Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (398 page)

Brightling looked at the key in his hand, then got back into his car. The driver took him to the main entrance, and there he used the key, surprised and miffed to see that the door was unlocked. Well, there were still people going in and out. He took the elevator to his office-apartment atop the main building. That door, he saw,
was
locked as it was supposed to be, and he opened it with a kind of one-person ceremony, and walked into the seat of Olympus’s chief god. No, that wasn’t right. Insofar as there was a god, it was Nature. From his office windows, he could see out over the plains of Kansas, the swaying young wheat . . . it was so beautiful. Almost enough to bring tears to his eyes. Nature. She could be cruel to individuals, but individuals didn’t matter. Despite all the warnings, humankind hadn’t learned that.

Well, learn it they would, the way Nature taught all Her lessons. The hard way.

Pat O’Connor made his daily report to the ASAC in the evening. Coatless, he slid into the chair opposite Ussery’s desk with his folder in hand. It was already fairly thick.

“Bannister case,” Chuck Ussery said. “Anything shaking loose yet, Pat?”

“Nothing,” the supervisory special agent replied. “We’ve interviewed fourteen friends in the Gary area. None of them had any idea what Mary was doing in New York. Only six of them even knew she was there, and she never discussed jobs or boyfriends, if any, with them. So, nothing at all has happened here.”

“New York?” the ASAC asked next.

“Two agents on the case there, Tom Sullivan and Frank Chatham. They’ve established contact with a NYPD detective lieutenant named d’Allessandro. Forensics has been through her apartment—nothing. Latent prints are all hers, not even a maid. Neighbors in the building knew her by sight, but no real friendships established, and therefore no known associates. The New York idea is to print up some flyers and pass them out via the NYPD. The local detective is worried there might be a serial killer loose. He has another missing female, same age, roughly the same appearance and area of residence, fell off the world about the same time.”

“Behavioral Sciences?” Ussery asked at once.

O’Connor nodded. “They’ve looked over the facts we have to date. They wonder if the e-mail was sent by the victim or maybe by a serial killer who wants to fuck over the family. Style differences on the message that Mr. Bannister brought in—well, we both saw that it appeared to have been written by a different person, or someone on drugs, but she was evidently not a drug user. And we can’t trace the e-mail back anywhere. It went into an anonymous-remailer system. That sort of thing is designed to protect the originator of electronic mail, I guess so people can swap porno over the Net. I talked with Eddie Morales in Baltimore. He’s the technical wizard in Innocent Images”—that was an ongoing FBI project to track down, arrest, and imprison those who swapped kiddie porn over their computers—“and Bert said they’re playing with some technical fixes. They have a hacker on the payroll who thinks he can come up with a way to crack through the anonymity feature, but he’s not there yet, and the local U.S. Attorney isn’t sure it’s legal anyway.”

“Shit.” Ussery thought of that legal opinion. Kiddie porn was one of the Bureau’s pet hates, and Innocent Images had turned into a high-priority nationwide investigation, run from the Baltimore Field Division.

O’Connor nodded. “That’s exactly what Bert said, Chuck.”

“So, nothing happening yet?”

“Nothing worthwhile. We have a few more of Mary’s friends to interview—five are set up for tomorrow, but if anything breaks loose, my bet’s on New York. Somebody must have known her. Somebody must have dated her. But not here, Chuck. She left Gary and didn’t look back.”

Ussery frowned, but there was no fault to be found with O’Connor’s investigative procedures, and there was a total of twelve agents working the Bannister case. Such cases ran and broke at their own speed. If James Bannister called, as he did every day, he’d just have to tell him that the Bureau was still working on it, then ask him for any additional friends he might have forgotten to list for the Gary team of agents.

CHAPTER 25

SUNRISE

“You didn’t stay very long, sir,” the immigration inspector observed, looking at Popov’s passport.

“A quick business meeting,” the Russian said, in his best American accent. “I’ll be back again soon.” He smiled at the functionary.

“Well, do hurry back, sir.” Another stamp on the well-worn passport, and Popov headed into the first-class lounge.

