by Tom Clancy
18
Lights
Ashley entered the bookshop at four in the afternoon. A true bibliophile, he paused on opening the door to appreciate the aroma.
“Is Mr. Cooley in today?” he asked the clerk.
“No, sir,” Beatrix replied. “He’s abroad on business. May I help you?”
“Yes. I understand that you’ve made some new acquisitions.”
“Ah, yes. Have you heard about the Marlowe first folio?” Beatrix looked remarkably like a mouse. Her hair was exactly the proper drab shade of brown and ill-kept. Her face was puffy, whether from too much food or too much drink, Ashley couldn’t say. Her eyes were hidden behind thick glasses. She dressed in a way that fitted the store exactly—everything she had on was old and out of date. Ashley remembered buying his wife the Brontë here, and wondered if those two sad, lonely sisters had looked like this girl. It was too bad, really. With a little effort she might actually have been attractive.
“A Marlowe?” the man from “Five” asked. “First folio, you said?”
“Yes, sir, from the collection of the late Earl of Crundale. As you know, Marlowe’s plays were not actually printed until forty years after his death.” She went on, displaying something that her appearance didn’t begin to hint at. Ashley listened with respect. The mouse knew her business as well as an Oxford don.
“How do you find such things?” Ashley asked when she’d finished her discourse.
She smiled. “Mr. Dennis can smell them. He is always traveling, working with other dealers and lawyers and such. He’s in Ireland today, for example. It’s amazing how many books he manages to obtain over there. Those horrid people have the most marvelous collections.” Beatrix did not approve of the Irish.
“Indeed,” David Ashley noted. He didn’t react to this bit of news at all. At least not physically, but a switch in the back of his head flipped on. “Well, that is one of the contributions our friends across the water have made. A few rather good writers, and whiskey.”
“And bombers,” Beatrix noted. “I shouldn’t want to travel there so much myself.”
“Oh, I take my holiday there quite often. The fishing is marvelous. ”
“That’s what Lord Louis Mountbatten thought,” the clerk observed.
“How often does Dennis go over?”
“At least once a month.”
“Well, on this Marlowe you have—may I see it?” Ashley asked with an enthusiasm that was only partially feigned.
“By all means.” The girl took the volume from a shelf and opened it with great care. “As you see, though the cover is in poor condition, the pages are in a remarkable state of preservation.”
Ashley hovered over the book, his eyes running down the opened page. “Indeed they are. How much for this one?”
“Mr. Dennis hasn’t set a price yet. I believe another customer is already very interested in it, however.”
“Do you know who that is?”
“No, sir, I do not, and I would not be able to reveal his name in any case. We respect our customers’ confidentiality,” Beatrix said primly.
“Quite so. That is entirely proper,” Ashley agreed. “So when will Mr. Cooley be back? I want to talk to him about this myself.”
“He’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”
“Will you be here also?” Ashley asked with a charming smile.
“No, I’ll be at my other job.”
“Too bad. Well, thank you very much for showing me this.” Ashley made for the door.
“My pleasure, sir.”
The security officer walked out of the arcade and turned right. He waited for the afternoon traffic to clear before crossing the street. He decided to walk back to Scotland Yard instead of taking a cab, and went downhill along St. James’s Street, turning left to go around the Palace to the east, then down Marlborough Road to The Mall.
It happened right there, he thought. The getaway car turned here to make its escape. The ambush was a mere hundred yards
west of where I’m standing now. He stood and looked for a few seconds, remembering.
The personality of a security officer is much the same all over the world. They do not believe in coincidences, though they do believe in accidents. They lack any semblance of a sense of humor where their work is concerned. This comes from the knowledge that only the most trusted of people have the ability to be traitors; before betraying their countries, they must first betray the people who trust them. Beneath all his charm, Ashley was a man who hated traitors beyond all things, who suspected everyone and trusted no one.
Ten minutes later Ashley got past the security checkpoint at Scotland Yard and took the elevator to James Owens’ office.
“That Cooley chap,” he said.
“Cooley?” Owens was puzzled for a moment. “Oh, the book dealer Watkins visited yesterday. Is that where you were?”
“A fine little shop. Its owner is in Ireland today,” Ashley said deadpan.
Commander Owens nodded thoughtfully at that. What had been unimportant changed with a word. Ashley outlined what he had learned over several minutes. It wasn’t even a real lead yet, but it was something to be looked at. Neither man said anything about how significant it might be—there had been many such things to run down, all of which to date had ended at blank walls. Many of the walls had also been checked out in every possible detail. The investigation wasn’t at a standstill. People were still out on the street, accumulating information—none of which was the least useful to the case. This was something new to be looked at, nothing more than that; but for the moment that was enough.
It was eleven in the morning at Langley. Ryan was not admitted to the meetings between CIA and FBI people coordinating information on the case. Marty Cantor had explained to him that the FBI might be uneasy to have him there. Jack didn’t mind. He’d get the information summaries after lunch, and that was enough for the moment. Cantor would come away both with the information FBI had developed, plus the thoughts and ideas of the chief investigators. Ryan didn’t want that. He preferred to look at the raw data. His unprejudiced outsider’s perspective had worked before and it might work again, he thought—hoped.
