Divide and Conquer o-7

by Tom Clancy

  Charles answered on the third ring. “B-sharp,” he said. That was the receiver code name.

  “C-natural,” said the caller.

  “Go ahead,” said Charles.

  “I’m across the street from the target,” said the caller. “They’re bringing him out the side door.”

  “No ambulance?”

  “No,” said the caller.

  “Who’s with him?” Charles asked.

  “Two men,” said the caller. “Neither of them in uniform.”

  Charles smiled. Americans were so predictable. If there were more than one operative, they invariably went to the user’s manual. “How to Be a Soldier or Spy,” Rule Fifty-three: Put the man above the mission. That thinking went at least as far back as the United States cavalry out West. Whenever the more aggressive Native American tribes like the Apaches were being pursued, they would stop to attack homesteaders. The warriors would always rape one of the women, leaving her where the cavalry was certain to find her. Invariably, the soldiers would send the woman back to the fort with an escort. That would not only delay the pursuing column but leave them depleted.

  “Is backup in place?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then take them,” Charles said.

  “It’s done,” the caller said confidently. “Out.”

  The phone went dead. Charles hung up.

  That was it. The last piece. He’d allowed the one agent to live to draw the others out. An injection in the neck, a fast-acting bacterial pneumonia, and the entire local cast was out of commission. Now there would be no one to put pieces together, to stop him from completing the mission.

  Charles had one more call to place before he went to bed. It was to a secure line in Washington, to one of the few men who knew of Charles’s involvement in this operation.

  To a man who didn’t follow the rule book.

  To a man who helped devise one of the most audacious schemes of modern times.

  NINETEEN

  Baku, Azerbaijan

  Tuesday, 1:35 A.M.

  The ride to the VIP Hospital took just under ten minutes. The VIP was the only hospital the American embassy deemed to be up to the standards of western health care. They had an arrangement with Dr. Kanibov, one of the city’s few English-speaking physicians. The fifty-seven-year-old Kanibov was paid off the books to be available for around-the-clock emergencies and to recommend qualified specialists when necessary.

  Tom Moore didn’t know if a specialist was going to be necessary. All he knew was that Pat Thomas had woken him twenty minutes earlier. Thomas had heard David Battat moaning on his cot. When Thomas went over to check on Battat, he found him soaked with perspiration and trembling. The embassy nurse had a look at him and took Battat’s temperature. He had a fever of 105. The nurse suggested that Battat may have hit his head or suffered capillary damage when he was attacked. Rather than wait for an ambulance, Thomas and Moore loaded Battat into one of the embassy staff cars in the gated parking lot and brought him to the hospital themselves. The medic called ahead to let Dr. Kanibov know that they had a possible case of neurogenic shock.

  This is all we need, to be down a man, Thomas thought as he drove through the dark, deserted streets of the embassy and business district. It was bad enough to have too few people to deal with normal intelligence work. But to find the Harpooner, one of the world’s most elusive terrorists, was going to take more. Thomas only hoped that his call to Washington would get them timely cooperation on a Saint Petersburg connection.

  Dr. Kanibov lived just a block from the hospital. The tall, elderly, white-goateed physician was waiting when they arrived. Battat’s teeth were chattering, and he was coughing. By the time a pair of orderlies put him on a gurney just inside the door, the American’s lips and fingernail beds were rich blue.

  “Very restricted blood flow,” said Kanibov to one of the orderlies. “Oxygen.” He looked in Battat’s mouth. “Traces of mucus. Suction, then give me an oral temperature.”

  “What do you think is wrong?” Thomas asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Kanibov said.

  “The nurse at the embassy said it could be neurogenic shock,” Thomas said to the doctor.

  “If it were, his face would be pale, not flushed,” the doctor said with annoyance. He looked at Thomas and Moore. “You gentlemen can wait here or you can go back and wait—”

  “We’ll stay here,” Thomas informed him. “At least until you know what’s wrong.”

  “Very well,” the doctor said as they wheeled Battat into the ward.

  It seemed strangely quiet for an emergency room, Thomas thought. Whenever his three boys hurt themselves back in Washington or in Moscow, the ERs were like the West Wing of the White House: loud, purposeful chaos. He imagined that the clinics in the poorer sections of Baku must be more like that. Still, the silence was unnerving, deathlike.

  Thomas looked at Moore. “There’s no sense for both of us to be here,” Thomas said. “One of us should get a little sleep.”

  “I wasn’t sleeping,” Moore said. “I was making those contacts we discussed and reviewing files.”

  “Did you find anything?” Thomas asked.

  “Nothing,” Moore said.

  “All the more reason for you to go back to the embassy,” Thomas said. “David is my responsibility. I’ll wait here.”

  Moore considered that. “All right,” he said. “You’ll call as soon as you know something?”

  “Of course,” Thomas said.

  Moore gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, then walked back through the lobby. He pushed the door open and walked around the front of the car to the driver’s side.

  A moment later, Tom Moore’s head jerked to the right and he dropped to the asphalt.

  TWENTY

  Washington, D.C.

  Monday, 6:46 P.M.

