Clark held a somewhat different view. Law had never been his concern – at least not his immediate concern. To him “legal” meant that something was “okay,” not that some legislators had drafted a set of rules, and that some President or other had signed it. To him it meant that the sitting President had decided that the continued existence of someone or something was contrary to the best interests of his country. His government service had begun in the United States Navy as part of the SEALs, the Navy’s elite, secretive commandos. In that tight, quiet community he’d made himself a name that was still spoken with respect: Snake, they’d called him, because you couldn’t hear his footsteps. To the best of his knowledge, no enemy had ever seen him and lived to tell the tale. His name had been different then, of course, but only because after leaving the Navy he’d made the mistake – he truly thought of it as a mistake, but only in the technical sense – of applying his skills on a free-agent basis. And done quite well, of course, until the police had discovered his identity. The lesson from that adventure was that while people didn’t really investigate happenings on the battlefield, they did elsewhere, requiring far greater circumspection on his part. A foolish error in retrospect, one result of his almost-discovery by a local police force was that he’d come to the attention of CIA, which occasionally needed people with his unique skills. It was even something of a joke: “When there’s killing to be done, get someone who kills for a living.” At least it had been funny back then, almost twenty years earlier.
Others decided who needed to die. Those others were the properly selected representatives of the American people, whom he’d served in one way or another for most of his adult life. The law, as he’d once bothered to find out, was that there was no law. If the President said “kill,” then Clark was merely the instrument of properly defined government policy, all the more so now, since selected members of Congress had to agree with the executive branch. The rules which from time to time prohibited such acts were Executive Orders from the President’s office, which orders the President could freely violate – or more precisely, redefine to suit the situation. Of course, Clark did very little of that. Mainly his jobs for the Agency involved his other skills – getting in and out of places without being detected, for example, at which he was the best guy around. But killing was the reason he’d been hired in the first place, and for Clark, who’d been baptized John Terrence Kelly at St. Ignatius Parish in Indianapolis, Indiana, it was simply an act of war sanctioned both by his country and also by his religion, about which he was moderately serious. Vietnam had never been granted the legal sanction of a declared war, after all, and if killing his country’s enemies back then had been all right, why not now? Murder to the renamed John T. Clark was killing people without just cause. Law he left to lawyers, in the knowledge that his definition of just cause was far more practical, and far more effective.
His immediate concern was his next target. He had two more days of availability on the carrier battle group, and he wanted to stage another stealth-bombing if he could.
Clark was domiciled in a frame house in the outskirts of Bogotá, a safe house the CIA had set up a decade earlier, officially owned by a corporate front and generally rented out commercially to visiting American businessmen. It had no obvious special features. The telephone was ordinary until he attached a portable encrypting device – a simple one that wouldn’t have passed muster in Eastern Europe, but sufficient for the relatively low-intercept threat down here – and he also had a satellite dish that operated just fine through a not very obvious hole in the roof and also ran through an encrypting system that looked much the same as a portable cassette player.
So what to do next? he asked himself. The Untiveros bombing had been carefully executed to look like a car bomb. Why not another, a real one? The trick was setting it up to scare hell out of the intended targets, flushing them into a better target area.
To accomplish that it had to appear an earnest attempt, but at the same time it couldn’t be earnest enough to injure innocent people. That was the problem with car bombs.
Low-order detonation? he thought. That was an idea. Make the bomb look like an earnest attempt that fizzled. Too hard to do, he decided.
Best of all would be a simple assassination with a rifle, but that was too hard to set up. Just getting a perch overlooking the proper place would be difficult and dangerous. The Cartel overlords kept tabs on every window with a line of sight to their own domiciles. If an American rented one, and soon thereafter a shot was fired from it – well, that wouldn’t exactly be covert, would it? The whole point was for them not to know exactly what was happening.
Clark’s operational concept was an elegantly simple one. So elegant and so simple that it hadn’t occurred to the supposed experts in “black” operations at Langley. What Clark wanted to do, simply, was to kill enough of the people on his list to increase the paranoia within his targeted community. Killing them all, desirable though it might be, was a practical impossibility. What he wanted to do was merely to kill enough of them, and to do so in such a way as to spark another reaction entirely.
The Cartel was composed of a number of very ruthless people whose intelligence was manifested in the sort of cunning most often associated with a skilled enemy on the battlefield. Like good soldiers they were always alert to danger, but unlike soldiers they looked for danger from within in addition to from without. Despite the success of their collaborative enterprise, these men were rivals. Flushed with money and power, they didn’t and would never have enough. There was never enough of either for men like this, but power most of all. It seemed to Clark and others that their ultimate goal was to assume political control of their country, but countries are not run by committees, at least not by large ones. All Clark needed to accomplish was to make the Cartel chieftains think that there was a power grab underway within their own hierarchy, at which point they would merrily start killing one another off in a new version of the Mafia wars of the 1930s.
Maybe, he admitted to himself. He gave the plan about a 30 percent chance of total success. But even if it failed, some major players would be removed from the field, and that, too, counted as a tactical success if not a strategic one. Weakening the Cartel might increase Colombia’s chances of dealing with it, which was another possible strategic outcome, but not the only one. There was also the chance that the war he was hoping to start could have the same result as the final act of the Castellammare Wars, remembered as the Night of the Italian Vespers, in which scores of mafiosi had been killed by their own colleagues. What had grown out of that bloody night was a stronger, better-organized, and more dangerous organized-crime network under the far more sophisticated leadership of Carlo Luchiano and Vito Genovese. That was a real danger, Clark thought. But things couldn’t get much worse than they already were. Or so Washington had decided. It was a gamble worth the taking.
Larson arrived at the house. He’d come here only once before, and while it was in keeping with Clark’s cover as a visiting prospector of sorts – there were several boxes of rocks lying around the house – it was one aspect of the mission that bothered him.
“Catch the news?”
“Everyone says car bomb,” Larson replied with a sly smile. “We won’t be that lucky next time.”
“Probably not. The next one has to be really spectacular.”
“Don’t look at me! You don’t expect that I’m going to find out when the next meet is, do you?”
It would be nice, Clark told himself, but he didn’t expect it, and would have disapproved any order requiring it. “No, we have to pray for another intercept. They have to meet. They have to get together and discuss what’s happened.”
“Agreed. But it might not be up in the mountains.”
“Oh?”
“They all have places in the lowlands, too.”
Clark had forgotten about that. It would make targeting very difficult. “Can we spot in the laser from an aircraft?”
“I don’t see why not. But then I land, refuel, and fly the hell out of this country forever.”