Without remorse - Tom Clancy [200]
All of which amounted to not very much. More than half of male humanity fell into the estimated height range. Considerably more than half of the men in the Baltimore metropolitan area were white. There were millions of combat veterans in America, many from elite military units - and the fact of the matter was that infantry skills were infantry skills, and you didn't have to be a combat vet to know them, and his country had had a draft for over thirty years, Ryan told himself. There were perhaps as many as thirty thousand men within a twenty-mile radius who fit the description and skill-inventory of his unknown suspect. Was he in the drug business himself? Was he a robber? Was he, as Farber had suggested, a man on some sort of mission? Ryan leaned heavily to the latter model, but he could not afford to discount the other two. Psychiatrists, and detectives, had been wrong before. The most elegant theories could be shattered by a single inconvenient fact. Damn. No, he told himself, this one was exactly what Farber said he was. This wasn't a criminal. This was a killer, something else entirely.
'We just need the one thing,' Douglas said quietly, knowing the look on his lieutenant's face.
'The one thing,' Ryan repeated. It was a private bit of shorthand. The one thing to break a case could be a name, an address, the description or tag number of a car, a person who knew something. Always the same, though frequently different, it was for the detective the crucial piece in the jigsaw puzzle that made the picture clear, and for the suspect the brick which, taken from the wall, caused everything to fall apart. And it was out there. Ryan was sure of it. It had to be there, because this killer was a clever one, much too clever for his own good. A suspect like this who eliminated a single target could well go forever undetected, but this one was not satisfied with killing one person, was he? Motivated neither by passion nor by financial gain, he was committed to a process, every step of which involved complex dangers. That was what would do him in. The detective was sure of it. Clever as he was, those complexities would continue to mount one upon the other until something important fell loose from the pile. It might even have happened already, Ryan thought, correctly.
* * *
'Two weeks,' Maxwell said.
'That fast?' James Greer leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. 'Dutch, that's really fast.'
'You think we should fiddle around?' Podulski asked.
'Damn it, Cas, I said it was fast. I didn't say it was wrong. Two weeks' more training, one week of travel and setup?' Greer asked, getting a nod. 'What about weather?'
'The one thing we can't control,' Maxwell admitted. 'But weather works both ways. It makes flying difficult. It also messes up radar and gunnery.'
'How in hell did you get all the pieces moving this early?' Greer asked with a mixture of disbelief and admiration.
'There are ways, James. Hell, we're admirals, aren't we? We give orders, and guess what? Ships actually move.'
'So the window opens in twenty-one days?'
'Correct. Cas flies out tomorrow to Constellation. We start briefing the air-support guys. Newport News is already clued in -well, partway. They think they're going to sweep the coast for triple-A batteries. Our command ship is plodding across the big pond right now. They don't know anything either except to rendezvous with TF-77.'
'I have a lot of briefing to do,' Cas confirmed with a grin.
'Helicopter crews?'
'They've been training at Coronado. They come into Quantico tonight. Pretty standard stuff, really. The tactics are straightforward. What does your man "Clark" say?'
'He's my man now?' Greer asked. 'He tells me he's comfortable with how things are going. Did you enjoy being killed?'
'He told you?' Maxwell chuckled. 'James, I knew the boy was good from what he did with Sonny, but it's different when you're there to see it - hell, to not see or hear it. He shut Marty Young up, and that's no small feat. Embarrassed a lot of Marines,