by Tom Clancy
“I’m sure General Howard and Colonel Kent wouldn’t have any objection to that. If your doctors think you are up to it.”
“They do, no question. Thanks, boss. Good work.”
“You’re welcome, Jay.”
When he discommed, Thorn smiled again. It felt pretty good to be the guy who came up with the missing piece of the puzzle. And to be the boss, too? How much better did it get than that?
He reached for the VR headset again. He hadn’t done more than a cursory look at this Natadze guy, enough to ascertain that he was their suspect. Now, he’d do a little more digging and see what else he could find.
Washington, D.C.
Natadze shook the delivery man’s hand again, and this time, he pressed a wad of folded bills into the man’s palm, ten hundreds. “Thank you, Esteban, I appreciate it.”
The man accepted the money without looking at it. “Yeah, well, you always done right by me, Mr. Natadze. This guy asked about guitars, and I told him, without thinking, you know? Lo siento. Least I could do was tell you. I hope it’s not nothing serious.”
“Let me be honest with you, Esteban, it’s a visa thing. Some papers I was supposed to fill out are… a little late.”
The delivery man, Hispanic and probably still working off a green card himself, nodded, his face grim. “I hear you.”
It was the perfect thing to say, as Natadze had known it would be. Now, in that moment, they were brothers, dodging La Migra, or whatever they were calling it these days. Just honest, hard-working men being hounded by the uncaring bureaucratic machine over some niggling technical detail, some obscure letter of the law designed to keep a good man from getting ahead. Esteban knew all about that.
“What will you do?”
“I’ll turn in the papers and pray for the best.”
“I know a guy who knows a good lawyer,” Esteban said.
“Thanks, my friend, I appreciate it. My uncle is an attorney; I’m sure he’ll know how to handle it.”
After the man left, the sense of panic Natadze felt threatened to roil up in his throat and choke him. Esteban felt bad, and that and the thousand dollars would probably keep the authorities from getting anything else out of him for a little while, but that was closing the gate after the horse had gotten out.
He forced himself to stand still and take three deep breaths, slowly, inhaling and exhaling through his nose. Blind panic would be fatal.
He felt only a little better as he headed for the back door. He would slip out, go over the fence into his neighbor’s yard — the one without the dog — and leave the area on foot. It didn’t seem likely they would have allowed the delivery man to pull right up to his door if they were out there now, watching, but he couldn’t take the chance. They’d know his car.
His main regret at losing the house were the guitars in the basement. They were beyond price, some of them, but even so, it was not worth spending the rest of his life on death row to stop and pack them. He had to go, now! Somehow, he would either send for them, or make it back here some day, but now was not the time.
Maybe he could take just one, the Friedrich…?
No. A man on foot carrying a guitar case was memorable.
He paused only long enough to collect his good revolver and some spare ammunition. He tucked the holstered gun under his sport coat.
It was not possible that they could have found him, and yet they had. Why else would somebody who claimed to be from Net Force be asking the air freight delivery man about him? He had to assume the worst — they knew who he was and they would be coming to get him.
It didn’t make any sense. He was sure he had not left anything behind in his operations of late, neither with Gridley nor the Russian, nothing that could tie him to them, much less to this house!
And yet they had questioned Esteban, and they knew about his hobby, and they knew where he lived. It was clear that they had only wanted to confirm it.
There was no way they could have gotten that information, no connection to him.
Well, yes. There was one way.
He dismissed the thought angrily, instantly ashamed that such a disloyal idea had crossed his mind.
And yet — who else could possibly know?
Another worry, but no time to distress about it now. To stay here was to be trapped.
He looked through the sliding glass door into his fenced backyard. Nobody there he could see. It had only been an hour or so since Esteban had talked to the agent, he’d said. Maybe they hadn’t had time to get the proper clearances and roll. There were laws in this country that governed such things. You couldn’t just kick in a door and arrest somebody without a judge permitting it.
But maybe they had a tame judge, and were on the way and closing fast.
Of course, they might be sitting in a helicopter a mile away watching through a telescope, or footprinting him with a satellite, or just on the other side of the tall wooden fence, guns drawn, ready to cook him on sight.
No, they’d want him alive. To find out who he was working for, and what else he knew of value. If they were out there.
He took a deep breath, and stepped out into the yard, his hand on his revolver’s butt under his jacket. He was not going to prison, no matter what else happened. And with any luck, he could take a couple of them with him.
But nobody yelled or leaped out waving guns. There were no helicopters in sight, and if they had a spysat watching him, there was no way to tell.
He made it to the fence, jumped up and caught the top, and pulled himself up to peer into his neighbor’s yard.
Nobody there.
He tugged himself up and over the seven-foot-tall fence and dropped to the soft, sweet-smelling and neatly mowed grass. He hurried across the yard to the gate. A few more blocks, he would steal a car, get farther away, change vehicles, and get farther still. He would avoid public transportation, use back roads when he could, and get out of the District. Into a neighboring state, maybe one past that.
If he got that far, then he’d figure out what to do from there.
27
Washington, D.C.
Kent wanted this to go by the numbers, and he was being very careful not to do anything to screw it up. It was, after all, his first field op for Net Force.
