by Tom Clancy
“Damn, I wish I’d had this a few hours ago.”
“Rolled you, did he?” This question came from Ed Kealty over a speaker phone.
“I know the problem,” the CIA official said. “Ryan is slick. I mean, slick. He’s skated through CIA like Dorothy Hamill at Innsbruck, done it for years. Congress loves him. Why? He comes across as the most straightforward guy this side of Honest Abe. Except he’s killed people.” The man’s name was Paul Webb, and he was a senior official in the Directorate of Intelligence, but not senior enough to prevent his whole unit from ending up on the RIF list. He should have been DDI now, Webb thought, and he would have been except for the way Ryan had gotten James Greer’s ear and never let go of it. And so his career had ended as an entry-level supergrade at CIA, and now that was being taken away from him. He had his retirement. Nobody could take that away well, if it became known that he’d smuggled these files out of Langley, he’d be in very deep trouble ... or maybe not. What really happened to whistle-blowers, after all? The media protected them pretty well, and he had his time in service, and ... he didn’t like being part of a reduction-in-force exercise. In another age, though he didn’t admit it even to himself, his anger might have prompted him to make contact with—no, not that. Not to an enemy. But the media wasn’t an enemy, was it? He told himself that it was not, despite an entire career of thinking otherwise.
“You’ve been rolled, Tom,” Kealty said again over the phone line. “Welcome to the club. I don’t even know all the stuff he can pull off. Paul, tell him about Colombia.”
“There’s no file on that one that I can find,” Webb admitted. “Wherever it is—well, there are special files, the ones with date-stamps on them. Like 2050 at the earliest. Nobody sees those.”
“How does that happen?” Donner demanded. “I’ve heard that before, but I’ve never been able to confirm—”
“How they keep those off the books? It’s a deal that has to go through Congress, an unwritten part of the oversight process. The Agency goes there with a little problem, asks for special treatment, and if Congress agrees, off the file goes into the special vault—hell, for all I know, the whole thing’s been shredded and turned into compost, but I can give you a few verifiable facts,” Webb concluded with an elegant dangle.
“I’m listening,” Donner replied. And so was his tape recorder.
“How do you suppose the Colombians broke up the Medellin cartel?” Webb asked, drawing Donner in further. It wasn’t all that hard. These people thought they knew about intrigue, Webb thought with a benign smile.
“Well, they had some sort of internal faction fight, a couple of bombs went off and—”
“They were CIA bombs. Somehow—I’m not sure exactly how, we initiated the faction fight. This I do know: Ryan was down there. His mentor at Langley was James Greer—they were like father and son. But when James died, Ryan wasn’t there for the funeral, and he wasn’t at home, and he wasn’t away on CIA business—he’d just come back from a NATO conference in Belgium. But then he just dropped off the map, like he’s done any number of times. Soon thereafter the President’s National Security Advisor, Jim Cutter, is accidentally run down by a D.C. transit bus on the G.W., right? He didn’t look? He just ran in front of a bus. That’s what the FBI said, but the guy running that was Dan Murray, and what job does he have now? FBI Director, right? It just so happens he and Ryan go back more than ten years. Murray was the ‘special’ guy for both Emil Jacobs and Bill Shaw. When the Bureau needed something done quietly, they called in Murray. Before that he was legal attaché in London—that’s a spook post, lots of contacts with the intelligence communities over there; Murray’s the black side of FBI, big time and well connected. And he picked Pat Martin to advise Ryan on Supreme Court appointments. Is the picture becoming clear?”
