by Tom Clancy
“The President really wants to move on this,” the Chief of Staff pointed out. We have to do something to make it look like we're DOING SOMETHING.
“Well, next time he sees the Pope, maybe he can ask for high-level intercession.” Jack's irreverent grin froze momentarily. Van Damm thought he was cautioning himself against speaking badly of the President, whom he disliked. But then Ryan's face went blank. Arnie didn't know Jack well enough to recognize the look. “Wait a minute…”
The Chief of Staff chuckled. It wouldn't hurt for the President to see the Pope. It always looked good with the voters, and after that the President would have a well-covered dinner with B'nai B'rith to show that he liked all religions. In fact, as van Damm knew, the President went to church only for show now that his children were grown. That was one amusing aspect of life. The Soviet Union was turning back to religion in its search for societal values, but the American political left had turned away long ago and had no inclination to turn back, lest it should find the same values that the Russians were searching for. Van Damm had started off as a left-wing believer, but twenty-five years of hands-on experience in government had cured him of that. Now he distrusted ideologues of both wings with equal fervor. He was the sort to look for solutions whose only attraction was that they might actually work. His reverie on politics took him away from the discussion of the moment.
“You thinking about something, Jack?” Alden asked.
“You know, we're all 'people of the book,' aren't we?” Ryan asked, seeing the outline of a new thought in the fog.
“So?”
“And the Vatican is a real country, with real diplomatic status, but no armed forces… they're Swiss… and Switzerland is neutral, not even a member of the UN. The Arabs do their banking and carousing there… gee, I wonder if he'd go for it…?” Ryan's face went blank again, and van Damm saw Jack's eye center as the light bulb flashed on. It was always exciting to watch an idea being born, but less so when you didn't know what it was.
“Go for what? Who go for what?” the Chief of Staff asked with some annoyance. Alden just waited.
Ryan told them.
“I mean, a large part of this whole mess is over the Holy Places, isn't it? I could talk to some of my people at Langley. We have a really good—”
Van Damm leaned back in his chair. “What sort of contacts do you have? You mean talking to the Nuncio?”
Ryan shook his head. “The Nuncio is a good old guy, Cardinal Giancatti, but he's just here for show. You've been here long enough to know that, Arnie. You want to talk to folks who know stuff, you go to Father Riley at Georgetown. He taught me when I got my doctorate at G-Town. We're pretty tight. He's got a pipeline into the General.”
“Who's that?”
“The Father General of the Society of Jesus. The head Jesuit, Spanish guy, his name is Francisco Alcalde. He and Father Tim taught together at St. Robert Bellarmine University in Rome. They're both historians, and Father Tim's his unofficial rep over here. You've never met Father Tim?”
“No. Is he worth it?”
“Oh, yeah. One of the best teachers I ever had. Knows D.C. inside and out. Good contacts back at the home office.” Ryan grinned, but the joke was lost on van Damm.
“Can you set up a quiet lunch?” Alden asked. “Not here, someplace else.”
“The Cosmos Club up in Georgetown. Father Tim belongs. The University Club is closer, but—”
“Right. Can he keep a secret?”
“A Jesuit keep a secret?” Ryan laughed. “You're not Catholic, are you?”
“How soon could you set it up?”
“Tomorrow or day after all right?”
“What about his loyalty?” van Damm asked out of a clear sky.
“Father Tim is an American citizen and he's not a security risk. But he's also a priest, and he has taken vows to what he naturally considers an authority higher than the Constitution. You can trust the man to honor all his obligations, but don't forget what all those obligations are,” Ryan cautioned. “You can't order him around, either.”
“Set up the lunch. Sounds like I ought to meet the guy in any case. Tell him it's a get-acquainted thing,” Alden said. “Make it soon. I'm free for lunch tomorrow and next day.”
“Yes, sir.” Ryan stood.