At the moment, he was in that RV that Lieutenant Fernandez — who was about to become a Captain as General Howard’s parting gift, though he didn’t know it yet — had scored. It was a comfortable way to sit surveillance, that was for sure.
John Howard sat on the couch, looking through the one-way polarized glass at the subject’s house. The man who lived there was one Eduard Natadze, a Georgian native. They didn’t know much else about him, except for the guitar material, but that didn’t matter — they knew what he looked like, they had his house in sight, and they knew if he showed up, they were going to grab him, which should be enough info to do the job.
Jay Gridley perched on one of the captain’s chairs, also staring out at the surveillance scene. He didn’t need to be here, but Kent understood why he wanted to be. He wouldn’t get in the way.
It was Kent himself who was the problem. He simply wasn’t as comfortable as he’d like to be. He knew he didn’t have any problems at all when it came to a battlefield, but this kind of operation was not his forte. Sure, he had done enough intel gathering over the years to know you sometimes had to sneak instead of stomp, but this was the first time he’d ever mounted an operation on U.S. soil, other than in training or VR exercises, and he wanted a win.
So far, everything had gone like a Swiss watch.
They were parked within two hundred meters of the subject’s residence. Fernandez had an eight-trooper team scattered around the place either disguised or in hiding. There was a “repairman” working on a street light, a “gardener” clipping bushes, and others hidden inside nondescript cars and trucks, ringing the house. When the guy came home, they’d have him.
His car was there, but he wasn’t in the house, they kne
w that, not unless he could make himself invisible to their FLIR and sound sensors, which could pick up a man’s body heat and the sound of his respiration. Unless he was hiding in a freezer and breathing real slow…
But as the day wore into night, and eventually into day again, there was no sign of the subject. Maybe he was out of town.
As Gridley crawled out of the overhead bed just after dawn, he said, “I just had a thought. Commander Thorn talked to the guy who delivers this guy’s guitars, right?”
Kent said, “That’s what he said.”
“Let me check something.”
Gridley sat on the couch, opened his flatscreen, and began tapping the keys. After a moment, he said, “Well, that’s that.”
“What?”
“I tapped into the carrier’s delivery logs for this address.”
“And…?”
“There are four of them in the last six months. All of them at exactly the same time: 1:30 p.m.”
General Howard came out of the head in the back of the coach, rubbing his face. “And this means what?”
“It seems unlikely that the driver would make four deliveries to the same address at exactly the same moment.”
“Yes,” Kent said, “it does. But I fail to see the significance. Why would the driver put down something that wasn’t so?”
Howard said, “These guitars are valuable, right? So if you were a guy paying for them, you probably wouldn’t want them sitting out on the front porch until you got home. Bad weather, a sticky-fingered passerby, that would be bad.”
Jay nodded. “So maybe the delivery guy has a key? So he can leave them inside?”
“If you had a house full of expensive guitars, would you give a delivery guy a key?”
“I wouldn’t,” Kent said.
“So maybe Natadze has some other arrangement with the guy,” Howard said. “Maybe the guy only comes round when he knows Natadze will be here.”
“Exactly,” Jay said. “I’m thinking our delivery guy probably just scanned the guitars as delivered at some point during the day — probably on his lunch hour, which would explain why the time was exactly the same for each delivery. But he didn’t actually deliver them until later, probably after hours.”
“Could be,” Kent said, “But even so…?”
Howard picked it up. “That would be service worth a nice tip.”
Kent got it. “Ah. You’re saying this guy is in Natadze’s pocket.”
“He told the Commander about the deliveries. Maybe he told Natadze about the Commander,” Jay said.
“Oh,” Kent and Howard said as one.
“Maybe we better have somebody have a little talk with this delivery guy,” Jay said.
It took a couple of hours, but when the FBI agent called them, he confirmed it. The delivery driver had stalled, but in the end, had confessed to telling Natadze about the query from Net Force.
Jay was right. That was that. At least for now.
“So we missed him,” Kent said. “Probably by minutes.”
Howard nodded, feeling the man’s frustration. “It happens.”
“Not to me.”
Howard said. “Have you taken up walking next to the ferry when you cross the river, Abe?”
Kent’s jaw muscles danced. He was probably thinking something he didn’t want to say to a general, even one who was his friend. Howard understood the feeling. He glanced at Julio, who had come by to hear the sitrep. Maybe he could make Abe feel a little better.
Howard said, “Listen, a few years back, we had a shooter on our to-do list, a Russian guy who called himself Ruzhyó.”
He saw Julio smile and shake his head.
“The op was out in the middle of the Nevada desert, nobody else around, the guy living in a trailer. Should have been a walk in the park. We set it up, went to collect him, by-the-book, and this one guy gave us a world of hurt. Had bouncing-betty mines jury-rigged, bigger explosives, a rack full of guns, and he was ready for us. We had troops blasted and down before we knew what hit us. Guy laid smoke and took off in his car, but we had the perimeter and he didn’t have a prayer. A couple hundred yards away, his car blew up. Big explosion, body parts everywhere, and end of mission.
“We packed it up, I left a couple of men in the trailer to secure it, and we went home to lick our wounds.”
