by Tom Clancy
"So who rolled whom, Tom?"
"What do you—"
"That's a little weak," Plumber observed acidly. "I suppose after you walked out of the meeting, Kealty's people had another little kaffeeklatsch. But you've trapped everybody, haven't you? If it ever gets out that your tape wasn't—"
"It won't," Donner said. "And all this coverage does is make our interview look better."
"Better to whom?" Plumber demanded on his way out the door. It was early in the day for him, too, and his first irrelevant thought of the day was that Ed Murrow would never have used hair spray.
DR. GUS LORENZ finished his morning staff meeting early. Spring was coming early to Atlanta. The trees and bushes were budding, and soon the air would be filled with the fragrances of all the flowering plants for which the southern city was so famous—and a lot of pollen, Gus thought, which would get his sinuses all stuffed, but it was a fain trade for living in a vibrant and yet gracious southern city. With the meeting done, he donned his white lab coat and headed off to his own special fiefdom in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC ("and P" had never been added to the acronym) was one of the government's crown jewels, an elite agency that was one of the world's important centers of medical research—many would say the most important. For that reason the center in Atlanta attracted the best of the profession. Some stayed.
Some left to teach at the nation's medical schools, but all were forever marked as CDC people, as others might boast of having served their time in the Marine Corps, and for much the same reason. They were the first people their country sent to trouble spots. They were the first to fight diseases, instead of armed enemies, and that cachet engendered an esprit de corps which more often than not retained the best of them despite the capped government salaries.
"Morning, Melissa," Lorenz said to his chief lab assistant—she had a master's and was finishing up her doctorate in molecular biology at nearby Emory University, after which she'd get a sizable promotion.
"Good morning, Doctor. Our friend is back," she added.
"Oh?" The specimen was all set up on the microscope. Lorenz took his seat, careful as always to take his time. He checked the paperwork to identify the proper sample against the record he'd had on his desk: 98-3-063A. Yes, the numbers matched. Then it was just a matter of zooming in on the sample… and there it was, the Shepherd's Crook.
"You're right. Got the other one set up?"
"Yes, Doctor." The computer screen split into two vertical halves, and next to the first was a specimen from 1976. They weren't quite identical. The curve at the bottom of the RNA chain was seemingly never the same way twice, as snowflakes had almost infinite patterns, but that didn't matter. What mattered was the protein loops at the top, and those were—
"Mayinga strain." He spoke the words matter-of-factly.
"I agree," Melissa said from just behind him. She leaned across to type on the keyboard, calling up -063B. "These were a lot harder to isolate, but—"
"Yes, identical again. This one's from the child?"
"A little girl, yes." Both voices were detached. One can only bear so much exposure to sadness before the mind's defense mechanism kicks in, and the samples become samples, disembodied from the people who donated them. "Okay, I have some calling to do."
THE TWO GROUPS were kept separate for obvious reasons, and in fact neither knew of the existence of the other. Badrayn spoke to one group of twenty. The Movie Star spoke to the second group, composed of nine. For both groups there were similarities of preparation. Iran was a nation-state, with the resources of a nation-state. Its foreign ministry had a passport office, and its treasury had a department of printing and engraving. Both allowed the printing of passports from any number of countries and the duplication of entry-exit stamps. In fact such documents could be prepared in any number of places, mostly illegally, but this source made for somewhat higher quality without the risk of revealing the place of origin.
The more important of the two missions was, perversely, the safer in terms of actual physical danger—well, depending on how one looked at it. Badrayn could see the looks on their faces. The very idea of what they were doing was the sort of thing to make a person's skin crawl, though in the case of these people, it was merely one more example of the vagaries of human nature. The job, he told them, was simple. Get in. Deliver. Get out. He emphasized that they were completely safe, as long as they followed the procedures on which they would be fully briefed. There would be no contacts on the other side. They needed none, and doing without them just made things safer. Each had a choice of cover stories, and such were the parameters of the mission that having more than one of the group select the same one didn't matter. What did matter was that the stories could be plausibly presented, and so each traveler would pick a field of business activity in which he had some knowledge. Nearly all had a university degree, and those who didn't could talk about trading or machine tools or some field better known to them than any customs official asking questions out of mere boredom.
The Movie Star's group was far more comfortable with their task. He supposed it was some flaw in the character of his culture that this was so. This group was younger and less experienced, and part of it was that the young simply know less of life, and therefore less of death. They were motivated by passion, by a tradition of sacrifice, and by their own hatreds and demons, all of which clouded their judgment in a way that pleased the masters, who always felt free to expend the hatreds and the passions, along with the people who bore them. This briefing was more detailed. Photographs were displayed, along with maps and diagrams, and the group drew closer, the better to see the details. None of them remarked on the character of the target. Life and death was so simple a question to those who didn't know the ultimate answers—or who thought they did, even if they did not—and that was better for all, really. With an answer to the Great Question fixed in their minds, the lesser ones would not even occur to them. The Movie Star had no such illusions. He asked the questions within his own mind, but never answered them. For him the Great Question had become something else. For him it was all a political act, not a matter of religion, and one didn't measure one's destiny by politics. At least not willingly. He looked at their faces, knowing that they were doing exactly that, but without realizing it. They were the best sort of people for the task, really. They thought they knew everything, but in reality they knew very little, only the physical tasks.
