CHAPTER FORTY-SIX Thursday, 1:40 P.M., Washington, D.C.
When he was a kid growing up in Houston, Darrell McCaskey carved his own Smith & Wesson automatic made out of balsa wood and kept it tucked in his belt at all times, the way he’d read the real FBI agents did. He screwed an eye-hook to the front of the weapon and attached a rubber band to the “gun sight.” When the rubber band was hooked to the hammer and released, he could fire small cardboard squares like bullets. McCaskey kept the squares in his shirt pocket where they were accessible and safe.
Darrell wore the gun starting in sixth grade. He kept it hidden under his button-down shirt. It gave him a John Wayne-rigid walk that the other kids teased him about, but Darrell didn’t care. They didn’t understand that keeping the law was everyone’s responsibility as well as a full-time job.
And he was a short kid. With hippies and yippies popping up and demonstrations and sit-ins happening everywhere, he felt better with a beltful of protection.
McCaskey shot the first teacher who tried to take the gun from him. After writing an essay in which he carefully researched the Constitution and the right to bear arms, he was permitted to keep the weapon. Provided he didn’t use it other than for self-defense against radicals.
As a rookie FBI agent, McCaskey loved stakeouts and investigations. He loved it even more when he was an Assistant Special Agent in Charge and had more autonomy.
When he became a Special Agent in Charge and then a Supervisory Special Agent, he was frustrated because there were fewer opportunities to spend time in the street.
When McCaskey was offered the position of Unit Chief in Dallas, he took the promotion largely because of his wife and three kids. The pay was better and the job was safer and his family got to see him more. But as he sat behind a desk coordinating the actions of others, he realized just how much he missed stakeouts and investigations. Within two years, joint activity with Mexican authorities gave him the idea to form official alliances with foreign police forces. The FBI Director approved his plan to draft and spearhead FIAT– – the Federal International Alliance Treaty. Quickly approved by Congress and eleven foreign governments, FIAT enabled McCaskey to work on cases in Mexico City, London, Tel Aviv, and other world capitals. He moved his family to Washington, quickly rose to Deputy Assistant Director, and was the only man Paul Hood asked to become Op-Center’s interagency liaison. McCaskey had been promised and given relative autonomy, and got to work closely with the CIA, the Secret Service, his old friends at the FBI, and more foreign intelligence and police groups than before.
But he was still deskbound. And thanks to fiber optics and computers, he didn’t leave his office the way he did when he was revving up FIAT. Because of diskettes and Email, he didn’t even have to walk over to the Xerox machine or even lean over to the out box. He wished he could have lived in the time of his childhood heroes, G-man Melvin Purvis and Treasury Man Eliot Ness. He could almost taste the exhilaration of chasing Machine Gun Kelly through the Midwest, or Al Capone’s thugs up rickety stairways and across dark rooftops in Chicago.
He frowned as he pushed buttons on his phone.
Instead, I’m entering a three-digit code to call the NRO. He knew there was no shame in that, though he didn’t see himself inspiring kids to make their own balsa-wood telephones.
He was put right through to Stephen Viens. The NRO had been downloading satellite views of the Demain plant in Toulouse, but they weren’t enough. Mike Rodgers had told him that if Ballon and his people had to go in, he didn’t want them going in blind. And despite what Rodgers had told Ballon, none of Matt Stoll’s technical team knew to what degree the T-Rays would be able to penetrate the facility, or how much it would tell them about the layout or distribution of forces.
Viens had been using the NRO’s Earth Audio Receiver Satellite to eavesdrop on the Demain site. The satellite used a laser beam to read the walls of a building the way a compact disc player read a CD. However, instead of data pits in the surface of a disc, the EARS read vibrations in the walls of buildings. Clarity depended upon the composition and thickness of the walls. With favorable materials such as metals, which vibrated with greater fidelity and resonance than porous brick, computer enhancement could recreate conversations which were taking place within the buildings.
These triple paned windows were no good: they didn’t vibrate sufficiently to be read.
“The structure is red brick,” Viens said thickly.
McCaskey’s head dropped.
“I was just about to call and tell you, but I wanted to make sure we couldn’t get anything,” Viens continued.
“There are newer materials inside, probably Sheet rock and aluminum, but the brick is soaking up whatever’s coming off them.” “What about cars?” McCaskey asked.
“We don’t have a clear enough shot at them,” said Viens. “Too many trees, hills, and overpasses.” “So we’re screwed.” “Basically,” said Viens.
McCaskey felt as if he were in command of the world’s most sophisticated battleship in dry dock. He and Rodgers and Herbert had always bemoaned the lack of on-site human intelligence, and this was a perfect example of why it was needed. “Billions for modern hardware but none for Mata Hari,” as Herbert had once put it.
McCaskey thanked Viens and hung up. How he yearned to be a man in the field on this one, to be the intelligence linchpin of a major operation with everything depending on him. He envied Matt Stoll, in whose hands the intelligence gathering rested. It was too bad that Stoll probably didn’t want the job. The computer jockey was a genius but he didn’t function well under pressure.
McCaskey went back to his computer, sent the photographs right to memory, then booted the Pentagon SITSIM, situation simulation, for an ELTS: European Landmark Tactical Strike. The residual political fallout of destroying national treasures was extremely high. So it was the policy of the United States military not to damage historical structures, even if it meant taking casualties. In the case of the Demain factory, acceptable “injury” as they called it— as though the structures were living things— would be “single-round defacement of stone or discoloration capable of complete restoration.” In other words, if you stitched a wall with bullets you were in deep trouble. And if you stained it with blood, you’d better be packing a bucket and mop.
Dipping into the French architectural database, he brought up a layout of the fortress they had to enter. The diagram was useless: it showed the way the place had looked in 1777 when the adjacent Vieux Pont bridge was constructed. Dominique had made some changes since then.
If he had obtained permits, none of them were filed anywhere. If he had submitted blueprints, none of those were on hand either. It had been easier getting plans of the Hermitage out of St. Petersburg for the Striker incursion.
This Dominique had obviously been greasing a lot of palms over many, many years.
McCaskey returned to the NRO photographs, which still showed him nothing. He envied Stoll, but he had to admit that the man would have something to be nervous about.
Even with Ballon’s help, they would be seriously outgunned if the situation degenerated to that. They would also be too restrained. The file on the New Jacobins was skimpy, but the information it contained had chilled him, details of methods they used to ambush or kill victims and tortures they devised to intimidate or extract information. He would have to forward that data to Hood if they went in. And he would point out that even Melvin Purvis and Eliot Ness would have thought this one over before going in.
There’s no time to get Striker into position, McCaskey thought, and the only tactician we have close to the site, Bob Herbert, is incommunicado.
He punched in Mike Rodgers’s number to tell him the bad news about the fortress… and to try to figure out if there were anything they could do to keep their bold but inexperienced field force from being butchered.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN Thursday, 8:17 P.M., Wunstorf, Germany
Bob Herbert had gone through two emotional phases during his rehabilitation.
The first was that his injury wasn’t going to beat him.
He was going to shock the experts and walk again. The second— which he entered when he got out of the hospital and his therapy became full-time— was that he was never going to be able to do a damn thing.
When he started working on strengthening his arms, his lower back, and his abdomen, they hurt like the Devil’s own pitchfork digging into his sinew. He wanted to give up, let the government pay him disability, and watch TV and not move from his house. But a pair of saintly nurses alternately prodded and pushed him through rehabilitation. One of them, in a less saintly moment, showed him that he could still have a gratifying sex life. And after that, Herbert never wanted to give up on anything again.