by Tom Clancy
Which was why she was annoyed with life at the moment. It was a minor annoyance having to take a slightly different route to work every day—in fact it was something of a challenge, since she gave herself the goal of not allowing it to affect her schedule. Driving to and from work never took more than fifty-seven minutes, nor less than forty-nine (unless she came in on a weekend, when different traffic rules applied). She always picked up Sally at exactly quarter to five. Taking new routes, mainly inside Baltimore, threatened to change this segment of her life, but there weren’t many driving problems that a Porsche 911 couldn’t solve.
Her route this day was down state Route 3, then across a secondary road. That brought her out onto Ritchie Highway, six miles above the Giant Steps Nursery School. She caught the light just right and took the turn in second gear, working quickly up to third, then fourth. The feline growl of the six-cylinder engine reached through the sound insulation as a gentle purr. Cathy Ryan loved her Porsche. She’d never driven anything else until after she was married—a station wagon was useful for shopping and family drives, unfortunately—and wondered what she’d do when her second child arrived. That, she sighed, would be a problem. It depended on where the sitter was, she decided. Or maybe she could finally convince Jack to get a nanny. Her husband was a little too working-class in that respect. He’d resisted the idea of hiring a part-time maid to help with the housework—that was all the more crazy since Cathy knew her husband tended to be something of a slob, slow to hang up his clothing. Getting the maid had changed that a little. Now, nights before the maid was due in, Jack scurried around picking things up so that she wouldn’t think the Ryans were a family of slovens. Jack could be so funny. Yes, she thought, we’ll get a nanny. After all, Jack’s a knight now. Cathy smiled at the traffic. Pushing him in the right direction wouldn’t be all that hard. Jack was very easy to manipulate. She changed lanes and darted past a dump truck in third gear. The Porsche made it so easy to accelerate around things.
She turned right into the Giant Steps parking lot two minutes later. The sports car bumped over the uneven driveway and she brought it to a stop in the usual spot. Cathy locked the car on getting out, of course. Her Porsche was six years old, but meticulously maintained. It had been her present to herself on getting through her intern year at Hopkins. There wasn’t a single scratch on the British Racing Green finish, and only a Hopkins parking sticker marred the gleaming chrome bumper.
“Mommy!” Sally met her at the door.
Cathy bent to pick her up. It was getting harder to bend over, and harder still to stand up with Sally around her neck. She hoped that their daughter would not feel threatened by the arrival of the baby. Some kids were, she knew, but she had already explained to the little girl what was going on, and Sally seemed to like the idea of a new brother or sister.
“So what did my big girl do today?” Dr. Ryan asked. Sally liked being called a Big Girl, and this was Cathy’s subterfuge for ensuring that sibling rivalry would be minimized by the arrival of a “little” boy or girl.
Sally wriggled free to drop back to the floor, and held up a finger painting done on what looked like wide-carriage computer paper. It was a credible abstract work of purple and orange. Together, mother and daughter went to the back and got her coat and lunch box. Cathy made sure that Sally’s coat was zipped and the hood up—it was only a few degrees above freezing outside, and they didn’t want Sally to get another cold. It took a total of five minutes from the time Cathy stopped the car until she was back out the door, walking toward it again.
She didn’t really notice the routineness of her daily schedule. Cathy unlocked the door, got Sally into her seat, and made sure the seat belt was fastened snugly before closing and locking the door and going around to the left side of the car.
She looked up briefly. Across Ritchie Highway was a small shopping center, a 7-Eleven Store, a cleaners, a video store, and a hardware dealer. There was a blue van parked at the 7-Eleven again. She’d noticed it twice the previous week. Cathy shrugged it off. 7-Eleven was a convenience store, and lots of people made it a regular stop on the way home.
“Hello, Lady Ryan,” Miller said inside the van. The two windows in the rear doors—they reminded Miller of the police transport van; he smiled to himself at that—were made of coated glass so that an outsider couldn’t see in. Alex was in the store getting a six-pack of Cokes, as he’d done on a fairly regular basis the previous two weeks.
