by Tom Clancy
“The child?” Miller asked.
“I rather suspect not, but we will allow for that possibility also.” He handed the letter to Michael McKenney. The intelligence officer for the ULA skimmed over the data.
“The security at the official functions will be airtight. The Americans have had a number of incidents, and they’ve learned from each of them,” McKenney said. Like all intelligence officers, he saw his potential opponents as overwhelmingly powerful. “But if they go forward with this one ...”
“Yes,” O’Donnell said. “I want you two to work together on this. We have plenty of time and we’ll use all of it.” He took the letter back and reread it before giving it to Miller. After they left, he wrote his instructions for their agent in London.
At the airport the next morning Cooley saw his contact and walked into the coffee shop. He was early for his flight, seasoned traveler that he was, and had a cup while he waited for it to be announced. Finished, he walked outside. His contact was just walking in. The two men brushed by each other, and the message was passed, just as was taught in every spy school in the world.
“He does travel about a good deal,” Ashley observed. It had taken Owens’ detectives less than an hour to find Cooley’s travel agent and to get a record of his trips for the past three years. Another pair was assembling a biographical file on the man. It was strictly routine work. Owens and his men knew better than to get excited about a new lead. Enthusiasm all too easily got in the way of objectivity. His car—parked at Gatwick Airport—had considerable mileage on the clock for its age, and that was explained by his motoring about buying books. This was the extent of the data assembled in eighteen hours. They would patiently wait for more.
“How often does he travel to Ireland?”
“Quite frequently, but he does business in English-language books, and we are the only two countries in Europe that speak English, aren’t we?” Ashley, too, was able to control himself.
“America?” Owens asked.
“Once a year, looks like. I rather suspect it’s to an annual trade show. I can check that myself.”
“They speak English, too.”
Ashley grinned. “Shakespeare didn’t live or print books there. There aren’t many examples of American publishing old enough to excite a person like Cooley. What he might do is buy up books of ours that have found their way across the water, but more likely he’s looking for buyers. No, Ireland fits beautifully with his cover—excuse me, if it is that. My own dealer, Samuel Pickett and Sons, travel there often also ... but not as much, I should think,” he added.
“Perhaps his biography will tell us something,” Owens noted.
“One can hope.” Ashley was looking for a light at the end of this tunnel, but saw only more tunnel.
“It’s okay, Jack,” Cathy said.
He nodded. Ryan knew that his wife was right. The nurse-practitioner had positively beamed at the news she gave them on their arrival. Sally was bouncing back like any healthy child should. The healing process had already begun.
Yet there was a difference between the knowledge of the mind and the knowledge of the heart. Sally had been awake this time. She was unable to speak, of course, with the respirator hose in her mouth, but the murmurs that tried to come out could only have meant: It hurts. The injuries inflicted on the body of his child did not appear any less horrific, despite his knowledge that they would heal. If anything they seemed worse now that she was occasionally conscious. The pain would eventually go away—but his little girl was in pain now. Cathy might be able to tell herself that only the living could feel pain, that it was a positive sign for all the discomfort it gave. Jack could not. They stayed until she dozed off again. He took his wife outside.
“How are you?” he asked her.
“Better. You can take me home tomorrow night.”
Jack shook his head. He hadn’t thought about that. Stupid, Ryan told himself. Somehow he’d assumed that Cathy would stay here, close to Sally.
“The house is pretty empty without you, babe,” he said after a moment.
“It’ll be empty without her,” his wife answered, and the tears started again. She buried her face in her husband’s shoulder. “She’s so little ...”
“Yeah.” Jack thought of Sally’s face, the two little blue eyes surrounded by a sea of bruises, the hurt there, the pain there. “She’s going to get better, honey, and I don’t want to hear any more of that ‘it’s my fault’ crap.”
“But it is!”
“No, it isn’t. Do you know how lucky I am to have you both alive? I saw the FBI’s data today. If you hadn’t stomped on the brakes when you did, you’d both be dead.” The supposition was that this had thrown off Miller’s aim by a few inches. At least two rounds had missed Cathy’s head by a whisker, the forensic experts said. Jack could close his eyes and recite that information word for word. “You saved her life and yours by being smart.”
It took Cathy a moment to react. “How did you find that out?”
“CIA. They’re cooperating with the police. I asked to be part of the team and they let me join up.”
“But—”
“A lot of people are working on this, babe. I’m one of them,” Jack said quietly. “The only thing that matters now is finding them.”
“Do you think ...”
“Yeah, I do.” Sooner or later.
