by Tom Clancy
“You do a great job, Katia,” I say.
“I’m serious. You’ve been doing this a long time, haven’t you? I mean, I knew you were good, but today you showed me a thing or two. Where did you study before? Are you from Israel?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Born and raised here in the States.”
“You’re not Jewish, are you?”
I smile. “Charlie Chaplin was once asked that question,” I say. “He replied, ‘I don’t have that honor, sorry.’ ”
She laughs. “Well, you’re damned good. I’d really hate to fight you for real.”
I don’t know what to say, so I shrug and mumble, “Thanks.”
“You have to rush off?” she asks. “You want to go get a coffee? Or something cold to drink? We can go to the little diner next door.”
Oh, brother. This is all I need. Damn. Part of me wants to go with her and the rest of me wants to run like hell. I just can’t get close to a woman. I know it doesn’t work. I’ve been there, done that.
“I don’t know… ” I start to say.
“Oh, come on. I’m not going to bite you. I might kick you in the groin if you don’t, but I won’t bite.”
“We’re all sweaty.”
She rolls her eyes. “What is this? You looking for every excuse you can think of? We’ll sit in the corner and no one will smell us.”
Damn, she is cute.
“All right,” I say.
She shakes her head as if to say, “I just don’t get you.” She grabs her stuff, I take mine, and we go out the door to the diner.
Katia buys a medium coffee, black. I opt for decaf. I don’t like to have to depend on stuff like caffeine. If you get too used to coffee to keep you alert, you have no business being a Splinter Cell.
Now comes the hard part. She’s probably going to ask me a lot of personal questions and I’m going to have to lie. I keep a catalog of cover stories for situations like this. The usual “What do you do for a living?” and “Where did you go to school?” and “Have you ever been married?” questions.
We sit at a table and she grins at me. “So. Here we are. See, this isn’t so bad.”
“Nope,” I reply. Maybe if I keep my end of the conversation monosyllabic, she’ll get bored.
“Now tell me again about your business. You get to travel a lot?”
“It’s nothing cool,” I say. “I sell ball bearings. I travel to other countries and sell ball bearings. It’s real exciting.”
She laughs. “I’ll bet it’s better than you say. Just the traveling part would interest me.”
“It’s all right at first, but you soon get tired of the early mornings, the crowded airports, the hassles of security these days, and the jet lag. Believe me, it’s not as exotic as it seems.”
“All right, what do you do for fun?”
“When I’m in another country?”
“No, here, silly. What do you do besides take Krav Maga classes?”
I look away. Sometimes the shy act turns off women and sometimes it makes them more interested. I’m hoping it’ll discourage her since she’s such an outgoing lass. “I don’t know,” I mutter. “Nothing much. I live alone. I’m not much of a socialite.”
“Oh, sure,” she counters. “A great-looking guy like you? You must have a dozen girlfriends.”
I shake my head. “I’m afraid not.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Uh-oh. She looks heartened. Maybe I should have told her I had six girlfriends that live with me. Damn, this is hard.
“Well, I know you’re not gay, so what is it? Bad marriage or something?”
“How do you know I’m not gay?”
She smirks. “Come on, a girl can tell.”
“What about you? You’re not married, are you?”
“I asked you first. But no, I’m not. I was married for four years when I was just out of college. Big mistake. Haven’t looked back. You?”
I don’t like to talk about that part of my life. “Yeah, I was married once. She died.”
Katia’s smile falls. That sure put a damper on things. Maybe I should just tell the truth more often. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “What happened?”
“Cancer,” I answer.
“That’s awful. How long were you married?”
“A little more than three years.”
“Kids?”
I’m not sure if I want to reveal this or not, but I do. “Yeah, one. I have a daughter going to college in Illinois.”
“Oh, wow,” Katia says. “Do you see her much?”
“Not often enough,” I say truthfully.
“Hey, you like to eat?” she asks, sensing that she should change the subject.
