by Tom Clancy
“Shit,” Clark observed. Then he thought for a second. “The Russian?”
Tawney nodded sagely. “Yes, that makes sense, doesn’t it? He set them up a numbered account, and when they were taken out, he still had the necessary numbers, didn’t he?”
“Fuck, so he sets them up and rips them off.”
“Quite,” Tawney observed. “Grady said six million dollars in the hospital, and the Swiss confirm that number. He needs a few hundred thousand to purchase the trucks and other vehicles they used—we have records on that from the police investigation—and left the rest in place, and then this Russian chap decided they have no further use of the funds. Well, why not?” the intelligence officer asked. “Russians are notoriously greedy people, you know.”
“The Russian giveth, and the Russian taketh away. He gave them the intel on us, too.”
“I would not wager against that, John,” Tawney agreed.
“Okay, let’s back up some,” John proposed, putting his temper back in its box. “This Russian appears, gives them intelligence information on us, funds the operation from somewhere—sure as hell not Russia, because, A, they have no reason to undertake such an operation and, B, they don’t have that much money to toss around. First question: where did the money—”
“And the drugs, John. Don’t forget that.”
“Okay, and the drugs—come from?”
“Easier to track the drugs, perhaps. The Garda say that the cocaine was medical quality, which means that it came from a drug company. Cocaine is closely controlled in every nation in the world. Ten pounds is a large quantity, enough to fill a fairly large suitcase—cocaine is about as dense as tobacco. So the bulk of the shipment would be the equivalent of ten pounds of cigarettes. Say the size of a large suitcase. That’s a bloody large quantity of drugs, John, and it would leave a gap in someone’s controlled and guarded warehouse, wherever it might be.”
“You’re thinking it all originated in America?” Clark asked.
“For a starting point, yes. The world’s largest pharmaceutical houses are there and here in Britain. I can get our chaps started checking out Distillers, Limited, and the others for missing cocaine. I expect your American DEA can attempt to do the same.”
“I’ll call the FBI about that,” Clark said at once. “So, Bill, what do we know?”
“We will assume that Grady and O’Neil were telling us the truth about this Serov chap. We have a former—presumably former—KGB officer who instigated the Hereford attack. Essentially he hired them to do it, like mercenaries, with a payment of cash and drugs. When the attack failed, he simply confiscated the money for his own ends, and on that I still presume that he kept it for himself. The Russian will not have such private means—well, I suppose it could be the Russian Mafia, all those former KGB chaps who are now discovering free enterprise, but I see no reason why they should target us. We here at Rainbow are not a threat to them in any way, are we?”
“No,” Clark agreed.
“So, we have a large quantity of drugs and six million American dollars, delivered by a Russian. I am assuming for the moment that the operation originated in America, because of the drugs and the quantity of the money.”
“Why?”
“I cannot justify that, John. Perhaps it’s my nose telling me that.”
“How did he get to Ireland?” John asked, agreeing to trust Tawney’s nose.
“We don’t know that. He must have flown into Dublin—yes, I know, with such a large quantity of drugs, that is not a prudent thing to do. We need to ask our friends about that.”
“Tell the cops that’s important. We can get a flight number and point of origin from that.”
“Quite.” Tawney made a note.
“What else are we missing?”
“I’m going to have my chaps at ‘Six’ check for the names of KGB officers who are known to have worked with terrorist groups. We have a rough physical description which may be of some use for the purposes of elimination. But I think our best hope is the ten pounds of drugs.”
Clark nodded. “Okay, I’ll call the Bureau on that one.”
“Ten pounds, eh?”
“That’s right, Dan, and doctor-quality pure. That’s a real shitload of coke, man, and there ought to be a blank spot in somebody’s warehouse.”
“I’ll call DEA and have them take a quick look,” the FBI Director promised. “Anything shaking on your end?”
“We’re giving the tree a kick, Dan,” John told him. “For the moment we’re proceeding on the assumption that the operation initiated in America.” He explained on to tell Murray why this was so.
“This Russian guy, Serov, you said, former KGB, formerly a go-between for terrorists. There weren’t all that many of those, and we have some information on the specialty.”
“Bill’s having ‘Six’ look at it, too, and I’ve already kicked it around with Ed Foley. I talked to Sergey Golovko about it as well.”
“You really think he’ll help?” Director Murray asked.
“The worst thing he can say is no, Dan, and that’s where we are already,” Rainbow Six pointed out.
“True,” Dan conceded. “Anything else we can do on this end?”
“If I come up with anything I’ll let you know, pal.”
“Okay, John. Been watching the Olympics?”
“Yeah, I actually have a team there.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, Ding Chavez and some men. The Aussies wanted us down to observe their security operations. He says they’re pretty good.”
“Free trip to the Olympics, not a bad gig,” the FBI director observed.
“I guess so, Dan. Anyway, let us know if you turn anything, will ya?”
“You bet, John. See you later, pal.”
“Yeah. Bye, Dan.”
