Jack Ryan 2 - Patriot Games (64 page)

The man arrived forty minutes later, apologizing for being held up in traffic. He stood for a moment, admiring the bookshelves.

“Smells like a wire burned out,” he judged next. “You're lucky, sir. That frequently causes a fire.”

“How difficult will it be to fix?”

“I expect that I'll have to replace the wiring. Ought to have been done years ago. This old place -- well, the electric service is older than I am, and that's too old by half.” He smiled.

Cooley showed him to the fuse box in the back room, and the man went to work. Dennis was unwilling to use his table lamp, and sat in the semidarkness while the tradesman went to work.

The electrician flipped off the outside master switch and examined the fuse box. It still had the original inspection tag, and when he rubbed off the dust, he read off the date: 1919. The man shook his head in amazement. Almost seventy bloody years! He had to remove some items to get at the wall, and was surprised to see that there was some recent plasterwork. It was as good a place to start as any. He didn't want to damage the wall any more than he had to. With hammer and chisel he broke into the new plaster, and there was the wire . . .

But it wasn't the right one, he thought. It had plastic insulation, not the gutta-percha used in his grandfather's time. It wasn't in quite the right place, either. Strange, he thought. He pulled on the wire. It came out easily.

“Mr. Cooley, sir?” he called. The shop owner appeared a moment later. “Do you know what this is?”

“Bloody hell!” the detective said in the room upstairs. “Bloody fucking hell!” He turned to his companion, a look of utter shock on his face. “Call Commander Owens!”

“I've never seen anything like this.” He cut off the end and handed it over. The electrician did not understand why Cooley was so pale.

Neither had Cooley, but he knew what it was. The end of the wire showed nothing, just a place where the polyvinyl insulation stopped, without the copper core that one expects to see in electrical circuitry. Hidden in the end was a highly sensitive microphone. The shop owner composed himself after a moment, though his voice was somewhat raspy.

“I have no idea. Carry on.”

“Yes, sir.” The electrician resumed his search for the power line.

Cooley had already lifted his telephone and dialed a number.

“Hello?”

“Beatrix?”

“Good morning, Mr. Dennis. How are you today?”

“Can you come into the shop this morning? I have a small emergency.”

“Certainly.” She lived only a block from the Holloway Road tube station. The Piccadilly Line ran almost directly to the shop. “I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“Thank you, Beatrix. You're a love,” he added before he hung up. By this time Cooley's mind was racing at mach-1. There was nothing in the shop or his home that could incriminate him. He lifted the phone again and hesitated. His instructions under these circumstances were to call a number he had memorized -- but if there were a microphone in his office, his phone . . . and his home phone . . . Cooley was sweating now despite the cool temperature. He commanded himself to relax. He'd never said anything compromising on either phone -- had he? For all his expertise and discipline, Cooley had never faced danger, and he was beginning to panic. It took all of his concentration to focus on his operational procedures, the things he had learned and practiced for years. Cooley told himself that he had never deviated from them. Not once. He was sure of that. By the time he stopped shaking, the bell rang.

It was Beatrix, he saw. Cooley grabbed his coat.

“Will you be back later?”

“I'm not sure. I'll call you.” He went right out the door, leaving his clerk with a very curious look.

It had taken ten minutes to locate James Owens, who was in his car south of London. The Commander gave immediate orders to shadow Cooley and to arrest him if it appeared that he was attempting to leave the country. Two men were already watching the man's car and were ready to trail him. Two more were sent to the arcade, but the detectives arrived just as he walked out, and were on the wrong side of the street. One hopped out of the car and followed, expecting him to turn onto Berkeley Street toward his travel agent. Instead, Cooley ducked into the tube station. The detective was caught off guard and raced down the entrance on his side of the street. The crowd of morning commuters made spotting his short target virtually impossible. In under a minute, the officer was sure that his quarry had caught a train that he had been unable to get close to. Cooley had escaped.

The detective ran back to the street and put out a radio call to alert the police at Heathrow airport, where this underground line ended -- Cooley always flew, unless he drove his own car -- and to get cars to all the underground stations on the Piccadilly Line. There simply wasn't enough time.

