by Tom Clancy
It was a new ball game, and for all his experience in the FBI, Murray was worried about how well the Bureau would be able to handle it. Director Jacobs was right on one thing: this was a top-priority mission. Bill Shaw would run the case personally, and Murray knew him to be one of the best intellects in the business. The thirty agents initially assigned to the case would treble in the next few days, then treble again. The only way to keep this from happening again was to demonstrate that America was too dangerous a place for terrorists. In his heart, Murray knew that this was impossible. No place was too dangerous, certainly no democracy.
But the Bureau did have formidable resources, and it wouldn’t be the only agency involved.
17
Recriminations and Decisions
Ryan awoke to find Robby waving a cup of coffee under his nose. Jack had managed to sleep without dreams this time, and the oblivion of undisturbed slumber had worked wonders on him.
“Sissy was over the hospital earlier. She says Cathy looks all right, considering. It’s all set up so you can get in to see Sally. She’ll be asleep, but you can see her.”
“Where is she?”
“Sissy? She’s out runnin’ some errands.”
“I need a shave.”
“Me, too. She’s getting what we need. First I’m gonna get some food in ya’,” Robby said.
“I owe you, man,” Jack said as he stood.
“Give it a rest, Jack. That’s what the Lord put us here for, like my pappy says. Now, eat!” Robby commanded.
Jack realized that he’d not eaten anything for a long time, and once his stomach reminded itself of this, it cried out for nourishment. Within five minutes he’d disposed of two eggs, bacon, hash-browns, four slices of toast, and two cups of coffee.
“Shame they don’t have grits here,” Robby observed. A knock came to the door. The pilot answered it. Sissy breezed in with a shopping bag in one hand and Jack’s briefcase in the other.
“You better freshen up, Jack,” she said. “Cathy looks better than you do.”
“Nothing unusual about that,” Jack replied—cheerfully, he realized with surprise. Sissy had baited him into it.
“Robby?”
“Yeah?”
“What the hell are grits?”
“You don’t want to know,” Cecilia Jackson answered.
“I’ll take your word for it.” Jack walked into the bathroom and started the shower. By the time he got out, Robby had shaved, leaving the razor and cream on the sink. Jack scraped his beard away and patched the bloody spots with toilet paper. A new toothbrush was sitting there too, and Ryan emerged from the room looking and feeling like a human being.
“Thanks, guys,” he said.
“I’ll take you home tonight,” Robby said. “I have to teach class tomorrow. You don’t. I fixed it with the department.”
“Okay.”
Sissy left for home. Jack and Robby walked over to the hospital. Visiting hours were under way and they were able to walk right up to Cathy’s room.
“Well, if it isn’t our hero!” Joe Muller was Cathy’s father. He was a short, swarthy man—Cathy’s hair and complexion came from her mother, now dead. A senior VP with Merrill Lynch, he was a product of the Ivy League, and had started in the brokerage business much as Ryan had, though his brief stint in the military had been two years of drafted service in the Army that he’d long since put behind him. He’d once had big plans for Jack and had never forgiven him for leaving the business. Muller was a passionate man who was also well aware of his importance in the financial community. He and Jack hadn’t exchanged a civil word in over three years. It didn’t look to Jack as though that was going to change.
“Daddy,” Cathy said, “we don’t need that.”
“Hi, Joe.” Ryan held out his hand. It hung there for five seconds, all by itself. Robby excused himself out the door, and Jack went to kiss his wife. “Lookin’ better, babe.”
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Muller demanded.
“The guy who wanted to kill me was arrested yesterday. The FBI has him,” Jack said carefully. He amazed himself by saying it so calmly. Somehow it seemed a trivial matter compared with his wife and daughter.
“This is all your fault, you know.” Muller had been rehearsing this for hours.
“I know,” Jack conceded the point. He wondered how much more he could back up.
“Daddy—” Cathy started to say.
