Games Of State (1996)

by Tom - Op Center 03 Clancy

  Hood pulled Stoll aside. "Matt, I'm getting sloppy. That kid who worked for Hausen, Reiner. He could have left a bug here."

  Stoll nodded. "You mean, like this one?" He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a folded-over piece of cellophane tape. Inside was a gumdrop-shaped object slightly larger than a pinhead. "I did a sweep of the room while you were away. I forgot to tell you in the heat of the hate game showing up and all that."

  Hood sighed and squeezed Stoll's shoulders. "Bless you, Matt."

  "Does that mean I get to stay here?" he asked.

  Hood shook his head.

  "Just thought I'd ask," Stoll said disconsolately.

  As he walked away, Hood was angry with himself for having overlooked that. He turned to Nancy, who had walked over. They were going into a potentially dangerous situation where a screwup could cost them the mission, a career, or a life.

  You've got to focus on the job, he remonstrated himself. You can't be distracted by Nancy and all the might-have-been scenarios.

  "Anything wrong?" Nancy asked.

  "No," he said.

  "Just standing around, beating yourself up." She smiled. "I remember the look."

  Hood flushed. He glanced up to make sure that Stoll wasn't watching.

  "It's okay," Nancy said.

  "What is?" he asked impatiently. He wanted to get out of here, break the tempting closeness.

  "Being human. Making a mistake now and then or wanting something that isn't yours. Or even wanting something that was yours."

  Hood turned toward Hausen so as not to make it seem as if he were turning away from Nancy. But he was. And she obviously knew it because she stepped between the men.

  "God, Paul, why do you put this burden on yourself? This burden to be so perfect?"

  "Nancy, this isn't the time or place--"

  "Why?" she asked. "You think we'll have another?"

  He said bluntly, "No. No, we probably won't."

  "Forget me for a moment. Think about you. When we were younger, you worked hard so you could get ahead. Now you are ahead and you're still pushing. Who's it for? Are you trying to set an example for your kids or your subordinates?"

  "Neither," he said with an edge. Why was everyone always on his back about his ethics, work and otherwise? "I'm only trying to do what's right. Personally, professionally, just what's right. If that's too simple or too vague for everybody, it isn't my problem."

  "We can leave," Hausen said. He put the phone in his jacket pocket and walked briskly toward Hood. He was obviously pleased, and unaware that he was interrupting anything. "The government has given clearance for us to leave at once." He turned to Lang. "Is everything set, Martin?"

  "The jet is yours," Lang said. "I won't be joining you. I'd only be in the way."

  "I understand," Hausen said. "The rest of us had better be going."

  Stoll strugged into the backpack with the T-ray imaging unit. "You betcha," he said glumly. "Why go to the hotel where I can have room service and a hot bath, when I can go to France and fight terrorists?"

  Hausen extended an arm toward the door. He had the eager, impatient manner of someone hurrying dinner guests out into the night. Hood hadn't seem him so animated all day. Was this, as he suspected, Ahab finally closing in on the White Whale--or was it, as Ballon believed, a politician about to score an unprecedented public relations coup?

  Hood took Nancy's hand and started toward the door. She resisted. He stopped and turned back. She was no longer the confident woman who strode toward him in the park. Nancy was a sad and lonely figure, seductive in her need.

  He knew what she was thinking. That she should be opposing them, not helping them destroy what was left of her life. As he watched her stand there, he flirted with the idea of telling her what she wanted to hear, of lying to her and saying that they could try again. His job was to protect the nation and he needed her help for that.

  And once you tell that lie, he thought, you can lie to Mike and your staff, to Congress, even to Sharon.

  "Nancy, you'll have work," Hood told her. "I said I'd help you and I will." He was going to remind her again who walked out on whom, but what was the point? Women weren't consistent or fair.

  "But that's my problem, not yours," Nancy said. It was as if she'd read his mind and was determined to prove him wrong. "You say you need my help if you get inside. Fine. I won't walk out on you a second time."

