Jack Ryan 2 - Patriot Games (49 page)

Kinter shook his head. “Bring her back sometime and we're even. We have a party for ex-patients every few months. Mr. Ryan, there is nothing you can do that comes close to what we all feel when we see our little patients come back -- walk back. That's why we're here, man, to make sure they come back for cake and juice. Just let us bounce her on our knees after she's better.”

“Deal.” Ryan wondered how many people were alive because of the people in this room. He was certain that this surgeon could be a rich man in private practice. Jack understood him, understood why he was here, and knew that his father-in-law wouldn't. He sat for a few minutes at Sally's side, listening to the machine breathe for her through the plastic tube. The nurse-practitioner overseeing the case smiled at him around her mask. He kissed Sally's bruised forehead before leaving. Jack felt better now, better about almost everything. But one item remained. The people who had done this to his little girl.

“It had wheelchair tags,” the clerk in the 7-Eleven was saying, “but the dude who drove it didn't look crippled or anything.”

“You remember what he looked like?” Special Agent Nick Capitano and a major from the Maryland State Police were interviewing the witness.

“Yeah, he was 'bout as black as me. Tall dude. He wore sunglasses, the mirror kind. Had a beard, too. There was always at least one other dude in the truck, but I never got a look at him -- black man, that's all I can say.”

“What did he wear?”

“Jeans and a brown leather jacket, I think. You know, like a construction worker.”

“Shoes or boots?” the Major asked.

“Never did see that,” the clerk said after a moment.

“How about jewelry, T-shirt with a pattern, anything special or different about him?”

“No, nothin' I remember.”

“What did he do here?”

“He always bought a six-pack of Coke Classic. Once or twice he got some Twinkies, but he always got hisself the Cokes.”

“What did he sound like? Anything special?”

The clerk shook her head. “Nah, just a dude, y'know?”

“Do you think you could recognize him again?” Capitano asked.

“Maybe -- we get a lot of folks through here, lotta regulars, lotta strangers, y'know?”

“Would you mind looking through some pictures?” the agent went on.

“Gotta clear it with the boss. I mean, I need the job, but you say this chump tried to kill a little girl -- yeah, sure, I'll help ya.”

“We'll clear it with the boss,” the Major assured her. “You won't lose pay over it.”

“Gloves,” she said, looking up. “Forgot to say that. He wore work gloves. Leather ones, I think.” Gloves, both men wrote in their notebooks.

“Thank you, ma'am. We'll call you tonight. A car will pick you up tomorrow morning so you can look at some pictures for us,” the FBI agent said.

“Pick me up?” The clerk was surprised.

“You bet.” Manpower was not a factor on this case. The agent who picked her up would pick her brain again on the drive into D.C. The two investigators left. The Major drove his unmarked State Police car.

Capitano checked his notes. This wasn't bad for a first interview. He, the Major, and fifteen others had spent the day interviewing people in stores and shops up and down five miles of Ritchie Highway. Four people thought they remembered the van, but this was the first person who had seen one of its occupants closely enough for a description. It wasn't much, but it was a start. They already had the shooter ID'd. Cathy Ryan had recognized Sean Miller's face -- thought she did, the agent corrected himself. If it had been Miller, he had a beard now, on the brown side of black and neatly trimmed. An artist would try to re-create that.

Twenty more agents and detectives had spent their day at the three local airports, showing photos to every ticket agent and gate clerk. They'd come up blank, but they hadn't had a description of Miller then. Tomorrow they would try again. A computer check was being made of international flights that connected to flights to Ireland, and domestic flights that connected to international ones. Capitano was happy that he didn't have to run all of those down. It would take weeks, and the chance of getting an ID from an airport worker diminished measurably every hour.

The van had been identified for more than a day, off the FBI's computer. It had been stolen a month before in New York City, repainted -- professionally, by the look of it -- and given new tags. Several sets of them, since the handicap tags found on it yesterday had been stolen less than two days before from a nursing home's van in Hagerstown, Maryland, a hundred miles away. Everything about the crime said it was a professional job from start to finish. Switching cars at the shopping center had been a brilliant finale to a perfectly planned and executed operation. Capitano and the Major were able to restrain their admiration, but they had to make an objective assessment of the people they were after. These weren't common thugs. They were professionals in every perverted sense of the word.