Grady would do it. He was sure of that. The challenge was too great for one of his ego to walk away, and the same was true of the reward. Six million dollars was more than the IRA had ever seen in one lump sum, even when Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi had bankrolled them in the early 1980s. The funding of terrorist organizations was always a practical problem. The Russians had historically given them some arms, but more valuably to the IRA, places to train, and operational intelligence against the British security services, but never very much money. The Soviet Union had never possessed a very large quantity of foreign exchange, and mainly used it to purchase technology with military applications. Besides, it had turned out, the elderly married couple they’d used as couriers to the West, delivering cash to Soviet agents in America and Canada, had been under FBI control almost the entire time! Popov had to shake his head. Excellent as the KGB had been, the FBI was just as good. It had a long-standing institutional brilliance at false-flag operations, which, in the case of the couriers, had compromised a large number of sensitive operations run by the “Active Measures” people in KGB’s Service A. The Americans had had the good sense not to burn the operations, but rather use them as expanding resources in order to gain a systematic picture of what KGB was doing—targets and objectives—and so learn what the Russians
hadn’t
already penetrated.

He shook his head again, as he walked off to the gate. And he was still in the dark, wasn’t he? The questions continued to swarm: Exactly
what
was he doing?
What
did Brightling want?
Why
attack this Rainbow group?

Chavez decided to set his MP-10 submachine gun aside today and concentrate instead on his Beretta .45. He hadn’t missed a shot with the Heckler & Koch weapon in weeks—in this context, a “miss” meant not hitting within an inch of the ideal bullet placement, between and slightly above the eyes on the silhouette target. The H&K’s diopter sights were so perfectly designed that if you could see the target through the sights, you hit the target. It was that simple.

But pistols were not that simple, and he needed the practice. He drew the weapon from the green Gore-Tex holster and brought it up fast, his left hand joining the right on the grip as his right foot took half a step back, and he turned his body, adopting the Weaver stance that he’d been taught years before at The Farm in the Virginia Tidewater. His eyes looked down, off the target, acquiring the pistol’s sights as it came up to eye level, and when it did, his right index finger pulled back evenly on the trigger—

—not quite evenly enough. The shot would have shattered the target’s jaw, and maybe severed a major blood vessel, but it would not have been instantly fatal. The second shot, delivered about half a second later, would have been. Ding grunted, annoyed with himself. He dropped the hammer with the safety-decock lever and reholstered the pistol.
Again.
He looked down, away from the target, then looked up. There he was, a terrorist with his weapon to the head of a child. Like lightning, the Beretta came up again, the sights matched up and Chavez pulled back his finger. Better. That one would have gone through the bastard’s left eye, and the second round, again half a second later, made the first between-the-eyes hole into a cute little figure-eight.

“Excellent double-tap, Mr. Chavez.”

Ding turned to see Dave Woods, the range master.

“Yeah, my first was wide and low,” Ding admitted. That it would have blown half the bastard’s face right off was not good enough.

“Less wrist, more finger,” Woods advised. “And let me see your grip again.” Ding did that. “Ah, yes, I see.” His hands adjusted Chavez’s left hand somewhat. “More like that, sir.”

Shit,
Ding thought. Was it that simple? By moving two fingers less than a quarter of an inch, the pistol slipped into a position as though the grip had been custom-shaped for his hands. He tried it a few times, then reholstered again and executed his version of a quick-draw. This time, the first round was dead between the eyes of the target seven meters away, and the second right beside it.

“Excellent,” Woods said.

“How long you been teaching, Sergeant Major?”

“Quite some time, sir. Nine years here at Hereford.”

“How come you never joined up with SAS?”

“Bad knee. Hurt it back in 1986, jumping down off a Warrior. I can’t run more than two miles without its stiffening up on me, you see.” The red mustache was waxed into two rather magnificent points, and the gray eyes sparkled. This son of a bitch could have taught shooting to Doc Holliday, Chavez knew at that moment. “Do carry on, sir.” The range master walked off.

“Well, shit,” Chavez breathed to himself. He executed four more quick-draws.
More finger, less wrist, lower the left hand a skosh on the grip . . . bingo . . .
In three more minutes there was a two-inch hole right in the middle of the instant-incapacitation part of the target. He’d have to remember this little lesson, Ding told himself.

