“How does he get out?” Sean asked.
“I can park a car around this corner, or this one. Timing for that is not a concern. We can wait all day for the right slot. We have a choice of escape routes. That’s no problem either. At rush hour the streets are crowded. That actually works for us. The cops will have trouble responding, and we can use a car that looks ordinary, like a state-owned one. They can’t stop all of them. Getaway is easy. The problem is your man. He has to be right here.”
“Why not catch him in his car at a different place?”
Alex shook his head. “Too hard. The roads are too crowded to be sure, and it’d be too easy to lose him. You’ve seen the traffic, Sean, and he never goes exactly the same way twice. If you want my opinion, you should split the operation, do it one part at a time.”
“No.” Miller was adamant. “We’ll do it the way I want.”
“Okay, man, but I’m telling you, this man is exposed.”
Miller thought that one over for a moment. Finally he smiled. “I have just the right man for it.
“The other part?”
Alex switched maps. “Easy. The target can take any route at all, but they all come to this place here at exactly four forty-five. We’ve checked six days in the past two weeks, never been off by more than five minutes. We’ll do the job right along here, close to the bridge. Anybody could handle this one. We can even rehearse it for you.”
“When?”
“This afternoon good enough?” Alex smiled.
“Indeed. Escape route?”
“We’ll show you. We might as well make it a real rehearsal.”
“Excellent.” Miller was well pleased. Getting here had been complicated enough. Not difficult, just complicated, involving six separate flights. It hadn’t been without humor, though. Sean Miller was traveling on a British passport at the moment, and the immigration clerk at Miami had taken his Belfast accent for Scottish. It hadn’t occurred to him that to an American ear there isn’t much difference between a brogue and a burr. If that’s the skill level in American law-enforcement officials, Miller told himself, this op should go easily enough.
They’d do the run-through today. If it looked good he’d summon the team, and they’d go in . . . four days, he judged. The weapons were already in place.
“Conclusions?” Cantor asked.
Ryan picked up a sixty-page sheaf of paper. “Here’s my analysis, for what it’s worth — not much,” Jack admitted. “I didn’t turn up anything new. The reports you already have are pretty good, given the lack of real evidence to go on. The ULA is a really kinky bunch. On one hand their operations don’t seem to have a real purpose that we can discern — but this kind of skill . . . They’re too professional to be operating without an objective, dammit!”
“True enough,” Cantor said. They were in his office, across the hall from the DDI’s. Admiral Greer was out of town. “You come up with anything at all?”
“I’ve mapped their operations geographically and against time. No pattern there that I can see. The only visible pattern is in the type of operation, and the execution, but that doesn’t mean anything. They like high-profile targets, but — hell, what terrorist doesn’t? That’s the whole point of being a terrorist, going after the really big game, right? They mostly use East Bloc weapons, but most of the groups do. We infer that they’re well financed. That’s logical, given the nature of their activity, but again there isn’t any substantive evidence to confirm it.
“O’Donnell has a real talent for dropping out of sight, both personally and professionally. There are three whole years we can’t account for, one before he turned up around the time of Bloody Sunday and two years after the Proves tried to punch his ticket. They’re both complete blanks. I talked to my wife about the plastic surgery angle —
“What?” Cantor didn’t react favorably to that.
“She doesn’t know why I wanted the information. Give me a break, Marty. I’m married to a surgeon, remember? One of her classmates is a reconstructive surgeon, and I had Cathy ask her where you can get a new face. Not many places that can really do it — I was surprised. I have a list of where they are in here. Two are behind the Curtain. It turns out that some of the real pioneering work was done in Moscow before World War Two. Hopkins people have been to the institute — it’s named for the guy, but I can’t recall the name — and they found a few odd things about the place.”
“Like what?” Cantor asked. “Like two floors that you can’t get onto. Annette DiSalvi — Cathy’s classmate — was there two years ago. The top two floors of the place can be reached only by special elevators, and the stairways have barred gates. Odd sort of thing for a hospital. I thought that was a funny bit of information. Maybe it’ll be useful to somebody else.”
Cantor nodded. He knew something about this particular clinic, but the closed floors were something new. It was amazing, he thought, how new bits of data could turn up so innocently. He also wondered why a surgical team from Johns Hopkins had been allowed into the place. He made a mental note to check that out.
“Cathy says this ‘getting a new face’ thing isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Most of the work is designed to correct damage from trauma — car accidents and things like that. The job isn’t so much to change as to repair. There is a lot of cosmetic work — I mean aside from nose jobs and face-lifts — but that you can accomplish almost as well with a new hair style and a beard. They can change chins and cheekbones pretty well, but if the work is too extensive it leaves scars. This place in Moscow is good, Annette says, almost as good as Hopkins or even UCLA. A lot of the best reconstructive surgeons are in California,” Jack explained. “Anyway, we’re not talking a face-lift or a nose job here. Extensive facial surgery involves multiple procedures and takes several months. If O’Donnell was gone for two years, a lot of the time was spent in the body shop.”
“Oh.” Cantor got the point. “He really is a fast worker, then?”
Jack grinned. “That’s what I was really after. He was out of sight for two years. At least six months of that time must have been spent in some hospital or other. So in the other eighteen months, he recruited his people, set up a base of operations, started collecting operational intelligence, and ran his first op.”
“Not bad,” Cantor said thoughtfully.
“Yeah. So he had to have recruited people from in the Proves. They must have brought some stuff with them, too. I’ll bet that his initial operations were things the PIRA had already looked at and set aside for one reason or another. That’s why the Brits thought they were actually part of the PIRA to begin with, Marty.”
“You said you didn’t find anything important,” Cantor said. “This sounds like pretty sharp analysis to me.”
“Maybe. All I did was reorder stuff you already had. Nothing new is in here, and I still haven’t answered my own question. I don’t have much of an idea what they’re really up to.” Ryan’s hand flipped through the pages of manuscript. His voice showed his frustration. Jack was not accustomed to failure. “We still don’t know where these bastards are coming from. They’re up to something, but damned if I know what it is.”
“American connections?”
“None — none at all that we know of. That makes me feel a lot better. There’s no hint of a contact with American organizations, and lots of reasons for them not to have any. O’Donnell is too slick to play with his old PIRA contacts.”
“But his recruiting –” Cantor objected. Jack cut him off.
“Over here, I mean. As chief of internal security, he could know who was who in Belfast and Londonderry. But the American connections to the Provisionals all run through Sinn Fein, the Proves’ political wing. He’d have to be crazy to trust them. Remember, he did his best to restructure the political leanings in the outfit and failed.”
“Okay. I see what you mean. Possible connections with other groups?”
Ryan shook his head. “No evidence. I wouldn’t bet against contact with some of the European groups, maybe some of the Islamic ones even, but not over here. O’Donnell’s a smart cookie. To come over here means too many complications — hey, they don’t like me, I can dig that. The good news is that the FBI’s right. We’re dealing with professionals. I am not a politically significant target. Coming after me has no political value, and these are political animals,” Jack observed confidently. “Thank God.”