"He is thorough," O'Donnell observed. Miller had returned with the aerial photographs that Dobbens had copied, topographic maps, and photos of Ryan's home from the land and water sides. Added to these were typed notes of the observations made by his people and other data thought to be of interest.
"Unfortunately he allows his personal feelings to interfere with his activities," Miller observed coolly.
"And you don't, Sean?" O'Donnell chided gently.
"It won't happen again," his operations officer promised.
"That's good. The important thing about mistakes is that we learn from them. So let's go over your proposed operation."
Sean took out two other maps and spent twenty minutes running through his ideas. He concluded with Dobbens' suggestion for a diversion.
"I like it." He turned to his intelligence chief. "Michael?"
"The opposition will be formidable, of course, but the plan allows for that. The only thing that worries me is that it will take nearly all of our people to do it."
"Nothing else looks feasible," Miller replied. "It's not so much a question of getting close enough, but of leaving the area after the mission is accomplished. Timing is crucial—"
"And when timing is crucial, simplicity is a must." O'Donnell nodded. "Is there anything else that the opposition might try?"
"I think not," McKenney said. "This is the worst-case expectation."
"Helicopters," Miller said. "They nearly did for us the last time. No real problem if we're prepared for it, but we must be prepared."
"Very well," O'Donnell said. "And the second part of the operation?"
"Obviously we need to know where all the targets will be," McKenney said. "When do you want me to activate our people?" On orders, the intelligence chief's penetration agents had been quiescent for some weeks.
"Not just yet," the Commander replied thoughtfully. "Again a question of timing. Sean?"
"I think we should wait until the mission is fully accomplished before moving."
"Yes, it proved to be a good idea the last time," the Commander agreed. "How many people are needed for your operation?"
"No less than fifteen. I think we can depend on Alex for three trained men, himself included. More than that—no, we should limit his participation as much as possible."
"Agreed," McKenney said.
"And training?" O'Donnell asked.
"The most we've ever done."
"To start when?"
"A month beforehand," Miller answered. "Any more time would be a waste of resources. For the moment I have quite a lot of work to do."
"So here are the plans," Murray said. "You can either let them stay at your embassy or we'll put them in Blair House, right across the street from the President."
"With all due respect to your Secret Service chaps—" The head of the Diplomatic Protection Group didn't have to go on. Their safety was his responsibility and he wouldn't trust it to foreigners any more than he had to.
"Yeah, I understand. They'll get a full security detail from the Secret Service plus a couple of FBI liaison people and the usual assistance from the local police. Finally we'll have two HRT groups on alert the whole time they're over, one in D.C., and a backup team at Quantico."
"How many people know?" Ashley asked.
"The Secret Service and Bureau people are already fully briefed. When your advance men go over, they ought to have most of the events scouted for you already. The local cops will not be notified until they have to know."
"You said most of the locations have been scouted, but not all?" Owens asked.
"Do you want us to check out the unannounced points this early, too?"
"No." The man from DPG shook his head. "It's bad enough that the public functions have to be exposed this early. It's still not official that they're going, you know. The element of surprise is our best defense."
Owens looked at his colleague, but didn't react. The head of the DPG was on his suspects list, and his orders were not to allow anyone to know the details of his investigation. Owens thought him to be in the clear, but his detectives had discovered a few irregularities in the man's personal life that had somehow gotten past all the previous security screenings. Until it was certain that he was not a possible blackmail risk, he would not be allowed to know that some possible suspects had already seen the itinerary. The Commander of C-13 gave Murray an ironic look.
"I think you're overdoing this, gentlemen, but that's your business," the FBI man said as he stood. "Your people are flying over tomorrow?"
"That's right."
"Okay, Chuck Avery of the Secret Service will meet your people at Dulles. Tell them not to be bashful about asking for things. You will have our total cooperation." He watched them leave. Five minutes later Owens was back.
"What gives, Jimmy?" Murray wasn't surprised.
"What further progress have you made on the chaps who attacked Ryan?"
"Not a thing for the past two weeks," Murray admitted. "You?"
"We have a possible link—let me be precise, we suspect that there might be a possible link."
The FBI man grinned. "Yeah, I know what that's like. Who is it?"