The wonderful world of the international terrorist, Murray had said to him outside the Old Bailey. It wasn’t very wonderful, Jack thought, but it was a fairly complete world, including all of what the Greeks and Romans thought the civilized world was. He was going over satellite reconnaissance data at the moment. The bound report he was looking at contained no less than sixteen maps. In addition to the cities and roads shown on them were little red triangles designating suspected terrorist training camps in four countries. These were being photographed on almost a daily basis by the photoreconnaissance satellites (Jack was not allowed to know their number) orbiting the globe. He concentrated on the ones in Libya. They did have that report from an Italian agent that Sean Miller had been seen leaving a freighter in Bengazi harbor. The freighter had been of Cypriot registry, owned by a network of corporations sufficiently complex that it didn’t really matter, since the ship was under charter to yet another such network. An American destroyer had photographed the ship in what certainly seemed a chance encounter in the Straits of Sicily. The ship was old but surprisingly well maintained, with modern radar and radio gear. She was regularly employed on runs from Eastern European ports to Libya and Syria, and was known to carry arms and military equipment from the East Bloc to client states on the Mediterranean. This data had already been set aside for further use.
Ryan found that the CIA and National Reconnaissance Office were looking at a number of camps in the North African desert. A simple graph accompanied the dated photos of each, and Ryan was looking for a camp whose apparent activity had changed the day that Miller’s ship had docked at Bengazi. He was disappointed to find that four had done so. One was known to be used by the Provisional Wing of the IRA—this datum had come from the interrogation of a convicted bomber. The other three were unknowns. The people there—aside from
the maintenance staff provided by the Libyan armed forces—could be identified from the photos as Europeans from their fair skin, but that was all. Jack was disappointed to see that you couldn’t recognize a face from these shots, just color of skin, and if the sun was right, color of hair. You could also determine the make of a car or truck, but not its identifying tag numbers. Strangely, the clarity of the photos was better at night. The cooler night air was less roiled and did not interfere with imaging as much as in the shimmering heat of the day.
The pictures in the heavy binder that occupied his attention were of camps 11-5-04, 11-5-18, and 11-5-20. Jack didn’t know how the number designators had been arrived at and didn’t really care. The camps were all pretty much the same; only the spacing of the huts distinguished one from another.
Jack spent the best part of an hour looking over the photos, and concluded that this miracle of modern technology told him all sorts of technical things, none of which were pertinent to his purpose. Whoever ran those camps knew enough to keep people out of sight when a reconsat was overhead—except for one which was not known to have photographic capability. Even then, the number of people visible was almost never the same, and the actual occupancy of the camps was therefore a matter for uncertain estimation. It was singularly frustrating.
Ryan leaned back and lit another low-tar cigarette bought from the kiosk on the next floor down. It went well with the coffee that was serving to keep him awake. He was up against another blank wall. It made him think of the computer games he occasionally played at home when he was tired of writing—Zork and Ultima. The business of intelligence analysis was so often like those computer “head games.” You had to figure things out, but you never quite knew what it was that you were figuring out. The patterns you had to deduce could be very different from anything one normally dealt with, and the difference could be significant or mere happenstance.
Two of the suspected ULA camps were within forty miles of the known IRA outpost. Less than an hour’s drive, Jack thought. If they only knew. He would have settled for having the Provos clean out the ULA, as they evidently wanted to do. There were indications that the Brits were thinking along similar lines. Jack wondered what Mr. Owens thought of that one and concluded that he probably didn’t know. It was a surprising thought that he now had information that some experienced players did not. He went back to the pictures.
One, taken a week after Miller had been seen in Bengazi, showed a car—it looked like a Toyota Land Cruiser—about a mile from 11-5-18, heading away. Ryan wondered where it was going. He wrote down the date and time on the bottom of the photo and checked the cross-reference table in the front. Ten minutes later he found the same car, the next day, at Camp 11-5- 09, a PIRA camp forty miles from 11-5-18.
Jack told himself not to get overly excited: 11-5-18 could belong to the Red Army Faction of West Germany, Italy’s resurgent Red Brigade, or any number of other organizations with which the PIRA cross-pollinated. He still made some notes. It was a “datum,” a bit of information that was worth checking out.
Next he checked the occupancy graph for the camp. This showed the number of camp buildings occupied at night, and went back for over two years. He compared it with a list of known ULA operations, and discovered ... nothing, at first. The instances where the number of occupied buildings blipped up did not correlate with the organization’s known activities ... but there was some sort of pattern, he saw.
What kind of pattern? Jack asked himself. Every three months or so the occupancy went up by one. Regardless of the number of the people at the camp, the number of huts being used went up by one, for a period of three days. Ryan swore when he saw that the pattern didn’t quite hold. Twice in two years the number didn’t change. And what does that mean?
“You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike,” Jack murmured to himself. It was a line from one of his computer games. Pattern-recognition was not one of his strong points. Jack left the room to get a can of Coke, but more to clear his head. He was back in five minutes.
