by Tom Clancy
“John Clark, your former bodyguard. Are you aware he is a fugitive from justice? Can you tell us the last time you spoke with him and the nature of your conversation?”
Ryan turned to van Damm, who also fought off a deer-in-the-headlights look. Arnie reached out and took Jack’s arm, tried to lead him on to the vehicles.
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Quickly Ryan recovered just enough to turn back to the reporter. “I’ll have a statement on this in a short while.”
More questions came, as the eager young reporter sensed that Ryan had no idea what the hell she was talking about. But Ryan said nothing else; he just hustled into the SUV behind his campaign manager.
Twenty seconds later, the SUV with Ryan, van Damm, and Price-O’Day pulled out as the door shut.
“What the fuck was that?” Jack asked.
Van Damm had his phone out already. “Just got a heads-up from D.C. Brannigan called a surprise press conference right before the six-o’clock news and said Clark was being picked up on a murder rap. I found out from FBI he managed to escape the SWAT team that went to arrest him.”
“What murder?” Jack almost shouted.
“Something about his actions in the CIA. I am working on getting a copy of the arrest order from DOJ. I should have it in an hour.”
“This is politics! I gave the man a full pardon for his work at CIA, just to prevent something like this from happening.” Ryan was yelling inside the car, the veins in his neck exposed.
“It is politics. Kealty’s going after him to get to you. We need to treat this with kid gloves, Jack. We’ll go back to the hotel, kibitz for a while, and make a statement that is careful—”
“I’m going to get in front of the cameras right now and tell America what kind of a man Ed Kealty is picking on. This is bullshit!”
“Jack, we don’t know the details. If Clark has done something other than what you pardoned him for, it is going to look extremely bad.”
“I know what Clark has done. Hell, I ordered him to do some of it.” Ryan thought for a moment. “What about Chavez?”
“He wasn’t mentioned at Brannigan’s press conference.”
“I need to check on John’s wife.”
“Clark needs to turn himself in.”
Jack shook his head. “No, Arnie. Trust me, he does not.”
“Why not?”
“Because John is involved in something that needs to stay quiet. Let’s just leave it at that. I will not go out on record with a call for Clark to come forward.”
Arnie started to protest, but Ryan raised his hand.
“You don’t have to like it, but you do have to drop it right now. Trust me, Clark needs to stay low until this blows over.”
“If it blows over,” Arnie said.
43
General Riaz Rehan entered the baked-brick hut with two of Haqqani’s men. They stood on either side of him holding flashlights, and they shined their beams on a figure slumped on the floor in the corner of the room. It was a man, both of his legs were crudely bandaged, and he lay on the floor on his left shoulder, facing the wall.
The Haqqani operatives wore black turbans and long beards, but Rehan was in a simple salwar kameez and a short prayer cap. His beard was short and trim, contrasting dramatically with the two long-haired Pashtuns.
Rehan lookހed over the prisoner. The man’s matted and soiled hair was more than half gray, but this was not an old man. He was healthy, or he had been so before he’d been blown ten feet by a rocket-propelled grenade.
Rehan stood over the man for several seconds, but the man did not look toward the light. Finally one of the Pashtun gunmen walked over and kicked the man on a bandaged leg. He stirred, turned to the light, tried to shield his eyes from it with his hands, then just sat up with his eyes closed.
The wrists of the infidel were shackled to an eyebolt on the poured-concrete floor, and his feet were bare.
“Open your eyes.” General Rehan said it in English. The Pakistani general motioned for the two guards to lower their flashlight beams a little, and when they did so, the bearded Westerner’s eyes slowly opened. Rehan saw the man’s left eye was blood red, perhaps from some blow to his nose or eye but likely due to a concussion from the RPG blast that, Rehan had been told, caused the prisoner’s other injuries.
“So… you speak English, yes?” Rehan asked.
The man did not answer at first, but after a moment he shrugged, then nodded.
