Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

“Get your ears on, Lieutenant.” Breckenridge tossed the muff-type protectors. Ryan put them on. He slid the clip into the pistol and thumbed down the slide release. The weapon was now “in battery,” ready to fire. Ryan pointed it downrange and waited. A moment later the light over the target snapped on. Jack brought the gun up and set the black circle right on the top of his front sight blade before he squeezed. Rapid-fire rules gave him one second per shot. This was more time than it sounded like. He got the first round off a little late, but most people did. The gun ejected the spent case and Ryan pulled it down for the next shot, concentrating on the target and his sights. By the time he counted to five, the gun was locked open. Jack pulled off the ear protectors.

“You’re getting there, Lieutenant,” Breckenridge said at the spotting scope. “All in the black: a nine, four tens, one of ’em in the X-ring. Again.”

Ryan reloaded with a smile. He’d allowed himself to forget how much fun a pistol could be. This was a pure physical skill, a man’s skill that carried the same sort of satisfaction as a just-right golf shot. He had to control a machine that delivered a .357-inch bullet to a precise destination. Doing this required coordination of eye and hand. It wasn’t quite the same as using a shotgun or a rifle. Pistol was much harder than either of those, and hitting the target carried a subintellectual pleasure that was not easily described to someone who hadn’t done it. His next five rounds were all tens. He tried the two-hand Weaver stance, and placed four out of five in the X-ring, a circle half the diameter of the ten-ring, used for tie-breaking in competition shoots.

“Not bad for a civilian,” Breckenridge said. “Coffee?”

“Thanks, Gunny.” Ryan took the cup.

“I want you to concentrate a little more on your second round. You keep letting that one go off to the right some. You’re rushing it a little.” The difference, Ryan knew, was barely two inches at fifty feet. Breckenridge was a stone perfectionist. It struck him that the Sergeant Major and Cathy had very similar personalities: either you were doing it exactly right or you were doing it completely wrong. “Doc, it’s a shame you got hurt. You would have made a good officer, with the right sergeant to bring you along — they all need that of course.”

“You know something, Gunny? I met a couple of guys in London that you’d just love.” Jack slipped the magazine back into his automatic.

“Ryan is rather a clever lad, isn’t he?” Owens handed the document back to Murray.

“Nothing really new in here,” Dan admitted, “but at least it’s well organized. Here’s the other thing you wanted.”

“Oh, our friends in Boston. How is Paddy O’Neil doing?” Owens was more than just annoyed at this. Padraig O’Neil was an insult to the British parliamentary system, an elected mouthpiece for the Provisional IRA. In ten years of trying, however, neither Owens’ Anti-Terrorist Branch nor the Royal Ulster Constabulary had ever linked him to an illegal act.

“Drinking a lot of beer, talking to a lot of folks, and raising a little money, just like always.” Murray sipped at his port. “We have agents following him around. He knows they’re there, of course. If he spits on the sidewalk, we’ll put him on the next bird home. He knows that, too. He hasn’t broken a single law. Even his driver — the guy’s a teetotaler. I hate to say it, Jimmy, but the bum’s clean, and he’s making points.”

“Oh, yes, he’s a charming one, Paddy is.” Owens flipped a page and looked up. “Let me see that thing your Ryan fellow did again.”

“The guys at Five glommed your copy. I expect they’ll give it to you tomorrow.”

Owens grunted as he flipped to the summary at the back of the document. “Here it is . . . Good God above!”

“What?” Murray snapped forward in his chair.

“The link, the bloody link. It’s right here!”

“What are you talking about, Jimmy? I’ve read the thing twice myself.”

” ‘The fact that ULA personnel seem to have been drawn almost entirely from “extreme” elements within the PIRA itself,’ ” he read aloud, ” ‘must have a significance beyond that established by existing evidence. It seems likely that since the ULA membership has been so recruited, some ULA “defectors-in-place” remain within the PIRA, serving as information sources to their actual parent organization. It follows that such information may be of an operational nature in addition to its obvious counterintelligence value.’ Operational,” Owens said quietly. “We’ve always assumed that O’Donnell was simply trying to protect himself . . . but he could be playing another game entirely.”

“I still haven’t caught up with you, Jimmy.” Murray set his glass down and frowned for a moment. “Oh. Maureen Dwyer. You never did figure out that tip, did you?”

Owens was thinking about another case, but Murray’s remark exploded like a flashbulb in front of his eyes. The detective just stared at his American colleague for a moment while his brain raced down a host of ideas.

“But why?” Murray asked. “What do they gain?”

“They can do great embarrassment to the leadership, inhibit operations.”

“But what material good does that do for the ULA? O’Donnell’s too professional to screw his old friends just for the hell of it. The INLA might, but they’re just a bunch of damned-fool cowboys. The ULA is too sophisticated for that sort of crap.”

“Yes. We’ve just surmounted one wall to find another before us. Still, that’s one more wall behind us. It gives us something to question young Miss Dwyer about, doesn’t it?”

“Well, it’s an idea to run down. The ULA has the PIRA penetrated, and sometimes they feed information to you to make the Provos look bad.” Murray shook his head. Did I just say that one terrorist outfit was trying to make another one look bad? “Do you have enough evidence to back that idea up?”

“I can name you three cases in the last year where anonymous tips gave us Provos who were at the top of our list. In none of the three did we ever learn who the source was.”

“But if the Provos suspect it — oh, scratch that idea. They want O’Donnell anyway, and that’s straight revenge for all the people he did away with within the organization. Okay, embarrassing the PIRA leadership may be an objective in itself — if O’Donnell was trying to recruit some new members. But you’ve already discarded that idea.”

Owens swore under his breath. Criminal investigation, he often said, was like doing a jigsaw puzzle when you didn’t have all the pieces and never really knew their shapes. But telling that to his subordinates wasn’t the same thing as experiencing it himself. If only they hadn’t lost Sean Miller. Maybe they might have gotten something from him by now. His instinct told him that one small, crucial fact would make a complete picture of all the rubbish he was sorting through. Without that fact, his reason told Owens, everything he thought he knew was nothing more than speculation. But one thought kept repeating itself in his mind:

“Dan, if you wanted to embarrass the Provisionals’ leadership politically, how and where would you do it?”

“Hello, this is Doctor Ryan.”

“This is Bernice Wilson at Johns Hopkins. Your wife asked me to tell you that she’s in an emergency procedure and she’ll be about a half hour late tonight.”

“Okay, thank you.” Jack replaced the phone. Mondays, he told himself. He went back to discussing the term paper projects with his two mids. His desk clock said four in the afternoon. Well, there was no hurry, was there?

The watch changed at Gate Three. The civilian guard was named Bob Riggs. He was a retired Navy chief master at arms, past fifty, with a beer belly that made it hard for him to see his shoes. The cold affected him badly, and he spent as much time as possible in the guardhouse. He didn’t see a man in his late twenties approach the opposite corner and disappear into a doorway. Neither did Sergeant Tom Cummings of the Marine guard force, who was checking some paperwork just after relieving the previous watch-stander. The Academy was good duty for the young Marine NCO. There were a score of good saloons within easy walking distance, and plenty of unattached womenfolk to be sampled, but the duty at Annapolis was pretty boring when you got down to it, and Cummings was young enough to crave some action. It had been a typical Monday. The previous guard had issued three parking citations. He was already yawning.

Fifty feet away, an elderly lady approached the entrance to the apartment building. She was surprised to see a handsome young man there and dropped her shopping bag while fumbling for her key.