The Movie Star felt rather like a murderer, but it was something he'd done before, at secondhand, anyway. Doing it firsthand was dangerous, and this promised to be the most dangerous such mission in years.
How remarkable that they didn't know better. Each of them inwardly styled himself the stone in Allah's own sling, without reflecting that such stones are by their very nature thrown away. Or maybe not. Perhaps they would be lucky, and for that eventuality he gave them the best data he'd managed to generate, and that data was pretty good. The best time would be afternoon, just before people got out from work, the better to use crowded highways to confuse their pursuers. He himself would go into the field again, he told them, to facilitate their ultimate escape—he didn't tell them, if it came to that.
"OKAY, ARNIE, WHAT'S going on?" Ryan asked. It was just as well that Cathy didn't have any procedures scheduled for today. She had seethed all night and was not in a proper mental state to do her normal work. He wasn't feeling much better, but there was neither justice nor much point in snapping at his chief of staff.
"Well, for damned sure there's a leak at CIA, or maybe in the Hill, somebody who knows about some of the things you did."
"Colombia, the only people who know are Fellows and Trent. And they also know that Murray wasn't there—not exactly, anyway. The rest of that operation is locked up tight."
"What actually happened?" And need-to-know applied to Arnie now. The President gestured and spoke as one explaining something to a parent:
"There were two operations, SHOWBOAT and RECIPROCITY
. One of them involved putting troops into Colombia, the idea was to bird-dog drug flights. Those flights were then splashed—"
"What?"
"Shot down, by the Air Force—well, some were intercepted, the crews arrested and processed quietly. Some other things happened, and then Emil Jacobs got killed, and RECIPROCITY got laid on. We started dropping bombs on places. Things got a little out of hand. Some civilians got killed, and it all started coming apart."
"How much did you know?" van Damm asked.
"I didn't know jack shit until late in the game. Jim Greer was dying then, and I was handling his work, but that was mostly NATO stuff. I was cut out of it until after the bombs started falling—I was in Belgium when that happened. I saw it on TV, would you believe? Cutter was actually running the operation. He suckered Judge Moore and Bob Ritter into starting it, and then he tried to close it down. That's when things got crazy. Cutter tried to cut off the soldiers—the idea was that they'd just disappear. I found out. I got into Ritter's personal records vault. So I went down into Colombia with the rescue crew, and we got most of them out. It wasn't much fun," Ryan reported. "There was some shooting involved, and I worked one of the guns on the chopper. A crewman, a sergeant named Buck Zimmer, got killed on the last extraction, and I've been looking after his family ever since. Liz Elliot got a hold of that and tried to use it against me a while later."
"There's more to it," Arnie said quietly.
"Oh, yeah. I had to report the operations to the Select Committee, but I didn't want to rip the government apart. So I talked it over with Trent and Fellows, and I came in to see the President. We talked for a while, and then I stepped out of the room, and Sam and Al talked with him for a while. I'm not exactly sure what they agreed on, but—"
"But he threw the election. He dumped his campaign manager and his campaign was for crap the whole way. Christ, Jack, what did you do?" Arnie demanded. His face was pale now, but for political reasons. And all along van Damm had figured that he'd run a brilliant and successful campaign for Bob Fowler, unseating a popular sitting President. And so, a fix had been in? And he'd never found out?
Ryan closed his eyes. He'd just forced himself to relive a dreadful night. "I terminated an operation that was technically legal, but teetering right on the edge. I closed it down quietly. The Colombians never found out. I thought I prevented another Watergate, domestically—and a godawful international incident. Sam and Al signed off on it, the records are sealed until long after we're all dead. Whoever leaked that must have picked up on a couple of rumors and made a few good guesses. What did I do? I think I obeyed the law as best I could—no, Arnie, I did not break the law. I followed the rules. It wasn't easy, but I did." The eyes opened. "So, Arnie, how will that play in Peoria?"
"Why couldn't you have just reported to Congress and—"
"Think back," the President said. "It wasn't just the one thing, okay? That's when Eastern Europe was coming unglued, the Soviet Union was still there but teetering, some really big things were happening, and if our government had come apart, right then, with everything else happening, hell, it could have been a mess like nobody's ever seen. America couldn't—we would not have been able to help settle Europe down if we'd been pissing around with a domestic scandal. And I was the guy who had to make the call and take the action, right now, or those soldiers would have been killed. Think about the box I was in, will you?
"Arnie, I couldn't go to anybody for guidance on that one, okay? Admiral Greer was dead. Moore and Ritter were compromised. The President was up to his eyeballs in it; at the time I thought he was running the show through Cutter— he wasn't; he got finessed into it by that incompetent political bastard. I didn't know where to go, so I went to the FBI for help. I couldn't trust anybody but Dan Murray and Bill Shaw, and one of our people at Langley on the operational side. Bill—did you know he was a J.D.? — worked me through the law part of it, and Murray helped with the recovery operation. They had an investigation started on Cutter. It was a code-word op, I think they called it ODYSSEY, and they were about to go to a U.S. magistrate for criminal conspiracy, but Cutter killed himself. There was an FBI agent fifty yards behind him when he jumped in front of the bus. You've met him, Pat O'Day. Nobody ever broke the law except for Cutter. The operations themselves were within the Constitution— at least that's what Shaw said."
