by Tom Clancy
“Excellent, Marvin.”
“You want a drink?”
“Alcohol, you mean?”
“Hey, man, I saw you have a beer with that German guy—
what was his name?”
“Herr Fromm, you mean.”
“Come on, it’s not as bad as eatin’ pork, is it?”
“Thank you, but I will pass on that—is that how you say it?”
“‘Pass on the drink’?—yeah, that’s fine, man. How’s that Fromm guy doing?” Marvin asked casually, looking at the meat. It was almost done.
“Doing well,” Ghosn answered just as casually. “He went off to see his wife.”
“Exactly what were you guys working on, anyway?” Russell poured himself a shot of Jack Daniel’s.
“He helped us with the explosives, some special tricks, you see. He’s an expert in the field.”
“Great.”
It was the first hopeful sign in a few days, maybe a few weeks, Ryan thought. Dinner was fine, all the better to make it home in time to have it with the kids. Cathy had evidently gotten home from work at a reasonable hour and had taken the time to fix a good one. Best of all, they’d talked over dinner, not about very much, but they’d talked. Afterwards Jack had helped her clean up. Finally the kids went off to bed, and they were alone.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” Cathy said.
“It’s okay, I guess I deserved it.” Ryan was willing to say almost anything to calm things down.
“No, I was wrong, Jack. I was feeling bitchy, and I had cramps, and my back hurt. What’s wrong with you is that you’re working too hard and drinking too much.” She came over to kiss him. “Smoking, Jack?”
He was amazed. He hadn’t expected to be kissed. More than that, he expected an explosion if she discovered that he’d smoked. “Sorry, babe. Bad day at the office. I wimped.”
Cathy held his hands. “Jack, I want you to cut back on the drinking, and get your rest. That’s your problem, that and the stress. We’ll worry about the smoking later, just so you don’t smoke around the kids. I haven’t been very sympathetic, and I’ve been a little wrong myself, but you have to clean up your act. What you’ve been doing is bad for you, and bad for us.”
“I know.”
“Go to bed. You need sleep more than anything else.”
Being married to a physician had its drawbacks. Chief among those was that you couldn’t argue with one. Jack kissed her on the cheek and did as he was told.
30
EAST ROOM
Clark arrived at the house at the proper time and had to do something unusual. He waited. After a couple of minutes he was ready to knock on the door, but then it opened. Dr. Ryan (male) came out partway, then stopped and turned to kiss Dr. Ryan (female), who watched him walk off, and, after his back was fully turned, fired off a beaming smile at the car.
All right! Clark thought. Maybe he did have a new career set up. Jack also looked fairly decent, and Clark told him so as soon as he got in the car.
“Yeah, well, I got sent to bed early.” Jack chuckled, tossing his paper on the front seat. “Forgot to have a drink, too.”
“Couple more days like that and you just might be human again.”
“Maybe you’re right.” But he still lit up a cigarette, somewhat to Clark’s annoyance. Then he realized just how smart Caroline Ryan was. One thing at a time. Damn, Clark told himself, that is some broad.
“I’m set up for the test flight. Ten o’clock.”
“Good. It is nice to put you to some real work, John. Playing SPO must be boring as hell,” Ryan said, opening the dispatch box.
“It has its moments, sir,” Clark replied, pulling onto Falcon’s Nest Road. It was another quiet day on the dispatches, and soon Ryan had his head buried in the morning Post.
Three hours later, Clark and Chavez arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. A pair of VC-20Bs had already been scheduled for routine training flights. The pilots and crews of the 89th Military Airlift—“The President’s”—Wing had a strict regimen for maintaining proficiency. The two aircraft took off a few minutes apart and headed east to perform various familiarization maneuvers to acquaint two new copilots with air-traffic control procedures—which the drivers already knew backwards and forwards, of course, but that was beside the point.
In the back, an Air Force technical sergeant was doing his own training, playing with the sophisticated communications equipment that the plane carried. He occasionally looked aft to see that civilian, whoever the hell he was, talking into a flower pot, or just into a little green stick. There are some things, the sergeant thought, that a guy just isn’t supposed to understand. He was entirely correct.
Two hours later the two Gulfstreams landed back at Andrews and rolled to a halt at the VIP terminal. Clark gathered up his gear and walked out to meet another civilian who’d been aboard the other aircraft. The pair walked off to their car, already talking.
“I could understand part of what you were saying—clear, I mean,” Chavez reported. “Say about a third of it, maybe a little less.”
“Okay, we’ll see what the techies can do with it.” The drive back to Langley took thirty-five minutes, and from there Clark and Chavez drove back into Washington for a late lunch.
Bob Holtzman had gotten the call the previous evening. It had come on his unlisted home line. A curt, short message, it had also piqued his interest. At two in the afternoon he walked into a small Mexican place in Georgetown called Esteban’s. Most of the business crowd had gone, leaving the place about a third full, mainly with kids from Georgetown University. A wave from the back told him where to go.
“Hello,” Holtzman said, sitting down.