Bill Shaw had no such hopes at the moment. The best potential lead they had was the identity of the black man who’d driven the van. This was being kept out of the media. As far as the TV and newspapers were concerned, all the suspects were white. The FBI hadn’t so much lied to the press as allowed them to draw a false conclusion from the partial data that had been released—as happened frequently enough. It might keep the suspect from being spooked. The only person who’d seen him at close range was the 7-Eleven clerk. She had spent several hours going over pictures of blacks thought to be members of revolutionary groups and come up with three possibles. Two of these were in prison, one for bank robbery, the other for interstate transport of explosives. The third had dropped out of sight seven years before. He was only a picture to the Bureau. The name they had for him was known to be an alias, and there were no fingerprints. He’d cut himself loose from his former associates—a smart move, since most of them had been arrested and convicted for various criminal acts—and simply disappeared. The best bet, Shaw told himself, was that he was now part of society, living a normal life somewhere with his past activities no more than a memory.
The agent looked over the file once again. “Constantine Duppens,” his alias had been. Well-spoken on the few occasions when he’d spoken at all, the informant had said of him. Educated, probably. Attached to the group the Bureau had been watching, but never really part of it, the file went on. He’d never participated in a single illegal act, and had drifted away when the leaders of the little band had started talking about supporting themselves with bank robberies and drug trafficking. Maybe a dilettante, Shaw thought, a student with a radical streak who’d gotten a look at one of the groups and recognized them for what they were—what Shaw thought they were: ineffective dolts, street hoods with a smattering of Marxist garbage or pseudo-Hitlerism.
A few fringe groups occasionally managed to set off a bomb somewhere, but these cases were so rare, so minor, that the American people scarcely knew that they’d happened at all. When a group robbed a bank or armored car to support itself, the public remembered that one need not be politically motivated to rob a bank; greed was enough. From a high of fifty-one terrorist incidents in 1982, the number had been slashed to seven in 1985. The Bureau had managed to run down many of these amateurish groups, preventing more than twenty incidents the previous year, with good intelligence followed by quick action. Fundamentally, the small cells of crazies had been done in by their own amateurism.
America didn’t have any ideologically motivated terrorist groups, at least not in the European sense. There were the Armenian groups whose main objec
tive was murdering Turkish diplomats, and the white-supremacist people in the Northwest, but in both cases the only ideology was hatred—of Turks, blacks, Jews, or whatever. These were vicious but not really dangerous to society, since they lacked a shared vision of their political objective. To be really effective, the members of such a group had to believe in something more than the negativity of hate. The most dangerous terrorists were the idealists, of course, but America was a hard place to see the benefits of Marxism or Nazism. When even welfare families had color televisions, how much attraction could there be to collectivism? When the country lacked a system of class distinctions, what group could one hate with conviction? And so most of the small groups found that they were guerrilla fish swimming not in a sea of peasants, but rather a sea of apathy. Not a single group had been able to overcome that fact before being penetrated and destroyed by the Bureau—then to learn that their destruction was granted but a few column inches on page eleven, their defiant manifesto not printed at all. They were judged by faceless editors not to be newsworthy. In so many ways this was the perfect conclusion to a terrorist trial.
In that sense the FBI was a victim of its own success. So well had the job been done that the possibility of terrorist activity in America was not a matter of general public concern. Even the Ryan Case, as it was now being called, was regarded as nothing more than a nasty crime, not a harbinger of something new in America. To Shaw it was both. As a matter of institutional policy, the FBI regarded terrorism as a crime without any sort of political dimension that might lend a perverted respectability to the perpetrators. The importance of this distinction was not merely semantic. Since by their nature, terrorists struck at the foundations of civilized society, to grant them the thinnest shred of respectability was the equivalent of a suicide note for the targeted society. The Bureau recognized, however, that these were not mere criminals chasing after money. Their objective was far more dangerous than that. For this reason, crimes that otherwise would have been in the domain of local police departments were immediately taken under charge by the federal government.
Shaw returned to the photo of “Constantine Duppens” one more time. It was expecting too much for a convenience-store clerk to remember one face from the hundred she saw every day, or at least to remember it well enough to pick out a photo that might be years old. She’d certainly tried to help, and had agreed to tell no one of what she’d done. They had a description of the suspect’s clothing—almost certainly burned—and the van, which they had. It was being dismantled piece by piece not far from Shaw’s office. The forensic experts had identified the type of gun used. For the moment, that was all they had. All Inspector Bill Shaw could do was wait for his agents in the field to come up with something new. A paid informant might overhear something, or a new witness might turn up, or maybe the forensics team would discover something unexpected in the van. Shaw told himself to be patient. Despite twenty-two years in the FBI, patience was something he still had to force on himself.
“Aw, I was starting to like the beard,” a co-worker said.
“Damned thing itched too much.” Alexander Constantine Dobbens was back at his job. “I was spending half my time just scratching my face.”
“Yeah, same thing when I was on subs,” his roommate agreed. “Different when you’re young.”
“Speak for yourself, grandpop!” Dobbens laughed. “You old married turkey. Just because you’re chained doesn’t mean I have to be.”
“You oughta settle down, Alex.”
