by Tom Clancy
“Not sure that’s a good idea, Ding,” Clark objected weakly.
“Why not? Feels pretty good to me right now, man.” Chavez got out of his chair and walked up to O’Neil. Then he lowered his knife hand to the chair. “Ain’t hard to do, man, just flick, and we can start your sex-change operation. I ain’t a doc, you understand, but I know the first part of the procedure, y’know?” Ding bent down to press his nose against O’Neil’s. “Man, you don’t ever, EVER mess with a Latino’s lady! Do you hear me?”
Timothy O’Neil had had a bad enough day to this point. He looked in the eyes of this Spanish man, heard the accent, and knew that this was not an Englishman, not even an American of the type he thought he knew.
“I’ve done this before, man. Mainly I kill with guns, but I’ve taken bastards down with a knife once or twice. It’s funny how they squirm—but I ain’t gonna kill you, boy. I’m just gonna make you a girl.” The knife moved tight up against the crotch of the man cuffed to the chair.
“Back it off, Domingo!” Clark ordered.
“Fuck you, John! That’s my wife he wanted to hurt, man. Well, I’m gonna fix this little fuck so he never hurts no more girls, ’mano.” Chavez turned to look at the prisoner again. “I’m gonna watch your eyes when I cut it all off, Timmy. I want to see your face when you start to turn into a girl.”
O’Neil blinked, as he looked deep into the dark, Spanish eyes. He saw the rage there, hot and passionate—but as bad as that was, so was the reason for it. He and his mates had planned to kidnap and maybe kill a pregnant woman, and there was shame in that, and for that reason there was justice in the fury before his face.
“It wasn’t like that!” O’Neil gasped. “We didn’t—we didn’t—”
“Didn’t have the chance to rape her, eh? Well, ain’t that a big fuckin’ deal?” Chavez observed.
“No, no, not rape—never, nobody in the unit ever did that, we’re not—”
“You’re fucking scum, Timmy—but soon you’re just gonna be scum, ’cuz ain’t no more fuckin’ in your future.” The knife moved a little. “This is gonna be fun, John. Like the guy we did in Libya two years ago, remember?”
“Jesus, Ding, I still have nightmares about that one,” Clark acknowledged, looking away. “I’m telling you, Domingo, don’t do it!”
“Fuck you, John.” His free hand reached to loosen O’Neil’s belt, then the button at the top of his slacks. Then he reached inside. “Well, shit, ain’t much to cut off. Hardly any dick here at all.”
“O’Neil, if you have anything to tell us, better say it now. I can’t control this kid. I’ve seen him like this before and—”
“Too much talk, John. Shit, Grady spilled his guts anyway. What does this one know that we need? I’m gonna cut it all off and feed it to one of the guard dogs. They like fresh meat.”
“Domingo, we are civilized people and we don’t—”
“Civilized? My ass, John, he wanted to kill my wife and my baby!”
O’Neil’s eyes popped again. “No, no, we never intended to—”
“Sure, asshole,” Chavez taunted. “You had those fucking guns ’cuz you wanted to win their hearts and minds, right? Woman-killer, baby-killer.” Chavez spat.
“I didn’t kill anybody, didn’t even fire my rifle. I—”
“Great, so you’re incompetent. You think you deserve to have a dick just ’cuz you’re fucking incompetent?”
“Who’s this Russian guy?” Clark asked.
“Sean’s friend, Serov, Iosef Serov. He got the money and the drugs—”
“Drugs? Christ, John, they’re fucking druggies, too!”
“Where’s the money?” John persisted.
“Swiss bank, numbered account. Iosef set it up, six million dollars—and—and, Sean asked him to bring us ten kilos of cocaine to sell for the money, we need the money to continue operations.”
“Where are the drugs, Tim?” Clark demanded next.
“Farm—farmhouse.” O’Neil gave them a town and road description that went into Chavez’s pocketed tape-recorder.
“This Serov guy, what’s he look like?” And he got that, too.