“You Holtzman?”
“That’s right,” the reporter said. “And you are?”
“Two friendly guys,” the older one said. “Join us for lunch?”
“Okay.” The younger one got up and started feeding quarters into a jukebox that played Mexican music. In a moment it was certain that his tape recorder wouldn’t have a chance of working.
“What do you want to see me about?”
“You’ve been writing some pieces on the Agency,” the older one started off. “The target of your articles is the Deputy Director, Dr. John Ryan.”
“I never said that,” Holtzman replied.
“Whoever leaked all that shit to you lied. It’s a setup.”
“Says who?”
“Just how honest a reporter are you?”
“What do you mean?” Holtzman asked.
“If I tell you something totally off the record, will you print it?”
“That depends on the nature of the information. What exactly is your intention?”
“What I mean, Mr. Holtzman, is that I can prove to you that you’ve been lied to, but the proof of that can never be revealed. It would endanger some people. It would also prove that somebody’s been using you to grind an ax or two. I want to know who that person is.”
“You know that I can never reveal a source. That violates our code of ethics.”
“Ethics in a reporter,” the man said just loudly enough to be heard over the music. “I like that. Do you also protect sources who lie to you?”
“No, we don’t do that.”
“Okay, then I’m going to tell you a little story, but the condition is that you may never, ever reveal what I am going to tell you. Will you honor such a condition?”
“What if I find out you are misleading me?”
“Then you will be free to print it. Fair enough?” Clark got a nod. “Just remember, I will be very unhappy if you ever print it, ’cuz I ain’t lying. One more thing, you can’t ever use what I am going to tell you as a lead to do your own digging.”
“That’s asking a lot.”
“You make the call, Mr. Holtzman. You have the reputation of an honest reporter, and a pretty smart one. There are some things that can’t be reported—well, that’s going too far. Let’s say that there are things that have
to remain secret for a very long time. Like years. What I’m getting at is this: you’ve been used. You have been conned into printing lies in order to hurt someone. Now, I’m not a reporter, but if I were, that would bother me. It would bother me because it’s wrong, and it would bother me because someone took me for a sucker.”
“You have it figured out. Okay, I agree to your conditions.”
“Fair enough.” Clark told his story. It took ten minutes.
“What about the mission? Where exactly did the man die?”
“Sorry, pal. And you can forget about finding that one out. Less than ten people can answer that.” Clark’s lie was a clever one. “If you even manage to figure out who they are, they won’t talk—they can’t. Not too many people voluntarily leak information about breaking laws.”
“And the Zimmer woman?”
“You can check out most of that story. Where she lives, the family business, where the kid was born, who was there, who the doctor was.”
Holtzman checked his notes. “There’s something really, really big behind all this, isn’t there?”
Clark just stared at him. “All I want is a name.”
“What will you do with it?”
“Nothing that concerns you.”
“What will Ryan do with it?”
“He doesn’t know we’re here.”
“Bullshit.”
“That, Mr. Holtzman, is the truth.”
Bob Holtzman had been a reporter a very long time. He’d been lied to by experts. He’d been the target of very organized and well-planned lies, had been the instrument of political vendettas. He didn’t like that part of his job, not in the least. The contempt he felt for politicians came mainly from their willingness to break any rule. Whenever a politician broke his word, told the most outrageous of lies, took money from a contributor and left the room at once to perform a service for that contributor, it was called “just politics.” That was wrong, and Holtzman knew it. There was still in him something of the idealist who had graduated from Columbia’s journalism school, and though life had made him a cynic, he was one of those few people in Washington who remembered his ideals and occasionally mourned for them.
“Assuming I can verify this story you’ve told, what’s in it for me?”
“Maybe just satisfaction. Maybe nothing more than that. I honestly doubt there will be any more, but if there is, I’ll let you know.”
“Just satisfaction?” Holtzman asked.
“Ever want to get even with a bully?” Clark asked lightly.
The reporter brushed that aside. “What do you do at the Agency?”
Clark smiled. “I’m really not supposed to talk about that.”
“Once upon a time, the story goes, a very senior Soviet official defected, right off the tarmac at Moscow airport.”
“I’ve heard that story. If you ever printed it ...”
“Yes, it would fuck up relations, wouldn’t it?” Holtzman observed.
“How long have you had it?”
“Since right before the last election. The President asked me not to run it.”
“Fowler, you mean?”
“No, the one Fowler beat.”
“And you played ball.” Clark was impressed.
“The man had a family, a wife and a daughter. Were they killed in a plane crash, like the press release said?”
“You ever going to print this?”
“I can’t, not for a lot of years, but someday I’m going to do a book....”
“They got out, too,” Clark said. “You’re looking at the guy who got them out of the country.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“The wife’s name is Maria. The daughter’s name is Katryn.”
Holtzman didn’t react, but he knew that only a handful of people in the Agency could possibly have known the details to that one. He’d just asked his own trick question and gotten the right answer.
“Five years from today I want the details of the bust-out.”
