On entering the shooting room, John saw all the targets perforated in the heads, as before. Ding and Eddie were with the hostages, covering them with their armored bodies, weapons trained on the cardboard targets, which in real life would be on the floor and bleeding explosively from their shattered skulls.
“Excellent,” Stanley pronounced. “Good improvisation. You, Tomlinson, you were slow, but your shooting was bloody perfect. You, too, Vega.”
“Okay, people, let’s head over to the office to see the instant replay,” John told them, heading outside and still shaking his head to clear his ears from the insult of the flash-bangs. He’d have to get ear protectors and goggles if he did much more of this, lest his hearing be permanently damaged – even though he felt it his duty to experience the real thing to be able to appreciate how everything worked. He grabbed Stanley on the walk over.
“Fast enough, Al?”
“Yes.” Stanley nodded. “The flash-bangs give us, oh, three to five seconds of incapacitation, and another fifteen or so of subnormal performance. Chavez adapted well. The hostages would all have survived, probably. John, our lads are right on the crest of the wave. They cannot get any better. Tomlinson, bad leg and all, didn’t lose more than half a step, if that much, and our little Frenchman moves like a bloody mongoose. Even Vega, big as he is, isn’t the least bit oafish. John, these lads are as good as any team I’ve ever seen.”
“I agree, but-”
“But still so much is in the hands of our adversaries. Yes, I know, but God help the bastards when we come for them.”
CHAPTER 13
AMUSEMENT
Popov was still trying to learn more about his employer, but finding nothing to enlighten himself. The combination of the New York Public Library and the Internet had turned up reams of information, but nothing that gave the slightest clue as to why he’d employed the former KGB officer to dig up terrorists and turn them loose upon the world. It was as likely that a child would conspire a murder plot against a loving parent. It wasn’t the morality of the event that troubled him. Morality had little place in intelligence operations. As a trainee at the KGB academy outside Moscow, the subject had never come up, except insofar as he and his classmates had always been given to understand that the State Was Never Wrong. “You will occasionally be ordered to do things you may find personally upsetting,” Colonel Romanov had said once. “Such things will be done, because the reasons, unknown to you or not, will always be proper ones. You do have the right to question something for tactical reasons-as the officer in the field, how you do the mission will generally be your affair. But to refuse an assignment is not acceptable.” And that had been that. Neither Popov nor his classmates had even made notes on the issue. It was understood that orders were orders. And so, once he accepted employment, Popov had done the jobs assigned . . .
. . . but as a servant of the Soviet Union he’d always known the overall mission, which was to get vital information to his country, because his country needed the information either for itself or to assist others whose actions would be of real benefit to his country. Even dealing with Il’ych Ramirez Sanchez, Popov had thought at the time, had served some special interest. He knew better now, of course. Terrorists were like wild dogs or rabid wolves that one tossed into someone’s back garden just to create a stir, and, yes, perhaps that had been strategically useful-or had been thought so by his masters, in the service of a state now dead and gone. But, no, the missions had not really been useful, had they? And as good as KGB had once been-he still thought them the best espionage agency the world had ever seen-it had ultimately been a failure. The Party for which the Committee for State Security had been the Sword and Shield was no more. The Sword had not slain the Party’s enemies, and the Shield had not protected against the West’s various weapons. And so, had his superiors really known what they’d needed to do?
Probably not, Popov admitted to himself, and because of that, perhaps every mission he’d been assigned had been to some greater or lesser degree a fool’s errand. The realization would have been a bitter one, except that his training and experience were paying off now with a lavish salary, not to mention the two suitcases of cash he’d managed to steal-but for doing what? Getting terrorists killed off by European police forces? He could just as easily, if not so profitably, have fingered them to the police and allowed them to be arrested, tried, and imprisoned like the criminal scum they were, which would actually have been far more satisfying. A tiger in a cage, pacing back and forth behind his bars and waiting for his daily five kilos of chilled horsemeat, was far more entertaining than one stuffed in a museum, and just as helpless. He was some sort of Judas goat, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, but if so, serving what sort of abattoir?
