Politika pp-1

by Tom Clancy

  He took his glass off the bottle, poured it half full of champagne, and then set the bottle down on the ground. That done, he stood there some more with the wind slashing at his cheeks, trying to think of a toast.

  It was a while before anything appropriate came to him.

  “May my vices die before I do,” he said at last, and raised the glass to his lips.

  FOURTEEN

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 31, 1999

  Gordian lifted his foot off the brake almost long enough for the tires of his Mercedes SL to make a complete rotation, then halted again and frowned impatiently. To say he was doing ten miles an hour in the bumper-to-bumper traffic would have been far too optimistic. Flanked by two huge semis in the center lane of 1-280, he felt like a minnow caught between two stalled whales.

  He checked his dash clock. Almost eight P.M.

  Shit!

  He reached into his sport coat for his flip phone and pressed in his home number.

  “Yes?” his wife answered on the first ring.

  “Hi, Ashley, it’s me.”

  “Roger? Where are you? What’s all that racket in the background?”

  “I’m on my way home,” he said. “And the noise is highway traffic.”

  There was silence on the phone. As Gordian had expected. He didn’t try talking into it.

  “Nice to see you’re not cutting things too close,” she said finally, her voice edged with sarcasm.

  Gordian figured he’d deserved that. He looked out his windshield at the back of a Jeep Cherokee, saw a little white dog with a black bandit stripe across its eyes staring back at him through the window of the hatch.

  “Listen, Ashley, I take this road all the time. If I’d known it would be this jammed tonight—”

  “If not on New Year’s Eve, then when else?” she said. “And do I have to remind you we have dinner reservations for nine o’clock?”

  “I’ll call the restaurant, see if they can switch our reservation to ten,” he said, knowing how stupid his offer sounded even before it left his mouth. As his wife had just pointed out, it was New Year’s Eve. Trader Vic’s would be booked solid.

  Gordian waited for her answer. Nothing moved on the congested road. The dog in the Cherokee nuzzled the window and continued watching him.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. Her sarcasm had curdled into anger. “I’m standing here in my good dress, ready to leave the house. Damn it, you gave me your word you’d be on time.”

  Gordian felt his stomach sink. He was thinking that he had not only given her his word, but he’d also very much intended to keep it. With most of his staff having left early for the holiday, however, he’d decided to play catch-up with his paperwork in the rare absence of distractions, figuring he could leave for home at six-thirty and be there within an hour. Why hadn’t he allowed for the possibility that he’d get stuck in traffic?

  “Honey, I’m sorry. I wanted to get some odds and ends done—”

  “Sure. As always. To the exclusion of anything remotely connected to a personal life,” she said, and took an audible breath. “I’m not going to argue this over the phone, Roger. I won’t be reduced to the role of a nagging wife. And we’ve been through it all before, anyway.”

  Gordian couldn’t think of anything to say. The silence in his earpiece had a barren, hollow sound. Ashley had been talking about a separation for the past several months. He never knew what to say to that, either. Other than to tell her he loved her, didn’t want her to leave, and was surprised she felt things were so bad between them that she would even consider leaving.

  There was a mild surge in traffic. It started in the left lane, where one of the flanking trucks hissed and rumbled forward as its driver released its air brakes. Then the Jeep began to move and Gordian toed the accelerator.

  He figured he’d gained about a car length of blacktop before the taillights of the Jeep flickered on and he had to brake behind it.

  “I don’t think I’d better be home when you get here,” Ashley said.

  “Honey…”

  “No, Roger,” she said. “Don’t. Not now.”

  Gordian’s stomach dropped some more. He knew from the flatness of her tone that there wouldn’t be any further discussion. She had closed up tight.

  “I need some room,” she said. “It can only make things worse if we see each other tonight.”

  “Where are you going to be?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ll call you later and let you know,” she said.

  And hung up.

  Click.

  Gordian held the phone to his ear for almost a full minute after the line went dead, then finally slipped it back into his pocket.

