by Tom Clancy
“Ruth’s always been a quick and accurate judge of character. If she’d thought you were a threat to our little granddaughter, she’d have put poison in your biscuits.”
Thorn blinked. It took a second for him to realize the old man was pulling his leg. At least he hoped that’s what Amos’s grin meant.
“Let me ask you something. You date many women of color?”
“No, sir.”
The dog returned. Dropped the stick. Thorn picked it up and tossed it again.
“Why start now?”
Thorn felt the urge to shrug, but stifled it. It didn’t seem appropriate somehow. “Usually, I found myself attracted to tall and brainy Nordic women. College professors, programmers, a doctor, once. Marissa doesn’t flaunt her intelligence—but she’s smarter than I am. And she’s funny, and she’s . . . wise, in a way I’m not. And she’s gorgeous. I wouldn’t much care if she were green or blue. I’m not sure what she sees in me.”
The dog returned again, but she was panting as she dropped the stick at Thorn’s feet. “That’s enough, Sheila,” Amos said. “I don’t want you so tired I have to carry you up the stairs when we get home.”
Thorn would have sworn the dog nodded and smiled. She left the stick, turned around, and wandered off the graveled driveway, sniffing the ground again.
“Gonna rain this afternoon,” Amos observed. “Couple degrees colder, it’d be snow, but we don’t get much of that down here.”
Thorn nodded.
“You have a pretty good job with the government,” Amos said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You like it okay?”
“Most of the time. There are days when I feel like walking away.”
“Every job is like that. So you can take care of our granddaughter if she decides to quit and stay home? Maybe have a baby?”
Thorn grinned.
“Am I missing something funny?”
“Marissa didn’t mention that I had my own business before I went to work for Net Force?”
“I don’t recall that it came up.”
Thorn chuckled. “I was lucky enough to have developed some software that was popular. Sold out at the right time. If the government fires me, we, uh, won’t miss any meals.”
The older man nodded. “Good enough. Marissa tells us you are a fencer?”
“I train on my own, but my best moves were twenty years ago.”
“Foil, épée, or saber?”
Thorn blinked again, surprised. “Mostly épée.”
Amos answered Thorn’s unasked question. “I expect she also told you I’m a big Shakespeare fan. Some of the roles require a little stage swordplay. I learned a bit of that over the years.”
“Ah.”>
“Well, I don’t want to overtire my old dog here, so maybe we should just head on back. Ruth’ll be fixin’ lunch pretty soon, and I want to tell her to make sure not to put any poison in yours.”
He extended his hand. Thorn took it. Amos had a firm grip. “Welcome to the family.”
“Just like that?”
“Marissa picked you, Ruth likes you.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, no problem there—I knew you were okay when my dog brought you the stick. She’s a better judge of character than either Ruth or I am.”
15
Eastern Seaboard Airlines Flight 1012
In the Air Somewhere over Tennessee
Carruth leaned back in the first-class jet seat and sipped at his drink, ice with one of those little bottles of bourbon. He smiled. It had been a banner week for him, at least when it came to capping people. First, the two Metro cops, then those two terrorist wannabes in New Orleans. It was good to know that, when push came to shove, he still had the moves. Yeah, training on the range was all well and good, and VR was getting more and more realistic, but there was nothing quite like the real thing: There was the sudden rush of adrenaline, the pucker-factor going from zero to full. The recoil of a rifle butt against your shoulder, the smell of gunpowder, the sharp crack! as the bullet zipped from the barrel and broke the sound barrier, loud even past the earplugs he wore . . .
Squeeze the trigger, work the bolt, squeeze again, and the bad guys went poof!
He knew Lewis wouldn’t count those three down on the Mississippi as a great victory—except that she had walked away alive and they hadn’t—but that’s why he’d been there as backup, and he’d done his job. She put two into the buyer—bam-bam! quick as you please—and he already had the scope dot lined up on the one who thought he was hiding a few meters away. Carruth cooked the sucker before he got his pistol into gear.
The second guy Carruth hadn’t seen until he started moving, but he had a good idea of where the guy should be, if he was there, and sure enough, he was almost spot on when the guy stepped into view.
Two shots, two up, two down—couldn’t do much better than that.
Three dead men on the ground and it was time to leave!
Lewis headed for the boat she’d set up. Either she’d make it or she wouldn’t, that was her concern. He cranked the van’s motor and took off.
He had three routes worked out, but the first one had been all he’d needed. It was as if God smiled upon him—the lights all turned green, there weren’t any traffic accidents, nobody working on the roads, it couldn’t have been any smoother. Some days, you got the bear, and he was happy this was one of them.
He crossed the Mississippi on the Highway 90 bridge, into Gretna, drove west, and took a dirt road to the south. He stopped at a big sludge pond near the railroad tracks—they had plenty of water down here—ponds, bayous, canals, lakes, and more.
He made sure nobody was watching him before he got the rifle out of the van.