He pulled the occupancy graphs from the three “unknown” camps to compare the respective levels of activity. What he really needed to do was to make Xerox copies of the graphs, but CIA had strict rules on the use of copying machines. Doing it would take time that he didn’t want to lose at the moment. The other two camps showed no recognizable pattern at all, while Camp -18 did seem to lean in that direction. He spent an hour doing this. By the end of it he had all three graphs memorized. He had to get away from it. Ryan tucked the graphs back where they belonged and returned to examining the photographs themselves.
Camp 11-5-20, he saw, showed a girl in one photo. At least there was someone there wearing a two-piece bathing suit. Jack stared at the image for a few seconds, then turned away in disgust. He was playing voyeur, trying to discern the figure of someone who was probably a terrorist. There were no such attractions at camps -04 and -18, and he wondered at the significance of this until he remembered that only one satellite was giving daylight photos with people in them. Ryan made a note to himself to check at the Academy’s library for a book on orbital mechanics. He decided that he needed to know how often a single satellite passed over a given spot in a day.
“You’re not getting anywhere,” he told himself aloud.
“Neither is anybody else,” Marty Cantor said. Ryan spun around.
“How did you get in here?” Jack demanded.
“I’ll say one thing for you, Jack, when you concentrate you really concentrate. I’ve been standing here for five minutes.” Cantor grinned. “I like your intensity, but if you want an opinion, you’re pushing a little hard, fella.”
“I’ll survive.”
“You say so,” Cantor said dubiously. “How do you like our photo album?”
“The people who do this full-time must go nuts.”
“Some do,” Cantor agreed.
“I might have something worth checking out,” Jack said, explaining his suspicions on Camp -18.
“Not bad. By the way, number -20 may be Action-Directe, the French group that’s picked up lately. DGSE—the French foreign intelligence service—thinks they have a line on it.”
“Oh. That may explain one of the photos.” Ryan flipped to the proper page.
“Thank God Ivan doesn’t know what that bird does,” Cantor nodded. “Hmm. We may be able to ID from this.”
“How?” Jack asked. “You can’t make out her face.”
“You can tell her hair length, roughly. You can also tell the size of her tits.” Cantor grinned ear to ear.
“What?”
“The guys in photointerpretation are—well, they’re very technical. For cleavage to show up in these photos, a girl has to have C-cup breasts—at least that’s what they told me once. I’m not kidding, Jack. Somebody actually worked the math out, because you can identify people from a combination of factors like hair color, length, and bust size. Action-Directe has lots of female operatives. Our French colleagues might find this interesting.” If they’re willing to deal, he didn’t say.
“What about -18?”
“I don’t know. We’ve never really tried to identify that one. The thing about the car may count against it, though.”
“Remember that our ULA friends have the Provos infiltrated,” Jack said.
“You’re still on that, eh? Okay, it’s something to be considered,” Cantor conceded. “What about this pattern thing you talked about?”
“I haven’t got anything to point to yet,” Jack admitted.
“Let’s see the graph.”
Jack unfolded it from the back of the binder. “Every three months, mostly, the occupancy rate picks up.”
Cantor frowned at the graph for a moment. Then he flipped through the photographs. On only one of the dates did they have a daylight photo that showed anything. Each of the camps had what looked like a shooting range. In the photo Cantor selected, there were three men standing near it.
“You might have something, Jack.�
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“What?” Ryan had looked at the photo and made nothing of it.
“What’s the distinguishing feature of the ULA?”
“Their professionalism,” Ryan answered.
“Your last paper on them said they were more militarily organized than some of the others, remember? Every one of them, as far as we can tell, is skilled with weapons.”
“So?”
“Think!” Cantor snapped. Ryan gave him a blank look. “Periodic weapons-refresher training, maybe?”
“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. How come nobody ever—”
“Do you know how many satellite photos come through here? I can’t say exactly, but you may safely assume that it’s a fairly large number, thousands per month. Figure it takes a minimum of five minutes to examine each one. Mostly we’re interested in the Russians—missile silos, factories, troop movements, tank parks, you name it. That’s where most of the analytical talent goes, and they can’t keep up with what comes in. The guys we have on this stuff here are technicians, not analysts.” Cantor paused. “Camp -18 looks interesting enough that we might try to figure a way to check it out, see who really lives there. Not bad. ”
“He’s violated security,” Kevin O’Donnell said by way of greeting. He was quiet enough that no one in the noisy pub would have heard him.
“Perhaps this is worth it,” Cooley replied. “Instructions?”
“When are you going back?”
“Tomorrow morning, the early flight.”
O’Donnell nodded, finishing off his drink. He left the pub and walked directly to his car. Twenty minutes later he was home. Ten minutes after that, his operations and intelligence chiefs were in his study.
“Sean, how did you like working with Alex’s organization?”
“They’re like us, small but professional. Alex is a very thorough technician, but an arrogant one. He hasn’t had a great deal of formal training. He’s clever, very clever. And he’s hungry, as they say over there. He wants to make his mark.”
