by Tom Clancy
“Madam Secretary-General, please,” Hood said. “We have less than a minute.”
She continued to hesitate. Hood had never been as disgusted with despots as he was right now with this so-called humanitarian. What was there to fret over? Lying to terrorists? Having to explain to the Gabonese Republic why the United Nations charter was being side-stepped, why the surviving members of the General Assembly weren’t consulted before the United States was permitted to terminate a hostage situation?
But this wasn’t the time for a debate. Hopefully, Chatterjee would see that, too. And quickly.
“All right,” the secretary-general replied. “I will place the call to save a life.”
“Thank you,” Hood replied. “I’ll be in touch.”
FORTY-TWO
New York, New York
Sunday, 12:00 A.M.
Harleigh Hood was on her knees, facing the closed doors of the Security Council chamber.
The Australian man was standing behind her, holding her hair tightly, painfully. The other man, the Spanish-sounding man, was behind him, looking at his watch. Harleigh’s face was badly swollen above the right cheek where she’d been pistol-whipped when she’d tried to bite him. There was blood on her mouth where she’d been backfisted, hard. Her gown was torn at both shoulders, her neck rug-burned from being dragged up here, all the while kicking at the floor, walls, and chairs. And her left side hurt with every breath because she’d been jackbooted there just a few seconds before.
Harleigh had not gone willingly to her execution.
Now that the young woman was here, she was staring ahead blankly. She hurt everywhere, but nothing was as painful as the utter loss of her humanity, something she couldn’t even touch. She realized, in a surprisingly lucid instant, that this was probably what it was like to be raped. Choice taken away. Dignity taken away. Future fear of any stimulus reminiscent of the experience, whether it was something pulling at your hair or the feeling of a rug under your knees. Perhaps worst of all, this wasn’t about anything she had done or said or been. She was just a convenient target for some animal’s hostility. Is that what death was supposed to be like? No angels and trumpets. She was just meat.
No.
Harleigh screamed a cry of rage that came from deep inside. She screamed again, and then her bruised muscles exploded and she tried to get to her feet. Death was that if you let it be that. The Australian tugged hard on her hair, twisting her around. Harleigh fell to the ground, onto her back. She fought to get up, wriggling from side to side. Her captor dropped his knee on her chest, hard, and remained there. He put the barrel of his gun in her mouth.
“Scream into this,” he said.
Harleigh did, defiantly, and he pushed the barrel down her throat until she gagged.
“Go on, one more time, angel,” he said. “Scream again and it will scream back.”
Metallic-tasting saliva quickly pooled in the bottom of Harleigh’s throat. Blood mixed with the saliva, and she stopped screaming; she had to as she tried to swallow around the gun. But she couldn’t swallow, cough, or breathe. She was going to drown in her own saliva before he could shoot her. She reached up and tried to push his hand back, but he used his free hand to grab her wrists. He easily forced Harleigh’s slender arms to the side.
“It’s time,” Barone said.
Downer glared down as Harleigh made a guttural sound around the gun barrel.
Just then the radio beeped.
“Hold it,” Barone said quickly. He answered the radio. “Yes?”
“This is Secretary-General Chatterjee,” said the caller. “We have your money, and a helicopter is on the way.”
Downer and Barone exchanged looks. Barone hit the mute button. His eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“She’s lying,” Downer said. “She couldn’t have gotten it this fast.”
Barone disengaged the mute. “How did you get it?” he asked.
“The United States government has guaranteed a loan from the Federal Reserve Bank in New York,” she said. “They’re putting together the currency and bringing it over.”
“Wait until you hear from me,” the Uruguayan said. He turned and started running down the stairs.
“You won’t execute the hostage?” Chatterjee said.
“I’ll execute two hostages if you’re lying,” he replied. He punched the radio off and hurried to the TAC-SAT phone at the front of the Security Council chamber.
FORTY-THREE
New York, New York
Sunday, 12:01 A.M.
