by Tom Clancy
“It’s history, John,” Chavez told him, understanding the look. They’d deployed on similar missions, but the Clark-Chavez team had never failed, though some of their missions had been on the insane side of hairy. “You know the funny part about this?”
“What’s that?” John asked, wondering if it would be the same feeling he’d had.
“I know I’m gonna die now. Someday, I mean. The little guy, he’s gotta outlive me. If he doesn’t, then I’ve screwed it up. Can’t let that happen, can I? JC is my responsibility. While he grows up, I grow old, and by the time he’s my age, hell, I’ll be in my sixties. Jesus, I never planned to be old, y’know?”
Clark chuckled. “Yeah, neither did I. Relax, kid. Now I’m a”—he almost said “fucking,” but Sandy didn’t like that particular epithet—“goddamned grandfather. I never planned on that, either.”
“It’s not so bad, John,” Sandy observed, cracking open the eggs. “We can spoil him and hand him back. And we will.”
It hadn’t happened that way with their kids, at least not on John’s side of the family. His mother was long dead from cancer, and his father from a heart attack on the job, while rescuing some children from a dwelling fire in Indianapolis, back in the late 1960s. John wondered if they knew that their son had grown up, and then grown old, and was now a grandfather. There was no telling, was there? Mortality and its attendant issues were normal at times like this, he supposed. The great continuity of life. What would John Conor Chavez become? Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief? That was mainly Domingo and Patsy’s job, and he had to trust them to do it properly, and they probably would. He knew his daughter and knew Ding almost as well. From the first time he’d seen the kid, in the mountains of Colorado, he’d known that this boy had something special in him, and the younger man had grown, blossoming like a flower in a particularly tough garden. Domingo Chavez was a younger version of himself, a man of honor and courage, Clark told himself, and therefore he’d be a worthy father, as he’d proven to be a worthy husband. The great continuity of life, John told himself again, sipping his coffee and puffing on the cigar, and if it was yet one more milestone on the road to death, then so be it. He’d had an interesting life, and a life that had mattered to others, as had Domingo, and as they all hoped would, John Conor. And what the hell, Clark thought, his life wasn’t over yet, was it?
Getting a flight to New York had proven more difficult than expected. They were all fully booked, but finally Popov had managed to get himself a coach seat in the back of an old United 727. He disliked the tight fit, but the flight was short. At La Guardia, he headed for a cab, on the way out checking his inside coat pocket and finding the travel documents that had gotten him across the Atlantic. They had served him well, but they had to go. Emerging into the evening air, he surreptitiously dumped them into a trash container before walking to the cabstand. He was a weary man. His day had started just after midnight, American East Coast time, and he hadn’t managed much sleep on the transatlantic flight, and his body was—how did the Americans put it?—running on empty. Maybe that explained the break with fieldcraft.
Thirty minutes later, Popov was within blocks of his downtown apartment, when the waste-disposal crew circulated past the United Airlines terminal to change the trash bags. The routine was mechanical and fairly strenuous physical labor for the mostly Puerto Rican work crew. One at a time, they lifted the metal tops off the cans and reached in to remove the heavy-gauge plastic garbage bags, then turned to dump them into wheeled containers that would later be tipped into trucks for transport to a landfill on Staten Island. The routine was good upper-body exercise, and most of the men carried portable radios to help themselves deal with the boredom of the work.
One can, fifty yards from the cabstand, didn’t sit properly in its holder. When the cleanup man lifted the bag, it caught on a metallic edge and ripped, spilling its contents onto the concrete sidewalk. That generated a quiet curse from the worker, who now had to bend down and pick up a bunch of objects with his gloved hands. He was halfway through when he saw the crimson cardboard cover of what appeared to be a British passport. People didn’t throw those things away, did they? He flipped it open and saw two credit cards inside, stamped with the same name on the passport. Serov, he saw, an unusual name. He dropped the whole package into the thigh pocket of his coveralls. He’d bring it by the lost-and-found. It wasn’t the first time he’d discovered valuable stuff in the trash. Once he’d even recovered a fully loaded 9-mm pistol!
By this time Popov was in his apartment, too tired even to unpack his bags. Instead he merely undressed and collapsed on the bed without even a vodka to help him off to sleep. By reflex, he turned on the TV and caught yet another story about the Hereford shoot-out. The TV was—govno, shit, he thought. There was the TV truck whose reporter had come close and tried to interview him. They hadn’t used it, but there he was, in profile, from twenty feet away, while the reporter gave a stand-up. All the more reason to clear out now, he thought, as he drifted off. He didn’t even have the energy to switch the TV off, and he slept with it on, the recurring stories entering his mind and giving him confused and unpleasant dreams throughout the night.
The passport, credit cards, and a few other items of apparent value arrived at the waste-disposal company’s Staten Island office—actually a trailer that had been towed to the spot—after the close of regular business hours. The trash collector tossed it on the correct desk and punched his time card on the way out for his drive back to Queens and his usual late dinner.
