by Tom Clancy
“It’s all stuff I’ve done before, Admiral.”
“Who’s going to get the personnel?” Ritter asked.
“That’s being taken care of,” James Greer assured him.
Ritter sat back, looking at the photos and diagrams. He was putting his career on the line, as was Greer and everyone else. But the alternative to doing something was doing nothing. Doing nothing meant that at least one good man. and perhaps twenty more, would never come home again. That wasn’t the real reason, though, Ritter admitted to himself. The real reason was that others had decided that the lives of those men didn’t matter, and those others might make the same decision again. That kind of thinking would someday destroy his Agency. You couldn’t recruit agents if the word got out that America didn’t protect those who worked for her. Keeping faith was more than the right thing. It was also good business.
“Better to get things going before we break the story,” he said. “It’ll be easier to get a ‘go-mission’ if we’ve already got it ready to go. Make it look like a unique opportunity. That’s the other big mistake they made with KINGPIN. It was too obviously aimed at getting a hunting license, and that was never in the cards. What we have here is a one-time rescue mission. I can take that to my friends in the NSC. That’ fly, probably, but we have to be ready to go when I do that.”
“Bob, does that mean you’re on our side?” Greer asked.
Ritter took a long moment before answering. “Yes, it does.”
“We need an additional safety factor,” Young said, looking at the large-scale map, figuring how the helicopters would get in.
“Yes, sir,” Kelly said. “Somebody has to go in early and eyeball things.” They still had both photos of Robin Zacharias out, one of an Air Force colonel, standing upright, holding his cap under his arm, chest decorated with silver wings and ribbons, smiling confidently into the camera with his family arrayed around him; and the other of a bowed, bedraggled man, about to be butt-stroked from behind. Hell, he thought, why not one more crusade?
“I guess that’s me.”
17
Complications
Archie hadn’t known much, but it turned out to be enough for Kelly’s purposes. All he really needed now was a little more sleep.
Tracking someone in a car, he found, was harder than it appeared on TV, and harder than it had been in New Orleans the one time he’d attempted it. If you followed too closely you ran the risk of being spotted. If you held too far back, you might lose the guy. Traffic complicated everything. Trucks could obstruct your vision. Watching one car half a block away necessarily caused you to ignore cars closer to you, and those, he found, could do the damnedest things. For all that, he blessed Billy’s red Roadrunner. It was easy to spot, with its bright color, and even though the driver liked to lay rubber on the street and corner, he still couldn’t break all that many traffic laws without attracting the attention of the police, something he didn’t want to do any more than Kelly did.
Kelly had sighted the car just after seven in the evening, close to the bar which Archie had identified. Whatever he was like, Kelly thought, he didn’t know much about being covert, but the car told him that. The mud was gone, he saw at once. The car looked freshly washed and waxed, and from their previous encounter, he knew Billy to be a man who treasured the thing. It offered a few interesting possibilities which Kelly considered while he trailed him, never closer than half a block, getting a feel for how he moved. It was soon apparent that he stayed clear of the major thoroughfares as much as possible and knew the side streets as a weasel knew his den. That placed Kelly at a disadvantage. Balancing it was the fact that Kelly was driving a car nobody noticed. There were just too many used Beetles on the street for one more to attract notice.
After forty minutes the pattern became clear. The Roadrunner turned right quickly and came to a stop at the end of the block. Kelly weighed his options and kept going, slowly. As he approached he saw a girl get out, carrying a purse. She walked up to an old friend, the Wizard, several blocks from his usual hangout. Kelly didn’t see a transfer of any kind—the two walked into a building and remained hidden for a minute or two until the girl came out—but he didn’t have to. The event fitted what Pam had told him. Better yet, it identified the Wizard, Kelly told himself, turning left and approaching a red light. Now he knew two things he hadn’t known before. In his rearview mirror he saw the Roadrunner cross the street. The girl headed the same way, disappearing from his view as the light changed. Kelly turned right and right again, spotting the Plymouth as it proceeded south with three people inside. He hadn’t noticed the man—probably a man—before, crouching in back.