  Paul Hood arrived at Op-Center, where he was to meet with Bob Herbert and Mike Rodgers. He also telephoned Liz Gordon. He asked her to wait around so he could talk to her later. He wanted to get her input on what, if anything, might be happening with the president from a clinical standpoint.

  Hood bumped into Ann Farris on the way to his office. She walked with him through the tight, winding maze of cubicles to the executive wing. As Herbert had joked when he first went to work at Op-Center, that was where the cubicles had ceilings.

  “Anything interesting going on?” Ann asked.

  “The usual confusion,” Hood said. “Only this time, it’s happening in Washington, not overseas.”

  “Is it something really bad?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Hood said. “There seems to be a loose cannon somewhere in the NSA.” Hood didn’t want to say anything about the president possibly having mental lapses of some kind. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Ann, but Megan Lawrence had told him something in confidence. For now, he wanted to keep the number of people with whom he shared that as small as possible. “What’s going on in your department?”

  “The usual efficiency and expert coordination,” she said with a disarming smile.

  “You mean nothing’s going on.”

  “Exactly,” Ann said. She waited a moment, then asked, “Do you expect to be here long?”

  “A couple of hours,” he said. “There’s no reason to go back to the hotel. I’d just sit there and watch some bad sitcom.”

  “Can I interest you in dinner?” she asked.

  “It may be a long night,” Hood said.

  “I don’t have any plans, either,” she said. “My son is staying with his dad this week. There’s nothing for me to go home to but a spoiled cat and those same sitcoms.”

  Hood’s heart began thumping a little faster than usual. He very much wanted to say yes to Ann. But he was still a married man, and going out with a divorced female coworker could cause trouble, legally as well as ethically. And Op-Center did not need this distraction. The intelligence team was brilliant at uncovering information. Hood having dinner with Farris would
be common knowledge by morning. Besides, if dinner with Ann was in the back of his mind, he would not be focusing on a crisis in the executive branch.

  “Ann, I wish I could,” he said sincerely. “But I don’t know when I’ll be finished here. Some other time?”

  “Sure,” she said with a small, sad smile. She touched the back of his hand. “Have a good meeting.”

  “Thanks,” Hood said.

  Ann left, and Hood continued on his way.

  Hood felt terrible now. He had not done what he really wanted to do, which was have dinner with Ann. And he had hurt her feelings.

  He stopped. He wanted to go after her and tell her he would have the dinner. But once he started down that road, there was no turning back. Hood continued toward his office.

  Hood buzzed Rodgers and Herbert when he arrived. Rodgers said he would be right over. Herbert was on the computer and said he would be with them in a few minutes.

  Rodgers was alert and professional when he arrived. The general had always wanted to run Op-Center. If he harbored any resentment about having it handed to him and then abruptly pulled away, it did not show. Above all, Rodgers was a good man and a team player.

  General Rodgers had spent most of the day overseeing the activities of Op-Center while Paul Hood was involved with the president and the UN initiative. As Hood briefed his deputy director about Herbert’s talk with Fenwick, Herbert wheeled in. The intelligence chief was flushed and perspiring slightly. He had hurried to get here.

  “How’s your relationship with Sergei Orlov at the Russian Op-Center?” Herbert asked breathlessly.

  The question surprised Hood. “I haven’t spoken to him in about six months. Why?”

  “I just received a message that was forwarded from the U.S. embassy in Baku,” Herbert said. “One of the CIA’s people over there, Tom Moore, is now convinced that Baku has had a visit from the Harpooner. Moore doesn’t know why the bastard’s there—”

  “It could have something to do with what you were just telling me about,” Rodgers said to Hood. “Bob’s conversation with Fenwick—”

  “About Iran fearing terrorist attacks from Azerbaijan,” Hood said.

  Rodgers nodded.

  “I agree that that’s a possibility,” Herbert said. “Paul, if it is the Harpooner, Moore wants to catch him going into or keep him from getting out of the former USSR. He’s hoping that the Russian Op-Center can help.”

  “How?” Hood asked. “Orlov and I shared our files years ago. There was nothing on the Harpooner.”

  “Orlov’s facility was new then,” Herbert said. “He or his people may have found something in the old KGB files since then. Something they might not have told us about.”

  “It’s possible,” Hood agreed. Op-Center was understaffed, and the situation at their Russian counterpart was even worse. Keeping up a regular flow of information was difficult.

  “In addition to intel on the Harpooner,” Herbert said, “Moore was hoping that Orlov’s people might be able to watch the northern and northwestern sections of Russia. He was thinking that the Harpooner might try to leave the region through Scandinavia.”

  Hood looked at his watch. “It’s about three in the morning over there,” he said.

  “Can you reach him at home?” Herbert asked. “This is important. You know it is.”

  Herbert was right. Regardless of the intelligence chief’s desire to see the terrorist captured, tried, and executed, the Harpooner was a man who deserved to be out of circulation.

  “I’ll call,” Hood said.

  “Before you do, what about President Lawrence?” Rodgers asked. “How did things go over there?”

