by Tom Clancy
The special train from Multan to Lahore was about to make an unscheduled and most abrupt stop.
Singh held his breath as the chugging engine hit the plates. There came a loud clang and a scream of protesting metal. The engine jumped the tracks, plowed into the ground, and ripped up great chunks of earth. More crashing noises filled the air as the engine slammed onto its side and kept skidding.
The following five or six cars also leaped from the rails and tumbled about like a child’s toy. More noise and great clouds of smoke and dust billowed into the night.
Singh was already on his feet, running toward the still-moving train. Some of the cars stayed on the track, and one of these, a boxcar with doors closed, loomed right in front of him. The door opened, and five Pakistani Rangers leaped out.
Singh fired, waving his weapon back and forth, hosing the soldiers. Next to him, Rahman’s weapon also spoke, as did Ganesha’s, and the Pakistanis went down, cut dead by a sleet of jacketed metal.
Sorry, Packy, better luck next time around.
More guns went off; the darkness was lit by muzzle flashes and exploding grenades. White phosphor blossomed, and red flares spewed. It was all quite colorful.
There were as many soldiers defending as there were attacking, but the SU troops had surprise—and a train wreck—on their side. Within a few moments, it was all over. A few wounded yelled in pain but were quickly silenced by gunshots. Singh, Bhattacharya, and Rahman went to their assigned boxcar. It was empty, but that did not matter. They set their explosives, activated the preset timers.
“Go!” Rahman said. “Quick!”
The three of them joined the other fleeing SU troops. They had only seconds to get clear. No one would have time to find and disarm the charges, if there had been anybody still alive here with such a mind.
A gun went off to the left. Singh twisted and raked the spot where he’d seen the muzzle flash, spraying quick three-round bursts from the AK, and heard a scream. One of the Pakistanis, playing dead. Dead for real, now.
But the Pakistani’s last shot had found a mark.
Bhattacharya went down.
Singh skidded to a stop, though Rahman kept running.
The fat man was hit in the chest, high and slightly off center, and the camo was already soaked with blood, a dark and wet splotch in the night. The fat man looked up at Singh. “I’m done,” he said. “Help me out here, Sikh.”
Singh nodded. “Yes.” He pointed the assault rifle at Bhattacharya’s forehead, squeezed the trigger fast, got off one round. The man’s body spasmed and went limp.
No time to stand around and offer prayers. Singh ran.
A few seconds later, light and noise shattered what was left of the hot and clammy night. The exploding train could easily be seen for miles by any who happened to look.
And it was felt, in a different way, around the entire world.
PART ONE
The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire
1
Friday, April 1st
Hampton Court, England
The palace, whose first royal occupant had been Henry VIII, back in the 1500s, was huge. The stone buildings themselves covered more than six acres, with ten times that much walled-in lawn and gardens around the structures. The chambers were mostly big, with high ceilings, tall windows, and a couple had stone fireplaces large enough to walk into without bumping your head. Most of the rooms were empty, save for giant wall hangings and baroque chandeliers. A few chambers had monstrous canopied beds or chairs and desks in them. There were art galleries, with age-muddied paintings hung. Much of the section they were in at the moment, called the King’s Apartments, had burned in a sudden fire in the mid-1980s and had been since restored to what it supposedly looked like in the 1700s.
Alex Michaels glanced around in awe. It was hard to imagine that anybody had ever actually lived in such a place.
It had cost them fifteen euros each to be admitted to the palace, after the ride on the tube from London. They’d strolled across the Thames on the Hampton Court Bridge, to the main entrance. Michaels had traveled over the years, more since he had become commander of the FBI stand-alone unit, Net Force, but he had somehow never made it to England until now. He and Toni had decided to add some vacation time to the week they had been allotted for the International Computer Crime Conference. They needed some time off; things had gotten a little rocky on a personal level the last few weeks.
