Sweepers by P. T. Deutermann Page A

around as the bike went by, but it was already accelerating along the right lane in a cone of smoky spray. Karen stood there for a second and Was about to start forward, but the admiral was scrambling to get his car door open, as if anxious to pursue the bike and its rider. But it was not to be: The stream of rush-hour traffic made it impossible for him to get out of his parking place, and she saw him thump the steering wheel in frustration. The rain became heavier, and she hurried to reach her own car. She looked back once more and saw the admiral push his way into traffic, provoking an angry constellation of brake lights and horns behind him.
    She got in and struggled out of her dripping raincoat. The rain drummed hard on the roof, and she decided just to wait it out for a few minutes, turning on the engine to get the defroster going. So what the hell was that all about? she wondered. She had had only the briefest glimpse of the rider’s face. The predominant impression was -thin: thin face, narrow hatchetlike head, a hank of greasy-looking black hair down one side, the flash of an earring. But there was no doubt that he had been looking at the admiral, almost as if he had been willing the admiral to see him.
    Mystified, she switched on her car phone, got out Mcnair’s card, and placed a call to his office. She got his voice mail. She asked if it would be amenable to meet with Admiral Sherman at his home in Mclean at 6:00 P.m. tomorrow night and said to call her if this would work. As the rain squall passed, she began watching the traffic for an opening. She made a mental note to close the loop with von Rensel first thing in the morning. She would also have to figure out how to put off any questions from Carpenter for one more day.
    As he piloted his Suburban carefully through the evening rush-hour traffic on I-95, Train von Rensel made a mental inventory of some things he needed to do before the lovely lady commander got herself too much further into the Sherman matter. A disappearing letter from a disappearing, SEAL who was also supposed to be an MIA-he shook his head.
    Assuming the good admiral was being honest, Train felt that his first comment in the snack bar had been the simple truth. Navy SEALS have the reputation of being the baddest of the bad in the Special Forces world, where bad inferred supreme competence rather than a capacity for malice.
    If a SEAL had been declared ‘missing in action and then had reappeared back in the States some time afterward, still being carried as an MIA, then there was a high probability that he had found himself a new government job.
    Fortunately, Train still had one contact in that organization all the spooks loved to hate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dr. Mchale Johnson was a senior scientist in the Computer Operations and Machine Intelligence Division of the FBI’s Washington laboratories, or at least that’s what he said he was. Train had first met him during an NIS counterintelligence operation connected with the Walker cryptography spy ring. Up to that point in his career, Train had been under the nayve impression that there were rigid rules governing the boundaries of counterintelligence operations, with the FBI solely in charge of domestic counterintelligence, while another agency dealt with security issues beyond U.S. borders. Mchale Johnson quickly had disabused him of this quaint notion, demonstrating repeatedly that both federal agencies had their own interpretations of this rule.
    During a subsequent Joint Intelligence Board debriefing on the Walker case, a board member from that other agency had tried to pin Train down as to whether or not he had seen any evidence that the FBI ever operated off the reservation. Train had testified solemnly that he had seen absolutely no evidence of any violations of’this rule during the investigation. Since then, Mchale Johnson had been available for informal consultations from time to time. The FBI kept score.
    But