  “I’ll fill you in after I talk to Orlov,” Hood said as he accessed his secure phone list on the computer. He found Orlov’s number. “But from the look of it, we’re facing a lose-lose situation. Either the president is suffering from some kind of mental fatigue, or we’ve got a group of top officials running a black ops action of some kind—”

  “Or both,” Herbert said.

  “Or both,” Hood agreed. “I’ve got Liz Gordon coming in later to talk about what the president might be experiencing.”

  Before punching in Orlov’s home telephone number, Hood called Op-Center’s linguistics office. He got Orly Turner on the line. Orly was one of Op-Center’s four staff translators. Her area of expertise was Eastern Europe and Russia. Hood conferenced her in to the call. Though Orlov spoke English well enough, Hood wanted to make sure there were no misunderstandings, no delays if technical terms or acronyms had to be explained.

  “You want to know what my gut tells me?” Herbert said.

  “What?” Hood asked as he punched in Orlov’s number.

  “That all of this is related,” Herbert said. “The president being out of the loop, Fenwick dealing secretly with Iran, the Harpooner showing up in Baku. It’s all part of a big picture that we haven’t figured out yet.”

  Herbert left the office. Hood didn’t disagree with him. In fact, his own gut was willing to go one step further.

  That the big picture was bigger than what they imagined.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Baku, Azerbaijan

  Tuesday, 3:58 A.M.

  When Tom Moore went down, Pat Thomas ran toward the hospital door. He was halfway out when he saw blood pulsing from the side of Moore’s head. Thomas stopped and jumped back just as a shot blew out the glass in the door. The bullet punched into his left thigh and knocked him down. He landed in a sitting position and continued to scuttle back. A second bullet chewed up the green tile inches in front of his foot. Thomas hurried backward along the floor, propelled by his palms and right heel. The wound burned viciously, and each move was agony. He left a long smear of blood behind him.

  It was a few moments before the hospital staff realized what had happened. One of the nurses, a young woman, ran forward and helped pull Thomas back. Several orderlies followed. They dragged him behind the admissions desk. Another nurse called the police.

  A bald-headed doctor knelt beside Thomas. He was wearing off-white surgical gloves and shouted instructions in Azerbaijani to other hospital workers who were in front of the counter. As he did, he took a pocket knife from his white coat and carefully cut away the fabric around the wound.

  Thomas winced as the khaki fabric came away. He watched as the doctor exposed the wound.

  “Will I live?” Thomas asked.

  The doctor didn’t answer. Suddenly, the bald man started to rise. But instead of getting up, he straddled the American’s legs. He sat on the wound, sending fire up through his patient’s waist. Thomas wanted to scream, but he could not. A moment later, the doctor slipped a hand behind the America’s head, holding it in place, and pushed the knife blade through his throat. The metal entered the skin just behind Thomas’s chin and pinned his mouth shut. The blade continued upward until Thomas could feel the point of the blade under his tongue.

  Thomas choked as he coughed blood into his closed mouth. He raised his hands and tried to push the bald man back. But he was too weak. Calmly and quickly, the bald man angled the knife back. Then he drew the knife down until it reached Thomas’s larynx. He cut swiftly to the left and right, following the line of the jaw all the way to the ears. Then he removed the blade, rose, and allowed Thomas to flop to the floor. The doctor pocketed the knife and walked away without a glance back.

  The American lay there, his arms weak and his fingers moving aimlessly. He could feel the warm blood flowing from both sides of his throat as the flesh around it grew cold. He tried to call out, but his voice was a burbling whisper. Then he realized that his chest was moving but no air was going to it. There was blood in his throat.

  Thomas’s thoughts were confused. His vision swirled black. He thought about flying up to Baku, about meeting with Moore. He wondered how Moore was. And then he thought about his children. For a moment, he was back playing ball with them on the front lawn.

  Then they were gone.

  TWENTY-TWO
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  Saint Petersburg, Russia

  Tuesday, 4:01 A.M.

  General Sergei Orlov was standing in the snow in the small town of Nar’yan Mar on the Arctic Ocean when a peeping bird caused him to start. He turned to look for it and found himself staring at his alarm clock.

  He was back in his one-bedroom apartment in Saint Petersburg.

  “Damn you,” Orlov said as the phone rang again. The former cosmonaut did not often dream of the town where he grew up. He hated being taken away from it and from his loving parents.

  “Sergei?” his wife Masha said groggily beside him.

  “I have it,” Orlov told her. He picked up the receiver of the cordless phone. He held it to his chest to stifle the ringing. “Go back to sleep.”

  “All right,” she said.

  Orlov listened enviously to the cozy rustle of the sheets as his wife curled up on her side. He got out of bed, pulled a bathrobe from the edge of the door, and pulled it on as he stepped into the living room. Even if this were a wrong number, Orlov would have trouble getting back to sleep.

  He finally answered the telephone. “Hello,” Orlov said with a trace of annoyance.

  “General Orlov?” said the voice on the other end. It was a man.

  “Yes?” Orlov said as he rubbed his eyes vigorously with his free hand. “Who is this?”