Free The Red Horseman by Stephen Coonts

whole thing’s a mare’s nest. A military that
stops believing its intelligence service is
fumbling around in the dark. As if we had a lot of
light now . . .”
    Toad was thinking of Judith Farrell.
Grafton had implied before that Farrell might have
been intentionally trying to harm the United States, but
Toad had automatically rejected it. Now he
began to consider the possibility seriously.
    “I’ll bet someone at Langley would like to know
where we got that photo,” Jake muttered.
    But if that was the case, wouldn’t that be the first
priority? Why the simple intimidation attempt?
It didn’t compute. If it were the CIA.
    But the Mossad angle was even more unlikely.
    What was wrong here? He was missing something. It was
right in front of him and he couldn’t see it. But
what?
    His eyes came to rest on Tarkington, who was
staring at him. Toad looked away
guiltily.
    What? He went over it again, from Judith
Farrell’s meeting with Toad all the way through this
morning’s verification of the false identities of the
agents.
    Toad said something.
    “What?”
    “It’s like Rubik’s Cube, isn’t it?”
Toad repeated.
    Rubik’s Cube had a solution, although the
solution was complex and one needed a good sense of
spatial relationships to figure it out. Jake
Grafton had spent a miserable week wrestling with a
cube some years back when Amy gave him one for
Christmas. Finally his next-door neighbor showed
him how the trick was done.
    The problems Jake had learned to solve had much
simpler solutions: one usually became apparent when
you backed off and looked at the forest instead of the
individual trees.
    Okay, Jake thought, by the numbers–One: if
someone at Langley knows about the photo, why
isn’t he trying to discover where and how I acquired
it?
    Maybe he is but I don’t know about
it.
    Unlikely, Jake decided. He and
Tarkington were the only people who knew the answers. And
Rita and Judith Farrell.
    But they don’t know about Rita. They might know
about Judith Farrell or have an agent in the
Mossad, but that would be a complex solution, only
acceptable if there are no simple ones. There must be
a simple explanation.
    Two: the person who sent the goons on Friday
night isn’t curious.
    Why not? Because he already knows.
    How?
    Jake Grafton’s eyes focused and he
looked again at Toad, who was watching him askance.
    “No,” Jake said.
    “No?”
    “Not like Rubik’s Cube.”
    The admiral Pufled around a sheet of paper and
picked up a pencil. On it he wrote “This
office is bugged.
    Toad came over and looked at the words. “You
think?”
    he murmured.
    Jake nodded. He got up, removed
his
    Jacket and draped it over the back of his chair,
loosened his tie and began to look- Toad started on
the other side of the room.
    In five minutes they had ruled out the obvious,
a micro Phone behind a painting or under a desk.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Jake suggested.
    “It’s nothing obvious,- Jake told Toad as
they walked toward the cafeteria.
    “Nothing conventional. If it was, the sweeps would
have discovered it.”
    The office was swept for listening devices twice
a week at random intervals.
    “Maybe it’s the telephone. We’ll have to take
that apart.
    And how about the window vibrator?,” Toad
suggested.
    This device used elevator music to vibrate
the glass pane and foil any Parabolic listening
device aimed at the window.
    “What if it isn’t a real vibrator?”
    “Perhaps our eavesdropper has a Parabolic
antenna aimed at the window,” Jake said, “and is
unscrambling the tape with a powerful computer, like a
Cray?”
    “That’s a possibility,”
    about it. –Are Toad admitted after he thought You
sure about the bug?”
    “No,” Jake told him. “But a listening
device would explain a lot. And not some simple
piece of Radio Shack junk. Something
computerized, something so sophisticated we don’t
see it for what it is.”
    “If they’re using that window as a sounding board,
about all we can do is