by Tom Clancy
“Roger that. Out.” Clark took his hand off the transmit button.
The men were quiet, but their looks were intense, Chavez saw. Too professional for an overt display—nobody was playing with a personal weapon, or anything as Hollywood as that—yet their faces were like stone, only their eyes moving back and forth over the diagrams or flickering back and forth to the TV monitors. It must have been very hard on Homer Johnston, Ding thought. He’d been on the fucker when he shot the kid. Homer had kids, and he could have transported the subject into the next dimension as easily as blinking his eyes. . . . But no, that would not have been smart, and they were paid to be smart. The men hadn’t been ready for even an improvised assault, and anything that smacked of improvisation would only get more children killed. And that wasn’t the mission, either. Then a phone rang. Bellow got it, hitting the speaker button.
“Yes?” the doctor said.
“We regret the incident with the child, but she was soon to die anyway. Now, when will our friends be released?”
“Paris hasn’t gotten back to us yet,” Bellow replied.
“Then, I regret to say, there will be another incident shortly.”
“Look, Mr. One, I cannot force Paris to do anything. We are talking, negotiating with government officials, and they take time to reach decisions. Governments never move fast, do they?”
“Then I will help them. Tell Paris that unless the aircraft bringing our friends is ready for us to board it in one hour, we will kill a hostage, and then another every hour until our demands are met,” the voice said, entirely without emotional emphasis.
“That is unreasonable. Listen to me: even if they brought all of them out of their prisons now, it would take at least two hours to get them here. Your wishes cannot make an airplane fly faster, can they?”
That generated a thoughtful pause. “Yes, that is true. Very well, we will commence the shooting of hostages in three hours from now . . . no, I will start the countdown on the hour. That gives you an additional twelve minutes. I will be generous. Do you understand?”
“Yes, you say that you will kill another child at twenty-two hundred hours, and another one every hour after that.”
“Correct. Make sure that Paris understands.” And the line went dead.
“Well?” Clark asked.
“John, you don’t need me here for this. It’s pretty damned clear that they’ll do it. They killed the first one to show us who’s the boss. They plan to succeed, and they don’t care what it takes for them to do so. The concession he just made may be the last one we’re going to get.”
“What is that?” Esteban asked. He walked to the window to see. “Helicopter!”
“Oh?” René went there also. The windows were so small that he had to move the Basque aside. “Yes, I see the police have them. Large one,” he added with a shrug. “This is not a surprise.” But—“José, get up to the roof with a radio, and keep us informed.”
One of the other Basques nodded and headed for the fire stairwell. The elevator would have worked fine, but he didn’t want to be inconvenienced by another power shutoff.
“Command, Rifle Two-One,” Johnston called a minute later.
“Rifle Two-One, this is Six.”
“I got a guy on the castle roof, one man, armed with what looks like a Uzi, and he’s got a brick, too. Just one, nobody else is joining up at this time.”
“Roger that, Rifle Two-One.”
“This isn’t the guy who whacked the kid,” the sergeant added.
“Okay, good, thank you.”
“Rifle Three has him, too . . . just walked over to my side. He’s circulating around . . . yeah, looking over the edge, looking down.”
“John?” It was Major Covington.
“Yes, Peter?”
“We’re not showing them enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Give them something to look at. Policemen, an inner perimeter. If they don’t see something, they’re going to wonder what’s going on that they cannot see.”
“Good idea,” Noonan said.
Clark liked it. “Colonel?”
“Yes,” Nuncio replied. He leaned over the table. “I propose two men, here, two more here . . . here . . . here.”
“Yes, sir, please make that happen right away.”
“René,” Andre called from in front of a TV screen. He pointed. “Look.”
There were two Guardia cops moving slowly and trying to be covert as they approached up Strada España to a place fifty meters from the castle. René nodded and picked up his radio. “Three!”
“Yes, One.”
“Police approaching the castle. Keep an eye on them.”
“I will do that, One,” Esteban promised.
“Okay, they’re using radios,” Noonan said, checking his scanner. “Citizen-band walkie-talkies, regular commercial ones, set on channel sixteen. Pure vanilla.”
“No names, just numbers?” Chavez asked.
“So far. Our point of contact calls himself One, and this guy is Three. Okay, does that tell us anything?”
“Radio games,” Dr. Bellow said. “Right out of the playbook. They’re trying to keep their identities secret from us, but that’s also in the playbook.” The two photo-ID pictures had long since been sent to France for identification, but both the police and intelligence agencies had come up dry.
“Okay, will the French deal?”
A shake of the head. “I don’t think so. The Minister, when I told him about the Dutch girl, he just grunted and said Carlos stays in the jug no matter what—and he expects us to resolve the situation successfully, and if we can’t, his country has a team of his own to send down.”
“So, we’ve gotta have a plan in place and ready to go—by twenty-two hundred.”
“Unless you want to see them kill another hostage, yes,” Bellow said. “They’re denying me my ability to guide their behavior. They know how the game is played.”
“Professionals?”