“You keep out of this,” Muller said to his daughter, a little too sharply for Jack.
“You can say anything you want to me, but don’t snap at her,” he warned.
“Oh, you want to protect her, eh? So where the hell were you yesterday!”
“I was in my office, just like you were.”
“You had to stick your nose in where it didn’t belong, didn’t you? You had to play hero—and you damned near got your family killed,” Muller went on through his lines.
“Look, Mr. Muller.” Jack had told himself all these things before. He could accept the punishment from himself. But not from his father-in-law. “Unless you know of a company on the exchange that makes a time machine, we can’t very well change that, can we? All we can do now is help the authorities find the people who did this.”
“Why didn’t you think about all this before, dammit!”
“Daddy, that’s enough!” Cathy rejoined the conversation.
“Shut up—this is between us!”
“If you yell at her again, mister, you’ll regret it.” Jack needed a release. He hadn’t protected his family the previous day, but he could now.
“Calm down, Jack.” His wife didn’t know that she was making things worse, but Jack took the cue after a moment. Muller didn’t.
“You’re a real big guy now, aren’t you?”
Keep going, Joe, and you might find out. Jack looked over to his wife and took a deep breath. “Look, if you came down here to yell at me, that’s fine, we can do that by ourselves, okay?—but that’s your daughter over there, and maybe she needs you, too.” He turned to Cathy. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”
Ryan left the room. There were still two very serious state troopers at the door, and another at the nurses’ station down the hall. Jack reminded himself that a trooper had been killed, and that Cathy was the only thing they had that was close to being a witness. She was safe, finally. Robby waved to his friend from down the hall.
“Settle down, boy,” the pilot suggested.
“He has a real talent for pissing me off,” Jack said after another deep breath.
“I know he’s an asshole, but he almost lost his kid. Try to remember that. Taking it out on him doesn’t help things.”
“It might,” Jack said with a smile, thinking about it. “What are you, a philosopher?”
“I’m a PK, Jack. Preacher’s Kid. You can’t imagine the stuff I used to hear from the parlor when people came over to talk with the old man. He isn’t so much mad at you as scared by what almost happened,” Robby said.
“So am I, pal.” Ryan looked down the hall.
“But you’ve had more time to deal with it.”
“Yeah.” Jack was quiet for a moment. “I still don’t like the son of a bitch.”
“He gave you Cathy, man. That’s something.”
“Are you sure you’re in the right line of work? How come you’re not a chaplain?”
“I am the voice of reason in a chaotic world. You don’t accomplish as much when you’re pissed off. That’s why we train people to be professionals. If you want to get the job done, emotions don’t help. You’ve already gotten even with the man, right?”
“Yeah. If he’d had his way, I’d be living up in Westchester County, taking the train in every day, and—crap!” Jack shook his head. “He still makes me mad.”
Muller came out of the room just then. He looked around for a moment, spotted Jack, and walked down. “Stay close,” Ryan told his friend.
“You almost killed my little gi
rl.” Joe’s mood hadn’t improved.
Jack didn’t reply. He’d told himself that about a hundred times, and was just starting to consider the possibility that he was a victim, too.
“You ain’t thinking right, Mr. Muller,” Robby said.
“Who the hell are you!”
“A friend,” Robby replied. He and Joe were about the same height, but the pilot was twenty years younger. The look he gave the broker communicated this rather clearly. The voice of reason didn’t like being yelled at. Joe Muller had a talent for irritating people. On Wall Street he could get away with it, and he assumed that meant that he could do it anywhere he liked. He was a man who had not learned the limitations of his power.
“We can’t change what has happened,” Jack offered. “We can work to see that it doesn’t happen again.”
“If you’d done what I wanted, this never would have happened!”