Tom Sullivan had worked late, and was now in the bar the FBI agents frequented, a block from the Jacob Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan. His partner Frank Chatham was there, too, and the two agents sat in a booth, sipping at their Sam Adams beers.
“Anything happening on your end?” Sullivan asked. He’d been in court all day, waiting to testify in a fraud case, but had never gotten to the witness stand because of procedural delays.
“I talked with two girls today. They both say they know Kirk Maclean, but neither one actually dated him,” Chatham replied. “Looks like another dry hole. I mean, he was cooperative, wasn’t he?”
“Any other names associated with the missing girls?”
Chatham shook his head. “Nope. They both said they saw him talking to the missing one and he walked one out once, like he told us, but nothing special about it. Just the usual singles bar scene. Nothing that contradicts anything he said. Neither one likes Maclean very much. They say he comes on to girls, asks some questions, and usually leaves them.”
“What kind of questions?”
“The usual—name, address, work, family stuff. Same stuff we ask, Tom.”
“The two girls you talked to today,” Sullivan asked thoughtfully. “Where they from?”
“One’s a New Yorker, one’s from across the river in Jersey.”
“Bannister and Pretloe are from out of town,” Sullivan pointed out.
“Yeah, I know. So?”
“So, if you’re a serial killer, it’s easier to take down victims with no close family members, isn’t it?”
“Part of the selection process? That’s a stretch, Tom.”
“Maybe, but what else we got?” The answer was, not very much. The flyers handed out by the NYPD had turned up fifteen people who’d said they recognized the faces, but they were unable to provide any useful information. “I agree, Maclean was cooperative, but if he approaches girls, dumps those who grew up near here and have family here, then walks our victim home, hell, it’s more than we have on anyone else.”
“Go back to talk to him?”
Sullivan nodded. “Yeah.” It was just routine procedure. Kirk Maclean hadn’t struck either agent as a potential serial killer—but that was the best-disguised form of criminal, both had learned in the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. They also knew that the dullest of routine investigative work broke far more cases than the miracles so beloved of mystery novels. Re
al police work was boring, mind-dulling repetition, and those who stuck with it won. Usually.
It was strange that morning at Hereford. On the one hand, Team-2 was somewhat cowed by what had happened the day before. The loss of comrades did that to any unit. But on the other hand, their boss was now a father, and that was always the best thing to happen to a man. On the way to morning PT, a somewhat strung-out Team-2 Leader, who’d had no sleep at all the night before, had his hand shaken by every member of the team, invariably with a brief word of congratulations and a knowing smile, since all of them were fathers already, even those younger than their boss. Morning PT was abbreviated, in acknowledgment of his physical condition, and after the run, Eddie Price suggested to Chavez that he might as well drive home for a few hours of sleep, since he’d be of little use to anyone in his current condition. This Chavez did, crashing and burning past noon, and wakening with a screaming headache.
As did Dmitriy Popov. It hardly seemed fair, since he’d had little to drink the day before. He supposed it was his body’s revenge on him for all the travel abuse on top of a long and exciting day west of London. He awoke to CNN on his bedroom TV, and padded off to the bathroom for the usual morning routine, plus some aspirin, then to the kitchen to make coffee. In two hours, he’d showered and dressed, unpacked his bags, and hung up the clothes he’d taken to Europe. The wrinkles would stretch out in a day or two, he thought. Then it was time for him to catch a cab for midtown.
On Staten Island, the lost-and-found person was a secretary who had this as one of her additional duties, and hated it. The items dropped on her desk were always smelly, sometimes enough to make her gag. Today was no exception, and she found herself wondering why people had to place such noxious items in the trash instead of—what? she never thought to wonder. Keep them in their pockets? The crimson passport was no exception. Joseph A. Serov. The photo was of a man about fifty, she thought, and about as remarkable to look at as a McDonald’s hamburger. But it was a passport and two credit cards and it belonged to somebody. She lifted the phone book from her desk and called the British Consulate in Manhattan, told the operator what it was about, and got the passport control officer as a result. She didn’t know that the passport-control office had for generations been the semisecret cover job for field officers of the Secret Intelligence Service. After a brief conversation, a company truck that was headed for Manhattan anyway dropped off the envelope at the consulate, where the door guard called to the proper office, and a secretary came down to collect it. This she dropped on the desk of her boss, Peter Williams.
Williams really was a spook of sorts, a young man on his first field assignment outside his own country. It was typically a safe, comfortable job, in a major city of an allied country, and he did work a few agents, all of them diplomats working at the United Nations. From them, he sought and sometimes got low-level diplomatic intelligence, which was forwarded to Whitehall to be examined and considered by equally low-level bureaucrats in the Foreign Office.
This smelly passport was unusual. Though his job was supposed to handle things like this, in fact he most often arranged substitute passports for people who’d somehow lost them in New York, which was not exactly a rare occurrence, though invariably an embarrassing one for the people who needed the replacements. The procedure was for Williams to fax the identification number on the document to London to identify the owner properly, and then call him or her at home, hoping to get a family member or employee who would know where the passport holder might be.
