by Tom Clancy
Dr. Carol Brightling walked out of her office, turned left down the wide corridor, then left again and down the steps to her parked car. Twenty minutes later, she locked the car and walked up the steps of her apartment building, there to be greeted by the faithful Jiggs, who jumped into her arms and rubbed his furry head against her breast, as he always did. Her ten years of misery were over, and though the sacrifice had been hard to endure, the reward for it would be a planet turning back to green, and a Nature restored to Her deserved Glory.
It was somehow good to be back in New York. Though he didn’t dare to return to his apartment, this was at least a city, and here he could disappear as easily as a rat in a junkyard. He told the taxi driver to take him to Essex House, an upscale hotel on Central Park South, and there he checked in under the name of Joseph Demetrius. Agreeably, there was a minibar in his room, and he mixed a drink with two miniatures of an American brand of vodka, whose inferior taste he was too anxious to be concerned about. Then, having come to his decision, he called the airline to confirm flight information, checked his watch, then called the front desk and instructed the clerk there to give him a wake-up call at the hellish hour of 3:30 A.M. The Russian collapsed into the bed without undressing. He’d have to do some quick shopping in the morning, and also visit his bank to pull his Demetrius passport out of the safe-deposit box. Then he’d get five hundred dollars out of an ATM cash machine, courtesy of his Demetrius MasterCard, and he’d be safe . . . well, if not truly safe, then safer than he was now, enough to be somewhat confident in himself and his future, such as it was, if the Project could be stopped. And if not, he told himself behind closed and somewhat drunken eyes, then at least he’d know what to avoid in order to keep himself alive. Probably.
Clark awoke at his accustomed hour. JC was sleeping better now, after two weeks of life, and this morning he’d at least synchronized himself with the master of the house, John found, as he emerged from his morning shave to hear his grandson’s first wake-up chirps in the bedroom where he and Patsy were currently quartered. Sandy was awakened by the sounds, though she’d managed to ignore the alarm on John’s side of the bed, her maternal or grand-maternal instincts obviously having their own selective power. Clark headed down to the kitchen to flip on the coffee machine, then opened the front door to collect his morning copies of the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Manchester Guardian for his morning news brief. One thing about Brit papers, he’d learned, the quality of the writing was better than in most American newspapers, and the articles were rather more concise.
The little guy was growing, John told himself when Patsy came into the kitchen with JC affixed to her left breast and Sandy in tow behind. But his daughter wasn’t drinking coffee, evidently fearful that the caffeine might find its way into her breast milk. Instead she drank milk herself, while Sandy got breakfast going. John Conor Chavez was fully engaged with his breakfast, and in ten minutes, his grandfather was similarly engaged with his own, the radio now on a BBC channel to catch the morning news to supplement the print in front of him. Both modalities confirmed that the world was essentially at peace. The lead story was the Olympic Games, which Ding had reported on every night for them—the morning for him, all those time zones away—the reports usually ending with the phone held to JC’s little face so that his proud father might hear the mewings he occasionally made, though rarely on cue.
By 6:30, John was dressed and heading out the door, and this morning, unlike a few others, he drove to the athletic field for his morning exercises. The men of Team-1 were there, their numbers still short because of the losses at the hospital shoot-out, but proud and tough as ever. Sergeant First Class Fred Franklin led the team this morning, and Clark followed his instructions, not as ably as the younger men, but trying still to keep up, and so earn their respect if also a few disparaging looks at the old fart who thought he was something else. The also short-numbered Team-2 was at the other side of the field, led by Sergeant Major Eddie Price, John saw. Half an hour later, he showered again—doing so twice in ninety minutes almost every day had often struck him as strange, but the wake-up shower was so firm a part of his life that he couldn’t dispense with it, and after working up a sweat with the troops, he always needed another. After that, dressed in his “boss’s” suit, he entered the headquarters building, checked the fax machine first, as always, and found a message from FBI headquarters that told him that nothing new had developed on the Serov case. A second fax told him that a package would be couriered to him early that morning from Whitehall, without saying exactly what it was. Well, John thought, flipping on the office coffee-drip machine, he’d find out in due course.
Al Stanley came in just before eight, still showing the effects of his wounds, but bouncing back well for a man of his age. Bill Tawney was in just two minutes later, and the senior leadership of Rainbow was in place for another working day.
The phone woke him up with a jolt. Popov reached for it in the darkness, missed, then reached again. “Yes.”
“It’s three-thirty, Mr. Demetrius,” the operator said.
“Yes, thank you,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich replied, switching on the light and swiveling to get his feet on the carpeted floor. The note next to his phone told him how to dial the number he wanted: nine . . . zero-one-one-four four . . .
Alice Foorgate came in a few minutes early. She put her purse in a desk drawer and sat down, and began reviewing her notes on the things that were supposed to happen today. Oh, she saw, a budget meeting. Mr. Clark would be in a foul mood until after lunch. Then her phone rang.
