by Tom Clancy
“Nothing to fuss over,” he said. “It’s just that you making it on the spot caught me by surprise.”
“The truth is, I caught myself by surprise . . . but I wouldn’t take a do-over if I could,” she said. “It was really two thoughts coming together on their own. I’ve been thinking a change of scenery might be in order for Ricci. That some distance might give us all a clearer perspective on what’s wrong, and maybe some ideas about how to fix it. When he didn’t arrive for the conference, that part of it solidified in my mind. And as things developed, and I saw there was no wearing down Noriko’s opposition, I decided it would be best to send someone from our office to New York.”
Nimec grunted.
“I noticed she rubbed you the wrong way,” he said.
“Noriko sees the Sullivan matter as a disruption to her work. She makes no bones about resenting our interference. And I feel she needs to be kept honest.”
“Doesn’t change how you came off,” Nimec said. “A few hours before the conference you were at my gym preaching patience. But you undercut her. Did it in front of me and Rollie.”
“It isn’t anything personal,” Megan insisted with a shrug. “I have high regard for her abilities, Pete. But let’s say there are some people who need to be shown the stick before the carrot.”
Nimec looked at her a moment, pulled at his ear.
“Sounds belligerent and agitating to me,” he said.
Megan smiled thinly, shrugged, leaned forward across her desk.
“Bow-wow,” she said.
Which Nimec guessed was as good a way as any to call their meeting to an end.
Industrial parks with billowing smokestacks filled Zaheer’s view out the windshield as he turned his leased Mercury sedan off the New Jersey Turnpike just west of Trenton, checked the route directions he’d generated with a free Internet-based mapping service, and went through a quick series of turns and traffic signals. The closeup street map guided him to his desired junction in minutes.
Zaheer drove past long bands of strip malls and fast-food restaurants interspersed with vacant weeded lots, the dead stalks piercing scales of dirty ice and snow to shiver stiffly in the wind. He soon found himself among the sprawling waterfront factories he’d spotted from the highway and read the corporate names above their entrances. The one penned onto his map was over to his left, a fenced-in employee parking area beside the plant’s main building. There were between fifteen and twenty vehicles slotted inside.
Going very slowly, noting the security cameras high up on either side of its otherwise unguarded gate, Zaheer passed the factory and turned up a street that ran back along the width of its parking area. His map coordinates showed that he was headed north, cruising past the east side of the plant. Perhaps halfway down the street a chain-link divider crossed the parking area and restricted admittance to another outdoor site behind it. The perimeter fence had been hung with metal CHEMICAL HAZARD and NO TRESPASSING signs as it stretched on back.
Here Zaheer’s attention was caught by a large number of cylindrical storage tanks. Thirty to forty feet tall, they rose in close groupings from level concrete support platforms, six tanks to a cluster, frameworks of galvanized-steel ladders and handholds climbing up their dull gray sides. He could see tangles of curved, narrow pipelines snaking between the rail-encircled domes of each tank cluster, with a wider pipe leading along the ground from the platform bottom to the factory’s rear wall.
Zaheer slid his car down the block toward a four-way intersection.
With few other vehicles on the road, Zaheer stopped at a red light in the crossing and glanced around. He could see an abandoned gas station directly behind the yard containing the storage tanks, bounded off from it by a planted copse of evergreen trees. The trees looked withered and neglected, their gnarled roots buried in a deep carpet of shed pine needles. Around the intersection’s three opposing corners were the type of satellite businesses that would have deliberately sprung up near the station before it shut down, their owners hoping to attract spillover customers. There was a small Mc-Donald’s on the far side of the exchange. Also across the street, but running off down the sidewalk from the northwest corner, were a coin-operated car wash, an automotive supply shop, and a nameless bar with dark, sooty windows. On Zaheer’s immediate right a U-Haul rental lot filled with trucks and trailers of various sizes occupied the intersection’s southwest corner.
Its advantageous location prompted him to smile with cool satisfaction.