He wasn’t attached to the deer rifle. He slung the .30-06 into the pond. He got back in the van and continued west, past the St. Charles Parish Hospital, veered to the north and east on I-310 to the Airline Highway, and then back to the airport. If anybody ever found the weapon, which was unlikely, it was clean, no prints, and there was no way to trace it to him—it had been bought by one of his men at a gun show in Orange County, California, from somebody who didn’t have a table but was walking around with a “for sale” sign stuck in the barrel. A cash transaction—Carruth’s man didn’t give a name, nor did he know the name of the man who had sold it to him. Perfect.
He’d turned the van back in, sans the magnetic sign, buried his gloves in a garbage bin, and gone to catch his flight, with two hours to spare. Slick as a spray of Break Free on a glass tabletop.
With the Winchester at the bottom of the pond, Carruth was more or less unarmed. He hadn’t wanted to risk shipping his BMF revolver anywhere, so it was locked in his gun safe at his house.
He sipped the liquor. Well, he wasn’t totally unarmed. He had a briefcase—one of those big, heavy, aluminum jobs, and it held two hardback books so thick he could barely close the case. He was fairly sure that the case and books would be enough to stop or at least slow down a common pistol round, enough so it wouldn’t kill him if it did get through. So if some would-be hijacker tried to take over the plane, that would give him some protection when he rushed the guy. If all the guy had was a knife? Then that wasn’t gonna be enough against a trained Navy SEAL swinging five kilos of metal briefcase. Carruth would pound that fool like a man driving railroad spikes.
There hadn’t been a successful hijacking of a U.S. commercial jet in a while—those maniacs who’d attacked the Towers had made hijacking a dangerous business. Before, people would sit still and wait for the authorities to deal with it; now, somebody stood up and announced that he was taking over the plane? Everybody and his old granny would jump the guy—he’d be hit with everything that wasn’t nailed down. If you figured you were going to get plowed into a building, then a guy with a box cutter didn’t seem so scary. People survived being stabbed all the time—hitting a skyscraper at a couple hundred miles an hour and being turned into a jet-fuel fireball didn’t leave any s
urvivors.
Carruth finished his drink. He thought about getting a second one, and decided against it. He needed to stay sober, just in case. Terrible, that you had to worry about such things in the United States of America.
Well, Carruth was prepared. Nobody was taking this jet anywhere it wasn’t supposed to go, not on his watch.
FBI/Net Force/Marine Corps Obstacle Course
Quantico, Virginia
There were days when Abe Kent felt like he had at nineteen. He’d get out of bed rested, no aches and pains anywhere, and if it weren’t for the bathroom mirror, he could almost forget for a minute that nineteen was more than forty years behind him.
This wasn’t one of those days. Normally, as part of his warm-up before he ran the obstacle course, he’d do ten or twelve chins, fifty push-ups, some crunches and stretches, to get the blood flowing and his joints limber. But a front was moving in, there was a cold and nasty drizzle falling, a little snow and a few ice pellets in the mix, and after eight chins, he knew he wasn’t going to get another rep without pulling something.
He managed forty push-ups before he ran out of steam, and one set of crunches where he normally did two. After which, he was tired enough so that actually going through the course seemed to be a lot more trouble than it was worth.
The devil on his shoulder said, Hell, Abe, you’re a general now, you can delegate things. Nobody expects you to be out in the cold rain running the obstacle course like some raw recruit! You don’t need to be able to beat men young enough to be your grandchildren! Bag this! Go home, take a hot shower, catch a few more winks—you earned it!
Kent smiled. Yeah, that’s how it started. Listen to that voice and pretty soon, you’re sitting in front of the television most of the time, drinking beer and thinking about how tough you were in the good old days. He might fall over dead from a heart attack, but if he did, at least it was better to do it here than sitting on his butt at home.
He headed for the course.
Only a few people out here this early, in the cold and wet. One of them looked familiar, just ahead of him. . . .
“John?”
“Morning, Abe.”
The two men shook hands. “I didn’t know you still came out here.”
“Got to,” Howard said. “Too easy to turn into a couch potato, now that I’m a civilian.”
“You could join a nice warm gym.”
Howard laughed. “When I can come here for free? Nah. Besides, there are too many sweet young things in tight spandex at the gym my wife doesn’t want me staring at. Gets hard to keep your mind on your workout. Not a problem out here with old jarheads in dirty sweats.”
Kent laughed.
“I thought for a minute there you were going to turn around and leave,” Howard said.
“For a minute there, I was. There are days when inertia is really hard to overcome.”
“I hear that. You want me to give you a head start?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I expect an old jarhead can keep up with a fat and out-of-shape ex-Army civilian, even if I have twenty years on him.”
Both men laughed.
Richmond, Virginia
“Trust me, Tommy, it couldn’t have gone any better. Compared to Ruth and Amos, my parents—if they ever get back from their Canadian vacation—will be a walk in the park.”
Thorn nodded. “I liked them.”
“Good thing.”
“So, when are we going to do this wedding?”
She shrugged. “We could do it Friday, if it was just me, but my mother will want a big church to-do. Even though I am getting long in the tooth for a white dress. I don’t think she ever really expected it would happen, so that’s the least I can do.”
“So, you figure it’ll take a couple months to set up?”
