*****
The digital clock said 4:17, but that didn’t make sense. He closed his eyes, but the noise in his head kept going. He blinked twice. Still 4:17. As his brain began to work it decided the phone was ringing. Struggling a little, he came awake and lifted the secure phone.
“Anderson,” he said simply.
“Sir, this is the duty officer, you asked to be advised if anything happened in Paris. It’s after ten there.”
Awake now, he sat up in the bed, saying “what have you got?”
“Initial report from Paris Station says they took one terrorist alive and interrogated him, another four were eliminated in a hotel room. All five are in the hands of the Paris Police as of 0900 Paris time. Phoenix and Falcon are enroute to London in a private airplane. According to this a follow up report is due in about another hour, about five-thirty our time. Also, the State desk officer over at the Joint Counter-Terrorism Center had a call from a mid-level guy in the French Foreign Ministry asking if they knew of an op we might be running in Paris.”
“What’d our guy tell him?”
“Nothing, sir, he didn’t know of anything, nobody else at the Center did, either. Neither did we, so we told them we had nothing.”
“OK. Do me a favor, check and see what’s going on on the Paris Police network, any APB’s or whatever those Frogs call such things. I want to know what they think they’re looking for, who if they have any names, and how hard they’re looking. I suspect I’ll have a call from their Director sometime this morning, awfully Christian of him not to have called already and woken me up. Guess he’s not that pissed.” Anderson realized he was musing aloud. “Oh yeah, and flash Paris that I want a teleconference at,” he looked at the clock again, “at seven o’clock Langley time, with all the details. You did say Phoenix is enroute to London by private airplane?”
“Yessir, that’s what it says here. Is that bad?”
Anderson chuckled. “No, not bad, son, just about what I’d have expected. Sheesh, Randy. Alright, son, you get back to work, call me here if you get anything else off the Paris net in the next hour and a half. I’ll take the teleconference here at home, tell my people I’ll be into the office about eight-thirty.”
“Yessir.” The line went dead and Anderson replaced his handset. He rolled onto his back and stared at the coffered ceiling, painfully aware for a moment that the other side of the bed was empty. “Still not used to it, old buddy. Amelia’s gone, gotta move on.”
The big house was dead quiet, seemed like it’d been dead quiet since Amelia’d died, what, seven months ago now? Some days he thought he should sell the place, too big for just him, the kids didn’t come that often. Maybe just take an apartment closer to the city, it’d be easier on his security team and he could always just go visit the kids instead of waiting for them to come to Virginia. But he hadn’t done it. When you got right down to it he loved this house, loved the rich paneling in the study, the bookshelves lined with his library, collected over a lifetime. He liked the subtlety of the colors Amelia had used to decorate the formal living room, the kitchen, the hearth room where he’d still watch football on Sundays with his security detail. In the fall he loved to sit out on the terrace, looking past the stone baluster across the lawn littered with the falling leaves of every amber color at the Potomac as it flowed lazily south to Washington and beyond. The Guys played football on that lawn sometimes. No, this was home. It reminded him of Amelia, which was a good thing. “Good woman, none better,” he murmured. “OK, down to business pal.”
The President had been as understanding as usual last night. That was the thing about this guy that set him apart from the Presidents he’d known before. This guy understood that the gloves had to come off to fight this enemy, and he was a fighter. Since taking office he’d given the Agency pretty much carte blanche to find, take, kill, kidnap, or buy terrorists just about anywhere on the planet. The Old Man had asked a few questions about what might happen, just in case the uproar in France reached his level, but he was satisfied and said he’d handle it if it did. In the end he’d simply said “Go, Randy, thanks for coming over.” The kind of President America needed and deserved in troubled times.
“And I’m by God the kind of spook America needs in troubled times,” he growled at the empty room. “Private airplane? What the hell is that Cameron character up to?” He laughed out loud. “Well, the man’s a fighter pilot after all, no surprise he can fly one of those things. I guess that tells me something about Paris—our guys must’ve figured it was too risky to leave the country by any “normal” way.” He made a mental note for his conversation with Paris at seven. “What else?” he asked the ceiling.
He lay there staring and thinking for fifteen minutes. Finally he decided there was nothing productive he could do until the phone call at seven, so he tugged the blankets back up to his chin and rolled over, and was back to sleep in a few minutes more. Randy Anderson, DDO, was not a man to worry about much.