The money was good. Several more missions like the first two and he could take his money, his false identity papers, and vanish from the face of the earth. He could lie on some beach, drinking tasty beverages and watching pretty girls in skimpy bathing suits or-what? Popov didn’t know exactly what sort of retirement he could stomach, but he was certain he could find something. Maybe use his talents to trade in stocks and bonds like a real capitalist, and thus spend his time enriching himself further. Perhaps that, he mused, sipping his morning coffee and staring out the window, looking south toward Wall Street. But he wasn’t quite ready for that life yet, and until he was, the fact that he didn’t know the nature of his missions’ purpose was troublesome. In not knowing, he couldn’t evaluate all the dangers to himself. But for all his skill, experience, and professional training, he hadn’t a clue as to why his employer wanted him to let the tigers from their cages, out in the open where the hunters were waiting. What a pity, Popov thought, that he couldn’t just ask. The answer might even be amusing.
Check-in at the hotel was handled with mechanical precision. The reception desk was huge, and crowded with computers that raced electronically to get the guests checked in, the quicker to get them spending money in the park itself. Juan took his card-key and nodded his thanks at the pretty female clerk, then hoisted his bags and headed off to his room, grateful that there were no metal detectors here. The walk was a short one, and the elevators unusually large, to accommodate people in wheelchairs, he imagined. Five minutes later, he was in his room, unpacking. He’d just about finished when a knock came at the door.
“Bonjour. ” It was Rene. The Frenchman came in and sat on the bed, stretching as he did so. “Are you ready, my friend?” he asked in Spanish.
“Si, ” the Basque replied. He didn’t look especially Spanish. His hair was on the red side of strawberry blond, his features handsome, and his beard neatly trimmed. Never arrested by the Spanish police, he was bright, careful, but thoroughly dedicated, with two car-bombings and a separate murder to his credit. This, Rene knew, would be Juan’s boldest mission, but he looked ready enough, tense, a little edgy perhaps, but coiled like a spring and prepared to play his role. Rene, too, had done this sort of thing before, most often murders right on crowded streets; he’d walk right up to his target, fire a suppressed pistol, and just walk on normally, which was the best way to do it, since you were almost never identified-people never saw the pistol, and rarely noticed a person walking normally down the Champs-Elysees. And so, you just changed your clothes and switched on the television to see the press coverage of your work. Action Directe had been largely, but not quite completely, broken up by the French police. The captured men had kept faith with their at-large comrades, hadn’t fingered or betrayed them, despite all the pressure and the promises of their uniformed countrymen – and perhaps some of them would be released as a result of this mission, though the main objective was to release their comrade Carlos. It would not be easy to get him out of Le Sante, Rene thought, rising to look out the window at the train station used by people going to the park, but-he saw the children there, waiting for their ride in-there were some things that no government, however brutal, could overlook.
Two buildings away, Jean-Paul was looking out at the same scene and contemplating much the same thoughts. He’d never married and had rarely even enjoyed a proper love affair. He knew now, at forty-three, that this had created a hole in his life and his character, an abnormality that he’d tried to fill with political ideology, with his beliefs in principles and his vision of a radiant socialist future for his country and for Europe and ultimately for the whole world. But a niggling part of his character told him that his dreams were mere illusions, and that reality was before him, three floors down and a hundred meters west, in the distant faces of children waiting to board the steam train to the park, and – but, no, such thoughts were aberrations. Jean-Paul and his friends knew the rightness of their cause and their beliefs. They’d discussed them at the greatest length over the years and concluded that their path was the right one. They’d shared their frustration that few understood – but someday they would understand, someday they would see the path of justice that socialism offered the entire world, would understand that the road to the radiant future had to be paved by the revolutionary elite who understood the meaning and force of history . . . and they wouldn’t make the mistakes the Russians had made, those backward peasants in that over-large, foolish nation. And so he was able to look down on the assembled people, as they tightened up at the platform while the steam whistle announced the coming of the train, and see . . . things. Even the children were not people, really, but political statements to be made by others, people like himself who understood how the world actually worked, or how it should work. Would work, he promised himself. Someday.