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Kellner said, "Camilla will find you some privacy. I want you to commit most of the files to memory." |
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"By the way, do you know a reporter named Ryerson?" |
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"I assume you mean the bastard who tried to pull a fast one on the new press secretary at the White House. Pretended to be an Arab terrorist, as I recall, botched it, got caught, and ended up by losing his job when the shit hit the fan. The Post tried to do it quietly, but when he filed suit for a couple of million against the paper and the ombudsman, everyone within earshot found out about it. That Joe Ryerson?" |
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"I can see you know Ryerson," Kellner said. "Somehow he has picked up on this. He has been calling Camilla, asking our reaction to Anna Neville's story. He may bother you." |
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"Not if he values his profile," Morgan said. |
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"I hope you're joking. Hands off the press." |
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"Now, come over here, John." Kellner led the way to the electronic wall map. "Ryerson and his colleagues would kill to see this," he said. With a remote decoder, Kellner superimposed a display of tracks on the geography of the hemisphere. "Care to make a guess?" |
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Morgan studied the trace. It began at Resolution Island in the mouth of the Hudson Strait and moved steadily, in fifty-kilometer increments, along the east coast of Canada and the United States, south to weather the Florida Keys, through the Yucatan Strait, and into the Caribbean, where the trace ended. |
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Morgan said, "A Russian?" |
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"Taken by a KH-13 or later." |
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"Right again. Actually, it's the track of a Russian Navy Hotel-class submarine. An old one. The heat signature shows it to be the Pravda, formerly the Andropov, née the Andrei Vishinskya boat we thought they had retired five years ago. It was on the first list of submarines to be sent to Murmansk, to the new facility we helped them build for fuel removal and |
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