by Tom Clancy
“The targets we have identified, where are they?” Hendley asked.
“All in Europe. They tend to be bankers or communications people. They move money around, or they handle messages, do briefings. One seems to gather intelligence. He travels a lot. Maybe he scouted locations for yesterday, but we haven’t been on him long enough to know. We have some targets who do comms, but we want to leave those alone. They’re too valuable. The other concern is to avoid targets whose demise will tell the opposition how we twigged to them. It has to appear random. I think for some we set it up in such a way that the opposition think they’ve gone over the hill. Took the money and bugged out—grabbed a piece of the good life and dropped off the earth. We can even leave e-mail messages like that behind.”
“And if they have a code to show it’s their messages, and not somebody who’s taken charge of their computers?” Davis asked.
“That works for us as much as it works against us. It’s a natural play, to arrange your disappearance in such a way as to suggest you’ve been whacked. Nobody’s going to come looking for a dead man, right? They must have that kind of concern. They hate us for corrupting their society, and so they must know that their people can be corrupted. They will have brave ones, and they’ll have cowardly ones. These people are not unified in their outlook. They’re not robots. Some will be true believers, sure, but others are in it for the ride, the fun, the glamour of what they’re doing, but when it comes to the nut-crunching time, life will be more attractive to them than death.” Granger knew people and motivations, and, no, they were not robots. In fact, the smarter they were, the less likely they were to be motivated by the simple. Most of the Muslim extremists, interestingly enough, were either in Europe or had been educated there. In a comfortable womb, they’d been isolated by their ethnic background—but also liberated from the repressive societies from which they’d sprung. Revolution had always been a creature of rising expectations—not a product of oppression, but of proto-liberation. It was a time of personal confusion and a time for seeking after identity, a period of psychological vulnerability when an anchor was needed and grasped at, whatever the anchor happened to be. It was sad to have to kill people who were more lost than anything else, but they’d chosen their path freely, if not intelligently, and if that path led to the wrong place, that was not the fault of their victims, was it?
THE FISH was pretty good. Jack tried the rockfish, the striped bass of the Chesapeake Bay. Brian opted for the salmon, and Dominic the crusted sea perch. Brian had chosen the wine, a French white from the Loire Valley.
“So, how the hell did you get here?” Dominic asked his cousin.
“I looked around, and this place interested me. So, I looked into it, and the more I found out, the less I could figure out. So, I came over and talked to Gerry, and I talked my way into a job.”
“Doing what?”
“They call it analysis. It’s more like mind reading. One guy in particular. Arabian name, plays with money in London. Mainly family money, dicks around with it, mainly trying to protect his father’s pile—it’s a nice pile,” Jack assured his companions. “He trades real estate. Nice way to preserve capital. The London market isn’t going down anytime soon. The Duke of Westminster is one of the richest guys in the world. He owns most of central London. Our little friend is emulating His Grace.”
“What else?”
“What else is that he’s fed money into a certain bank account that’s the source of payment for a bunch of Visa cards, four of whose owners you guys met yesterday.” It wasn’t a completed circle yet, but that wouldn’t take the FBI much longer to close it up tight. “He also talked in his e-mails about the ‘wonderful events’ of yesterday.”
“How did you get access to his e-mails?” Dominic asked.
“I can’t say. You’ll have to get that from somebody else.”
“About ten miles that way, I bet,” Dominic said, pointing northeast. The spook community tended to work on lines that were ordinarily forbidden to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In any case, Cousin Jack just maintained a fairly blank look that would not have won him any money at a high-stakes poker table.
“So, he funds bad guys?” Brian asked.
“Correct.”
“That does not make him a good guy,” Brian developed the thought a little further.
“Probably not,” Junior agreed.
“Maybe we’ll meet him. What else can you tell us?” Brian continued.