Bellow shrugged. “Might as well be. They know what I’m going to try, and if they know it ahead of time, then they know how to maneuver clear.”
“No way to mitigate their behavior?” Clark asked, wanting it clear.
“I can try, but probably not. The ideological ones, the ones who have a clear idea of what they want—well, they’re hard to reason with. They have no ethical base to play with, no morality in the usual sense, nothing I can use against them. No conscience.”
“Yeah, we saw that, I guess. Okay.” John stood up straight and turned to look at his two team leaders. “You got two hours to plan it, and one more to set it up. We go at twenty-two hundred hours.”
“We need to know more about what’s happening inside,” Covington told Clark.
“Noonan, what can you do?”
The FBI agent looked down at the blueprints, then over at the TV monitors. “I need to change,” he said, heading over to his equipment case and pulling out the green-on-green night gear. The best news he’d seen so far was that the castle windows made for two blind spots. Better yet, they could control the lights that bled energy into both of them. He walked over to the park engineer next. “Can you switch off these lights along here?”
“Sure. When?”
“When the guy on the roof is looking the other way. And I need somebody to back me up,” Noonan added.
“I can do that,” First Sergeant Vega said, stepping forward.
The children were whining. It had started two hours earlier and only gotten worse. They wanted food—something adults would probably not have asked for, since adults would be far too frightened to eat, but children were different somehow. They also needed to use the restroom quite a bit, and fortunately there were two bathrooms adjacent to the control room, and René’s people didn’t stop them from going—the restrooms had no windows or phones or anything to make escape or communication possible, and it wasn’t worth the aggravation to have the children soiling their pants. The children didn’t t
alk directly to any of his people, but the whining was real and growing. Well-behaved kids, else it would be worse, René told himself, with an ironic smile. He looked at the wall clock.
“Three, this is One.”
“Yes, One,” came the reply.
“What do you see?”
“Eight policemen, four pairs, watching us, but doing nothing but watching.”
“Good.” And he set the radio down.
“Log that,” Noonan said. He’d checked the wall clock. It was about fifteen minutes since the last radio conversation. He was in his night costume now, the two-shade greens they’d used in Vienna. His Beretta .45 automatic, with suppressor, was in a special, large shoulder holster over his body armor, and he had a backpack slung over one shoulder. “Vega, ready to take a little walk?”
“You betcha,” Oso replied, glad at last to be doing something on a deployment. As much as he liked being responsible for the team’s heavy machine gun, he’d never gotten to use it, and, he thought, probably never would. The biggest man on the team, his hobby was pumping iron, and he had a chest about the dimensions of a half-keg of beer. Vega followed Noonan out the door, then outside.
“Ladder?” the first sergeant asked.
“Tool and paint shop fifty yards from where we’re going. I asked. They have what we need.”
“Fair ’nuff,” Oso replied.
It was a fast walk, dodging through a few open areas visible to the fixed cameras, and the shop they headed for had no sign on it at all. Noonan slipped the ground-bolted door and walked in. None of the doors, remarkably enough, were locked. Vega pulled a thirty-foot extension ladder off its wall brackets. “This ought to do.”
“Yeah.” They went outside. Movement would now be trickier. “Noonan to command.”
“Six here.”
“Start doing the cameras, John.”
In the command center, Clark pointed to the park engineer. There was danger here, but not much, they hoped. The castle command center, like this one, had only eight TV monitors, which were hard-wired into over forty cameras. You could have the computer simply flip through them in an automatic sequence, or select cameras for special use. With a mouse-click, one camera was disabled. If the terrorists were using the automatic sequence, as seemed likely, they probably would not notice that one camera’s take was missing during the flip-through. They had to get through the visual coverage of two of them, and the park engineer was ready to flip them off and on as needed. The moment a hand appeared in camera twenty-three’s field of view, the engineer flipped it off.
“Okay, twenty-three is off, Noonan.”
“We’re moving,” Noonan said. The first walk took them twenty meters, and they stopped behind a concession stand. “Okay, we’re at the popcorn building.”
The engineer flipped twenty-three back on, and then turned off twenty-one.
“Twenty-one is off,” Clark reported next. “Rifle Two-One, where’s the guy on the roof?”
“West side, just lit up a smoke, not looking down over the edge anymore. Staying still at the moment,” Sergeant Johnston reported.
“Noonan, you are clear to move.”
“Moving now,” the FBI agent replied. He and Vega double-timed it across the stone slabs, their rubber-soled boots keeping their steps quiet. At the side of the castle was a dirt strip about two meters wide, and some large box-woods. Carefully, Noonan and Vega angled the ladder up, setting it behind a bush. Vega pulled the rope to extend the top portion, stopping it just under the window. Then he got between the ladder and the building, grabbed the treads and held them tight, pulling the ladder against the rough stone blocks.
“Watch your ass, Tim,” Oso whispered.
“Always.” Noonan went up quickly for the first ten feet, then slowed to a vertical crawl. Patience, Tim told himself. Plenty of time to do this. It was the sort of lie that men tell themselves.
“Okay,” Clark heard. “He’s going up the ladder now. The roof guy is still on the opposite side, fat, dumb, and happy.”
