by Tom Clancy
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 Okl
ahoma 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.”
“That’s been confirmed by the visual record,” Nimec said. “I’ve already had our experts do computer magnifications of the televised footage. And we’re trying to dig up amateur videos. There must have been thousands of people with minicams at the scene. But even in the absence of other evidence, I think we can assume the bomb was inserted into the area by means of the booth. Whether it was with or without the knowing complicity of the donut man is still anybody’s guess.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Scull said, “whoever planted the charge got plenty of bang for his buck.”
Nimec looked stiffly at the eyehole camera lens atop the video monitor.
“The charge was very compact in proportion to its effectiveness, yes,” he said, his frown making it clear that he disliked Scull’s particular shorthand. “I’m guessing it was something like C-4 or HBX.”
“And the secondary explosions?” Gordian asked.
Nimec shrugged. “Hard to tell at this stage,” he said.
The room was quiet for a moment. Gordian drank some coffee.
“Okay, Pete, supposing we go along with your assessment for now, and put aside homegrown terrorists as the culprits,” he said. “What about militant Islamic fundamentalists?”
“All of them, you mean?”
Gordian looked at him. “I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
“Neither was I. It’s just that things aren’t always very straightforward when it comes to our enemies in the Arab world. On the one hand, they’re more likely to be interested in causing mass destruction for its own sake. Their hatred of America makes no distinction between its government and its citizens,” Nimec said. “On the other hand, we in this room really must draw a distinction between state-sponsored terrorism and acts committed by extremist fringe groups, or by lone wolves with nebulous ties to both. The line between them isn’t always clear, but it exists. And it may be very relevant in this instance.”
“As I’m sure you’ll explain,” Gordian said, still regarding him steadily.
“In my opinion, the World Trade Center bombing fits more or less into the third category,” he said. “There’s never been any conclusive proof that would link the conspirators to a foreign government. Ramzi Yousef, the so-called mastermind of the plot, was an incredible bungler. His bomb was supposed to cause the largest of the Twin Towers to crack up and fall into the other, which didn’t happen. It was also supposed to release a poisonous cloud of cyanide gas. Obviously that didn’t happen either, since the sodium cyanide he’d impregnated it with vaporized in the heat of the blast ... something any high school chemistry student with a B grade average would have foreseen. Two years later, Yousef sets his Manila hotel room on fire while making liquid explosives and takes off for Pakistan to avoid arrest, leaving behind a computer whose hard drive is full of incriminating data files. If this fool was an agent of a hostile Middle Eastern nation, his superiors must have been quite desperate for a henchman.”
“Okay, so he was a regular Shemp. I’ve got no problem with what you’re saying,” Scull said. “But while we’re doing Terrorism 101, I think we ought to mention the guys that knocked Pan Am 103 out of the air.”
“Scull’s right, we should,” Nimec said. “Even at this early stage, it seems to me there are at least superficial comparisons to be made. Both were efficient, well-financed, and bloodthirsty operations. And, God help humanity, the men who did the work were slick professionals.”
“We know that the Pan Am 103 disaster was underwritten by Libya,” Gordian said. “What you’re suggesting, then, is that last night’s attack has the earmarks of state-supported terrorism.”
“I’m not at all ready to go that far. But it certainly meets several of the criteria,” Nimec said. He smoothed a hand over his bristle of close-cropped hair. “The question is, who’d want to do the deed?”
“I think I see what Pete means,” Nordstrum said. “All the usual suspects have been quiescent for some time now, though for different reasons. The Khatami government in Iran’s trying to impress the European Union with a more moderate posture than its predecessors. Ditto for Iraq, where Saddam’s been hoping to achieve an easing of Gulf War sanctions by acting like the boy next door. We know the Syrians are engaged in back channel peace talks with Israel... offhand, I can’t see that any Moslem regime would want to rock the apple cart right now.”
“I didn’t hear you mention Khadafy in that list of the born again,” Scull said.