Clark replaced the secure phone and leaned back in his chair, wondering what he might be missing. He was checking everything he had thought of, every loose end, hoping that somewhere someone might come up with another seemingly innocent factoid that might lead to another. He’d never quite appreciated how hard it was to be a cop investigating a major crime. The color of the damned car the bad guys drove was or could be important, and you had to remember to ask that question, too. But it was something for which he was not trained, and he had to trust the cops to do their jobs.
They were doing that. In London, the police sat Timothy O’Neil down in the usual interrogation room. Tea was offered and accepted.
It wasn’t easy for O’Neil. He wanted to say nothing at all, but with the shock of the information given him by the police that could only have originated with Sean Grady, his faith and his resolve had been shaken, and as a result he had said a few things, and that was a process that once begun could not be taken back.
“This Russian chap, Serov, you told us his name was,” the detective inspector began. “He flew into Ireland?”
“It’s a long swim, mate,” O’Neil replied as a joke.
“Yes, and a difficult drive,” the police inspector agreed. “How did he fly in?”
The answer to that was silence. That was disappointing, but not unexpected.
“I can tell you something you don’t know, Tim,” the inspector offered, to jump-start the conversation.
“What might that be?”
“This Serov bloke set you up a numbered Swiss account for all the money he brought in. Well, we just learned from the Swiss that he cleaned it out.”
“What?”
“The day of your operation, someone called the bank and transferred nearly all the money out. So, your Russian friend gave with one hand, and took away with the other. Here”—the inspector handed a sheet of paper across—“this is the account number, and this is the activation number to do transfers. Six million dollars, less what you chaps spent to buy the trucks and such. He transferred it out, to his own personal account, I’ll wager. You chaps picked the wrong friend, Tim.”
“That bloody fucking thief!” O’Neil w
as outraged.
“Yes, Tim, I know. You’ve never been one of those. But this Serov chappie is, and that’s a fact, my boy.”
O’Neil swore something at odds with his Catholicism. He recognized the account number, knew that Sean had written it down, and was reasonably certain that this cop wasn’t lying to him about what had happened with it.
“He flew into Shannon on a private business jet. I do not know where from.”
“Really?”
“Probably because of the drugs he brought in with him. They don’t search plutocrats, do they? Bloody nobility, they act like.”
“What kind of aircraft, do you know?”
O’Neil shook his head. “It had two engines and the tail was shaped like a T, but no, I do not know the name of the bloody thing.”
“And how did he get to the meeting?”
“We had a car meet him.”
“Who drove the car?” the inspector asked next.
“I will not give you names. I’ve told you that.”
“Forgive me, Tim, but I must ask. You know that,” the cop apologized. He’d worked hard winning this terrorist’s confidence. “Sean trusted this Serov chap. That was evidently a mistake. The funds were transferred out two hours after your operation began. We rather suspect he was somewhere close, to watch, and when he saw how things were going, he simply robbed you. Russians are greedy buggers,” the cop sympathized. His eyes didn’t show his pleasure at the new information developed. The room was bugged, of course, and already the Police of the Metropolis were on the phone to Ireland.
The Irish national police force, called the Garda, had almost always cooperated with their British counterparts, and this time was no exception. The senior local Gardai drove at once to Shannon to check for flight records—as far as he was concerned, all he wanted to know was how ten pounds of illegal drugs had entered his country. That tactical mistake by the IRA had only enraged the local cops, some of whom did have their tribal sympathies with the revolutionary movement to the north. But those sympathies stopped well short of drug-trafficking, which they, like most cops in the world, regarded as the dirtiest of crimes.
The flight-operations office at Shannon had paper records of every flight that arrived or departed from the complex, and with the date, the assistant operations manager found the right sheet in under three minutes. Yes, a Gulfstream business jet had arrived early in the morning, refueled, and departed soon after. The documents showed the tail number and the names of the flight crew. More to the point, it showed that the aircraft was registered in the United States to a large charter company. From this office, the Irish police officer went to immigration/customs control, where he found that one Joseph Serov had indeed cleared customs on the morning indicated. The Gardai took a photocopy of all relevant documents back to his station, where they were faxed immediately to Garda headquarters in Dublin, and then on to London, and from there to Washington, D.C.
“Damn,” Dan Murray said at his desk. “It did start here, eh?”
“Looks that way,” said Chuck Baker, the assistant director in charge of the criminal division.
“Run this one down, Chuck.”
“You bet, Dan. This one’s getting pretty deep.”
Thirty minutes later, a pair of FBI agents arrived at the office of the charter company at the Teterboro, New Jersey, airport. There they soon ascertained that the aircraft had been chartered by one Joseph Serov, who’d paid for the charter with a certified check drawn on an account at Citibank that was in his name. No, they didn’t have a photo of the client. The flight crew was elsewhere on another flight, but as soon as they came back they would cooperate with the FBI, of course.
From there the agents, plus some photocopied documents, went to the bank branch where Serov kept his account, and there learned that nobody at the branch had ever met the man. His address, they found, was the same damned post-office box that had dead-ended the search for his credit card records.