"Geoffrey Watkins." That got a reaction.
"The foreign-service guy? Damn! Anybody else on the list that I know?"
"The chap you were just talking to. Ashley's people discovered that he's not entirely faithful to his wife."
"Boys or girls?" Murray took a cue from the way Owens had said that. "You mean that he doesn't know, Jimmy?"
"He doesn't know that the itinerary has been leaked, possibly to the wrong people. Watkins is among them, but so is our DPG friend."
"Oh, that's real good! The plans may be leaked, and you can't tell the head of the security detail because he may be the one—"
"It's most unlikely, but we must allow for the possibility."
"Call the trip off, Jimmy. If you have to break his leg, call it the hell off."
"We can't. He won't. I spoke with His Highness day before yesterday and told him the problem. He refuses to allow his life to be managed that way."
"Why are you telling me this?" Murray rolled his eyes.
"I must tell someone, Dan. If I can't tell my chaps, then… " Owens waved his hands.
"You want us to call the trip off for you, is that it?" Murray demanded. He knew that Owens couldn't answer that one. "Let's spell this one out nice and clear. You want our people to be alert to the chance that an attack is a serious possibility, and that one of the good guys might be a bad guy."
"Correct."
"This isn't going to make our folks real happy."
"I'm not terribly keen on it myself, Dan," Owens replied.
"Well, it gives Bill Shaw something else to think about." Another thought struck him. "Jimmy, that's one expensive piece of live bait you have dangling on the hook."
"He knows that. It's our job to keep the sharks away, isn't it?"
Murray shook his head. The ideal solution would be to find a way to cancel the trip, thereby handing the problem back to Owens and Ashley. That meant involving the State Department. The boys at Foggy Bottom would spike that idea, Murray knew. You couldn't un-invite a future chief of state because the FBI and Secret Service didn't think they could guarantee his safety—the reputation of American law-enforcement would be laid open to ridicule, they'd say, knowing that his protection wasn't the responsibility of the people at State.
"What do you have on Watkins?" he asked after a moment. Owens outlined his "evidence."
"That's all?"
"We're still digging, but so far there is nothing more substantive. It could all be coincidence, of course…"
"No, it sounds to me like you're right." Murray didn't believe in coincidences either. "But there's nothing that I could take to a grand jury at home. Have you thought about flushing the game?"
"You mean running through a change in the schedule? Yes, we have. But then what? We could do that, see if Watkins goes to the shop, and arrest both men there—if we can confirm that what is happening is what we think it to be. Unfortunately, that means throwing away the only link we've ever had with the ULA, Dan. At the moment, we're watching Cooley as closely as we dare. He is still traveling. If we can find out whom he is contacting, then perhaps we can wrap up the entire operation. What you suggest is an option, but not the best one. We do have time, you know. We have several months before we need to do something so drastic as that."
Murray nodded, not so much in agreement as in understanding. The possibility of finding and destroying O'Donnell's bunch had to be tantalizing to Scotland Yard. Bagging Cooley now would quash that. It wasn't something that they'd simply toss off. He knew that the Bureau would think much the same way.
"Jack, I want you to come along with me," Marty Cantor said. "No questions."
"What?" Ryan asked, and got an accusing look. "All right, all right." He took the files he was working on and locked them in his file cabinet, then grabbed his jacket. Cantor led him around the corner to the elevator. After arriving on the first floor, he walked rapidly west into the annex behind the headquarters building. Once in the new structure, they passed through five security checkpoints. This was an all-time record for Ryan, and he wondered if Cantor had had to reprogram the pass-control computer to get him into this building. After ten minutes he was on the fourth floor in a room identified only by its number.
"Jack, this is Jean-Claude. He's one of our French colleagues."
Ryan shook hands with a man twenty years older than himself, whose face was the embodiment of civilized irony. "What gives, Marty?"
"Professor Ryan," Jean-Claude said. "I am informed that you are the man we must thank."
"What for—" Ryan stopped. Uh-oh. The Frenchman led him to a TV monitor.
"Jack, you never saw this," Cantor said as a picture formed on the screen. It had to be satellite photography. Ryan knew it at once from the viewing angle, which changed very slowly.