So here they were, in the huge house of kings and queens, but, vast as it was, Hampton Court Palace was not big enough to contain Toni Fiorella’s simmering anger. Michaels expected it to burst out any second, to blast him and whatever room they were in to a blackened crisp. They weren’t married, but it seemed the honeymoon period was coming to an end, as much as he did not want it to happen.
Fifteen euros: that was a lot to be allowed to walk around inside a musty castle for a couple of hours. If it hadn’t been for the calculator built into the electronic virgil on his belt, Michaels would never have been able to figure out what that was in real money. Multiplying fractions was not his favorite pastime.
He pointed out the security beam generator to Toni, inset into the support that held the drooping velvet ropes that were supposed to keep the tourists from sitting in the antique chairs. “Step over that, I bet we’ll hear an alarm scream.”
Toni said nothing.
Oh, Lord, what have I done now? “You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Michaels drew in a long, slow breath and let it escape silently as they walked along. A costumed man who looked as if he might be from Henry’s court stood under a painting of an ugly couple and two much betterlooking dogs, explaining to a tour group the significance of the painting. The costumed man had what Michaels had been told was a posh accent, nary a dropped aitch, very upper class.
Before he and Toni had become lovers, Michaels had been married and divorced. There was a way that a woman said, “I’m fine,” the tone clipped and brusque, that meant she was anything but fine. He had learned not to go any farther down that road unless he was really ready to hear what was wrong, sometimes at a decibel level equal to standing in front of the speakers at a This Is Your Brain on Drugs rock concert. Would Toni yell at him in the Great Hall? Or would she wait until they were in the smaller Tudor rooms where Cardinal Wolsey once pursued his studies? Right at the moment, if Michaels dared to touch her, he was almost sure his fingers would get burned. She was pissed, and he was pretty sure it was at him.
Why wasn’t life simple? Two people love each other, they get together, and live happily ever after?
Probably what Anne Boleyn thought when she hooked up with the fat man, you reckon? said his inner voice.
He told his inner voice to shut up.
She waited until they were outside, strolling across a damp and chilly lawn toward the North Gardens and the carefully tended hedge maze before she said anything. He was watching her peripherally, admiring her athletic walk, her beautiful face and figure. She had been his assistant since he’d been at Net Force, and she was very good at her job. She was also almost a dozen years younger than he was, a bright, tough, nice Italian girl from the Bronx who was an adept at an Indonesian martial art called pentjak silat. She had been teaching it to him, and he was getting better at it, but if push came to shove and she was really angry, she could wipe the floor with him and never break a sweat. That was an odd sensation, knowing the woman you loved could kick your ass if she felt like it.
When she spoke, her voice was quiet, even, no anger apparent in it. “Why did you send Marshall to the OCIC meeting in Kabul?”
Michaels took another deep breath. Why hadn’t he sent her? Because Afghanistan was not a place he wanted Toni to be. It was backward, women were fourth-class citizens, after men, boys, and horses, and there were frequent terrorist attacks on foreigners, particularly Americans. He did not want to put her at risk. But he couldn’t say that straight out. Instead, he said, “Marshall wanted to go. I didn’t think you di
d.”
“I didn’t, particularly,” she said.
“Well, so there it is. You didn’t have to. No problem, right?”
He should be so lucky. She said, “I was up. I should have gone.”
“But you just said you didn’t want to go.”
She stopped walking and stared at him. God, she was beautiful, even when she was mad at him. Maybe even more so when she was mad at him.
“That’s not the point. I was up; you should have sent me, whether I wanted to or not. Why didn’t you?”
He had a pretty good memory, a necessary requisite for prevarication, but even so, when it got right down to it, Michaels was not a very good liar. Oh, sure, he could tell somebody their hair looked nice when it didn’t, or smile and nod at a superior’s bad taste in clothes without blurting it out, but beyond simple and harmless white lies designed to spare feelings, he had no real interest in games of deceit. She had caught him, he had tried to slip past and couldn’t, so he wasn’t going to try to lie his way out of it. He shook his head and went for the truth: “Because I didn’t want to send you into a place where you might be at risk.”
