by Tom Clancy
Mr. Cooley had an ancient teak desk in keeping with the rest of the shop’s motif, and even a cushionless swivel chair to prove to the customers that nothing in the shop was modern. Even the bookkeeping was done by hand. No electronic calculators here. A battered ledger book dating back to the 1930s listed thousands of sales, and the shop’s book catalog was made of simple filing cards in small wooden boxes, one set listing books by title, and another by author. All writing was done with a gold-nibbed fountain pen. A no-smoking sign was the only modem touch. The smell of tobacco might have ruined the shop’s unique aroma. The store’s stationery bore the “by appointment to” crests of four Royal Family members. The arcade was but a ten-minute uphill walk from Buckingham Palace. The glass door had a hundred-year-old silver bell hanging on the top of the frame. It rang.
“Good morning, Mr. Cooley.”
“And to you, sir,” Dennis answered one of his regulars as he stood. He had an accent so neutral that his customers had him pegged as a native of three different regions. “I have the first-edition Defoe. The one you called about earlier this week. Just came in yesterday.”
“Is this the one from that collection in Cork you spoke about?”
“No, sir. I believe it’s originally from the estate of Sir John Claggett, near Swaffham Prior. I found it at Hawstead’s in Cambridge. ”
“A first edition?”
“Most certainly, sir.” The book dealer did not react noticeably. The code phrase was both constant and changing. Cooley made frequent trips to Ireland, both north and south, to purchase books from the estates of deceased collectors or from dealers in the country. When the customer mentioned any county in the Irish Republic, he indicated the destination for his information. When he questioned the edition of the book, he also indicated its importance. Cooley pulled the book off the shelf and set it on his desk. The customer opened it with care, running his finger down the title page.
“In an age of paperbacks and half-bound books. ...”
“Indeed.” Cooley nodded. Both men’s love for the art of bookbinding was genuine. Any good cover becomes more real than its builders expect. “The leather is in remarkable shape.” His visitor grunted agreement.
“I must have it. How much?”
The dealer didn’t answer. Instead Cooley removed the card from the box and handed it to his customer. He gave the card only a cursory look.
“Done.” The customer sat down in the store’s only other chair and opened his briefcase. “I have another job for you. This is an early copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. I found it last month at a little shop in Cornwall.” He handed the book over. Cooley needed only a single look at its condition.
“Scandalous. ”
“Can your chap restore it?”
“I don’t know. ...” The leather was cracked, some of the pages had been dog-eared, and the binding was frayed almost to nonexistence.
“I’m afraid the attic in which they found it had a leaky roof,” the customer said casually.
“Oh?” Is the information that important? Cooley looked up. “A tragic waste.”
“How else can you explain it?” The man shrugged.
“I’ll see what I can do. He’s not a miracle worker, you know.” Is it that important?
“I understand. Still, the best you can arrange.” Yes, it’s that important.
“Of course, sir.” Cooley opened his desk drawer and withdrew the cashbox.
This customer always paid cash. Of course. He removed the wallet from his suitcoat and counted out the fifty-pound notes. Cooley checked the amount, then placed the book in a stout cardboard box, which he tied with string. No plastic bags for this shop. Seller and buyer shook hands. The transfer was complete. The customer walked south toward Piccadilly, then turned right, heading west toward Green Park and downhill to the Palace.
Cooley took the envelope that had been hidden in the book and tucked it away in a drawer. He finished making his ledger entry, then called his travel agent to book a flight to Cork, where he would meet a fellow dealer in rare books and have lunch at the Old Bridge restaurant before catching a flight home. Beatrix would have to manage the shop tomorrow. It did not occur to him to open the envelope. That was not his job. The less he knew, the less was vulnerable if he were caught. Cooley had been trained by professionals, and the first rule pounded into his head had been need-to-know. He ran the intelligence operation, and he needed to know how to do that. He didn’t always need to know what specific information he gathered.
“Hello, Doctor Ryan.” It was an American voice, with a South Bay Boston accent that Jack remembered from his college days. It sounded good. The man was in his forties, a wiry, athletic frame, with thinning black hair. He had a flower box tucked under his arm. Whoever he was, the cop outside had opened the door for him.
“Howdy. Who might you be?”
“Dan Murray. I’m the Legal Attaché at the embassy. FBI,” he explained. “Sorry I couldn’t get down sooner, but things have been a little busy.” Murray showed his ID to the cop sitting in with Ryan—Tony Wilson was off duty. The cop excused himself. Murray took his seat.
“Lookin’ good, ace.”
“You could have left the flowers at the main desk.” Ryan gestured around the room. Despite all his efforts to spread the flowers about, he could barely see the walls for all the roses.
“Yeah, I figured that. How’s the grub?”
“Hospital food is hospital food.”
“Figured that, too.” Murray removed the red ribbon and opened the box. “How does a Whopper and fries grab you? You have a choice of vanilla or chocolate shakes.”
Jack laughed—and grabbed.
“I’ve been over here three years,” Murray said. “Every so often I have to hit the fast-food joints to remind myself where I come from. You can get tired of lamb. The local beer’s pretty good, though. I’d have brought a few of those but—well, you know.”