"When?" he asked.
"Last night, our time, about three A.M. local."
"Correct." Jean-Claude nodded, his eyes locked on the screen.
It was Camp -20, Ryan thought. The one that belonged to Action-Directe. The spacing of the huts was familiar. The infrared picture showed that three of the huts had their heaters on. The brightness of the heat signals told him that ground temperature must have been about freezing. South of the camp, behind a dune, two vehicles were parked. Jack couldn't tell if they were jeeps or small trucks. On closer inspection, faint figures were moving on the cold background: men. From the way they moved: soldiers. He counted eight of them split into two equal groups. Near one of the huts was a brighter light. There appeared to be a man standing there. Three in the morning, when one's body functions are at the lowest ebb. One of the camp guards was smoking on duty, doubtlessly trying to stay awake. That was a mistake, Ryan knew. The flare of the match would have destroyed his night vision. Oh, well…
"Now," Jean-Claude said.
There was a brief flash from one of the eight intruders; it was strange to see but not hear it. Ryan couldn't tell if the guard moved as a result, but his cigarette did, flying perhaps two yards, after which both images remained stationary. That's a kill, he told himself. Dear God, what am I watching? The eight pale shapes closed on the camp. First they entered the guard hut—it was always the same one. A moment later they were back outside. Next, they redeployed into the two groups of four, each group heading toward one of the «lighted» huts.
"Who are the troops?" Jack asked.
"Paras," Jean-Claude answered simply.
Some of the men reappeared thirty seconds later. After another minute, the rest emerged—more than had gone in, Ryan saw. Two seemed to be carrying something. Then something else entered the picture. It was a bright glow that washed out other parts of the picture, but the new addition was a helicopter, its engines blazing in the infrared picture. The picture quality deteriorated and the camera zoomed back. Two more helicopters were in the area. One landed near the vehicles, and the jeeps were driven into it. After that helicopter lifted off, the other skimmed the ground, following the vehicle tracks for several miles and erasing them with its downdraft. By the time the satellite lost visual lock with the scene, everyone was gone. The entire exercise had taken less than ten minutes.
"Quick and clean," Marty breathed.
"You got her?" Jack had to ask.
"Yes," Jean-Claude replied. "And five others, four of them alive. We removed all of them, and the camp guards who, I regret to say, did not survive the evening." The Frenchman's regrets were tossed in for good manners only. His face showed what he really felt.
"Any of your people hurt?" Cantor asked.
An amused shake of his head: "No. They were all asleep, you see. One slept with a pistol next to his cot, and made the mistake of reaching for it."
"You pulled everybody out, even the camp guards?"
"Of course. All are now in Chad. The living are being questioned."
"How did you arrange the satellite coverage?" Jack asked.
This answer came with a Gallic shrug. "A fortunate coincidence."
Right, Jack thought. Some coincidence. I just watched the instant-replay of the death of three or four people. Terrorists, he corrected himself. Except for the camp guards, who only helped terrorists. The timing could not have been an accident. The French wanted us to know that they were in counterterrorist operations for-real.
"Why am I here?"
"But you made this possible," Jean-Claude said. "It is my pleasure to give you the thanks of my country."
"What's going to happen to the people you captured?" Jack wanted to know.
"Do you know how many people they have assassinated? For those crimes they will answer. Justice, that will happen to them."
"You wanted to see a success, Jack," Cantor said. "You just did."
Ryan thought that one over. Removing the bodies of the camp guards told him how the operation would end. No one was supposed to know what had happened. Sure, some bullet holes were left behind, and a couple of bloodstains, but no bodies. The raiders had quite literally covered their tracks. The whole operation was "deniable." There was nothing left behind that would point to the French. In that sense it had been a perfect covert operation. And if that much effort had gone into making it so, then there was little reason to suspect that the Action-Directe people would ever face a jury. You wouldn't go to that much trouble and then go through the publicity of a trial, Ryan told himself. Goodbye, Francoise Theroux…
I condemned these people to death, he realized finally. Just the one of them was enough to trouble his conscience. He remembered the police-style photograph he'd seen of her face and the fuzzy satellite image of a girl in a bikini.
