State of Siege - Tom Clancy [6]
He was going to miss those feelings, too. He opened a small plastic box that held a paper clip General Sergei Orlov had given him. Orlov was the head of the Russian op-center, a facility code-named Mirror Image. Op-Center had helped Mirror Image prevent renegade Russian officers and politicians from throwing Eastern Europe into war. The paper clip had a fiber-thin microphone inside. It had been used by Colonel Leonid Rossky to spy on potential rivals of Minister of the Interior Nikolai Dogin, one of the organizers of the war effort.
Hood put the plastic box in the cardboard carton and looked at a small, black piece of twisted metal. The shard was stiff and light, the ends bubbled and charred. It was part of the skin of a North Korean Nodong missile It had melted when Op-Center's military unit, Striker, destroyed the weapon before it could be launched at Japan. Hood's second-in-command, General Mike Rodgers, had brought the fragment back for him.
My second-in-command, Hood thought. Technically, Hood would be on vacation for two weeks before his resignation took effect. Mike would be acting director until then. Hood hoped the president would give Mike the job full time after that. It would be a terrible blow to Mike if he didn't.
Hood picked up the Nodong fragment. It was like holding a piece of his life. Japan was spared an attack, one to two million lives saved. Several lives lost. This memento and others like it were passive, but the memories they triggered were anything but. He put the fragment back in the carton. The hum of air coming from the overhead vents seemed unusually loud. Or maybe the office was just unusually silent? The night crew was on, and the phone wasn't ringing. Footsteps weren't coming to or from his door. Hood quickly went through the other memories tucked in the top drawer of his desk.
There were postcards from the kids when they vacationed at Grandma's-not like this last time, when his wife took them there while she decided whether or not to leave him. There were books he'd read on airplanes with notes scribbled in the margins, things he had to remember to do when he got where he was going or when he returned. And there was a brass key from the hotel in Hamburg, Germany, where he bumped into Nancy Jo Bosworth, a woman he'd loved and planned to marry. Nancy had walked out of his life over twenty years before without an explanation.
Hood held the brass key in his palm. He resisted the urge to slip it into his pocket, feel like he was back at the hotel, just for a moment. Instead, Hood placed the key in the box. Returning to the girl, even in memory, who'd walked out of his life, wasn't going to help save his family.
Hood shut the top drawer. He'd told Sharon that he would take her on one big last-night of having-an expense-account dinner, and there was no excuse to miss it. He'd already said his last good-byes to the office workers, and the senior staff had thrown him a surprise party that afternoon-even though it wasn't much of a surprise. When intelligence chief Bob Herbert had E-mailed everyone the time and date, he'd forgotten to remove Hood's E-mail address from his list. Paul had pretended to be surprised when he walked into the conference room. He was just glad that Herbert didn't make mistakes like that as a rule. Hood opened the bottom drawer. He took out his personal address book, the crossword puzzle CD-ROM he'd never gotten to use, and the scrapbook of daughter Harleigh's violin recitals. He'd missed too damn many of those. The four of them would be going