The general squatted down, close to his prisoner. “Who are you?”
No response from the prisoner.
“What is your name?”
Still nothing.
“It hardly matters. My sources tell me you are a guest in Pakistan of Major Mohammed al Darkur of the Joint Intelligence Bureau. You came here in order to spy on what Major al Darkur erroneously thinks is a joint ISI — Haqqani network facility.”
The wounded man did not respond. It was difficult to tell in the low light, but his pupils were still somewhat dilated from his concussion.
“I would very much like to understand why you are here, in Miran Shah, right now. Is there something special you are hoping to find, or was it just fate that has your journey into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas coincide with my visit here? Major al Darkur has been meddlesome to my efforts of late.”
The gray-haired man just stared at him.
“You, friend, are a very boring conversationalist.”
“Been called worse.”
“Ah. Now you talk. Shall we have a polite discussion, man-to-man, or shall I have my associates pry the next words past your tongue?”
“Do what you have to do, I’m going to catch a nap.” And with that the American lay back on his side, his chains jangling on the concrete floor as he positioned himself.
Rehan shook his head in frustration. “Your country should have stayed out of Pakistan, just like the British should have stayed away. But you inject yourselves, your culture, your military, your sin, into all cracks on the globe. You are an infection that spreads insidiously.”
Rehan started to say something else, but he stopped himself. Instead he just waved an angry hand at the prostrate wounded man and turned to one of the Haqqani operatives.
The American did not speak any Urdu, the native tongue of General Rehan. Nor did he speak much Pashto, the native tongue of the Haqqani network officer standing next to General Rehan. But Sam spoke English, so Rehan clearly intended for the prisoner to understand his command when he relayed it in Englid it in sh.
“See what he knows. If he tells you willingly, execute him humanely. If he wastes your time, make him regret doing so.”
“Yes, General,” replied the black-turbaned man.
Rehan turned and ducked his head as he exited the baked-brick cell.
From his position on the floor, Driscoll watched him leave. When he was alone in the room, Sam said, “You may not remember me, but I remember you, asshole.”
44
John Clark stepped off the bus in Arlington, Virginia, at five-fifty a.m. He kept the hood of his jacket over his head as he walked up North Pershing into a neighborhood that was still asleep. His target was in the 600 block of North Fillmore, but he would not go there directly; instead he continued on Pershing, ducked up the drive of a darkened two-story clapboard home, and followed the property line to the back fence. There he climbed over, dropped down into the dark, and followed this fence line until he made his way to the carport across the street from his target.
He kept his eyes on the two-story whitewashed home on a zero-lot property in front of him, crouched next to a garbage can with a violent cracking in his knees, and waited.
It was cold this morning, below forty, and a wet breeze blew in from the northwest. Clark was tired, he’d been moving from place to place all night: a coffee shop in Frederick, a train station in Gaithersburg, a bus stop in Rockville, and then transfers to busses in Falls Church and Tysons Corner. He could have traveled on a more direct route, b
ut he did not want to arrive too early. A man walking through the streets early on a workday was less noticeable than a man strolling through a residential neighborhood in the middle of the night.
Especially when there were trained watchers about.
From Clark’s vantage point, here between a Saab four-door and a garbage can full of what John had determined to be soiled diapers, he could not see a surveillance crew monitoring the whitewashed wood home across tiny North Fillmore, but he imagined they were there. They would have determined there was a chance he’d come here to see the man who lived here, so they would have put one car with a two-person crew somewhere in a driveway on the street. The homeowner would have come out to see what the hell the car was doing there, but the watchers would have flashed their FBI creds, and that would have been the end of that conversation.
He waited twenty-two minutes before a light came on in an upstairs window. A few more minutes and a downstairs light flicked on.
Clark waited some more. While doing so he repositioned himself, put his butt down on the edge of the carport to allow the blood to flow back into his legs.