“The world is full of interesting things to do, and I haven’t done them all yet.” Not hardly. He was a field engineer for Baltimore Gas and Electric Company and usually worked nights. The job forced him to spend much of his time on the road, checking equipment and supervising line crews. Alex was a popular fellow who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty, who actually enjoyed the physical work that many engineers were too proud to do. A man of the people, he called himself. His pro-union stance was a source of irritation to management, but he was a good engineer, and being black didn’t hurt either. A man who was a good engineer, popular with his people, and black was fireproof. He’d done a good deal of minority recruiting, moreover, having brought a dozen good workers into the company. A few of them had shaky backgrounds, but Alex had brought them around.
It was often quiet working nights, and as was usually the case, Alex got the first edition of the Baltimore Sun. The case was already off the front page, now back in the local news section. The FBI and State Police, he read, were continuing to investigate the case. He was still amazed that the woman and kid had survived—testimony, his training told him, to the efficacy of seat belts, not to mention the work of the Porsche engineers. Well, he decided, that’s okay. Killing a little kid and a pregnant woman wasn’t exactly something to brag about. They had wasted the state trooper, and that was enough for him. Losing that Clark boy to the cops continued to rankle Dobbens, though. I told the dumb fuck that the man was too exposed there, but no, he wanted to waste the whole family at once. Alex knew why that was so, but saw it as a case of zeal overcoming realism. Damned political-science majors, they think you can make something happen if you wish hard enough. Engineers knew different.
Dobbens took comfort from the fact that all the known suspects were white. Waving to the helicopter had been his mistake. Bravado had no place in revolutionary activity. It was his own lesson to be learned, but this one hadn’t hurt anyone. The gloves and hat had denied the pigs a description. The really funny thing was that despite all the screwups, the operation had been a success. That IRA punk, O-something, had been booted out of Boston with his honky tail between his legs. At least the operation had been politically sound. And that, he told himself, was the real measure of success.
From his point of view, success meant earning his spurs. He and his people had provided expert assistance to an established revolutionary group. He could now look to his African friends for funding. They really weren’t African to his way of thinking, but they liked to call themselves that. There were ways to hurt America, to get attention in a way that no revolutionary group ever had. What, for example, if he could turn out the lights in fifteen states at once? Alex Dobbens knew how. The revolutionary had to know a way of hitting people where they lived, and what better way, he thought, than to make unreliable something that they took for granted? If he could demonstrate that the corrupt government could not even keep their lights on reliably, what doubts might he put in people’s heads next? America was a society of things, he thought. What if those things stopped working? What then would people think? He didn’t know the answer to that, but he knew that something would change, and change was what he was after.
19
Tests and Passing Grades
“He is an odd duck,” Owens observed. The dossier was the result of three weeks of work. It could have gone faster, of course, but when you don’t want the news of an inquiry to reach its subject, you had to be more circumspect.
Dennis Cooley was a Belfast native, born to a middle-class Catholic family, although neither of his deceased parents had been churchgoers, something decidedly odd in a region where religion defines both life and death. Dennis had attended church—a necessity for one who’d been educated at the parish school—until university, then stopped at once and never gone back. No criminal record at all. None. Not even a place in a suspected associates file. As a university student he’d hung around the fringes of a few activist groups, but never joined, evidently preferring his studies in literature. He’d graduated with the highest honors. A few courses in Marxism, a few more in economics, always with a teacher whose leanings were decidedly left of center, Owens saw. The police commander snorted to himself. There were enough of those at the London School of Economics, weren’t there?
For two years all they had were tax records. He’d worked in his father’s bookshop, and so far as the police were concerned, simply did not exist. That was a problem with police work—you noticed only the criminals
. A few very discreet inquiries made in Belfast hadn’t turned up anything. All sorts of people had visited the shop, even soldiers of the British Army, who’d arrived there about the time Cooley had graduated university. The shop’s window had been smashed once or twice by marauding bands of Protestants—the reason the Army had been called in in the first place—but nothing more serious than that. Young Dennis hadn’t frequented the local pubs enough that anyone had noticed, hadn’t belonged to any church organization, nor any political club, nor any sports association. “He was always reading something,” someone had told one of the detectives. There’s a bloody revelation, Owens told himself. A bookshop owner who reads ...
Then his parents had died in an auto accident.
Owens was struck by the fact that they’d died in a completely ordinary way. A lorry’s brakes had failed and smashed into their Mini one Saturday afternoon. It was hard to remember that some people in Ulster actually died “normally,” and were just as dead as those blown up or shot by the terrorists who prowled the night. Dennis Cooley had taken the insurance settlement and continued to operate the store as before after the quiet, ill-attended funeral ceremony at the local church. Some years later he’d sold out and moved to London, first setting up a shop in Knightsbridge and soon thereafter taking over a shop in the arcade where he continued to do business.
Tax records showed that he made a comfortable living. A check of his flat showed that he lived within his means. He was well-regarded by his fellow dealers. His one employee, Beatrix, evidently liked working with him part-time. Cooley had no friends, still didn’t frequent local pubs—rarely drank at all, it seemed—lived alone, had no known sexual preferences, and traveled a good deal on business.