‘Sure/ Jack observed. ‘Especially if we provide their
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equipment. M-i tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, cellular communications . . .’
‘Come on, Jack,’ Riley said.
‘No, Father, the nature of the mission will demand some heavy weapons, for psychological impact if nothing else. You have to demonstrate that you’re serious. Once you do that, then the rest of the force can wear the Michaelangelo jumpsuits and carry their halberds and smile into the cameras – but you still need a Smith &. Wesson to beat four aces, especially over there.’
Riley conceded the point. ‘I like the elegance of the concept, gentlemen. It appeals to the noble. Everyone involved claims to believe in God by one name or another. By appealing to them in His name .. . hmm, that’s the key, isn’t it? The City of God. When do you need an answer?’
‘It’s not all that high-priority,’ Alden answered. Riley got the message. It was a matter of official White House interest, but was not something to be fast-tracked. Neither was it something to be buried on the bottom of someone’s desk pile. It was, rather, a back-channel inquiry to be handled expeditiously and very quietly.
‘Well, it has to go through the bureaucracy. The Vatican has the world’s oldest continuously-operating bureaucracy in the world, remember.’
That’s why we’re talking to you,’ Ryan pointed out. ‘The General can cut through all the crap.’
‘That’s no way to talk about the princes of the church, Jack!’ Riley nearly exploded with laughter.
‘I’m a Catholic, remember? I understand.’
‘I’ll drop them a line,’ Riley promised. Today, his eyes said.
‘Quietly,’ Alden emphasized.
‘Quietly,’ Riley agreed.
Ten minutes later, Father Timothy Riley was back in his car for the short drive back to his office at Georgetown. Already his mind was at work. Ryan had guessed right about Father Tim’s connections and their importance. Riley was composing his message in Attic Greek, the language of philosophers never spoken by more than
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fifty thousand people, but the language in which he’d studied Plato and Aristotle at Woodstock Seminary in Maryland all those years before.
Once in his office, he instructed his secretary to hold all calls, closed the door, and activated his personal computer. First he inserted a disk that allowed the use of Greek characters. Riley was not a skilled typist – having both a secretary and a computer rapidly erodes that skill – and it took him an hour to produce the document he needed. It was printed up as a double-spaced nine-page letter. Riley next opened a desk drawer and dialed in his code for a small but secure office safe that was concealed in what appeared to be a file drawer. Here, as Ryan had long suspected, was a cipher book, laboriously handprinted by a young priest on the Father General’s personal staff. Riley had to laugh. It just wasn’t the sort of thing one associated with the priesthood. In 1944, when Admiral Chester Nimitz had suggested to John Cardinal Spellman, Catholic Vicar General for the U.S. military, that perhaps the Marianas Islands needed a new bishop, the Cardinal had produced his cipher book, and used the communications network of the U.S. Navy to have a new bishop appointed. As with any other organization, the Catholic Church occasionally needed a secure communications link, and the Vatican cipher service had been around for centuries. In this case, the cipher key for this day was a lengthy passage from Aristotle’s discourse on Being qua Being, with seven words removed, and four grotesquely misspelled. A commercial encryption program handled the rest. Then he had to print out a new copy and set it aside. His computer was again switched off, erasing all record of the communique. Riley next faxed the letter to the Vatican, and shredded all the hard copies. The entire exercise took three laborious hours, and when he informed his secretary that he was ready to get back to business, he knew that he’d have to work far into the night. Unlike an ordinary businessman, Riley didn’t swear.
‘I don’t like this,’ Leary said quietly behind his binoculars.
