by Tom Clancy
“I agree, but—”
“But still so much is in the hands of our adversaries. Yes, I know, but God help the bastards when we come for them.”
CHAPTER 13
AMUSEMENT
Popov was still trying to learn more about his employer, but finding nothing to enlighten himself. The combination of the New York Public Library and the Internet had turned up reams of information, but nothing that gave the slightest clue as to why he’d employed the former KGB officer to dig up terrorists and turn them loose upon the world. It was as likely that a child would conspire a murder plot against a loving parent. It wasn’t the morality of the event that troubled him. Morality had little place in intelligence operations. As a trainee at the KGB academy outside Moscow, the subject had never come up, except insofar as he and his classmates had always been given to understand that the State Was Never Wrong. “You will occasionally be ordered to do things you may find personally upsetting,” Colonel Romanov had said once. “Such things will be done, because the reasons, unknown to you or not, will always be proper ones. You do have the right to question something for tactical reasons—as the officer in the field, how you do the mission will generally be your affair. But to refuse an assignment is not acceptable.” And that had been that. Neither Popov nor his classmates had even made notes on the issue. It was understood that orders were orders. And so, once he accepted employment, Popov had done the jobs assigned . . .
. . . but as a servant of the Soviet Union he’d always known the overall mission, which was to get vital information to his country, because his country needed the information either for itself or to assist others whose actions would be of real benefit to his country. Even dealing with Il’ych Ramirez Sanchez, Popov had thought at the time, had served some special interest. He knew better now, of course. Terrorists were like wild dogs or rabid wolves that one tossed into someone’s back garden just to create a stir, and, yes, perhaps that had been strategically useful—or had been thought so by his masters, in the service of a state now dead and gone. But, no, the missions had not really been useful, had they? And as good as KGB had once been—he still thought them the best espionage agency the world had ever seen—it had ultimately been a failure. The Party for which the Committee for State Security had been the Sword and Shield was no more. The Sword had not slain the Party’s enemies, and the Shield had not protected against the West’s various weapons. And so, had his superiors really known what they’d needed to do?
Probably not, Popov admitted to himself, and because of that, perhaps every mission he’d been assigned had been to some greater or lesser degree a fool’s errand. The realization would have been a bitter one, except that his training and experience were paying off now with a lavish salary, not to mention the two suitcases of cash he’d managed to steal—but for doing what? Getting terrorists killed off by European police forces? He could just as easily, if not so profitably, have fingered them to the police and allowed them to be arrested, tried, and imprisoned like the criminal scum they were, which would actually have been far more satisfying. A tiger in a cage, pacing back and forth behind his bars and waiting for his daily five kilos of chilled horsemeat, was far more entertaining than one stuffed in a museum, and just as helpless. He was some sort of Judas goat, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, but if so, serving what sort of abattoir?
The money was good. Several more missions like the first two and he could take his money, his false identity papers, and vanish from the face of the earth. He could lie on some beach, drinking tasty beverages and watching pretty girls in skimpy bathing suits or—what? Popov didn’t know exactly what sort of retirement he could stomach, but he was certain he could find something. Maybe use his talents to trade in stocks and bonds like a real capitalist, and thus spend his time enriching himself further. Perhaps that, he mused, sipping his morning coffee and staring out the window, looking south toward Wall Street. But he wasn’t quite ready for that life yet, and until he was, the fact that he didn’t know the nature of his missions’ purpose was troublesome. In not knowing, he couldn’t evaluate all the dangers to himself. But for all his skill, experience, and professional training, he hadn’t a clue as to why his employer wanted him to let the tigers from their cages, out in the open where the hunters were waiting. What a pity, Popov thought, that he couldn’t just ask. The answer might even be amusing.
Check-in at the hotel was handled with mechanical precision. The reception desk was huge, and crowded with computers that raced electronically to get the guests checked in, the quicker to get them spending money in the park itself. Juan took his card-key and nodded his thanks at the pretty female clerk, then hoisted his bags and headed off to his room, grateful that there were no metal detectors here. The walk was a short one, and the elevators unusually large, to accommodate people in wheelchairs, he imagined. Five minutes later, he was in his room, unpacking. He’d just about finished when a knock came at the door.
“Bonjour.” It was René. The Frenchman came in and sat on the bed, stretching as he did so. “Are you ready, my friend?” he asked in Spanish.
“Sí,” the Basque replied. He didn’t look especially Spanish. His hair was on the red side of strawberry blond, his features handsome, and his beard neatly trimmed. Never arrested by the Spanish police, he was bright, careful, but thoroughly dedicated, with two car-bombings and a separate murder to his credit. This, René knew, would be Juan’s boldest mission, but he looked ready enough, tense, a little edgy perhaps, but coiled like a spring and prepared to play his role. René, too, had done this sort of thing before, most often murders right on crowded streets; he’d walk right up to his target, fire a suppressed pistol, and just walk on normally, which was the best way to do it, since you were almost never identified—people never saw the pistol, and rarely noticed a person walking normally down the Champs-Élysées. And so, you just changed your clothes and switched on the television to see the press coverage of your work. Action Directe had been largely, but not quite completely, broken up by the French police. The captured men had kept faith with their at-large comrades, hadn’t fingered or betrayed them, despite all the pressure and the promises of their uniformed countrymen—and perhaps some of them would be released as a result of this mission, though the main objective was to release their comrade Carlos. It would not be easy to get him out of Le Sante, René thought, rising to look out the window at the train station used by people going to the park, but—he saw the children there, waiting for their ride in—there were some things that no government, however brutal, could overlook.