“Wait a minute. I know Dan Murray. He’s a tough son of a bitch, but he’s an honest cop—”
“He was in Colombia with Ryan, which is to say, he was off the map at exactly the same time. Okay, remember, I do not have the file on this operation, okay? I can’t prove any of this. Look at the sequence of events. Director Jacobs and all the others were killed, and right after that we have bombs going off in Colombia, and a lot of the cartel boys go to talk it over with God—but a lot of innocent people got killed, too. That’s the problem with bombs. Remember how Bob Fowler made an issue of that? So what happens then? Ryan disappears. Murray does, too. I figure they went down to turn the operation off before it got totally out of hand—and then Cutter dies at a very convenient moment. Cutter didn’t have the balls for wet work, he probably knew that, and people probably were afraid he’d crack because he just didn’t have the nerve. But Ryan sure as hell did—and still does. Murray—well, you kill the FBI Director, and you piss off a very serious organization, and I can’t say I disapprove. Those Medellin bastards stepped way over the line, and they did it in an election year, and Ryan was in the right place to play a little catch-up ball, and so somebody issued him a hunting license, and maybe things got a little out of hand—it happens—and so he goes down there to shut it down. Successfully,” Webb emphasized. “In fact, the whole operation was a success. The cartel came apart—”
“Another one took its place,” Donner objected. Webb nodded with an insider’s smile.
“True, and they haven’t killed any American officials, have they? Somebody explained to them what the rules are. Again, I will not say that what Ryan did was wrong, except for one little thing.”
“What’s that?” Donner asked, disappointing Webb, though he was fully caught up in the story now.
“When you deploy military forces into a foreign country, and kill people, it’s called an act of war. But, again, Ryan skated. The boy’s got some beautiful moves. Jim Greer trained him well. You could drop Ryan in a septic tank and he’ll come out smelling like Old Spice.”
“So, what’s your beef with him?”
“You finally asked,” Webb observed. “Jack Ryan is probably the best intelligence operator we’ve had in thirty years, the best since Allen Dulles, maybe the best since Bill Donovan. Red October was a brilliant coup. Getting the chairman of KGB out was even better. The thing in Colombia, well, they twisted the tiger’s tail, and they forgot that the tiger has great big claws. Okay,” Webb allowed. “Ryan’s a king spook—but he needs somebody to tell him what the law is, Tom.”
“A guy like this would never get elected,” Kealty observed, straining himself to say as little as possible. Three miles away his own chief of staff almost pulled the phone away from him, they were so close to getting the message across. Fortunately, Webb carried on.
“He’s done a great job at the Agency. He was even a good adviser for Roger Durling, but that’s not the same as being President. Yeah, he rolled you, Mr. Donner. Maybe he rolled Durling—probably not, but who can say? But this guy is rebuilding the whole fucking government, and he’s building it in his image, in case you didn’t notice. Every appointment he’s made, they’re all people he’s worked with, some for a long time—or they were selected for him by close associates. Murray running the FBI. Do you want Dan Murray in charge of America’s most powerful law enforcement agency? You want these two people picking the Supreme Court? Where will he take us?” Webb paused, and sighed. “I hate doing this. He’s one of us at Langley, but he isn’t supposed to be President, okay? I have an obligation to my country, and my country isn’t Jack Ryan.” Webb collected the photos and tucked them back in the folders. “I gotta get back. If anyone finds out what I’ve done, well, look what happened to Jim Cutter ...”
“Thank you,” Donner said. Then he had some decisions to make. His watch said three-fifteen, and he had to make them fast. Driving that decision would be a well-understood fact. There was something in creation even more furious than a woman scorned. It was a reporter who’d discovered that he’d been rolled.
ALL NINE WERE dying. It would take from five to eight days, but they were all doomed, and they all knew it. Their faces
stared at the overhead cameras, and they had no illusions now. Their executions would be even crueller than the courts had decided for them. Or so they thought. This group promised to be more dangerous than the first—they just knew more of what was going on—and as a result they were more fully restrained. As Moudi watched, the army medics went in to draw blood samples from the subjects, which would be necessary to confirm and then to quantify the degree of their infection. On their own, the medics had come up with a way to keep the “patients” from struggling during the process—a jerked arm at the wrong moment could make one of the medical corpsmen stab the needle into the wrong body, and so while one man did the sample, the other held a knife across the subject’s throat. Doomed though the criminals believed themselves to be, they were criminals, and cowards, and therefore unwilling to hasten their deaths. It wasn’t good medical technique, but then nobody in the building was practicing good medicine. Moudi watched the process for a few minutes and left the monitoring room.