Miller checked his watch: She’d arrived at 4:46 and was leaving at 4:52. Next to him, a man with a camera was shooting away. Miller raised binoculars. The green Porsche would be easy to spot, plus it had a customized license plate, CR-SRGN. Alex had explained how license plates in Maryland could be bought to individual specifications, and Sean wondered who’d be using that code next year. Surely there was another surgeon with the initials CR.
Alex got back in and started the engine. The van left the parking lot just as the target’s Porsche did. Alex did his own driving. He went north on Ritchie Highway, hung a quick U-turn, and raced south to keep the Porsche in sight. Miller joined him in the right-side seat.
“She takes this road south to Route 50, across the Severn River bridge, then gets off 50 onto Route 2. We want to hit her before she does that. We’ll proceed, take the same exit, and switch cars where I showed you. Too bad,” Alex said. “I was beginning to like this here van.”
“You can buy another with what we’re paying you.”
A grin split the black face. “Yeah, I ’spect so. Have a better interior on the next one, too.” He turned right, taking the exit onto Route 50. It was a divided, multilane highway. Traffic was moderate to heavy. Alex explained that this was normal.
“No problem getting the job done,” he assured Miller.
“Excellent,” Miller agreed. “Good work, Alex.” Even if you do have a big mouth.
Cathy always drove more sedately with Sally aboard. The little girl craned her neck to see over the dashboard, her left hand fiddling with the seat belt buckle as it usually did. Her mother was relaxing now. It generally took her about this length of time to settle down from a hard day—there were few easy ones—at the Wilmer Eye Institute. It wasn’t stress so much. She’d had two procedures today and would have two more the next day. She loved her work. There were a lot of people now who could see only because of her professional skill, and the satisfaction of that was not something easily communicated, even to Jack. The price of it was that her days were rarely easy ones. The minute precision demanded by ophthalmic surgery denied her coffee—she couldn’t risk the slight tremor in her hands that might come from caffeine—and imposed a degree of concentration on her that few professions demanded. There were more difficult medical skills, but not many. This was the main reason she drove her 911. It was as though in pushing through the air, or taking a tight corner at twenty-five in second gear, the car drained the excess energy from the driver and spread it into the environment. She almost always got home in a good mood. Tonight would be better still since it was Jack’s turn to fix dinner. If the car had been built with a brain, it would have noticed the reduced pressure on accelerator and brakes as they took the Route 2 exit. It was being pampered now, like a faithful horse that had jumped all the fences properly.
“Okay?” Alex asked, keeping west on Route 50 toward Washington.
The other man in the back handed Miller the clipboard with the new time notation. There was a total of seven entries, all but the last complete with photographs. Sean looked at the numbers. The target was on a beautifully regular schedule.
“Fine,” he said after a moment.
“I can’t give you a precise spot for the hit—traffic can make things go a little funny. I’d say we should try on the east side of the bridge.”
“Agreed.”
Cathy Ryan walked into her house fifteen minutes later. She unzipped Sally’s coat and watched her little—“big”—girl struggle out of the sleeves, a skill she was just beginning to acquire. Cath
y took it and hung it up before getting out of her coat. Mother and daughter then proceeded to the kitchen, where they heard the unmistakable noise of a husband trying to fix dinner and a television tuned to the MacNeil-Lehrer Report.
“Daddy, look what I did!” Sally said first.
“Oh, great!” Jack took the picture and examined it with great care. “I think we’ll hang this one up.” All of them got hung up. The art gallery in question was the front of the family refrigerator. A magnetized holder gave the finger painting a semipermanent place over the ice and cold-water dispenser. Sally never noticed that there was a new hanging spot every day. Nor did she know that every such painting was saved, tucked away in a box in the foyer closet.
“Hi, babe.” Jack kissed his wife next. “How were things today?”
“Two cornea replacements. Bernie assisted on the second one—it was a bear. Tomorrow, I’m scheduled for a vitrectomy. Bernie says hi, by the way.”
