by Tom Clancy
Except in this case it didn’t work. Scarcely had he made the pickup when someone bumped into him from behind.
“Excuse me, old man—signore, that is,” the voice corrected itself in what sounded like Oxford English. Just the sort of thing to make a civilized man feel at ease with a situation.
Greengold didn’t even respond, just turned to his right to wash his hands and take his leave. He made it to the sink, and turned on the water, when he looked in the mirror.
Most of the time, the brain works faster than the hands. This time he saw the blue eyes of the man who had bumped into him. They were ordinary enough, but their expression was not. By the time his mind had commanded his body to react, the man’s left hand had reached forward to grab his forehead, and something cold and sharp bit into the back of his neck, just below the skull. His head was pulled sharply backward, easing the passage of the knife into his spinal cord, severing it completely.
Death did not come instantly. His body collapsed when all of the electrochemical commands to his muscles ceased. Along with that went all feeling. Some distant fiery sensations at his neck were all that remained, and the shock of the moment didn’t allow them to grow into serious pain. He tried to breathe, but couldn’t comprehend that he would never do that again. The man turned him around like a department store mannequin and carried him to the toilet stall. All he could do now was look and think. He saw the face, but it meant nothing to him. The face looked back, regarding him as a thing, an object, without even the dignity of hatred. Helplessly, David scanned with his eyes as he was set down on the toilet. The man appeared to reach into his coat to steal his wallet. Was that what this was, just a robbery? A robbery of a senior Mossad officer? Not possible. Then the man grabbed David by the hair to lift up his drooping head.
“Salaam aleikum,” his killer said: Peace be unto you. So, this was an Arab? He didn’t look the least bit Arabic. The puzzlement must have been evident on his face.
“Did you really trust Hassan, Jew?” the man asked. But he displayed no satisfaction in his voice. The emotionless delivery proclaimed contempt. In his last moments of life, before his brain died from lack of oxygen, David Greengold realized that he’d fallen for the oldest of espionage traps, the False Flag. Hassan had given him information so as to be able to identify him, to draw him out. Such a stupid way to die. There was time left for only one more thought:
Adonai echad.
The killer made sure his hands were clean, and checked his clothing. But knife thrusts like this one didn’t cause much in the way of bleeding. He pocketed the wallet, and the dead-drop package, and after adjusting his clothing made his way out. He stopped at his table to leave twenty-three Euros for his own meal, including only a few cents for the tip. But he would not be coming back soon. Finished with Giovanni’s, he walked across the square. He’d noticed a Brioni’s on his way in, and he felt the need for a new suit.
HEADQUARTERS, United States Marine Corps, is not located in the Pentagon. The largest office building in the world has room for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, but somehow or other the Marines got left out, and have to satisfy themselves with their own building complex called the Navy Annex, a quarter of a mile away on Lee Highway in Arlington, Virginia. It isn’t that much of a sacrifice. The Marines have always been something of a stepchild of the American military, technically a subordinate part of the Navy, where their original utility was to be the Navy’s private army, thus precluding the need to embark soldiers on warships, since the Army and the Navy were never supposed to be friendly.
Over time, the Marine Corps became a rationale unto itself, for more than a century the only American land fighting force that foreigners ever saw. Absolved of the need to worry about heavy logistics, or even medical personnel—they had the squids to handle that for them—every Marine was a rifleman, and a forbidding, sobering sight to anyone who did not have a warm spot in his heart for the United States of America. For this reason, the Marines are respected, but not always beloved, among their colleagues in America’s service. Too much show, too much swagger, and too highly developed a sense of public relations for the more staid services.
The Marine Corps acts like its own little army, of course—it even has its own air force, small, but possessed of sharp fangs—and that now included a chief of intelligence, though some uniformed personnel regarded that as a contradiction in terms. The Marine intelligence headquarters was a new establishment, part of the Green Machine’s effort to catch up with the rest of the services. Called the M-2—“2” being the numerical identifier of someone in the information business—the chief’s name was Major General Terry Broughton, a short, compact professional infantryman who’d been stuck with this job in order to bring a little reality to the spook trade: The Corps had decided to remember that at the end of the paper trail was a man with a rifle who needed good information in order to stay alive. It was just one more secret of the Corps that the native intelligence of its personnel was second to none—even to the computer wizards of the Air Force whose attitude was that anyone able to fly an airplane just had to be smarter than anybody else. Eleven months from now, Broughton was in line to take command of the Second Marine Division, based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. This welcome news had just arrived a week before, and he was still in the best of good moods from it.
That was good news for Captain Brian Caruso as well, for whom an audience with a general officer was, if not exactly frightening, certainly reason for a little circumspection. He was wearing his Class-A olive-colored uniform, complete to the Sam Browne belt, and all the ribbons to which he was entitled, which wasn’t all that many, though some of them were kind of pretty, as well as his gold parachute-jumper’s wings, and a collection of marksmanship awards large enough to impress even a lifelong rifleman like General Broughton.
The M-2 rated a lieutenant-colonel office boy, plus a black female gunnery sergeant as a personal secretary. It all struck the young captain as odd, but nobody had ever accused the Corps of logic, Caruso reminded himself. As they liked to say: two hundred thirty years of tradition untrammeled by progress.
