by Tom Clancy
“Cing’mon, man. We gotta get down off this stage while we can,” he said, reaching out to Harrison. “Ain’t gonna be much longer before it collapses altogether.”
Harrison grabbed hold of his hand, let himself be helped to his feet, and then was crushing Tasheya to him, feeling her chin press into the hollow of his neck, feeling the warm flood of her tears against his face. And for a brief moment, standing there amid the destruction, he understood that, while things might never be okay for him again — no, not even close to okay — there was reason to hope they would eventually get better.
“Our friend’s right,” he said finally, nodding toward Zyman. “We’d better go.”
EIGHTEEN
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK JANUARY 1, 2000
In his office at the Platinum Club, Nick Roma sat in pensive silence, his lights out, the dance hall on the floor below him silent. It was two o’clock in the morning. All but a handful of the people who had begun the night shaking their asses off down there had left hours ago, their partying having come to a finish after news of the Times Square explosion infiltrated the room like a plague virus. The few who remained were mostly core members of his crew, men who wouldn’t give a damn about anything except getting drunk at the bar.
Of course, he had known what was going to happen, known that the New Year’s celebration would become a national death rite before it was all over. But somehow, it wasn’t until he had seen the reports on television that he grasped the enormity of the destruction he’d helped bring about.
Nick sat in the darkness, not making a sound, thinking. He’d noticed there was very little sound out on the street, either. Every now and then the lights of a passing car would sweep across the windows overlooking the avenue, throwing a crazy quilt of shadows over his features, but otherwise the people down there had disappeared. They had seen lightning strike suddenly from the sky and burrowed down into their holes like frightened animals.
Could anyone really get away with what he’d been part of? If he was linked to it, the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, on this particular night, in the heart of its largest city… The country had never taken a hit like this before, and the pressure on law-enforcement agencies to find those behind it would be tremendous.
Roma pondered that for a moment. Could it be they would wind up tripping over each other’s feet? He supposed there was that danger for them. In the horse race to see which agency could make the first arrests, they might conceal leads, refuse to share information. Such things had happened before in investigations that threatened to become trouble for him, and he’d turned the situation to good advantage every time.
Still, he’d always been someone who dealt with expedients. His concerns were with running his business interests, not radical politics. He neither knew nor cared why Vostov had become involved in this affair, and had made it clear to his messengers that, while preferring to avoid a rift with the organizatsiya, he would not be controlled by anyone in Moscow. If Vostov wanted to reach out for assistance in smuggling the C-4 into the U.S., it was going to cost him. And if he wanted him to provide a broader range of support to Gilea and her group, it would cost even more. In money, and in favors owed.
A million-dollar payment from the Russians had settled his misgivings enough to win his participation, but Roma still wondered if he had gotten in over his head. He supposed he would feel less vulnerable when the strike team was out of the country…
The sound of his doorknob quietly turning pulled him from his thoughts with a start. He leaned forward, his hand dropping into his desk drawer and closing around the grip of his MP5K.
He continued to hold it even after Gilea entered the room, her slender silhouette gliding forward through the dimness.
“You could have knocked,” he said.
“Yes.” She pushed the door shut and he heard the deadbolt click behind her. “I could have.”
Roma regarded her in the scant illumination coming in from the streetlights outside his window.
“There’s a light switch on the wall beside you,” he said.
She nodded but made no move toward the switch.
“We were successful,” she said, coming farther into the room. “But I suppose you already know.”
“I had the television on earlier,” he said, nodding. His hand still on the gun.
She took a step forward, then another, stopping in front of the desk, her fingers going to the collar of her black leather coat, unbuttoning the top button, then the button underneath it.
“Why are you here?” he said. “You know Zachary won’t have your papers ready until tomorrow. And I don’t suppose it’s just to say good night.”
“No, not really,” she said. She put both hands flat on the desktop and leaned forward, her face coming very close to his in the semidarkness.
Gilea finished opening her coat, shrugged out of it, tossed it onto the chair beside her. She was wearing a dark sweater underneath.
He waited.
“I’ve been enjoying this night too much to have it end, Nick,” she said. Leaning closer, her voice almost a whisper. “You don’t have to be holding that gun.”
Roma swallowed. Enjoying this night? What kind of woman was she? Two hours earlier she had been responsible for untold carnage, yet now, out of the blue…?
He felt something akin to horror, and yet…
And yet…
The thing that horrified him the most was his own unbidden physical response to her nearness.
The attraction she held for him was incredible.
She leaned closer still, putting her face next to his, her lips brushing against his ear.
“You know what I came here for,” she said. “You know what I want.”
Roma’s throat felt dry. His heart was pounding.
He breathed. Breathed again.
He took his hand off his gun and reached out to pull her against him. And as her soft flesh touched him, warm against his skin, he glanced at the mirror and smiled a small, private smile.
NINETEEN
NEW YORK CITY AND SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA JANUARY 1, 2000
6:30 A.M.
The city was in shock.
