by Tom Clancy
“He’s a bloody cipher, a zero,” Owens said.
“Yes,” Ashley replied. “At least it explains where Geoff met him—he was a lieutenant with one of the first regiments to go over, and probably wandered into the shop once or twice. You know what a talker Geoff Watkins is. They probably started talking books—can’t have been much else. I doubt that Cooley has any interest beyond that.”
“Yes, I believe he’s what the Yanks call a nerd. Or at least it’s an image he’s cultivating. What about his parents?”
Ashley smiled. “They are remembered as the local Communists. Nothing serious, but decidedly bolshie until the Hungarian uprising of 1956. That seems to have disenchanted them. They remained outspokenly left-wing, but their political activities effectively ended then. Actually they’re remembered as rather pleasant people, but a little odd. Evidently they encouraged the local children to read—made good business sense, if nothing else. Paid their bills on time. Other than that, nothing.”
“This girl Beatrix?”
“Somehow she got an education from our state schools. Didn’t attend university, but self-taught in literature and the history of publishing. Lives with her elderly father—he’s a retired RAF sergeant. She has no social life. She probably spends her evenings watching the telly and sipping Dubonnet. She rather intensely dislikes the Irish, but doesn’t mind working with ‘Mr. Dennis’ because he’s an expert in his field. Nothing there at all.”
“So, we have a dealer in rare books with a Marxist family, but no known ties with any terrorist group,” Owens summarized. “He was in university about the same time as our friend O’Donnell, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, but nobody remembers if they ever met. In fact, they lived only a few streets apart, but again no one remembers if Kevin ever frequented the bookshop.” Ashley shrugged. “That goes back before O’Donnell attracted any serious attention, remember. If there were a lead of some sort then, it was never documented. They shared this economics instructor. That might have been a useful lead, but the chap died two years ago—natural causes. Their fellow students have scattered to the four winds, and we’ve yet to find one who knew both of them.”
Owens walked to the comer of his office to pour a cup of tea. A chap with a Marxist background who attended the same school at the same time as O‘Donnell. Despite the total lack of a connection with a terrorist group, it was enough to follow up. If they could find something to suggest that Cooley and O’Donnell knew each other, then Cooley was the likely bridge between Watkins and the ULA. That did not mean there was any evidence to suggest the link was real, but in several months they had discovered nothing else even close.
“Very well, David, what do you propose to do?”
“We’ll plant microphones in his shop and his home, and tap all of his telephone calls, of course. When he travels, he’ll have a companion. ”
Owens nodded approval. That was more than he could do legally, but the Security Service didn’t operate under the same rules as did the Metropolitan Police. “How about watching his shop?”
“Not easy, when you remember where it is. Still, we might try to get one of our people hired in one of the neighboring shops.”
“The one opposite his is a jewelry establishment, isn’t it?”
“Nicholas Reemer and Sons,” Ashley nodded. “Owner and two employees.”
Owens thought about that. “I could find an experienced burglary detective, someone knowledgeable in the field....”
“Morning, Jack,” Cantor said.
“Hi, Marty.”
Ryan had given up on the satellite photographs weeks before. Now he was trying to find patterns within the terrorist network. Which group had connections with which other? Where did their arms come from? Where did they train? Who helped with the training? Who provided the money? Travel documents? What countries did they use for safe transits?
The problem with these questions was not a lack of information, but a glut of it. Literally thousands of CIA field officers and their agents, plus those of every other Western intelligence service, were scouring the world for such information. Many of the agents—foreign nationals recruited and paid by the Agency—would make reports on the most trivial encounter in the hope of delivering The One Piece of Information that would crack open Abu Nidal, or Islamic Jihad, or one of the other high-profile groups, for a substantial reward. The result was thousands of communiques, most of them full of worthless garbage that was indistinguishable from the one or two nuggets of real information. Jack had not realized the magnitude of the problem. The people working on this were all talented, but they were being overwhelmed by a sea of raw intelligence data that had to be graded, collated, and cross-referenced before proper analysis could begin. The difficulty of finding any single organization was inversely proportional to its size, and some of these groups were composed of a mere handful of people—in extreme cases composed of family members only.
“Marty,” Jack said, looking away from the papers on his desk, “this is the closest thing to impossible I’ve ever seen.”
“Maybe, but I’ve come to deliver a well-done,” Cantor replied.
“What?”
“Remember that satellite photo of the girl in the bikini? The French think they’ve ID’d her: Françoise Theroux. Long, dark hair, a striking figure, and she was thought to be out of the country when the photo was made. That confirms that the camp belongs to Action-Directe.”
“So who’s the girl?”
“An assassin,” Marty replied. He handed Jack a photograph taken at closer range. “And a good one. Three suspected kills, two politicians and an industrialist, all with a pistol at close range. Imagine how it’s done: you’re a middle-aged man walking down the street; you see a pretty girl; she smiles at you, maybe asks for directions or something; you stop, and the next thing you know, there’s a pistol in her hand. Goodbye, Charlie.”