I shrug. “I guess. Doesn’t everyone?”
“I like to cook. You want to try one of Katia Loenstern’s specials some night?” she asks.
I don’t want to tell her that I like to cook, too. That would just give us something in common.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I say. It pains me to have to tell her this.
She looks as if I’d just slapped her. “Really?” she asks. “You’d be missing something, I tell you.”
“I believe you. Thanks, really. But I just can’t do that. I’m sorry.”
“What’s the matter? I said I don’t bite.”
“It’s not that,” I mutter. I try to put on the introverted, scared-of-women act to dissuade her.
“Don’t you find me attractive?”
There’s my opening. “No,” I say.
I really thought that would do the trick, but instead she says, “Bullshit! You think I’m gorgeous. I can tell. Come on, what is it with you?”
I laugh and say, “Look, Katia, you’re my instructor. I don’t… I can’t get involved, all right? Let’s just be friends.”
She shakes her head but keeps smiling. “Boy, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that one. Fine. Look, we all have pasts we want to hide. Don’t worry about it. We’ll be friends if that’s what you want.”
By now we’re done with our coffees. I look at the time and say, “Well, I guess I’d better be going. I have some, uhm, sales reports to do this afternoon.”
She sighs and says, “Okay, Sam. Will you be at the next class?”
“I should be. You never know, though, in my job.”
We walk out of the diner together and she holds out her hand. I take it and give it a light squeeze.
“Okay, friend,” she says. “I’ll see you next time.”
“Okay,” I reply. And then we separate. She goes back to the studio and I begin the walk home, cursing at myself for being such a shit.
* * *
When I get back to the house, I hear the phone ringing. I keep a regular unlisted home phone line. There’s an extension in the kitchen, on the middle level, right when you walk into the house.
I pick up the receiver and I hear Sarah’s sweet voice.
“Hi, Dad, it’s me!”
“Sarah honey! I’m happy to hear from you,” I say. I honestly get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I talk to her.
“Just wanted to let you know that Rivka and I are about to leave for the airport. We’re so excited.”
I tense up and say, “Whoa, hold on. The airport? Where are you going?”
“Jerusalem, Dad. Remember? We’ve been planning this for—”
“Sarah, we discussed this at length! I told you that you couldn’t go.”
“Dad! Come on, you didn’t come right out and say I couldn’t go. You didn’t want me to go, but you didn’t say I couldn’t go.”
“Well, you can’t go. Israel’s just too volatile right now. With the state of things in the world with respect to Americans, I’m just not comfortable with it.”
Naturally, she sounds upset. “Oh, come on, Dad! I’m twenty years old! You can’t stop me now! We’re on our way to the airport as we speak! I have my tickets and everything!”
Aw, hell. What am I supposed to do about
this?
“Sarah, I wish we’d talked more about this.” I try to control my anger.
“Look, I’ll call you when we get to Jerusalem. I’ll try to figure out what the time difference is and not call you in the middle of the night. I gotta go.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “Be careful. I love you.” But she had already hung up. Damn it.
I guess I had forgotten all about her plans. Sarah wanted to go with her friend Rivka to Israel over spring break. I had told her I wasn’t too crazy about her going to such a dangerous location but I guess I wasn’t forceful enough. What can I do? Technically, she’s an adult.
Sarah’s a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. She’s a junior. I think. Sometimes I forget how long she’s been in college. Rivka is her best friend and she happens to be from Israel. They’re supposedly going to stay with Rivka’s family in Jerusalem for a little less than a week.
I glance at the photo of Sarah that’s stuck on the refrigerator with a magnet. She’s the spitting image of her mother. Beautiful and smart. A class act all the way. The only thing she inherited from me was my stubbornness.
