“And live,” Jack added with a chuckle. Damn, he thought, what the hell is Dad going to say when he finds out about me?
CHAPTER 16
AND THE
PURSUING
HORSES
SUNDAY WAS a day of rest for most people, and at The Campus it was much the same, except for the security people. Gerry Hendley believed that maybe God had had a point, that seven-day schedules accomplished a lot less than adding 16.67 percent to a man’s weekly productivity. It also dulled the brain by denying it free-form exercise, or just the luxury of doing nothing at all.
But today it was different, of course. Today they’d be planning real black operations for the first time. The Campus had been active just over nineteen months, and that time had mostly been spent in establishing their cover as a trading and arbitrage business. His department heads had taken the Acela trains back and forth to New York many times to meet their white-world counterparts, and though it had seemed slow at the time, in retrospect it had been very quickly indeed that they’d made their reputation in the money-management community. They’d hardly ever shown the world their real results, of course, from speculating on currencies and a few very carefully chosen stock issues, sometimes even insider trades on companies which themselves didn’t know the business that was coming their way. Staying covert had been the overall objective, but since The Campus had to be self-supporting, it also had to generate real income. In World War II, the Americans had peopled its black-operations establishments with lawyers, while the Brits had used bankers. Both had proven to be good for screwing people . . . and killing them. It had to be something about the way they looked at the world, Hendley thought over his coffee.
He gazed at the others: Jerry Rounds, his head of Strategic Planning; Sam Granger, his chief of Operations. Even before the building had been completed, the three of them had been thinking about the shape of the world, and how a few of the corners could best be rounded off. Rick Bell was here, too, his chief of Analysis, the one who spent his working days sorting through the “take” from NSA and CIA, and trying to find meaning in the flood of unrelated information—aided, of course, by the thirty-five thousand analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and other such places. Like all senior analysts, he also liked to frolic in the operations playground, and here that was actually possible, since The Campus was too small to have been overtaken by its own bureaucracy. He and Hendley worried that it might not always be so, and both made sure that no empires were being built.
To the best of their knowledge, theirs was the only institution in all the world like this. And it had been set up in such away that it could be erased from the landscape in a matter of two or three months. Since Hendley Associates did not invite outside investors, their public profile was low enough that the radar never spotted their machinations, and, in any case, the community they were in did not advertise. It was easy to hide in a field in which everyone did the same, and nobody ratted on anyone else, unless very badly stung. And The Campus didn’t sting. At least not with money.
“So,” Hendley began, “are we ready?”
“Yes,” Rounds said for Granger. Sam nodded soberly and smiled.
“We’re ready,” Granger announced officially. “Our two boys have earned their spurs in a way we never anticipated.”
“They earned ’em, all right,” Bell agreed. “And the Ryan boy has identified a good first target, this Sali fellow. The events of Friday have generated a lot of message traffic. They turn out a lot of cheerleaders. A lot of them are stringers and wanna-bes, but even if we pop one of them by mistake it’s no great loss. I have the first four all lined up. So, Sam, do you have a plan for dealing with them?”
That was Davis’s cue. “We’re going to do reconnaissance by fire. After we whack one or two, well see what reaction, if any, results, and we will take our guidance from there. I agree that Mr. Sali looks like a profitable first target. Question is, is his elimination going to be overt or covert?”
“Explain,” Hendley ordered.
“Well, if he’s found dead on the street, that’s one thing. If he disappears with his daddy’s money and leaves behind a note saying that he wants to stop what he’s doing and just retire, that’s something else,” Sam explained.
“Kidnapping? It’s dangerous.” The Metropolitan Police in London had a closure rate on kidnappings that nibbled at one hundred percent. That was a dangerous game to play, especially on their first move.
“Well, we can hire an actor, dress him up right, fly him to New York, Kennedy, and then just have him disappear. In fact, we dispose of the body and keep the money. How much does he have access to, Rick?”
“Direct access? Hell, it’s over three hundred million bucks.”
“Might look good in the corporate exchequer,” Sam speculated. “And it wouldn’t hurt his dad much, would it?”
“His father’s money—all of it? Try the sunny side of three billion,” Bell answered. “He’ll miss it, but it wouldn’t break him. And given his opinion of his son, it might even develop as good cover for our operation,” he hypothesized.
“I am not recommending this as a course of action, but it is an alternative,” Granger concluded.
It had been talked about before, of course. It was too obvious a play to escape notice. And three hundred million dollars would have looked just fine in a Campus account, say in the Bahamas or Liechtenstein. You could hide money anywhere that had telephone lines. It was just electrons anyway, not gold bricks.
Hendley was surprised that Sam had brought this up so soon. Maybe he wanted to get a read on his colleagues. They were clearly not overcome with emotion at the thought of ending this Sali’s life, but to steal from him in the process pushed some very different buttons. A man’s conscience could be a funny thing, Gerry concluded.
“Let’s set that aside for the moment. How hard will the hit be?” Hendley asked.
“With what Rick Pasternak gave us? It’s child’s play, so long as our people don’t make a complete hash of it. Even then the worst thing that can happen is that it’ll look like a mugging that went wrong,” Granger told them.
“What if our guy drops the pen?” Rounds worried.
“It’s a pen. You can write with it. It’ll pass inspection with any cop in the world,” Granger replied confidently. He reached in his pocket and passed his sample around the table. “This one’s cold,” he assured them.
They’d all been briefed in. To all appearances, it was an expensive ballpoint, gold-plated, with obsidian on the clip. By depressing the clip and turning the nib cover, you switched the point from a real pen to a hypodermic with a lethal transfer agent. It would paralyze the victim in fifteen to twenty seconds, and kill him in three minutes, with no cure, and a very transient signature in the body. As the pen went around the conference table, the executives invariably felt the hypo point, and then experimented with using it for a simulated hit, mostly as an ice-pick strike, though Rounds handled it like a diminutive sword.
“It would be nice to try it on a dry run,” he observed quietly.
“Anyone here want to volunteer as the victim?” Granger asked the table. No heads nodded. The mood of the room didn’t surprise him much. It was time for a sober pause, the sort of thing that comes over a man when he signs his application for life insurance, a product that is valuable only if you are dead, which rather takes the fun out of the moment.
“Fly them to London together?” Hendley asked.
“Correct.” Granger nodded, and turned back to his business voice. “We have them scout out the target, pick their moment, and make their hit.”
“And wait to see the results?” Rounds asked, rhetorically.
“Correct. Then they can fly off to the next target. The whole operation should not take more than a week. Then we fly them home and await developments. If somebody taps into his money pile after his demise, we’ll probably know, right?”
“We ought to,” Bell confirmed. “And if anyone purloins it,’ well know where it goes.”
“Excellent,” Granger observed. After all, that was what “reconnaissance-by-fire” meant.
THEY WOULDN’T be here long, the twins both thought. They were quartered in adjoining rooms at the local Holiday Inn, and this Sunday afternoon they were both watching TV with one guest.
“How’s your mom?” Jack asked.
“Fine, doing a lot of stuff with the local schools—parochial ones. A little more than a teacher’s aide, but not actually teaching. Dad’s working some new project—supposedly Boeing is back looking at an SST, supersonic airliner. Dad says they’ll probably never build it, unless Washington coughs up a lot of money, but with the Concorde retired people are thinking about it again, and Boeing likes to keep their engineers busy. They’re a little nervous about the Airbus people, and they don’t want to be caught with their pants down if the French start getting ambitious.”