Jack looked at the photograph. She didn’t look dangerous—she looked like every man’s fantasy. “Like we used to say in college, not the sort of girl you’d kick out of bed. Jesus, what sort of world do we live in, Marty?”
“You know that better than I do. Anyway, we’ve been asked to keep an eye on the camp. If we spot her there again, the French want us to real-time the photo to them.”
“They’re going to go in after her?”
“They didn’t say, but you might recall that the French have troops in Chad, maybe four hundred miles away. Airborne units, with helicopters. ”
Jack handed the picture back. “What a waste.”
“Sure is.” Cantor pocketed the photo and the issue. “How’s it going with your data?”
“So far I have a whole lot of nothing. The people who do this full-time ... ”
“Yeah, for a while there they were working around the clock. We had to make them stop, they were burning out. Computerizing it was a little helpful. Once we had the head of one group turn up at six airports in one day, and we knew the data was for crap, but every so often we get a live one. We missed that guy by a half hour outside Beirut last March. Thirty goddamned minutes,” Cantor said. “You get used to it.”
Thirty minutes, Jack thought. If I’d left my office thirty minutes earlier, I’d be dead. How am I supposed to get used to that?
“What would you have done to him?”
“We wouldn’t have read him his constitutional rights,” Cantor replied. “So, any connections that you’ve been able to find?”
Ryan shook his head. “This ULA outfit is so goddamned small. I have sixteen suspected contacts between the IRA and other groups. Some of them could be our boys, but how can you tell? The reports don’t have pictures, the written descriptions could be anybody. Even when we have a reported IRA contact with a bunch they’re not supposed be talking to—one that might actually be the ULA—then, A, our underlying information could easily be wrong, and B, it could be the first time they talked with the IRA! Marty, how in the hell is somebody supposed to make any sense out of this garbage?�
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“Well, the next time you hear somebody ask what the CIA is doing about terrorism—you won’t be able to tell him.” Cantor actually smiled at that. “These people we’re looking for aren’t dumb. They know what’ll happen if they get caught. Even if we don’t do it ourselves—which we might not want to do—we can always tip the Israelis. Terrorists are tough, nasty bastards, but they can’t stand up to real troops and they know it.
“That’s the frustrating part. My brother-in-law’s an Army major, part of the Delta Force down at Fort Bragg. I’ve seen them operate. They could take out this camp you looked at in under two minutes, kill everybody there, and be gone before the echo fades. They’re deadly and efficient, but without the right information, they don’t know where to be deadly and efficient at. Same with police work. Do you think the Mafia could survive if the cops knew exactly where and when they did their thing? How many bank robberies would be successful if the SWAT team was waiting inside the doors? But you gotta know where the crooks are. It’s all about intelligence, and intelligence comes down to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats sifting through all this crap. The people who gather the intel give it to us, and we process it and give it to the operations teams. The battle is fought here, too, Jack. Right here in this building, by a bunch of GS-9s and -10s who go home to their families every night.”
But the battle is being lost, Jack told himself. It sure as hell isn’t being won.
“How’s the FBI doing?” he asked.
“Nothing new. The black guy—well, he might as well not exist so far as anyone can tell. They have a crummy picture that’s several years old, an alias with no real name or prints to check, and about ten lines of description that mainly says he’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut. The Bureau’s checking through people who used to be in the radical groups—funny how they have mostly settled down—without any success so far.”
“How about the bunch who flew over there two years back?” Not so long ago members of several radical American groups had flown to Libya to meet with “progressive elements” of the third-world community. The echoes of that event still reverberated through the antiterrorism community.
“You’ve noticed that we don’t have any pictures from Bengazi, right? Our agent got picked up—one of those horrible accidents. It cost us the photos and it cost him his neck. Fortunately they never found out he was working for us. We know some of the names of the people who were there, but not all.”
“Passport records?”
Cantor leaned against the doorframe. “Let’s say Mr. X flew to Europe, an American on vacation—we’re talking tens of thousands of people per month. He makes contact with someone on the other side, and they get him the rest of the way without going through the usual immigration-control procedures. It’s easy—hell, the Agency does it all the time. If we had a name we could see if he was out of the country at the right time. That would be a start—but we don’t have a name to check.”
“We don’t have anything!” Ryan snapped.
“Sure we do. We have all that”—he waved at the documents on Ryan’s desk—“and lots more where that came from. Somewhere in there is the answer.”
“You really believe that?”
“Every time we crack one of these things, we find that all the information was under our nose for months. The oversight committees in Congress always hammer us on that. Sitting in that pile right now, Jack, is a crucial lead. That’s almost a statistical certainty. But you probably have two or three hundred such reports sitting there, and only one matters.”
“I didn’t expect miracles, but I did expect to make some progress,” Jack said quietly, the magnitude of the problem finally sinking in.