  Snapping her head the way she did in the hotel lobby, she walked toward Hausen. The long, blond hair swept to the side, as if it were brushing away doubt and anger.

  Hausen thanked her, thanked them all, as the five of them entered the elevator for the quick ride to the lobby.

  Hood stood beside Nancy. He wanted to thank her, but just saying it didn't seem to be enough. Without looking at her, he squeezed her hand and quickly released it. From the corner of his eye he saw Nancy blink several times, the only break in her otherwise stoic expression.

  He couldn't remember when he felt both this close and this far from a person. It was frustrating being unable to move in one direction or the other, and he could only imagine how much worse it felt for Nancy.

  And then she let him know by reaching over and squeezing his hand and not releasing it as tears crept from her eyes. The ping of the elevator as they reached the lobby broke their touch but not the spell as she released him and they walked, eyes ahead, toward the waiting car.

  FORTY-SIX

  Thursday, 1:40 P.M., Washington, D.C.

  When he was a kid growing up in Houston, Darrell McCaskey carved his own Smith & Wesson automatic made out of balsa wood and kept it tucked in his belt at all times, the way he'd read the real FBI agents did. He screwed an eye-hook to the front of the weapon and attached a rubber band to the "gun sight." When the rubber band was hooked to the hammer and released, he could fire small cardboard squares like bullets. McCaskey kept the squares in his shirt pocket where they were accessible and safe.

  Darrell wore the gun starting in sixth grade. He kept it hidden under his button-down shirt. It gave him a John Wayne-rigid walk that the other kids teased him about, but Darrell didn't care. They didn't understand that keeping the law was everyone's responsibility as well as a full-time job. And he was a short kid. With hippies and yippies popping up and demonstrations and sit-ins happening everywhere, he felt better with a beltful of protection.

  McCaskey shot the first teacher who tried to take the gun from him. After writing an essay in which he carefully researched the Constitution and the right to bear arms, he was permitted to keep the weapon. Provided he didn't use it other than for self-defense against radicals.

  As a rookie FBI agent, McCaskey loved stakeouts and investigations. He loved it even more when he was an Assistant Special Agent in Charge and had more autonomy. When he became a Special Agent in Charge and then a Supervisory Special Agent, he was frustrated because there were fewer opportunities to spend time in the street.

  When McCaskey was offered the position of Unit Chief in Dallas, he took the promotion largely because of his wife and three kids. The pay was better and the job was safer and his family got to see him more. But as he sat behind a desk coordinating the actions of others, he realized just how much he missed stakeouts and investigations. Within two years, joint activity with Mexican authorities gave him the idea to form official alliances with foreign police forces. The FBI Director approved his plan to draft and spearhead FIAT--the Federal International Alliance Treaty. Quickly approved by Congress and eleven foreign governments, FIAT enabled McCaskey to work on cases in Mexico City, London, Tel Aviv, and other world capitals. He moved his family to Washington, quickly rose to Deputy Assistant Director, and was the only man Paul Hood asked to become Op-Center's interagency liaison. McCaskey had been promised and given relative autonomy, and got to work closely with the CIA, the Secret Service, his old friends at the FBI, and more foreign intelligence and police groups than before.

  But he was still deskbound. And thanks to fiber optic
s and computers, he didn't leave his office the way he did when he was revving up FIAT. Because of diskettes and E-mail, he didn't even have to walk over to the Xerox machine or even lean over to the out box. He wished he could have lived in the time of his childhood heroes, G-man Melvin Purvis and Treasury Man Eliot Ness. He could almost taste the exhilaration of chasing Machine Gun Kelly through the Midwest, or Al Capone's thugs up rickety stairways and across dark rooftops in Chicago.

  He frowned as he pushed buttons on his phone. Instead, I'm entering a three-digit code to call the NRO. He knew there was no shame in that, though he didn't see himself inspiring kids to make their own balsa-wood telephones.