Darkness was falling rapidly, the good time of the day for John Kelly. He continued to follow the Roadrunner, leaving his lights off as long as he dared, and was rewarded by seeing it stop at a brownstone corner house, where all three occupants got out, having made their deliveries for the night to four pushers. He gave them a few minutes, parking his car a few blocks away and coming back on foot to observe, again disguised as a street drunk. The local architecture made it easier. All of the houses on the other side of the street had marble front steps, large, rectangular blocks of stone that made for good cover and concealment. It was just a matter of sitting on the sidewalk and leaning back against them, and he could not be seen from behind. Picking the right set of steps, close but not too close to a working street light, gave him a nice shadow in which to conceal himself, and besides, who paid any attention to a street bum anyway? Kelly adopted the same sort of drunken huddle he’d seen in others, occasionally lifting his bag-covered bottle for a simulated sip while he watched the corner brownstone for several hours.
Blood types O+, O-, and AB-, he remembered from the pathology report. The semen left inside Pam had been matched to those blood types, and he wondered what blood type Billy’s was, as he sat there, fifty yards away from the house. The traffic moved on the street. People walked back and forth. Perhaps three people had given him a look, but nothing more than that as he feigned sleep, watching the house from the corner of his eye and listening to every sound for possible danger as the hours passed. A pusher was working the sidewalk perhaps twenty yards or so behind him, and he listened to the man’s voice, for the first time hearing how he described his product and negotiated the price, listening also to the different voices of the customers. Kelly had always possessed unusually good hearing—it had saved his life more than once—and this, too, was valuable intelligence information for his mind to catalog and analyze as the hours passed. A stray dog came up to him, sniffing in a curious, friendly way, and Kelly didn’t shoo it away. That would have been out of character—had it been a rat things might have been different, he thought—and maintaining his disguise was important.
What sort of neighborhood had this been? Kelly wondered. On his side the dwellings were fairly ordinary brick row-houses. The other side was a little different, the more substantial brownstones perhaps fifty percent wider. Maybe this street had been the border between ordinary working people and the more substantial members of the turn-of-the-century middle class. Maybe that brownstone had been the upscale home of a merchant or a sea captain. Maybe it had resonated to the sound of a piano on the weekends, from a daughter who’d studied at the Peabody Conservatory. But they’d all moved on to places where there was grass, and this house, too, was now vacant, a brown, three-story ghost of a different time. He was surprised at how wide the streets were, perhaps because when they’d been laid out the principal mode of transport had been horse-powered wagons. Kelly shook the thought off. It was not relevant, and his mind had to concentrate on what was.
Four hours, finally, had passed when the three came out again, the men in the lead, the girl following. Shorter than Pam, stockier. Kelly risked himself slightly by lifting his head to watch. He needed to get a good look at Billy, who he assumed to be the driver. Not a very impressive figure, really, perhaps five-nine, slim at one-fifty or so, something shiny at his wrist, a watc
h or bracelet; he moved with brisk economy—and arrogance. The other was taller and more substantial, but a subordinate, Kelly thought, from the way he moved and the way he followed. The girl, he saw, followed more docilely still, her head down. Her blouse, if that’s what it was, wasn’t fully buttoned, and she got into the car without raising her head to look around or do anything else that might proclaim interest in the world around her. The girl’s movements were slow and uneven, probably from drugs, but that wasn’t all of it. There was something else, something Kelly didn’t quite catch about her that was disturbing nonetheless . . . a slackness, perhaps. Not laziness in her movement but something else. Kelly blinked hard when he remembered where he’d seen it before. At the ville, during PLASTIC FLOWER, the way the villagers had moved to assemble when they’d been summoned. Resigned, automatic motion, like living robots under the control of that major and his troops. They would have moved the same way to their deaths. And so she moved. And so would she.
