Clear and Present Danger

by Tom Clancy

  “So do your lawyer shit and get us off!”

  The look on Stuart’s face was all the response either man needed.

  “You tell our friends that if we don’t get off on this one, we start talking.”

  The jail guards had already told both men in loving detail what fate had in store for them. One had even shown Ramór a poster of the chair itself with the caption REGULAR OR EXTRA CRISPY. Though a hard man and a brutal one, the idea of being strapped into a hard-backed wooden chair, then having a copper band affixed to his left leg, and a small metal cap set on a bale spot that the prison barber would shave on his head the day be fore, and the small sponge soaked in a saline solution to facilitate electrical conductivity, the leather mask to keep his eyes from flying out of his head ... Ramón was a brave man when he hac the upper hand, and that hand held a gun or a knife directec at an unarmed or bound person. Then he was quite brave. In had never occurred to him that one day he might be the helpless one. Ramón had lost five pounds in the preceding week. His ap petite was virtually nil and he took an inordinate interest in light bulbs and wall sockets. He was afraid, but more than that he was angry, at himself for his fear, at the guards and police for giving him that fear, and at his former associates for not getting him free of this mess.

  “I know many things, many useful things.”

  “It does not matter. I have spoken with the federales, and they do not care what you know. The U.S. Attorney claims to have no interest in what you might tell him.”

  “That is ridiculous. They always trade for information, they always—”

  “Not here. The rules have changed.”

  “What do you tell us?”

  “I will do my best for you.” I’m supposed to tell you to die like men, Stuart could not say. “There are many things that can happen in the next few weeks.”

  The attorney was rewarded with skeptical expressions not entirely devoid of hope. He himself had no hope at all. The U.S. Attorney was going to handle this one himself, the better to get his face on the 5:30 and 11:00 Eyewitness News broadcasts. This would be a very speedy trial, and a U.S. Senate seat would be available in just over two years. So much the better that the prosecutor could point to his law-and-order record. Frying some druggie-pirate-rapist-murderers would surely appeal to the citizens of the sovereign state of Alabama, Stuart knew. The defense attorney objected to capital punishment on principle, and had spent much of his time and money working against it. He’d successfully taken one case to the Supreme Court and on a five-to-four decision managed to get his client a new trial, where the death sentence had been bargained down to life plus ninety-nine years. Stuart regarded that as a victory even though his client had survived precisely four months in the prison’s general population until someone who disliked child-murderers had put a shank into his lumbar spine. He didn’t have to like his clients—and most often he didn’t. He was occasionally afraid of them, especially the drug runners. They quite simply expected that in return for however much cash—it was generally cash—they paid for his services they would get their freedom in return. They did not understand that in law there are no guarantees, especially for the guilty. And these two were guilty as hell. But they did not deserve death. Stuart was convinced that society could not afford to debase itself to the level of ... his clients. It was not a popular opinion in the South, but Stuart had no ambition to run for public office.

  In any case, he was their lawyer, and his job was to provide them with the best possible defense. He’d already explored the chances of a plea-bargain; life imprisonment in exchange for information. He’d already examined the government’s case. It was all circumstantial—there were no witnesses except his own clients, of course—but the physical evidence was formidable, and that Coast Guard crew had scrupulously left the crime scene intact except for removing some evidence, all of which had been carefully locked up for a proper chain-of-evidence. Whoever had briefed and trained those people had done it right. Not much hope there. His only real hope, therefore, was to impeach their credibility. It was a slim hope, but it was the best he had.

  Supervisory Special Agent Mark Bright was also working late The crew had been busy. For starters there had been an office and a home to search, a lengthy procedure that was just the opening move in a process to last months, probably, since all the documents found, all the phone numbers scribbled in any of eleven places, all the photographs on desks and walls, and everything else found would have to be investigated. Every business acquaintance of the deceased would be interviewed, along with neighbors, people whose offices adjoined his, members of his country club, and even parishioners at his church. For all that, the major break in the case had come in the second hour of the fourth home search, fully a month after the case had begun. Something had told them all that there had to be something else. In his den, the deceased had a floor safe—with nc record of its purchase or installation—neatly hidden by an un-tacked segment of the wall-to-wall carpeting. Discovering it had required thirty-two days. Tickling it open took nearly ninety minutes, but an experienced agent had done it by first experimenting with the birthdays of the deceased’s whole family, then playing variations on the theme. It turned out that the three-element combination came from taking the month of the man’s birth and adding one, taking the day of his birth and adding two, then taking the year of his birth and adding three. The door of the expensive Mosler came open with a whisper as it rubbed against the rug flap.

  No money, no jewels, no letter to his attorney. Inside the safe had been five computer disks of a type compatible with the businessman’s IBM personal computer. That told the agents all they wanted. Bright had at once taken the disks and the deceased’s computer to his office, which was also equipped with IBM-COMPATIBLE machines. Mark Bright was a good investigator, which meant that he was a patient one. His first move had been to call a local computer expert who assisted the FBI from time to time. A free-lance software consultant, he’d first protested that he was busy, but he’d only needed to hear that there was a major criminal investigation underway to settle that. Like many such people who informally assist the FBI, he found police work most exciting, though not quite exciting enough to take a full-time job for the FBI Laboratory. Government service didn’t come close to paying what he earned on the outside. Bright had anticipated his first instruction: bring in the man’s own computer and hard-disk.