Chavez backed off and let his visible temper subside. Then he smiled. “Okay, John, let’s talk to the others. Thanks, Timmy. You can keep your dick, ’mano.”
It was late afternoon over Canada’s Quebec province. The sun reflected off the hundreds of lakes, some of them still covered with ice. Popov had been sleepless for the entire flight, the only wakeful passenger in first class. Again and again his mind went over the same data. If the British had captured Grady, then they had his primary cover name, which was in his travel documents. Well, he’d dispose of them that very day. They had a physical description, but he looked not the least bit remarkable. Grady had the number of the Swiss account that Dmitriy had set up, but he’d already transferred the funds to another account, one not traceable to him. It was theoretically possible that the opposition could pursue the information Grady was sure to give them—Popov had no illusions about that—perhaps even secure a set of fingerprints from . . . no, that was too unlikely to be considered a danger, and no Western intelligence service would have anything to cross-match. No Western service even knew anything about him—if they had, he would have been arrested long before.
So, what did that leave? A name that would soon evaporate, a description that fitted a million other men, and a bank account number for a defunct account. In short, very little. He did need to check out, though, very quickly, the procedures by which Swiss banks transferred funds, and whether that process was protected by the anonymity laws that protected the accounts themselves. Even that—the Swiss were not paragons of integrity, were they? No, there would be an arrangement between the banks and the police. There had to be, even if the only purpose was to enable the Swiss police to lie effectively to other national police forces. But the second account was truly a shadow one. He’d set it up through an attorney who didn’t have the ability to betray him, because they’d only met over the telephone. So, there was no path from the information Grady had to where he was now, and that was good. He’d have to think very carefully about ever accessing the 5.7 million dollars in the second account, but there might well be a way to do it. Through another attorney, perhaps, in Liechtenstein, where banking laws were even stricter than in Switzerland? He’d have to look into it. An American attorney could guide him in the necessary procedures, also under total anonymity.
You’re safe, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich, Popov told himself. Safe and rich, but it was time to stop taking risks. He’d initiate no more field operations for John Brightling. Once he got into O’Hare, he’d catch the next flight to New York, get back to his apartment, report in to Brightling, and then look for an elegant escape route. Would Brightling let him go?
He’d have to, Popov told himself. He and Henriksen were the only men on the planet who could link the executive to mass murder. He might think about killing me, but Henriksen would warn him not to. Henriksen was also a professional, and he knew the rules of the game. Popov had kept a diary, which was in a safe place, the vault of a law firm in New York, with carefully written handling instructions. So, no, that was not a real danger, so long as his “friends” knew the rules—and Popov would remind them, just in case.
Why go back to New York at all? Why not simply disappear? It was tempting . . . but, no. If nothing else, he had to tell Brightling and Henriksen to leave him alone from now on and explain why it was in their interest to do so. Besides, Brightling had an unusually good source in the American government and Popov could use that person’s information as additional protection. You never had too much protection.
With all that decided, Popov finally allowed himself to relax. Another ninety minutes to Chicago. Below him was a vast world, with plenty of room to disappear in, and now he had the money for it. It had all been worth it.
“Okay, what do we have?” John asked his senior executives.
“This name, Iosef Serov. It�
�s not on our computer in London,” said Cyril Holt of the Security Service. “What about CIA?”
Clark shook his head. “We have two guys named Serov on the books. One’s dead. The other one’s in his late sixties and retired in Moscow. What about the description?”
“Well, it fits this chap.” Holt passed a photo across the table.
“I’ve seen this one before.”
“He’s the chap who met with Ivan Kirilenko in London some weeks ago. That fits the rest of the puzzle, John. We believe he was involved in the leak of information on your organization, as you will recall. For him, then, to show up with Grady—well, it does fit, almost too well, as a matter of fact.”
“Any way to press this?”
“We can go to the RVS—both we and CIA have relatively good relations with Sergey Golovko, and perhaps they can assist us. I will lobby very hard for that,” Holt promised.
“What else?”