Clark was quiet for a moment. Well, if the reporter was willing to break a rule, then Clark had to play ball, too. “That’s fair. Okay, you have a deal.”
“Jesus Christ, John!” Chavez said.
“The man needs a quid pro quo. ”
“How many people inside know the details?”
“Of the operation? Not many. My end ... if you mean all the details, maybe twenty, and only five of them are still in the Agency. Ten of them are not Agency employees.”
“Then who?”
“That would give too much away.”
“Air Force Special Ops,” Holtzman said. “Or maybe the Army, Task Force 160, those crazy guys at Fort Campbell, the ones who went into Iraq the first night—”
“You can speculate all you want, but I’m not going to say anything. I will say this, when I tell you my end, I want to know how the hell you figured out that we even had this operation.”
“People like to talk,” Holtzman said simply.
“True enough. Do we have a deal, sir?”
“If I can verify what you’ve told me, if I’m sure I’ve been lied to, yes, I will reveal the source. You have to promise that it will never get to the press.”
Jesus, this is like diplomacy, Clark reflected. “Agreed. I’ll call you in two days. For what it’s worth, you’re the first reporter I’ve ever talked to.”
“So, what do you think?” Holtzman asked with a grin.
“I think I ought to stick with spooks.” John paused. “You might have been a pretty good one.”
“I am a pretty good one.”
“Just how heavy is this thing?” Russell asked.
“Seven hundred kilos.” Ghosn did the mental arithmetic. “Three quarters of a ton—your ton, that is.”
“Okay,” Russell said. “The truck’ll handle that. How do we get it from the truck into my truck?” The question turned Ghosn pale.
“I had not considered that.”
“How was it loaded on?”
“The box is set on a wooden ... platform?”
“You mean a pallet? They put it in with a forklift?”
“Yes,” Ghosn said, “that is correct,”
“You’re lucky. Come on, I’ll show you.” Russell led the man out into the cold. Two minutes later he saw that one of the barns had a concrete loading dock and a rusty, propane-powered forklift. The only bad news was that the dirt path leading up to it was covered with snow and frozen mud. “How delicate is the bomb?”
“Bombs can be very delicate, Marvin,” Ghosn pointed out.
Russell had a good laugh at that one. “Yeah, I guess so.”
It was fully ten hours earlier in Syria. Dr. Vladimir Moiseyevich Kaminiskiy had just started work, early as was his custom. A professor at Moscow State University, he’d been sent to Syria to teach in his specialty, which was respiratory problems. It was not a specialty to make a man an optimist. Much of what he saw in the Soviet Union and also here in Syria was lung cancer, a disease as preventable as it was lethal.
His first case of the day had been referred by a Syrian practitioner whom he admired—the man was French-trained and very thorough—and also one who only referred interesting cases.
On entering the examining room, Kaminiskiy found a fit-looking man in his early thirties. A closer look showed someone with a gray, drawn face. His first impression was, cancer, but Kaminiskiy was a careful man. It could be something else, something contagious. His examination took longer than he’d expected, necessitating several X-ray films, and some additional tests, but he was called back to the Soviet Embassy before the results arrived.
It required all of Clark’s patience, but he let it go almost three days on the assumption that Holtzman didn’t get right on the case. John left his house at eight-thirty in the evening and drove to a gas station. There he told the attendant to fill up the car—he hated pumping it himself—and walked over to the pay phone.
“Yeah,” Holtzman said, answering his unlisted li
ne.
Clark didn’t identify himself. “You have a chance to run the facts down?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact. Got most of ’em, anyway. Looks like you were right. Really is annoying when people lie to you, isn’t it?”
“Who?”
“I call her Liz. The President calls her Elizabeth. Want a freebie?” Holtzman added.
“Sure.”
“Call this evidence of good faith on my part. Fowler and she are getting it on. Nobody’s reported it because we figure it’s not the public’s business.”
“Good for you,” Clark observed. “Thanks. I owe you one.”
“Five years, man.”
“I’ll be around.” Clark hung up. So, John thought. I thought that’s who it was. He dropped another quarter in the phone. He got lucky on the first try. It was a woman’s voice.
“Hello?”
“Dr. Caroline Ryan?”
“Yes, who’s this?”
“The name you wanted, ma’am, is Elizabeth Elliot. The President’s National Security Advisor.” Clark decided not to add the other part. It was not relevant to the situation, was it?
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.” The line clicked off.
Cathy had sent Jack to bed early again. The man was being sensible. Well, that wasn’t a surprise, was it? she thought. After all, he married me.
The timing could have been a little better. A few days earlier she had planned to skip the official dinner, claiming work as an excuse, but now ...
How do I do this ... ?
“Morning, Bernie,” Cathy Ryan said as she scrubbed her hands, as usual, all the way to the elbows.
“Hi, Cath. How’s it going?”
“A lot better, Bernie.”
“Really?” Dr. Katz started scrubbing.
“Really.”
“Glad to hear it,” Katz observed dubiously.