While they waited for the TAC-SAT to ring, Rodgers called Bob Herbert and briefed him. Herbert said he would get in touch with New York Police Commissioner Kane. The men had worked together when Russian spies in Brighton Beach were helping to orchestrate a coup in Moscow. Herbert had a good rapport with the commissioner and felt that Gordon would welcome the chance to save the hostages — and the UN.
When Rodgers was finished, he made another call — to check messages, he said. That wasn’t true, but he didn’t want the young woman to know it. He asked to borrow Hood’s cell phone to make the call. While Hood looked on, Rodgers stood between the woman and the desk so she couldn’t see what he was doing. It was a trick he had learned from Bob Herbert, who used his wheelchair phone to spy on people after he left a meeting. Rodgers turned off the ringer on the office phone and then called the number, using Hood’s cell phone. He answered the office phone, switched it to speaker, and left both lines open. Then he put the cell phone in his pants pocket, making sure he didn’t disconnect.
Rodgers went back and sat on the desk, across from Annabelle Hampton. Hood paced between them. As the minutes inched by, Rodgers became more convinced that this wasn’t going to go the way he wanted.
The young woman was staring ahead fixedly the entire time. Rodgers did not doubt what she was looking at. The future. Ani Hampton didn’t strike Rodgers as the PGA type — a postgame analyst. Many intelligence and military people worked like chess masters or ballroom dancers. They followed carefully tested patterns and deviated as little as possible from often-complex moves and strategies. When deviations did occur, they were later studied and either incorporated into the playbook or discarded.
But there were also many CIA field personnel who took a more ephemeral approach to tactics. These were the so-called “sharks.” Typically, sharks were loners whose modus operandi was to continually move and look ahead. It didn’t matter if the bridge burned behind them; they probably weren’t going back, anyway. These were the kinds of people who managed to infiltrate foreign villages, terrorist cells, and enemy bases.
Rodgers was betting that Ani Hampton was a shark. She wasn’t sitting here regretting anything. She was figuring out what to do next. Rodgers had a damn good idea exactly what that was, which was why he’d asked Colonel August to leave. Just in case.
Looking at the young woman, Rodgers felt cold — inside, not out. What she’d done here reminded him of something he’d learned during his first tour of duty in Vietnam: that while treason was the exception rather than the rule, it was everywhere. In every nation, every city, every town. And there were no reliable profiles, no rules, to sort out the practitioners. Traitors came in all ages, sexes, and nationalities. They worked in public places and private places and held jobs where they came into contact with information or people. And what they did could be personal or it could be motivated entirely by profit.
There was something else about traitors, something unique to them. They were most dangerous when they were caught. Faced with execution for their crimes, they had nothing to lose. If they had a final gambit, however futile or destructive it was, they’d try it.
In 1969, the CIA had received intelligence that North Vietnam was using a South Vietnamese military hospital in Saigon to distribute drugs to American servicemen. Rodgers went there, ostensibly to visit a wounded comrade. He watched as South Vietnamese nurses accepted American dollars from “wounded” South Vietnamese soldiers — actually, fifteen-
to eighteen-year-old Viet Cong infiltrators — as payment for moving heroin and marijuana from the basement to field-bound medical kits. When arrested, two of the three nurses pulled pins from hand grenades that killed them and seven wounded soldiers in the ward.
Caregivers and teenagers becoming killers. Vietnam was unique that way. It was the reason so many veterans had snapped when they came home. In quiet villages, young girls frequently greeted American soldiers. Some asked for candy or money. Often, that was all they wanted. Other times, girls carried dolls that were rigged to explode. Sometimes the girls blew up with them. Old women occasionally offered bowls of cyanide-laced rice to the Americans, rice which they ate first to put the soldiers at ease. These were shapes of destruction more frightening than an M16 or a land mine. More than any other war, Vietnam had robbed American soldiers of the notion that anything anywhere could be trusted. And returning from that war, many soldiers found that they could no longer open up to wives, relatives, even children. That was one of the reasons Mike Rodgers had never married. Getting close to anyone other than a fellow soldier was impossible. And all the therapy, all the reasoning in the world couldn’t change that. Once killed, innocence could not be revived.
