Patriot Games by Tom Clancy

“It’s okay, Jack,” Cathy said.

He nodded. Ryan knew that his wife was right. The nurse-practitioner had positively beamed at the news she gave them on their arrival. Sally was bouncing back like any healthy child should. The healing process had already begun.

Yet there was a difference between the knowledge of the mind and the knowledge of the heart. Sally had been awake this time. She was unable to speak, of course, with the respirator hose in her mouth, but the murmurs that tried to come out could only have meant: It hurts. The injuries inflicted on the body of his child did not appear any less horrific, despite his knowledge that they would heal. If anything they seemed worse now that she was occasionally conscious. The pain would eventually go away — but his little girl was in pain now. Cathy might be able to tell herself that only the living could feel pain, that it was a positive sign for all the discomfort it gave. Jack could not. They stayed until she dozed off again. He took his wife outside.

“How are you?” he asked her.

“Better. You can take me home tomorrow night.”

Jack shook his head. He hadn’t thought about that. Stupid, Ryan told himself. Somehow he’d assumed that Cathy would stay here, close to Sally.

“The house is pretty empty without you, babe,” he said after a moment.

“It’ll be empty without her,” his wife answered, and the tears started again. She buried her face in her husband’s shoulder. “She’s so little . . . ”

“Yeah.” Jack thought of Sally’s face, the two little blue eyes surrounded by a sea of bruises, the hurt there, the pain there. “She’s going to get better, honey, and I don’t want to hear any more of that ‘it’s my fault’ crap.”

“But it is!”

“No, it isn’t. Do you know how lucky I am to have you both alive? I saw the FBI’s data today. If you hadn’t stomped on the brakes when you did, you’d both be dead.” The supposition was that this had thrown off Miller’s aim by a few inches. At least two rounds had missed Cathy’s head by a whisker, the forensic experts said. Jack could close his eyes and recite that information word for word. “You saved her life and yours by being smart.”

It took Cathy a moment to react. “How did you find that out?”

“CIA. They’re cooperating with the police. I asked to be part of the team and they let me join up.”

“But –”

“A lot of people are working on this, babe. I’m one of them,” Jack said quietly. “The only thing that matters now is finding them.”

“Do you think . . .”

“Yeah, I do.” Sooner or later.

Bill Shaw had no such hopes at the moment. The best potential lead they had was the identity of the black man who’d driven the van. This was being kept out of the media. As far as the TV and newspapers were concerned, all the suspects were white. The FBI hadn’t so much lied to the press as allowed them to draw a false conclusion from the partial data that had been released — as happened frequently enough. It might keep the suspect from being spooked. The only person who’d seen him at close range was the 7-Eleven clerk. She had spent several hours going over pictures of blacks thought to be members of revolutionary groups and come up with three possibles. Two of these were in prison, one for bank robbery, the other for interstate transport of explosives. The third had dropped out of sight seven years before. He was only a picture to the Bureau. The name they had for him was known to be an alias, and there were no fingerprints. He’d cut himself loose from his former associates — a smart move, since most of them had been arrested and convicted for various criminal acts — and simply disappeared. The best bet, Shaw told himself, was that he was now part of society, living a normal life somewhere with his past activities no more than a memory.

The agent looked over the file once again. “Constantine Duppens,” his alias had been. Well-spoken on the few occasions when he’d spoken at all, the informant had said of him. Educated, probably. Attached to the group the Bureau had been watching, but never really part of it, the file went on. He’d never participated in a single illegal act, and had drifted away when the leaders of the little band had started talking about supporting themselves with bank robberies and drug trafficking. Maybe a dilettante, Shaw thought, a student with a radical streak who’d gotten a look at one of the groups and recognized them for what they were — what Shaw thought they were: ineffective dolts, street hoods with a smattering of Marxist garbage or pseudo-Hitlerism.

A few fringe groups occasionally managed to set off a bomb somewhere, but these cases were so rare, so minor, that the American people scarcely knew that they’d happened at all. When a group robbed a bank or armored car to support itself, the public remembered that one need not be politically motivated to rob a bank; greed was enough. From a high of fifty-one terrorist incidents in 1982, the number had been slashed to seven in 1985. The Bureau had managed to run down many of these amateurish groups, preventing more than twenty incidents the previous year, with good intelligence followed by quick action. Fundamentally, the small cells of crazies had been done in by their own amateurism.

America didn’t have any ideologically motivated terrorist groups, at least not in the European sense. There were the Armenian groups whose main objective was murdering Turkish diplomats, and the white-supremacist people in the Northwest, but in both cases the only ideology was hatred — of Turks, blacks, Jews, or whatever. These were vicious but not really dangerous to society, since they lacked a shared vision of their political objective. To be really effective, the members of such a group had to believe in something more than the negativity of hate. The most dangerous terrorists were the idealists, of course, but America was a hard place to see the benefits of Marxism or Nazism. When even welfare families had color televisions, how much attraction could there be to collectivism? When the country lacked a system of class distinctions, what group could one hate with conviction? And so most of the small groups found that they were guerrilla fish swimming not in a sea of peasants, but rather a sea of apathy. Not a single group had been able to overcome that fact before being penetrated and destroyed by the Bureau — then to learn that their destruction was granted but a few column inches on page eleven, their defiant manifesto not printed at all. They were judged by faceless editors not to be newsworthy. In so many ways this was the perfect conclusion to a terrorist trial.

In that sense the FBI was a victim of its own success. So well had the job been done that the possibility of terrorist activity in America was not a matter of general public concern. Even the Ryan base, as it was now being called, was regarded as nothing more than a nasty crime, not a harbinger of something new in America. To Shaw it was both. As a matter of institutional policy, the FBI regarded terrorism as a crime without any sort of political dimension that might lend a perverted respectability to the perpetrators. The importance of this distinction was not merely semantic. Since by their nature, terrorists struck at the foundations of civilized society, to grant them the thinnest shred of respectability was the equivalent of a suicide note for the targeted society. The Bureau recognized, however, that these were not mere criminals chasing after money. Their objective was far more dangerous than that. For this reason, crimes that otherwise would have been in the domain of local police departments were immediately taken under charge by the federal government.

Shaw returned to the photo of “Constantine Duppens” one more time. It was expecting too much for a convenience-store clerk to remember one face from the hundred she saw every day, or at least to remember it well enough to pick out a photo that might be years old. She’d certainly tried to help, and had agreed to tell no one of what she’d done. They had a description of the suspect’s clothing — almost certainly burned — and the van, which they had. It was being dismantled piece by piece not far from Shaw’s office. The forensic experts had identified the type of gun used. For the moment, that was all they had. All Inspector Bill Shaw could do was wait for his agents in the field to come up with something new. A paid informant might overhear something, or a new witness might turn up, or maybe the forensics team would discover something unexpected in the van. Shaw told himself to be patient. Despite twenty-two years in the FBI, patience was something he still had to force on himself.