Two buildings away, Jean-Paul was looking out at the same scene and contemplating much the same thoughts. He’d never married and had rarely even enjoyed a proper love affair. He knew now, at forty-three, that this had created a hole in his life and his character, an abnormality that he’d tried to fill with political ideology, with his beliefs in principles and his vision of a radiant socialist future for his country and for Europe and ultimately for the whole world. But a niggling part of his character told him that his dreams were mere illusions, and that reality was before him, three floors down and a hundred meters west, in the distant faces of children waiting to board the steam train to the park, and—but, no, such thoughts were aberrations. Jean-Paul and his friends knew the rightness of their cause and their beliefs. They’d discussed them at the greatest length over the years and concluded that their path was the right one. They’d shared their frustration that so few understood—but someday they would understand, someday they would see the path of justice that socialism offered the entire world, would understand that the road to the radiant future had to be paved by the revolutionary elite who understood the meaning and force of history . . . and they wouldn’t make the mistakes the Russians had made, those backward peasants in that over-large, foolish nation. And so he was able to look down on the assembled people, as they tightened up at the platform while the steam whistle announced the coming of the train, and see . . . things. Even the children were not
people, really, but political statements to be made by others, people like himself who understood how the world actually worked, or how it should work. Would work, he promised himself. Someday.
Mike Dennis always took his lunch outside, a habit he’d formed in Florida. One thing he liked about Worldpark was that you could have a drink here, in his case a nice red Spanish wine, which he sipped from a plastic cup as he watched how people circulated, and looked for goofs of one kind or another. He found no obvious ones. The walkways had been laid out after careful and thorough planning, using computer simulations.
The rides here were the things that drew people most of all, and so the walkways had been planned to lead people to the more spectacular of them. The big expensive ones were pretty spectacular. His own kids loved to ride them, especially the Dive Bomber, a top-hanging coaster that looked fit to make a fighter pilot lose his lunch, next to which was the Time Machine, a virtual-reality ride that accommodated ninety-six guests per seven-minute cycle—any longer and some patrons could get violently ill, tests had shown. Out of that and it was time for some ice cream or a drink, and there were concessions planted right there to answer the cravings. Farther away was Pepe’s, an excellent sit-down restaurant specializing in Catalonian cuisine—you didn’t put restaurants too close to the rides. Such attractions were not complementary, since watching the Dive Bomber didn’t exactly heighten the appetite, and for adults, neither did riding it. There was a science and an art to setting up and operating theme parks like this one, and Mike Dennis was one of the handful of people in the world who knew how it was done, which explained his enormous salary and the quiet smile that went with his sips of wine, as he watched his guests enjoy the place. If this was work, then it was the best job in the world. Even the astronauts who rode the space shuttle didn’t have this sort of satisfaction. He got to play with his toy every day. They were lucky to fly twice in a year.
His lunch completed, Dennis rose and walked back toward his office on Strada España, the Spanish Main Street, the central spoke on the partial wheel. It was another fine day at Worldpark, the weather clear, the temperature twenty-one Celsius, the air dry and pure. The rain in Spain did not, in his experience, stay mainly in the plain. The local climate was much like California’s, which, he reflected, went just fine with the Spanish language of the majority of his employees. On the way, he passed one of the park security people. Andre, the name tag said, and the language tag on the other shirt pocket said he spoke Spanish, French, and English. Good, Dennis thought. They didn’t have enough people like that.
The meeting place was prearranged. The Dive Bomber ride used as its symbol the German Ju-87 Stuka, complete to the Iron Cross insignia on the wings and fuselage, though the swastika on the tail had been thoughtfully deleted. It ought to have greatly offended Spanish sensibilities, Andre thought. Did no one remember Guernica, that first serious expression of Nazi Grausamkeit, when thousands of Spanish citizens had been massacred? Was historical appreciation that shallow here? Evidently it was. The children and adults in line frequently reached out to touch the half-scale model of the Nazi aircraft that had dived on both soldiers and civilians with its “Trumpet of Jericho” siren. The siren was replicated as part of the ride itself, though on the hundred-fifty-meter first hill, the screams of the riders as often as not drowned it out, followed by the compressed-air explosion and fountain of water at the bottom when the cars pulled out through simulated flak bursts for the climbing loop into the second hill after dropping a bomb on a simulated ship. Was he the only person in Europe who found the symbology here horrid and bestial?