They’d been overly pessimistic on many things, and one of them was the quantity of virus that would be needed. In the culturing tank, the Ebola had consumed the monkey kidneys and blood with a gusto whose results chilled even the director. Though it happened fundamentally at the molecular level, overall it was like seeing ants going after dead fruit, seeming to come from nowhere and then covering it, turning it black with their bodies. So it was with the Ebola virus; even though it was too small to see, there were literally trillions of them eating and displacing the tissue offered them as food. What had been one color was now another, and you didn’t have to be a physician to know that the contents of the chamber were hateful beyond words. It chilled his blood merely to look at the dreadful “soup.” There were liters of it now, and they were growing more, using human blood taken from the Tehran central blood bank.
The director was examining a sample under the electron microscope, comparing it with another. As Moudi approached, he could see the date-stamp labels on each. One was from Jean Baptiste. The other was newly arrived from a “patient” in the second group of nine.
“They’re identical, Moudi,” he said, turning when the younger man approached.
This was not as much to be expected as one might think. One of the problems with viruses was that, since they were scarcely alive at all, they were actually ill suited for proper reproduction. The RNA strand lacked an “editing function” to ensure that each generation would fully follow in the footsteps of its predecessor. It was a serious adaptive weakness of Ebola, and many other similar organisms. Sooner or later each Ebola outbreak petered out, and this was one of the reasons. The virus itself, maladapted to the human host, became less virulent. And that was what made it the ideal biological weapon. It would kill. It would spread. Then it would die before doing too much of the latter. How much it did of the former was a function of the initial distribution. It was both horribly lethal and also self-limiting.
“So, we have at least three generations of stability,” Moudi observed.
“And by extrapolation, probably seven to nine.” The project director, whatever his perversion of medical science, was a conservative on technical issues. Moudi would have said nine to eleven. Better that the director was right, he admitted to himself, turning away.
On a table at the far wall were twenty cans. Similar to the ones used to infect the first collection of criminals, but slightly modified, they were labeled as economy-size cans of a popular European shaving cream. (The company was actually American-owned, which amused everyone associated with the project.) They’d been exactly what they said, and been bought singly in twelve different cities in five different countries, as the lot numbers inked on their curving bottoms showed. Here in the Monkey House they’d been emptied and carefully disassembled for modification. Each would contain a half liter of the thinned-out “soup,” plus a neutral-gas propellant (nitrogen, which would not involve any chemical reaction with the “soup” and would not support combustion) and a small quantity of coolant. Another part of the team had already tested the delivery system. There would be no degradation of the Ebola at all for more than nine hours. After that, with the loss of the coolant, the virus particles would start to die in a linear function. At 9 + 8 hours, less than ten percent of the particles would be dead—but those, Moudi told himself, were the weak ones anyway, and probably the particles that would be unlikely to cause illness. At 9 + 16 hours, fifteen percent would be dead. Thereafter, experiments had revealed, every eight hours—for some reason the numbers seemed to track with thirds of days—an additional five percent would die. And so ...
