Patriot games - Tom Clancy [204]
"Then why are you leaving in August?" Ryan asked.
Cantor delivered his answer without facing him. "Maybe you'll find out someday, Jack."
Back alone in his office, Ryan couldn't get his mind off what he'd seen. Five thousand miles away, agents of the DGSE's "action" directorate were now questioning that girl. If this had been a movie, their techniques would be brutal. What they used in real life, Ryan didn't want to know. He told himself that the members of Action- Directe had brought it on themselves. First, they had made a conscious choice to be what they were. Second, in subverting the French legal system the previous year, they'd given their enemies an excuse to bypass whatever constitutional guarantees but was that truly an excuse?
"What would Dad think?" he murmured to himself. Then the next question hit him. Ryan lifted his phone and punched in the right number.
"Cantor."
"Why, Marty?"
"Why what, Jack?"
"Why did you let me see that?"
"Jean-Claude wanted to meet you, and he also wanted you to see what your data accomplished."
"That's bull, Marty! You let me into a real-time satellite display-okay, taped, but essentially the same thing. There can't be many people cleared for that. I don't need-to-know how good the real-time capability is. You could have told him I wasn't cleared for it and that would have been that."
"Okay, you've had some time to think it over. Tell me what you think."
"I don't like it."
"Why?" Cantor asked.
"It broke the law."
"Not ours. Like I told you twenty minutes ago, all we did was provide intelligence information to a friendly foreign nation."
"But they used it to kill people."
"What do you think intel is for, Jack? What should they have done? No, answer this first: what if they were foreign nationals who had murdered French nationals in-in Liechtenstein, say, and then boogied back to their base?"
"That's not the same thing. That's more more like an act of war-like doing the guards at the camp. The people they were after were their own citizens who committed crimes in their own country, and-and are subject to French law."
"And what if it had been a different camp? What if those paratroopers had done a job for us, or the Brits, and taken out your ULA friends?"
"That's different!" Ryan snapped back. But why? he asked himself a moment later. "It's personal. You can't expect me to feel the same way about that."
"Can't I?" Cantor hung up the phone.
Ryan stared at the telephone receiver for several seconds before replacing it in the cradle. What was Marty trying to tell him? Jack reviewed the events in his own mind, trying to come to a conclusion that made sense.
Did any of it make sense? Did it make sense for political dissidents to express themselves with bombs and machine guns? Did it make sense for small nations to use terrorism as a short-of-war weapon to change the policies of larger ones? Ryan grunted. That depended on which side of the issue you were on-or at least there were people who thought that way. Was this something completely new?
It was, and it wasn't. State-sponsored terrorism, in the form of the Barbary pirates, had been America 's first test as a nation. The enemy objective then had been simple greed. The Barbary states demanded tribute before they would give right of passage to American-flag trading ships, but it had finally been decided that enough was enough. Preble took the infant U.S. Navy to the Mediterranean Sea to put an end to it-no, to put an end to America 's victimization by it, Jack corrected himself.
God, it was even the same place, Ryan thought. "To the shores of Tripoli," the Marine Hymn said, where First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon, USMC, had attacked the fort at Derna. Jack wondered if the place still existed. Certainly the problem did.
The violence hadn't changed. What had changed were the rules under which the large nations acted, and the objectives of their enemies. Two hundred years earlier, when a small nation offended a larger one, ships and troops would settle matters. No longer was this simple wog-bashing,