The memory of Regan giving birth flashes through my mind. It was a difficult labor and being on a U.S. military base in Germany didn’t help. I was in the CIA at the time, working in Eastern Europe. Regan had a job as a cryptanalyst for the NSA. We met in Georgia, of all places. Not Georgia, USA, but the former Soviet state. We had a stormy affair and Regan got pregnant. The wedding was a small, quiet one on the base in Germany, and that’s where Sarah was born.
I don’t like to reflect on the three years Regan and I were together. It wasn’t a happy time. I loved Regan and she loved me, but our professions interfered. It was a distant, difficult marriage. Regan eventually went back to the States and took Sarah with her. She reclaimed her maiden name, Burns, and had Sarah’s legally changed. As for me, I dedicated myself entirely to the work, operating extensively in Germany, Afghanistan, and the Soviet satellites in the years leading up to the collapse of the USSR. Needless to say, I became estranged from Regan and Sarah.
I think Sarah was fifteen when Regan died. That was so goddamned hard. I hadn’t spoken to Regan in years, and I tried my best to have a reconciliation with her when I learned that she had less than a year to live. Fucking ovarian cancer. It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to figure out why I’m afraid of commitment now. Living with the guilt of not being there while Sarah was growing up and then facing the fact that the woman you love is dying will turn anyone off from relationships.
I became Sarah’s legal guardian, and that’s when I took the bureaucratic job with the CIA in the States, hoping I could settle into a suburban life and focus more on her upbringing. Unfortunately, I have enough trouble being comfortable around human beings in general, much less a teenage girl. It was an awkward, difficult time. I suppose, though, that it’s turned out okay. After she graduated from high school, Sarah seemed to come around and appreciate me more. I’ve read that all teenagers go through the same thing. Once they leave the nest, they become your friend. Thank goodness that’s what happened with us.
I wish I could see her more often.
I hear myself sigh as I force these thoughts out of my head. I walk downstairs to the office so I can check my other answering machine. My line to the NSA isn’t a phone at all. It’s really more of a pager embedded in a paperweight on my desk. If the pin light is on, that means I need to contact Lambert from a secure line outside the house. I don’t ever call on my home line.
The pin light is on.
4
Police Constable Robert Perkins disliked his beat with a passion. Every night it was the same thing, except on Sundays when the theater was dark. Even days were bad because of matinees.
As the officer in charge of the area surrounding the National Theatre in London, PC Perkins felt that supervising traffic was below his station. Nevertheless, he did it without complaint. He didn’t actually have to direct traffic — thank God for that — except in the case of an emergency, a royal event, or if some idiot did something to cause an accident. Perkins had walked this beat for the last twenty-two years and would probably be doing it for at least the next ten. Perkins could always put in for a transfer, but his superiors always frowned upon such requests. At age forty-three, he felt, he was becoming a bit long in the tooth for this type of work.
On weekday evenings traffic was even worse because of the business day rush hour. Waterloo Bridge loomed overhead, running from northwest to southeast across the Thames to the South Bank. The mass of vehicles traversing that particular road never let up. At rush hour, before the theater’s evening performance, it was at its worst. The “congestion charge” of £5 over and above the parking fee didn’t dissuade drivers from attempting to use the theater’s small car park. Perkins wondered why more people didn’t just take the tube and walk. Certainly it was simpler and less annoying.
Perkins usually stood at the intersection of Theatre Avenue and Upper Ground because the only place coaches could let off passengers was on Upper Ground at the back of the theater. Thus, he was practically directly beneath Waterloo Bridge and had to deal with the noise of the traffic above him. It gave him a daily headache.
It was now 6:30 and the bulk of the evening traffic was at its peak. Perkins stood at the crossroad and watched as irritable coach drivers continued to stop, then move, stop, then move. Civilian and taxi drivers moving along Theatre Avenue had even worse tempers. They expected the world to stop so that they could see the latest Shakespearean production.