"She's murdered at least three people," Cantor said, reading Jack's face.
"Professor Ryan, she has no heart, that one. No feelings. You must not be misled by her face," Jean-Claude advised. "They cannot all look like Hitler."
But that was only part of it, Ryan knew. Her looks merely brought into focus that hers was a human life whose term was now unnaturally limited. As she has limited those of others. Jack told himself. He admitted to himself that he would have no qualms at all if her name had been Sean Miller.
"Forgive me," he said. "It must be my romantic nature."
"But of course," the Frenchman said generously. "It is something to be regretted, but those people made their choice, Professor, not you. You have helped to avenge the lives of many innocent people, and you have saved those of people you will never know. There will be a formal note of thanks—a secret one, of course—for your assistance."
"Glad to help, Colonel," Cantor said. Hands were shaken all around, and Marty led Jack back to the headquarters building.
"I don't know that I want to see anything like that again," Ryan said in the corridor. "I mean, I don't want to know their faces. I mean—hell, I don't know what I mean. Maybe—it's just… different when you're detached from it, you know? It was too much like watching a ball game on TV, but it wasn't a ball game. Who was that guy, anyway?"
"Jean-Claude's the head of the DGSE's Washington Station, and he was the liaison man. We got the first new picture of her a day and a half ago. They had the operation all ready to roll, and he got things going inside of six hours. Impressive performance."
"I imagine they wanted us to be impressed. They're not bringing 'em in, are they?"
"No. I seriously doubt those people are going back to France to stand trial. Remember the problem they had the last time they tried a public trial of Action-Directe members? The jurors started getting midnight phone calls, and the case got blown away. Maybe they don't want to put up with the hassle again." Cantor frowned. "Well, it's not our call to make. Their system isn't the same as ours. All we did was forward information to an ally."
"An American court could call that accessory to murder."
"Possibly," Cantor admitted. "Personally, I prefer what Jean-Claude called it."
"Then why are you leaving in August?" Ryan asked.
Cantor delivered his answer without facing him. "Maybe you'll find out someday, Jack."
Back alone in his office, Ryan couldn't get his mind off what he'd seen. Five thousand miles away, agents of the DGSE's «action» directorate were now questioning that girl. If this had been a movie, their techniques would be brutal. What they used in real life, Ryan didn't want to know. He told himself that the members of Action-Directe had brought it on themselves. First, they had made a conscious choice to be what they were. Second, in subverting the French legal system the previous year, they'd given their enemies an excuse to bypass whatever constitutional guarantees… but was that truly an excuse?
"What would Dad think?" he murmured to himself. Then the next question hit him. Ryan lifted his phone and punched in the right number.
"Cantor."
"Why, Marty?"
"Why what, Jack?"
"Why did you let me see that?"
"Jean-Claude wanted to meet you, and he also wanted you to see what your data accomplished."
"That's bull, Marty! You let me into a real-time satellite display—okay, taped, but essentially the same thing. There can't be many people cleared for that. I don't need-to-know how good the real-time capability is. You could have told him I wasn't cleared for it and that would have been that."
"Okay, you've had some time to think it over. Tell me what you think."
"I don't like it."
"Why?" Cantor asked.
"It broke the law."
"Not ours. Like I told you twenty minutes ago, all we did was provide intelligence information to a friendly foreign nation."
"But they used it to kill people."
"What do you think intel is for, Jack? What should they have done? No, answer this first: what if they were foreign nationals who had murdered French nationals in—in Liechtenstein, say, and then boogied back to their base?"
"That's not the same thing. That's more… more like an act of war—like doing the guards at the camp. The people they were after were their own citizens who committed crimes in their own country, and—and are subject to French law."
"And what if it had been a different camp? What if those paratroopers had done a job for us, or the Brits, and taken out your ULA friends?"
"That's different!" Ryan snapped back. But why? he asked himself a moment later. "It's personal. You can't expect me to feel the same way about that."
"Can't I?" Cantor hung up the phone.
Ryan stared at the telephone receiver for several seconds before replacing it in the cradle. What was Marty trying to tell him? Jack reviewed the events in his own mind, trying to come to a conclusion that made sense.