There was no other word for the malaise that gripped New York. Not even the World Trade Center bombing had so tested the people and resources of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs.
Of course, the World Trade Center bombing hadn’t taken out the heart of the city.
* * *
Times Square was nearly as packed with people at this moment as it had been when the explosion occurred. The red and blue strobes from the emergency vehicles that ringed the blast site and the arc lights that the rescue workers had brought in were fading, giving way to the slanting rays of dawn.
The day promised to be clear and cold, and the early morning light threw everything into stark relief. Ten-foot-tall temporary chimneys, hastily put in place by city workers to cover broken steam pipes in the streets, spouted clouds of vapor, shielding workers from the hot blasts and directing the flow upward. Wisps of fog from the chimneys flowed around and through the site, wreathing it in clouds and backlit rainbows, giving it an otherworldly appearance. People with acronyms — FBI, NYCFD, ATF, NYPD — silk-screened onto their nylon coats crawled though the wreckage, sifting the debris for the smallest fragments that might lead them to those responsible for the atrocity. Members of the National Guard, hastily mobilized, kept gawkers at bay so that the site would remain undisturbed — if that was a word that could be applied to what was essentially a bomb crater — except by the rescue workers. Everybody, no matter how intent they were on their search, gave way to emergency workers and the teams combing the wreckage with dogs. The dogs were looking for victims. Their handlers were praying for survivors.
The long night had been punctuated by this search. A dog would whine and scratch at the crumpled remains of a massive neon sign, the tangled web of a broken bleacher, the tortured fragments of a skyscraper. An ants’ nest of activity would e
rupt around the excited dog. Rescue workers would bring an amazing array of instruments to bear on the spot — infrared heat sensors, supersensitive microphones, tiny video cameras on flexible probes, ultrasound machines, metal detectors, motion detectors, X-rays.
If there was even the slightest indication that the person trapped inside was still breathing, no effort was spared to shift the wreckage and get him or her out. Cranes, bags that could be inserted into the smallest crevices and then inflated to lift the obstructions slowly and gently, levers, braces, and plain old manpower were used to get to the people who needed help. But as time dragged on, the desperate effort to extract survivors was giving way to the heartbreaking act of marking remains. Fluorescent orange flags on slender wire stakes fluttered in the breeze, each representing a life lost. Eventually, when it was clear that there were no more survivors, the grim task of retrieving the corpses would begin.
And through it all, the men and women in the nylon coats continued their search for evidence.
* * *
Half a mile away, the morning light slanted through the stained glass windows of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The air of the church, heavy with incense and smoke from thousands of candles lining the walls and altars, took on a rainbow hue. But the people who filled the pews were immune to its beauty. Many of them had been in Times Square when it happened. More had seen it on CNN or the local news. Some had lost friends and family. The deadly blast and the screams of the dying echoed in their memories. Nothing, not even the solace they’d sought here in an all-night mass for the victims, would ever silence them.
* * *
The meeting took place a little past noon in a sub-basement conference room at UpLink’s corporate headquarters on Rosita Avenue, in San Jose. With its clean lines, direct overhead lights, beige carpeting, and coffee machine, it looked very much like the upstairs conference rooms minus the windows. But being sealed away from a view of the Mount Hamilton foothills was only its most superficial difference.
Access was restricted to those in Gordian’s inner circle, all of whom were provided with digital key codes that unlocked the door. Two-foot-thick concrete walls and acoustical paneling soundproofed the room from the keenest human ears. Steel reinforcements within the walls had been implanted with noise generators and other state-of-the-art masking systems to thwart monitoring of electronic communications. Sweep teams went through the room on a regular basis, and telephones, computers, and videoconferencing equipment going in or out of it were checked for bugs using spectrum and X-ray analysis.
While Gordian felt the term “secure” was a relative one, and supposed that someone who was crafty enough, determined enough, and had enough sophisticated hardware at his disposal could still find a way to listen in on his top-level discussions, he was confident that this part of his operational center was as resistant to eavesdropping as caution and countersurveillance technology allowed. In the comint game, the most you could ever do was stay one step ahead of the droops — a word of Vince Scull’s creation meaning “dirty rotten snoops.”
Now Gordian looked at the faces around the conference table, considering how best to start a meeting that was light-years from business-as-usual. Present in the flesh were his Foreign Affairs Consultant Alex Nordstrum, Vice President of Special Projects Megan Breen, and Security Chief Peter Nimec. On a video docking station across the table, Vince’s puffy-eyed, basset-hound face was scowling at him over a high-band satellite link from Kaliningrad.
Gordian took a deep breath. He had observed that, to a person, their features reflected his own low, grim mood.
“I want to thank all of you for coming in virtually without advance notice,” he said. “I don’t know how many of you lost friends or loved ones in Times Square last night. For those who might have, my profound condolences.” He paused and turned his gaze toward Megan. “Have you gotten any word from your brother and sister-in-law?”
A trim brunette in her late thirties, Megan looked at him with alert, sapphire-blue eyes.