“How’s his kid?” Jack asked.
“Just an appendectomy, she’ll be climbing the monkey bars next week,” Cathy replied, surveying the kitchen. She often wondered if having Jack fix dinner was worth the wreckage he made of her room. It appeared that he was fixing pot roast, but she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t that Jack was a bad cook—with some things he was pretty good—he was just so damned sloppy about it. Never kept his utensils neat. Cathy always had her knives, forks, and everything else arranged like a surgical instrument tray. Jack would just set them anywhere and spent half of his time looking for where they were.
Sally left the room and found a TV that didn’t have a news show on.
“Good news,” Jack said.
“Oh?”
“I finished up at CIA today.”
“So what are you smiling about?”
“There just isn’t anything I see to make me suspect that we have anything to worry about.” Jack explained for several minutes, keeping within the bounds of classification—mostly. “They’ve never operated over here. They don’t have any contacts over here that we know of. The real thing is that we’re not good targets for them.”
“Why?”
“We’re not political. The people they go after are soldiers, police, judges, mayors, stuff like that—”
“Not to mention the odd prince,” Cathy observed.
“Yeah, well, we’re not one of those either, are we?”
“So what are you telling me?”
“They’re a scary bunch. That Miller kid—well, we’ve talked about that. I’ll feel a little better when they have him back in the can. But these guys are pros. They’re not going to mount an op three thousand miles from home for revenge.”
Cathy took his hand. “You’re sure?”
“Sure as I can be. The intelligence biz isn’t like mathematics, but you get a feel for the other guy, the way his head works. A terrorist kills to make a political point. We ain’t political fodder.”
Cathy gave her husband a gentle smile. “So I can relax now?”
“I think so. Still, keep an eye on the mirror.”
“And you’re not going to carry that gun anymore,” she said hopefully.
“Babe, I like shooting. I forgot what fun a pistol can be. I’m going to keep shooting at the Academy, but, no, I won’t be wearing it anymore.”
“And the shotgun?”
“It hasn’t hurt anybody.”
“I don’t like it, Jack. At least unload it, okay?” She walked off to the bedroom to change.
“Okay.” It wasn’t that important. He’d keep the box of shells right next to the gun, on the top shelf of the closet. Sally couldn’t reach it. Even Cathy had to stretch. It would be safe there. Jack reconsidered all his actions over the past three and a half weeks and decided that they had been worthwhile, really. The alarm system on the house wasn’t such a bad idea, and he liked his new 9mm Browning. He was getting pretty good scores. If he kept at it for a year, maybe he could give Breckenridge a run for his money.
He checked the oven. Another ten minutes. Next he turned up the TV. The current segment on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour was—I’ll be damned.
“Joining us from our affiliate WGBH in Boston is Padraig—did I pronounce that right?—O‘Neil, a spokesman for Sinn Fein and an elected member of the British Parliament. Mr. O’Neil, why are you visiting America at this time?”
“I and many of my colleagues have visited America many times, to inform the American people of the oppression inflicted upon the Irish people by the British government, the systematic denial of economic opportunity and basic civil rights, the total abrogation of the judicial process, and the continuing brutality of the British army of occupation against the people of Ireland,” O’Neil said in a smooth and reasonable voice. He had done all this before.
“Mr. O’Neil,” said someone from the British Embassy in Washington, “is the political front-man for the Provisional Wing of the so-called Irish Republican Army. This is a terrorist organization that is illegal both in Northern Ireland and in the Irish Republic. His mission in the United States is, as always, to raise money so that his organization can buy arms and explosives. This source of income for the IRA was damaged by the cowardly attack against the Royal Family in London last year, and his reason for being here is to persuade Irish-Americans that the IRA had no part in that.”
“Mr. O’Neil,” MacNeil said, “how do you respond to that?”