She laughed. “A couple months? Lord, even a shotgun wedding would take that long. A regular wedding takes at least a year to plan.”
“You’re kidding.”
“You keep saying that when you know I’m not.”
“What’s to plan? Get a church, buy a dress, print some invitations, hire a preacher.”
She laughed again. “So much to learn, so little time . . .”
16
Washington, D.C.
As she drove to the meeting where she was to talk to Carruth, Lewis considered her new problem. She had started this knowing that there were some risks when dealing with people who wanted the ability to raid U.S. Army bases. Like Aziz, such men would not be above killing anybody they needed to in order to get what they wanted. She had thought to mitigate this risk going in. She had first strained possible buyers for her information through a series of blind e-drops and cutouts strung out around the world. She used a server in North Africa, piggybacked on a military communications satellite in geosynch over the Virgin Islands, and a wireless plexus in Argentina, all of these, and others, feeding their sigs back and forth among themselves before forwarding it to a generic server she kept in a rented apartment in Delaware. The server put things into a file that she could access anonymously and only via a password, and in theory nobody knew it existed save her and the domain-namers. This was a weave complex enough so that nobody was going to thread their way through it to show up on her doorstep. And if they opened the apartment door in Delaware without deactivating it, there was a block of C4 wired to a detonator that was going to reduce the server and anybody standing too close to it to little pieces, so even if they got that far, there wasn’t going to be any there there. . . .
Some of what came her way were half-assed offers, some she was sure were law enforcement agencies from different countries, including, probably, the U.S., and a very few seemed legit.
These latter, she had separated out.
She had a highly discreet investigator working for her, and she sent him the names. Simmons had been a military intelligence op, then a contract agent for the CIA and NSA until he had been caught dealing in the black market in Syria. He apparently knew where too many bodies were to risk any public legal action, so he had been quietly cashiered out of government service and told to keep his mouth shut and a low profile, or risk being nailed using antiterrorist laws.
Being able to dig down and uncover bodies was useful to Lewis.
This was how she had wound up with Aziz, and had he not been greedy, he might have panned out.
With that buyer dead, she had to start over again. So she had gone back to the cutouts, and come up with a couple more potentials.
One of them was supposedly another Middle Easterner, the other, of all things, an Australian. Before she met anybody else, she had to make sure that they weren’t cops, and that they had some references she could run down. So she sent the names to Simmons as she had before. This was the riskiest part of the whole operation, and she was very careful here.
She couldn’t assume that the next potential buyer would be some kind of fundamentalist terrorist who would be impressed by the gun of a dead martyr, so it looked as if Carruth might need to make another run at an Army base. And this time, best he return with something of more substantive value than a fancy handgun.
The clock was ticking. But Simmons hadn’t gotten back to her, and that was worrisome. Could be any number of valid reasons for this—but even if he didn’t have anything useful for her, he was usually quick to pass that along. Whenever she had something for him, she got herself a cheap, one-time phone, sent him the number via an encrypted file, and he would get back to her the same day, or sometimes the next day.
But it had been three days since she’d heard a word from him, and this was bothersome.
The place where she was to meet Carruth was just ahead. A ratty cafe on a street that was torn up for roadwork. You had to park a block away and walk in, and it wasn’t worth the effort. The food was crappy and, of course, the coffee was commercial brew that sat in the pot all day. . . .
She grinned. She and Carruth both were going to lose weight if they kept meeting at such places.
Midtown Grill
“Simmons. Here’s the address,” Lewis said.
“Who is this guy?” Carruth asked.
“He’s a former intelligence op—worked for Army Intel, JMTS, then freelanced for the CIA and NSA—now on his own. He’s the man I’ve had running down potential buyers for our product.”
Carruth nodded. “Okay. And I’m going to see him why?”
“To find out why he’s not answering my e-mail and calls.”
“Maybe he forgot to pay his cable bill.”
“And maybe he turned into a butterfly and flew off to Central America.”
Carruth looked at the address and grinned. “What do you want me to do when I find him?”
“See why he hasn’t gotten back to me on the two names I sent him to check out.”
“Which are?”
“You don’t need to know,” she said.
He laughed. “Remember when you were standing on the walk down in New Orleans and Abdul and his Ugly Brother stepped out of the trees with pistols, ready to shoot you?”
“I recall it, yes.”
“Captain, we are together in this to our eyeballs and I demonstrated my loyalty by punching holes in those bad guys and killing ’em deader than black plastic. I’m not going to run off and start a business of my own here. Aside from which, if I ask this guy Simmons about the names, he might just, you know, blurt them out by accident.”
She considered it for a few seconds. “All right. I take your point. One of the men is an Australian, name of Brian Stuart; the other one is another Middle Easterner, using the name Ali bin Rahman bin Fahad Al-Saud.”
Carruth shook his head. “One of the princes? These guys are big on naming every man related to them, aren’t they? Bin-this and bin-that.”
“I expect the name is phony,” she said. “No more a prince than you are.”
“So I get the dope from Simmons on Brian and binwhosit, and we’re back in business, right?”