‘Neither do I,’ Paulson agreed. His view of the scene through the ten-power telescopic sight was less panoramic and far more focused. Nothing about the situation was pleasing. The subject was one the FBI had been chasing for more than ten years. Implicated in the deaths of two special agents of the Bureau and a United States Marshal, John Russell (a/k/a Matt Murphy, a/k/a Richard Burton, a/k/a Red Bear) had disappeared into the warm embrace of something called The Warrior Society of the Sioux Nation. There was little of the warrior about John Russell. Born in Minnesota far from the Sioux reservation, he’d been a petty felon whose one major conviction had landed him in prison. It was there that he had discovered his ethnicity and begun thinking like his perverted image of a Native American – which to Paulson’s way of thinking had more of Mikhail Bakunin in it than of Cochise or Toohoolhoolzote. Joining another prison-born group called the American Indian Movement, Russell had been involved in a half-dozen nihilistic acts, ending with the deaths of three federal officers, then vanished. But sooner or later they all screwed up, and today was John Russell’s turn. Taking its chance to raise money by running drugs into Canada, the Warrior Society had made its mistake, and allowed its plans to be overheard by a federal informant.
They were in the ghostly remains of a farming town six miles from the Canadian border. The FBI Hostage Rescue Team, as usual without any hostages to rescue, was acting its role as the Bureau’s premier SWAT team. The ten men deployed on the mission under squad supervisor Dennis Black were under the administrative control of the Special Agent in Charge of the local field office. That was where the Bureau’s customary professionalism had come to a screeching halt. The local S-A-C had set up an elaborate ambush plan that had started badly and nearly ended in disaster, with three agents already in hospitals from the auto wrecks and two more with serious gunshot wounds. In return, one
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subject was known dead, and maybe another was wounded, but no one was sure at the moment. The rest – three or four, they were not sure of that either – were holed up in what had once been a motel. What they knew for sure was that either the motel had a still-working phone or, more likely, the subjects had a cellular ‘brick’ and had called the media. What was happening now was of such magnificent confusion as to earn the admiration of Phineas T. Barnum. The local S-A-C was trying to salvage what remained of his professional reputation by using the media to his advantage. What he hadn’t figured out yet was that handling network teams dispatched from as far away as Denver and Chicago wasn’t quite the same thing as dealing with the local reporters fresh from journalism school. It was very hard to call the shots with the pros.
‘Bill Shaw is going to have this guy’s balls for brunch tomorrow/ Leary observed quietly.
That does us a whole lot of good/ Paulson replied. A snort. ‘Besides, what balls?’
‘What you got?’ Black asked over the secure radio circuit.
‘Movement, but no ID/ Leary replied. ‘Bad light. These guys may be dumb, but they’re not crazy.’
‘The subjects have asked for a TV reporter to come in with a camera, and the S-A-C has agreed.’
‘Dennis, have you-‘ Paulson nearly came off the scope at that.
‘Yes, I have/ Black replied. ‘He says he’s in command.’ The Bureau’s negotiator, a psychiatrist with hard-won expertise in these affairs, was still two hours away, and the S-A-C wanted something for the evening news. Black wanted to throttle the man, but he couldn’t, of course.
‘Can’t arrest the guy for incompetence/ Leary said, his hand over the microphone. Well, the only thing these bastards don’t have is a hostage. So, why not give ’em one! That’ll give the negotiator something to do.
Talk to me, Dennis/ Paulson said next.
‘Rules of Engagement are in force, on my authority/ Supervisory Special Agent Black said. The reporter is a
li kj Up^J
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female, twenty-eight, blonde and blue, about five-six. Cameraman is a black guy, dark complexion, six-three. I told him where to walk. He’s got brains, and he’s playing ball.’
‘Roger that, Dennis.’
‘How long you been on the gun, Paulson?’ Black asked next. The book said that a sniper could not stay fully alert on the gun for more than thirty minutes, at which point the observer and sniper exchanged positions. Dennis Black figured that someone had to play by the book.
‘About fifteen minutes, Dennis. I’m okay .. . okay, I got the newsies.’
They were very close, a mere hundred fifteen yards from the front door of the block building. The light was not good. The sun would set in another ninety minutes. It had been a blustery day. A hot south-westerly wind was lipping across the prairie. Dust stung the eyes. Worse, the wind was hitting over forty knots and was directly across his line of sight. That sort of wind could screw up his aim by as much as four inches.