Evidently so. People raced off the ride to rejoin the line to ride it again, except for those who bumbled off to recover their equilibrium, sometimes sweating, and twice, he’d seen, to vomit. A cleanup man with a mop and bucket stood by for that—not the choicest job in Worldpark. The medical-aid post was a few meters farther away, for those who needed it. Andre shook his head. It served the bastards right to feel ill after choosing to ride that hated symbol of fascism.
Jean-Paul, René, and Juan appeared almost together close to the entrance of the Time Machine, all sipping soft drinks. They and the five others were marked by the hats they’d bought at the entrance kiosk. Andre nodded to them, rubbing his nose as planned. René came over to him.
“Where is the men’s room?” he asked in English.
“Follow the signs,” Andre pointed. “I get off at eighteen hours. Dinner as planned?”
“Yes.”
“All are ready?”
“Entirely ready, my friend.”
“Then I will see you at dinner.” Andre nodded and walked off, continuing his patrol as he was paid to do, while his comrades walked about, some taking the time to enjoy the rides, he imagined. The park would be even busier tomorrow, he’d been told at the morning briefing session. Another nine-thousand-plus would be checking into the hotels tonight or tomorrow morning in preparation for the bank-holiday weekend in this part of Europe, for Good Friday. The park was set up for mobs of people, and his fellow security personnel had told him all manner of amusing stories about the things that happened here. Four months earlier, a woman had delivered twins in the medical post twenty minutes after riding the Dive Bomber, much to her husband’s surprise and the delight of Dr. Weiler—the children had been awarded lifetime passes to Worldpark on the spot, which had made the local TV news, part of the park’s genius for public relations. Maybe she’d named the boy Troll, Andre snorted, as he spotted one ahead. The Trolls were short-leg /massive-head costumes worn by petite females, he’d learned on coming to work. You could tell by the skinny legs that fit in to the huge feet-shoes they wore. There was even a water supply in the costume to make the monstrous lips drool . . . and over there was a Roman legionnaire dueling comically with a Germanic barbarian. One of them would alternately run from the other, usually to the applause of the people sitting down to watch the spectacle. He turned to walk over to the German Strasse, and was greeted by the oom-pah music of a marching band—why didn’t they play the Horst Wessel Lied? Andre wondered. It would have gone well with the damned green Stuka. Why not dress the band in SS black, maybe have compulsory shower baths for some of the guests—wasn’t that part of European history, too? Damn this place! Andre thought. The symbology was designed to incur the rage of anyone with the most rudimentary political awareness. But, no, the masses had no memory, no more than they had any understanding of political and economic history. He was glad they’d chosen this place to make their political statement. Maybe this would get the idiots to think, just a little bit, perhaps, about the shape of the world. The mis-shape, Andre corrected himself, allowing himself a very un-Worldpark frown at the sunny day and smiling crowds.
There, he told himself. That was the spot. The children loved it. There was a crowd of them there even now, dragging, pulling the hands of their parents, dressed in their shorts and sneakers, many wearing hats, with helium-filled balloons tied to their little wrists. And there was a special one, a little girl in a wheelchair, wearing the Special Wish button that told every ride attendant to allow her on without the need to stand in line. A sick one, Dutch from the style of her parents’ dress, Andre thought, probably dying from cancer, sent here by some charity or other modeled on the American Make-A-Wish Foundation, which paid for the parents to bring their dying whelp here for one first and last chance to see the Trolls and other cartoon characters, their rights licensed to Worldpark for sale and other exploitation. How brightly their sick little eyes shone here, Andre saw, on their quick road to the grave, and how solicitous the staff was to them, as though that mattered to anyone, this bourgeois sentimentality upon which the entire park was founded. Well. They’d see about all that, wouldn’t they? If there were ever a place to make a political statement, to bring the attention of all Europe and all the world to what really mattered, this was it.
Ding finished his first pint of beer. He’d have only one more. It was a rule that no one had written down and t
hat no one had actually enforced, but by common agreement nobody on the teams had more than two at a time while the teams were on-call, as they almost always were—and besides, two pints of Brit beer were quite a lot, really. Anyway, all the members of Team-2 were home having dinner with their families. Rainbow was an unusual outfit in that sense. Every soldier was married, with a wife and at least one kid. The marriages even appeared to be stable. John didn’t know if that was a mark of special-operations troopers, but these two-legged tigers who worked for him were pussycats at home, and the dichotomy was both amazing and amusing to him.
Sandy served the main course, a fine roast beef. John rose to get the carving knife so that he could do his duty. Patsy looked at the huge hunk of dead steer and thought briefly about mad-cow disease, but decided that her mother had cooked the meat thoroughly. Besides, she liked good roast beef, cholesterol and all, and her mom was the world’s champ at making gravy.
“How’s it going at the hospital?” Sandy asked her physician daughter.
“OB is pretty routine. We haven’t had a single hard one in the last couple of weeks. I’ve kinda hoped for a placenta previa, maybe even a placenta abrupta to see if we have the drill down, but—”
“Don’t wish for those, Patsy. I’ve seen them happen in the ER. Total panic, and the OB better have his act together, or things can go to hell in a New York minute. Dead mother and a dead child.”
“Ever see that happen, Mom?”