So it was all true, then, Kelly thought. They really did use girls as couriers. . . among other things. The car started as he watched, and Billy’s manner with the car matched the name to the driver. The car jerked a few feet to the corner, then turned left, accelerating with the squeal of tires across the intersection and out of Kelly’s sight. Billy, five-nine, slim, watch or bracelet, arrogant. The positive identification was set in Kelly’s brain, along with the face and the hair. He wouldn’t forget it. The other male form was recorded as well, the one without a name—just a destiny far more immediate than its owner knew.
Kelly checked the watch in his pocket. One-forty. What had they been doing in there? Then he remembered other things that Pam had said. A little party, probably. That girl, whoever she was, probably also had O+, O-, or AB- fluid in her. But Kelly couldn’t save the whole world, and the best way to save her had nothing at all to do with freeing her directly. He relaxed himself, just a little, waiting, because he didn’t want his movement to appear to be linked with anything in case someone might have seen him, even be watching him now. There were lights in some of these houses, and so he lingered in his spot for another thirty minutes, enduring his thirst and some minor cramps before rising and shambling off to the corner. He’d been very careful tonight, very careful and very effective, and it was time for the second phase of the night’s work. Time to continue his efforts at making a diversion.
Mainly he stuck to alleys, moving slowly, allowing his gait to wander left and right for several blocks in the undulating path of a snake—he smiled—before he went back to the streets, only pausing briefly to put on the pair of rubber surgical gloves. He passed a number of pushers and their lieutenants as time passed, looking for the right one. His path was what is called a quartering search, a series of ninety-degree turns centered actually on where his Volkswagen was parked. He had to be careful, as always, but he was the unknown hunter, and the prey animals had no idea what they were, deeming themselves to be predators themselves. They were entitled to their illusions.
It was almost three when Kelly selected him. A loner, as Kelly had taken to calling them. This one had no lieutenant, perhaps was a new one in this business, just learning the ropes. He wasn’t that old, or didn’t appear so from forty yards away, as he counted through his roll after the night’s enterprise. There was a lump at his right hip, undoubtedly a handgun, but his head was down. He was somewhat alert. On hearing Kelly’s approach the head came up and turned, giving him a quick once-over, but the head went back to its task, dismissing the approaching shape and counting the money as the distance closed.
Kelly had troubled himself to go to his boat earlier in the day, using the Scout because he didn’t want anyone at the yard to know that he had a different car, and retrieving something. As he approached Junior—everyone had to have an assigned name, however briefly—Kelly shifted the wine bottle from his right hand to his left. The right hand then pulled the cotter pin from the tip of the bang stick that was inside his new bush jacket, held in cloth loops on the left side on the now unbuttoned garment. It was a simple metal rod, eighteen inches long, with a screw-on cylinder at the tip, and the cotter pin dangled from a short length of light chain. Kelly’s right hand removed it from the loops, still holding it in place as he closed on Junior.
The pusher’s head turned again in annoyance. Probably he had trouble counting, and now he was arranging the bills by denomination. Maybe Kelly’s approach had disturbed his concentration, or maybe he was just dumb, which seemed the more likely explanation.
Kelly stumbled, falling to the sidewalk, his head lowered, making himself look all the more harmless. His eyes looked backwards as he rose. He saw no other pedestrians within more than a hundred yards, and the only automobile lights he noted were red, not white, all pointed or heading away. As his head came up, there was no one at all in his view except for Junior, who was finishing up the night’s work, ready to go wherever home was for a nightcap or something else.
Ten feet now, and the pusher was ignoring him as he might ignore a stray dog, and Kelly knew the exhilaration that came the moment before it happened, that last moment of excited satisfaction when you just knew it was going to work, the enemy in the kill zone, unsuspecting that his time had come. The moment in which you could feel the blood in your veins, when you alone knew the silence was about to be violated, the wonderful satisfaction of knowing. Kelly’s right hand came out a little as he took another step, still not headed all that close to the target, clearly walking past him, not towards him, and the criminal’s eyes looked up again, just for a moment to make sure, no fear in his eyes, hardly even annoyance; not moving, of course, because people walked around him, not the reverse. Kelly was just an object to him, one of the things that occupied the street, of no more interest than an oil stain on the blacktop.
