“Welcome to Shannon, sir,” the immigration official said. “May I see your passport, please?”
“Here.” Popov handed it across.
The bureaucrat thumbed through it. “Ah, you’ve been here recently. The purpose of your trip, sir?”
“Business. Pharmaceuticals,” the Russian added, in case the immigration official wanted to open his bags.
“Mm-hmm,” the man responded, without a shred of interest. He stamped the passport and handed it back. “Anything to declare?”
“Not really.”
“Very well. Have a pleasant time, sir.” The smile was as mechanical as his movement forward, then he left to go down the steps to his car.
Popov didn’t so much sigh in relief as grumble at his tension, which had clearly been wasted. Who would charter such an aircraft for $100,000 to smuggle drugs, after all? Something else to learn about capitalism, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich told himself. If you had enough money to travel like a prince, then you couldn’t be outside the law. Amazing, he thought. He put on his overcoat and walked out of the aircraft, where a black Jaguar was waiting, his bags already loaded into the boot. “Mr. Serov?” the driver asked, holding the door open. There was enough noise out here that he didn’t have to worry about being overheard.
“That’s right. Off to see Sean?”
“Yes, sir.”
Popov nodded and got into the back. A minute later. they were heading off the airport grounds. The country roads were like those in England, narrower than those in America – and he was still driving on the wrong side of the road. How strange, Popov thought. If the Irish didn’t like the English, then why did they emulate their driving patterns?
The ride took half an hour, and ended in a farmhouse well off the main roads. Two cars were there and a van, with one man standing outside to keep watch. Popov recognized him. It was Roddy Sands, the cautious one of this unit.
Dmitriy got out and looked at him, without shaking hands. He took the black drug-filled suitcase from the boot and walked in.
“Good morning, losef,” Grady said in greeting. “How was your flight?”
“Comfortable.” Popov handed the bag over. “This is what you requested, Sean.” The tone of voice was clear in its meaning. Grady looked his guest in the eye, a little embarrassment on his face. “I don’t like it, either, but one must have money to support operations, and this is a means of getting it.” The ten pounds of cocaine had a variable value. It had cost Horizon Corporation a mere $25,000, having bought it on the market that was open to drug companies. Diluted, on the street, it would be worth five hundred times that. Such was another aspect of capitalism, Popov thought, dismissing it now that the transfer had been made. Then he handed over a slip of paper.
“That is the account number and activation code for the secure account in Switzerland. You can only make withdrawals on Monday and Wednesday as an added security measure. The account has in it six million dollars of United States currency. The amount in the account can be checked at any time,” Popov told him.
“A pleasure to do business with you, as always, Joe,” Sean said, allowing himself a rare smile. He’d never had so much as a tenth of that much money under his control, for all his twenty plus years as a professional revolutionary. Well, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, they weren’t businessmen, were they?
“When will you move?”
“Very soon. We’ve checked out the objective, and our plan is a thing of beauty, my friend. We will sting them, Iosef Andreyevich,” Grady promised. “We will hurt them badly.”
“I will need to know when, exactly. There are things I must do as well,” Popov told him.
That stopped him, Dmitriy saw. The issue here was operational security. An outsider wanted to know things that only insiders should have knowledge of. Two sets of eyes stared at each other for a few seconds. But the Irishman relented. Once he verified that the money was in place, then his trust in the Russian was confirmed-and delivery of the ten pounds of white powder was proof of the fact in and of itself-assuming that he wasn’t arrested by the Garda later this day. But Popov wasn’t that sort, was he?
“The day after tomorrow. The operation will commence at one in the afternoon, exactly.”
“So soon?”
Grady was pleased that the Russian had underestimated him. “Why delay? We have everything we need, now that the money is in place.”
“As you say, Sean. Do you require anything else of me?”
“No.”
“Then I will be off, with your permission.”
This time they shook hands. “Daniel will drive you to Dublin?”
