Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (264 page)

“Why my kids, Jeff? I’m the one—here. If people get mad, it’s supposed to be at me. Why do people like this go after children, tell me that ...”

“It’s a hateful act, Mr. President, hateful to God and man,” Raman said, as three more agents came into the Oval Office. What was he doing now? the assassin asked himself. What in hell was he doing? Why had he said
that?

THEY WERE TALKING in a language he didn’t understand. O’Day stayed down, sitting on the floor with his little girl, holding her in his lap with both arms and trying to look as harmless as she did. Dear God, all the years he’d trained for things like this—but never to be inside, never to be
in
the crime scene while the crime happened. Outside, you knew what to do. He knew exactly what was happening. If any Service people were left—probably some, yes, there had to be. Somebody had fired three or four bursts with an M-16—O’Day knew the distinctive chatter of that weapon. No more bad guys had entered. His mind added those facts up. Okay, there were good guys outside. First they’d establish a perimeter to make sure nobody got in or out. Next they’d call in—who? The Service probably had its own SWAT team, but also close by would be the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, with its own choppers to get them here. Almost on cue, he heard a helicopter overhead.

“THIS IS TROOPER three, we’re orbiting the area now,” a voice said over the radio. “Who’s in charge down there?”

“This is Special Agent Price, United States Secret Service. How long you with us, Trooper?” she asked over a state police radio.

“We have gas for ninety minutes, and then another chopper will relieve us. Looking down now, Agent Price,” the pilot reported. “I have one individual to the west, looks like a female behind a dead tree, looking into the scene. She one of yours?”

“Michaels, Price,” Andrea said over her personal radio system. “Wave to the chopper.”

“Just waved at us,” Trooper Three reported at once.

“Okay, that’s one of mine, covering the back.”

“All right. We have no movement around the building, and no other people within a hundred yards. We will continue to orbit and observe until you say otherwise.”

“Thank you. Out.”

THE MARINE VH-60 landed on the athletic field. Sally and Little Jack were fairly thrown aboard, and Colonel Goodman lifted off at once, heading east toward the water, which, the Coast Guard had told him moments before, was free of unknown craft. He rocketed the Black Hawk to altitude, going north over the water. To his left he could see the shape of a French-made police helicopter orbiting a few miles north of Annapolis. It didn’t require much insight to explain it, and behind calm eyes he wished for a couple of squads of recon Marines to deliver to the site. He’d once heard that criminals who hurt children faced a rough go in prison, but that wasn’t half of what Marines would do if they got the chance. His reverie ended there. He didn’t even look back to see how the other two kids were doing. He had an aircraft to fly. That was his function. He had to trust others to do theirs.

THEY WERE LOOKING out the windows now. They were being careful about it. While the wounded one stood leaning against the wall—looked like a kneecap, O’Day saw; good—the other one allowed his eye to peer around the edge. It wasn’t too hard to guess what he saw. Sirens announced the arrival of police cars. Okay, they probably had the perimeter forming now. Mrs. Daggett and her three women helpers had the kids in a single bunch on the corner, while the two subjects traded words. Good, that was smart. They weren’t doing all that well, O’Day thought. One of them was always sweeping the room with eyes and muzzle, but they hadn’t

Just then one of them reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a photo. He said something else in whatever tongue they spoke. Then he closed the shades. Damn. That would prevent scoped rifles from seeing inside. They were smart enough to know that people might just shoot. Few of the kids here were tall enough to look out and—

The one with the photo held it up again and walked toward the kids. He pointed.

“That one.”

Strangely, it was only now, it seemed, that they saw O’Day in the room. The knee-shot one blinked his eyes and aimed the AK right at him. The inspector took his arms from around his daughter’s chest and held them up.

“Enough people been hurt, pal,” he said. It didn’t require all that much effort to make his voice shake. He’d made a mistake, too, holding his Megan that way. That fuck might shoot through her to get to me, he realized, a sudden wave of nausea rippling through his stomach at the thought. Slowly, carefully, he lifted her and moved her off his lap, and onto the floor to his left.