“But at least you got him.”
Howard shook his head. “No, we didn’t. He suckered us. He was buried in a hidey-hole. The car ran on a remote, the body parts were a mix of an old lab skeleton and a butcher shop. After we left, he climbed out of his concealment, went to the trailer, killed the two men I’d left, and disappeared.”
Kent turned to look at Howard.
“Yeah. One step ahead of me all the way. He’d been a Spetsnaz guy and a shooter for years, he had figured we’d find him one day, and he set up his scenario well in advance. He knew the terrain, knew how we would come in, and he had an answer for all our questions. We underestimated him—I underestimated him — and he cost me two dead and two wounded.
“You didn’t lose anybody here today. The guy was tipped off before we ever rolled, before we even heard about it. There was nothing you could have done to make it work, Abe. He knew we were coming before we did, and he took off. It’s just the breaks.”
Kent nodded. “Point taken.” After a moment, he said, “Knowing you, General, you wouldn’t have been real happy about your Russian. That the end of the story?”
“No. We ran into him again, in England. He hooked up with another bad guy we had reason to talk to, and our second meeting ended with Mr. Ruzhyó pushing up the daisies.”
“That name means ‘rifle,’ doesn’t it? My Russian is very rusty.”
“Yes. And he had one when we came across him — a little twenty-two built into a cane. If we hadn’t been wearing body armor, he would have taken three of us out with that sucker — five shots, five hits. He got one round through a glove, and knocked out another shooter’s weapon. He could have escaped, but for whatever reason, he didn’t, he stood and fought. Hell of a gunslinger. I wished he’d been one of ours.” He paused, then looked at Kent.
“Bad pennies keep turning up. You did everything right, but this guy got a pass. Not your fault. You’ll do better next time.”
“Damn straight I will,” Kent said.
Both Howard and Julio smiled. They knew exactly how he felt.
28
Net Force HQ
Quantico, Virginia
Thorn jacked out of VR and sighed. Much of yesterday and this morning, he had hunted for traces of the man called Eduard Natadze, and had found nothing more useful than what they already knew. Using the new parameters and expanding the time limits, he had searched all manner of things connected to classical guitars, and found that Natadze had bought other instruments. An examination of his house already gave them that — a locked room in the basement had a collection of them, neatly cased, and a gun safe that held others, according to the portable X-ray scanner the FBI had used to check it. They left the house as they found it and set up surveillance, but nobody expected the man to return — he’d been burned, and he had to know they’d watch the place. Still, according to what they knew, the killer loved his guitars. Maybe he would risk it to recover them.
That he showed up on a couple of security cams at shops or concerts did them no good.
There were no records of him anywhere officially. If he was here on a visa, it was not under the name of Eduard Natadze or anything even remotely similar to that. Nor was his photo registered anywhere in the INS. Neither the car in his driveway nor the house itself were listed in his name; they were officially owned by corporations, holding companies, and dead ends. Nor were there any driver’s licenses issued in that name or carrying that photo in any of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, or Puerto Rico.
The man was off the radar — at least as far as Thorn had been able to determine.
It did not seem possible in the information age that
somebody could walk in civilized society and not leave any more tracks than this man did, but there it was. And when the Invisible Man goes to ground, how do you find him?
Maybe Jay Gridley was doing better.
Endless Summer Modesto, California
Jay crept slowly along the strip, the murmur of the Viper’s exhaust a deep, throaty rumble loud in the summer night. The cruisers were out, low-riders and candy-apple-red or green metal flake paint jobs twenty coats deep; custom rods showing their brilliant feathers, a fine display of rolling automobile iron, mostly Detroit, but a few foreign cars sprinkled in among the big machines. The Beach Boys’ classic hit, “I Get Around,” blared from somebody’s radio — bad guys and hip chicks and driving around on a Saturday night. Easier back in the days when gasoline was leaded and thirty cents a gallon for ethyl.
His fire-engine-yellow Dodge was tiny compared to the full-sized cars, an open cockpit two-seater, but the engine was more than respectable. The Viper could scream with the biggest dinosaurs, and once you pressed the pedal to the metal, the speedometer needle went one way and the gas gauge needle went the other. A rocket on wheels, Jay liked to think, and while expensive to drive in RW, it was considerably cheaper here in VR.
Despite the admiring gazes of the girls dressed in tight shorts watching the cars grumble past in the warm summer night, Jay was frustrated.
Natadze was nowhere to be found. The scenario was entertaining, but that was all — the guy Jay wanted wasn’t in it, and no matter which block he circled, he could not find the man.
Either Jay had lost a few steps, or the guy was a ghost.
And that wasn’t all that was wrong. Yeah, he’d overcome his fear of VR, jumped back in the pool, and was in control again, but being shot, that feeling he’d had of utter terror and helplessness in the moment before the gun went off, that was still nagging at him like a bad back. The memory kept replaying in his mind, popping up at odd times and places. Taking a bath and avoiding getting the bandage on his head wet, he saw it: The man stalking toward his car, the gun in his hand, the flash — he didn’t remember the sound of the shot, but he did remember the muzzle blast — and then nothingness.