  After first making exact copies of the five disks using a program called CHASTITY BELT, he had Bright store the originals while he went to work on the copies. The disks were encrypted, of course. There were many ways of accomplishing that, and the consultant knew them all. As he and Bright had anticipated, the encrypting algorithm was permanently stored on the deceased’s hard disk. From that point it was merely a question of what option and what personal encrypting key had been used to secure the data on the disks. That took nine nonstop hours, with Bright feeding coffee and sandwiches to his friend and wondering why he did it all for free.

  “Gotcha!” A scruffy hand punched the PRINT command, and the office laser printer started humming and disgorging papers. All five disks were packed with data, totaling over seven hundred single-spaced pages of text. By the time the third one was printed, the consultant had left. Bright read it all, over a period of three days. Then he made six Xerox copies for the other senior agents in the case. They were now flipping through the pages around the conference table.

  “Christ, Mark, this stuff is fantastic!”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Three hundred million dollars!” another exclaimed. “Christ, I shop there myself ...”

  “What’s the total involved?” a third asked more soberly.

  “I just skimmed through this stuff,” Bright answered, “but I got close to seven hundred million. Eight shopping malls spread from Fort Worth to Atlanta. The investments go through eleven different corporations, twenty-three banks, and—”

  “My life insurance is with this company! They do my I
RA, and—”

  “The way he set it up, he was the only one who knew. Talk about an artist, this guy was like Leonardo....”

  “Sucker got greedy, though. If I read this right, he skimmed off about thirty million ... God almighty ...”

  The plan, as with all great plans, was an elegantly simple one. There were eight real-estate-development projects. In each case the deceased had set up himself as the general partner representing foreign money—invariably described as Persian Gulf oil money or Japanese industrial money, with the funds laundered through an incredible maze of non-American banks. The general partner had used the “Oil Money”—the term was almost generic in the venture capital field—to purchase land and set the project in motion, then solicited further development funds from limited partners who had no say in the executive management of the individual projects, but whose profits were almost guaranteed by the syndicate’s previous performance. Even the one in Fort Worth had made money, despite the recent slowdown in the local oil industry. By the time ground was broken on every project, actual ownership was further disguised by majority investment from banks, insurance companies, and wealthy private investors, with much of the original overseas investment fully recovered and gone back to the Bank of Dubai and numerous others—but with a controlling interest remaining in the project itself. In this way, the overseas investors speedily recouped their initial investment with a tidy profit, and continued to get much of the profits from the project’s actual operations, further looking forward to the eventual sale of the project to local interests for more profit still. For each hundred million dollars invested, Bright estimated, one hundred fifty million fully laundered dollars were extracted. And that was the important part. The hundred million put in, and the fifty million profit taken out were as clean as the marble on the Washington Monument.

  Except for these computer disks.

  “Every one of these projects, and every dime of investment and profits, went through IRS, SEC, and enough lawyers to fill the Pentagon, and nobody ever caught a sniff. He kept these records in case somebody ever burned him—but he must have expected to trade this information for a crack at the Witness Protection Program—”

  “And he’d be the richest guy in Cody, Wyoming,” Mike Schratz observed. “But the wrong people got a sniff. I wonder what tipped them off? What did our friends say?”

  “They don’t know. Just that they pulled the job of killing them all off and making it look like a disappearance. The bosses clearly anticipated losing them and compartmentalized the information. How hard is it to get one of these mutts to take a contract? It’s like filling out a girl’s dance card at the cotillion.”

  “Roger that. Headquarters know about this yet?”

  “No, Mike, I wanted you guys to see it first,” Bright said. “Opinions, gentlemen?”

  “If we move fast ... we could seize a whole shitload of money ... unless they’ve moved the money on us,” Schratz thought aloud. “I wonder if they have? As clever as this stuff is ... I got a buck says they haven’t. Takers?”

  “Not from me,” another agent announced. This one was a CPA and a lawyer. “Why should they bother? This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to—hell, it is a perfect plan. I suppose we ought to show some appreciation, what with all the help they’re giving our balance-of-payments problem. In any case, folks, this money is exposed. We can bag it all.”

  “There’s the Bureau’s budget for the next two years—”

  “And a squadron of fighters for the Air Force. This is big enough to sting them pretty good. Mark, I think you ought to call the Director,” Schratz concluded. There was general agreement. “Where’s Pete today?” Pete Mariano was the special-agent-in-charge of the Mobile Field Office.

  “Probably Venice,” an agent said. “He’s going to be pissed he was away for this one.”

  Bright closed the ring binder. He was already booked on an early-morning flight to Dulles International Airport.