“Correct, the airport there.”
“Tell him, and he will take you.”
“Thank you, Sean-and good luck. Perhaps we will meet afterwards,” Dmitriy added.
“I would like that.”
Popov gave him a last look-sure that it would be the last, despite what he’d just said. Grady’s eyes were animated now, thinking about a revolutionary demonstration that would be the capstone of his career. There was a cruelty there that Popov had not noted before. Like Furchtner and Dortmund, this was a predatory animal rather than a human being, and, as much experience as he’d had with such people, Popov found himself troubled by it. He was supposed to be skilled at reading minds, but in this one he saw only emptiness, only the absence of human feelings, replaced by ideology that led him-where? Did Grady know? Probably not. He thought himself on the path to some Radiant Future-the term most favored by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union-but the light that beckoned him was far more distant than he realized, and its bright glow hid the realized, and its bright glow hid the holes in the road immediately before him. And truly, Popov thought on, were he ever to achieve that which he wanted, then he’d be a disaster as a ruler of men, like those he resembled-Stalin, Mao, and the rest-so divorced from the common man’s outlook as to be an alien, for whom life and death were mere tools to achieve his vision, not something of humanity at all. Of all the things Karl Marx had given the world, surely that outlook was the worst. Sean Grady had replaced his humanity and emotions with a geometrically precise model of what the world should be and he was too wedded to that vision to take note of the fact that it had failed wherever it had been tried. His pursuit was one after a chimera, a creature not real, never quite within reach, but drawing him onward to his own destruction-and as many others as he might kill first. And his eyes sparkled now in his enthusiasm for the chase. His ideological soundness denied him the ability to see the world as it really was-as even the Russians had come to see, finally, after seventy years of following the same chimera. Sparkling eyes serving a blind master, how strange, the Russian thought, turning to leave.
“Okay, Peter, you have the duty,” Chavez told his Team” counterpart. As of now Team-1 was the go-team, and Team-2 was on standby/standdown, and back into the more intensive training regimen.
“As you say, Ding,” Covington replied. “But nothing seems to be happening anywhere.”
The intelligence that had been passed on to them from the various national agencies was actually rather encouraging. Informants who’d chatted with known or suspected terrorists–mostly the latter, since the more active ones would have been arrested-reported back that the Worldpark incident had chilled the atmosphere considerably, especially since the French had finally published the names and photos of the known terrorists who’d been killed in Spain, and one of them, it had turned out, had been a revered and respected former member of Action Directe, with six known murders to his credit and something of a reputation as an expert operator. His public destruction had rumbled through the community, along with greatly increased respect for the Spanish police, which was basking institutionally in the glow of Rainbow’s deeds, to the great discomfort of Basque terrorists, who, Spanish sources reported, were also somewhat chastened by the loss of some of their most respected members.
If this was true, Bill Tawney’s summary document suggested, then Rainbow was indeed having the effect that had been hoped for when it had been formed. Maybe this meant that they wouldn’t have to move into the field and kill people as frequently to prove their mettle.
But there was still nothing to suggest why there had been three such incidents so close in time, or who, if anyone, might have instigated them. The British Secret Intelligence Service’s analysis section called it random, pointing out that Switzerland, Germany, and Spain were different countries, and that it was unlikely that anyone had contacts in the underground groups in all three of them. Two of them, perhaps, but not all three. It also suggested that contacts be made with former East Bloc intelligence services, to check out what was happening with certain retired members. It might even be worth buying their information for the going price, which was rather high now that the former intelligence officers had to make a real living in the real world-but not as high as the cost of an incident in which people got hurt. Tawney had highlighted that when he passed it on to John Clark, and the latter had discussed it with Langley again, only to be rebuffed again, which had Rainbow Six grumbling all week about the REMFs at CIA headquarters. Tawney thought about suggesting it to the London headquarters of “Six” on his own hook, but without the positive endorsement of CIA, it would have been wasted effort.