He’d just adjusted to his new position when the front door of the home opened, a man in a windbreaker stepped out, stretched for a moment on the fence, and started up the street in a slow jog.
Clark stood slowly in the dark and retraced his steps through the two backyards.
John Clark made certain no one was following James Hardesty, CIA archivist, before he began jogging behind him. There were a few more men and women out for their predawn, pre-workday exercise now, so Clark fit in to the residential color. Or he would as long as the only illumination came from streetlights. John wore a black viny怅el hooded jacket that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows on a jogger, but his belted khaki chinos and his Vasque boots weren’t typical attire for the other runners around here.
He overtook Hardesty on South Washington Boulevard, just as he passed Towers Park on the right. The CIA man glanced back for an instant as he heard the jogger behind him, he moved to the edge of the curb to let the faster man pass, but instead the man spoke. “Jim, it’s John Clark. Keep running. Let’s go up in the trees here and have a quick chat.”
Without a word, both men ran up the little incline and stepped into an empty playground. There was just faint light in the sky, enough to see faces close. They stopped by a swing set.
“How’s it going, John?”
“I guess you could say I’ve been better.”
“You don’t need that gun on your hip.”
Clark didn’t know if the weapon was printing under his jacket or if Hardesty had just assumed. “I don’t need it for you, maybe. Whether or not I need it has yet to be determined.”
Neither man was out of breath; the jog had lasted less than a half-mile.
Hardesty said, “When I heard you were on the run, I thought you might come looking for me.”
Clark replied, “The FBI probably had the same suspicions.”
A nod. “Yep. A two-man SSG team a half-block up the street. They showed up before Brannigan went on the news.” The Special Surveillance Group was a unit of non-agent FBI employees who served as the Bureau’s army of watchers.
“Figured.”
“I doubt they’ll come looking for me for a half-hour or so. I’m all yours.”
“I won’t keep you. I’m just trying to get a handle on what’s going on.”
“DOJ has a hard-on for you, big-time. That’s pretty much all I know. But I want you to know this. Whatever they got on you, John, they didn’t get anything from me that wasn’t in your file.”
Clark did not even know that Hardesty had been questioned. “The FBI interviewed you?”
Hardesty nodded. “Two senior special agents grilled me at a hotel in McLean yesterday morning. I saw some younger special agents in another meeting room interviewing other guys from the building. Pretty much everyone who was around when you were in SAD was questioned about you. I guess I warranted the first-string agents because Alden told them you and I go way back.”
“What did they ask?”
“All kinds of stuff. They had your file already. Guess those pricks Kilborn and Alden saw something in there that they didn’t like, so they started some sort of DOJ investigation.”
Clark just shook his head. “No. What could be in my CIA record that would warrant CIA going out of shop like that? Even if they thought they had me on some bullshit treason charge, they’d bring me in themselves before they breathed a word of it to DOJ.”
Hardesty shook his head. “Not if they had something on you that wasn’t part of your CIA duties. Those fucks would sell you down the river because you are friends with Ryan.”
Shit, thought Clark. What if this wasn’t about The Campus? What if this was about the election? “What did they ask?”
Hardesty shook his head but stopped it in mid-shake. “Wait. I am the archivist. I know, or at least I have seen, virtually everything in the virtual record. But there was one thing they asked me about that threw me for a loop.”
“What’s that?”
“I know all your SAD exploits don’t make it into the files, but normally there is a grain of something in the files that can link up to what you were actually working on. Meaning I might not have a clue what a paramilitary operations officer did in Nigeria, but I can tell you if he was in Africa on a particular date. Malaria shots, commercial air travel, per diems that correspond to the location, that sort of thing.”
“Right.”
“But the two feds asked me about your activities in Berlin in March 1981. I went through the files… ” Hardesty shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing at all about you being anywhere near Germany at that time.”
John Clark did not have to think back. He remembered instantly. He gave away nothing, just asked, “Did they believe you?”