“The General will see you now, Captain,” she said, looking up from the phone on her desk.
“Thank you, Gunny,” Caruso said, coming to his feet and heading for the door, which the sergeant held open for him.
Broughton was exactly what Caruso had expected. A whisker under six feet, he had the sort of chest that might turn away a high-speed bullet. His hair was a tiny bit more than stubble. As with most Marines, a bad hair day was what happened when it got to half an inch, and required a trip to the barber. The general looked up from his paperwork and looked his visitor up and down with cold hazel eyes.
Caruso did not salute. Like naval officers, Marines do not salute unless under arms or “covered” with a uniform cap. The visual inspection lasted about three seconds, which only felt like a week or so.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Have a seat, Captain.” The general pointed to a leather-covered chair.
Caruso did sit down, but remained at the position of attention, bent legs and all.
“Know why you’re here?” Broughton asked.
“No, sir, they didn’t tell me that.”
“How do you like Force Recon?”
“I like it just fine, sir,” Caruso replied. “I think I have the best NCOs in the whole Corps, and the work keeps me interested.”
“You did a nice job in Afghanistan, says here.” Broughton held up a folder with red-and-white-striped tape on the edges. That denoted top-secret material. But special-operations work often fell into that category, and, sure as hell, Caruso’s Afghanistan job had not been something for the NBC Nightly News.
“It was fairly exciting, sir.”
“Good work, says here, getting all your men out alive.”
“General, that’s mostly because of that SEAL corpsman with us. Corporal Ward got shot up pretty bad, but Petty Officer Randall saved his life, and that’s for su
re. I put him in for a decoration. Hope he gets it.”
“He will,” Broughton assured him. “And so will you.”
“Sir, I just did my job,” Caruso protested. “My men did all—”
“And that’s the sign of a good young officer,” the M-2 cut him off. “I read your account of the action, and I read Gunny Sullivan’s, too. He says you did just fine for a young officer in his first combat action.” Gunnery Sergeant Joe Sullivan had smelled the smoke before, in Lebanon and Kuwait, and a few other places that had never made the TV news. “Sullivan worked for me once,” Broughton informed his guest. “He’s due for promotion.”
Caruso bobbed his head. “Yes, sir. He’s sure enough ready for a step up in the world.”
“I’ve seen your fit-rep on him.” The M-2 tapped another folder, this one not with TS formatting. “Your treatment of your men is generous in its praise, Captain. Why?”
That made Caruso blink. “Sir, they did very well. I could not have expected more under any circumstances. I’ll take that bunch of Marines up against anybody in the world. Even the new kids can all make sergeant someday, and two of them have ‘gunny’ written all over them. They work hard, and they’re smart enough that they start doing the right thing before I have to tell them. At least one of them is officer material. Sir, those are my people, and I am damned lucky to have them.”
“And you trained them up pretty well,” Broughton added.
“That’s my job, sir.”
“Not anymore, Captain.”
“Excuse me, sir? I have another fourteen months with the battalion, and my next job hasn’t been determined yet.” Though he’d happily stay in Second Force Recon forever. Caruso figured he’d screen for major soon, and maybe jump to battalion S-3, operations officer for the division’s reconnaissance battalion.
“That Agency guy who went into the mountains with you, how was he to work with?”
“James Hardesty, says he used to be in the Army Special Forces. Age forty or so, but he’s pretty fit for an older guy, speaks two of the local languages. Doesn’t wet his pants when bad things happen. He—well, he backed me up pretty well.”
The TS folder went up again in the M-2’s hands. “He says here you saved his bacon in that ambush.”
“Sir, nobody looks smart getting into an ambush in the first place. Mr. Hardesty was reconnoitering forward with Corporal Ward while I was getting the satellite radio set up. The bad guys were in a pretty clever little spot, but they tipped their hand. They opened up too soon on Mr. Hardesty, missed him with their first burst, and we maneuvered uphill around them. They didn’t have good enough security out. Gunny Sullivan took his squad right, and when he got in position, I took my bunch up the middle. It took a total of ten to fifteen minutes, and then Gunny Sullivan got our target, took him right in the head from ten meters. We wanted to take him alive, but that wasn’t possible the way things played out.” Caruso shrugged. Superiors could generate officers, but not the exigencies of the moment, and the man had had no intention of spending time in American captivity, and it was hard to put the bag on someone like that. The final score had been one badly shot-up Marine, and sixteen dead Arabs, plus two live captives for the Intel pukes to chat with. It had ended up being more productive than anyone had expected. The Afghans were brave enough, but they weren’t madmen—or, more precisely, they chose martyrdom only on their own terms.
“Lessons learned?” Broughton asked.
“There is no such thing as too much training, sir, or being in too good a shape. The real thing is a lot messier than exercises. Like I said, the Afghans are brave enough, but they are not trained. And you can never know which ones are going to slug it out, and which ones are going to cave. They taught us at Quantico that you have to trust your instincts, but they don’t issue instincts to you, and you can’t always be sure if you’re listening to the right voice or not.” Caruso shrugged, but he just went ahead and spoke his mind. “I guess it worked out okay for me and my Marines, but I can’t really say I know why.”
