Debt Of Honor (1994)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 06 Clancy

  The President gave Ryan a nod. "So then, what do we tell Goto about it?"

  "That's your decision, Mr. President. I would recommend nothing at the moment. Let's debrief the girl first. Say a week or so, and then the Ambassador will check in for the usual courtesy visit to present your greetings to a new head of government--"

  "And ask him politely how his countrymen will react if Mr. Nationalist turned out to be dipping his wick in a round-eye. Then we extend a small olive branch, right?" Durling caught on quickly enough, Jack thought.

  "That's my recommendation, sir."

  "A very small one," the President noted dryly.

  "Just one olive on it for the moment," Ryan conceded.

  "Approved," Durling said again, adding more sharply, "Next are you going to suggest what olive branch to offer?"

  "No, sir. Have I pushed too much?" Jack asked, realizing just how far he had gone.

  Durling almost apologized for speaking crossly to his National Security Advisor. "You know, Bob was right about you."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Bob Fowler," Durling said, waving Ryan into a chair. "You ticked me off pretty bad when I brought you in the first time."

  "Sir, I was a burn-out then, remember?" Jack did. The nightmares hadn't stopped yet. He saw himself, sitting there in the National Military Command Center, telling people what they had to do, but in the nightmare they couldn't see or hear him, as the Hot Line message kept coming in, taking his country closer and closer to the war he had in fact probably stopped. The full story on that had never been written in the open media. Just as well. Everyone who had been there knew.

  "1 didn't understand that then. Anyway"--Durling raised his arms to stretch--"when we dropped the ball last summer, Bob and I talked some things over up at Camp David. He recommended you for the job. Surprised?" the President asked with a twisty grin.

  "Very," Jack admitted quietly. Arnie van Damm had never told him that story. Ryan wondered why.

  "He said you're one levelheaded son of a bitch when the crap hits the fan. He also said you were an opinionated, pushy son of a bitch the rest of the time. Good judge of character, Bob Fowler." Durling gave him a moment to absorb that. "You're a good man in a storm, Jack. Do us both a favor and remember that this is as far as you can act without my approval. You've already had another pissing contest with Brett, haven't you?"

  "Yes, sir." Jack bobbed his head like a schoolboy. "Just a little one."

  "Don't push so hard. He's my Secretary of State."

  "I understand, sir."

  "All ready for Moscow?"

  "Cathy is really looking forward to it," Ryan answered, pleased with the change of subject and noting that Durling had handled him very well indeed.

  "It'll be good to see her again. Anne really likes her. Anything else?"

  "Not right now."

  "Jack, thanks for the heads-up," Durling said to conclude the meeting on a positive note.

  Ryan left the office by the west door, walking past the (Teddy) Roosevelt Room and heading toward his office. Ed Kealty was in again, he saw, working in his office. He wondered when that one would break, realizing that the President, however pleased with the events of this day, still had that scandal hanging over him. That sword again, Jack thought. He had gone a little close to the edge this time, and it was his mission to make the President's job easier, not harder. There was more to it, after all, than foreign entanglements--and politics, something he had tried to keep at arm's length for years, was as real as anything else.

  Fowler? Damn.

  It would be a safe time to do it, they knew. Goto was giving a speech on TV tonight, his maiden broadcast as Prime Minister, and whatever he said, it guaranteed that he wouldn't be with his young mistress that evening. Perhaps the night's mission would be an interesting and useful counterpoint to what the politician had to say, a reply, of sorts, from America. They both liked that idea.

  John Clark and Ding Chavez were walking along the block at the proper time, looking across the crowded street at the nondescript building. They always seemed that way, John thought. Maybe someone would tumble to the idea that a garish facade or an office tower was actually better camouflage, or maybe not. More likely it was boredom talking again. A man came out and removed his sunglasses with his left hand. He smoothed his hair, stroking the back of his head twice with his left hand, then moved off. Nomuri had never ascertained the location of Kim Norton's room. Moving in that close was a risk, but the orders had come to take that risk, and now, having given the signal, he walked off toward where he'd left his car. Ten seconds later Nomuri was lost in the crowded sidewalk, Clark saw. He could do that. He had the right height and looks. So did Ding. With his size, glossy black hair, and complexion, Chavez at a distance could almost blend in here. The haircut he'd imposed on his partner helped even more. From behind he was just another person on the sidewalk. That was useful, Clark told himself, feeling ever more conspicuous, especially at a moment like this.