But in this case, Williams got a telephone call from Whitehall barely thirty minutes after sending the information.
“Peter?”
“Yes, Burt?”
“This passport, Joseph Serov—rather strange thing just happened.”
“What’s that?”
“The address we have for the chap is a mortuary, and the telephone number is to the same place. They’ve never heard of Joseph Serov, alive or dead.”
“Oh? A false passport?” Williams lifted it from his desk blotter. If it were a fake, it was a damned good one. So was something interesting happening for a change?
“No, the computer has the passport number and name in it, but this Serov chap doesn’t live where he claims to live. I think it’s a matter of false papers. The records show that he is a naturalized subject. Want us to run that down, as well?”
Williams wondered about that. He’d seen false papers before, and been trained on how to obtain them for himself at the SIS training academy. Well, why not? Maybe he’d uncover a spy or something. “Yes, Burt, could you do that for me?”
“Call you tomorrow,” the Foreign Office official promised.
For his part, Peter Williams lit up his computer and sent an e-mail to London, just one more routine day for a young and very junior intelligence officer on his first posting abroad. New York was much like London, expensive, impersonal, and full of culture, but sadly lacking in the good manners of his hometown.
Serov, he thought, a Russian name, but you could find them everywhere. Quite a few in London. Even more in New York City, where so many of the cabdrivers were right off the boat or plane from Mother Russia and knew neither the English language nor where to find the landmarks of New York. Lost British passport, Russian name.
Three thousand four hundred miles away, the name “Serov” had been input onto the SIS computer system. The name had already been run for possible hits and nothing of value had been found, but the executive program had many names and phrases, and it scanned for all of them. The name “Serov” was enough—it had also been entered spelled as Seroff and Serof—and when the e-mail from New York arrived, the computer seized upon and directed the message to a desk officer. Knowing that Iosef was the Russian version of Joseph, and since the passport description gave an age in the proper range, he flagged the message and forwarded it to the computer terminal of the person who had originated the enquiry on one Serov, Iosef Andreyevich.
In due course, that message appeared as e-mail on the desktop computer of Bill Tawney. Bloody useful things, computers, Tawney thought, as he printed up the message. New York. That was interesting. He called the number of the Consulate and got Peter Williams.
“This passport from the Serov chap, anything else you can tell me?” he asked, after establishing his credentials.
“Well, yes, there are two credit cards that were inside it, a MasterCard and a Visa, both platinum.” Which, he didn’t have to add, meant that they had relatively large credit limits.
“Very well. I want you to send me the photo and the credit-card numbers over secure lines immediately.” Tawney gave him the correct numbers to call.
“Yes, sir. I’ll do that at once,” Williams replied earnestly, wondering what this was all about. And who the devil was William Tawney? Whoever it was, he was working late, since England was five hours ahead of New York, and Peter Williams was already wondering what he’d have for dinner.
“John?”
“Yeah, Bill?” Clark replied tiredly, looking up from his desk and wondering if he’d get to see his grandson that day.
“Our friend Serov has turned up,” the SIS man said next. That got a reaction. Clark’s eyes narrowed at once.
“Oh? Where?”
“New York. A British passport was found in a dustbin at La Guardia Airport, along with two credit cards. Well,” he amended his report, “the passport and credit cards were in the name of one Joseph A. Serov.”
“Run the cards to see if—”
“I called the legal attaché in your embassy in London to have the accounts run, yes. Should have some information within the hour. Could be a break for us, John,” Tawney added, with a hopeful voice.
“Who’s handling it in the U.S.?”
“Gus Werner, assistant director, Terrorism Division. Ever met him?”
Clark shook his head. “No, but I know the name.”
“I know Gus. Good chap.”
The FBI has cordial relationships with all manne
r of businesses. Visa and MasterCard were no exceptions. An FBI agent called the headquarters of both companies from his desk in the Hoover Building, and gave the card numbers to the chiefs of security of both companies. Both were former FBI agents themselves—the FBI sends many retired agents off to such positions, which creates a large and diverse old-boy network—and both of them queried their computers and came up with account information, including name, address, credit history, and most important of all, recent charges. The British Airways flight from London Heathrow to Chicago O’Hare leaped off the screen—actually the faxed page—at the agent’s desk in Washington.
“Yeah?” Gus Werner said, when the young agent came into his office.
“He caught a flight from London to Chicago late yesterday, and then a flight from Chicago to New York, about the last one, got a back-room ticket on standby. Must have dumped the ID right after he got in. Here.” The agent handed over the charge records and the flight information. Werner scanned the pages.
“No shit,” the former chief of the Hostage Rescue Team observed quietly. “This looks like a hit, Johnny.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the young agent, fresh in from the Oklahoma City field division. “But it leaves one thing out—how he got to Europe this time. Everything else is documented, and there’s a flight from Dublin to London, but nothing from here to Ireland,” Special Agent James Washington told his boss.
