The information was very interesting, Henriksen thought, and this Russian was pretty good at developing it. He would have made a good agent for the Foreign Counterintelligence Division . . . but then, that’s just what he had been, in a way, only working for the other side, of course. And with the information, he recalled his idea, from the Qantas flight.
“Dmitriy,” Bill asked, “do you have contacts in Ireland?”
Popov nodded. “Yes, several of them.”
Henriksen looked over at Dr. Brightling for approval and got a nod. “How would they like to get even with the SAS?”
“That has been discussed many times, but it is not practical. It is like sending a bank robber into a guarded bank—no, that is not right. It is like sending a robber into the government agency which prints the money. There are too many defensive assets to make the mission practical.”
“But they actually wouldn’t be going to Hereford, would they? What if we could draw them out into the open, and then stage our own little surprise for them? . . .” Henriksen explained on.
It was a very interesting idea, Popov thought. But: “It is still a very dangerous mission.”
“Very well. What is the current condition of the IRA?”
Popov leaned back in his chair. “They are badly split. There are now several factions. Some want peace. Some want the disorders to continue. The reasons are both ideological and personal to the faction members. Ideological insofar as they truly believe in their political objective of overturning both the British rule in Northern Ireland and the Republican government in Dublin, and establishing a ‘progressive socialist’ government. As an objective, it’s far too ambitious for a practical world, yet they believe in it and hold to it. They are committed Marxists—actually more Maoist than Marxist, but that is not important to us at the moment.”
“And the personal side?” Brightling asked.
“When one is a revolutionary, it is not merely a matter of belief, but also a matter of perception by the public. To many people a revolutionary is a romantic character, a person who believes in a vision of the future and is willing to risk his life for it. From that comes his social status. Those who know such people often respect them. Therefore, to lose that status injures the former revolutionary. He must now work for a living, drive a truck or whatever he is capable of—”
“Like what happened to you when the KGB RIF’d you, in other words,” Henriksen offered.
Popov had to nod at that. “In a way, yes. As a field officer of State Security, I had status and importance enjoyed by few others in the Soviet Union, and losing that was more significant to me than the loss of my modest salary. It will be the same for these Irish Marxists. And so they have two reasons for wanting the disorders to continue: their political ideological beliefs, and their need for personal recognition as something more than ordinary worker-citizens.”
“Do you know such people?” Henriksen asked pointedly.
“Yes, I can probably identify some. I met many in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, where they trained with other ‘progressive elements.’ And I have traveled to Ireland on occasion to deliver messages and money to support their activities. Those operations tied up large segments of the British Army, you see, and were, therefore, worthy of Soviet support as a distraction to a large NATO enemy.” Popov ended his discourse, looking at the other two men in the room. “What would you have them do?”
“It’s not so much a question of what as of how,” Bill told the Russian. “You know, when I was in the Bureau, we used to say that the IRA was composed of the best terrorists in the world, dedicated, smart, and utterly vicious.”
“I would agree with that assessment. They were superbly organized, ideologically sound, and willing to undertake nearly anything if it had a real political impact.”
“How would they view this mission?”
“What mission is that?” Dmitriy asked, and then Bill explained his basic mission concept. The Russian listened politely and thoughtfully before responding: “That would appeal to them, but the scope and the dangers are very large.”
“What would they require to cooperate?”
“Money and other support, weapons, explosives, the things they need to carry on their operations. The current faction-fighting has probably had the effect of disrupting their logistical organization. That’s doubtless how the peace faction is trying to control the continued-violence faction, simply by restricting their access to weapons. Without that, they cannot take physical action, and cannot therefore enhance their own prestige. So, if you offer them the wherewithal to conduct operations, they will listen seriously to your plan.”
“Money?”
“Money allows one to purchase things. The factions with which we would deal have probably been cut off from regular funding sources.”
“Which are?” Brightling asked.
“Drinking clubs, and what you call the ‘protection racket,’ yes?”
“That’s right,” Henriksen confirmed with a nod. “That’s how they get their money, and that source is probably well controlled by the peace factions.”
“So, then, how much do you think, Dmitriy?” John Brightling asked.
“Several million dollars, I should say, at the least, that is.”
“You’ll have to be very careful laundering it,” Bill warned their boss. “I can help.”
“Call it five million? . . .”
“That should be enough,” Popov said, after a moment’s reflection, “plus the psychological attraction of bearding the lion so close to his own den. But I can offer no promises. These people make their own decisions, for their own reasons.”
“How quickly could you arrange the meeting?”
“Two days, perhaps three, after I arrive in Ireland,” Popov answered.
“Get your tickets,” Brightling told him decisively.
“One of them did some talking before he deployed,” Tawney said. “His name was René. Before he set off to Spain, he chatted with a girlfriend. She had an attack of conscience and came in on her own. The French interviewed her yesterday.”