* * *
The Cosmos Club in Washington is located at the corner of Massachusetts and Florida Avenues. The former manor house of Sumner Welles, Ryan thought it looked naked without about four hundred acres of rolling ground, a stable of thoroughbred horses, and perhaps a resident fox that the owner would hunt, but not too hard. These were surroundings the place had never possessed, and Ryan wondered why it had been built in this place in this style, so obviously at odds with the realities of Washington, but built by a man who had understood the workings of the city so consummately well. Chartered as a club of the intelligentsia — membership was based on “achievement” rather than money — it was known in Washington as a place of erudite conversation, and the worst food in a town of undistinguished restaurants. Ryan led Alden into a small private room upstairs.
Father Timothy Riley, S.J., was waiting for them, a briar pipe clamped in his teeth as he paged through the morning's Post. A glass sat at his right hand, a skim of sherry at the bottom of it. Father Tim was wearing a rumpled shirt and a jacket that needed pressing, not the formal priest's uniform that he saved for important meetings and had been hand-tailored by one of the nicer shops on Wisconsin Avenue. But the white Roman collar was stiff and bright, and Jack had the sudden thought that despite all his years of Catholic education he didn't know what the things were made of. Starched cotton? Celluloid like the detachable collars of his grandfather's age? In either case, its evident rigidity must have been a reminder to its wearer of his place in this world, and the next.
“Hello, Jack!”
“Hi, Father. This is Charles Alden, Father Tim Riley.” Handshakes were exchanged, and places at the table selected. A waiter came in and took drink orders, closing the door as he left.
“How's the new job, Jack?” Riley asked.
The horizons keep broadening," Ryan admitted. He left it at that. The priest would already know the problems Jack was having at Langley.
“We've had this idea about the Middle East, and Jack suggested that you'd be a good man to discuss it with,” Alden said, getting everyone back to business. He had to stop when the waiter returned with drinks and menus. His discourse on the idea took several minutes.
“That's interesting,” Riley said, when it was all on the table.
“What's your read on the concept?” the National Security Advisor wanted to know.
“Interesting…” The priest was quiet for a moment.
“Will the Pope…?” Ryan stopped Alden with a wave of the hand. Riley was not a man to be hurried when he was thinking. He was, after all, an historian, and they didn't have the urgency of medical doctors.
“It certainly is elegant,” Riley observed after thirty seconds. “The Greeks will be a major problem, though.”
“The Greeks? How so?” Ryan asked in surprise.
“The really contentious people right now are the Greek Orthodox. We and they are at each other's throats half the time over the most trivial administrative issues. You know, the rabbis and the imams are actually more cordial at the moment than the Christian priests are. That's the funny thing about religious people, it's hard to predict how they'll react. Anyway, the problems between the Greeks and Romans are mainly administrative — who gets custody over which site, that sort of thing. There was a big go-round over Bethlehem last year, who got to do the midnight mass in the Church of the Nativity. It is awfully disappointing, isn't it?”
“You're saying it won't work because two Catholic churches can't—”
“I said there could be a problem, Dr. Alden. I did not say that it wouldn't work.” Riley lapsed back into silence for a moment. "You'll have to adjust the troika… but given the nature of the operation, I think we c
an get the right kind of cooperation. Co-opting the Greek Orthodox is something you'll have to do in any case. They and the Muslims get along very well, you know.
“How so?” Alden asked.
“Back when Mohammed was chased out of Medina by the pre-Muslim pagans, he was granted asylum at the Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai — it's a Greek Orthodox shrine. They took care of him when he needed a friend. Mohammed was an honorable man; that monastery has enjoyed the protection of the Muslims ever since. Over a thousand years, and that place has never been troubled despite all the nasty things that have happened in the area. There is much to admire about Islam, you know. We in the West often overlook that because of the crazies who call themselves Muslims — as though we don't have the same problem in Christianity. There is much nobility there, and they have a tradition of scholarship that commands respect. Except that nobody over here knows much about it.” Riley concluded.
“Any other conceptual problems?” Jack asked.
Father Tim laughed: “The Council of Vienna! How did you forget that, Jack?”
“What?” Alden sputtered in annoyance.