Did any of it make sense? Did it make sense for political dissidents to express themselves with bombs and machine guns? Did it make sense for small nations to use terrorism as a short-of-war weapon to change the policies of larger ones? Ryan grunted. That depended on which side of the issue you were on—or at least there were people who thought that way. Was this something completely new?
It was, and it wasn't. State-sponsored terrorism, in the form of the Barbary pirates, had been America's first test as a nation. The enemy objective then had been simple greed. The Barbary states demanded tribute before they would give right of passage to American-flag trading ships, but it had finally been decided that enough was enough. Preble took the infant U.S. Navy to the Mediterranean Sea to put an end to it—no, to put an end to America's victimization by it, Jack corrected himself.
God, it was even the same place, Ryan thought. "To the shores of Tripoli," the Marine Hymn said, where First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon, USMC, had attacked the fort at Derna. Jack wondered if the place still existed. Certainly the problem did.
The violence hadn't changed. What had changed were the rules under which the large nations acted, and the objectives of their enemies. Two hundred years earlier, when a small nation offended a larger one, ships and troops would settle matters. No longer was this simple wog-bashing, though. The smaller countries now had arsenals of modern weapons that could make such punitive expeditions too expensive for societies that had learned to husband the lives of their young men. A regiment of troops could no longer settle matters, and moving a whole army was no longer such a simple thing. Knowing this, the small country could inflict wounds itself, or even more safely, sponsor others to do so—"deniably" — in order to move its larger opponent in the desired direction. There wasn't even much of a hurry. Such low-level conflict could last years, so small were the expenditures of resources and so different the perceived value of the human lives taken and lost.
What was new, then, was not the violence, but the safety of the nation that either performed or sponsored it. Until that changed, the killing would never stop.
So, on the international level, terrorism was a form of war that didn't even have to interrupt normal diplomatic relations. America itself had embassies in some of the nations, even today. Nearer to home, however, it was being treated as a crime. He'd faced Miller in the Old Bailey, Ryan remembered, not a military court-martial. They can even use that against us. It was a surprising realization. They can fight their kind of war, but we can't recognize it as such without giving up something our society needs. If we treat terrorists as politically motivated activists, we give them an honor they don't deserve. If we treat them as soldiers, and kill them as such, we both give them legitimacy and violate our own laws. By a small stretch of the imagination, organized crime could be thought of as a form of terrorism, Ryan knew. The terrorists' only weakness was their negativity. They were a political movement with nothing to offer other than their conviction that their parent society was unjust. So long as the people in that society felt otherwise, it was the terrorists who were alienated from it, not the population as a whole. The democratic processes that benefited the terrorists were also their worst political enemy. Their prime objective, then, had to be the elimination of the democratic process, converting justice to injustice in order to arouse members of the society to sympathy with the terrorists.
The pure elegance of the concept was stunning. Terrorists could fight a war and be protected by the democratic processes of their enemy. If those processes were obviated, the terrorists would win additional political support, but so long as those processes were not obviated, it was extremely difficult for them to lose. They could hold a society hostage against itself and its most important precepts, daring it to change. They could move around at will, taking advantage of the freedom that defined a democratic state, and get all the support they needed from a nation-state with which their parent society was unwilling or unable to deal effectively.
The only solution was international cooperation. The terrorists had to be cut off from support. Left to their own resources, terrorists would become little more than an organized-crime network… But the democracies found it easier to deal with their domestic problems singly than to band together and strike a decisive blow at those who fomented them, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Had that just changed? The CIA had given data on terrorists to someone else, and action had been taken as a result. What he had seen earlier, therefore, was a step in the right direction, even if it wasn't necessarily the right kind of step. Ryan told himself that he'd just witnessed one of the world's many imperfections, but at least one aimed in the proper direction. That it had disturbed him was a consequence of his civilization. That he was now rationalizing it was a result of… what?
Cantor walked into Admiral Greer's office.
"Well?" the DDI asked.
"We'll give him a high B, maybe an A-minus. It depends on what he learns from it."
"Conscience attack?" the DDI asked.
"Yeah."
"It's about time he found out what the game's really like. Everybody has to learn that. He'll stay," Greer said.