  He leaned back against the seat rest and rubbed his forehead, expelling a tired, resigned sigh.

  No reason I need to hurry home now, he thought.

  In front of him, the little dog with its face in the window had started barking and wagging its tail. Or looked like it was barking, anyway, since he couldn’t actually hear it through two panes of glass and the drone of several hundred idling motors.

  Gordian held his hand up and waved and the dog swished its tail back and forth more rapidly.

  “Happy New Year,” he said to the interior of his car.

  FIFTEEN

  NEW YORK CITY DECEMBER 31, 1999

  11:40 P.M.

  On an upper story of a sleek steel-and-glass office tower at Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, a group of German executives from the international magazine empire Fuchs Inc. had gathered behind floor-to-ceiling windows to watch the proceedings below. Well in advance of their holiday visit, office space used by their American editorial staff had been converted into an observatory /banquet area that included plush lounge chairs, high-magnification telescopes, a wet bar, and gourmet hors d’oeuvres served by a white-glove waiter staff. Also prior to their arrival, a memo instructing employees to leave the building early on New Year’s Eve had circulated down through the corporate hierarchy. It was their express wish that the observation deck be inaccessible to Americans, regardless of their positions in the company. The spectacle taking place in Times Square, so oddly crass and colorful, was one the foreign management wanted to view — and comment upon — in secure, uninterrupted privacy.

  While the hectic New Year’s Eve gathering might be an American tradition, the German businessmen, who had poured millions of dollars into glossing up the district, felt it was theirs alone to enjoy from on high.

  11:43 P.M.

  A large outdoor parade stand had been erected on the concrete island occupying the middle of the square from Forty-second Street to roughly Forty-third Street, the military recruiting office and benches that normally stood in that area having been uprooted prior to the festivities by the mayor’s New Year’s 2000 Organizing Committee. It was here that the mayor and other public officials stood with their families, friends, political patrons, and a smattering of entertainers, making speeches, waving to the crowd, leading cheers of “I love New York!” smiling to camera lenses, and urging people to have a good time while please, please, please remaining considerate of the guy with his elbow in your ribs and his hand on your girlfriend’s fanny. Overlooking the street on the uptown side of One Times Square, the Panasonic Astrovision Giant Display Screen, which had replaced the Sony Jumbotron Screen in 1996, and been leased to the NBC television network shortly thereafter, flashed enormous images of everyone on the stand across 890 square feet of pixels, so that all in the crowd could bask in their charismatic nearness.

  Seated beside his wife and daughter on the platform — where a famous, born-on-the-lower-east-side comedian had just begun snapping off one-liners at the mike — Police Commissioner Bill Harrison felt like a cold piece of meat on a makeshift smorgasbord. Any minute now somebody was going to flip the damn thing over on its side, and the starving rabble would feast.

  He looked around skeptically, wishing he could be more confident of the precautions that had been taken for the safety
of the big shots on exhibit, not to mention the safety of his wife and daughter, who had cheerfully (and against his protestations) insisted on accompanying him to this fiasco. Half the City Hall establishment, and enough stars to fill a week’s worth of Entertainment Tonight programs, were in attendance. Despite the transparent bulletproof shields protecting the speakers, despite the constellation of uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives, and private bodyguards surrounding the stand, despite the mounted cops, bomb-sniffing dogs, and rooftop surveillance teams sweeping the scene, despite the endless hashing over of Operation 2000’s details by its planners, there was still room for something nasty to slip through the net. With over a dozen crosstown streets and every major subway line in the city feeding into the neighborhood, how could it be otherwise?

  As his eyes continued making their circuit of the immediate area, they fell briefly on the Emergency Services Unit’s One-Truck, parked in close proximity to the VIP stand on Forty-second Street. Besides being chock full of rescue and tactical equipment, the big, bulky vehicle was loaded with firepower ranging from Ruger Mini-14s to 12-gauge Ithaca shotguns to belt-fed Squad Automatic Weapons to M16s equipped with grenade tubes and multipurpose ammunition. Behind it on standby were two smaller Radio Emergency Patrol trucks, a surveillance van, a temporary headquarters vehicle, and a bomb truck.