“That’s what I thought.” She started walking again.
He went after her. “Look, Toni, I love you. Is it so wrong to want to keep you out of harm’s way?”
“For a lover, no. I’d be unhappy if you didn’t want that. But for a colleague in the intelligence community, yes, it’s wrong. You know I can take care of myself.”
“Yes,” he said. He knew, he’d seen that demonstrated a few times. She was better able to take care of herself when things got physical than he was, but even so, she wasn’t Superwoman.
“I want you to treat me like one of the boys.”
He smiled. “That would be a trick. I can’t think of you that way, and if I did, well, I wouldn’t be interested. I like girls. You in particular.”
She gave him a tiny grin in return, a quick flash, so she wasn’t totally pissed off at him. “I meant at the office. I very much like being treated as a woman when we’re on our own time.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? You really need to, you know. I want you to hold my hand when we walk in the moonlight—but not when we’re at work. You need to separate your personal life from your work life, Alex.”
“Okay. I will. Next time you’re up, you go, no matter where it is.”
She flashed a bigger smile. “Good. Now, you suppose we might find some chocolate somewhere?”
They both laughed, and he felt a great sense of relief. Neither of them had been to England before, and one of the things they noticed early on was that there were chocolate candy machines everywhere: in stores, train stations, even pubs. It had become a running joke between them, finding chocolate. They both expected to gain thirty pounds and have their faces break out before they returned to the States.
His virgil played the first few bars of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” He had an incoming telecom. He pulled the device from his belt and saw that the caller was from the office of the FBI’s director.
“That’s cute,” Toni said, meaning the music. She waved her finger as if directing an orchestra.
“Jay must have sneaked into my office and reprogrammed the ringer again. Better than last time, when it was George Thorogood’s ”Bad to the Bone.”
“Ta dah dah dah dah dump!” Toni sang.
“Everybody I work with has a warped sense of humor,” he said. “This is Alex Michaels.”
“Please hold for the director,” a secretary said.
Toni looked at him, and he held his hand over the virgil’s microphone. “Boss.”
“I sure wish Walt Carver hadn’t had that heart attack,” Toni said.
“I think he’s glad he did. It gave him an excuse to retire and go fishing. It’s only been a month; we should give her a chance—”
“Commander, this is Melissa Allison. I’m sorry to interrupt your vacation, but we have a situation of which you need to be aware.”
Her face appeared on the virgil’s liquid crystal display screen, so he tapped his send-visual mode and held the unit so he could see the virgil’s cam thumbnail of his own face in the screen’s corner.
Allison, forty-six, was a thin redhead with a coolbordering-on-cold voice and demeanor. She was a political appointee, a lawyer with no experience in the field but an encyclopedic knowledge of where dozens of political bodies were buried. The rumor was that certain high-ranking members of congress had prevailed on the President to offer her the FBI directorship vacated by Walt Carver’s mild cardiac event so she’d keep quiet about things better left that way. Outside of a couple of meetings and a few memos, Michaels hadn’t had to deal with her yet.
“Go ahead.”
“Some hours ago, an unidentified military force attacked a Pakistani train near the Indian border, killed a dozen guards, and then blew the train to pieces. The cargo was a top-secret shipment of electronic components on their way to be used in the Pakistani nuclear bomb program.”
“I thought there was a nonproliferation treaty between Pakistan and India.”
“There is, but neither country pays any attention to it. The government of Pakistan is convinced the attacking terrorist force was a special unit of the Indian Army.”
“Do they have proof of this?”
“Not enough to start a war. Not yet—but they are looking hard.”
Michaels looked at the tiny image of the director’s face. “With all due respect, ma’am, what’s this got to do with us? Shouldn’t the spooks be on the hot seat?”