“If I’d done what you wanted, I’d be working with you every day, moving money from Column A to Column B and pretending it was important, like all the other Wall Street wimps—and hating it, and turning into another miserable bastard in the financial world. I proved that I could do that as well as you, but I made my pile, and so now I do something I like. At least we’re trying to make the world a better place instead of trying to take it over with leveraged buyouts. It’s not my fault that you don’t understand that. Cathy and I are doing what we like to do.”
“Something you like,” Muller snapped, rejecting the concept that making money wasn’t something to be enjoyed in and of itself. “Make the world a better place, eh?”
“Yeah, because I’m going to help catch the bastards who did this.”
“And how is a punk history teacher going to do that!”
Ryan gave his father-in-law his best smile. “That’s something I can’t tell you, Joe.”
The stockbroker swore and stalked away. So much for reconciliation, Jack told himself. He wished it had gone otherwise. His estrangement with Joe Muller was occasionally hard on Cathy.
“Back to the Agency, Jack?” Robby asked.
“Yeah.”
Ryan spent twenty minutes with his wife, long enough to learn what she’d told the police and to make sure that she really was feeling better. She was dozing off when he left. Next he went across the street to the Shock-Trauma Center.
Getting into scrubs reminded him of the only other time he’d done so, the night Sally was born. A nurse took him into the Critical Care Recovery Unit, and he saw his little girl for the first time in thirty-six hours, a day and a half that had stretched into an eternity. It was a thoroughly ghastly experience. Had he not been told positively that her survival chances were good, he might have broken down on the spot. The bruised little shape was unconscious from the combination of drugs and injuries. He watched and listened as the respirator breathed for her. She was being fed from bottles and tubes that ran into her veins. A doctor explained that her condition looked far worse than it was. Sally’s liver was functioning well, under the circumstances. In two or three more days the broken legs would be set.
“Is she going to be crippled?” Jack asked quietly.
“No, there isn’t any reason to worry about that. Kids’ bones—what we say is, if the broken pieces are in the same room, they’ll heal. It looks far worse than it is. The trick with cases like this is getting them through the first hour—in her case, the first twelve or so. Once we get kids through the initial crisis, once we get the system working again, they heal fast. You’ll have her home in a month. In two months, she’ll be running around like it never happened. As crazy as that sounds, it’s true. Nothing heals like a kid. She’s a very sick little girl right now, but she’s going to get well. Hey, I was here when she arrived.”
“What’s your name?”
“Rich Kinter. Barry Shapiro and I did most of the surgery. It was close—God, it was so close! But we won. Okay? We won. You will be taking her home.”
“Thanks—that doesn’t cover it, Doc.” Jack stumbled over a few more words, not knowing what to say to the people who had saved his daughter’s life.
Kinter shook his head. “Bring her back sometime and we’re even. We have a party for ex-patients every few months. Mr. Ryan, there is nothing you can do that comes close to what we all feel when we see our little patients come back—walk back. That’s why we’re here, man, to make sure they come back for cake and juice. Just let us bounce her on our knees after she’s better.”
“Deal.” Ryan wondered how many people were alive because of the people in this room. He was certain that this surgeon could be a rich man in private practice. Jack understood him, understood why he was here, and knew that his father-in-law wouldn’t. He sat for a few minutes at Sally’s side, listening to the machine breathe for her through the plastic tube. The nurse-practitioner overseeing the case smiled at him around her mask. He kissed Sally’s bruised forehead before leaving. Jack felt better now, better about almost everything. But one item remained. The people who had done this to his little girl.
“It had wheelchair tags,” the clerk in the 7-Eleven was saying, “but the dude who drove it didn’t look crippled or anything.”
“You remember what he looked like?” Special Agent Nick Capitano and a major from the Maryland State Police were interviewing the witness.
“Yeah, he was ’bout as black as me. Tall dude. He wore sunglasses, the mirror kind. Had a beard, too. There was always at least one other dude in the truck, but I never got a look at him—black man, that’s all I can say.”
“What did he wear?”
“Jeans and a brown leather jacket, I think. You know, like a construction worker.”