Tim Noonan was in the next lane over, using his own Beretta, shooting slower than Chavez, and not quite as tight in his groups, but
all
of his rounds would have driven through the bottom of the brain, and right into the stem, where instant kills happened, because that was where the spinal cord entered the brain. Finally, both ran out of ammunition. Chavez took off his ear-protectors and tapped Noonan on the shoulder.

“A little slow today,” the technical expert observed, with a frown.

“Yeah, well, you dropped the fucker. You were HRT, right?”

“Yeah, but not really a shooter. I did the tech side for them, too. Well, okay, I shot with them regularly, but not quite good enough for the varsity. Never got as fast as I wanted to be. Maybe I have slow nerves.” Noonan grinned as he field-stripped his pistol for cleaning.

“So how’s that people-finder working out?”

“The damned thing is fucking magic, Ding. Give me another week and I’ll have the new one figured out. There’s a parabolic attachment for the antenna, looks like something out of
Star Trek,
I guess, but goddamn, does it find people.” He wiped the parts off and sprayed Break-Free on them for cleaning and lubrication. “That Woods guy’s a pretty good coach, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, well, he just fixed a little problem for me,” Ding said, taking the spray can to start cleaning his own service automatic.

“The head guy at the FBI Academy when I was there did wonders for me, too. Just how your hands match up on the butt, I guess. And a steady finger.” Noonan ran a patch through the barrel, eyeballed it, and reassembled his pistol. “You know, the best part about being over here is, we’re about the only people who get to carry guns.”

“I understand civilians can’t own handguns over here, eh?”

“Yeah, they changed the law a few years ago. I’m sure it’ll help reduce crime,” Noonan observed. “They started their gun-control laws back in the ’20s, to control the IRA. Worked like a charm, didn’t it?” The FBI agent laughed. “Oh, well, they never wrote down a Constitution like we did.”

“You carry all the time?”

“Hell, yes!” Noonan looked up. “Hey, Ding, I’m a cop, y’dig? I feel naked without a friend on my belt. Even when I was working Lab Division in Headquarters, reserved parking space and all, man, I
never
walked around D.C. without a weapon.”

“Ever have to use it?”

Tim shook his head. “No, not many agents do, but it’s part of the mystique, you know?” He looked back at his target. “Some skills you just like to have, man.”

“Yeah, same for the rest of us.” It was a fillip of British law that the Rainbow members
were
authorized to carry weapons everywhere they went, on the argument that as counterterror people they were always on duty. It was a right Chavez hadn’t exercised very much, but Noonan had a point. As Chavez watched, he slapped a full magazine into the reassembled and cleaned handgun, dropped the lever to close the slide, then after safing the weapon, ejected the magazine to slide one more round into it. The gun went back into his hip holster, along with two more full magazines in covered pockets on the outside. Well, it was part of being a cop, wasn’t it?

“Later, Tim.”

“See you around, Ding.”

Many people can’t do it, but some people simply remember faces. It’s a particularly useful skill for bartenders, because people will come back to establishments where the guy at the bar remembers your favorite drink. This was true at New York’s Turtle Inn Bar and Lounge, on Columbus Avenue. The foot patrolman came in just after the bar opened at noon and called, “Hey, Bob.”

“Hi, Jeff, coffee?”

“Yeah,” the young cop said, watching the bartender get some Starbuck’s from the urn. Unusually for a bar, this place served good coffee, since that was the yuppie thing in this part of town. One sugar and some cream, and he passed the cup over.

Jeff had been on this beat for just under two years, long enough that he knew most of the business owners, and most of them knew him and his habits. He was an honest cop, but never one to turn down free food or drink, especially good donuts, the American cop’s favorite food.

“So, what’s shakin’?” Bob asked.

“Looking for a missin’ girl,” Jeff replied. “Know this face?” He handed the printed flyer over.

“Yeah, Annie something, likes Kendall Jackson Reserve Chardonnay. Used to be a regular. Haven’t seen her in a while, though.”