by Tom Clancy
You’re safe, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich, Popov told himself. Safe and rich, but it was time to stop taking risks. He’d initiate no more field operations for John Brightling. Once he got into O’Hare, he’d catch the next flight to New York, get back to his apartment, report in to Brightling, and then look for an elegant escape route. Would Brightling let him go?
He’d have to, Popov told himself. He and Henriksen were the only men on the planet who could link the executive to mass murder. He might think about killing me, but Henriksen would warn him not to. Henriksen was also a professional, and he knew the rules of the game. Popov had kept a diary, which was in a safe place, the vault of a law firm in New York, with carefully written handling instructions. So, no, that was not a real danger, so long as his “friends” knew the rules—and Popov would remind them, just in case.
Why go back to New York at all? Why not simply disappear? It was tempting . . . but, no. If nothing else, he had to tell Brightling and Henriksen to leave him alone from now on and explain why it was in their interest to do so. Besides, Brightling had an unusually good source in the American government and Popov could use that person’s information as additional protection. You never had too much protection.
With all that decided, Popov finally allowed himself to relax. Another ninety minutes to Chicago. Below him was a vast world, with plenty of room to disappear in, and now he had the money for it. It had all been worth it.
“Okay, what do we have?” John asked his senior executives.
“This name, Iosef Serov. It’s not on our computer in London,” said Cyril Holt of the Security Service. “What about CIA?”
Clark shook his head. “We have two guys named Serov on the books. One’s dead. The other one’s in his late sixties and retired in Moscow. What about the description?”
“Well, it fits this chap.” Holt passed a photo across the table.
“I’ve seen this one before.”
“He’s the chap who met with Ivan Kirilenko in London some weeks ago. That fits the rest of the puzzle, John. We believe he was involved in the leak of information on your organization, as you will recall. For him, then, to show up with Grady—well, it does fit, almost too well, as a matter of fact.”
“Any way to press this?”
“We can go to the RVS—both we and CIA have relatively good relations with Sergey Golovko, and perhaps they can assist us. I will lobby very hard for that,” Holt promised.
“What else?”
“These numbers,” Bill Tawney put in. “One is probably a bank account identification number, and the other is probably the control-activation code number. We’ll have their police look into it for us. That will tell us something, if the money hasn’t been laundered, of course, and if the account is still active, which it ought to be.”
“The weapons,” the senior cop present told them, “judging by the serial numbers, are of Soviet origin, from the factory in Kazan. They’re fairly old, at least ten years, but none of them had ever been fired before today. On the drug issue, I forwarded the information to Dennis Maguire—he’s chief of the Garda. It will be on the telly in the morning. They found and seized ten pounds of pure cocaine—by ‘pure’ I mean medicinal quality, almost as though it had been purchased from a pharmaceutical house. The street value is enormous. Millions,” the chief superintendent told them. “It was found in a semi-abandoned farmhouse on the Irish West Coast.”
“We have identification on three of the six prisoners. One has not yet been able to talk to us because of his injuries. Oh, they were using cellular phones to communicate, like walkie-talkies. Your Noonan chap did very well indeed to close the phone cells down. God only knows how many lives that saved,” Holt told them.
At the far end of the table, Chavez nodded and shivered at the news. If they’d been able to coordinate their actions . . . Jesus. It would not have been a good day for the good guys. What they’d had was bad enough. There would be funerals. People would have to put on their Class-A uniforms and line up and fire off the guns . . . and then they’d have to replace the men who were gone. Not far away, Mike Chin was in a bed, a cast on one of his wounded legs because a bone was broken. Team-1 was out of business for at least a month, even as well as they’d fought back. Noonan had come through big-time, having killed three of them with his pistol, along with Franklin, who’d just about decapitated one with his big MacMillan .50, then used his monster rifle to kill the little brown truck and keep the five terrorists in it from getting away. Chavez was looking down at the conference table and shaking his head when his beeper went off. He lifted it and saw that it was his home number. He rose from his seat and called on the wall phone.