“You did. You saw something that no one else did. You may have found Françoise Theroux. And now if a French agent sees something that might be useful to us, maybe they’ll pass it along. You didn’t know this, but the intel business is like the old barter economy. We give them, and then they give us, or we’ll never give to them again. If this pans out, they’ll owe us big-time. They really want that gal. She popped a close friend of their President, and he took it personally.
“Anyway, you get a well-done from the Admiral and the DGSE. The boss says you should take it a little easier, by the way. ”
“I’ll take it easy when I find the bastards,” Ryan replied.
“Sometimes you have to back off. You look like hell. You’re tired. Fatigue makes for errors. We don’t like errors. No more late hours, Jack, that comes from Greer, too. You’re out of here by six.” Cantor left, denying Jack a chance to object.
Ryan turned back toward his desk, but stared at the wall for several minutes. Cantor was right. He was working so late that half the time he couldn’t drive up to Baltimore to see how his daughter was doing. Jack rationalized that his wife was with her every day, frequently spending the night at Hopkins to be close to their daughter. Cathy has her job and I have mine.
So, he told the wall, at least I managed to get something right. He remembered that it had been an accident, that Marty had made the real connection; but it was also true that he’d done what an analyst was supposed to do, find something odd and bring it to someone’s attention. He could feel good about that. He’d found a terrorist maybe, but certainly not the right one.
It’s a start. His conscience wondered what the French would do if they found that pretty girl, and how he’d feel about it if he found out. It would be better, he decided, if terrorists were ugly, but pretty or not, their victims were just as dead. He promised himself that he wouldn’t go out of his way to find out if anyone got her. Jack went back into the pile, looking for that one piece of hard information. The people he was looking for were somewhere in the pile. He had to find them.
“Hello, Alex,” Miller said as he entered the car.
“How was the trip?” He still had his beard, Dobbens saw. Well, nobody had gotten much of a look at him. This time he’d flown to Mexico, driven across the border, then taken a domestic flight into D.C., where Alex had met him.
“Your border security over here’s a bloody joke.”
“Would it make you happy if they changed it?” Alex inquired. “Let’s talk business.” The abruptness of his tone surprised Miller.
Aren’t you a proud one, with one whole operation under your belt, Miller thought. “We have another job for you.”
“You haven’t paid me for the last one yet, boy.”
Miller handed over a passbook. “Numbered account, Bahamian bank. I believe you’ll find the amount correct.”
Alex pocketed the book. “That’s more like it. Okay, we have another job. I hope you don’t expect to go with it as fast as before.”
“We have several months to plan it,” Miller replied.
“I’m listening.” Alex sat through ten minutes of information.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Dobbens asked when he was finished.
“How hard would it be to gather the information we need?”
“That’s not the problem, Sean. The problem is getting your people in and out. No way I could handle that.”
“That is my concern.”
“Bullshit! If my people are involved, it’s my concern, too. If that Clark turkey broke to the cops, it would have burned a safehouse—and me!”
“But he didn’t break, did he? That’s why we chose him.”
“Look, what you do with your people, I don’t give a rat’s ass. What happens to my people, I do. That last little game we played for you was bush league, Sean.”
Miller figured out what “bush league” meant from context. “The operation was politically sound, and you know it. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that the objective is always political. Politically, the operation was a complete success.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that!” Alex snapped back in his best intimidating tone. Miller was a proud little twerp, but Alex figured he could pinch his head off with one good squeeze. “You lost a troop because you were play
ing this personal, not professional—and I know what you’re thinking. It was our first big play, right? Well, son, I think we proved that we got our shit together, didn’t we? And I warned you up front that your man was too exposed. If you’d listened to me, you wouldn’t have a man on the inside. I know your background is pretty impressive, but this is my turf, and I know it.”
Miller knew that he had to accept that. He kept his face impassive. “Alex, if we were in any way displeased, we would not have come back to you. Yes, you do have your shit together,” you bloody nigger, he didn’t say. “Now, can you get us the information we need?”
“Sure, for the right price. You want us in the op?”
“We don’t know yet,” Miller replied honestly. Of course the only issue here is money. Bloody Americans.
“If you want us in, I’m part of the planning. Number one, I want to know how you get in and out. I might have to go with you. If you shitcan my advice this time, I walk and I take my people with me.”
“It’s a little early to be certain, but what we hope to arrange is really quite simple....”
“You think you can set that up?” For the first time since he’d arrived, Sean had Alex nodding approval. “Slick. I’ll give you that. It’s slick. Now let’s talk price.”
Sean wrote a figure on a piece of paper and handed it to Alex. “Fair enough?” People interested in money were easy to impress.
“I sure would like an account at your bank, brother.”
“If this operation comes off, you will.”
“You mean that?”
Miller nodded emphatically. “Direct access. Training facilities, help with travel documents, the lot. Your skill in helping us last time attracted attention. Our friends like the idea of an active revolutionary cell in America.” If they really want to do business with you, it’s their problem. “Now, how quickly can you get the information?”
“End of the week good enough?”