“You suppose they got the van themselves?” Capitano asked the Major.

The State Police investigator grunted. “There's some outfit in Pennsylvania that steals them from all over the Northeast, paints them, reworks the interior, and sells 'em. You guys are looking for them, remember?”

“I've heard a few things about the investigation, but that's not my territory. It's being looked at. Personally, I think they did it themselves. Why risk a connection with somebody else?”

“Yeah,” the Major agreed reluctantly. The van had already been checked out by state and federal forensic experts. Not a single fingerprint had been found. The vehicle had been thoroughly cleaned, down to the knobs on the window handles. The technicians found nothing that could lead them to the criminals. Now the dirt and fabric fibers vacuumed from the van's carpet were being analyzed in Washington, but this was the sort of clue that worked reliably only on TV. If the people had been smart enough to clean out the van, they were almost certainly smart enough to burn the clothing they'd worn. Everything was being checked out anyway, because even the smartest people did make mistakes.

“You heard anything on the ballistics yet?” the Major asked, turning the car onto Rowe Boulevard.

“Oughta be waiting for us.” They'd found almost twenty nine-millimeter cartridge cases to go along with the two usable bullets recovered from the Porsche, and the one that had gone through Trooper Fontana's chest and lodged in the back seat of his wrecked car. These had gone directly to the FBI laboratory in Washington for analysis. The evidence would tell them that the weapon was a submachine gun, which they already knew, but might give them a type, which they didn't yet know. The cartridge cases were Belgian-made, from the Fabrique Nationale at Liege. They might be able to identify the lot number, but FN made so many millions of such rounds per year, which were shipped and reshipped all over the world, that the lead was a slim one. Very often such shipments simply disappeared, mainly from sloppy -- or creative -- bookkeeping.

“How many black groups are known to have contact with these ULA characters?”

“None,” Capitano replied. “That's something we are going to have to establish.”

“Great.”

Ryan arrived home to find an unmarked car and a liveried State Police cruiser in his driveway. Jack's own FBI interview wasn't a long one. It hadn't taken long to confirm the fact that he quite simply knew nothing about the attempt on his family or himself.

“Any idea where they are?” he asked finally.

“We're checking airports,” the agent answered. “If these guys are as smart as they look, they're long gone.”

“They're smart, all right,” Ryan noted sourly. “What about the one you caught?”

“He's doing one hell of a good imitation of a clam. He has a lawyer now, of course, and the lawyer is telling him to keep his mouth shut. You can depend on lawyers for that.”

“Where'd the lawyer come from?”

“Public defender's office. It's a rule, remember. You hold a suspect for any length of time, he has to have a lawyer. I don't think it matters. He probably isn't talking to the lawyer either. We have him on a state weapons violation and federal immigration laws. He goes back to the U.K. as soon as the paperwork gets done. Maybe two weeks or so, depending on if the attorney contests things.” The agent closed his notebook. “You never know, maybe he'll start talking, but don't count on it. The word we get from the Brits is that he's not real bright anyway. He's the Irish version of a street hood, very good with weapons but a little slow upstairs.”

“So if he's dumb, how come --”

“How come he's good at what he does? How smart do you have to be to kill somebody? Clark's a sociopathic personality. He has very little in the way of feelings. Some people are like that. They don't relate to the people around them as being real people. They see them as objects, and since they're only objects, whatever happens to them is not important. Once I met a hit man who killed four people -- just the ones we know about -- and didn't bat an eye, far as I could tell; but he cried like a baby when we told him his cat died. People like that don't even understand why they get sent to prison; they really don't understand,” he concluded. “Those are the scary ones.”

“No,” Ryan said. “The scary ones are the ones with brains, the ones who believe in it.”

“I haven't met one of those yet,” he admitted.