“Expensive place, a town house on Berkeley Square—nice part of London, couple of blocks from the U.S. Embassy. Likes to use whores for his sexual recreation. He especially likes one girl named Rosalie Parker. The British Security Service keeps an eye on him, and they regularly debrief his main squeeze—the Parker girl. He pays her top dollar, in cash. Miss Parker is supposed to be popular with rich people. I suppose she slings it pretty good,” Jack added with distaste. “There’s a new photo on the computer file. He’s about our age, olive complexion, a sort of beard—the kind a guy might have to look sexy, you know? Drives an Aston Martin. Hot car. Usually goes around London in cabs, though. He doesn’t have a place in the country, but he takes country trips on weekends to getaway hotels, mostly with Miss Parker or another rent-a-broad. Works downtown in the financial district. Has an office in the Lloyd’s of London building—third floor, I think. He makes three or four trades per week. Mainly, I think he just sits there and watches the TV and stock tickers, reads the papers, stuff like that.”
“So, he’s a spoiled rich kid who wants some excitement in his life?” Dominic summarized.
“Correct. Except maybe he likes to go out and play in the traffic.”
“That’s dangerous, Jack,” Brian pointed out. “It could even get somebody Excedrin Headache number three-five-six.” Brian was wearing his game face, in anticipation of meeting the guy who had financed the death of David Prentiss.
And suddenly Jack thought that Miss Rosalie Parker of London might not be getting all that many more Louis Vuitton bags. Well, she probably had a nice retirement plan already arranged if she was as smart as the Security Service and Special Branch thought she was.
“How’s your dad doing?” Dominic asked.
“Writing his memoirs,” Jack answered. “I wonder how much he’ll be able to put in? You know, even Mom doesn’t know much about what he did at CIA, and the little bit I know—well, there’s a lot of stuff he can’t write about. Even the things that are sort of out in the public eye, he can’t confirm they really happened.”
“Like getting the head of the KGB to defect. That’s gotta be some story. That guy’s been on TV. I guess he’s still pissed at your dad for keeping him from taking the Soviet Union over. Probably thinks he could have saved it.”
“Maybe so. Dad has a lot of secrets, all right. So do some of his pals from the Agency. One guy in particular, named Clark. Scary guy, but him and Dad are pretty tight. I think he’s in England now, boss of that new secret counterterrorism bunch that the press talks about every year or so, the ‘men of black,’ they call ’em.”
“They’re real,” Brian said. “Out at Hereford in Wales. They’re not that secret. The senior guys from Force Recon have been out there to train with ’em. Never been there myself, but I know two guys who have. Them and the Brit SAS. They’re serious troops.”
“How far inside were you, Aldo?” his brother asked.
“Hey, the special-operations community is pretty tight. We cross-train, share new equipment and stuff. Most important part is when we sit down with beers and share war stories. Everybody has a different way of looking at problems, and, you know, sometimes the other guy has a better idea than you have. The Rainbow team—that’s the ‘men of black’ the newsies talk about—they’re very smart, but they’ve learned a thing or two from us over the years. Thing is, they’re smart enough to listen to new ideas. The boss man, this Clark guy, he’s supposed to be very smart.”
“He is. I’ve met him. Dad thinks he’s the cat
’s ass.” He paused before going on. “Hendley knows him, too. Why he isn’t here, I don’t know. I asked the first day I came here. Maybe because he’s too old.”
“He’s a shooter?”
“I asked Dad once. Dad said he couldn’t say. That’s how he says yes. I guess I caught him at a weak moment. Funny thing about Dad, he can’t lie worth a damn.”
“I guess that’s why he loved being President so much.”
“Yeah, I think that’s the main reason he quit. He figured Uncle Robby could handle it better than he did.”
“Until that cracker bastard wasted his ass,” Dominic observed. The shooter, one Duane Farmer, was currently sitting on death row in Mississippi. “The last of the Klan,” the newspapers called him, and so he was, at age sixty-eight, just a damned-by-everybody bigot who could not abide the thought of a black President, and had used his grandfather’s World War One revolver to make it so.