“You just made a friend for life, Mr. Murray, even without the beer. ”
“Dan.”
“Jack.” Ryan was tempted to wolf down the burger for fear of having a nurse come through the door and throw an immediate institutional fit. No, he decided, I’ll enjoy this one. He selected the vanilla shake. “The local guys say you broke records identifying me.”
“No big deal.” Murray poked a straw into the chocolate one. “By the way, I bring you greetings from the Ambassador—he wanted to come over, but they have a big-time party for later tonight. And my friends down the hall send their regards, too.”
“Who down the hall?”
“The people you have never worked for.” The FBI agent raised his eyebrows.
“Oh.” Jack swallowed a few fries. “Who the hell broke that story?”
“Washington. Some reporter was having lunch with somebody’s aide—doesn’t really matter whose, does it? They all talk too much. Evidently he remembered your name in the back of the final report and couldn’t keep his trap shut. Apologies from Langley, they told me to tell you. I saw the TV stuff. You dodged that pretty good.”
“I told the truth—barely. All my checks came through Mitre Corporation. Some sort of bookkeeping thing, and Mitre had the consulting contract.”
“I understand all your time was at Langley, though.”
“Yeah, a little cubbyhole on the third floor with a desk, a computer terminal, and a scratchpad. Ever been there?”
Murray smiled. “Once or twice. I’m in the terrorism business, too. The Bureau has a much nicer decorator. Helps to have a PR department, don’t you know?” Murray affected a caricatured London accent. “I saw a copy of the report. Nice work. How much of it did you do?”
“Most. It wasn’t all that hard. I just came up with a new angle to look at it from.”
“It’s been passed along to the Brits—I mean, it came over here two months ago for the Secret Intelligence Service. I understand they liked it.”
“So their cops know.”
“I’m not sure—well, yo
u can probably assume they do now. Owens is cleared all the way on this stuff.”
“And so’s Ashley.”
“He’s a little on the snotty side, but he’s damned smart. He’s ‘Five.’ ”
“What?” Ryan didn’t know that one.
“He’s in MI-5, the Security Service. We just call it Five. Has a nice insider feel that way.” Murray chuckled.
“I figured him for something like that. The other two started as street cops. It shows.”
“It struck a few people as slightly curious—the guy who wrote Agents and Agencies gets stuck in the middle of a terrorist op. That’s why Ashley showed up.” Murray shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe all the coincidences you run into in my business. Like you and me.”
“I know you come from New England—oh, don’t tell me. Boston College?”
“Hey, I always wanted to be an FBI agent. It was either BC or Holy Cross, right?” Murray grinned. That in-house FBI joke went back two generations, and was not without a few grains of truth. Ryan leaned back and sucked the shake up the straw. It tasted wonderful.
“How much do we know about these ULA guys?” Jack asked. “I never saw very much at Langley.”
“Not a hell of a lot. The boss-man’s a chap named Kevin O’Donnell. He used to be in the PIRA. He started throwing rocks in the streets and supposedly worked his way up to head counterintelligence man. The Provos are pretty good at that. Have to be. The Brits are always working to infiltrate the Organization. The word is that he got a little carried away cleansing the ranks, and barely managed to skip out before they gave him Excedrin Headache number three-five-seven. Just plain disappeared and hasn’t been spotted since. A few sketchy reports, like maybe he spent some time in Libya, like maybe he’s back in Ulster with a new face, like maybe he has a lot of money—want to guess where from?—to throw around. All we know for sure is that he’s one malignant son of a bitch.
“His organization?” Murray set the milkshake down. “It’s gotta be small, probably less than thirty. We think he had part of the breakout from Long Kesh last summer. Eleven hard-core Provos got out. The RUC bagged one of ’em two days later and he said that six of the eleven went south, probably to Kevin’s outfit. He was a little pissed by that. They were supposed to come back to the PIRA fold, but somebody convinced them to try something different. Some very bad boys—they had a total of fifteen murders among them. The one you killed is the only one to show up since. ”
“Are they that good?” Ryan asked.
“Hey, the PIRA are the best terrorists in the world, unless you count those bastards in Lebanon, and those are mostly family groups. Hell of a way to describe them, isn’t it? But they are the best. Well organized, well trained, and they believe, if you know what I mean. They really care about what they’re doing. The level of commitment these characters have to the Cause is something you have to see to believe.”
“You’ve been in on it?”
“Some. I’ve been able to sit in on interrogations—the other side of the two-way mirror, I mean. One of these guys wouldn’t talk—wouldn’t even give ’em his name!—for a week. Just sat there like a sphinx. Hey, I’ve chased after bank robbers, kidnappers, mob guys, spies, you name it. These fellows are real pros—and that’s the PIRA, maybe five hundred real members, not even as big as a New York Mafia family, and the RUC—that’s the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the local cops—is lucky to convict a handful in a year. They have a law of omertà up there that would impress the old-time Sicilians. But at least the cops have a handle on who the bastards are. The ULA—we got a couple of names, a few pictures, and that’s it. It’s almost like the Islamic Jihad bums. You only know them from what they do.”
“What do they do?” Ryan asked.
