Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (733 page)

He gazed at the others: Jerry Rounds, his head of Strategic Planning; Sam Granger, his chief of Operations. Even before the building had been completed, the three of them had been thinking about the shape of the world, and how a few of the corners could best be rounded off. Rick Bell was here, too, his chief of Analysis, the one who spent his working days sorting through the “take” from NSA and CIA, and trying to find meaning in the flood of unrelated information—aided, of course, by the thirty-five thousand analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and other such places. Like all senior analysts, he also liked to frolic in the operations playground, and here that was actually possible, since The Campus was too small to have been overtaken by its own bureaucracy. He and Hendley worried that it might not always be so, and both made sure that no empires were being built.

To the best of their knowledge, theirs was the only institution in all the world like this. And it had been set up in such a way that it could be erased from the landscape in a matter of two or three months. Since Hendley Associates did not invite outside investors, their public profile was low enough that the radar never spotted their machinations, and, in any case, the community they were in did not advertise. It was easy to hide in a field in which everyone did the same, and nobody ratted on anyone else, unless very badly stung. And The Campus didn’t sting. At least not with money.

“So,” Hendley began, “are we ready?”

“Yes,” Rounds said for Granger. Sam nodded soberly and smiled.

“We’re ready,” Granger announced officially. “Our two boys have earned their spurs in a way we never anticipated.”

“They earned ’em, all right,” Bell agreed. “And the Ryan boy has identified a good first target, this Sali fellow. The events of Friday have generated a lot of message traffic. They turn out a lot of cheerleaders. A lot of them are stringers and wanna-bes, but even if we pop one of them by mistake it’s no great loss. I have the first four all lined up. So, Sam, do you have a plan for dealing with them?”

That was Davis’s cue. “We’re going to do reconnaissance by fire. After we whack one or two, we’ll see what reaction, if any, results, and we will take our guidance from there. I agree that Mr. Sali looks like a profitable first target. Question is, is his elimination going to be overt or covert?”

“Explain,” Hendley ordered.

“Well, if he’s found dead on the street, that’s one thing. If he disappears with his daddy’s money and leaves behind a note saying that he wants to stop what he’s doing and just retire, that’s something else,” Sam explained.

“Kidnapping? It’s dangerous.” The Metropolitan Police in London had a closure rate on kidnappings that nibbled at one hundred percent. That was a dangerous game to play, especially on their first move.

“Well, we can hire an actor, dress him up right, fly him to New York Kennedy, and then just have him disappear. In fact, we dispose of the body and keep the money. How much does he have access to, Rick?”

“Direct access? Hell, it’s over three hundred million bucks.”

“Might look good in the corporate exchequer,” Sam speculated. “And it wouldn’t hurt his dad much, would it?”

“His father’s money—all of it? Try the sunny side of three billion,” Bell answered. “He’ll miss it, but it wouldn’t break him. And given his opinion of his son, it might even develop as good cover for our operation,” he hypothesized.

“I am not recommending this as a course of action, but it is an alternative,” Granger concluded.

It had been talked about before, of course. It was too obvious a play to escape notice. And three hundred million dollars would have looked just fine in a Campus account, say in the Bahamas or Liechtenstein. You could hide money anywhere that had telephone lines. It was just electrons anyway, not gold bricks.

Hendley was surprised that Sam had brought this up so soon. Maybe he wanted to get a read on his colleagues. They were clearly not overcome with emotion at the thought of ending this Sali’s life, but to steal from him in the process pushed some very different buttons. A man’s conscience could be a funny thing, Gerry concluded.

“Let’s set that aside for the moment. How hard will the hit be?” Hendley asked.

“With what Rick Pasternak gave us? It’s child’s play, so long as our people don’t make a complete hash of it. Even then the worst thing that can happen is that it’ll look like a mugging that went wrong,” Granger told them.

“What if our guy drops the pen?” Rounds worried.

“It’s a pen. You can write with it. It’ll pass inspection with any cop in the world,” Granger replied confidently. He reached in his pocket and passed his sample around the table. “This one’s cold,” he assured them.

