“Yeah, honey?”
“Ding, you want to come over here. It’s started,” Patsy told him calmly. Ding’s response was a sudden flip of his heart.
“On the way, baby.” Ding hung up. “John, I gotta get home. Patsy says it’s started.”
“Okay, Domingo.” Clark managed a smile, finally. “Give her a kiss for me.”
“Roge-o, Mr. C.” And Chavez headed for the door.
“The timing on this thing is never good, is it?” Tawney observed.
“Well, at least something good is happening today.” John rubbed his eyes. He even accepted the idea of becoming a grandfather. It beat the hell out of losing people, a fact that had yet to hammer all the way into his consciousness. His people. Two of them, dead. Several Tore wounded. His people.
“Okay,” Clark went on. “What about the information leak? People, we’ve been set up and hit. What are we going to do about it?”
“Hello, Ed, it’s Carol,” the President’s Science Advisor said.
“Hi, Dr. Brightling. What can I do for you?”
“What the hell happened in England today? Was it our people our Rainbow team, I mean?”
“Yes, Carol, it was.”
“How did they do? The TV wasn’t very clear, and–
“Two dead, four or so wounded,” the DCI answered. °’ Nine terrorists dead, six captured, including their leader.”
“The radios we got to them, how’d they work?”
“Not sure. I haven’t seen the after-action report yet, but I know the main thing they’re going to want to know.”
“What’s that, Ed?”
“Who spilled the beans. They knew John’s name, his wife and daughter’s names, identities, and place of work. They had good intel, and John isn’t very happy about that.”
“The family members, are they okay?”
“Yeah, no civilians hurt, thank God. Hell, Carol, I know Sandy and Patricia. There’s going to be some serious fallout over this one.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Not sure yet, but I won’t forget you asked.”
“Yeah, well, I want to know if those radio gadgets worked. I told the guys at E-Systems to get them out pronto, ‘cuz these guys are important. Gee, I hope they helped some.”
“I’ll find out, Carol,” the DCI promised.
“Okay, you know where to reach me.”
“Okay, thanks for the call.”
CHAPTER 30
VISTAS
It was everything he’d expected-not knowing what to expect-and more, and at the end of it Domingo Chavez held his son in his hands.
“Well,” he said, looking down at the new life that would be his to guard, educate, and in time present to the world. After a second that seemed to last into weeks, he handed the newborn to his wife.
Patsy’s face was bathed in perspiration, and weary from the five-hour ordeal of delivery, but already, as such things went, the pain was forgotten. The goal had been achieved, and she held her child. The package was pink, hairless, and noisy, the last part assuaged by the proximity of Patsy’s left breast, as John Conor Chavez got his first meal. But Patsy was exhausted, and in due course a nurse removed the child to the nursery. Then Ding kissed his wife and walked alongside her bed as she was wheeled to her room. She was already asleep when they arrived. He kissed her one last time and walked outside. His car took him back onto the Hereford base, and then to the official home of Rainbow Six.
“Yeah?” John said, opening the door.
Chavez just handed over a cigar with a blue ring. “John Conor Chavez, seven pounds eleven ounces. Patsy’s doing fine, granpop,” Ding said, with a subdued grin. After all. Patsy had done the hard part.
There are moments to make the strongest of men weep, and this was one of them. The two men embraced. “Well,” John said, after a minute or so, reaching into the pocket of his bathrobe for a handkerchief with which he rubbed his eyes. “Who’s he look like?”
“Winston Churchill,” Domingo replied with a laugh. “Hell, John, I’ve never been able to figure that one out, but John Conor Chavez is a confusing enough name, isn’t it? The little bastard has a lot of heritage behind him. I’ll start him off on karate and guns about age five . . . maybe six,” Ding mused.
“Better golf and baseball, but he’s your kid, Domingo. Come on in.”
“Well?” Sandy demanded, and Chavez gave the news for the second time while his boss lit up his Cuban cigar. He despised smoking, and Sandy, a nurse, hardly approved of the vice, but on this one occasion, both relented. Mrs. Clark gave Ding a hug. “John Conor?”
“You knew?” John Terrence Clark asked.