Zaheer turned into the defunct gas station before the light could change, then made a circular inspection of the property. He glided around the island where its uprooted pumps must once have stood, rolled past its empty cashier’s booth and peered into the vacant shell of its refreshment shop as he drove by the front window. Convinced the premises were deserted, he pulled his Mercury up to the screen of evergreens behind the shop, got out, and took a small digital camera from his coat pocket.
Zaheer stood near the trunk of the car and took a quick series of photos of the intersection’s four corners, paying special attention to the U-Haul rental lot. Then he turned toward the dying boundary trees, paused for a cautious glance over each shoulder, and stepped forward under their black, gangly boughs.
Hidden within the copse of pines, Zaheer could see the enormous storage tanks about a hundred and fifty feet ahead of him. Again his camera clicked. There was no fence barring access to the factory grounds from this approach. It would have been premature to assume the site was clear of security, he thought—a guard, or guards, might very well patrol it during certain hours. Almost beyond a doubt there would be an overnight watch in place. Men, perhaps dogs. But if anyone was on shift right now, Zaheer hadn’t noticed. Were it his desire, he could have easily walked right over to the tanks before it was possible to stop him . . . and when the time came to act, he had full faith there would be no need to get that close.
Al-hamdu lillahi, God had already brought him more than close enough, he thought in silence.
Zaheer stood there in the trees a while longer, observing the site and taking more than a dozen additional snapshots of the tanks for later reference. Then he returned the camera to his coat pocket and hastened back to the car.
Hasul Benazir would be pleased with the intelligence he had gathered today; all was falling well and neatly into place.
Nimec went down to Rollie Thibodeau’s office and found the door partially open. He knocked and walked through as Thibodeau looked up from his desk.
“Come right on in, why don’tcha?” Thibodeau said.
Nimec pushed the door shut behind him.
“This room been swept recently?” he asked.
Thibodeau met his gaze. He held a can of Diet Coke in his hand.
“Walls are clean, if that’s what you askin’,” he said.
Nimec approached him and sat. The room was windowless, as Thibodeau preferred. Stacks of paperwork hid the desktop. An old-fashioned upright balance scale stood in one corner, flaking pink paint. Thibodeau had once told him it was a memento of some kind from Louisiana.
“We have to talk,” Nimec said.
“Kinda got that sense.”
“Everything we say stays right here. Between us.”
Thibodeau nodded.
“I need you to tell me about Ricci,” Nimec said.
“You mind I use four-letter words?”
Nimec didn’t smile. He watched Thibodeau sip his cola, and then nod toward the water cooler.
“Be more sugar-free in the fridge compartment, you want some,” he said.
“No thanks, hate the stuff.”
Thibodeau patted his reduced stomach.
“Me, too,” he said. “But it works.”
Nimec watched him closely.
“I want to know what happened in Big Sur,” he said. “When Ricci got the boss’s daughter out of that cabin where she was held hostage.”
Thibodeau was silent. Nimec kept watching his face.
“Filed
my report four months ago,” Thibodeau said.
“And I read it,” Nimec said. “Back when it was written, and a bunch of times since.”
“Ain’t no detail was left out.”
“No?”
“No.”
Nimec sat there studying his features with sharp interest.
“How about what you personally took from those details?” he said. “Nothing omitted there?”
“Like?”
“Suspicions,” Nimec said. “Possible conclusions.”
Thibodeau looked at him.
“I wrote down what I saw,” he said. “What I knew.”
“Sum it up for me again,” Nimec said.
“Thought you just said you been over the report.”
“Once more, Rollie.”
Thibodeau lifted the soda can to his lips, took a long swallow, and shrugged.
“Place had two floors,” he said. “Ricci’s in the lead, takes our extraction team through the back door. We see four men downstairs, get the drop on them—”
“We.”
“Everybody but Ricci, yeah,” Thibodeau said. “Soon’s we’re in, I see him run on up to the second floor, see his backup follow. Ricci knew Julia was in an upstairs room, shook it outta one of her kidnappers. Knew she was alone with Le Chaute Sauvage, a killer who’d snuff a man or woman’s life same way you’d blink an eye.”