“And?” Clark asked.
“And the purpose of the mission was to free Carlos, but he said nothing to her about their being assigned the mission by anyone. In fact he said little, though the interview did develop the name of another participant in the mission, or so our French colleagues think. They’re running that name down now. The woman in question—well, he and she had been friends, lovers, for some time, and evidently he confided in her. She came to the police on her own because of the dead Dutch child. The Paris papers have made a big show of that, and it evidently troubled her conscience. She told the police that she tried to talk him out of the job—not sure that I believe that—and that he told her that he’d think about it. Evidently he didn’t follow through on that, but the French are now wondering if someone might have opted out. They’re sweeping up the usual suspects for a chat. Perhaps they’ll turn up something,” Tawney concluded hopefully.
“That’s all?” Clark asked.
“It’s quite a lot, really,” Peter Covington observed. “It’s rather more than we had yesterday, and it allows our French friends to pursue additional leads.”
“Maybe,” Chavez allowed. “But why did they go out? Who’s turning these bastards loose?”
“Anything from the other two incidents?” Clark asked.
“Not a bloody peep,” Tawney replied. “The Germans have rattled every bush. Cars were seen going in and out of the Fürchtner/Dortmund house, but she was an artist, and they might well have been buyers of her paintings. In any case, no vehicle descriptions, much less license-plate numbers. That is dead, unless someone else walks into a police station and makes a statement.”
“Known associates?” Covington asked.
“All interviewed by the BKA, with no results. Hans and Petra were never known for talking. The same was true of Model and Guttenach.” Tawney waved his hands in frustration.
“It’s out
there, John,” Chavez said. “I can feel it.”
“I agree,” Covington said with a nod. “But the trick’s getting our hands on it.”
Clark frowned mightily, but he knew the drill, too, from his time in the field. You wanted information to develop, but merely wanting it never made it happen. Things like that just came to you when they decided to come. It was that simple, and that maddening, especially when you knew it was there and you knew that you needed it. With one small bit of information, Rainbow could turn some national police force loose and sweep up the person or persons they wanted and grill them over a slow fire until they got what they needed. The French or the Germans would be best—neither of them had the legal restrictions that the Americans and Brits had placed on their police forces. But that wasn’t a good way to think, and the FBI usually got people to spill their guts, even though they treated all criminals with white kid gloves. Even terrorists, once caught, usually told what they knew—well, not the Irish, John remembered. Some of those bastards wouldn’t say “boo,” not even their own names. Well, there were ways of handling that level of recalcitrance. It was just a matter of speaking to them outside of police view, putting the fear of God, and of pain, into them. That usually worked—had always worked in John Clark’s experience. But first you needed somebody to talk to. That was the hard part.
As a field officer of the CIA he’d often enough been in distant, uncomfortable places on a mission, then had the mission aborted—or just as bad, postponed—because some vital bit of information had been missing or lost. He’d seen three men and one woman die for that reason, in four different places, all of them behind the Iron Curtain. Four people, all of whose faces he’d known, lost, judicially murdered by their parent countries. Their struggle against tyranny had ultimately been successful, but they hadn’t lived to see it or enjoy the fruits of their courage, and it was part of Clark’s conscience that he remembered every single one of them—and because of that he’d grown to hate the people who’d had the information he’d needed but had not been able to get out in time. So it was now. Ding was right. Somebody was calling these animals out of their lairs, and he wanted that somebody. Finding him or her would give them all manner of names and telephone numbers and addresses for the European police agencies to sweep up into one big bag, and so end much of the terrorism that still hung over Europe like a cloud. And that would be a hell of a lot better than sending his troopers out into the field with loaded guns.
Popov packed his bags. He was getting quite expert at this, the Russian told himself, and had learned to pack his shirts without their coming out of the bag wrinkled, which he’d never learned as a KGB officer. Well, the shirts were more expensive now, and he’d learned to take better care of them. The suitcases, however, reflected his previous occupation, and included some special pockets and compartments in which he could keep his “alternate” travel documents. These he kept with him at all times now. Should the whole project collapse of its own weight, he wanted to be able to disappear without a trace, and his three unused sets of documents should help in that. In the final extreme, he could access his Bern bank account and disappear back into Russia, though he had other plans for his future—
—but he worried that greed might be clouding his judgment. Five million dollars. If he could bank that to himself, then he’d have the resources he needed to live in comfort forever, in virtually any place of his choosing, especially if he invested it wisely. But how could he defraud the IRA out of the money detailed to them? Well, that might easily come to him. Then his eyes closed and he asked himself about greed. Was it indeed clouding his operational judgment? Was he taking an unnecessary chance, led along by his wish to have this huge amount of money? It was hard to be objective about one’s own motivations. And it was hard to be a free man now, not just one of thousands of field officers in the Committee for State Security, having to justify every single dollar, pound, or ruble he spent to the accountants at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, the most humorless people in a singularly humorless agency.
