Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

He lowered the extinguisher with a shamefaced grin and gestured comically to the spectators. The light was off. The switch was off. The fire, if it had been a fire, was gone. He’d call the building’s electrician. Cooley opened the door to explain what was wrong to his fellow shop owners. One remarked that the wiring in the arcade was horribly out of date. It was something Cooley hadn’t ever thought about. Electricity was electricity. You flipped the switch and the light went on, and that was that. It annoyed him that something so reliable, wasn’t. A minute later he called the building manager, who promised that an electrician would be there in half an hour.

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.