"Probably."
The pickup truck tried to pull into the driveway that passed under the Hoover building, but a guard waved him off. The driver hesitated, partly in frustration, partly in rage while he tried to figure something else out. The heavy traffic didn't help. Finally he started circling the block until he was able to find a way into a public parking garage. The attendant held up his nose at the plebeian vehicle—he was more accustomed to Buicks and Cadillacs—and burned rubber on the way up the ramp to show his feelings. The driver and his son didn't care. They walked downhill and across the street, going by foot on the path denied their truck. Finally they got to the door and walked in.
The agent who had desk duty noted the entrance of two people somewhat disreputably dressed, the elder of whom had something wrapped in his leather jacket and tucked under his arm. This got the agent's immediate and full attention. He waved the visitors over with his left hand. His right was somewhere else.
"Can I help you, sir?"
"Hi," the man said. "I got something for you." The man raised the jacket and pulled out a submachine gun. He quickly learned that this wasn't the way to get on the FBI's good side.
The desk agent snatched the weapon and yanked it off the desk, standing and reaching for his service revolver. The panic button under the desk was already pushed, and two more agents in the room converged on the scene. The man behind the desk immediately saw that the gun's bolt was closed—the gun was safe, and there wasn't a magazine in the pistol grip.
"I found it!" the kid announced proudly.
"What?" one of the arriving agents said.
"And I figured I'd bring it here," the lad's father said.
"What the hell?" the desk agent observed.
"Let's see it." A supervisory agent arrived next. He came from a surveillance room whose TV cameras monitored the entrance. The man behind the desk rechecked to make sure the weapon was safe, then handed it across.
It was an Uzi, the 9mm Israeli submachine gun used all over the world because of its quality, balance, and accuracy. The cheap-looking (the Uzi is anything but cheap, though it does look that way) metal stampings were covered with red-brown rust, and water dripped from the receiver. The agent pulled open the bolt and stared down the barrel. The gun had been fired and not cleaned since. It was impossible to tell how long ago that had been, but there weren't all that many FBI cases pending in which a weapon of this type had been used.
"Where did you find this, sir?"
"In a quarry, about thirty miles from here," the man said.
"I found it!" the kid pointed out.
"That's right, he found it," his father conceded. "I figured this was the place to bring it."
"You thought right, sir. Will both of you come with me, please?"
The agent on the desk gave both of them «visitor» passes. He and the other two agents on entrance-guard duty went back to work, wondering what the hell that had been all about.
On the building's top floor, those few people in the corridor were surprised to see a man walking around with a machine gun, but it would not have been in keeping with Bureau chic to pay too much attention—the man with the gun did have an FBI pass, and he was carrying it properly. When he walked into an office, however, it did get a reaction from the first secretary he saw.
"Is Bill in?" the agent asked.
"Yes, I'll—"
Her eyes didn't leave the gun.
The man waved her off, motioned for the visitors to follow him, and walked toward Shaw's office. The door was open. Shaw was talking with one of his people. Special Agent Richard Alden went straight to Shaw's desk and set the gun on the blotter.
"Christ, Richie!" Shaw looked up at the agent, then back down at the gun. "What's this?"
"Bill, these two folks just walked in the door downstairs and gave it to us. I thought it might be interesting."
Shaw looked at the two people with visitor passes and invited them to sit on the couch against the wall. He called for two more agents to join them, plus someone from the ballistics laboratory. While things were being organized, his secretary got a cup of coffee for the father and a Dr Pepper for the son.
"Could I have your names, please?"
"I'm Robert Newton and this here's my son Leon." He gave his address and phone number without being asked.
"And where did you find the gun?" Shaw asked while his subordinates were taking notes.
"It's called Jones Quarry. I can show you on a map."
"What were you doing there?"
"I was fishing. I found it," Leon reminded them.
"I was getting in some firewood," his father said.
"This time of year?"
"Beats doing it during the summer, when it's hot, man," Mr. Newton pointed out reasonably. "Also lets the wood season some. I'm a construction worker. I walk iron, and it's a little slow right now, so I went out for some wood. The boy's off from school today, so I brought him along. While I cut the wood, Leon likes to fish. There's some big ones in the quarry," he added with a wink.