“I have.” Jack walked him to the door and watched him pull away. The house was an empty, quiet place without Sally running around, without the TV on, without Cathy talking about her friends at Hopkins. For several minutes Jack wandered around aimlessly, as though expecting to find someone. He didn't want to sit down, because that would somehow be an admission that he was all alone. He walked into the kitchen and started to fix a drink, but before he was finished, he dumped it all down the sink. He didn't want to get drunk. It was better to keep his mind unimpaired. Finally he lifted the phone and dialed.

“Yes,” a voice answered.

“Admiral, Jack Ryan.”

“I understand that your girl's going to be all right,” James Greer said. “I'm glad to hear that, son.”

“Thank you, sir. Is the Agency involved in this?”

“This is an unsecure line, Jack,” the Admiral replied.

“I want in,” Ryan said.

“Be here tomorrow morning.”

Ryan hung up and went looking for his briefcase. He opened it and took out the Browning automatic pistol. After setting it on the kitchen table, he got out his shotgun and cleaning kit. He spent the next hour cleaning and oiling first the pistol, then the shotgun. When he was satisfied, he loaded both.

He left for Langley at five the next morning. Ryan had managed to get four more hours of sleep before rising and going through the usual morning ritual of coffee and breakfast. His early departure allowed him to miss the worst of the traffic, though the George Washington Parkway was never really free of the government workers heading to and from the agencies that were always more or less awake. After getting into the CIA building, he reflected that he had never called here and found Admiral Greer absent. Well, he told himself, that's one thing in this world that I can depend on. A security officer escorted him to the seventh floor.

“Good morning, sir,” Jack said on entering the room.

“You look better than I expected,” the DDI observed.

“It's an illusion mostly, but I can't solve my problem by hiding in a corner, can I? Can we talk about what's going on?”

“Your Irish friends have gotten a lot of attention. The President himself wants action on this. We've never had international terrorists play games in our country -- at least, not things that ever made the press,” Greer said cryptically. “It is now a high-priority case. It's getting a lot of resources.”

“I want to be one of them,” Ryan said simply.

“If you think that you can be part of an operation --”

“I know better than that, Admiral.”

Greer smiled at the younger man. “That's good to see, son. I thought you were smart. So what do you want to do for us?”

“We both know that the bad guys are part of the network. The data you let me look at was pretty limited. Obviously you're going to be trying to collate data on all the groups, searching for leads on the ULA. Maybe I can help.”

“What about your teaching?”

“I can be here when I'm not teaching. There isn't much to hold me at home at the moment, sir.”

“It isn't good practice to use people who are personally involved in the investigation,” Greer pointed out.

“This isn't the FBI, sir. I'm not going out into the field. You just told me that. I know you want me back here on a permanent basis, Admiral. If you really want me, let me start off doing something that's important to both of us.” Jack paused, searching for another point. “If I'm good enough, let's find out now.”

“Some people aren't going to like it.”

“There's things happening to me that I don't like very much, sir, and I have to live with it. If I can't fight back somehow, I might as well stay at home. You're the only chance I have to do something to protect my family, sir.”

Greer turned to refill his coffee cup from the drip machine behind his desk. He'd liked Jack almost from the first moment he'd met him. This was a young man accustomed to having his way, though he was not arrogant about it. That was a point in his favor: Ryan knew what he wanted, but wasn't overly pushy. He wasn't a person driven by ambition, another point in his favor. Finally, he had a lot of raw talent to be shaped and trained and directed. Greer was always looking for talent. The Admiral turned back.

“Okay, you're on the team. Marty's coordinating the information. You'll work directly with him. I hope you don't talk in your sleep, son, because you're going to see stuff that you're not even allowed to dream about.”

“Sir, there's only one thing that I'm going to dream about.”

It had been a very busy month for Dennis Cooley. The death of an earl in East Anglia had forced his heirs to sell off a massive collection of books to pay the death duties, and Cooley had used up nearly all of his available capital to secure no less than twenty-one items for his shop. But it was worth it: among them was a rare first-folio of Marlowe's plays. Better still, the dead earl had been assiduous in protecting his treasures. The books had been deep-frozen several times to kill off the insects that desecrated these priceless relics of the past. The Marlowe was in remarkably good shape, despite the waterstained cover that had put off a number of less perceptive buyers. Cooley was stooped over his desk, reading the first act of The Jew of Malta, when the bell rang.