“Not yet,” she said, “but that isn’t any reason to assume they were hurt. The long-distance phone lines to and from New York are choked.”
Megan’s unworried tone didn’t fool Gordian. He had once — long ago — made the mistake of thinking she was just another starched and stuffy executive clone cranked out by the Harvard Business School — in her case, one with an added sheepskin in psychology from Columbia. An executive clone who was apt to play mind games, then. That had been pure bias, a last prickly vestige of the blue-collar resentments that were the bulk of his familial inheritance. It had taken him years to discard his unfair, limiting preconceptions about those with upper-class backgrounds. Dan Parker had been the first to make him see things differently. Meg had taken him the rest of the way down the road.
In a sense, though, those stereotypical notions had worked in Meg’s favor when he’d originally employed her as a human resource executive/headhunter for the R&D divisions. He’d wanted someone who could make hiring and firing decisions in a detached, intelligent manner, and that she had done. But he’d also gotten an inspired thinker, and a trusted confidant, in the bargain. And that was something he hadn’t expected of her.
“Pete, you have people out east. You think they can do anything to help Megan find out about her relatives?” he said.
Nimec tipped his narrow jaw downward slightly, his tightly wound version of a nod.
“I’m sure they can,” he said.
“Good.” Gordian was quiet a second, his eyes moving around the table again. “I think we’d better do some talking about what happened last night. Ask ourselves why in God’s name anybody would want to do something like that. And who would be capable of it.”
“Turn on the tube, and you’ll hear the talking heads blathering about domestic terrorism,” Nimec said. “Present company excepted, Alex.”
Nordstrum was looking down at his eyeglasses, wiping their lenses with a cleaning cloth he’d pulled from a pocket of his herringbone blazer.
“I’m a part-time consultant for CNN and several other news-gathering agencies. They pay well and give me an opportunity to air my views. Not all, uh, talking heads warrant immediate disregard.”
Scull’s voice came from the video setup. “Watch your ass, Nimec.”
He shrugged. “My point was just that their general opinion is kind of ironic, when you recall that the knee-jerk reaction once would’ve been to pin any terrorist act on the Arabs. Oklahoma City changed all that.”
“I take it you disagree with the media consensus,” Gordian said.
“Even from what little we know about the bombing, I very much doubt it could have been pulled off by some borderline retardates from Ephraim City.”
“Reasons?”
“Several,” Nimec said. “For openers, their justification for homegrown violence is a paranoid hatred and suspicion of the feds, and a sense of themselves as latter-day minutemen fighting for their constitutional liberties. Their targets have always had some connection, whether real or symbolic, to government agencies. The killing of ordinary citizens is something they view as collateral to the struggle.” He paused a moment, sipped his coffee. “Remember, the real intent in bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Building was to take out FBI and ATF employees with offices on the upper floors. The damage to the lower stories was unavoidable given that the drums of fertilizer and fuel oil McVeigh detonated weighed over four thousand pounds, couldn’t have been smuggled into the building, and therefore had to be left in front of it. What I’m saying is that he couldn’t pinpoint his target, so he convinced himself all those kids in the day-care center were necessary casualties of war. Acceptable losses.”
“What about the bombing in Olympic Park?” Megan asked. “That was a public space.”
“The verdict on who was behind that one’s still out,” Nimec said. “But even there, I can see the message they might have been sending. A hard-core belief among the superpatriots is that all three branches of government have been
infiltrated by an international Zionist conspiracy… a secret cabal bent on absorbing the United States into a New World Order. And the Olympics has been a symbol of globalism since its origin. You can see where I’m heading.”
“If you follow that warped thinking, though, you can imagine how they might have seen the Times Square event as something comparable,” Gordian said. “A kind of worldwide jubilee bringing people of every nation together.”
Nimec wobbled his hand in front of him. “That’s a little tenuous. At best, we’re dealing with prosaic minds when we talk about the movement’s leadership. And once you come down to the foot soldiers, you’re really dredging the bottom of the IQ curve. These are men who get confused if it takes more than a single stroke of the pencil to connect the dots.”
“If you don’t mind, Pete, I’d like to get back to what you said a minute ago. About not believing they could have pulled it off…”
“Let’s use Oklahoma City as an example again,” Nimec said, nodding. “The bomb that was detonated was big and crude because the perpetrators couldn’t get their hands on more sophisticated, more tightly controlled demolitions… not in sufficient quantities to achieve their goal, at any rate. So instead they follow a recipe that’s been disseminated in cheap kitchen explosives handbooks, Internet message boards, you name it. A scene in the Turner Diaries becomes their mission blueprint, and the rest is history. The whole episode’s characterized by a lack of imagination, and a reliance on materials that can be obtained easily and legally.”
“The eyewitness accounts I’ve been hearing all agree that the initial blast emanated from a vender’s booth on Forty-second Street,” Nordstrum said. “There’s also supposed to have been an incident involving a K-9 cop and the vender just minutes earlier.”