“That was bad,” John Patrick Ryan, Jr., agreed. “You know, except for him, I wouldn’t have been born. It’s a big family story. Uncle Robby’s version of it was pretty good. He loved telling stories. Him and Dad were pretty tight. After Robby got wasted, the political pukes were running around in circles, some of them wanted Dad to pick up the flag again, like, but he didn’t do it, and so, I guess, he helped that Kealty guy get elected. Dad can’t stand him. That’s the other thing he never learned, how to be nice to people he hates. He just didn’t like living at the White House very much.”
He was good at it, being President, Dominic thought.
“You tell him that. Mom didn’t mind leaving, either. That First Lady stuff wrecked her doctor work, and she really hated what it did with Kyle and Katie. You know that old saying, the most dangerous place in the world is between a mom and her kids? It’s for real, guys. Only time I ever saw her lose her temper—Dad does that a lot more than Mom does—was when somebody told her that her official duties required her not to go to Kyle’s pageant at his day-care center. Jeez, she really came unglued. Anyway, the nannies helped—and the newspeople hammered her about that, how it wasn’t American and all that. You know, if anybody had ever taken a picture of Dad taking a piss, I bet someone would have said he wasn’t doing it right.”
“That’s what critics are for, to tell you how much smarter they are than the person they’re criticizing.”
“In the Bureau, Aldo, they’re called lawyers, or the Office of Professional Responsibility,” Dominic informed the table. “They have their sense of humor surgically removed before they join up.”
“The Marines have reporters, too—and I bet not one of them ever went through boot camp.” At least the guys who worked in the IG had been through the Basic School.
“I guess we should cheer up,” Dominic announced, holding up his wineglass. “Ain’t nobody going to criticize us.”
“And live,” Jack added with a chuckle. Damn, he thought, what the hell is Dad going to say when he finds out about me?
CHAPTER 16
AND THE PURSUING HORSES
SUNDAY WAS a day of rest for most people, and at The Campus it was much the same, except for the security people. Gerry Hendley believed that maybe God had had a point, that seven-day schedules accomplished a lot less than adding 16.67 percent to a man’s weekly productivity. It also dulled the brain by denying it free-form exercise, or just the luxury of doing nothing at all.
But today it was different, of course. Today they’d be planning real black operations for the first time. The Campus had been active just over nineteen months, and that time had mostly been spent in establishing their cover as a trading and arbitrage business. His department heads had taken the Acela trains back and forth to New York many times to meet their white-world counterparts, and though it had seemed slow at the time, in retrospect it had been very quickly indeed that they’d made their reputation in the money-management community. They’d hardly ever shown the world their real results, of course, from speculating on currencies and a few very carefully chosen stock issues, sometimes even insider trades on companies which themselves didn’t know the business that was coming their way. Staying covert had been the overall objective, but since The Campus had to be self-supporting, it also had to generate real income. In World War II, the Americans had peopled its black-operations establishments with lawyers, while the Brits had used bankers. Both had proven to be good for screwing people . . . and killing them. It had to be something about the way they looked at the world, Hendley thought over his coffee.
He gazed at the others: Jerry Rounds, his head of Strategic Planning; Sam Granger, his chief of Operations. Even before the building had been completed, the three of them had been thinking about the shape of the world, and how a few of the corners could best be rounded off. Rick Bell was here, too, his chief of Analysis, the one who spent his working days sorting through the “take” from NSA and CIA, and trying to find meaning in the flood of unrelated information—aided, of course, by the thirty-five thousand analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and other such places. Like all senior analysts, he also liked to frolic in the operations playground, and here that was actually possible, since The Campus was too small to have been overtaken by its own bureaucracy. He and Hendley worried that it might not always be so, and both made sure that no empires were being built.