“They are, but if they and the Pakistanis can be believed, there was no way anyone could know about the train and what it carried. The terrorists had plenty of time to get into position for the ambush, and the Pakistanis say this wasn’t possible.”
“Obviously it was,” Michaels said.
“The liaison with the CIA tells him there were only four people who knew about the shipment and the route. The crates were unmarked, and the workmen and train personnel who loaded and were delivering the materials didn’t know what they were carrying.”
“Coincidence, maybe? They attacked a train at random?”
“Nineteen trains passed that point in the twenty-four hours prior to the one that was destroyed. Only one carried anything of strategic importance.”
“Then somebody told.”
“The Pakistanis say not. Nobody had a chance to tell. Once the operation began, three of the four who knew were together, and the other one—who happens to be the head of their secret police—didn’t get around to decoding the computer message telling him about the shipment until an hour before the attack. Some kind of computer failure on his end had his system down. Even if he had wanted to tell, there wasn’t enough time.”
“Somebody intercepted the message and broke the code, then,” Michaels said.
“Which is why it concerns us,” she said. “The problem there is, the security encryption was supposedly bulletproof, a factored number hundreds of digits long. According to the CIA, it would take a SuperCray running full time, day and night, about a million years to break the code.”
Great, Michaels thought. He said, “I’ll have my people look into it.”
“Good. Keep me informed.”
Her picture disappeared as she broke the connection.
Toni, who had been listening, shook her head. “Not possible,” she said.
“Right. The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer. Come on, let’s go see the maze.”
“You going to call Jay?”
“It can wait a few more minutes.”
2
Friday, April 1st
London, England
The waiter arrived with a Bombay gin and tonic and set it on the table next to the overstuffed leather chair where Lord Geoffrey Goswell sat reading the Times. The Japanese markets were going to hell in a handbasket, the American stock market was holding steady, and gold fut
ures were up.
The weather forecast for London called for rain on the morrow.
Nothing about which to be concerned.
Goswell glanced up. He watched the servant bide a moment to see if there was anything else required, and gave the waiter a military nod. “Thank you, Paddington.”
“Milord.”
The waiter glided noiselessly away. Here was a good man, old Paddington. He’d had been delivering the paper and drinks here at the club for what? Thirty, thirty-five years? He was polite, efficient, knew his place, and never intruded. Would that all servants were half as well-mannered. A man to be remembered with a nice tip at Christmas, was Paddington.
Across the short stretch of dark and worn oval Oriental rug, reading a trash paper like the Sun or the New York Times or some such, Sir Harold Bellworth harrumphed and blew out a fragrant cloud of Cuban cigar smoke. He lowered his paper a bit and looked at Goswell. “Can’t believe what the American President said today. I don’t understand why they put up with that kind of bloody nonsense over there. If the PM did that, he would be tossed out on his ear, and rightly so.”
Bellworth, eighty-two, was class of ’47, thus eight years older than Goswell.
Goswell smiled politely at the older man. “Well, they’re Americans now, aren’t they?”
“Mmm, yes, of course.” Here was a standard reply that answered neatly so many questions. There was the British way, and then there were all the . . . other ways. Well, they are Americans, aren’t they? Or French, or German, or for God’s sake, Spanish. What else could one expect from foreigners, save the wrong way of doing things?
“Mmph.” Harry lifted the paper and went back to his reading.
Goswell glanced at the big, round clock over the bookcase. Half-past five already. He should have Paddington call Stephens, he supposed. It would be a slow drive to The Yews, especially on a Friday evening, with all the rabble streaming out of the city for their weekly two-day holiday, but there was no help for it. Normally, he would just stay at Portman House in the city until Saturday, then enjoy the leisurely drive to his estate in Sussex, but that scientist fellow of his, Peter Bascomb-Coombs, was arriving for dinner at half-nine, so there was no help for it. Given the traffic, Goswell would be lucky to make it in time as it was. He folded the financial section and put it next to his gin and tonic, picked up the drink, and took a large sip. Ah. He put the glass down.