  The C-141 landed ten minutes early at Howard Field. After the clean, dry air of the Colorado Rockies, and the cleaner, thinner, and drier air of the flight, the damp oven of the Isthmus of Panama was like walking into a door. The soldiers assembled their gear and allowed themselves to be herded off by the loadmaster. They were quiet and serious. The change in climate was a physical sign that playtime was over. The mission had begun. They immediately boarded yet another green bus which took them to some dilapidated barracks on the grounds of Fort Kobbe.

  The MH-53J helicopter landed several hours later at the same field, and was rolled unceremoniously into a hangar, which was surrounded with armed guards. Colonel Johns and the flight crew were taken to nearby quarters and told to stay put.

  Another helicopter, this one a Marine CH-53E Super Stallion, lifted off the deck of USS Guadalcanal just before dawn. It flew west over the Bay of Panama to Corezal, a small military site near the Gaillard Cut, the most difficult segment of the original Panama Canal construction project. The helicopter-carrier’s flight-deck crew attached a bulky item to a sling dangling from the helicopter’s underside, and the CH-53E headed awkwardly toward shore. After a twenty-minute flight, the helicopter hovered over its predetermined destination. The pilot killed his forward speed and gently eased toward the ground, coached by instructions from the crew chief, until the communications van touched down on a concrete pad. The sling was detached and the helicopter flew off at once to make room for a second aircraft, a smaller CH-46 troop carrier which deposited four men before returning to its ship. The men went immediately to work setting up the van.

  The van was quite ordinary, looking most of all like a cargo container with wheels, though it was painted in the mottled green camouflage scheme of most military vehicles. That changed rapidly as the communications technicians began erecting various radio antennas, including one four-foot satellite dish. Power cables were run in from a generator vehicle already in place, and the van’s air-conditioning systems were turned on to protect the communications gear, rather than the technicians. They wore military-style dress, though none of them were soldiers. All the pieces were now in place.

  Or almost all. At Cape Canaveral, a Titan-IIID rocket began its final countdown. Three senior Air Force officers and half a dozen civilians watched the hundred or so technicians go through the procedure. They were unhappy. Their cargo had been bumped at the last minute for this less important one (they thought). The explanation for the change was not to their collective satisfaction, and there weren’t enough launch rockets to play this sort of game. But nobody had bothered telling them what the game actually was.

  “Tallyho, tallyho. I have eyeballs on target,” Bronco reported. The Eagle bottomed out half a mile astern and slightly below the target. It seemed to be a four-engined Douglas. A DC-4, -6, or -7, a big one—the biggest he’d yet intercepted. Four piston engines and a single rudder made it a Douglas product, certainly older than the man who was now chasing it. Winters saw the blue flames from the exhaust ports on the big radial engines, along with the moonlight shimmering from the propellers. The rest was mainly guesswork.

  The flying became harder now. He was closing on the target and had to slough off his airspeed lest he overtake it. Bronco throttled his Pratt & Whitney engines back and put on some flaps to increase both lift and drag as he watched his airspeed drop to a scant two-hundred forty knots.

  He matched speed when he was a hundred yards aft of the target. The heavy fighter rocked slightly—only the pilot would have noticed—from the larger plane’s wake turbulence. Time. He took a deep breath and flexed his fingers once around the stick. Captain Winters switched on his powerful landing lights. They were alert, he saw. The wingtips rocked a second after his lights transfixed the former airliner in the sky.

  “Aircraft in view, please identify, over,” he called over the guard frequency.

  It started turning—it was a DC-7B, he thought now, the last of the great piston-engine liners, so quickly brushed aside by the advent of the jetliners in
the late fifties. The exhaust flames grew brighter as the pilot added power.

  “Aircraft in view, you are in restricted airspace. Identify immediately, over,” Bronco called next. Immediately is a word that carries a special meaning for flyers.

  The DC-7B was diving now, heading for the wave tops. The Eagle followed almost of its own accord.

  “Aircraft in view, I repeat—you are in restricted airspace. Identify at once!”

  Turning away now, heading east for the Florida peninsula. Captain Winters eased back on the stick and armed his gun system. He checked the surface of the ocean to make sure that there were no ships or boats about.

  “Aircraft in view, if you do not identify I will open fire, over.” No reaction.

  The hard part now was that the Eagle’s gun system, once armed, did everything possible to facilitate the pilot’s task of hitting the target. But they wanted him to bring one in alive, and Bronco had to concentrate to make sure he’d miss, then squeezed the trigger for a fraction of a second.

  Half the rounds in the magazine were tracers, and the six-barrel cannon spat them out at a rate of almost a hundred per second. What resulted was a streak of green-yellow light that looked like one of the laser beams in a science-fiction movie, and hung for a sizable portion of infinity a bare ten yards from the DC-7B’s cockpit window.

  “Aircraft in view: level out and identify or you’ll eat the next burst. Over.”

  “Who is this? What the hell are you doing?” The DC-7B leveled out.

  “Identify!” Winters commanded tersely.

  “Carib Cargo—we’re a special flight, inbound from Honduras.”

  “You are in restricted airspace. Come left to new course three-four-seven.”

  “Look, we didn’t know about the restriction. Tell us where to go and we’re out of here, okay? Over.”