  He was put right through to Stephen Viens. The NRO had been downloading satellite views of the Demain plant in Toulouse, but they weren't enough. Mike Rodgers had told him that if Ballon and his people had to go in, he didn't want them going in blind. And despite what Rodgers had told Ballon, none of Matt Stoll's technical team knew to what degree the T-Rays would be able to penetrate the facility, or how much it would tell them about the layout or distribution of forces.

  Viens had been using the NRO's Earth Audio Receiver Satellite to eavesdrop on the Demain site. The satellite used a laser beam to read the walls of a building the way a compact disc player read a CD. However, instead of data pits in the surface of a disc, the EARS read vibrations in the walls of buildings. Clarity depended upon the composition and thickness of the walls. With favorable materials such as metals, which vibrated with greater fidelity and resonance than porous brick, computer enhancement could recreate conversations which were taking place within the buildings. These triple-paned windows were no good: they didn't vibrate sufficiently to be read.

  "The structure is red brick," Viens said thickly.

  McCaskey's head dropped.

  "I was just about to call and tell you, but I wanted to make sure we couldn't get anything," Viens continued. "There are newer materials inside, probably Sheet rock and aluminum, but the brick is soaking up whatever's coming off them."

  "What about cars?" McCaskey asked.

  "We don't have a clear enough shot at them," said Viens. "Too many trees, hills, and overpasses."

  "So we're screwed."

  "Basically," said Viens.

  McCaskey felt as if he were in command of the world's most sophisticated battleship in dry dock. He and Rodgers and Herbert had always bemoaned the lack of on-site human intelligence, and this was a perfect example of why it was needed. "Billions for modern hardware but none for Mata Hari," as Herbert had once put it.

  McCaskey thanked Viens and hung up. How he yearned to be a man in the field on this one, to be the intelligence linchpin of a major operation with everything depending on him. He envied Matt Stoll, in whose hands the intelligence gathering rested. It was too bad that Stoll probably didn't want the job. The computer jockey was a genius but he didn't function well under pressure.

  McCaskey went back to his computer, sent the photographs right to memory, then booted the Pentagon SITSIM, situation simulation, for an ELTS: European Landmark Tactical Strike. The residual political fallout of destroying national treasures was extremely high. So it was the policy of the United States military not to damage historical structures, even if it meant taking casualties. In the case of the Demain factory, acceptable "injury" as they called it--as though the structures were living things--would be "single-round defacement of stone or discoloration capable of complete restoration." In other words, if you stitched a wall with bullets you were in deep trouble. And if you stained it with blood, you'd better be packing a bucket and mop.

  Dipping into the French architectural database, he brought up a layout of the fortress they had to enter. The diagram was useless: it showed the way the place had looked in 1777 when the adjacent Vieux Pont bridge was constructed. Dominique had made some changes since then. If he had obtained permits, none of them were filed anywhere. If he had submitted blueprints, none of those were on hand either. It had been easier getting plans of the Hermitage out of St. Petersburg for the Striker incursion. This Dominique had obviously been greasing a lot of palms over many, many years.

  McCaskey returned to the NRO photographs, which still showed him nothing. He envied Stoll, but he had to admit that the man would have something to be nervous about. Even with Ballon's help, they would be seriously outgunned if the situation degenerated to that. They would also be too restrained. The file on the New Jacobins was skimpy, but the information it contained had chilled him, details of methods they used to ambush or kill victims and tortures they devised to intimidate or extract information. He would have to forward that data to Hood if they went in. And he would point out that even Melvin Purvis and Eliot Ness would have thought this one over before going in.

  There's no time to get Striker into position, McCaskey thought, and the only tactician we have close to the site, Bob Herbert, is incommunicado.

  He punched in Mike Rodgers's number to tell him the bad news about the fortress ... and to try to figure out if there were anything they could do to keep their bold but inexperienced field force from being butchered.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Thursday, 8:17 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany

  Bob Herbert had gone through two emotional phases during his rehabilitation.

  The first was that his injury wasn't going to beat him. He was going to shock the experts and walk again. The second--which he entered when he got out of the hospital and his therapy became full-time--was that he was never going to be able to do a damn thing.

