Patriot games - Tom Clancy [87]
There was five seconds of silence on the phone.
"What do you know, Jack?" the broker asked finally.
"I'm playing a hunch."
"Okay twenty-K plus I'll call you at ten tomorrow. You think I should ?"
"It's a toss of the dice, but I think it's a good toss."
"Thanks. Anything else?"
"No. I have to go eat dinner. Good night, Mort."
"See ya." Both men hung up. At the far end of the phone, the broker decided that he'd go in for a thousand shares, too. Ryan was occasionally wrong, but when he was right, he tended to be very right.
"Christmas Day," O'Donnell said quietly. "Perfect."
"Is that the day they're moving Sean?" McKenney asked.
"He leaves London by van at four in the morning. That's bloody good news. I was afraid they'd use a helicopter. No word on the route they'll use " He read on. "But they're going to take him across on the Lymington ferry at eight-thirty Christmas morning. Excellent timing, when you think about it. Too early for heavy traffic. Everyone'll be opening his presents and getting dressed for church. The van might even have the ferry to itself-who'd expect a prisoner transfer on Christmas Day?"
"So, we are going to break Sean out, then?"
"Michael, our men do us little good when they're inside, don't they? You and I are flying over tomorrow morning. I think we'll drive down to Lymington and look at the ferry."
* * *
9
A Day for Celebration
od, it'll be nice to have two arms again," Ryan observed.
"Two more weeks, maybe three," Cathy reminded him. "And keep your hand still inside the damned sling!"
"Yes, dear."
It was about two in the morning, and things were going badly-and well. Part of the Ryan family tradition-a tradition barely three years old, but a tradition nevertheless-was that after Sally was in bed and asleep, her parents would creep down to the basement storage area-a room with a padlocked door-and bring the toys upstairs for assembly. The previous two years, this ceremony had been accompanied by a couple of bottles of champagne. Assembling toys was a wholly different sort of exercise when the assemblers were half blasted. It was their method of relaxing into the Christmas spirit.
So far things had gone well. Jack had taken his daughter to the seven o'clock children's mass at St. Mary's, and gotten her to bed a little after nine. His daughter had slid her head around the fireplace wall only twice before a loud command from her father had banished her to her bedroom for good, her arm clasping an overly talkative AG Bear to her chest. By midnight it was decided that she was asleep enough for her parents to make a little noise. This had begun the toy trek, as Cathy called it. Both parents removed their shoes to minimize noise on the hardwood steps and went downstairs. Of course, Jack forgot the key to the padlock, and had to climb back upstairs to the master bedroom to search for it. Five minutes later the door was opened and the two of them made four trips each, setting up a lavish pile of multicolored boxes near the tree, next to Jack's tool kit.
"You know what the two most obscene words in the English language are, Cathy?" Ryan asked nearly two hours later.
" 'Assembly required,' " his wife answered with a giggle. "Honey, last year I said that."
"A small Phillips." Jack held his hand out. Cathy smacked the screwdriver into his hand like a surgical instrument. Both of them were sitting on the rug, fifteen feet from the eight-foot tree. Around them was a crescent of toys, some in boxes, some already assembled by the now-exasperated father of a little girl.
"You ought to let me do that."
"This is man's work," her husband said. He sat the screwdriver down and sipped at a glass of champagne.
"You chauvinist pig! If I let you do this by yourself, you wouldn't be finished by Easter."
She was right, Jack told himself. Doing it half-drunk wasn't all that hard. Doing it one-handed was hard but not insurmountable. Doing it one-handed and half-drunk was The damned screws didn't want to stay in the plastic, and the instructions for