“Eighteen-fifteen. Everybody knows that! After the final settlement of the Napoleonic Wars, the Swiss had to promise never to export mercenaries. I'm sure we can finesse that. Excuse me, Dr. Alden. The Pope's guard detachment is composed of Swiss mercenaries. So was the French king's once — they all got killed defending King Louis and Marie Antoinette. Same thing nearly happened to the Pope's troops once, but they held the enemy off long enough for a small detachment to evacuate the Holy Father to a secure location, Castel Gandolfo, as I recall. Mercenaries used to be the main Swiss export, and they were feared wherever they went. The Swiss Guards of the Vatican are mostly for show now, of course, but once upon a time the need for them was quite real. In any case, Swiss mercenaries had such a ferocious reputation that a footnote of the Council of Vienna, which settled the Napoleonic Wars, compelled the Swiss to promise not to allow their people to fight anywhere but at home and the Vatican. But, as I just said, that is a trivial problem. The Swiss would be delighted to be seen helping solve this problem. It could only increase their prestige in a region where there is a lot of money.”
“Sure,” Jack observed. “Especially if we provide their equipment. M-1 tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, cellular communications…”
“Come on, Jack,” Riley said.
“No, Father, the nature of the mission will demand some heavy weapons, for psychological impact if nothing else. You have to demonstrate that you're serious. Once you do that, then the rest of the force can wear the Michaelangelo jump suits and carry their halberds and smile into the cameras — but you still need a Smith &. Wesson to beat four aces, especially over there.”
Riley conceded the point. “I like the elegance of the concept, gentlemen. It appeals to the noble. Everyone involved claims to believe in God by one name or another. By appealing to them in His name… hmm, that's the key, isn't it? The City of God. When do you need an answer?”
“It's not all that high-priority,” Alden answered. Riley got the message. It was a matter of official White House interest, but was not something to be fast-tracked. Neither was it something to be buried on the bottom of someone's desk pile. It was, rather, a back-channel inquiry to be handled expeditiously and very quietly.
“Well, it has to go through the bureaucracy. The Vatican has the world's oldest continuously-operating bureaucracy in the world, remember.”
That's why we're talking to you,“ Ryan pointed out. ”The General can cut through all the crap."
“That's no way to talk about the princes of the church, Jack!” Riley nearly exploded with laughter.
“I'm a Catholic, remember? I understand.”
“I'll drop them a line,” Riley promised. Today, his eyes said.
“Quietly,” Alden emphasized.
“Quietly,” Riley agreed.
Ten minutes later, Father Timothy Riley was back in his car for the short drive back to his office at Georgetown. Already his mind was at work. Ryan had guessed right about Father Tim's connections and their importance. Riley was composing his message in Attic Greek, the language of philosophers never spoken by more than fifty thousand people, but the language in which he'd studied Plato and Aristotle at Woodstock Seminary in Maryland all those years before.
Once in his office, he instructed his secretary to hold all calls, closed the door, and activated his personal computer. First he inserted a disk that allowed the use of Greek characters. Riley was not a skilled typist — having both a secretary and a computer rapidly erodes that skill — and it took him an hour to produce the document he needed. It was printed up as a double-spaced nine-page letter. Riley next opened a desk drawer and dialed in his code for a small but secure office safe that was concealed in what appeared to be a file drawer. Here, as Ryan had long suspected, was a cipher book, laboriously hand-printed by a young priest on the Father General's personal staff. Riley had to laugh. It just wasn't the sort of thing one associated with the priesthood. In 1944, when Admiral Chester Nimitz had suggested to John Cardinal Spellman, Catholic Vicar General for the U.S. military, that perhaps the Marianas Islands needed a new bishop, the Cardinal had produced his cipher book, and used the communications network of the U.S. Navy to have a new bishop appointed. As with any other organization, the Catholic Church occasionally needed a secure communications link, and the Vatican cipher service had been around for centuries. In this case, the cipher key for this day was a lengthy passage from Aristotle's discourse on Being qua Being, with seven words removed, and four grotesquely misspelled. A commercial encryption program handled the rest. Then he had to print out a new copy and set it aside. His computer was again switched off, erasing all record of the communiqué. Riley next faxed the letter to the Vatican, and shredded all the hard copies. The entire exercise took three laborious hours, and when he informed his secretary that he was ready to get back to business, he knew that he'd have to work far into the night. Unlike an ordinary businessman, Riley didn't swear.