Rodgers was not happy to revisit those feelings of mistrust again through Annabelle Hampton. The young woman had sold innocent lives for profit and dishonored the government she worked for. He wondered how anyone could be content with blood money.
The building was quiet, and there were no ambient sounds coming from outside. First Avenue had been shut down just beyond this building and the FDR Drive had been closed because it passed right behind the United Nations. Obviously, the New York Police Department wanted to have clear access if they needed it. The dead-end street in front of this building was also closed.
When the TAC-SAT beeped, it startled them all.
Hood stopped pacing and stood beside Rodgers. Annabelle’s gaze shifted to the general. Her mouth was set, and there wasn’t a hint of compliance in her pale blue eyes.
Rodgers wasn’t surprised. Annabelle Hampton was a shark, after all.
“Answer the phone,” Rodgers said.
She stared at him. Her eyes were cold. “If I don’t, are you going to torture me again?”
“I’d rather not,” Rodgers said.
“I know that,” Annabelle said. She grinned. “Things have changed, haven’t they?”
There was definitely something different in the young woman’s voice. Aggressiveness. Confidence. They’d given her too much time to think. The dance had begun, and Annabelle Hampton was leading. Rodgers was glad he’d taken the precautions he had.
“You could force me to answer by bending my finger back again,” she said. “Or you could hurt me in other ways. Open a paper clip or find a push pin and press the point through the soft skin under one of my eyes. Standard CIA method of persuasion. But then the pain would show in my voice. They’d know I was being coerced.”
“You said you’d cooperate,” Hood pointed out.
“And if I don’t cooperate, what will you do?” she asked. “If you shoot me, the hostage dies for sure.” She made a point of looking at Hood. “Possibly your daughter.”
Hood’s body stiffened.
She was better than he’d expected, Rodgers thought. The dance had become a quick, dirty game of chicken. Rodgers already knew which way this was going. What he needed now was to buy August time.
“What do you want?” Rodgers asked.
“I want you to cut me loose and leave the room,” she said. “I’ll make the call you want, then I go free.”
“I won’t do it,” Rodgers said.
“Why not?” Ani asked. “Don’t want to dirty your hands cutting a deal with me?”
“I’ve cut deals with worse than you,” Rodgers said. “I won’t cut a deal because I don’t trust you. You need this operation to succeed. Terrorists don’t pay in advance. That’s how they ensure loyalty. The situation you’re in now, you need your cut of the ransom.”
The TAC-SAT beeped a second time.
“Whether you trust me or not,” Annabelle said, “if I don’t answer the phone, they’re going to assume that something has happened to me. They’ll execute the girl.”
“In that case,” Rodgers replied evenly, “you’ll either be executed or spend your life in jail as an accomplice.”
“I end up with ten to twenty years if I cooperate with you,” Ani said. “I get life or death if I don’t. What’s the difference?”
“About thirty years,” Rodgers said. “It might not matter now, but it will when you’re sixty.”
“Spare me the recon from the front,” she replied.
“Ms. Hampton, please,” Hood said. “It’s not too late to help yourself and dozens of innocent people.”
“Tell your partner, not me,” she said.
The TAC-SAT beeped a third time.
“There will be a total of five rings,” Ani said. “Then a girl in the Security Council Chamber will have her head blown open. Is that what you want? Either of you?”
Rodgers took a half-step forward. He shouldered between Hood and the woman. He didn’t know if Hood would take the bait and order him to comply with her, but he didn’t want to risk it. Hood was still the director of Op-Center, and Rodgers didn’t want them fighting each other. Especially since Hood didn’t know what else was going on right now.