  Harrison took more than a little comfort in knowing that the elite ESU personnel were trained to respond to virtually any crisis; if something bad went down, they would be able to meet the challenge of coping with it head-on. But response wasn’t the same as prevention, and Oklahoma City loomed darkly over his thoughts tonight, reminding him that it only took a second for hundreds of innocent lives to be lost.

  “Is that Dick Clark?” Rosetta said, pointing toward a sudden swirl of activity near the stand. “By those TV cameras over there?”

  He sat forward, craning his head.

  “Don’t think so,” he said. “That guy looks too old.”

  “You never know, Bill. He’d have to be around seventy by now.”

  “Dick Clark stopped aging at thirty,” he said. “Unlike your poor bedraggled husband, whose energies are on the wane as we speak, and who will be sleeping like a rock the moment his head hits the pillow tonight.”

  “Is that so?”

  “My days as a late-night party animal are behind me, sweetheart,” he said.

  She put her hand on his thigh and let it rest there, a slanted little smile on her lips, her eyes glinting in the way that never failed to make his throat tighten and his heart skip a beat.

  Tonight was no exception.

  He looked at her with surprise, catching his breath.

  “Like I said, old man, you never know,” she said.

  11:45 P.M.

  “Yo, cuz, you got jelly donuts?”

  The bearded vender lifted his eyes from his wristwatch and shook his head.

  “How ’bout custard?”

  “No more.”

  Des Sanford looked over at his friend, Jamal. Jamal looked back at him and shrugged. Both teenagers were wearing hooded sweatshirts with knit caps underneath. Both also happened to be very confused by this white guy who you’d think would be interested in making a buck here tonight, but didn’t seem to have shit to sell. A minute ago they’d smoked a little ganja, caught themselves a buzz, and then zipped straight over to his stand, figuring something sweet would go down fine. Maybe a couple coffees to get the chill out of their bones.

  Des rubbed his hands together for warmth. Why the fuck couldn’t New Year’s be in July?

  “Don’t be tellin’ us there ain’t no chocolate sprinkle,” he said. “I mean, you gotta have chocolate sprinkle.”

  “Sold out,” the vender told the teenagers, glancing at his watch.

  Des poked a finger under his cap and scratched his forehead. He swore to God, if he lived to be a hundred, he’d never get these white dudes, didn’t matter if they came from the Bronx or had some kind of foreign accent like this one. Man has himself some prime turf, southeast corner of Forty-second Street, right under the building with the big screen, right where the ball gonna come drop-pin’ from the roof any minute now, and what’s he do but stand there concentrating on his watch like he had someplace better to be, telling people he’s out of this, that and the other thing.

  Des leaned forward and read the name on his vender’s license.

  “Julius, m’man, maybe you oughtta try tellin’ us what you do have. ”

  The vender nodded vaguely toward the sparse row of plain and powdered donuts on the upper shelf of his cart.

  Des blew air through his compressed lips, making a small sound of disgust. Not only did the donuts look stale, but he was positive they had come out of a box.

  “Eats like that, you know, we coulda bought at the deli,” he said. “Sign on your stand be sayin’ fresh donuts. I mean, how you be cleaned out when it ain’t even midnight yet?”

  The vender looked at Des, his blue eyes holding on him, seeming to stare right through him. Then he reached under the counter.

  Des looked at Jamal again, puzzled, wondering if he’d gone too far razzing the guy, if this was some kind of crazy mutha had a problem with black people, maybe kept a piece tucked away under his apron just in case somebody mouthed off to him. Jamal was asking himself the same thing, and was about to suggest that they move on when the vender’s hand reappeared holding a brown paper bag.