“I don't like this,” Leary said quietly behind his binoculars.
“Neither do I,” Paulson agreed. His view of the scene through the ten-power telescopic sight was less panoramic and far more focused. Nothing about the situation was pleasing. The subject was one the FBI had been chasing for more than ten years. Implicated in the deaths of two special agents of the Bureau and a United States Marshal, John Russell (a/k/a Matt Murphy, a/k/a Richard Burton, a/k/a Red Bear) had disappeared into the warm embrace of something called The Warrior Society of the Sioux Nation. There was little of the warrior about John Russell. Born in Minnesota far from the Sioux reservation, he'd been a petty felon whose one major conviction had landed him in prison. It was there that he had discovered his ethnicity and begun thinking like his perverted image of a Native American — which to Paulson's way of thinking had more of Mikhail Bakunin in it than of Cochise or Toohoolhoolzote. Joining another prison-born group called the American Indian Movement, Russell had been involved in a half-dozen nihilistic acts, ending with the deaths of three federal officers, then vanished. But sooner or later they all screwed up, and today was John Russell's turn. Taking its chance to raise money by running drugs into Canada, the Warrior Society had made its mistake, and allowed its plans to be overheard by a federal informant.
They were in the ghostly remains of a farming town six miles from the Canadian border. The FBI Hostage Rescue Team, as usual without any hostages to rescue, was acting its role as the Bureau's premier SWAT team. The ten men deployed on the mission under squad supervisor Dennis Black were under the administrative control of the Special Agent in Charge of the local field office. That was where the Bureau's customary professionalism had come to a screeching halt. The local S-A-C had set up an elaborate ambush plan that had started badly and nearly ended in disaster, with three agents already in hospitals from the auto wrecks and two more with serious gunshot wounds. In return, one subject was known dead
, and maybe another was wounded, but no one was sure at the moment. The rest — three or four, they were not sure of that either — were holed up in what had once been a motel. What they knew for sure was that either the motel had a still-working phone or, more likely, the subjects had a cellular “brick” and had called the media. What was happening now was of such magnificent confusion as to earn the admiration of Phineas T. Barnum. The local S-A-C was trying to salvage what remained of his professional reputation by using the media to his advantage. What he hadn't figured out yet was that handling network teams dispatched from as far away as Denver and Chicago wasn't quite the same thing as dealing with the local reporters fresh from journalism school. It was very hard to call the shots with the pros.
“Bill Shaw is going to have this guy's balls for brunch tomorrow,” Leary observed quietly.
“That does us a whole lot of good,” Paulson replied. A snort. “Besides, what balls?”
“What you got?” Black asked over the secure radio circuit.
“Movement, but no ID,” Leary replied. “Bad light. These guys may be dumb, but they're not crazy.”
“The subjects have asked for a TV reporter to come in with a camera, and the S-A-C has agreed.”
“Dennis, have you—” Paulson nearly came off the scope at that.
“Yes, I have,” Black replied. “He says he's in command.” The Bureau's negotiator, a psychiatrist with hard-won expertise in these affairs, was still two hours away, and the S-A-C wanted something for the evening news. Black wanted to throttle the man, but he couldn't, of course.
“Can't arrest the guy for incompetence,” Leary said, his hand over the microphone. Well, the only thing these bastards don't have is a hostage. So, why not give 'em one! That'll give the negotiator something to do.
“Talk to me, Dennis,” Paulson said next.
“Rules of Engagement are in force, on my authority,” Supervisory Special Agent Black said. The reporter is a female, twenty-eight, blonde and blue, about five-six. Cameraman is a black guy, dark complexion, six-three. I told him where to walk. He's got brains, and he's playing ball."