“Yeah, honey?”
“Ding, you want to come over here. It’s started,” Patsy told him calmly. Ding’s response was a sudden flip of his heart.
“On the way, baby.” Ding hung up. “John, I gotta get home. Patsy says it’s started.”
“Okay, Domingo.” Clark managed a smile, finally. “Give her a kiss for me.”
“Roge-o, Mr. C.” And Chavez headed for the door.
“The timing on this thing is never good, is it?” Tawney observed.
“Well, at least something good is happening today.” John rubbed his eyes. He even accepted the idea of becoming a grandfather. It beat the hell out of losing people, a fact that had yet to hammer all the way into his consciousness. His people. Two of them, dead. Several more wounded. His people.
“Okay,” Clark went on. “What about the information leak? People, we’ve been set up and hit. What are we going to do about it?”
“Hello, Ed, it’s Carol,” the President’s Science Advisor said.
“Hi, Dr. Brightling. What can I do for you?”
“What the hell happened in England today? Was it our people—our Rainbow team, I mean?”
“Yes, Carol, it was.”
“How did they do? The TV wasn’t very clear, and—”
“Two dead, four or so wounded,” the DCI answered. “Nine terrorists dead, six captured, including their leader.”
“The radios we got to them, how’d they work?”
“Not sure. I haven’t seen the after-action report yet, but I know the main thing they’re going to want to know.”
“What’s that, Ed?”
“Who spilled the beans. They knew John’s name, his wife and daughter’s names, identities, and place of work. They had good intel, and John isn’t very happy about that.”
“The family members, are they okay?”
“Yeah, no civilians hurt, thank God. Hell, Carol, I know Sandy and Patricia. There’s going to be some serious fallout over this one.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Not sure yet, but I won’t forget you asked.”
“Yeah, well, I want to know if those radio gadgets worked. I told the guys at E-Systems to get them out pronto, ’cuz these guys are important. Gee, I hope they helped some.”
“I’ll find out, Carol,” the DCI promised.
“Okay, you know where to reach me.”
“Okay, thanks for the call.”
CHAPTER 30
VISTAS
It was everything he’d expected—not knowing what to expect—and more, and at the end of it Domingo Chavez held his son in his hands.
“Well,” he said, looking down at the new life that would be his to guard, educate, and in time present to the world. After a second that seemed to last into weeks, he handed the newborn to his wife.
Patsy’s face was bathed in perspiration, and weary from the five-hour ordeal of delivery, but already, as such things went, the pain was forgotten. The goal had been achieved, and she held her child. The package was pink, hairless, and noisy, the last part assuaged by the proximity of Patsy’s left breast, as John Conor Chavez got his first meal. But Patsy was exhausted, and in due course a nurse removed the child to the nursery. Then Ding kissed his wife and walked alongside her bed as she was wheeled to her room. She was already asleep when
they arrived. He kissed her one last time and walked outside. His car took him back onto the Hereford base, and then to the official home of Rainbox Six.
“Yeah?” John said, opening the door.
Chavez just handed over a cigar with a blue ring. “John Conor Chavez, seven pounds eleven ounces. Patsy’s doing fine, gran-pop,” Ding said, with a subdued grin. After all, Patsy had done the hard part.
There are moments to make the strongest of men weep, and this was one of them. The two men embraced. “Well,” John said, after a minute or so, reaching into the pocket of his bathrobe for a handkerchief with which he rubbed his eyes. “Who’s he look like?”
“Winston Churchill,” Domingo replied with a laugh. “Hell, John, I’ve never been able to figure that one out, but John Conor Chavez is a confusing enough name, isn’t it? The little bastard has a lot of heritage behind him. I’ll start him off on karate and guns about age five . . . maybe six,” Ding mused.
“Better golf and baseball, but he’s your kid, Domingo. Come on in.”