By this time, the FBI had a copy of Serov’s passport photo—but those were often valueless for the purposes of identification, intended more, Director Murray thought, to identify the body of a plane-crash victim than to facilitate the search for a living human being.
But the case file was growing, and for the first time Murray felt optimistic. They were gradually turning up data on this subject, and sooner or later they’d find where he’d slipped up—trained KGB officer or not—because everyone did, and once you appeared on the FBI’s collective radarscope, nine thousand skilled investigators started looking, and they wouldn’t stop looking until told to stop. Photo, bank account, credit card records . . . the next step would be to find out how the money had gotten into his account. He had to have an employer and/or sponsor, and that person or entity could be squeezed for additional information. It was now just a matter of time, and Murray thought they had all the time they needed to run this mutt down. It wasn’t often that they bagged a trained spook. They were the most elusive of game, and for that reason all the more pleasing when you could hang the head of one over the mantelpiece. Terrorism and drug-trafficking. This would be a juicy case to give to a United States Attorney.
“Hello,” Popov said.
“Howdy,” the man replied. “You’re not from here.”
“Dmitriy Popov,” the Russian said, extending his hand.
“Foster Hunnicutt,” the American said, taking it. “What do you do here?”
Popov smiled. “Here, I do nothing at all, though I am learning to ride a horse. I work directly for Dr. Brightling.”
“Who—oh, the big boss of this place?”
“Yes, that is correct. And you?”
“I’m a hunter and guide,” the man from Montana replied.
“Good, and you are not a vegan?”
Hunnicutt thought that was pretty good. “Not exactly. I like red meat as much as the next man. But I prefer elk to this mystery meat,” he went on, looking down with some distaste for what was on his plate.
“Elk?”
“Wapiti, biggest damned deer you’re ever gonna see. A good one’s got maybe four, five hundred pounds of good meat in him. Nice rack, too.”
“Rack?”
“The antlers, horns on the head. I’m partial to bear meat, too.”
“That’ll piss off a lot of the folks here,” Dr. Killgore observed, working into his pasta salad.
“Look, man, hunting is the first form of conservation. If somebody don’t take care of the critters, there ain’t nothing to hunt. You know, like Teddy Roosevelt and Yellowstone National Park. If you want to understand game, I mean really understand them, you better be a hunter.”
“No arguments here,” the epidemiologist said.
“Maybe I’m not a bunny-hugger. Maybe I kill game, but, goddamnit, I eat what I kill. I don’t kill things just to watch ’em die—well,” he added, “not game animals anyway. But there’s a lot of ignorant-ass people I wouldn’t mind popping.”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” Maclean asked with a smile.
“You bet. Too many people fucking up the place with electric toothbrushes and cars and ugly-ass houses.”
“I brought Foster into the Project,” Mark Waterhouse replied. He’d known Maclean for years.
“All briefed in?” Killgore asked.
“Yes, sir, and it’s all fine with me. You know, I always wondered what it was like to be Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith. Maybe now I can find out, give it a few years.”
“About five,” Maclean said, “according to our computer projections.”
“Bridger? Smith?” Popov asked.
“They were Mountain Men,” Hunnicutt told the Russian. “They were the first white men to see the West, and they were legends, explorers, hunters, Indian fighters.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame about the Indians.”
“Maybe so,” Hunnicutt allowed.
“When did you get in?” Maclean asked Waterhouse.
“We drove in today,” Mark replied. “Th
e place is about full up now, isn’t it?” He didn’t like the crowding.
“That it is,” Killgore confirmed. He didn’t, either. “But it’s still nice outside. You ride, Mr. Hunnicutt?”
“How else does a man hunt in the West? I don’t use no SUV, man.”
“So, you’re a hunting guide?”
“Yeah.” Hunnicutt nodded. “I used to be a geologist for the oil companies, but I kissed that off a long time ago. I got tired of helping to kill the planet, y’know?”
Another tree-worshiping druid, Popov thought. It wasn’t especially surprising, though this one struck him as verbose and a little bombastic.
“But then,” the hunter went on, “well, I figured out what was important.” He explained for a few minutes about the Brown Smudge. “And I took my money and hung it up, like. Always liked hunting and stuff, and so I built me a cabin in the mountains—bought an old cattle ranch—and took to hunting full-time.”
“Oh, you can do that? Hunt full-time, I mean?” Killgore asked.
“That depends. A fish-and-game cop hassled me about it . . . but, well, he stopped hassling me.”
Popov caught a wink from Waterhouse to Killgore when this primitive said that, and in a second he knew that this Hunnicutt person had killed a police officer and gotten away with it. What sort of people did this “project” recruit?
“Anyway, we all ride in the morning. Want to join us?”
“You bet! I never turn that down.”
“I have learned to enjoy it myself,” Popov put in.
“Dmitriy, you must have some Cossack in you.” Killgore laughed. “Anyway, Foster, show up here for breakfast a little before seven, and we can go out together.”