"Explain." Jack said.

"The wireless bugs are omnidirectional. Okay, they transmit to the SHF transmitter, and that one gets it out of the airplane."

"Why four channels?"

"The big problem is cancelling out the airplane noise, the engine whine, the air, all that stuff. Two channels are interior sound. The other two are for background noise only. We use that to cancel out the crap. We have people down in S&T who have been working on that for quite a while. You use the recorded background noise to establish what the interference is, then just change its phase to cancel it out. Pretty simple stuff if you have the right computer backup equipment. We do. Okay? The transmitter goes in a bottle. We aim it out of the window. Easy to do, I checked. Now, we will need a chase plane."

"Like what?"

"With the right equipment, a business jet like a Gulf-stream, better yet an I-135. I'd recommend more than one, have them form up and break off."

"How far away?"

"As long as its line of sight up to thirty miles, and doesn't have to be the same altitude. Not like we have to fly formation on the guy."

"How hard to build it?"

"Simple. The hardest part is the battery, and that'll fit in a liquor bottle, like I said. We'll make it a brand that you usually find in a duty-free store - I have a guy checking that - one with a ceramic bottle 'stead of a glass one. Like an expensive bottle of Chivas, maybe. The Japanese like their scotch."

"Detection?" Ryan asked.

Clark grinned like a teenager who'd just snookered a teacher. "We build the system exclusively from Japanese components, and we place a receiver tuned to the right freqs in the aircraft. He'll be traveling with the usual mob of newsies. I'll set a receiver in the waste bin of one of the downstairs heads. If the op gets burned, they'll think it was one of their own. It'll even look like a journalist did it."

Ryan nodded. "Nice touch, John."

"I thought you'd like that. When the bird lands, we have a guy recover the bottle. We'll fix it - I mean, we'll see to it that you can't get the cork out. Superglue, maybe."

"Getting aboard in Mexico City?"

"I have Ding looking at that. Time he got a taste of planning operations, and this is the soft side. My Spanish is good enough to fool a Mexican national."

"Back to the bugging equipment. We won't be reading this in real-time?"

"No way" Clark shook his head. "What'll come across will be garbled, but we'll use high-speed tape machines to record, then we can wash it through the 'puters downstairs to get clean copy. It's an additional operational safeguard. The guys in the chase birds won't know what they're listening to, and only the drivers need to know who they're shadowing maybe not even that, as a matter of fact I have to check on that."