Nimec was shaking his head. “He’ll always have fangs, but there’s no benefit to him in stirring up trouble at a time when the rest of his Arab brothers are reaching out across the water. He’s not going to risk isolating himself.”
The five of them were silent awhile. Gordian rose from the table, went to the credenza, topped off his coffee, and sat back down. He stared into his cup without drinking for several more seconds, then looked up at the others.
“I may as well be the first to say what’s on everybody’s mind,” he said at last. “It’s conceivable that it could be Russia. Or factions within the Russian government, anyway. Starinov has any number of political opponents who would like to see him get egg on his face ... and who’d have access to money, materials, and highly proficient operatives.”
He noticed that Megan’s eyes had narrowed in thought.
“Meg?” he said.
“It’s just that the whole thing isn’t coming together for me. Nobody’s claimed responsibility for the bombing—”
“And it could be nobody ever will, if I may interject,” Nimec said. “The trend for the past decade has been for terrorist groups to avoid drawing attention to themselves, the idea being to keep their enemies guessing, and jumping at shadows.”
“I’m aware of that,” Megan said. “But in this instance the act would have been committed with very specific aims in mind—namely a chilling of relations between our two countries, and the weakening of Starinov’s prestige and authority within his own government. Seems to me, there’d be no sense in it unless the finger of blame very clearly pointed in his direction. Furthermore, why would Starinov have engineered the strike, unless he wanted to bring about his own downfall? Like I said, it doesn’t gel. There’s no damn logic to it.”
“Not apparently, and not yet,” Nimec said. “But our players might have a subtle strategy that we just aren’t grasping at this juncture.”
“I agree,” Nordstrum said. “It may feel like forever since the bombing, but the fact is it’s barely been twelve hours. We have to wait for more information, see how everything develops—”
“And do what in the meantime? Sit on our hands?” Scull said. “Gord, listen to me. Can you imagine the negative impact on our plans for the ground station if the blast is pinned on Starinov? I’m the one in Russia. I’ve got a close-up view of what’s going on politically. And I can tell you, there are a lot of people in high positions who’d love for our Yankee asses to ride on out of here on horseback.”
“Jesus, Scull,” Megan said. “Hundreds of innocent people were killed last night, we’ve been discussing a situation that could destabilize an entire region, and you’re—”
“What? Being up front abo
ut why I’m talking to my videophone at midnight Kaliningrad time and trying to figure out the big picture? If we aren’t concerned about our interests in Russia, who’s gonna be? And how come Gord called this coffee klatch in the first place?”
Nordstrum sighed and rubbed his eyelids. “Obviously we all know why we’re here, Scull. But I think Megan was trying to add some perspective to the—”
“Wait,” Gordian said, holding up his hand. “I’m sure that none of us have had much sleep, and everybody’s frazzled. But some extremely important issues have been raised, and I’m glad we didn’t postpone this discussion. Somebody, I think it was Julius Caesar, once said that the art of life is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s, and what I’ve always thought he meant was that you’ve got to meet the unexpected head-on, grapple with it, rather than try to tiptoe around it. That’s the reason we developed the Sword project.” He paused for comment, received none, and turned toward Nimec. “Pete, I want Max Blackburn to assemble a team that will gather information about who may have been responsible for the bombing. He’s to spare no expense.”
Nimec nodded. There was a look Gordian occasionally got in his eyes, a tight, hard focus, that always evoked a mental image of someone holding a magnifying glass into the sunlight to set a leaf on fire. A look that made whoever it was turned upon feel as if he were being bathed in combustible heat. It was a look that he was giving Nimec right now.
“I think it’ll be best if Max flies to Russia as soon as possible. He can coordinate things from there, use the ground station as our primary base of operations,” Gordian continued. “At the same time, Pete, you track down whatever leads you can here in the U.S. I’m hoping for fast progress.”
Nimec nodded again.
“We keep a low profile, okay?” Gordian said. “If the intelligence community gets the slightest hint we’re conducting an independent investigation, they’ll shut us down.”