by Tom Clancy
“Suit yourself.” After the waiter placed the cart, Benton tipped him and showed him out the door. Once again he locked the door and resumed his position over the file. “You were saying?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes. America.” Verbaken took a sip of water. “My wife and I went on our honeymoon there. New York City. Fascinating place.”
Benton took another shot and then took the time to examine the contents of his meal. He laid the pistol on the bed and lifted the lids on the food. “Mmm. Looks pretty good. Creamed potato soup with smoked eel, salmon flaky pastry with Sevruga caviar, asparagus, and a bottle of Duvel beer. Can’t beat that, eh?”
“I’m sure it’s delicious.”
“Sure you don’t want anything?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Benton frowned. “Wait a second. I asked for a basket of bread. And butter. Damn.” He went to the phone, picked up the receiver, and punched the button for room service.
“Yeah, this is Mr. Benton in 505. I ordered some bread and butter with my lunch. It’s not on the tray. Uh-huh. Okay, thanks.” He hung up and moved back to the file to snap another photo. “They’re sending it up.”
“Go ahead and eat,” Verbaken said. “I don’t mind.”
Benton smiled and left the OPSAT on the table with the file. He moved to the cart but was stopped by the sound of a key in the door.
“That was fast,” Verbaken said.
“A little too fast if you ask me.” Benton leaped for the Beretta, but the door exploded inward before he could reach it. Yuri thrust the suppressor-fitted barrel of a Heckler & Koch VP70 in Benton’s face, preventing him from reacting.
“Don’t move, gentlemen,” Yuri said, keeping the gun trained on Benton. “Back up, please, and raise your hands high above your head.” With his other hand he placed the hotel’s master passkey back into his pocket.
Benton did as he was told. Verbaken went pale.
Vlad drew a gun of his own, a Glock, and pointed it at the Belgian. “Don’t get up on our account,” the Russian said.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Verbaken whispered.
Vlad struck the man across the face with the Glock. “I didn’t say to talk,” he said.
Verbaken held his hands to his cheek and bent forward.
“Keep your hands in the air, please,” Vlad ordered.
The Belgian complied, revealing an ugly scrape on the left side of his face.
Yuri motioned to the sofa. “Sit down over there, please,” he said to Benton. “Keep your hands up.”
Benton moved slowly around the coffee table, next to the food cart. With the speed of a cat he grabbed a knife from the cart and threw it at Yuri. The Russian, however, was faster. He snapped his body sideways as the knife flew past him and hit the wall. The Heckler & Koch recoiled twice—thwack thwack. Benton jerked backward and crashed into the food cart, creating a sickening cacophony of breaking glass and clanging pans. The American eventually rolled off the cart and fell to the floor, facedown.
In a panic Verbaken jumped to his feet and ran toward the door. Thwack thwack. This time Vlad’s silenced Glock performed the dirty work. The Belgian slammed into the door and slid down slowly, leaving a bloody smear.
After a few silent seconds, Yuri observed, “Well, that didn’t go very well.”
“Not too smooth,” Vlad agreed. “Messy.”
“We’d better hurry. That made a lot of noise.”
Vlad nodded and went to the copier. He took the sheets of paper from the table — the stack that had already been photographed and the pages that hadn’t. He put the paper back in the manila folder, picked up Benton’s OPSAT, and dropped it on the carpet. He then lifted his hard-heeled shoe and brought it down forcefully, smashing the device.
“Do we need anything else?” he asked his partner.
“Look in the bedroom. See if his laptop is there. Bring the American’s weapon if you can find it quickly,” Yuri answered. Vlad grunted and went into the bedroom. Yuri walked over to Benton’s corpse and kicked the man’s head.
“Fuck you,” he muttered.
Vlad returned with a laptop and a Five-seveN, the weapon of choice for NSA intelligence officers. “Look what I found.”
“Good. Now let’s get out of here.”
After cracking the door open, Yuri made a quick check of the hallway. He nodded to his partner and they left, shutting the door behind them.
