And it wasn’t as though his budget was all that much to worry about. Less than fifty people, total, scarcely three million dollars in payroll expense, since everyone was paid the usual military rate, plus the fact that Rainbow picked up everyone’s housing expense out of its multi-government funding. One inequity was that the American soldiers were better paid than their European counterparts. That bothered John a little, but there was nothing he could do about it, and with housing costs picked up-the housing at Hereford wasn’t lavish, but it was comfortable-nobody had any trouble living. The morale of the troops was excellent. He’d expected that. They were elite troopers, and that sort invariably had a good attitude, especially since they trained almost every day, and soldiers loved to train almost as much as they loved to do the things they trained for.
There would be a little discord. Chavez’s Team-2 had drawn both field missions, as a result of which they’d swagger a little more, to the jealous annoyance of Peter Covington’sTeam-1, which was slightly ahead on the team/team competition of PT and shooting. Not even a cat’s whisker of difference, but people like this, as competitive as any athletes could ever be, worked damned hard for that fifth of a percentage point, and it really came down to who’d had what for breakfast on the mornings of the competitive exercises, or maybe what they’d dreamed about doing the night. Well, that degree of competition was healthy for the team as a whole. And decidedly unhealthy for those against whom his people deployed.
Bill Tawney was at his desk as well, going over the known information on the terrorists of the night before. The Austrians had begun their inquiries with the German-Federal Police Office-the Bundes Kriminal Amt–even before the takedown. The identities of Hans Fiuchtner and Petra fund had been confirmed by fingerprints. The BKA investigators would jump onto the case hard that day. For starters, they’d trace the IDs of the people who’d rented the car that had been driven to the Ostermann home, and search for the house in Germany-probably Germany, Tawney reminded himself-that they’d lived in: The other four would probably be harder. Fingerprints had already been taken and were being compared on the computer scanning systems that everyone had now. Tawney agreed with the initial assessment of the Austrians that the four spear-carriers had probably been from the former East ` Germany, which seemed to be turning out all manner of political aberrants: converts from communism who were now discovering the joys of nazism, lingering true believers in the previous political-economic- model, and just plain thugs who were a major annoyance to the regular German police forces.
But this had to be political. Furchtner and Dortmund were had been, Bill corrected himself-real, believing communists all their lives. They’d been raised in the former West Germany to middle-class families, the way a whole generation of terrorists had, striving all their active lives for socialist perfection or some such illusion. Anti so they had raided the home of a high-end capitalist . . . seeking what?
Tawney lifted a set of faxes from Vienna. Erwin Ostermann had told the police during his three-hour debrief that they’d sought his “special inside codes” to the international trading system. Were there such things? Probably not, Tawney judged-why not make sure? He lifted his phone and dialed the number of an old friend, Martin Cooker, a former “Six” man who now worked in Lloyd’s ugly building in London’s financial district.
“Cooper,” a voice said.
“Martin, this is Bill Tawney. How are you this rainy morning?”
“Quite well, Bill, and you-what are you doing now?”
“till taking the Queen’s shilling, old man. New job, very, hush-hush, I’m afraid.”
“What can I do to help you, old man?” ,
“Rather a stupid question, actually. Are there any insider channels in the international trading system? Special codes and such things?” .
“I bloody wish there were, Bill. Make our job here much easier,” replied the former station chief for Mexico City. and a few other minor posts for the British Secret Intelligence Service. “What exactly do you mean?”
“Not sure, but the subject just came up.”
“Well, people at this level do have personal relationships and often trade information, but I take it you mean something rather more structured, an insider-network marketplace sort of thing?”
“Yes, that’s the idea.”
“If so, they’ve all kept it a secret from me and the people I work with, old man. International conspiracies?” Cooper snorted. “And this is a chatty mob, you know. Everyone’s into everyone else’s business.”
“No such thing, then?”