“Don’t think too much, Captain. When the shit hits the fan, you don’t have time to think it all the way through. You think beforehand. It’s in how you train your people, and assign responsibilities to them. You prepare your mind for action, but you never think you know what form the action is going to take. In any case, you did everything pretty well. You impressed this Hardesty guy—and he is a fairly serious customer. That’s how this happened,” Broughton concluded.
“Excuse me, sir?”
“The Agency wants to talk to you,” the M-2 announced. “They’re doing a talent hunt, and your name came up.”
“To do what, sir?”
“Didn’t tell me that. They’re looking for people who can work in the field. I don’t think it’s espionage. Probably the paramilitary side of the house. I’d guess that’s the new counterterror shop. I can’t say I’m pleased to lose a promising young Marine. However, I have no say in the matter. You are free to decline the offer, but you do have to go up and talk to them beforehand.”
“I see.” He didn’t, really.
“Maybe somebody reminded them of another ex-Marine who worked out fairly well up there . . .” Broughton half observed.
“Uncle Jack, you mean? Jesus—excuse me, sir, but I’ve been dodging that ever since I showed up at the Basic School. I’m just one more Marine O-3, sir. I’m not asking for anything else.”
“Good,” was all Broughton felt like saying. He saw before him a very promising young officer who’d read the Marine Corps Officer’s Guide front to back, and hadn’t forgotten any of the important parts. If anything he was a touch too earnest, but he’d been the same way once himself. “Well, you’re due up there in two hours. Some guy named Pete Alexander, another ex-Special Forces guy. Helped run the Afghanistan operation for the Agency back in the 1980s. Not a bad guy, so I’ve heard, but he doesn’t want to grow his own talent. Watch your wallet, Captain,” he said in dismissal.
“Yes, sir,” Caruso promised. He came to his feet, into the position of attention.
The M-2 graced his guest with a smile. “Semper Fi, son.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Caruso made his way out of the office, nodded to the gunny, never said a word to the half-colonel, who hadn’t bothered looking up, and headed downstairs, wondering what the hell he was getting into.
HUNDREDS OF miles away, another man named Caruso was thinking the same thing. The FBI had made its reputation as one of America’s premier law-enforcement agencies by investigating interstate kidnappings, beginning soon after passage of the Lindbergh Law in the 1930s. Its success in closing such cases had largely put an end to kidnapping-for-money—at least for smart criminals. The Bureau closed every single one of those cases, and professional criminals had finally caught on that this form of crime was a sucker’s game. And so it had remained for years, until kidnappers with objectives other than money had decided to delve into it.
And those people were much harder to catch.
Penelope Davidson had vanished on her way to kindergarten that very morning. Her parents had called the local police within an hour after her disappearance, and soon thereafter the local sheriff’s office had called the FBI. Procedure allowed the FBI to get involved as soon as it was possible for the victim to have been taken across a state line. Georgetown, Alabama, was just half an hour from the Mississippi state line, and so the Birmingham office of the FBI had immediately jumped on the case like a cat on a mouse. In FBI nomenclature, a kidnapping case is called a “7,” and nearly every agent in the office got into his car and headed southwest for the small farming-market town. In the mind of each agent, however, was the dread of a fool’s errand. There was a clock on kidnapping cases. Most victims were thought to be sexually exploited and killed within four or six hours. Only a miracle could get the child back alive that quickly, and miracles didn’t happen often.
But most of them were men with wives and children themselves, and so they worked as though there were a chanc
e. The office ASAC—Assistant Special Agent in Charge—was the first to talk to the local sheriff, whose name was Paul Turner. The Bureau regarded him as an amateur in the business of investigations, out of his depth, and Turner thought so as well. The thought of a raped and murdered little girl in his jurisdiction turned his stomach, and he welcomed federal assistance. Photos were passed out to every man with a badge and a gun. Maps were consulted. The local cops and FBI Special Agents headed to the area between the Davidson house and the public school to which she’d walked five blocks every morning for two months. Everyone who lived on that pathway was interviewed. Back in Birmingham, computer checks were made of possible sex offenders living within a hundred-mile radius, and agents and Alabama state troopers were sent to interview them, too. Every house was searched, usually with permission of the owner, but often enough without, because the local judges took a stern view of kidnapping.
For Special Agent Dominic Caruso, it wasn’t his first major case, but it was his first “7,” and while he was unmarried and childless, the thought of a missing child caused his blood first to chill, and then to boil. Her “official” kindergarten photo showed blue eyes and blond hair turning brown, and a cute little smile. This “7” wasn’t about money. The family was working class and ordinary. The father was a lineman for the local electric co-op, the mother worked part-time as a nurse’s aide in the county hospital. Both were churchgoing Methodists, and neither, on first inspection, seemed a likely suspect for child abuse, though that would be looked into, too. A senior agent from the Birmingham Field Office was skilled in profiling, and his initial read was frightening: This unknown subject could be a serial kidnapper and killer, someone who found children sexually attractive, and who knew that the safest way to commit this crime was to kill the victim afterward.