“I need to speak to Mr. John Clark,” the voice said.
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“No,” the voice said. “You may not.”
That made the secretary blink with puzzlement. She almost said that she could hardly forward a call under such circumstances, but didn’t. It was too early in the morning for unpleasantness. She placed the incoming call on hold and punched another button.
“A call for you on line one, sir.”
“Who is it?” Clark asked.
“He didn’t say, sir.”
“Okay,” John grumbled. He switched buttons and said, “This is John Clark.”
“Good morning, Mr. Clark,” the anonymous voice said in greeting.
“Who is this?” John asked.
“We have a mutual acquaintance. His name is Sean Grady.”
“Yes?” Clark’s hand tightened on the instrument, and he punched the RECORD button for the attached taping system.
“You may know my name, therefore, as Iosef Andreyevich Serov. We should meet, Mr. Clark.”
“Yes,” John replied evenly, “I’d like that. How do we do it?”
“Today, I think, in New York. Take the British Airways Concorde Flight 1 into JFK, and I will meet you at one in the afternoon at the entrance to the Central Park Zoo. The redbrick building that looks like a castle. I shall be there at eleven o’clock exactly. Any questions?”
“I suppose not. Okay, eleven A.M. in New York.”
“Thank you. Good-bye.” The line went dead, and Clark switched buttons again.
“Alice, could you have Bill and Alistair join me, please?”
They came in less than three minutes later. “Listen to this one, guys,” John said, hitting the PLAY button on the tape machine.
“Bloody hell,” Bill Tawney observed, a second before Al Stanley could do the same. “He wants to meet you? I wonder why.”
“Only one way to find out. I have to catch the Concorde for New York. Al, could you get Malloy awake so he can chopper me to Heathrow?”
“You’re going?” Stanley asked. The answer was obvious.
“Why not? Hell”—John grinned—“it gets me out of the fucking budget meeting.”
“Quite so. There could be dangers involved.”
“I’ll have the FBI send some people to look after me, and I’ll have a friend with me,” Clark pointed out, meaning his .45 Beretta. “We’re dealing w
ith a professional spook here. There’s more danger to him than there is to me, unless he’s got a very elaborate operation set up at the other end, and we should be able to spot that. He wants to meet with me. He’s a pro, and that means he wants to tell me something—or maybe ask me something, but I’d lean the other way, right?”
“I’d have to agree with that,” Tawney said.
“Objections?” Clark asked his principal subordinates. There were none. They were just as curious as he was, though they’d want good security in New York for the meeting. But that would not be a problem.
Clark checked his watch. “It’s short of four in the morning there—and he wants the meet to be today. Pretty fast for this sort of thing. Why the hurry? Any ideas?”
“He could want to tell you that he had no connection with the hospital incident. Aside from that? . . .” Tawney just shook his head.
“Timing’s a problem. That’s a ten-thirty flight, John,” Stanley pointed out. “It’s now three-thirty on your East Coast. No one important will be at work yet.”
“We’ll just have to wake them up.” Clark looked at his phone and hit the speed-dial button for FBI headquarters.
“FBI,” another anonymous voice said.
“I need to talk to Assistant Director Chuck Baker.”
“I don’t think Mr. Baker will be in now.”
“I know. Call him at home. Tell him that John Clark is calling.” He could almost hear the oh, shit at the other end of the call, but an order had been given by a voice that sounded serious, and it would have to be followed.
“Hello,” another voice said somewhat groggily a minute later.
“Chuck, this is John Clark. Something’s turned on the Serov case.”
“What’s that?” And why the hell can’t it wait four hours? the voice didn’t go on.
John explained. He could hear the man waking up at the other end.
“Okay,” Baker said. “I’ll have some guys from New York meet you at the terminal, John.”
“Thanks, Chuck. Sorry to shake you loose at this hour.”
“Yeah, John. Bye.”
The rest was easy. Malloy came into his office after his own morning workout, and called to get his helicopter readied for a hop. It didn’t take long. The only headache was having to filter through the in- and outbound airliner traffic, but the chopper landed at the general-aviation terminal, and an airport security car took John to the proper terminal, where Clark was able to walk into the Speedway Lounge twenty minutes before the flight to collect his ticket. This way, he also bypassed security, and was thus spared the embarrassment of having to explain that he carried a pistol, which in the United Kingdom was the equivalent of announcing that he had a case of highly infectious leprosy. The service was British-lavish, and he had to decline the offer of champagne before boarding the aircraft. Then the flight was called, and Clark walked down the jetway and into the world’s fastest airliner for Flight 1 to New York’s JFK International. The pilot gave the usual preflight brief, and a tractor pushed the oversized fighter aircraft away from its gate. In less than four hours, John thought, he’d be back in the States. Wasn’t air travel wonderful? But better yet, he had in his lap the package that had just been couriered in. It was the personnel package for one Popov, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich. It had been heavily edited, he was sure, but even so it made for interesting reading, as the Concorde leaped into the air and turned west for America. Thank you, Sergey Nikolayevich, John thought, flipping through the pages. It had to be the real KGB file, John saw. Some of the photocopied pages showed pinholes in the upper-left corners, which meant that they dated back to when KGB had used pins to keep pages together instead of staples, that having been copied from the British MI-6 back in the 1920s. It was a piece of trivia that only insiders really knew.