Cooley got off at the next station, as his training had taught him, and took a cab to Waterloo Station. There he made a telephone call.

“Five-five-two-nine,” the voice answered.

“Oh, excuse me, I was trying to get six-six-three-zero. Sorry.” There followed two seconds of hesitation on the other side of the connection.

“Oh . . . That's quite all right,” the voice assured him in a tone that was anything but all right.

Cooley replaced the phone and walked to a train. It was everything he could do not to look over his shoulder.

“This is Geoffrey Watkins,” he said as he lifted the phone.

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” the voice said. “I was trying to get Mr. Titus. Is this six-two-nine-one?” All contacts are broken until further notice, the number told him. Not known if you are in danger. Will advise if possible.

“No, this is six-two-one-nine,” he answered. Understood. Watkins hung the phone up and booked out his window. His stomach felt as though a ball of refrigerated lead had materialized there. He swallowed twice, then reached for his tea. For the rest of the morning, it was hard to concentrate on the Foreign Office white paper he was reading. He needed two stiff drinks with lunch to settle himself down.

By noon, Cooley was in Dover, aboard a cross-channel ferry. He was fully alert now, and sat in a corner seat on the upper deck, looking over the newspaper in his hands to see if anyone was watching him. He'd almost bearded the hovercraft to Calais, but decided against it at the last moment. He had enough cash for the Dover-Dunkerque ferry, but not the more expensive hovercraft, and he didn't want to leave a paper trail behind. It was only two and a quarter hours in any case. Once in France, he could catch a train to Paris, then start flying. He started to feel secure for the first time in hours, but was able to suppress it easily enough. Cooley had never known this sort of fear before, and it left a considerable aftertaste. The quiet hatred that had festered for years now ate at him like an acid. They had made him run. They had spied on him! Because of all his training, all the precautions that he'd followed assiduously, and all the professional skill that he'd employed, Cooley had never seriously considered the possibility that he would be turned. He had thought himself too skillful for that. That he was wrong enraged him, and for the first time in his life, he wanted to lash out himself. He'd lost his bookshop and with it all the books he loved, and this, too, had been taken from him by the bloody Brits! He folded the paper neatly and set it down in his lap while the ferry pulled into the English Channel, placid with the summer sun overhead. His bland face stared out at the water with a gaze as calm as a man in contemplation of his garden while he fantasized images of blood and death.

Owens was as furious as anyone had ever seen him. The surveillance of Cooley had been so easy, so routine -- but that was no excuse, he told his men. That harmless-looking little poof, as Ashley had called him, had slipped away from his shadowers as adroitly as someone trained at Moscow Center itself. There were men at every international airport in Britain clutching pictures of Cooley, and if he used his credit card to purchase any kind of ticket, the computers would notify Scotland Yard at once, but Owens had a sickening feeling that the man was already out of the country. The Commander of C-13 dismissed his people.

Ashley was in the room, too, and his people had been caught equally off guard. He and Owens shared a look of anger mixed with despair.

A detective had left the tape of a phone call to Geoffrey Watkins made less than an hour after Cooley disappeared. Ashley played it. It lasted all of twenty seconds. And it wasn't Cooley's voice. If it had been, they would have arrested Watkins then and there. For all their effort, they still did not have a single usable piece of evidence on Geoffrey Watkins.

“There is a Mr. Titus in the building. The voice even gave the correct number. By all rights it could have been a simple wrong number.”

“But it wasn't, of course.”

“That is how it's done, you know. You have pre-set messages that are constructed to sound entirely harmless. Whoever trained these chaps knew what they were about. What about the shop?”

“The girl Beatrix knows absolutely nothing. We have people searching the shop at this moment, but so far they've found nothing but old bloody books. Same story at his flat.” Owens stood and spoke in a voice full of perverse wonder. “An electrician . . . Months of work, gone because he yanks the wrong wire.”

“He'll turn up. He could not have had a great deal of cash. He must use his credit card.”