  “Here,” he said, stuffing the handful of donuts on display into the bag, then crunching the bag shut and holding it out to Des. “No charge.”

  Des looked at him tentatively.

  “You sure, man?”

  The vender nodded and stretched his hand farther out over the counter, shoving the bag against Des’s chest.

  “Take them,” he said. “Last chance.”

  Des grabbed the donuts. He had a feeling that if he hadn’t, the dude would have just opened his hand and let the bag drop to the sidewalk.

  “Uh, thanks,” he said, and glanced up at the Astrovision Screen. It showed a closeup of the mayor, who was giving his rap from that stand in the middle of the street, working up to his countdown, talking all kinds of shit about New York City being an example to the world, millions of people in Times Square, everybody having a good time, everybody getting along, peace, brotherhood, togetherness, and please don’t drink and drive. Not a word in his speech about donut guys that didn’t have any donuts, but what the hell, this was a party. Below his face, the time was being displayed in bright red numbers, 11:50 now, ten minutes and counting to the Big 21.

  Des had to admit, he felt pumped.

  “C’mon, let’s move back some. I wanna get a good look at the ball when it come down,” he said, turning to Jamal.

  Jamal nodded. He looked at the vender, acknowledged the freebie he’d given them with a halfhearted little dip of his chin, then started walking off with his friend.

  The vender watched them brush against a woman in a black leather coat and beret who was approaching the stand, pause to apologize while eyeing her up and down, then vanish into the crowd.

  “Enjoy yourselves,” he muttered.

  11:47 P.M.

  Shouldering past the two black kids, Gilea moved up to the donut stand and looked across the counter at Akhad.

  “Are you sold out?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I was just closing.”

  “Too bad,” she said.

  “There should be other venders,” he said. “They also sell donuts.”

  “I’ve seen them around.”

  “Good,” he said. “Then you shouldn’t have any problems.”

  “No, I shouldn’t.”

  She stuffed her hands into her coat. In her left pocket was a radio transmitter roughly the size and shape of a lipstick tube — and identical to one Akhad was carrying as a fail-safe. One clockwise twist would send a coded-frequency signal to a receiver/initiator inside the donut stand, detonating the sheets of C-4 explosive sandwiched betwee
n thin aluminum panels along its front, back, and sides. Separate blocks of plastique totaling over a hundred pounds in weight had been packed behind the doors of its storage compartments. In addition to the C-4, the compartments contained thousands of tiny nails and ball bearings. Dispersed in every direction by the blast, the shrapnel would buffet the area for hundreds of yards, exponentially compounding the destructive force of the explosion, chewing through human flesh like buckshot through tissue paper. While an independent electronic blasting cap had been wired to each compartment, all of the wires threaded into the same firing system, so that the ignition of the charges — and the release of their deadly projectiles — would be simultaneous.

  And that would only be the beginning.

  Gilea checked the watch on her right hand, her opposite hand still in her pocket, the transmitter still nestled within it.

  “Almost midnight, I’d better be on my way, ” she said, her eyes meeting Akhad’s. “Thank you for your help.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Good night.”

  She smiled, turned, and strode toward the south side of the block.

  Akhad took a deep breath and checked his own watch. He himself would be leaving the booth in exactly two minutes — and that was none too soon.

  He wanted to be as far away as possible when the area turned into a shrieking, flaming pit out of deepest hell.

  11:48 P.M.

  “… take our viewers live to Times Square, where Fox TV’s own Taylor Sands has been in the thick of things all night. Taylor, what’s it like out there?”

  “Jessica, the temperature might be dropping fast, but that hasn’t kept the number of people in the square from going up — and to quote the Buster Poindexter song, they are feeling hot, hot, hot. A few moments ago, a representative from the NYPD told me the crowd has exceeded all predictions, and may well top three million in the final count… and let me tell you, from where I stand, it is virtually impossible to see an inch of pavement that isn’t occupied. Yet everybody seems to be having fun, and so far there have been only a few minor incidents requiring police attention.”