Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [7]
"I wanted to," Katzen admitted. "Boy, how I wanted to."
"But you didn't. We're employees of a foreign power conducting surveillance on behalf of a minority government so that their military can keep am eye on Islamic fanatics. We don't exactly have a moral imperative to gun down locals. If we're attacked, we lock the van door, get inside, and radio the local polisi. They rush out here in their swift Renaults and deal with the situation."
"Unless they're Motherland sympathizers," Katzen said.
"No," Coffey replied, "the police here are pretty fair. They may not like you, but they believe in the law and they'll uphold it."
"Anyway," Rodgers said, "the DPM doesn't expect us to have that kind of trouble. At worst there'll be tossed watermelon, eggs, manure, that sort of thing."
"Terrific," Katzen said. "At least in Washington they only sling mud."
"If it ever rained here," Coffey said, "we'd get that too.
Rodgers held out his hand and Coffey passed him the water. After taking a long swallow the general said, "Cheer up. As Tennessee Williams once said, 'Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.' "
* * *
THREE
Monday, 6:48 a.m.,
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Paul Hood sat sipping black coffee in the den of his comfortable suburban home. He'd opened the ivory-colored drapes, had cracked the sliding glass door an inch, and was looking across the backyard. Hood had traveled the world and was intimately familiar with many parts of it. But there was nothing that thrilled him as much as the dirty-white picket fence that marked his small part of it.
The grass was glistening-green, and a warm breeze carried the smell of roses from his wife's tiny garden. Eastern bluebirds and yellow warblers were lively with song, and squirrels were acting like furry little Strikers as they moved, stopped, reconnoitered, then moved again. The rustic tranquility was broken now and then by what the jazz-loving Hood called the morning door jam: the slap of a screen door, the groan of a garage door, or the slam of a car door.
To Hood's right was a dark oak bookcase filled with Sharon's well-used volumes on gardening and cooking. The shelves were also hacked with the encyclopedias, atlases, and dictionaries Harleigh and Alexander didn't consult anymore since all that material was on CDROM. Then there was a small corner section for Hood's own favorite novels. Ben-Hur. From Here to Eternity. The War of the Worlds. Tender Is the Night. Works by Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Old Lone Ranger novels by Fran Striker that Hood had read as a kid and went back to every now and then. To Hood's left were shelves filled with mementoes of his tenure as the mayor of Los Angeles. Plaques, mugs, keys to other cities, and photographs with domestic and foreign dignitaries.
The coffee and fresh air were equally invigorating. His lightly starched shirt was comfortable. And his new shoes felt rich, even though they weren't. He remembered when his father couldn't afford to buy him new shoes. It was thirty-five years ago, when Paul was nine and President Kennedy had been assassinated. His father, Frank "Battleship" Hood, a Navy man during the Second World War, had quit one accounting job to take another. The Hoods had sold their house and were about to move from Long Island to Los Angeles when the new firm put a sudden freeze on hiring. The firm was very, very sorry but they didn't know what was going to happen to the company, to the economy, to the country. His father didn't work for thirteen months after that, and they had to move into a small apartment. An apartment small enough so he could hear his mother consoling his father when he cried at night.
Now here he was. Relatively affluent and the director of Op-Center. In less than a year, Hood and his core team had turned the agency, formally known as the National Crisis Management