Perkins had lived in London his entire life and had never been inside the National Theatre except to investigate reports of theft, sick patrons, or the occasional belligerent guest. Not once had he sat in one of the three theaters to watch something. He didn’t really care to. He wasn’t into “high brow” entertainment. When he had told his wife that, she’d replied that back in Shakespeare’s day the plays were considered entertainment for the lower and middle classes. Perkins had nothing to say to that.
A blast of car horns on Theatre Avenue pulled his attention away from a density of taxis on Upper Ground. He squinted in that direction and was aghast at what he saw moving slowly along the street and eventually stopping on double red lines, halting traffic.
It was a large lorry pulling a flatbed covered with theater scenery. Three “actors” were performing on it for the benefit of pedestrians and cars trying to go around the lorry. Perkins had never seen anything like this in all his many years on the South Bank. For one thing, lorries weren’t allowed on that particular road.
Perkins grabbed the radio from his belt and contacted his second-in-command, PC Blake, who was stationed on the other side of the theater.
“Yes, sir?”
“Blake, have you seen the lorry over here on Theatre Avenue?”
“What lorry?”
“There’s a bloody lorry with actors on the back of it. They’re doing some kind of show. It’s causing all kinds of problems over here.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about it, sir.”
“Get on to the box office and ask them if this belongs to the theater.”
“Will do.”
Blake signed off and Perkins strode toward the lorry, preparing to give someone hell. He had to stop, though, and direct a number of cars around the lorry and then run back to the intersection to unclog a maze of taxis that formed in less than ten seconds. Perkins cursed and slapped the bonnet of one of the taxis, telling the driver to hurry around and lay off the horn.
Blake came back on the radio.
“Perkins here.”
“Sir, the theater people don’t know anything about it. They didn’t provide this so-called entertainment.”
“Right. That does it. Thank you, Blake.”
Perkins replaced the radio and took a deep breath. He was angry now and he pitied the poor soul he was about to berate. He left the chaos at the intersection
and walked with purpose to the lorry.
The actors were dressed in medieval attire and speaking lines that no one could hear due to the traffic on the bridge overhead. What was the bloody point? Perkins wondered.
The driver sat in the cab bobbing his upper body in a strange fashion. He appeared to be Middle Eastern — he had a dark complexion and black facial hair.
Perkins stepped up to the window and rapped loudly on it.
“Listen here! You’ve got to move! You’re not supposed to be here!” Perkins shouted.
The driver didn’t look at him. He continued to bob back and forth, muttering something to himself.
“Sir! Please lower your window! I’m speaking to you!”
Perkins rapped the window once more and then he understood what the driver was doing.
He was praying.
As soon as the realization hit him, Perkins’s heart nearly stopped. He gasped and stepped back from the lorry, but it was too late.
The explosives were so powerful that they obliterated the lorry and its troupe of suicide “actors,” eight vehicles on Theatre Avenue, and caused a section of Waterloo Bridge to collapse. Fourteen motorcars fell off the bridge, causing a massive, burning pileup. The side of the theater facing the blast was singed and several windows were broken. Sixty-two people were killed and nearly a hundred and fifty were injured.
Constable Perkins never had to supervise traffic at the National Theatre again.
* * *
Each major broadcast network covered the disaster in the U.K., but it was BBC-2 that featured an exclusive interview with a Turkish terrorism expert that happened to be in London on business. A bright female reporter caught Namik Basaran as the fifty-two-year-old man rushed out of the Ritz Hotel to travel to Embankment and view the scene personally. Close beside him was his bodyguard, a broad-shouldered man wearing a turban.
“Mr. Basaran, can you tell us what your visit to London entails?” the reporter asked.
Basaran, a swarthy man with a noticeable skin condition, spoke to the camera. “I am the head of a not-for-profit charity organization in Turkey called Tirma. For the four years of our existence we have provided relief aid to victims of terrorist attacks all over the world. The United Kingdom is no exception. I hope to authorize the release of several thousand pounds to help the victims of this horrible tragedy.”