“No!” It was Marlene Daggett’s voice.

“Bring her to me!” the man insisted.

Do it, do it,
O’Day thought.
Save your resistance for when it counts. It doesn’t change anything right now.
But she couldn’t hear his thoughts.

“Bring her!” the shooter repeated.

“No!”

The man shot Daggett in the chest from a range of three feet.

“WHAT WAS THAT?” Price snapped. Ambulances were coming up Ritchie Highway now, their whooping sirens different from the monotonal screams of the police cars. Down to her left, state troopers were trying to get the road clear, shunting traffic away from the area while their hands rubbed on their holsters, wishing they were there to help. Their angry gestures conveyed their mental state to the puzzled drivers.

Closer to Giant Steps, those immediately outside heard a renewed wave of screams, little kids in terror, for what reason they could only guess.

THE LEATHER JACKET rode up when you were sitting down like this. If anyone had been behind him, he’d see the holster in the small of his back, the inspector knew. He’d never seen a murder before. He’d investigated his share of them, but to see one ... a lady who worked with kids. The shock on his face was as real as any man’s, watching life vanish ... innocent life, his mind added. So he really had no choice.

When he next looked at Marlene Daggett, he wished that he might tell her that her murderers would not be leaving this building alive.

It was miraculous that none of the kids were wounded as yet. All the shooting had gone high, and he realized that had Miss Anne not knocked him down, he might be dead beside his daughter now. There were holes in the wall, and the bullets that had made them would have transited the space he’d been in a second or two before. He looked down a second, to see his hands shaking. His hands knew what they had to do. They knew their task and they didn’t understand why they weren’t doing it, why the mind which commanded them hadn’t yet given them the release. But his hands had to be patient. This was a job of the mind.

The subject lifted Katie Ryan by her arm, wrenching it, making her cry out as he twisted it. O’Day thought about his first supervisor, working that first kidnapping case, Dom DiNapoli, that big, tough guinea who’d wept bringing the child back to her family: “Never forget, they’re
all
our kids.”

They might just as easily have selected Megan, they were so close—and that thought
did
cross from mind to mind as the one with SANDBOX looked at the photo again, and over toward Pat O’Day.

“Who are you?” the voice demanded, while his partner moaned with increasing pain.

“What d’ya mean?” the inspector asked in nervous reply.
Look dumb and scared.

“Whose child is that?” He pointed at Megan.

“She’s mine, okay? I don’t know who that one belongs to,” the FBI agent lied.

“She is the one we want, she is President’s child, yes?”

“How the hell should I know? My wife usually picks Megan up, not me. Do what you gotta do and get the fuck outa here, okay?”

“You inside,” a female voice boomed from outside. “This is the United States Secret Service. We want you to come out. You will not be hurt if you do. You have no place to go. Come out where we can see you, and you will not be hurt.”

“That’s good advice, man,” Pat told him. “Nobody’s gonna get out of here, you know?”

“You know who this girl is? She is daughter of your President Ryan! They will not dare shoot me!” the subject proclaimed. His English was pretty good, O’Day noted, nodding.

“What about all the other kids, man? That’s the only one you want, that’s the only other one that matters—hey, why not, you know, like, let some out, eh?”

The man was partly right. The Service guys wouldn’t shoot at one target for fear that someone else might be in here, as one surely was, his rifle leveled at Pat’s chest. And they were smart enough that they were never less than five feet apart. Shooting them would take two separate moves.

What really scared O’Day was the casual, reflexive way he’d killed Marlene Daggett. They just plain didn’t care. You couldn’t predict that sort of criminal. You could talk to them, try to calm them down, distract them, but beyond that, there was only one way to deal with them.

“We give them children, they give us car, yes?”

“Hey, that works for me, okay? I think that’s just fine. I just want to get my daughter home tonight, y’know?”

“Yes, you take good care of your little one. Sit there.”

“No problem.” He relaxed his hands, bringing them closer to his chest, right at the top of the zipper on his jacket. Undo that and the leather would hang better, concealing his gun.

