“Can’t I?” Cantor hung up the phone.
Ryan stared at the telephone receiver for several seconds before replacing it in the cradle. What was Marty trying to tell him? Jack reviewed the events in his own mind, trying to come to a conclusion that made sense.
Did any of it make sense? Did it make sense for political dissidents to express themselves with bombs and machine guns? Did it make sense for small nations to use terrorism as a short-of-war weapon to change the policies of larger ones? Ryan grunted. That depended on which side of the issue you were on — or at least there were people who thought that way. Was this something completely new?
It was, and it wasn’t. State-sponsored terrorism, in the form of the Barbary pirates, had been America’s first test as a nation. The enemy objective then had been simple greed. The Barbary states demanded tribute before they would give right of passage to American-flag trading ships, but it had finally been decided that enough was enough. Preble took the infant U.S. Navy to the Mediterranean Sea to put an end to it — no, to put an end to America’s victimization by it, Jack corrected himself.
God, it was even the someplace, Ryan thought. “To the shores of Tripoli,” the Marine Hymn said, where First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, USMC, had attacked the fort at Derna. Jack wondered if the place still existed. Certainly the problem did.
The violence hadn’t changed. What had changed were the rules under which the large nations acted, and the objectives of their enemies. Two hundred years earlier, when a small nation offended a larger one, ships and troops would settle matters. No longer was this simple wog-bashing, though. The smaller countries now had arsenals of modern weapons that could make such punitive expeditions too expensive for societies that had learned to husband the lives of their young men. A regiment of troops could no longer settle matters, and moving a whole army was no longer such a simple thing. Knowing this, the small country could inflict wounds itself, or even more safely, sponsor others to do so — “deniably” — in order to move its larger opponent in the desired direction. There wasn’t even much of a hurry. Such low-level conflict could last years, so small were the expenditures of resources and so different the perceived value of the human lives taken and lost.
What was new, then, was not the violence, but the safety of the nation that either performed or sponsored it. Until that changed, the killing would never stop.
So, on the international level, terrorism was a form of war that didn’t even have to interrupt normal diplomatic relations. America itself had embassies in some of the nations, even today. Nearer to home, however, it was being treated as a crime. He’d faced Miller in the Old Bailey, Ryan remembered, not a military court-martial. They can even use that against us. It was a surprising realization. They can fight their kind of war, but we can’t recognize it as such without giving up something our society needs. If we treat terrorists as politically motivated activists, we give them an honor they don’t deserve. If we treat them as soldiers, and kill them as such, we both give them legitimacy and violate our own laws. By a small stretch of the imagination, organized crime could be thought of as a form of terrorism, Ryan knew. The terrorists’ only weakness was their negativity. They were a political movement with nothing to offer other than their conviction that their parent society was unjust. So long as the people in that society felt otherwise, it was the terrorists who were alienated from it, not the population as a whole. The democratic processes that benefited the terrorists were also their worst political enemy. Their prime objective, then, had to be the elimination of the democratic process, converting justice to injustice in order to arouse members of the society to sympathy with the terrorists.
The pure elegance of the concept was stunning. Terrorists could fight a war and be protected by the democratic processes of their enemy. If those processes were obviated, the terrorists would win additional political support, but so long as those processes were not obviated, it was extremely difficult for them to lose. They could hold a society hostage against itself and its most important precepts, daring it to change. They could move around at will, taking advantage of the freedom that defined a democratic state, and get all the support they needed from a nation-state with which their parent society was unwilling or unable to deal effectively.
The only solution was international cooperation. The terrorists had to be cut off from support. Left to their own resources, terrorists would become little more than an organized-crime network . . . But the democracies found it easier to deal with their domestic problems singly than to band together and strike a decisive blow at those who fomented them, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Had that just changed? The CIA had given data on terrorists to someone else, and action had been taken as a result. What he had seen earlier, therefore, was a step in the right direction, even if it wasn’t necessarily the right kind of step. Ryan told himself that he’d just witnessed one of the world’s many imperfections, but at least one aimed in the proper direction. That it had disturbed him was a consequence of his civilization. That he was now rationalizing it was a result of . . . what?
Cantor walked into Admiral Greer’s office.
“Well?” the DDI asked.
“We’ll give him a high B, maybe an A-minus. It depends on what he learns from it.”
“Conscience attack?” the DDI asked.
“Yeah.”
“It’s about time he found out what the game’s really like. Everybody has to learn that. He’ll stay,” Greer said.
“Probably.”
The pickup truck tried to pull into the driveway that passed under the Hoover building, but a guard waved him off. The driver hesitated, partly in frustration, partly in rage while he tried to figure something else out. The heavy traffic didn’t help. Finally he started circling the block until he was able to find a way into a public parking garage. The attendant held up his nose at the plebeian vehicle — he was more accustomed to Buicks and Cadillacs — and burned rubber on the way up the ramp to show his feelings. The driver and his son didn’t care. They walked downhill and across the street, going by foot on the path denied their truck. Finally they got to the door and walked in.
The agent who had desk duty noted the entrance of two people somewhat disreputably dressed, the elder of whom had something wrapped in his leather jacket and tucked under his arm. This got the agent’s immediate and full attention. He waved the visitors over with his left hand. His right was somewhere else.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Hi,” the man said. “I got something for you.” The man raised the jacket and pulled out a submachine gun. He quickly learned that this wasn’t the way to get on the FBI’s good side.
The desk agent snatched the weapon and yanked it off the desk, standing and reaching for his service revolver. The panic button under the desk was already pushed, and two more agents in the room converged on the scene. The man behind the desk immediately saw that the gun’s bolt was closed — the gun was safe, and there wasn’t a magazine in the pistol grip.
“I found it!” the kid announced proudly.
“What?” one of the arriving agents said.
“And I figured I’d bring it here,” the lad’s father said.
“What the hell?” the desk agent observed.
“Let’s see it.” A supervisory agent arrived next. He came from a surveillance room whose TV cameras monitored the entrance. The man behind the desk rechecked to make sure the weapon was safe, then handed it across.
It was an Uzi, the 9mm Israeli submachine gun used all over the world because of its quality, balance, and accuracy. The cheap-looking (the Uzi is anything but cheap, though it does look that way) metal stampings were covered with red-brown rust, and water dripped from the receiver. The agent pulled open the bolt and stared down the barrel. The gun had been fired and not cleaned since. It was impossible to tell how long ago that had been, but there weren’t all that many FBI cases pending in which a weapon of this type had been used.
“Where did you find this, sir?”
“In a quarry, about thirty miles from here,” the man said.
“I found it!” the kid pointed out.
“That’s right, he found it,” his father conceded. “I figured this was the place to bring it.”
“You thought right, sir. Will both of you come with me, please?”
The agent on the desk gave both of them “visitor” passes. He and the other two agents on entrance-guard duty went back to work, wondering what the hell that had been all about.