Three minutes went by before there was a knock at the door again. The silence prompted another knock.
“Room service.” It was a woman’s voice this time.
Knock knock. “Hello?”
The waitress used a passkey and pushed the door open a bit. “Room service. Hello?” She swung the door wider and saw Verbaken’s bloody body on the floor. The waitress gasped, took in the sight of the other corpse on the far side of the room, and ran from the suite screaming.
3
I live in a townhouse inside the triangle formed by I-695, York Road, and Dulaney Valley Road in Towson, Maryland. This suburb of Baltimore has a reputation for being “hip” since Towson University is located here. I guess it’s hip. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not very hip. I’m not a social guy. I don’t date, I don’t go out, and I stay pretty much to myself. When I’m not on an assignment for Third Echelon, I lead a relatively boring existence. I have no friends to speak of, my neighbors probably think I’m some kind of recluse, and the only shops I frequent are the nearby grocery store, a liquor store, and the dry cleaners in the strip mall over on York Road.
I like it that way.
The townhouse is much too large for a single man in his forties. I have three floors in which to spread out. I indulge myself in simple pleasures such as a supersize flat-screen television, DVD player, and a surround-sound system. I keep a library of reference material in the lower floor, and that’s also where my home office is. If someone were to look at the books in my library, they’d think I was a geography professor or maybe a history lecturer. For my work I study the countries of the world. I try to keep abreast of everything that’s happening politically and economically, especially in the so-called hot spots. Sometimes a single bit of knowledge about an unusual item that exists only in a given country can save your life. Knowing who’s really on your side and who’s not is of primary importance when you’re in the field. So every day I try to learn something new about a place. It keeps me sharp.
I live near Towson Town Center, a huge indoor mall that attracts all the beautiful people in the area. I avoid it like the plague. I detest shopping malls because they’re all the same. Same shops, same franchises, and the same ignorant people going about their daily business of spending money — usually someone else’s. When I need something, I go to out-of-the-way mom-and-pop shops. I can find clothes anywhere. If I want DVDs or CDs, I buy them online and get them mailed to me. In fact, I do an awful lot of online shopping. It keeps my personal interactions to a minimum.
I want to remain as anonymous as possible.
I cook my own meals. I’m pretty good at it, too. That’s one of the things that Sarah appreciates about me. She visits infrequently, but when she does she always wants me to cook for her instead of going out to a restaurant. That’s fine by me. Being able to cook is yet another valuable skill that’s helpful in my profession. You wouldn’t believe the number of strange and inhospitable places I’ve been where I’ve had to whip up a meal from whatever I could find around me. I’ve learned to eat some pretty disgusting stuff in my time, so being able to cook a decent gourmet meal on my own is a gift.
Although I don’t go out much, there are a couple of places I frequent. One is a gym that’s farther south on York, past the university. It’s actually just over the line separating Towson with Baltimore. It’s a funky little gym that appeals to minority toughs. Only a few white guys go there. It’s mostly Hispanics and African-Americans who are into boxing or weight lifting. I imagine a lot of them are in gangs, but they don’t bother me.
&
nbsp; The other place I go, and on a much more regular basis, is the Krav Maga studio that’s in the same strip mall as my dry cleaners. It’s close enough that I walk there from the townhouse. And that’s where I go today after breakfast.
I put on my workout clothes — a jumpsuit, really — and make sure the security system is on. I leave the house and begin the ten-minute walk to the strip mall. It’s a fine day outside — spring has come early this year and we didn’t have a bad winter. Of course, I was gone most of the winter, so it didn’t matter. The assignment in the Far East took nearly three months. I was in Hong Kong for most of that time doing the preparation for the job in Macau. The assignment also involved a couple of trips to Singapore. Tracing the Shop’s arms pipeline in that area turned out to be more difficult than was originally predicted.