“Let me go, and I’ll tell them what you want,” she said.
“Why don’t you say what we want and then we’ll let you go?” Rodgers countered.
“Because as much as you don’t trust me, I don’t trust you,” she said. “And right now, you need me more than I need you.”
The TAC-SAT beeped a fourth time.
“Mike—” Hood said.
Though Hood had been there for the planning of the bottleneck, he was obviously hoping the original idea could be adhered to: drawing the terrorists outside. But Rodgers waited. A few seconds more could make the difference between success and failure.
“I’m against this,” Rodgers said to Annabelle.
“And you hate the fact that that doesn’t matter,” she replied.
“No,” Rodgers told the young woman. “I’ve eaten shit before, too. We’re all grown-ups here. What I hate is having to trust someone who has already broken one promise.”
The general tucked a gun into his belt, reached into his pants pocket, and pulled out a switchblade. He snapped it open with a flick of his hand and began cutting her free.
The TAC-SAT beeped a fifth time.
Annabelle reached for the knife. “I’ll finish that,” she said.
Rodgers released the knife. He stood back, in case she decided to use it on him.
“I want you out of here,” the young woman said. “I want to see you on my security camera, in the hallway. And leave me my keys.”
Rodgers took the key case from his pants pocket and tossed it on the floor in front of her. Then he grabbed his jacket from the back of a chair and followed Hood out.
The young woman finished cutting herself loose, then switched the computer monitor to a security view. As Rodgers crossed the office lobby toward the corridor, Ani leaned over and picked up the TAC-SAT.
“Speak,” she said.
Rodgers was just going out of earshot as she said that. Fortunately, he wasn’t out of earshot for long. He hurried into the hallway and passed under the security camera.
Like Annabelle Hampton, Rodgers was a shark. But for all her bold threats and lies, for all the bluster she’d just thrown at them, he had something the young woman lacked.
Thirty years in the water.
FORTY-FOUR
New York, New York
Sunday, 12:04 A.M.
As soon as Rodgers and Hood passed beyond the fish-eye lens of the security camera, Rodgers took Hood’s cell phone from his pocket. The general stopped in the corridor and listened in silence for a moment, then disconnected. He handed Hood the cell phone along with one of his t
wo guns.
“She told him the truth?” Hood asked.
“She screwed us good,” Rodgers said.
Rodgers pulled the point-to-point radio from his jacket pocket. He pushed the transmit button on top.
“Brett?” he said.
“Here, General.”
“The bottleneck is a go,” Rodgers said. “Will you make it?”
“I’ll make it,” August replied.
“Good,” Rodgers said. “When do you want the feedback?”
“In two minutes,” August said.
Rodgers looked at his watch. “You’ve got it. I’ll get in position, north side of the building. I’ll be ready in seven minutes.”
“Understood,” August said and signed off. “Good luck.”
“Godspeed,” Rodgers said. He put the radio back in his pocket.
Hood shook his head. “You called this one right.”
“Unfortunately,” Rodgers admitted. He looked at his watch. “Listen. I’ve got to get going. Call the NYPD and have them close off this floor and take our lady into custody. She’ll probably be armed, so if she comes out before they get here, you may have to take her down.”
“I can do that,” Hood said.
All of Op-Center’s executive officers had taken extensive weapons training, since they were likely targets of terrorism. Right now, Hood didn’t think he would have any trouble firing at Annabelle Hampton. And it wasn’t only because she had betrayed them. It was because Rodgers was so completely prepared, so much in charge, that there was no questioning his orders. Which was what military leadership was all about.
“I’ll also need you to try what you suggested before.”
“Chatterjee?”
Rodgers nodded. “I know it’s a long shot, but explain what’s going to happen. If she doesn’t want to cooperate, tell her there’s nothing she can do to stop what we’ve set in—”
“I know the drill,” Hood said.
“Right,” Rodgers said. “Sorry. Tell her there’s only one thing I want from her and her people.”