  "Showtime," Ding breathed. Both men crossed the street as unobtrusively as possible.

  Clark was dressed as a businessman, but rarely had he felt more naked. Neither he nor Ding had so much as a folding pocket knife. Though both men were well skilled in unarmed combat, both had enough experience to prefer arms--the better to keep one's enemies at a distance.

  Luck smiled on them. There was no one in the tiny lobby of the building to note their presence. The two men took the stairs up. Second floor, all the way back, left side.

  Nomuri had done his job well. The corridor was empty. Clark had the lead, and headed quickly down the dimly lit passage. The lock was a simple one. With Ding standing guard, he took out his burglar tools and defeated it, then opened the door quickly. They were already inside before they realized that the mission was a bust.

  Kimberly Norton was dead. She lay on a futon, wearing a medium-expensive silk kimono that was bunched just below the knees, exposing her lower legs. Postmortem lividity was beginning to color the underside of her body as gravity drew her blood downward. Soon the top of the body would be the color of ash, and the lower regions would be maroon. Death was so cruel, John thought. It wasn't enough that it stole life. It also stole whatever beauty the victim had once possessed. She'd been pretty--well, that was the point, wasn't it? John checked the body against the photograph, a passing resemblance to his younger daughter, Patsy. He handed the picture to Ding. He wondered if the lad would make the same connection.

  "It's her."

  "Concur, John," Chavez observed huskily. "It's her." Pause. "Shit," he concluded quietly, examining the face for a long moment that made his face twist with anger. So, Clark thought, he sees it too.

  "Got a camera?"

  "Yeah." Ding pulled a compact 35mm out of his pants pocket. "Play cop?"

  "That's right."

  Clark stooped down to examine the body. It was frustrating. He wasn't a pathologist, and though he had much knowledge of death, more knowledge still was needed to do this right. There ... in the vein on the top of her foot, a single indentation. Not much more than that. So she'd been on drugs? If so, she'd been a careful user, John thought. She'd always cleaned the needle and ... He looked around the room. There. A bottle of alcohol and a plastic bag of cotton swabs, and a bag of plastic syringes.

  "I don't see any other needle marks."

  "They don't always show, man," Chavez observed.

  Clark sighed and untied the kimono, opening it. She'd been wearing nothing under it.

  "Fuck!" Chavez rasped. There was fluid inside her thighs.

  "That's a singularly unsuitable thing to say," Clark whispered back. It was as close as he'd come to losing his temper in many years. "Take your pictures."

  Ding didn't answer. The camera flashed and whirred away. He recorded the scene as a forensic photographer might have done. Clark then started to rearrange the kimono, uselessly giving the girl back whatever dignity that death and men had failed to rob from her.

  "Wait a minute
... left hand."

  Clark examined it. One nail was broken. All the others were medium-long, evenly coated with a neutral polish. He examined the others. There was something under them.

  "Scratched somebody?" Clark asked.

  "See anyplace she scratched herself, Mr. C?" Ding asked.

  "No."

  "Then she wasn't alone when it happened, man. Check her ankles again," Chavez said urgently.

  On the left one, the foot with the puncture, the underside of the ankle revealed bruises almost concealed by the building lividity. Chavez shot his last frame.

  "I thought so."

  "Tell me why later. We're out of here," John said, standing.

  Within less than a minute they were out the back door, down the meandering alley, and back on a main thorough-fare to wait for their car.

  "That was close," Chavez observed as the police car pulled up to Number 18. There was a TV crew fifteen seconds behind.