To the best of their knowledge, theirs was the only institution in all the world like this. And it had been set up in such a way that it could be erased from the landscape in a matter of two or three months. Since Hendley Associates did not invite outside investors, their public profile was low enough that the radar never spotted their machinations, and, in any case, the community they were in did not advertise. It was easy to hide in a field in which everyone did the same, and nobody ratted on anyone else, unless very badly stung. And The Campus didn’t sting. At least not with money.
“So,” Hendley began, “are we ready?”
“Yes,” Rounds said for Granger. Sam nodded soberly and smiled.
“We’re ready,” Granger announced officially. “Our two boys have earned their spurs in a way we never anticipated.”
“They earned ’em, all right,” Bell agreed. “And the Ryan boy has identified a good first target, this Sali fellow. The events of Friday have generated a lot of message traffic. They turn out a lot of cheerleaders. A lot of them are stringers and wanna-bes, but even if we pop one of them by mistake it’s no great loss. I have the first four all lined up. So, Sam, do you have a plan for dealing with them?”
That was Davis’s cue. “We’re going to do reconnaissance by fire. After we whack one or two, we’ll see what reaction, if any, results, and we will take our guidance from there. I agree that Mr. Sali looks like a profitable first target. Question is, is his elimination going to be overt or covert?”
“Explain,” Hendley ordered.
“Well, if he’s found dead on the street, that’s one thing. If he disappears with his daddy’s money and leaves behind a note saying that he wants to stop what he’s doing and just retire, that’s something else,” Sam explained.
“Kidnapping? It’s dangerous.” The Metropolitan Police in London had a closure rate on kidnappings that nibbled at one hundred percent. That was a dangerous game to play, especially on their first move.
“Well, we can hire an actor, dress him up right, fly him to New York Kennedy, and then just have him disappear. In fact, we dispose of the body and keep the money. How much does he have access to, Rick?”
“Direct access? Hell, it’s over three hundred million bucks.”
“Might look good in the corporate exchequer,” Sam speculated. “And it wouldn’t hurt his dad much, would it?”
“His father’s money—all of it? Try the sunny side of three billion,” Bell answered. “He’ll miss it, but it wouldn’t break him. And given his opinion of his son, it might even develop as good cover for our operation,” he hypothesized.
“I am not recommending this as a course of action, but it is an alternative,” Granger co
ncluded.
It had been talked about before, of course. It was too obvious a play to escape notice. And three hundred million dollars would have looked just fine in a Campus account, say in the Bahamas or Liechtenstein. You could hide money anywhere that had telephone lines. It was just electrons anyway, not gold bricks.
Hendley was surprised that Sam had brought this up so soon. Maybe he wanted to get a read on his colleagues. They were clearly not overcome with emotion at the thought of ending this Sali’s life, but to steal from him in the process pushed some very different buttons. A man’s conscience could be a funny thing, Gerry concluded.
“Let’s set that aside for the moment. How hard will the hit be?” Hendley asked.
“With what Rick Pasternak gave us? It’s child’s play, so long as our people don’t make a complete hash of it. Even then the worst thing that can happen is that it’ll look like a mugging that went wrong,” Granger told them.
“What if our guy drops the pen?” Rounds worried.
“It’s a pen. You can write with it. It’ll pass inspection with any cop in the world,” Granger replied confidently. He reached in his pocket and passed his sample around the table. “This one’s cold,” he assured them.
They’d all been briefed in. To all appearances, it was an expensive ballpoint, gold-plated, with obsidian on the clip. By depressing the clip and turning the nib cover, you switched the point from a real pen to a hypodermic with a lethal transfer agent. It would paralyze the victim in fifteen to twenty seconds, and kill him in three minutes, with no cure, and a very transient signature in the body. As the pen went around the conference table, the executives invariably felt the hypo point, and then experimented with using it for a simulated hit, mostly as an ice-pick strike, though Rounds handled it like a diminutive sword.
“It would be nice to try it on a dry run,” he observed quietly.