“These numbers,” Bill Tawney put in. “One is probably a bank account identification number, and the other is probably the control-activation code number. We’ll have their police look into it for us. That will tell us something, if the money hasn’t been laundered, of course, and if the account is still active, which it ought to be.”
“The weapons,” the senior cop present told them, “judging by the serial numbers, are of Soviet origin, from the factory in Kazan. They’re fairly old, at least ten years, but none of them had ever been fired before today. On the drug issue, I forwarded the information to Dennis Maguire—he’s chief of the Garda. It will be on the telly in the morning. They found and seized ten pounds of pure cocaine—by ‘pure’ I mean medicinal quality, almost as though it had been purchased from a pharmaceutical house. The street value is enormous. Millions,” the chief superintendent told them. “It was found in a semi-abandoned farmhouse on the Irish West Coast.”
“We have identification on three of the six prisoners. One has not yet been able to talk to us because of his injuries. Oh, they were using cellular phones to communicate, like walkie-talkies. Your Noonan chap did very well indeed to close the phone cells down. God only knows how many lives that saved,” Holt told them.
At the far end of the table, Chavez nodded and shivered at the news. If they’d been able to coordinate their actions . . . Jesus. It would not have been a good day for the good guys. What they’d had was bad enough. There would be funerals. People would have to put on their Class-A uniforms and line up and fire off the guns . . . and then they’d have to replace the men who were gone. Not far away, Mike Chin was in a bed, a cast on one of his wounded legs because a bone was broken. Team-1 was out of business for at least a month, even as well as they’d fought back. Noonan had come through big-time, having killed three of them with his pistol, along with Franklin, who’d just about decapitated one with his big MacMillan .50, then used his monster rifle to kill the little brown truck and keep the five terrorists in it from getting away. Chavez was looking down at the conference table and shaking his head when his beeper went off. He lifted it and saw that it was his home number. He rose from his seat and called on the wall phone.
“Yeah, honey?”
“Ding, you want to come over here. It’s started,” Patsy told him calmly. Ding’s response was a sudden flip of his heart.
“On the way, baby.” Ding hung up. “John, I gotta get home. Patsy says it’s started.”
“Okay, Domingo.” Clark managed a smile, finally. “Give her a kiss for me.”
“Roge-o, Mr. C.” And Chavez headed for the door.
“The timing on this thing is never good, is it?” Tawney observed.
“Well, at least something good is happening today.” John rubbed his eyes. He even accepted the idea of becoming a grandfather. It beat the hell out of losing people, a fact that had yet to hammer all the way into his consciousness. His people. Two of them, dead. Several more wounded. His people.
“Okay,” Clark went on. “What about the information leak? People, we’ve been set up and hit. What are we going to do about it?”
“Hello, Ed, it’s Carol,” the President’s Science Advisor said.
“Hi, Dr. Brightling. What can I do for you?”
“What the hell happened in England today? Was it our people—our Rainbow team, I mean?”
“Yes, Carol, it was.”
“How did they do? The TV wasn’t very clear, and—”
“Two dead, four or so wounded,” the DCI answered. “Nine terrorists dead, six captured, including their leader.”
“The radios we got to them, how’d they work?”
“Not sure. I haven’t seen the after-action report yet, but I know the main thing they’re going to want to know.”
“What’s that, Ed?”
“Who spilled the beans. They knew John’s name, his wife and daughter’s names, identities, and place of work. They had good intel, and John isn’t very happy about that.”
“The family members, are they okay?”
“Yeah, no civilians hurt, thank God. Hell, Carol, I know Sandy and Patricia. There’s going to be some serious fallout over this one.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Not sure yet, but I won’t forget you asked.”
“Yeah, well, I want to know if those radio gadgets worked. I told the guys at E-Systems to get them out pronto, ’cuz these guys are important. Gee, I hope they helped some.”
“I’ll find out, Carol,” the DCI promised.
“Okay, you know where to reach me.”
“Okay, thanks for the call.”
CHAPTER 30
VISTAS
It was everything he’d expected—not knowing what to expect—and more, and at the end of it Domingo Chavez held his son in his hands.