“Well?” Sandy demanded, and Chavez gave the news for the second time while his boss lit up his Cuban cigar. He despised smoking, and Sandy, a nurse, hardly approved of the vice, but on this one occasion, both relented. Mrs. Clark gave Ding a hug. “John Conor?”
“You knew?” John Terrence Clark asked.
Sandy nodded. “Patsy told me last week.”
“It was supposed to be a secret,” the new father objected.
“I’m her mother, Ding!” Sandy explained. “Breakfast?”
The men checked their watches. It was just after four in the morning, close enough, they all agreed.
“You know, John, this is pretty profound,” Chavez said. His father-in-law noted how Domingo switched in and out of accents depending on the nature of the conversation. The previous day, interrogating the PIRA prisoners he’d been pure Los Angeles gang kid, his speech redolent with Spanish accent and street euphemisms. But in his reflective moments, he reverted to a man with a university master’s degree, with no accent at all. “I’m a papa. I’ve got a son.” Followed by a slow, satisfied, and somewhat awestruck grin. “Wow.”
“The great adventure, Domingo,” John agreed, while his wife got the bacon going. He poured the coffee.
“Huh?”
“Building a complete person. That’s the great adventure, sonny boy, and if you don’t do it right, what the hell good are you?”
“Well, you guys’ve done okay.”
“Thanks, Domingo,” Sandy said from the stove. “We worked at it pretty hard.”
“More her than me,” John said. “I was away so damned much, playing field-spook. Missed three Christmases, goddamnit. You never forgive yourself for that,” he explained. “That’s the magic morning, and you’re supposed to be there.”
“Doing what?”
“Russia twice, Iran once—getting assets out every time. Two worked, but one came apart on me. Lost that one, and he didn’t make it. Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. He bit the big one four months later, poor bastard. Not a good Christmas,” Clark concluded, remembering just how bleak that had been, seeing the KGB scoop the man up not fifty meters from where he’d been standing, seeing the face turned to him, the look of despair on the doomed face, having to turn away to make his own escape down the pipeline he’d set up for two, knowing there was nothing else he might have done, but feeling like shit about it anyway. Then, finally, he’d had to explain to Ed Foley what had happened—only to learn later that the agent had been burned—“shopped” was the euphemism—by a KGB mole inside CIA’s own headquarters building. And that fuck was still alive in a federal prison, with cable TV and central heating.
“It’s history, John,” Chavez told him, understanding the look. They’d deployed on similar missions, but the Clark-Chavez team had never failed, though some of their missions had been on the insane side of hairy. “You know the funny part about this?”
“What’s that?” John asked, wondering if it would be the same feeling he’d had.
“I know I’m gonna die now. Someday, I mean. The little guy, he’s gotta outlive me. If he doesn’t, then I’ve screwed it up. Can’t let that happen, can I? JC is my responsibility. While he grows up, I grow old, and by the time he’s my age, hell, I’ll be in my sixties. Jesus, I never planned to be old, y’know?”
Clark chuckled. “Yeah, neither did I. Relax, kid. Now I’m a”—he almost said “fucking,” but Sandy didn’t like that particular epithet—“goddamned grandfather. I never planned on that, either.”
“It’s not so bad, John,” Sandy observed, cracking open the eggs. “We can spoil him and hand him back. And we will.”
It hadn’t happened that way with their kids, at least not on John’s side of the family. His mother was long dead from cancer, and his father from a heart attack on the job, while rescuing some children from a dwelling fire in Indianapolis, back in the late 1960s. John wondered if they knew that their son had grown up, and then grown old, and was now a grandfather. There was no telling, was there? Mortality and its attendant issues were normal at times like this, he supposed. The great continuity of life. What would John Conor Chavez become? Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief? That was mainly Domingo and Patsy’s job, and he had to trust them to do it properly, and they probably would. He knew his daughter and knew Ding almost as well. From the first time he’d seen the kid, in the mountains of Colorado, he’d known that this boy had something special in him, and the younger man had grown, blossoming like a flower in a particularly tough garden. Domingo Chavez was a younger version of himself, a man of honor and courage, Clark told himself, and therefore he’d be a worthy father, as he’d proven to be a worthy husband. The great continuity of life, John told himself again, sipping his coffee and puffing on the cigar, and if it was yet one more milestone on the road to death, then so be it. He’d had an interesting life, and a life that had mattered to others, as had Domingo, and as they all hoped would, John Conor. And what the hell, Clark thought, his life wasn’t over yet, was it?
