Executive orders - Tom Clancy [449]
Ryan flipped through the papers he had. One preliminary conclusion leaped off the page at him: Eleven years?
Yes, sir.
So this is a major operation for somebody-a country.
That's a real possibility.
Who else would have the resources? he asked, and Price reminded herself that he'd been an intelligence officer for a long time.
Agent Raman came in and took his seat. He'd heard that observation, and he and Price traded a look and a nod.
The wall phone rang. Captain Overton walked over to get it. Yes? He listened for a few minutes, then turned. Mr. President, this is Mrs. Foley at CIA.
The President went to take the call. Yeah, Mary Pat.
Sir, we had a call a few minutes ago from Moscow. Our friend Golovko asks if he can be of any assistance. I recommend a 'yes' on that.
Agreed. Anything else?
Avi ben Jakob wants to talk to you later today. Ears-only, the DDO told him.
About an hour, let me get woke up first.
Yes, sir Jack?
Yeah, MP?
Thank God about Katie, she said, mother to father, then going on as mother alone: If we can get a line on this, we will.
I KNOW YOU'RE our best, Mrs. Foley heard. We're doing okay right now.
Good. Ed and I will be in all day. She hung up.
How's he sound? Clark asked.
He'll make it, John.
Chavez rubbed his hand over the night's growth of beard. The three of them plus quite a few others had spent the night reviewing everything CIA had on terrorist groups. We have to do something about this, guys. This is an act of war. His voice was devoid of accent now, as it tended to be when he got serious enough to call on his education instead of his L.A. origins.
We don't know much. Hell, the DDO said, we don't know anything yet.
Shame he couldn't have taken one alive. This observation, to the surprise of the two others, came from Clark.
He probably didn't have much of a chance to snap the cuffs on the guy, Ding replied.
True. Clark lifted the set of crime-scene photos that had been couriered over from the FBI just after midnight. He'd worked the Middle East, and it had been hoped that he might have recognized a face, but he hadn't. Mainly he'd learned that whichever FBI puke had been inside, the gent could shoot as well as he ever had. Lucky man, to have been there, to have had that chance, and to take it.
Somebody's taking one hell of a big chance, John said.
That's a fact, Mary Pat agreed automatically, but then they all wondered about it.
The question was not how big the chance was, but rather how big the chance was perceived to be by whoever had tossed the dice. The nine terrorists had all been throwaways, as surely marked for death as the Hezbollah fanatics who'd gone strolling down Israeli streets in clothing made by DuPont-that was the CIA joke about it, though in fact the plastic explosives had probably come from the Skoda Works in the former Czechoslovakia. Not-so-smart bombs was the other in-house sobriquet. Had they really believed that they could pull it off? The problem with some of the fanatics was that they didn't weigh things very well maybe they hadn't even cared.
That was also the problem of those who sent them. This mission had been different, after all. Ordinarily, terrorists boasted widely of what they did, however odious the act, and at CIA and elsewhere they'd waited for fifteen hours for the press release. But it never came, and if it hadn't by now, then it never would. If they didn't make the release, then they didn't want anyone to know. But that was an illusion. Terrorists always proclaimed their acts, but they didn't always appreciate that police agencies could figure things out anyway.
Nation-states knew better, or were supposed to. Okay, fine, the dealers hadn't had anything that could identify their point of origin-or so some might think. But Mary Pat was under no such illusions. The FBI was better than good, good enough that the Secret Service was letting the Bureau handle all of the forensics. And so it was likely that whoever had initiated the mission might actually expect that the story would eventually unravel. Knowing that-probably-they'd