The Navy called it CPA, Closest Point of Approach, the nearest distance that a straight course took you to another ship or point of land. CPA here was three feet. When he was half a step away, Kelly’s right hand pulled the bang stick from under his jacket. Then he pivoted on his left foot and drove off the right while his right arm extended almost as though to deliver a punch, all one hundred ninety-five pounds of his body mass behind the maneuver. The swollen tip of the bang stick struck the pusher just under the sternum, aimed sharply upward. When it did, the combined push of Kelly’s arm and the inertial mass of the body pushed the chamber backwards, jamming the primer on the fixed firing pin, and the shotgun shell went off, its crimped green-plastic face actually in contact with Junior’s shirt.
The sound was like that of dropping a cardboard box on a wooden floor. Whump. Nothing more than that, certainly not like a shot at all, because all the expanding gas from the powder followed the shot column into Junior’s body. The light trap load—a low-brass shell with #8 birdshot, like that used for competition shooting, or perhaps an early-season dove hunt—would have only injured a man at more than fifteen yards, but in contact with his chest, it might as easily have been an elephant gun. The brutal power of the shot drove the air from his lungs in a surprisingly loud whoosh, forcing Junior’s mouth open in a way that surprise might have done. And truly he was surprised. His eyes looked into Kellys, and Junior was still alive, though his heart was already as destroyed as a toy balloon, and the bottom of his lungs torn to bits. Gratifyingly, there was no exit wound. The upward angle of the strike left all of the energy and shot inside the chest, and the power of the explosion served to keep his body erect for a second—no more than that, but for Junior and Kelly it seemed a moment that lasted for hours. Then the body just fell, straight down, like a collapsing building. There was an odd, deep sigh, from air and gun-gases forced out of the entrance wound by the fall, a foul odor of acrid smoke and blood and other things that stained the air, not unlike the ended life it represented. Junior’s eyes were still open, still looking at Kelly, still focusing on his face and trying to say something, his mouth open and quivering until all movement stopped with the question un-asked and -answered.
Kelly took the roll from Junior’s still-firm hand and kept moving up the street, his eyes and ears searching for danger, and finding none. At the corner he angled to the gutter and swished the tip of the bang stick in some water to remove whatever blood might be there. Then he turned, heading west to his car, still moving slowly and unevenly. Forty minutes later he was home, richer by eight hundred forty dollars and poorer by one shotgun shell.
“And who’s this one?” Ryan asked.
“Would you believe, Bandanna?” the uniformed officer answered. He was an experienced patrol officer, white, thirty-two years old. “Deals smack. Well, not anymore.”
The eyes were still open, which was not terribly common in murder victims, but this one’s death had been a surprise, and a very traumatic one at that, despite which the body was amazingly tidy. There was a three-quarter-inch entrance wound with a jet-black ring around it like a donut, perhaps an eighth of an inch in thickness. That was from powder, and the diameter of the hole was unmistakably that of a 12-gauge shotgun. Beyond the skin was just a hole, like into an empty box. All of the internal organs had either been immolated or simply pulled down by gravity. It was the first time in his life that Emmet Ryan had ever looked into a dead body this way, as though it were not a body at all, but a mannequin.
“Cause of death,” the coroner observed with early-morning irony, “is the total vaporization of his heart. The only way we’ll even be able to identify heart tissue is under a microscope. Steak tartare,” the man added, shaking his head.
“An obvious contact wound. The guy must have jammed the muzzle right into him, then triggered it off.”
“Jesus, he didn’t even cough up any blood,” Douglas said. The lack of an exit wound left no blood at all on the sidewalk, and from a distance Bandanna actually looked as though he were asleep—except for the wide and lifeless eyes.