Greed, Popov thought, worrying about it. He had to set that whole issue aside. He had to go forward as the professional he’d always been, careful and circumspect at every turn, lest he be caught by enemy counterintelligence services or even by the people with whom he would be meeting. The Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army was as ruthless as any terrorist organization in the world. Though its members could be jolly fellows over a drink—in their drinking they so closely resembled Russians—they killed their enemies, inside and outside their organization, with as little compunction as medical testers with their laboratory rats. Yet they could also be loyal to a fault. In that they were predictable, and that was good for Popov. And he knew how to deal with them. He’d done so often enough in the past, both in Ireland and the Bekaa Valley. He just couldn’t let them discern his desire to bank the money earmarked to them, could he?
The packing done, Popov took his bags to the elevator, then down to the street level, where the apartment house’s doorman flagged him a cab for La Guardia, where he’d board the shuttle for Boston’s Logan International, and there to catch the Aer Lingus flight to Dublin. If nothing else, his work for Brightling had gotten him a lot of frequent-flyer miles, though with too many different airlines to be of real help. But they always flew him first-class, which KGB had never done, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought with a suppressed smile in the backseat of the cab. All he had to do, he reminded himself, was deal honestly with the PIRA. If the opportunity came to steal their money, then he’d take it. But he already knew one thing: they’d jump at the proposed operation. It was too good to pass up, and if nothing else, the PIRA had élan.
Special Agent Patrick O’Connor looked over the information faxed from New York. The trouble with kidnapping investigations was time. No investigation ever ran quickly enough, but it was worse with kidnappings, because you knew that somewhere was a real person whose life depended upon your ability to get the information and act upon it before the kidnapper decided to end his nasty little game, kill the current hostage, and go grab another. Grab another? Yes, probably, because there had been no ransom demand, and that meant that whoever had snatched Mary Bannister off the street wasn’t willing to sell her back. No, he’d be using her as a toy, almost certainly for sexual gratification, until he tired of her, and then, probably, he’d kill her. And so, O’Connor thought himself to be in a race, albeit on a track he couldn’t see, and running against a stopwatch hidden in the hand of another. He had a list of Ms. Bannister’s local friends and associates, and he had his men and women out talking to them, hoping to turn up a name or a phone number that would lead them on to the next step in the investigation . . . but probably not, he thought. No, this case was all happening in New York. This young woman had gone there to seek her fortune in the bright city lights, like so many others. And many of them did find what they were seeking, which was why they went, but this one, from the outskirts of Gary, Indiana, had gone there without knowing what it was like in a big city, and lacked the self-protective skills one needed in a city of eight million . . .
. . . and she was probably already dead, O’Connor admitted quietly to himself, killed by whatever monster had snatched her off the street. There was not a damned thing he could do about it except to identify, arrest, and convict the creep, which would save others, but wouldn’t be worth a damn to the victim whose name titled the case file on his desk. Well, that was one of the problems of being a cop. You couldn’t save them all. But you did try to avenge them all, and that was something, the agent told himself, as he rose to get his coat for the drive home.
Chavez sipped his Guinness and looked around the club. The Eagle of the Legion had been hung on the wall opposite the bar, and people already went over to touch the wooden staff in respect. Three of his Team-2 people were at a table, drinking their brews and chatting about something or other with two of Peter Covington’s troops. The TV was on—snooker championships? Chavez wondered. That was a national
event? Which changed into news and weather.
More El Niño stuff, Ding saw with a snort. Once it had just been called weather, but then some damned oceanographer had discovered that the warm/cold water mix off the coast of South America changed every few years, and that when it happened the world’s climate changed a little bit here and there, and the media had latched onto it, delighted, so it seemed, to have another label to put on things they lacked the education to understand. Now they said that the current rendition of the “El Niño Effect” was unusually hot weather in Australia.
“Mr. C, you’re old enough to remember. What did they say before this crap?”
“They called it unusually hot, cold, or seasonable weather, tried to tell you if it was going to be hot, cold, sunny, or rainy the next day, and then they told you about the baseball scores.” With rather less accuracy on the weather side, Clark didn’t say. “How’s Patsy doing?”
“Another couple of weeks, John. She’s holding up pretty well, but she bitches about how big her belly’s gotten to be.” He checked his watch. “Ought to be home in another thirty minutes. Same shift with Sandy.”
“Sleeping okay?” John went on.
“Yeah, a little restless when the little hombre rolls around, but she’s getting all she needs. Be cool, John. I’m taking good care of her. Looking forward to being a grandpa?”
Clark sipped at his third pint of the evening. “One more milestone on the road to death, I suppose.” Then he chuckled. “Yeah, Domingo, I am looking forward to it.” I’ll spoil the shit out of this little bastard, and then just hand him back when he cries. “Ready to be a pop?”