“He's out of the country already. Don't say he isn't. If he's clever enough for what we know he's done --”

“Yes.” Ashley nodded reluctant agreement. “One doesn't always win, James.”

“It is so nice to hear that!” Owens snapped out his reply. “These bastards have outguessed us every step of the way. The Commissioner is going to ask me how it is that we couldn't get our thumbs out in time, and there is no answer to that question.”

“So what's the next step, then?”

“At least we know what he looks like. We . . . we share what we know with the Americans, all of it. I have a meeting scheduled with Murray this evening. He's hinted that they have something operating that he's not able to talk about, doubtless some sort of CIA op.”

“Agreed. Is it here or there?”

“There.” Owens paused. “I am getting sick of this place.”

“Commander, you should measure your successes against your failures,” Ashley said. “You're the best man we've had in this office in some years.”

Owens only grunted at that remark. He knew it was true. Under his leadership, C-13 had scored major coups against the Provisionals. But in this job, as in so many others, the question one's superiors always asked was, What have you accomplished today? Yesterday was ancient history.

“Watkins' suspected contact has flown,” he announced three hours later.

“What happened?” Murray closed his eyes halfway through the explanation and shook his head sadly. “We had the same sort of thing happen to us,” he said after Owens finished. “A renegade CIA officer. We were watching his place, and let things settle into a comfortable routine, and then -- zip! He snookered the surveillance team. He turned up in Moscow a week later. It happens, Jimmy.”

“Not to me,” Owens almost snarled. “Not until now, that is.”

“What's he look like?” Owens handed a collection of photographs across the desk. Murray flipped through them. “Mousy little bastard, isn't he? Almost bald.” The FBI man considered this for a moment, then lifted his phone and punched in four numbers. “Fred? Dan. You want to come down to my office for a minute?”

The man arrived a minute later. Murray didn't identify him as a member of the CIA and Owens didn't ask. He didn't have to. He'd given over two copies of each photo.

Fred -- one of the men from “down the hall” -- took his photos and looked at them. “Who's he supposed to be?”

Owens explained briefly, ending, “He's probably out of the country by now.”

“Well, if he turns up in any of our nets, we'll let you know,” Fred promised, and left.

“Do you know what they're up to?” Owens asked Murray.

“No. I know something is happening. The Bureau and the Agency have a joint task force set up, but it's compartmented, and I don't need to know all of it yet.”

“Did your chaps have a part in the raid on Action-Directe?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Murray said piously. How the hell did you hear about that, Jimmy?

“I thought as much,” Owens replied. Bloody security! “Dan, we are concerned here with the personal safety of --”

Murray held his hands up like a man at bay. “I know, I know. And you're right, too. We ought to cut your people in on this. I'll call the Director myself.”

The phone rang. It was for Owens.

“Yes?” The Commander of C-13 listened for a minute before hanging up. “Thank you.” A sigh. “Dan, he's definitely on the continent. He used a credit card to purchase a railway ticket. Dunkerque to Paris, three hours ago.”

“Have the French pick him up?”

“Too late. The train arrived twenty minutes ago. He's completely gone now. Besides, we have nothing to arrest him for, do we?”

“And Watkins has been warned off.”

“Unless that was a genuinely wrong number, which I rather doubt, but try to prove that in a court of law!”

“Yeah.” Judges didn't understand any instinct but their own.

“And don't tell me that you can't win them all! That's what they pay me to do.” Owens looked down at the rug, then back up. “Please excuse me for that.”

“Aah!” Murray waved it off. “You've had bad days before. So have I. It's part of the business we're in. What we both need at a time like this is a beer. Come on downstairs, and I'll treat you to a burger.”

“When will you call your Director?”

“It's lunchtime over there. He always has a meeting going over lunch. We'll let it wait a few hours.”

Ryan had lunch with Cantor that day in the CIA cafeteria. It could have been the eating place in any other government building. The food was just as unexciting. Ryan decided to try the lasagna, but Marty stuck with fruit salad and cake. It seemed an odd diet until Jack watched him take a tablet before eating. He washed it down with milk.