“When you say his backup . . . this would have been Derek Glenn from our San Diego unit.”
“Right.”
“A guy Ricci pulled in on the operation,” Nimec said. “He got tight with him since they worked together a couple years back.”
Thibodeau shrugged.
“Tight as anybody can be,” he said. “Or so I hear.”
Nimec grunted. “Okay, give me the rest.”
Thibodeau spread his hands.
“Didn’t see much after Glenn went up,” he said. “I hear a crash on the second floor, what I can tell is a door bein’ kicked in. Can’t leave the first floor till we got a clamp on it. Disarm the prisoners, cuff ’em, get ’em all together in a single room. Then check and secure the other rooms. And there are attack dogs need to be sedated. Once we get it all under control, I take some of the men upstairs—”
“This is how long after the entry?” Nimec said.
“These things, you know they move in a flash.”
“About how long, Rollie?” Nimec said.
Thibodeau shrugged, his hands still wide apart.
“More’n five minutes, less’n ten,” he said. “By the time I’m upstairs, Julia’s out of the room. I see Glenn in the hall keepin’ her steady on her feet . . . the Killer had her tied to a chair with ropes, and there’s still little pieces of ’em hangin’ from her. I order the men to get her safe away, then head toward the room where Ricci found her, but the door’s propped shut.”
“This is after Ricci kicked it in.”
“Be better if you go over that with him,” Thibodeau said. “From what I heard afterward, Ricci found the Killer holdin’ a knife to Julia’s throat, got a trigger on him, warned him he moved a hair, he was gonna die. There a history between them to consider. Ricci was trackin’ him for over a year, after he bolted from that germ-weapon plant in Canada. That whole time, Le Chaute Sauvage was layin’ low to ground, knowin’ Ricci was breathin’ down his neck. History. Ricci uses it to get into his head, offers him a deal—the Killer lets Julia go free, they both lose their weapons, face off man to man.” He paused a moment. “The Killer’s a hired hand. Got no personal reason to hurt Julia, knows he’s dead if he uses the knife. He figures Ricci’s givin’ him his only chance, goes for it.”
“And Ricci wedges a chair against the door as soon as Julia’s out.”
“Says his main reason was to put something there to block it ’case the Killer got around him, giving us a few seconds to pull her away. Used whatever he could reach, and the chair was it.”
Nimec looked at him.
“But putting it there wasn’t only about buying time for you,” he said. “It was also part of the two of them going at it alone.”
“That something to ask Ricci,” Thibodeau said. He reached for his soda, sipped. “It was all over in that room before I put the ram to the door. I come in, find him on the floor, his leg bleedin’ rivers from a knife cut. What I know from his report is that the two of them fought like hell, an’ Le Chaute Sauvage grabbed the blade from where Ricci dropped it. They wound up out on a balcony, out there hundreds of feet over the canyon, and the Killer took a long fall.”
Nimec sat very still, his eyes on Thibodeau.
“Took a fall, or was pushed?” he said. “Let’s get it right out in the open, Rollie.”
Thibodeau was quiet for a while, looking across the desk at Nimec.
“Tom Ricci never been my favorite person,” he said. “You won’t see me shed no tears for that killer, though. Whatever did or didn’t happen in there, Julia’s life was a tradeoff I gonna take any time. It’s finished, and we all got to walk on.”
“Doesn’t sound to me like you believe Ricci’s done that.”
“Try’n keep what I believe to myself,” Thibodeau said. He shrugged a little. “You asked what I knew for a fact, I answered based on what I saw and heard.”
Nimec shook his head.
“Some men does dead before their time,” he said. “Those were your words about Ricci, or close enough. You telling me now I got their meaning wrong?”
Thibodeau met his gaze.
“Can’t say what was in his mind going into that room,” he said. “Don’t got any more of a clue what’s on it now.”