They’d all been briefed in. To all appearances, it was an expensive ballpoint, gold-plated, with obsidian on the clip. By depressing the clip and turning the nib cover, you switched the point from a real pen to a hypodermic with a lethal transfer agent. It would paralyze the victim in fifteen to twenty seconds, and kill him in three minutes, with no cure, and a very transient signature in the body. As the pen went around the conference table, the executives invariably felt the hypo point, and then experimented with using it for a simulated hit, mostly as an ice-pick strike, though Rounds handled it like a diminutive sword.

“It would be nice to try it on a dry run,” he observed quietly.

“Anyone here want to volunteer as the victim?” Granger asked the table. No heads nodded. The mood of the room didn’t surprise him much. It was time for a sober pause, the sort of thing that comes over a man when he signs his application for life insurance, a product that is valuable only if you are dead, which rather takes the fun out of the moment.

“Fly them to London together?” Hendley asked.

“Correct.” Granger nodded, and turned back to his business voice. “We have them scout out the target, pick their moment, and make their hit.”

“And wait to see the results?” Rounds asked, rhetorically.

“Correct. Then they can fly off to the next target. The whole operation should not take more than a week. Then we fly them home and await developments. If somebody taps into his money pile after his demise, we’ll probably know, right?”

“We ought to,” Bell confirmed. “And if anyone purloins it, we’ll know where it goes.”

“Excellent,” Granger observed. After all, that was what “reconnaissance-by-fire” meant.

THEY WOULDN’T
be here long, the twins both thought. They were quartered in adjoining rooms at the local Holiday Inn, and this Sunday afternoon they were both watching TV with one guest.

“How’s your mom?” Jack asked.

“Fine, doing a lot of stuff with the local schools—parochial ones. A little more than a teacher’s aide, but not actually teaching. Dad’s working some new project—supposedly Boeing is back looking at an SST, supersonic airliner. Dad says they’ll probably never build it, unless Washington coughs up a lot of money, but with the Concorde retired people are thinking about it again, and Boeing likes to keep their engineers busy. They’re a little nervous about the Airbus people, and they don’t want to be caught with their pants down if the French start getting ambitious.”

“How was the Corps?” Jack asked Brian.

“The Corps is the Corps, cuz. It just rolls along, keeping busy for the next war that’ll come along.”

“Dad was worried when you went to Afghanistan.”

“It was a little exciting. The people there, they’re tough, and they’re not dumb, but they’re not trained that well, either. So, when we bumped heads with ’em, we came out ahead. If we saw something that looked hinky, we called air in on it, and that usually took care of things.”

“How many?”

“How many did we take out? Some. Not enough, but some. The Green Berets went in first, and the Afghans learned from that that a stand-up fight was not in their interest. Mostly, we did pursuit and reconnaissance, bird-dogging for the airedales. We had a CIA guy with us, and a signals-intelligence detachment. The bad guys used their radios a little too much. When we got a hit, we’d move in to about a mile or so and give it a look-see, and if it was interesting enough we’d call in air and scramble the hell out of it. Scary to watch,” Brian summarized.

“I bet.” Jack popped open a can of beer.

“So this Sali guy, the one with the girlfriend, Rosalie Parker?” Dominic asked. Like most cops, he had a good memory for names. “You said that he was jumpin’ up and down about the shootings?”

“Yup,” Jack said. “Thought they were just swell.”

“So who was the cheerleading with?”

“Pals he e-mails to. The Brits have his phones tapped, and the e-mails—well, as I said, I can’t tell you about the e-mails. Those European phone systems aren’t anywhere near as secure as people think—I mean, everybody knows about intercepting cell phones and stuff, but the cops over there pull stuff we can’t do here. The Brits especially, they use intercepts to track the IRA guys. I heard that the rest of the European countries are even freer to act.”

“They are,” Dominic assured him. “At the Academy, we had some in the national Academy program—that’s like a doctoral course for cops. They’d talk about that sort of thing after you got a few drinks into them. So, this Sali guy liked what those mutts did, eh?”

“Like his team won the Super Bowl,” Jack replied at once.

“And he bankrolls them?” Brian asked.

“That’s right.”

“Interesting,” was all Brian had to say after getting that question answered.