The Irishman smiled at the camera as benignly as Bob Keeshan’s Captain Kangaroo. “Mr. Bennett, as usual, skirts over the legitimate political issues here. Are Northern Ireland’s Catholics denied economic and political opportunity—yes, they are. Have the legal processes in Northern Ireland been subverted for political reasons by the British government—yes, they have. Are we any closer to a political settlement of this dispute that goes back, in its modern phase, to 1969—no, I regret to say we are not. If I am a terrorist, why have I been allowed into your country? I am, in fact, a member of the British Parliament, elected by the people of my parliamentary district.”
“But you don’t take your seat in Parliament,” MacNeil objected.
“And join the government that is killing my constituents?”
“Jesus,” Ryan said, “what a mess.” He turned the TV off.
“Such a reasonable man,” Miller said. Alex’s house was outside the D.C. beltway. “Tell your friends how reasonable you are, Paddy. And when you get to the pubs tonight, be sure to tell your friends that you have never hurt anyone who was not a genuine oppressor of the Irish people.” Sean watched the whole segment, then placed an overseas call to a pay phone outside a Dublin pub.
The next morning—only five hours later in Ireland—four men boarded a plane for Paris. Neatly dressed, they looked like young executives traveling with their soft luggage to business appointments overseas. At Charles de Gaulle International Airport they made connections to a flight to Caracas. From there they flew Eastern Air Lines to Atlanta, and another Eastern flight to National Airport, just down the Potomac from the memorial to Thomas Jefferson. The four were jet-lagged out and sick of airliner seats when they arrived. They took an airport limousine to a local hotel to sleep off their travel shock. The young businessmen checked out the next morning and were met by a car.
14
Second Chances
There ought to be a law against Mondays, Ryan thought. He stared at what had to be the worst way to start any day: a broken shoelace that dangled from his left fist. Where were the spares? he asked himself. He couldn’t ask Cathy; she and Sally had left the house ten minutes before on the way to Giant Steps and Hopkins. Damn. He started rummaging through his dresser drawers. Nothing. The kitchen. He walked downstairs and across the house to the kitchen drawer that held everything that wasn’t someplace else. Hidden beneath the notepads and magnets and scissors he found a spare pair—no, one white lace for a sneaker. He was getting warmer. Several minutes of digging later, he found something close enough. He took one and left the other. After all, shoelaces
broke one at a time.
Next Jack had to select a tie for the day. That was never easy, though at least he didn’t have his wife around to tell him he’d picked the wrong one. He was wearing a gray suit, and picked a dark blue tie with red stripes. Ryan was still wearing white, button-down shirts made mostly of cotton. Old habits die hard. The suit jacket slid on neatly. It was one of the suits Cathy had bought in England. It was painful to admit that her taste in clothing was far better than his. That London tailor wasn’t too bad, either. He smiled at himself in the mirror—you handsome devil!—before heading downstairs. His briefcase was waiting on the foyer table, full of the draft quizzes he’d be giving today. Ryan took his overcoat from the closet, checked to see his keys were in the right pocket, got the briefcase, and went out the door.
“Oops!” He unlocked the door and set the burglar alarm before going back outside.
Sergeant Major Breckenridge walked down the double line of Marines, and his long-practiced eyes didn’t miss a thing. One private had lint on his blue, high-necked blouse. Another’s shoes needed a little more work, and two needed haircuts; you could barely see their scalps under the quarter-inch hair. All in all, there wasn’t much to be displeased with. Every one would have passed a normal inspection, but this wasn’t a normal post, and normal rules didn’t apply. Breckenridge was not a screamer. He’d gotten past that. His remonstrations were more fatherly now. They carried the force of a command from God nevertheless. He finished the inspection and dismissed the guard detail. Several marched off to their gate posts. Others rode in pickups to the more remote posts to relieve the current watch standers at eight o’clock exactly. Each Marine wore his dress blues and a white pistol belt. Their pistols were kept at the posts. They were unloaded, in keeping with the peaceful nature of their duty, but full clips of .45 ACP cartridges were always nearby, in keeping with the nature of the Marines.