“They seem to specialize in high-risk, high-profile operations. It took over a year to confirm that they exist at all; we thought they were a special-action group of the PIRA. They’re an anomaly within the terrorist community. They don’t make press releases, they don’t take public credit for what they do. They go for the big-time stuff and they cover their tracks like you wouldn’t believe. It takes resources to do that. Somebody is bankrolling them in a pretty big way. They’ve been identified for nine jobs we’re sure of, maybe two others. They’ve only had three operations go bad—quite a track record. They missed killing a judge in Londonderry because the RPG round was a dud—it still took his body-guard out. They tried to hit a police barracks last February. Somebody saw them setting up and phoned in—but the bastards must have been monitoring the police radio. They skipped before the cavalry arrived. The cops found an eighty-two-millimeter mortar and a box of rounds—high-explosive and white phosphorus, to be exact. And you got in the way of the last one.
“These suckers are getting pretty bold,” Murray said. “On the other hand, we got one now.”
“We?” Ryan said curiously. “It’s not our fight.”
“We’re talking terrorists, Jack. Everybody wants them. We swap information back and forth with the Yard every day. Anyway, the guy they have in the can right now, they’ll keep talking at him. They have a hook on this one. The ULA is an outcast outfit. He is going to be a pariah and he knows it. His colleagues from PIRA and INLA won’t circle wagons around him. He’ll go to a maximum-security prison, probably to one on the Isle of Wight, populated with some real bad boys. Not all of them are political types, and the ordinary robbers.and murderers will probably—well, it’s funny how patriotic these guys are. Spies, for example, have about as much fun in the joint as child molesters. This guy went after the Royal Family, the one thing over here that everybody loves. We’re talking some serious hard time with this kid. You think the guards are going to bust their ass looking out for his well-being? He’s going to learn a whole new sport. It’s called survival. After he has a taste of it, people will talk to him. Sooner or later that kid’s going to have to decide just how committed he is. He just might break down a little. Some have. That’s what we play for, anyway. The bad guys have the initiative, we have organization and procedures. If they make a mistake, give us an opportunity, we can act on it.”
Ryan nodded. “Yeah, it’s all intelligence.”
“That’s right. Without the right information we’re crippled. All we can do is plod along and hope for a break. But give us one solid fact and we’ll bring the whole friggin’ world down on ’em. It’s like taking down a brick wall. The hard part’s getting that first brick loose.”
“And where do they get their information?”
“They told me you tumbled to that,” Murray observed with a smile.
“I don’t think it was a chance encounter. Somebody had to tip them. They hit a moving target making an unscheduled trip.”
“How the hell did you know that?” the agent demanded.
“Doesn’t matter, does it? People talk. Who knew that they were coming in?”
“That is being looked at. The interesting thing is what they were coming in for. Of course, that could just be a coincidence. The Prince gets briefed on political and national security stuff, same as the Queen does. Something happened with the Irish situation, negotiations between London and Dublin. He was coming in for the briefing. All I can tell you.”
“Hey, if you checked me out, you know how I’m cleared,” Ryan sniffed.
Murray grinned. “Nice try, ace. If you weren’t cleared TS, I wouldn’t have told you this much. We’re not privy to it yet anyway. Like I said, it might just have been a coincidence, but you guessed right on the important part. It was an unscheduled trip and somebody got the word out for the ambush. Only way it could have happened. You will consider that classified information, Doctor Ryan. It doesn’t go past that door.” Murray was affable. He was also very serious about his job.
Jack nodded agreement. “No problem. It was a kidnap, too, wasn’t it?”
The FBI agent grimaced and shook his head. “I’ve handled about a half-dozen kidnappings and closed every case with a conviction. We only lost o
ne hostage—they killed that kid the first day. Those two were executed. I watched,” Murray said coldly. “Kidnapping is a high-risk crime all the way down the line. They have to be at a specific place to get their money—that’s usually what gets ‘em caught. We can track people like you wouldn’t believe, then bring in the cavalry hard and fast. In this case ... we’re talking some impressive bargaining chips, and there would not be a money transfer—the public release of some ‘political’ prisoners is the obvious objective. The evidence does lean that way, except that these characters have never done one of those. It makes the escape procedures a lot more complex, but these ULA characters have always had their escape routes well planned beforehand. I’d say you’re probably right, but it’s not as clear-cut as you think. Owens and Taylor aren’t completely sure, and our friend isn’t talking. Big surprise.”
“They’ve never made a public announcement, you said? Was this supposed to be their break into the big time? Their first public announcement, they might as well do it with something spectacular,” Ryan said thoughtfully.
“That’s a fair guess.” Murray nodded. “It certainly would have put them on the map. Like I said, our intel on these chaps is damned thin; almost all of it’s secondhand stuff that comes through the PIRA—which is why we thought they were actually part of it. We haven’t exactly figured what they’re up to. Every one of their operations has—how do I say this? There seems to be a pattern there, but nobody’s ever figured it out. It’s almost as though the political fallout isn’t aimed at us at all, but that doesn’t make any sense—not that it has to make sense,” the agent grunted. “It’s not easy trying to psychoanalyze the terrorist mind.”