“Not to my knowledge, Bill. It’s the sort of thing the uninformed believe in, of course, but it doesn’t exist, unless that’s the mob who assassinated John Kennedy,” Cooper added with a chuckle.
“Much what I’d thought, Martin, but I needed to tick that box. Thanks, my friend”
“Bill, you have any idea on who might have attacked that Ostermann chap in Vienna?”
“Not really. You know him?”
“My boss does. I’ve met him once. Stems a decent bloke, and bloody smart as well.”
“Really all I know is what I saw on the telly this morning.” It wasn’t entirely a lie, and Martin would understand in any case, Tawney knew.
“Well, whoever did the rescue, my hat is off to them. Smells like SAS to me.”
“Really? Well, that wouldn’t be a surprise, would. it?”
“Suppose mot. Good hearing from you, Bill. How about dinner sometime?”
“Love to. I’ll call you next time fm in London.”
“Excellent. Cheers.”
Tawney replaced the phone. It seemed that Martin had landed on his feet after being let go from “Six,” which had reduced its size with the diminution of the Cold War. Well, that was to be expected. The sort of thing the uninformed believe in, Tawney thought. Yes, that fit. Furchtner and Dortmund were communists, and would not have trusted or believed in the open market. In their universe, people could only get wealthy by cheating, exploiting, and conspiring with others of the same ilk. And what did that mean? . . .
Why had they attacked the home of Erwin Ostermann? You couldn’t rob such a man. He didn’t keep his money in cash or gold bars. It was all electronic, theoretical money, really, that existed in computer memories and traveled across telephone wires, and that was difficult to steal, wasn’t it?
No, what a man like Ostermann had was information, the ultimate source of power, ethereal though it was. Were Dortmund and Furchtner willing to kill for that? It appeared so, but were the two dead terrorists the sort of people who could make use of such information? No, they couldn’t have been, because then they would have known that the thing they’d sought didn’t exist.
Somebody hired them, Tawney thought. Somebody had sent them out on their mission. But who?
And to what purpose? Which was-even a better question, and one from which he could perhaps learn the answer to the first.
Back up, he told himself. If someone had hired them for a job, who could it have been? Clearly someone connected to the old terror network, someone who’d know where they were and whom they’d known and trusted to some degree, enough to risk their lives. But -Fiirchtner and Dortmund had been ideologically pure communists. Their acquaintances would be the same, and they would certainly not have trusted or taken orders from anyone of a different political shade. And how else could this notional person have known where and how to contact them, win their confidence, and send them off on a mission of death; chasing after something that didn’t really exist? . . .
A superior officer? Tawney wondered, stretching his mind for more information than he really had. Someone of the same political bent or beliefs, able to order them, or at least to motivate them to do something dangerous.
He needed more information; and he’d use his SIS and police contacts to get every scrap he could from the Austrian/German investigation. For starters, he called Whitehall to make sure he got full translations of all the hostage interviews. Tawney had been an intelligence officer for a long time, and something had gotten his nose to twitch.
“Ding, I didn’t like your takedown plan,” Clark said in the big conference room.
“I didn’t either, Mr. C, but without a chopper, didn’t have much. choice, did I?” Chavez replied with an air of self-righteousness. “But that’s not the thing that really scares me.”
“What is?” John asked.
“Noonan brought this one up. Every time we go into a place, there are people around – the public, reporters, TV crews, all of that. Wharf one of them has a cell phone and calls the bad guys inside to tell them what’s happening? Real simple, isn’t it? We’re fucked and so are some hostages.”
“We should be able to deal with that,” Tim Noonan told them. “It’s the way a cell phone works. It broadcasts a signal to tell the local cell that it’s there and it’s on, so that the computer systems can route an incoming call to it. Okay, we can get instrumentation to read that, and maybe to block the signal path-maybe even clone the bad guys’ phone, trap the incoming call and bag the bastards outside, maybe even flip ’em, right? But I need that soft ware, and I need it now.”