“Bear, this is Six, over,” John said, getting another idea.
“Bear copies, Six.”
“Play around a little on the west side, just to draw some attention, over.”
“Roger that.”
Malloy stopped his endless circling, leveled out, and then eased toward the castle. The Night Hawk was a relatively quiet aircraft for a helicopter, but the guy on the roof turned to watch closely, the colonel saw through his night-vision goggles. He stopped his approach at about two hundred meters. He wanted to get their attention, not to spook them. The roof sentry’s cigarette blazed brightly in the goggles. It moved to his lips, then away, then back, staying there.
“Say hello, sweetie,” Malloy said over the intercom. “Jesus, if I was in a Night Stalker, I could spray your ass into the next time zone.”
“You fly the Stalker? What’s it like?”
“If she could cook, I’d fucking marry her. Sweetest chopper ever made,” Malloy said, holding hover. “Six, Bear, I have the bastard’s attention.”
“Noonan, Six, we’ve frozen the roof sentry for you. He’s on the opposite side from you.”
Good, Noonan didn’t say. He took off his Kevlar helmet and edged his face to the window. It was made of irregular segments held in place by lead strips, just like in the castles of old. The glass wasn’t as good as float-plate, but it was transparent. Okay. He reached into his backpack and pulled a fiber-optic cable with the same cobra-head arrangement he’d used in Bern.
“Noonan to Command, you getting this?”
“That’s affirmative.” It was the voice of David Peled. The picture he saw was distorted, but you quickly got used to that. It showed four adults, but more important, it showed a crowd of children sitting on the floor in the corner, close to two doors with labels—the toilets, Peled realized. That worked. That worked pretty well. “Looks good, Timothy. Looks very good.”
“Okay.” Noonan glued the tiny instrument in place and headed down the ladder. His heart was racing faster than it ever did on the morning three-mile run. At the bottom, he and Vega both hugged the wall.
The cigarette flew off the roof, and the sentry got tired of looking at the chopper, Johnston saw.
“Our friend’s moving east on the castle roof. Noonan, he’s coming your way.”
Malloy thought of maneuvering to draw the attention back, but that was too dangerous a play. He turned the helicopter sideways and continued his circling, but closer in, his eyes locked on the castle roof. There wasn’t much else he could do except to draw his service pistol and fire, but at this range it would be hard enough to hit the castle. And killing people wasn’t his job, unfortunately, Malloy told himself. There were times when he found the idea rather appealing.
“The helicopter annoys me,” the voice on the phone said.
“Pity,” Dr. Bellow replied, wondering what response it would get. “But police do what police do.”
“News from Paris?”
“Regrettably not yet, but we hope to hear something soon. There is still time.” Bellow’s voice adopted a quiet intensity that he hoped would be taken for desperation.
“Time and tide wait for no man,” One said, and hung up.
“What’s that mean?” John asked.
“It means he’s playing by the rules. He hasn’t objected to the cops he can see on the TV, either. He knows the things he has to put up with.” Bellow sipped his coffee. “He’s very confident. He figures he’s in a safe place, and he’s holding the cards, and if he has to kill a few more kids, that’s okay, because it’ll get him what he wants.”
“Killing children.” Clark shook his head. “I didn’t think—hell, I’m supposed to know better, right?”
“It’s a very strong taboo, maybe the strongest,” Dr. Bellow agreed. “The way they killed that little girl, though . . . there was no hesitation, just like shooting a paper target. Ideological,” the psychiatrist went on. “They’ve subordinated everything to their beli
ef system. That makes them rational, but only within that system. Our friend Mr. One has chosen his objective, and he’ll stick to it.”
The remote TV system, the park engineer saw, was really something. The objective lens now affixed to the castle window was less than two millimeters across at its widest point, and even if noticed, would be mistaken for a drop of paint or some flaw in the window glass. The quality of the image wasn’t very good, but it showed where people were, and the more you looked at it, the more you understood what initially appeared to be a black-and-white photograph of clutter. He could count six adults now, and with a seventh atop the castle, that left only three unaccounted for—and were all the children in view? It was harder with them. All their shirts were the same color, and the red translated into a very neutral gray on the black-and-white picture. There was the one in a wheelchair, but the rest blended together in the out-of-focus image. The commandos, he could see, were worried about that.
“He’s heading back west again,” Johnston reported. “Okay, he’s at the west side now.”
“Let’s go,” Noonan told Vega.
“The ladder?” They’d taken it down and laid it behind the bushes on its side.
“Leave it.” Noonan ran off in a crouch, reaching the concession structure in a few seconds. “Noonan to Command, time to do the cameras again.”
“It’s off,” the engineer told Clark.
“Camera twenty-one is down. Get moving, Tim.”
Noonan popped Vega on the shoulder and ran another thirty meters. “Okay, take down twenty-three.”
“Done,” the park engineer said.
“Move,” Clark commanded.
Fifteen seconds later, they were in a safe position. Noonan leaned against a building wall and took a long breath. “Thanks, Julio.”