HE COULD
have stayed another night, but he had things to do in the morning, and so he was driving back to London in his Aston Martin Vanquish, Bowland black. Its interior was charcoal, and its handmade twelve-cylinder engine was pushing out most of its 460 horsepower as he headed east on the M4 at a hundred miles per hour. In its way, the car was better than sex. It was a pity Rosalie wasn’t with him, but—he looked over at his companion—Mandy was an agreeable bed warmer, if a little too skinny for his usual tastes. If only she could put some meat on her bones, but European fashion did not encourage that. The fools who determined the rules of women’s bodies were probably pederasts who wished them all to look like young boys. Madness, Sali thought. Pure madness.

But Mandy enjoyed riding in this car, more than Rosalie did. Rosalie, sadly, was fearful of driving fast, not as trusting of his skills as she should have been. He hoped he could take this car home—he’d fly it there, of course. His brother had a fast car of his own, but the dealer had told him that this four-wheeled rocket topped out at over three hundred kilometers per hour—that was 196 miles per hour—and the Kingdom had some fine, flat, straight roads. Okay, so he had a cousin who flew Tornado fighters for the Royal Saudi Air Force, but this car was
his,
and that made all the difference. Unfortunately, the police here in England would not allow him to exercise it properly—one more traffic ticket and he might lose his driver’s license, the spoilsports—but at home there would be no such problems. And after seeing what it could
really
do, he’d fly it back to Gatwick and use it to excite women, which was almost as good as just driving it. Certainly Mandy was properly excited by it. He’d have to get her a nice Vuitton bag and have it messengered to her flat tomorrow. It didn’t hurt to be generous with women, and Rosalie needed to learn that she had some competition.

Racing into town as rapidly as the traffic and the police allowed, he zoomed past Harrods, through the vehicle tunnel, and past the Duke of Wellington’s house before turning right onto Curzon Street and then left onto Berkeley Square. A flash of his lights told the man he paid to guard his parking place to move his car, and he was able to park just in front of his three-story brownstone town house. With continental manners, he got out of the car and raced around to open Mandy’s door and gallantly escorted her up the steps to the huge oak front door, and, smiling, held it open for her. In a few minutes, she’d be opening an even nicer door for him, after all.

“THE LITTLE
bugger’s back,” Ernest observed, making the proper note of the time on his clipboard. The two Security Service officers were in a British Telecom van parked fifty yards away. They’d been there for about two hours. This young Saudi madman drove as though he were the reincarnation of Jimmy Clark.

“I suppose he had a better weekend than we did,” Peter agreed. Then he turned to punch the buttons to activate various wiretap systems in the Georgian town house. These included three cameras whose tapes were collected every third day by a penetration team. “He is a vigorous little bastard.”

“Probably uses Viagra,” Ernest thought aloud, and somewhat enviously.

“One must be a good sport, Ernie, my lad. It will cost him two weeks of our pay. And for what she is about to receive, she will surely be truly grateful.”

“Bugger,” Ernest observed sourly.

“She’s thin, but not
that
thin, boyo.” Peter had himself a good laugh. They knew what Mandy Davis charged her “tricks,” and, like men everywhere, they wondered what special things she might do to earn it, all while holding her in contempt. As counterintelligence officers, they did not quite have the degree of sympathy a seasoned police constable might have had for relatively unskilled women trying to earn their way. Seven hundred fifty pounds for an evening’s visit, and two thousand pounds for a complete night. Exactly what her custom was for a full weekend, no one had asked.

They both picked up the earphones to make sure the microphones worked, switching channels to track them through the house.

“He’s an impatient sod,” Ernest observed. “Suppose she’ll stay the night?”

“I’ll wager she doesn’t, Ernie. Then maybe he’ll get on the bloody phone and we can get something useful off the bastard.”

“Bloody wog,” Ernest muttered, to his partner’s agreement. They both thought Mandy was prettier than Rosalie. Fit for a government minister.

THEY WERE
correct in their judgment. Mandy Davis left at 10:23 A.M., stopping at the door for one last kiss, and a smile certain to break any man’s heart, and then she walked downhill on Berkeley Street heading toward Piccadilly, where she did not turn right at the Boots drugstore for the Underground station on the corner of Piccadilly and Stratton, but rather caught a cab that took her downtown, to New Scotland Yard. There, she’d be debriefed by a friendly young detective whom she rather fancied, though she was too skilled in her profession to mix business of the business sort with business of the pleasure sort. Uda was a vigorous john, and a generous one, but whatever illusions existed in their relationship were his, not hers.