  "Don't you just love it? They're going to tie up everything real nice and neat ... What is it, Ding?"

  "Ain't right, Mr. C. Supposed to look like an OD, right?"

  "Yeah, why?"

  "You OD on smack, man, it just stops. Boom, bye-bye. I seen a guy go out like that back in the old days, never got the sticker out of his arm, okay? Heart stops, lungs stop, gone. You don't get up and set the needle down and then lay back down, okay? Bruises on the leg. Somebody stuck her. She was murdered, John. And probably she was raped, too."

  "I saw the paraphernalia. All U.S.-made. Nice setup. They close the case, blame the girl and her family, give their own people an object lesson." Clark looked over as the car pulled around the corner. "Good eye, Ding."

  "Thanks, boss." Chavez fell silent again, his anger building now that he had nothing to do but think it over. "You know, I'd really like to meet that guy."

  "We won't."

  Time for a little perverse fantasy: "I know, but I used to be a Ninja, remember? It might be real fun, especially barehanded."

  "That just breaks bones, pretty often your own bones."

  "I'd like to see his eyes when it happens."

  "So put a good scope on the rifle," Clark advised.

  "True," Chavez conceded. "What kind of person gets off on that, Mr. C?"

  "One sick motherfucker, Domingo. I met a few, once."

  Just before they got into the car, Ding's black eyes locked on Clark.

  "Maybe I will meet this one personally, John. El fado can play tricks. Funny ones."

  "Where is she?" Nomuri asked from behind the wheel.

  "Drive," Clark told him.

  "You should have heard the speech," Chet said, moving up the street and wondering what had gone wrong.

  "The girl's dead," Ryan told the President barely two hours later, 1:00 P.M., Washington time.

  "Natural causes?" Durling asked.

  "Drug overdose, probably not self-administered. They have photos. We ought to have them in thirty-six hours. Our guys just got clear in time. The Japanese police showed up pretty fast."

  "Wait a minute. Back up. You're saying murder?"

  "That's what our people think, yes, Mr. President."

  "Do they know enough to make that evaluation?"

  Ryan took his seat and decided that he had to explain a little bit. "Sir, our senior officer knows a few things about the subject, yes."

  "That was nicely phrased," the President noted dryly. "I don't want to know any more about that subject, do I?"

  "No reason for it right now, sir, no."

  "Goto?"

  "Possibly one of his people. Actually the best indicator will be how their police report it. If anything they tell us is at variance with what we've learned from our own people, then we'll know that somebody played with the data, and not all that many people have the ability to order changes in police reports." Jack paused for a moment. "Sir, I've had another independent evaluation of the man's character." He went on to repeat Kris Hunter's story.

  "You're telling me that you believe he had this young girl killed, and will use his police to cover it up? And you already knew he likes that sort of thing?" Durling flushed. "You wanted me to extend this bastard an olive branch? What the hell's the matter with you?"

  Jack took a deep breath. "Okay, yes, Mr. President, I had that coming. The question is, now what do we do?"

  Durling's face changed. "You didn't deserve that, sorry."

  "Actually I do deserve it, Mr. President. I could have told Mary Pat to get her out some time ago--but I didn't," Ryan observed bleakly. "I didn't see this one coming."

  "We never do, Jack. Now what?"

  "We can't tell the legal attache at the embassy because we don't 'know' about this yet, but I think we prep the FBI to check things out after we're officially notified. I can call Dan Murray about that."

  "Shaw's designated hitter?"

  Ryan nodded. "Dan and I go back a ways. For the political side, I'm not sure. The transcript of his TV speech just came in. Before you read it, well, you need to know what sort of fellow we're dealing with."

  "Tell me, how many common bastards like that run countries?"

  "You know that better than I do, sir." Jack thought about that for a moment. "It's not entirely a bad thing. People like that are weak, Mr. President. Cowards, when you get down to it. If you have to have enemies, better that they have weaknesses."