"But politically…"
"Yeah, even I'm not that ignorant. So here I am, Arnie. I didn't break the law. I served my country's interests as best I could under the circumstances, and look what good it's done me."
"Damn. How is it that Bob Fowler never was told?"
"That was Sam and Al. They thought it would have poisoned Fowler's presidency. Besides, I don't really know what the two of them said to the President, do I? I never wanted to know, I never found out, and all I have is speculation—pretty good speculation," Ryan admitted, "but that's all."
"Jack, it's not often I don't know what to say."
"Say it anyway," the President ordered.
"It's going to get out. The media has enough now to put some pieces together, and that will force Congress to launch an investigation. What about the other stuff?"
"It's all true," Ryan said. "Yeah, we got our hands on Red October, yeah, I got Gerasimov out myself. My idea, my operation, nearly got my ass killed, but there you go. If we hadn't, then Gerasimov was poised to launch his own coup to topple Andrey Narmonov—and then there might still be a Warsaw Pact, and the bad old days might never have gone away. So we compromised the bastard, and he didn't have any choices but to get on the airplane. He's still pissed despite all we did to get him set up over here, but I understand his wife and daughter like America just fine."
"Did you kill anybody?" Arnie asked.
"In Moscow, no. In the sub—he was trying to self-destruct the submarine. He killed one of the ship's officers and shot up two others pretty bad, but I punched his ticket myself—and I had nightmares about it for years."
In another reality, van Damm thought, his President would be a hero. But reality and public politics had little in common. He noted that Ryan hadn't recounted his story about Bob Fowler and the aborted nuclear launch. The chief of staff had been around for that one, and he knew that three days later, J. Robert Fowler had come nearly apart at the realization at how he'd been saved from mass murder on a Hitlerian scale. There was a line in Hugo's Les Miserables that had struck the older man when he'd first read the book in high school: "What evil good can be." Here was another case. Ryan had served his country bravely and well more than once, but not one of the things he'd done would survive public scrutiny. Intelligence, love of country, and courage merely added up to a series of events which anyone could twist out of recognition into scandal. And Ed Kealty knew how to do just that.
"How do we spin-control all this?" the President asked.
"What else do I need to know?"
"The files on Red October and Gerasimov are at Langley. The Colombian thing, well, you know what you need to know. I'm not sure even I have the legal right to unseal the records. On the other hand, you want to destabilize Russia? This will do it."
RED OCTOBER, GOLOVKO thought, then he looked up at the high ceiling of his office. "Ivan Emmetovich, you clever bastard. Zvo tvoyu maht!"
The curse was spoken in quiet admiration. From the first moment he'd met Ryan, he'd underestimated him. and even with all the contacts, direct and indirect, that had followed, he had to admit, he'd never stopped doing it. So that was how he'd compromised Gerasimov! And in so doing, he'd saved Russia, perhaps—but a country was supposed to be saved from within, not without. Some secrets were supposed to be kept forever, because they protected everyone equally. This was such a secret. It would embarrass both countries now. For the Russians, it was the loss of a valuable national asset through high treason—worse still, something their intelligence organs had not discovered, which was quite incredible on reflection, but the cover stories had been good ones, and the loss of two hunter submar
ines in the same operation had made the affair something that the Soviet navy had every desire to forget—and so they hadn't looked far beyond the cover story.
Sergey Nikolay'ch knew the second part better than the first. Ryan had forestalled a coup d'etat. Golovko supposed that Ryan might as easily have told him what was happening and left it to the Soviet Union's internal organs—but, no. Intelligence services turned everything to their advantage, and Ryan would have been mad not to have done so here. Gerasimov must have sung like a canary—he knew the Western aphorism—and given up everything he'd known; Ames, for one, had been identified that way, he was sure, and Ames had been a virtual diamond mine for KGB.
And you always told yourself that Ivan Emmetovich was a gifted amateur, Golovko thought.
But even his professional admiration was tempered. Russia might soon need help. How could she go for that help to someone who, it would now be known, had tampered with his country's internal politics like a puppeteer? That realization was worth another oath, not spoken in admiration of anything.
PUBLIC WATERWAYS ARE free for the passage of all, and so the Navy couldn't do anything more than prevent the charter boat from getting too close to the Eight-Ten Dock. Soon it was joined by another, then more still, until a total of eleven cameras were pointing at the covered graving dock, now empty with the demise of most of America's missile submarines, and also empty of another which had briefly lived there, not American, or so the story went.
It was possible to access the Navy's personnel records via computer, and some were doing that right now, checking for former crewmen of USS Dallas. An early-morning call to CoMSuuPAC concerning his tenure as commanding officer of Dallas got no farther than his public affairs officer, who was well-schooled in no-commenting sensitive inquiries. Today he'd get more than his fair share. So would others.