Clark was about halfway across the North Atlantic when Popov awoke on his own again at seven-fifteen. He ordered breakfast sent up and got himself clean in preparation for a busy day. By eight-fifteen, he was walking out the front door, and looked first of all for a men’s store that was open for business. That proved to be frustrating, until finally he found one whose doors opened promptly at nine. Thirty minutes later, he had an expensive but somewhat ill-fitting gray suit, plus shirts and ties that he took back to his hotel room and into which he changed at once. Then it was time for him to walk to Central Park.
The building that guarded the Central Park Zoo was strange to behold. It was made of brick, and had battlements on the roof as though to defend the area against armed attack, but the same walls were dotted with windows, and the entire building sat in a depression rather than atop a hill, as a proper castle did. Well, American architects had their own ideas, Popov decided. He circulated about the area, looking for the FBI agents (or perhaps CIA field officers? he wondered) who were certain to be there to cover this meeting—and possibly to arrest him? Well, there was nothing to be done about that. He would now learn if this John Clark were truly an intelligence officer. That business had rules, and Clark should follow them as a matter of professional courtesy. The gamble was a huge one on his part, and Clark had to respect it for that very reason, but he couldn’t be sure. Well, one couldn’t be sure of much in this world.
Dr. Killgore came to the cafeteria at his accustomed hour, but surprisingly didn’t find his Russian friend, or Foster Hunnicutt, there. Well, maybe they’d both slept late. He lingered over breakfast twenty minutes more than usual before deciding, the hell with it, and drove to the horse barn. There he found another surprise. Both Buttermilk and Jeremiah were in the corral, neither of them saddled or bridled. There was no way for him to know that both horses had walked back to their home on their own last night. Curious, he walked both back to their stalls before saddling up his own usual mount. He waited outside in the corral for another fifteen minutes, wondering if his friends would show up, but they didn’t, and he and Kirk Maclean rode off west for their morning tour of the countryside.
The covert side of the business could be fun, Sullivan thought. Here he was driving what appeared to be a Consolidated Edison van, and wearing the blue coveralls that announced the same employment. The clothing was baggy enough to allow him to carry a dozen weapons inside the ugly garment, but better yet it made him effectively invisible. There were enough of these uniforms on the streets of New York that no one ever noticed them. This discreet surveillance mission had been laid on in one big hurry, with no fewer than eight agents already at the rendezvous site, all carrying the passport photo of this Serov subject, for what good it was. They lacked height and weight estimates, and that meant they were looking for an OWG, an ordinary white guy, of which New York City had at least three million.
Inside the terminal, his partner, Frank Chatham, was waiting at the exit ramp off British Airways Flight 1, in a suit and tie. His coverall outfit was inside the Con Ed van that Sullivan had parked outside the terminal. They didn’t even know who this Clark guy was whom they were meeting, just that Assistant Director Baker thought he was pretty fucking important.
The aircraft got in exactly on time. Clark, in seat 1-C, stood and was the first off the aircraft. The FBI escort at the jetway exit was easy to spot.
“Looking for me?”
“Your name, sir?”
“John Clark. Chuck Baker should have—”
“He did. Follow me, sir.” Chatham led him out the fast way, bypassing immigration and customs, and it was just one more time that John’s passport wouldn’t be stamped to celebrate his entry into a sovereign country. The Con Ed van was easily spotted. Clark went for it without being told to and hopped in.
“Hi, I’m John Clark,” he told the driver.
“Tom Sullivan. You’ve met Frank.”
“Let’s move, Mr. Sullivan,” John told him.
“Yes, sir.” The van took off at once. In the back, Chatham sat and struggled into his blue coveralls.
“Okay, sir, what exactly is happening here?”
“I’m meeting a guy.”
“Yeah, but his real name is Popov. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich Popov. He used to be a colonel in the old KGB. I have his personnel package, read it coming across. He’s a specialist in dealing with terrorists, probably has more connections than the phone company.”
“This guy set up the operation that—”
“Yeah.” John nodded in the front-right passenger seat. “The operation that went after my wife and my daughter. They were the primary targets.”
“Shit!” Chatham observed, as he zipped his outfit up. They hadn’t known that. “And you want to meet with this mutt?”
“Business is business, guys,” John pointed out, wondering if he really believed that or not.
“So, who are you?”
“Agency, used to be, anyway.”
“How do you know Mr. Baker?”
“I have a slightly different job now, and we have to interface with the Bureau. Mainly with Gus Werner, but lately I’ve been talking with Baker, too.”