  He might make a state visit, Durling thought. We might have to put him up at Blair House, right across the street. Throw a state dinner: we'll walk out into the East Room and make pretty speeches, and toast each other, and shake hands as though we're bosom buddies. Be damned to that! He lifted the folder with Goto's speech and skimmed through it.

  "That son of a bitch! 'America will have to understand,' my ass!"

  "Anger, Mr. President, isn't an effective way of dealing with problems."

  "You're right," Durling admitted. He was silent for a moment, then he smiled in a crooked way. "You're the one with the hot temper, as I recall."

  Ryan nodded. "I've been accused of that, yes, sir."

  "Well, that's two big ones we have to deal with when we get back from Moscow."

  "Three, Mr. President. We need to decide what to do about India and Sri Lanka." Jack could see from the look on Durling's face that the President had allowed himself to forget about that one.

  Durling had allowed himself to semiforget another problem as well.

  "How much longer will I have to wait?" Ms. Linders demanded.

  Murray could see her pain even more clearly than he heard it. How did you explain this to people? Already the victim of a vile crime, she'd gotten it out in the open, baring her soul for all manner of strangers. The process hadn't been fun for anyone, but least of all for her. Murray was a skilled and experienced investigator. He knew how to console, encourage, chivvy information out of people. He'd been the first FBI agent to listen to her story, in the process becoming as much a part of her mental-health team as Dr. Golden. After that had come another pair of agents, a man and a woman who specialized more closely in cases of this type. After them had come two separate psychiatrists, whose questioning had necessarily been somewhat adversarial, both to establish finally that her story was true in all details and to give her a taste of the hostility she would encounter.

  Along the way, Murray realized, Barbara Linders had become even more of a victim than she'd been before. She'd built her self up, first, to reveal herself to Clarice, then again to do the same with Murray, then again, and yet once more still. Now she looked forward to the worst ordeal of all, for some of the members of the Judiciary Committee were allies of Ed Kealty, and some would take it upon themselves to hammer the witness hard either to curry favor with the cameras or to demonstrate their impartiality and professionalism as lawyers. Barbara knew that. Murray had himself walked her through the expected ordeal, even hitting her with the most awful of questions--always preceded with as gentle a preamble as possible, like, "One of the things you can expect to be asked is--"<
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  It took its toll, and a heavy toll at that. Barbara--they were too close now for him to think of her as Ms. Linders--had shown all the courage one could expect of a crime victim and more besides. But courage was not something one picked out of the air. It was something like a bank account. You could withdraw only so much before it was necessary to stop, to take the time to make new deposits. Just the waiting, the not knowing when she would have to take her seat in the committee room and make her opening statement in front of bright TV lights, the certainty that she would have to bare her soul for the entire world ... it was like a robber coming into the bank night after night to steal from her hard-won accumulation of inner resolve.

  It was hard enough for Murray. He had built his case, had the prosecutor lined up, but he was the one close to her. It was his mission, Murray told himself, to show this lady that men were not like Ed Kealty, that a man was as repulsed by such acts as women were. He was her knight-errant. The disgrace and ultimate imprisonment of that criminal was now his mission in life even more than it was hers.

  "Barb, you have to hang in there, kid. We're going to get this bastard, but we can't do it the right way unless ..." He mouthed the words, putting conviction he didn't feel into them. Since when did politics enter into a criminal case? The law had been violated. They had their witnesses, their physical evidence, but now they were stuck in a holding pattern that was as damaging to this victim as any defense lawyer might be.

  "It's taking too long!"

  "Two more weeks, maybe three, and we go to bat, Barb."

  "Look, I know something is happening, okay? You think I'm dumb? He's not out making speeches and opening bridges and stuff now, is he? Somebody told him and he's building up his case, isn't he?"

  "I think what's happening is that the President is deliberately holding him in close so that when this does break, he won't be able to fall back on a high public profile as a defense. The President is on our side, Barb. I've briefed him in on this case myself, and he said, 'A criminal is a criminal,' and that's exactly what he should have said."