Greed, Popov thought, worrying about it. He had to set that whole issue aside. He had to go forward as the professional he’d always been, careful and circumspect at every turn, lest he be caught by enemy counterintelligence services or even by the people with whom he would be meeting. The Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army was as ruthless as any terrorist organization in the world. Though its members could be jolly fellows over a drink-in their drinking they so closely resembled Russians-they killed their enemies, inside and outside their organization, with as little compunction as medical testers with their laboratory rats. Yet they could also be loyal to a fault. In that they were predictable, and that was good for Popov. And he knew how to deal with them. He’d done so often enough in the past, both in Ireland and the Bekaa Valley. He just couldn’t let them discern his desire to bank the money earmarked to them, could he?
The packing done, Popov took his bags to the elevator, then down to the street level, where the apartment house’s doorman flagged him a cab for La Guardia, where he’d board the shuttle for Boston’s Logan International, and there to catch the Aer Lingus flight to Dublin. If nothing else, his work for Brightling had gotten him a lot of frequent-flyer miles, though with too many different airlines to be of real help. But they always flew him first-class, which KGB had never done, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought with a suppressed smile in the backseat of the cab. All he had to do, he reminded himself, was deal honestly with the PIRA. If the opportunity came to steal their money, then he’d take it. But he already knew one thing: they’d jump at the proposed operation. It was too good to pass up, and if nothing else, the PIRA had elan.
Special Agent Patrick O’Connor looked over the information faxed from New York. The trouble with kidnapping investigations was time. No investigation ever ran quickly enough, but it was worse with kidnappings, because you knew that somewhere was a real person whose life depended upon your ability to get the information and act upon it before the kidnapper decided to end his nasty little game, kill the current hostage, and go grab another. Grab another? Yes, probably, because there had been no ransom demand, and that meant that whoever had snatched Mary Bannister off the street wasn’t willing to sell her back. No, he’d be using her as a toy, almost certainly for sexual gratification, until he tired of her, and then, probably, he’d kill her. And so, O’Connor thought himself to be in a race, albeit on a track he couldn’t see, and running against a stopwatch hidden in the hand of another. He had a list of Ms. Bannister’s local friends and associates, and he had his men and women .out talking to them, hoping to turn up a name or a phone number that would lead them an to the next step in the investigation . . . but probably not, he thought. No, this case was all happening in New York. This young woman had gone there to seek her fortune in the bright city lights, like so many others. And many of them did find what they were peeking, which was why they went, but this one, from the outskirts of Gary, Indiana, had gone there without knowing what it was like in a big city, and lacked the self protective skills one needed in a city of eight million . . .
. . . and she was probably already dead, O’Connor admitted quietly to himself, killed by whatever monster had snatched her off the street. There was not a damned thing he could do about it except to identify, arrest, and convict the creep, which would save others, but wouldn’t be worth a damn to the victim whose name titled the case file on his desk. Well, that was one of the problems of being a cop. You couldn’t save them all. But you did try to avenge them all, and that was something, the agent told himself, as he rose to get his coat for the drive home.
Chavez sipped his Guinness and looked around the club. The Eagle of the Legion had been hung on the wall opposite the bar, and people already went over to touch the wooden staff in respect. Three of his Team-2 people were at a table, drinking their brews and chatting about something or other with two of Peter Covington’s troops. The TV was on – snooker championships? Chavez wondered. That was a national event? Which changed into news and weather.
More El Nino stuff, Ding saw with a snort. Once it had just been called weather, but then some damned oceanographer had discovered that the warm/cold water mix off the coast of South America changed every few years, and that when it happened the world’s climate changed a little bit here and there, and the media had latched onto it, delighted, so it seemed, to have another label to put on things they lacked the education to understand. Now they said that the current rendition of the “El Nino Effect” was unusually hot weather in Australia.
“Mr. C, you’re old enough to remember. What did they say before this crap?”
“They called it unusually hot, cold, or seasonable weather, tried to tell you if it was going to be hot, cold, sunny, or rainy the next day, and then they told you about the baseball scores.” With rather less accuracy on the weather side, Clark didn’t say. “How’s Patsy doing?”
“Another couple of weeks, John. She’s holding up pretty well, but she bitches about how big her belly’s gotten to be.” He checked his watch. “Ought to be home in another thirty minutes. Same shift with Sandy.”
“Sleeping okay?” John went on.
“Yeah, a little restless when the little hombre rolls around, but she’s getting all she needs. Be cool, John. I’m taking good care of her. Looking forward to being a grandpa?”
Clark sipped at his third pint of the evening. “One more milestone on the road to death, I suppose.” Then he chuckled. “Yeah, Domingo, I am looking forward to it.” I’ll spoil the shit out of this little bastard, and then just hand him back when he cries. “Ready to be a pop?”
“I think I can handle it, John. How hard can it be? You did it.”
Clark ignored the implicit challenge. “We’re going to be sending a team down to Australia in a few weeks.”
“What for?” Chavez asked.
“The Aussies are a little worried about the Olympics, and we look pretty sexy ’cause of all the missions we’ve had, So, they want some of us to come on down and look over things with their SAS.”
“Their guys any good?”
Clark nodded. “So I am told, but never hurts to get an outside opinion, does it?”
“Who’s going down?”
“I haven’t decided yet. They already have a consulting company, Global Security, Ltd., run by a former FBI guy. Noonan knows him. Henriksen, something like that.”
“Have they ever had a terrorist incident down there?” Domingo asked next.
“Nothing major that I can remember, but, well, you don’t remember Munich in 1972, do you?”
Chavez shook his head. “Just what I’ve read about it. The German cops really screwed the pooch on that mission.”
“Yeah, I guess. Nobody ever told them that they’d have to face people like that. Well, now we all know, right? That’s how GSG-9 got started, and they’re pretty good.”
“Like the Titanic, eh? Ships have enough lifeboats because she didn’t?”
John nodded agreement. “That’s how it works. It takes a hard lesson to make people learn, son.” John set his empty glass down.
“Okay, but how come the bad guys never learn” Chavez asked, finishing off his second of the evening. “We’ve delivered some tough lessons, haven’t we? But you think we can fold up the tents? Not hardly, Mr. C. They’re still out there, John, and they’re not retiring, are they? They ain’t learned shit.”
“Well, I’d sure as hell learn from it. Maybe they’re just dumber than we are. Ask Bellow about it,” Clark suggested.
“I think I will.”
Popov was fading off to sleep. The ocean below the Aer Lingus 747 was dark now, and his mind was well forward of the aircraft, trying to remember faces and voices from the past, wondering if perhaps his contact had turned informer to the British Security Service, and would doom him to identification and possible arrest. Probably not. They’d seemed very dedicated to their cause – but you could never be sure. People turned traitor for all manner of reasons. Popov knew that well. He’d helped more than his share of people do just that, changing their loyalties, betraying their countries, often for small amounts of cash. How much the easier to turn against an atheist foreigner who’d given them equivocal support? What if his contacts had come to see the futility of their cause? Ireland would not turn into a Marxist country, for all their wishes. The list of such nations was very thin now, though across the world academics still clung to the words and ideas of Marx and Engels and even Lenin. Fools. There were even those who said that Communism had been tried in the wrong country-that Russia had been far too backward to make those wonderful ideas work.