“Well,” he said, looking down at the new life that would be his to guard, educate, and in time present to the world. After a second that seemed to last into weeks, he handed the newborn to his wife.
Patsy’s face was bathed in perspiration, and weary from the five-hour ordeal of delivery, but already, as such things went, the pain was forgotten. The goal had been achieved, and she held her child. The package was pink, hairless, and noisy, the last part assuaged by the proximity of Patsy’s left breast, as John Conor Chavez got his first meal. But Patsy was exhausted, and in due course a nurse removed the child to the nursery. Then Ding kissed his wife and walked alongside her bed as she was wheeled to her room. She was already asleep when they arrived. He kissed her one last time and walked outside. His car took him back onto the Hereford base, and then to the official home of Rainbox Six.
“Yeah?” John said, opening the door.
Chavez just handed over a cigar with a blue ring. “John Conor Chavez, seven pounds eleven ounces. Patsy’s doing fine, gran-pop,” Ding said, with a subdued grin. After all, Patsy had done the hard part.
There are moments to make the strongest of men weep, and this was one of them. The two men embraced. “Well,” John said, after a minute or so, reaching into the pocket of his bathrobe for a handkerchief with which he rubbed his eyes. “Who’s he look like?”
“Winston Churchill,” Domingo replied with a laugh. “Hell, John, I’ve never been able to figure that one out, but John Conor Chavez is a confusing enough name, isn’t it? The little bastard has a lot of heritage behind him. I’ll start him off on karate and guns about age five . . . maybe six,” Ding mused.
“Better golf and baseball, but he’s your kid, Domingo. Come on in.”
“Well?” Sandy demanded, and Chavez gave the news for the second time while his boss lit up his Cuban cigar. He despised smoking, and Sandy, a nurse, hardly approved of the vice, but on this one occasion, both relented. Mrs. Clark gave Ding a hug. “John Conor?”
“You knew?” John Terrence Clark asked.
Sandy nodded. “Patsy told me last week.”
“It was supposed to be a secret,” the new father objected.
“I’m her mother, Ding!” Sandy explained. “Breakfast?”
The men checked their watches. It was just after four in the morning, close enough, they all agreed.
“You know, John, this is pretty profound,” Chavez said. His father-in-law noted how Domingo switched in and out of accents depending on the nature of the conversation. The previous day, interrogating the PIRA prisoners he’d been pure Los Angeles gang kid, his speech redolent with Spanish accent and street euphemisms. But in his reflective moments, he reverted to a man with a university master’s degree, with no accent at all. “I’m a papa. I’ve got a son.” Followed by a slow, satisfied, and somewhat awestruck grin. “Wow.”
“The great adventure, Domingo,” John agreed, while his wife got the bacon going. He poured the coffee.
“Huh?”
“Building a complete person. That’s the great adventure, sonny boy, and if you don’t do it right, what the hell good are you?”
“Well, you guys’ve done okay.”
“Thanks, Domingo,” Sandy said from the stove. “We worked at it pretty hard.”
“More her than me,” John said. “I was away so damned much, playing field-spook. Missed three Christmases, goddamnit. You never forgive yourself for that,” he explained. “That’s the magic morning, and you’re supposed to be there.”
“Doing what?”
“Russia twice, Iran once—getting assets out every time. Two worked, but one came apart on me. Lost that one, and he didn’t make it. Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. He bit the big one four months later, poor bastard. Not a good Christmas,” Clark concluded, remembering just how bleak that had been, seeing the KGB scoop the man up not fifty meters from where he’d been standing, seeing the face turned to him, the look of despair on the doomed face, having to turn away to make his own escape down the pipeline he’d set up for two, knowing there was nothing else he might have done, but feeling like shit about it anyway. Then, finally, he’d had to explain to Ed Foley what had happened—only to learn later that the agent had been burned—“shopped” was the euphemism—by a KGB mole inside CIA’s own headquarters building. And that fuck was still alive in a federal prison, with cable TV and central heating.
