of the niceties of American political in-fighting, drew comfort from the hectic activity, assuming, rather like Jed's whippet, that where you have so much circumstance and movement, you must surely have progress too.
* * *
So really there had been no heavy augurs, only the minor alarms that are part and parcel of a clandestine operation: for instance, the nagging reminders that vital data such as selected intercepts and reconnaissance photographs and area intelligence reports from Langley were somehow jamming in the pipeline on their way to Strelski's desk; and the eerie feeling, known separately to Burr and Strelski but not yet shared, that Operation Limpet was being run in tandem with another operation, whose presence they could feel but not see.
Otherwise the only headache was as usual Apostoll, who, not for the first time in his mercurial career as Flynn's supersnitch, had done a disappearing act. And this was all the more tiresome because Flynn had flown to Curaçao specially in order to be on hand for him and was now sitting about in an expensive hotel, feeling like the girl who has been stood up at the ball.