I received mixed reviews for the Macau job. Lambert was pleased with all the stuff I got out of the casino’s computer, but he wasn’t happy about the killings. Kim Wei Lo was indeed a very bad man and probably deserved to die, but Lambert felt we could have gotten more information out of him later. He would have gone down in the subsequent arrests that the Chinese government will surely initiate once the NSA provides them with the proof of the Shop’s existence in their country and territories. Hell, I didn’t set out to kill him, it just happened that way. It was either him or me. Lambert understands that, but he was still perturbed. He’ll get over it, though.
As Splinter Cells go, I’m pretty lucky that I’m not assigned to a static location. Dan Lee, the agent who was killed in Macau, lived and worked in the Far East territory. Of course, the guy was Chinese, so that made sense. But there are other Splinter Cells stationed in parts of the world where I certainly wouldn’t want to stay all the time. I like coming back to the States between jobs, even if it’s only to hip Towson, Maryland. I guess I have a special designation within Third Echelon. Being the first Splinter Cell and an agent who can adapt easily to just about any place they send me, I’m more useful as a “contractor.” In the old days, spies were often diplomats or embassy intelligence officers stationed in the country where they did the spying. I guess that still goes on. With Third Echelon, though, the Splinter Cells are guys that have no affiliation with the U.S. government — at least, they don’t in a public sense. I’ve used numerous cover identities when I’m on a job and I have to sometimes learn trades and skills to make the cover more legitimate.
I was in the CIA before I became a Splinter Cell. I hated it. Too much bureaucracy. Too much in-fighting and not enough cooperation between the other big agencies. In the CIA I had to spy in the traditional way — usually posing as a diplomat or someone in an official capacity. I had to be in more social situations than I cared for. I’m not good at entertaining some prime minister and his wife and talking about the local politics. Later on I moved to a stateside job in weapons development. I thought I came up with some pretty good theoretical work on information warfare, but the bureaucratic machine hampered my creativity. It was extremely frustrating. I’m a man of action and that’s why I left the CIA when Colonel Irving Lambert asked me to join Third Echelon.
I was reluctant at first, but Lambert did a pretty good job of flattering me. He told me I was the only man for the job. I was a “rare specimen,” he said. I was a spy who had never come close to being caught. I had a lifetime’s worth of espionage experience (I’m four years older than Lambert!), but I haven’t left any fingerprints on the intelligence community. He told me I knew how to survive and stay invisible. He knew I could keep a secret. So I joined.
The Macau job was pretty typical of what I do. My cover in Hong Kong was that of a journalist, which is something I’ve been on several occasions. I was supposedly working on a book about the changes in Hong Kong since the handover in 1997. To tell the truth, I didn’t see that many changes. I’d been to Hong Kong many times before 1997 and a couple of times since, and I can’t tell much difference other than the fact that there are fewer Brits now.
Still, there are some British government agencies left in Hong Kong. They provided the private boat that got me to Macau and back. The rest of it I had to do alone, though. I motored around the peninsula at night and moored a couple of miles from the main port. Like the Americans, the Brits supposedly had no knowledge of my presence or actions in the area, although the U.K. is just as interested in closing down the Shop as we are. That’s why they helped.
I get to the strip mall and walk inside KM Studio, early as usual. I’m always the first one there. The instructor is an Israeli woman named Katia Loenstern. She’s thirty-something and extremely attractive. Very buff and strong, too. I think she likes me, but I can’t reciprocate. It’s just too dangerous in my business to get involved with someone. Besides, I never know when I have to leave the country, and I can’t talk about what I’m doing. It’s not the best set of circumstances upon which to build a relationship. I don’t particularly enjoy being celibate, but I’ve trained myself not to think about it. I can appreciate looking at a beautiful woman, but that’s as far as my thought process goes. I’ve been able to find the discipline to stymie it there before I allow the desire mechanism to kick in.
Katia is in the studio, limbering up on a ballet rail. I think she rents the studio to a ballet class on some days. I can’t imagine that Krav Maga classes alone pay the rent.
“Sam!” she says, obviously surprised to see me.
“Hi, Katia,” I reply.
