Patriot games - Tom Clancy [164]
"You're sure? Really sure?"
"Uncle John, we have over thirty agents on the case now, plus the local police. You bet we're sure. We'll get 'em, too. The Director's put the word out on this case. We want 'em. Whatever it takes, we'll get these bastards," Edward Michael Donoho, Jr., said with cold determination.
John Donoho looked at his nephew, and for the first time he saw a man. Eddie's FBI post was a source of family pride, but John finally knew why this was so. He wasn't a kid anymore. He was a man with a job about which he was deadly serious. More than the photographs, it was this that decided things. John had to believe what he'd been told.
The owner of the Patriots Club stood up straight and walked down the bar to the folding gate. He lifted it and made for the back room, with his nephew trailing behind.
"But our boys are fighting back," O'Neil was telling the fifteen men in the room. "Every day they fight back to-joining us, Johnny?"
"Out," Donoho said quietly.
"What-I don't understand, John," O'Neil said, genuinely puzzled.
"You must think I'm pretty stupid. I guess maybe I was. Leave." The voice was more forceful now, and the feigned accent was gone. "Get out of my club and don't ever come back."
"But, Johnny-what are you talking about?"
Donoho grabbed the man by his collar and lifted him off his chair. O'Neil's voice continued to protest as he was propelled all the way out the front door. Eddie Donoho waved to his uncle as he followed his charge out onto the street.
"What was that all about?" one of the men from the back room asked. Another of them, a reporter for the Boston Globe, started making notes as the bar owner stumbled through what he had finally learned.
To this point no police agency had implicated any terrorist group by name, and in fact neither had Special Agent Donoho done so. His instructions from Washington on that score had been carefully given and carefully followed. But in the translation through Uncle John and a reporter, the facts got slightly garbled-as surprised no one-and within hours the story was on the AP wire that the attack on Jack Ryan and his family had been made by the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army.
Sean Miller's mission in America had been fully accomplished by an agency of the United States government.
Miller and his party were already back home. As many people in this line of work had done before. Sean reflected on the value of rapid international air travel. In this case it had been off to Mexico from Washington's Duties International, from there to the Netherlands Antilles, to Schiphol International Airport on a KLM flight, and then to Ireland. All one needed were correct travel documents and a little money. The travel documents in question were already destroyed, and the money untraceable cash. He sat across from Kevin O'Donnell's desk, drinking water to compensate for the dehydration normal to flying.
"What about Eamon?" One rule of ULA operations was that no overseas telephone calls ever came to his house.
"Alex's man says he was picked up." Miller shrugged. "It was a risk I felt worth taking. I selected Ned for it because he knows very little about us." He knew that O'Donnell had to agree with that. Clark was one of the new men brought into the Organization, and more of an accident than a recruit. He'd come south because one of his friends from the H-blocks had come. O'Donnell had thought him of possible use, since they had no experienced work-alone assassins. But Clark was stupid. His motivations came from emotion rather than ideology. He was, in fact, a typical PIRA thug, little different from