“And that’s that,” Nimec said.
Thibodeau nodded and sat without further comment.
The silence between them stretched on, longer than the first. Then Nimec stood, his expression sober.
“If Ricci entered intending to execute a man, blocked the door so there wouldn’t be witnesses, I can’t let it go,” he said. “I need to find out.”
Thibodeau shrugged again. He drained what was left in the soda can, crunched it in his fist, tossed it into the wastebasket under his desk.
“You do, I expect it ain’t gonna come no good,” he said.
Nimec looked at him.
“Maybe not,” he said. “But I tell you one thing, Rollie. I don’t, and none of us better kid ourselves into thinking we’ll ever be able to walk on.”
Stiff-necked and fatigued after almost seventy-two hours of travel through stormy weather, Khalid exited the jeep, slammed the door behind him, and strode around to the front grille against an onrushing blast of snow.
He had been far short of the mark about the length of their drive to the Neelam Valley, estimating it would take a full two days, a prospect that had made him less than sanguine at the time. In hindsight, Khalid would have gladly accepted it. With the gale having inundated the entire region they needed to cover, he and Yousaf were still over a hundred kilometers from their destination. They would be fortunate to reach the village of Halmat by dawn in these conditions, and night was not yet even half over.
They had taken shifts driving round-the-clock, Yousaf adamant in his insistence they press onward over rolling mountainous terrain that would have taxed one’s endurance in the best of circumstances . . . and they had until now encountered nothing but winter at its most relentless and savage. When Yousaf did acquiesce to a stop, it would be just long enough for them to get out for a miserable, hurried piss in the cold wind and snow, or sit inside their vehicle eating sparely and hastily of meal rations appropriated from the army rangers they had disposed of behind them on the road to Chirak. Then, impatient, he would order them to move on.
The storm had eased only on occasion; Yousaf’s headstrong resolve never once. Earlier in their journey the snow had blown over the ground in wildly shifting eddies, twisting into undulant serpentine braids that deceived and wearied the eye, making it impossible to be sure they were even driving in a straight line. By the seco
nd night it began to come on hard and thick with the north wind’s direct frontal onslaught, piling up around them in deep rippled sheets, coating the windshield faster than their wipers could scrape it clean. Tonight’s progress had been an ever-worsening struggle as the center of the storm had seemed to gather around them in a turbulent mass. The moonlight had been choked off, the shadows of the mountain peaks and cornices blanked from sight along with any waypoints Khalid had meant to use for orientation. Were it not for their GPS receiver they would have certainly been lost, and might well have found themselves driving in endless, wandering circles. There had been embankments around which they had needed to detour, pits and ditches that seemed to open beneath them like sucking, toothless mouths. Even with Yousaf at the wheel, reluctant to lose a moment, they had twice needed to halt due to losses of visibility and traction. On each instance Khalid had left the jeep to remove large cakes of frozen debris from between its tires and wheel wells, and then clean its headlamps of the filmy white cataracts of snow that would collect over them, blocking their output to render them all but useless.
This, then, was their third unplanned stop in the past two hours, and it had seemed to throw Yousaf—never a talkative companion—into an especially sullen and overanxious state. His hands locked around the wheel, he had watched in brittle silence as Khalid pushed out his door, then sat very still with the motor running, and the wipers making their ceaseless rhythmical swipes across the windshield.
He went to the back of the jeep, used a few good, hard kicks to break up the clotted snow around the mudflaps of both rear tires, and scooped whatever didn’t crumble out of the well with his gloved hands. Then he returned to the vehicle’s front end. A glance through the windshield revealed that Yousaf was still staring at him rigidly from the driver’s seat, as if he were somehow to blame for the storm and its resultant delays.
Khalid crouched to brush off the snow-covered right headlamp. To get out of the fiendish weather and know their objective was accomplished . . . these alone were adequate reasons for his eagerness to arrive at the town of Halmat in the valley. But the thought of separating himself from Yousaf and his foul moods gave him added incentive to push on.