“Shoes or boots?” the Major asked.
“Never did see that,” the clerk said after a moment.
“How about jewelry, T-shirt with a pattern, anything special or different about him?”
“No, nothin’ I remember.”
“What did he do here?”
“He always bought a six-pack of Coke Classic. Once or twice he got some Twinkies, but he always got hisself the Cokes.”
“What did he sound like? Anything special?”
The clerk shook her head. “Nah, just a dude, y’know?”
“Do you think you could recognize him again?” Capitano asked.
“Maybe—we get a lot of folks through here, lotta regulars, lotta strangers, y’know?”
“Would you mind looking through some pictures?” the agent went on.
“Gotta clear it with the boss. I mean, I need the job, but you say this chump tried to kill a little girl—yeah, sure, I’ll help ya.”
“We’ll clear it with the boss,” the Major assured her. “You won’t lose pay over it.”
“Gloves,” she said, looking up. “Forgot to say that. He wore work gloves. Leather ones, I think.” Gloves, both men wrote in their notebooks.
“Thank you, ma’am. We’ll call you tonight. A car will pick you up tomorrow morning so you can look at some pictures for us,” the FBI agent said.
“Pick me up?” The clerk was surprised.
“You bet.” Manpower was not a factor on this case. The agent who picked her up would pick her brain again on the drive into D.C. The two investigators left. The Major drove his unmarked State Police car.
Capitano checked his notes. This wasn’t bad for a first interview. He, the Major, and fifteen others had spent the day interviewing people in stores and shops up and down five miles of Ritchie Highway. Four people thought they remembered the van, but this was the first person who had seen one of its occupants closely enough for a description. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. They already had the shooter ID’d. Cathy Ryan had recognized Sean Miller’s face—thought she did, the agent corrected himself. If it had been Miller, he had a beard now, on the brown side of black and neatly trimmed. An artist would try to re-create that.
Twenty more agents and detectives had spent their day at the three local airports, showing photos to every ticke
t agent and gate clerk. They’d come up blank, but they hadn’t had a description of Miller then. Tomorrow they would try again. A computer check was being made of international flights that connected to flights to Ireland, and domestic flights that cpnnected to international ones. Capitano was happy that he didn’t have to run all of those down. It would take weeks, and the chance of getting an ID from an airport worker diminished measurably every hour.
The van had been identified for more than a day, off the FBI’s computer. It had been stolen a month before in New York City, repainted—professionally, by the look of it—and given new tags. Several sets of them, since the handicap tags found on it yesterday had been stolen less than two days before from a nursing home’s van in Hagerstown, Maryland, a hundred miles away. Everything about the crime said it was a professional job from start to finish. Switching cars at the shopping center had been a brilliant finale to a perfectly planned and executed operation. Capitano and the Major were able to restrain their admiration, but they had to make an objective assessment of the people they were after. These weren’t common thugs. They were professionals in every perverted sense of the word.
“You suppose they got the van themselves?” Capitano asked the Major.
The State Police investigator grunted. “There’s some outfit in Pennsylvania that steals them from all over the Northeast, paints them, reworks the interior, and sells ’em. You guys are looking for them, remember?”
“I’ve heard a few things about the investigation, but that’s not my territory. It’s being looked at. Personally, I think they did it themselves. Why risk a connection with somebody else?”
“Yeah,” the Major agreed reluctantly. The van had already been checked out by state and federal forensic experts. Not a single fingerprint had been found. The vehicle had been thoroughly cleaned, down to the knobs on the window handles. The technicians found nothing that could lead them to the criminals. Now the dirt and fabric fibers vacuumed from the van’s carpet were being analyzed in Washington, but this was the sort of clue that worked reliably only on TV. If the people had been smart enough to clean out the van, they were almost certainly smart enough to burn the clothing they’d worn. Everything was being checked out anyway, because even the smartest people did make mistakes.