James shook his head. “Hell, no. Apparently Alden had told them to watch out for me because you and I have some history. So the feds pressed me. They asked me about a hit you did on a Stasi operative named Schuman. I told them the truth. I’ve never heard of any Schuman, and I didn’t know a damn thing about you in Berlin in ’eighty-one.”
Clark just nodded, his poker face remaining intact. The dawn filled out some of the features of Hardesty’s face. The question John wanted to ask hung in the air for a moment, then Hardesty answered it unbidden.
“I did not say one damn word about Hendley Associates.” Hardesty was one of the few at CIA who knew of the existence of The Campus. In fact, Jim Hardesty was the one who suggested Chavez and Clark go meet with Gerry Hendley in the first place.
Clark stared into the man’s eyes. It was too dark to get a read on him, but, Clark decided, Jim Hardesty wouldn’t lie to him. After a few seconds he said, “Thank you.”
James just shrugged. “I’ll take that to my grave. Look, John, whatever happened in Germany, this isn’t going to be about you. You’re just a pawn. Kealty wants to push Ryan into a corner on the issue of black ops. He’s using you, guilt by association or whatever you want to call it. But the way he’s having the FBI rummage through your past ops, pulling them out, and waving them around in the air, stuff that ought to just be left right the fuck where it is — I mean, he’s digging up old bones at Langley, and nobody needs that.”
John just looked at him.
“You know and I know they don’t have anything on you substantive. No sense in you making the situation any worse.”
“Say what you want to say, Jim.”
“I am not worried about your indictment. You are a tough guy.” He sighed. “I’m worried you are going to get killed.”
John said nothing.
“It makes no sense to run from this. When Ryan gets elected, this whole thing will dry up. Maybe, just maybe, you do a dozen months in a Club Fed somewhere. You can handle that.”
“You want me to turn myself in?”
Hardesty sighed. “You running like this isn’t good for you, it isn’t good for American
black ops, and it isn’t good for 뀀t goodyour family.”
Clark nodded now, looked at his watch. “Maybe I’ll do that.”
“It’s best.”
“You’d better get on home now before SSG calls it in.”
The men shook hands. “Think about what I said.”
“I will.” Clark turned away from Hardesty, stepped into the trees lining the playground, and headed for the bus stop.
He had a plan now, a direction.
He wasn’t going to turn himself in.
No, he was going to Germany.
45
Clark sat in the back of a CVS pharmacy in the Sand-town neighborhood of West Baltimore. It was a blighted part of the city, rife with crime and decay, but it was also a good place for Clark to lie low.
Seated around him were locals, most old and sickly, waiting for their prescriptions to be filled. John himself kept his coat bunched up around his neck and his knit cap pulled down over his ears — it made him look like he was fighting a bad cold, but it also served to cover his facial features in case anyone around was looking for him.
Clark knew Baltimore; he’d walked these streets as a young man. Back then, he had been forced to disguise himself as a homeless person while he tracked the drug gang who had raped and then murdered his girlfriend, Pam. He’d killed a lot of people here in Baltimore, a lot of people who deserved to die.
That was around the time when he’d joined the Agency. Admiral Jim Greer had helped him cover up his exploits here in Baltimore so that he could work with the Special Activities Division. It was also the time when he’d met Sandy O’Toole, who later became Sandy Clark, his wife.
He wondered where Sandy was right now, but he would not call. He knew she would be under surveillance, and he also knew Ding would be taking care of her.
Right now, he needed to concentrate on his plan.
John knew that, as soon as the FBI missed him up in Emmitsburg, there would be a BOLO, a “Be on the lookout” order, broadcast among law enforcement agencies of the area, ensuring that everyone from traffic cops to organized-crime detectives would have his picture and his description and an order to pick him up if they saw him. In addition to this, Clark had no doubt the FBI was using its huge resources to hunt him down.