It was simple enough. The travelers would all fly out of Tehran. Flight time to London, seven hours. Flight time to Paris, thirty minutes less. Flight time to Frankfurt, less still. Much of that factor was the time of day, Moudi had learned. In the three cities there would be easy connecting flights. Baggage would not be checked because the travelers would be moving on to another country, and therefore customs inspection wasn’t necessary, and therefore no one would notice the cans of unusually cold shaving cream. About the time the coolant ran out, the travelers would be in their first-class seats, climbing to cruising altitude to their cities of final destination, and there again international air travel worked out nicely. There were direct flights from Europe to New York, to Washington, to Boston, to Philadelphia, to Chicago, to San Francisco, to Los Angeles, to Atlanta, to Dallas, to Orlando, and regular connecting flights to Las Vegas, and Atlantic City—in fact to all of America’s convention cities. The travelers would all fly first class, the quicker to claim their luggage and get through customs. They would have good hotel reservations, and return tickets that took them out from different airports. From time-zero to delivery no more than twenty-four hours would pass, and therefore eighty percent of the Ebola released would be active. After that, it was all random, in Allah’s hands—no! Moudi shook his head. He was not the director. He would not apply this act to the will of his God. Whatever it might be, however necessary it was to his country—and a new one at that—he would not defile his religious beliefs by saying or even thinking that.
Simple enough? It had been simple once, but then—it was a legacy of sorts. Sister Jean Baptiste, her body long since incinerated ... instead of leaving children behind as a woman’s body ought, disease was its only physical legacy, and that was an act of such malignance that surely Allah must be offended. But she’d left something else, too, a real legacy. Moudi had once hated all Westerners as unbelievers. In school he’d learned of the Crusades, and how those supposed soldiers of the prophet Jesus had slaughtered Muslims, as Hitler had later slaughtered Jews, and from that he’d taken the lesson that all Westerners and all Christians were something less than the people of his own Faith, and it was easy to hate such people, easy to write them off as irrelevancies in a world of virtue and belief. But that one woman. What was the West and what was Christianity? The criminals of the eleventh century, or a virtuous woman of the twentieth who denied every human wish she might have had—and for what? To serve the sick, to teach her faith. Always humble, always respectful. She’d never broken her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—Moudi was sure of that—and though those vows and those beliefs might have been false, they hadn’t been that false. He’d learned from her the same thing that the Prophet had learned. There was but one God. There was but one Book. She had served both with a pure heart, however misguided her religious beliefs might have been.
Not just Sister Jean Baptiste, he reminded himself. Sister Maria Magdalena, too. And she had been murdered—and why? Loyalty to her faith, loyalty to her vows, loyalty to her friend, not one of which the Holy Koran found the least bit objectionable.
It would have been so much easier for him had he only worked with black Africans. Their religious beliefs were things the Koran abhorred, since many of them were still pagans in deed if not in word, ignorant of the One God, and he could easily have looked down on them, and not worried at all about Christians—but he had met Jea
n Baptiste and Maria Magdalena. Why? Why had that happened?
Unfortunately for him it was too late to ask such questions. What was past was past. Moudi walked to the far corner of the room and got himself some coffee. He’d been awake for more than a day, and with fatigue came doubts, and he hoped the drink would chase them away until sleep could come, and with it rest, and with that, perhaps, peace.
“YOU HAVE TO be kidding!” Arnie snarled into the phone.
Tom Donner’s voice was as apologetic as it could be. “Maybe it was the metal detectors on the way out. The tape—I mean, it’s damaged. You can still see it and hear it just fine, but there’s a little noise on the audio track. Not broadcast quality. The whole hour’s worth is shot. We can’t use it.”
“So?” van Damm demanded.
“So, we have a problem, Arnie. The segment is supposed to run at nine.”
“So, what do you want me to do about it?”
“Is Ryan up to redoing it live? We’ll get better share that way,” the anchorman offered.
The President’s chief of staff almost said something else. If this had been sweeps week—during which the networks did their best to inflate their audiences in order to get additional commercial fees—he might have accused Donner of having done this deliberately. No, that was a line even he couldn’t cross. Dealing with the press on this level was rather like being Clyde Beatty in center ring, armed with a bottomless chair and a blank-loaded revolver, holding great jungle cats at bay for the audience, having the upper hand at all times, but knowing that the cats needed to get lucky only once. Instead he just offered silence, forcing Donner to make the next move.