“Attention,” the voice called again. “We want to talk.”

CATHY RYAN JOINED her children in the helicopter. The agents’ faces were grim enough. Sally and Jack were coming out of the initial shock and sobbing now, looking to their mother for solace as the Black Hawk leaped into the sky again, heading southwest for Washington with another in trail. The pilot, she saw, was not taking the usual route, but was instead going directly west, away from where Katie was. That was when SURGEON collapsed into the arms of her kids.

“O’DAY IS IN there,” Jeffers told her.

“You sure, Norm?”

“That’s his truck. I saw him going in right before this went down.”

“Shit,” Price swore. “That’s probably the shot we heard.”

“Yah.” Jeffers nodded grimly.

THE PRESIDENT WAS in the Situation Room, the best spot to keep track of things. Perhaps he might have been elsewhere, but he couldn’t face his office, and he wasn’t President enough to pretend that—

“Jack?” It was Robby Jackson. He came over as his President stood, but they’d been friends much longer than that, and the two shared an embrace. “Been here before, man. It worked out then, too, remember?”

“We have tag numbers off the cars in the parking lot. Three are rentals. We’re running them now,” Raman said, a phone to his ear. “Should be able to get some kind of ID.”

HOW DUMB MIGHT they be? O’Day asked himself. They’d have to be pretty fucking stupid to think they had any chance at all of getting out of here ... and if they didn’t have that hope, then they had nothing to lose ... not a damned thing ... and they didn’t seem to care about killing. It had happened before, in Israel, Pat remembered. He didn’t recall the name or the date, but a couple of terrorists had had a bunch of kids and hosed them before the commandos were able to ...

He’d taught tactics for every possible situation, or so he’d thought, and would have said as recently as twenty minutes before—but to have your only child next to you ...

They’re all our kids,
Dom’s voice told him again.

The unhurt killer had Katie Ryan by the upper arm. She was only whimpering now, exhausted from her earlier screams, almost hanging from his hand as the subject stood there to the left of the wounded one. His right hand held the AK. If he’d had a pistol, he could have held that weapon to her head, but the AK was too lengthy for that. Ever so slowly, Inspector O’Day moved his hand down, opening the zipper on his jacket.

They started talking back and forth again. The wounded one was in considerable discomfort. At first, the adrenaline rush had blocked it out, but now things were settling down somewhat, and with the release of tension also went the pain-blocking mechanism that protected the body in periods of great stress. He was saying something, but Pat couldn’t tell what it was. The other one snarled a reply, gesturing to the door, speaking with passion and frustration. The scary part would come when they came to a decision. They might just shoot the kids. Those outside would probably rush the building if they heard more than a shot or two. They might be fast enough to save some of the kids, but ...

He started thinking of them as Hurt and Unhurt. They were pumped up but confused, excited but undecided, wanting to live but coming to the realization that they would not ...

“Hey, uh, guys,” Pat said, holding his arms up and moving them to distract them from the open zipper. “Can I say something?”

“What?” Hurt demanded, as Unhurt watched.

“All these kids you have here, it’s like too many to cover, right?” he asked, with an emphatic nod to get the idea across. “How about I take my little girl out and some of the others, okay? Make things easier for you, maybe?”

That generated some more jabbering. The idea actually seemed attractive to Unhurt, or so it appeared to O’Day.

“Attention, this is the Secret Service!” the voice called yet again. It sounded like Price, the FBI agent thought. Unhurt was looking toward the door, and his body language was leaning him that way, and to get there he had to pass in front of Hurt.

“Hey, come on, okay, let some of us go, will ya?” O’Day pleaded. “Maybe I can tell them to give you a car or something.”

Unhurt waved his rifle in the inspector’s direction. “Stand!” he commanded.

“Okay, okay, be cool, all right?” O’Day stood slowly, keeping his hands well away from his body. Would they see his holster if he turned around? The Service people had spotted it the first time he’d come in, and if he fucked this one up, then Megan ... there was no turning back. There just wasn’t.