“Where the heck you been? I thought you’d disappeared off the face of the earth.”
That’s right. I was in the Far East. I hadn’t been to class in three months even though I had paid for the whole year in advance.
“I’ve been away on business,” I said. At least it was the truth. “Sorry. I should have told you I’d be gone a while.”
She straightens out and faces me. As usual, she’s dressed in a leotard and tights for the warm-up. She’d put on a little more clothing later for the sparring portion of the class. Katia is tall, muscular, and has a nice, natural body. Her black hair comes down just past her shoulders. She has brown eyes, a long nose, and a rather pouty mouth. Yep, I would certainly jump her bones in another life.
“Just what kind of business are you in?”
“Sales. Overseas sales. I was in the Far East for three months.”
She eyes me skeptically. “You don’t look like a salesman.”
I put down my gym bag that contains a towel and an extra T-shirt and sit on the mat. I begin my own warm-up stretches and ask, “I don’t? What does a salesman look like?”
She gets on the mat near me and continues calisthenics. “I don’t know. Just not like you.”
“What do I look like?”
“You look like a soldier. Like a career soldier. Someone who’s been in the army for thirty years.”
“Thirty years? I’m not that old!”
“No, I guess you’re not. Okay, twenty years. How old are you, anyway? I forgot.”
“It’s on my application for the class, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I could go look it up, but I’m too busy right this second.”
“I’m forty-seven.”
She makes a face that indicates she’s impressed. “Sam, you don’t look a day over forty. Maybe even thirty-eight. And that’s getting pretty close to me.”
I look at her and she smiles at me. Is she flirting? Was that a come-on?
“Why, how old are you?” I ask.
“You know it’s impolite to ask a woman her age.”
“Aw, geez, Katia. Come on, I fessed up.”
“Guess.”
I’m pretty sure what the answer is, but I pretend to think about it. “Thirty-five?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Very good.”
Two more students enter the studio. Josh and Brian are orthodox Jews who believe that “the war” will come to their neighborhood someday, and they want to be able to defend themselves. They’re big guys. I don’t think they’d have any problem defending themselves, w
ith or without Krav Maga.
“Anyway, welcome back,” Katia says to me, ending our conversation.
“Thanks,” I say.
Over the next ten minutes the other students arrive. Out of twelve people, nine are men ranging from age sixteen to forty-something. I think I’m the oldest guy in the class. The three women are relatively young, between eighteen and thirty, I think. Katia’s a very good instructor. She starts each class with a basic warm-up that includes some kind of aerobic activity, strength conditioning with push-ups and sit-ups, and stretching. Warm-ups are usually different in each class to keep things interesting and to ensure that each student leaves with a variety of exercises that can be used to keep fit outside of class. Following warm-up, Katia leads us in hand techniques for fifteen minutes. This time is devoted to hand strikes such as punches, elbows, and hammerfists, and associated defenses. The next fifteen minutes focus on leg techniques — kicks, knees, and their defenses. The final quarter hour is spent on self-defenses, and in Krav Maga there’s a lot to learn. Katia goes through each self-defense move thoroughly, step-by-step to ensure maximum understanding. Then we practice live, with partners. The entire hour includes drills to enhance muscle strength and cardiovascular conditioning, as well as drills to teach students how to operate under pressure or fatigue, defend against multiple attackers, and keep fighting spirit high for the entire duration of a defense or fight.
Unlike the color belt system used by other martial arts systems, Krav Maga is broken down into levels. When you progress through the system, you move up in level until you reach 3B, the most advanced class that Katia teaches. That’s the one I’m in, as well as “Fight Class,” where we have the opportunity to spar while wearing protective gear. In 3B we work on weapons defenses, grappling, joint locks, spinning heel, and slap kicks, and other advanced combatives.
When the hour’s up, everyone is in a major sweat. I can’t wait to get home and hit the shower. As folks are leaving, I wipe my face and neck with a towel and catch my breath. Katia comes over to me and says, “Sam, you should be teaching this class, not me.”