  When he started working on strengthening his arms, his lower back, and his abdomen, they hurt like the Devil's own pitchfork digging into his sinew. He wanted to give up, let the government pay him disability, and watch TV and not move from his house. But a pair of saintly nurses alternately prodded and pushed him through rehabilitation. One of them, in a less saintly moment, showed him that he could still have a gratifying sex life. And after that, Herbert never wanted to give up on anything again.

  Until now.

  Because he didn't want anyone in the camp to know he was coming, he wasn't able to use the small, powerful headlights Op-Center's Chief Electrician Einar Kinlock had built into his wheelchair. The ground was uneven and rough. Sometimes it sloped sharply, other times it ended in sheer drops. In the dark, the chair was constantly getting caught in the undergrowth. Herbert had to push hard to escape, and twice he ended up on the ground. Righting the chair and climbing back in were the toughest things he'd ever had to do, and getting up the second time left him drained. As he settled into the leather seat, his shirt was wet with cold perspiration and he was so tired he was shaking.

  He wanted to stop and call for help. But he reminded himself that he couldn't be sure of anyone. That fear was more like the old Nazi Germany than anything he had encountered.

  He continually checked the phosphorescent pocket compass he carried. But after more than an hour of pushing himself, he saw headlights about an eighth of a mile to the southwest. He stopped and watched carefully where the vehicle went. It was moving slowly along the rough road Alberto had told him about, and he waited as it passed. Though the brake lights were dim, he saw them flash in the distance. The interior lights went on, dark figures moved away from him, and then there was blackness again, and silence.

  Obviously, that was where he needed to be.

  Herbert moved over the lumpy ground toward the car. He avoided the road in case anyone else was coming, his arms nearly numb with the effort of crossing this last stretch of woods. He only hoped that Jody didn't take him for a neo-Nazi and drop from a tree.

  Upon reaching the car, a limousine, he edged forward. The Skorpion was still in his lap, so he tucked it under his leg where it wouldn't be seen. He could still grab it quickly if he had to. As he neared, he saw the tops of tents with smoke from campfires rising beyond them. He saw young men standing between the tents, looking toward the fires. And then he saw at least two or three hundred people facing a clear spot by the lake, a s
pot where a man and a woman stood alone.

  The man was speaking. Herbert wheeled himself behind a tree and listened, able to understand most of the German.

  "... that this day ends an era of struggling at cross purposes. From tonight forward, our two groups will work together, united by a common goal and a single name: Das National Feuer."

  The man shouted the name not just for effect but to be heard. Herbert felt his strength return as well as his anger rise as the crowd cheered. They whooped and raised both arms high as if their team had just won the World Cup. Herbert wasn't surprised that these people eschewed the Nazi salute and cries of Sieg Heil! Though they surely wished for salvation and victory, and though they had ruffians and killers among them, they were not the Nazis of Adolf Hitler. They were far more dangerous: they had the advantage of having learned from his mistakes. However, almost everyone was holding something aloft, either a dagger or a medal or even a pair of boots. They were probably the artifacts stolen from the movie trailer. So Hitler wasn't entirely unrepresented in this new Nuremberg rally.

  Herbert turned from the fires so his eyes would again adjust to the darkness, and peered around for Jody.

  When the cheering died, he heard a voice whisper behind him, "I waited for you."

  Herbert turned and saw Jody. She looked nervous.

  "You should've waited for me back there," Herbert whispered, pointing the way he'd come. "I could've used some help." He took her hand. "Jody, let's go back. Please. This is insane."

  She gently tugged her hand away. "I'm scared, but now more than ever I have to fight it."

  "You're scared," Herbert whispered, "and you're also obsessing. You're fixated on a goal which has taken on a life of its own. Believe me, Jody, going over to them isn't as big as you're making it."

  Herbert's voice was drowned out as the speaker continued. Herbert wished he didn't have to hear him, his voice carrying clearly, forcefully, without a megaphone. Herbert tugged at Jody. She refused to budge.