Sandy nodded. “Patsy told me last week.”
“It was supposed to be a secret,” the new father objected.
“I’m her mother, Ding!” Sandy explained. “Breakfast?”
The men checked their watches. It was just after four in the morning, close enough, they all agreed.
“You know, John, this is pretty profound,” Chavez said. His father-in-law noted how Domingo switched in and out of accents depending on the nature of the conversation. The previous day, interrogating the PIRA prisoners he’d been pure Los Angeles gang kid, his speech redolent with Spanish accent and street euphemisms. But in his reflective moments, he reverted to a man with a university master’s degree, with no accent at all. “I’m a papa. I’ve got a son.” Followed by a slow, satisfied, and somewhat awestruck grin. “Wow.”
“The great adventure, Domingo,” John agreed, while his wife got the bacon going. He poured the coffee.
“Huh?”
“Building a complete person. That’s the great adventure, sonny boy, and if you don’t do it right, what the hell good are you?”
“Well, you guys’ve done okay.”
“Thanks, Domingo,” Sandy said from the stove. “We worked at it pretty hard.”
“More her than me,” John said. “I was away so damned much, playing field-spook. Missed three Christmases, goddamnit. You never forgive yourself for that,°” he explained. “That’s the magic morning, and you’re supposed to be there.”
“Doing what?”
“Russia twice, Iran once-getting assets out every time. Two worked, but one came apart on me. Lost that one, and he didn’t make it. Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. He bit the big one four months liter, poor bastard. Not a good Christmas,” Clark concluded, remembering just how bleak that had been, seeing the KGB scoop the man up not fifty meters from where he’d been standing, seeing the face turned to him, the look of despair on the doomed face, having to turn away to make his own escape down the pipeline he’d set up for two, knowing there was nothing else he might have done, but feeling like shit about it anyway. Then, finally, he’d had to explain to Ed Foley what had happened-only to learn later that the agent had been burned-“shopped” was the euphemism-by a KGB mole inside CIA’s own headquarters building. And that fuck was still alive in a federal prison, with cable TV and central heating.
“It’s history, John,” Chavez told him, understanding the look. They’d deployed on similar missions, but the Clark Chavez team had never failed, though some of their missions had been on the insane side of hairy. “You know the funny part about this?”
“What’s that?” John asked, wondering if it would be the same feeling he’d had.
“I know I’m gonna die now. Someday, I mean. The little guy, he’s gotta outlive me. If he doesn’t, then I’ve screwed it up. Can’t let that happen, can I? JC is my responsibility. While he grows up, I grow old, and by the time he’s my age, hell, I’ll be in my sixties. Jesus, I never planned to be old, y’know?”
Clark chuckled. “Yeah, neither did I. Relax, kid. Now I’m a”-he almost said “fucking,” but Sandy didn’t like that particular epithet “goddamned grandfather. I never planned on that, either.”
“It’s not so bad, John,” Sandy observed, cracking open the eggs. “We can spoil him and hand him back. And we will.” It hadn’t happened that way with their kids, at least not on John’s side of the family. His mother was long dead from cancer, and his father from a heart attack on the job, while rescuing some children from a dwelling fire in Indianapolis, back in the late 1960s. John wondered if they knew that their son had grown up, and then grown old. and was now a grandfather. There was no telling, was there? Mortality and its attendant issues were normal at times like this, he supposed. The great continuity of life. What would John Conor Chavez become? Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief? That was mainly Domingo and Patsy’s job, and he had to trust them to do it properly, and they probably would. He knew his daughter and knew Ding almost as well. From the first time he’d seen the kid, in the mountains of Colorado, he’d known that this boy had something special in him, and the younger man had grown, blossoming like a flower in a particularly tough garden. Domingo Chavez was a younger version of himself, a man of honor and courage, Clark told himself, and therefore he’d be a worthy father, as he’d proven to be a worthy husband. The great continuity of life, John told himself again, sipping his coffee and puffing on the cigar, and if it was yet one more milestone on the road to death, then so be it. He’d had an interesting life, and a life that had mattered to others, as had Domingo, and as they all hoped would, John Conor. And what the hell, Clark thought, his life wasn’t over yet, was it?