Getting a flight to New York had proven more difficult than expected. They were all fully booked, but finally Popov had managed to get himself a coach seat in the back of an old United 727. He disliked the tight fit, but the flight was short. At La Guardia, he headed for a cab, on the way out checking his inside coat pocket and finding the travel documents that had gotten him across the Atlantic. They had served him well, but they had to go. Emerging into the evening air, he surreptitiously dumped them into a trash container before walking to the cabstand. He was a weary man. His day had started just after midnight, American East Coast time, and he hadn’t managed much sleep on the transatlantic flight, and his body was—how did the Americans put it?—running on empty. Maybe that explained the break with fieldcraft.
Thirty minutes later, Popov was within blocks of his downtown apartment, when the waste-disposal crew circulated past the United Airlines terminal to change the trash bags. The routine was mechanical and fairly strenuous physical labor for the mostly Puerto Rican work crew. One at a time, they lifted the metal tops off the cans and reached in to remove the heavy-gauge plastic garbage bags, then turned to dump them into wheeled containers that would later be tipped into trucks for transport to a landfill on Staten Island. The routine was good upper-body exercise, and most of the men carried portable radios to help themselves deal with the boredom of the work.
One can, fifty yards from the cabstand, didn’t sit properly in its holder. When the cleanup man lifted the bag, it caught on a metallic edge and ripped, spilling its contents onto the concrete sidewalk. That generated a quiet curse from the worker, who now had to bend down and pick up a bunch of objects with his gloved hands. He was halfway through when he saw the crimson cardboard cover of what appeared to be a British passport. People didn’t throw those things away, did they? He flipped it open and saw two credit cards inside, stamped with the same name on the passport. Serov, he saw
, an unusual name. He dropped the whole package into the thigh pocket of his coveralls. He’d bring it by the lost-and-found. It wasn’t the first time he’d discovered valuable stuff in the trash. Once he’d even recovered a fully loaded 9-mm pistol!
By this time Popov was in his apartment, too tired even to unpack his bags. Instead he merely undressed and collapsed on the bed without even a vodka to help him off to sleep. By reflex, he turned on the TV and caught yet another story about the Hereford shoot-out. The TV was—govno, shit, he thought. There was the TV truck whose reporter had come close and tried to interview him. They hadn’t used it, but there he was, in profile, from twenty feet away, while the reporter gave a stand-up. All the more reason to clear out now, he thought, as he drifted off. He didn’t even have the energy to switch the TV off, and he slept with it on, the recurring stories entering his mind and giving him confused and unpleasant dreams throughout the night.
The passport, credit cards, and a few other items of apparent value arrived at the waste-disposal company’s Staten Island office—actually a trailer that had been towed to the spot—after the close of regular business hours. The trash collector tossed it on the correct desk and punched his time card on the way out for his drive back to Queens and his usual late dinner.
Tom Sullivan had worked late, and was now in the bar the FBI agents frequented, a block from the Jacob Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan. His partner Frank Chatham was there, too, and the two agents sat in a booth, sipping at their Sam Adams beers.
“Anything happening on your end?” Sullivan asked. He’d been in court all day, waiting to testify in a fraud case, but had never gotten to the witness stand because of procedural delays.
“I talked with two girls today. They both say they know Kirk Maclean, but neither one actually dated him,” Chatham replied. “Looks like another dry hole. I mean, he was cooperative, wasn’t he?”