Games of State - Tom Clancy [86]
Herbert's only wound was another unpleasant scrape across his chest, inflicted by the shoulder strap.
There was a moment of clear silence, broken by cars honking from far off, and people approaching cautiously, yelling to other people to get help.
Not sure that he had put the car or its occupants out of commission, Herbert pressed down on the gas to get away. The car didn't move. He could feel his tires racing, but he could also feel the tug of the two fenders locked together.
He sat still for a moment, realizing for the first time how his heart was racing as he wondered if he could get himself and the wheelchair out.
Suddenly, the van bellowed back to life. Herbert felt a rough tug and looked in the rearview mirror. A new driver had taken the place of the old one and had shifted into reverse. Now he moved ahead, then shifted back, then jerked ahead.
Trying to shake me loose, Herbert thought, even as the vehicles unhooked. Without stopping, the van continued to back up. It sped off, then turned a corner and vanished.
The intelligence officer sat gripping the steering wheel, trying to decide what to do. In the distance, he heard the siren which had sent the neo-Nazis on their way. One of those loud ones which made the Opel police cars sound like Buicks. People began coming up to the window and speaking to Herbert softly, in German.
"Danke, " he said. "Thanks. I'm all right. Gesund Healthy."
Healthy? he thought. He thought of the police coming to question him. German police were not famed for their friendliness. At best, he would be treated objectively. At worst
At worst, he thought, the police station has a couple of neo-Nazi sympathizers. At worst; they put me in prison. At worst, somebody gets to me in the middle of the night with a knife or a length of steel wire.
"Screw that," he said. Thanking the onlookers again and politely urging them to get out of the way, Herbert quickly shifted gears, picked up the phone, and set off after the van.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Thursday, 11:00 A.M.,
Washington, D.C.
It was nicknamed the Kraken, after the fabled, many-tentacled sea monster. And it was set up by Matt Stoll when he was hired as one of Op-Center's first employees.
The Kraken was a powerful computer system which was linked to databases worldwide. The resources and information ranged from photo libraries to FBI fingerprint files, from books in the Library of Congress to newspaper morgues in every major city of the United States, from stock prices to air and rail schedules, from telephone directories around the world to troop and police strength and deployment in most cities at home and abroad.
But Stoll and his small staff had designed a system which not only accessed data, it analyzed it. An ID program written by Stoll allowed researchers to circle a nose or an eye or mouth on a terrorist's face and find it anywhere it appeared in international police or newspaper files. Landscapes could likewise be compared by highlighting the contour of a mountain, horizon, or shore. Two full-time day and night operators were stationed at the Archive, which could handle over thirty separate operations at once.
It took the Kraken less than fifteen minutes to find the photograph of Deputy Foreign Minister Hausen. It had been snapped by a Reuters photographer and published in a Berlin newspaper five months before, when Hausen had arrived to give a speech at a dinner of Holocaust survivors. When he received the information, Eddie couldn't help but resent the cruelty of the juxtaposition of this particular image in the game.
The landscape behind Hausen took a little longer to identify, though here the programmers got lucky. Instead of asking for a worldwide check,