"Oh, okay." Shaw grinned. "Leon, you ever catch one?"
"No, but I got close last time," the youngster responded.
"Then what?" Mr. Newton nodded for his son.
"My hook got caught on sumthin' heavy, you know, an' I pulled and pulled and pulled. It come loose, and I tried real hard, but I couldn't reel it up. So I called my daddy."
"I reeled it in," Mr. Newton explained. "When I saw it was a gun, I almost crapped my drawers. The hook was snagged on the trigger guard. What kinda gun is that, anyway?"
"Uzi. It's made in Israel, mostly," the ballistics expert said, looking up from the weapon. "It's been in the water at least a month."
Shaw and another agent shared a look at that bit of news.
"I'm afraid I handled it a lot," Newton said. "Hope I didn't mess up any fingerprints."
"Not after being in the water, Mr. Newton," Shaw replied. "And you brought it right here?"
"Yeah, we only got it, oh" — he checked his watch—"an hour and a half ago. Aside from handling it, we didn't do anything. It didn't have no magazine in it."
"You know guns?" the ballistics man asked.
"I spent a year in Nam. I was a grunt with the 173rd Airborne. I know M-16s pretty good." Newton smiled. "And I used to do a little hunting, mostly birds and rabbits."
"Tell us about the quarry," Shaw said.
"It's off the main road, back maybe three-quarters of a mile, I guess. Lots of trees back there. That's where I get my firewood. I don't really know who owns it. Lots of cars go back there. You know, it's a parking spot for kids on Saturday nights, that sorta place."
"Have you ever heard shooting there?"
"No, except during hunting season. There's squirrels in there, lotsa squirrels. So what's with the gun? Does it mean anything to ya?"
"It might. It's the kind of gun used in the murder of a police officer, and—"
"Oh, yeah! That lady and her kid over Annapolis, right?" He paused for a moment. "Damn."
Shaw looked at the boy. He was about nine, the agent thought, and the kid had smart eyes, scanning the items Shaw had on his walls, the memorabilia from his many cases and posts. "Mr. Newton, you have done us a very big favor."
"Oh, yeah?" Leon responded. "What you gonna do with the gun?"
The ballistics expert answered. "First we'll clean it and make sure it's safe. Then we'll fire it." He looked at Shaw. "You can forget any other forensic stuff. The water in the quarry must be chemically active. This corrosion is pretty fierce." He looked at Leon. "If you catch any fish there, son, you be sure you don't eat them unless your dad says it's all right."
"Okay," the boy assured him.
"Fibers." Shaw said.
"Yeah, maybe that. Don't worry. If they're there, we'll find 'em. What about the barrel?"
"Maybe," the man replied. "By the way, this gun comes from Singapore. That makes it fairly new. The Israelis just licensed them to make the piece eighteen months ago. It's the same outfit that makes the M-16 under license from Colt's." He read off the number. It would be telexed to the FBI's Legal Attache in Singapore in a matter of minutes. "I want to get to work on this right now."
"Can I watch?" Leon asked. "I'll keep out of the way."
"Tell you what," Shaw said. "I want to talk to your dad a little longer. How about I have one of our agents take you through our museum. You can see how we caught all the old-time bad guys. If you wait outside, somebody will come and take you around."
"Okay!"
"We can't talk about this, right?" Mr. Newton asked after his son had left.
"That's correct, sir." Shaw paused. "That's important for two reasons. First, we don't want the perpetrators to know that we've had a break in the case—and this could be a major break, Mr. Newton; you've done something very important. The other reason is to protect you and your family. The people involved in this are very dangerous. Put it this way: you know that they tried to kill a pregnant woman and a four-year-old girl."
That got the man's attention. Robert Newton, who had five children, three of them girls, didn't like hearing that.
"Now, have you ever seen people around the quarry?" Shaw asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Anybody."
"There's maybe two or three other folks who cut wood back there. I know the names—I mean their first names, y'know? And like I said, kids like to go parking back there." He laughed. "Once I had to help one out. I mean, the road's not all that great, and this one kid was stuck in the mud, and… " Newton's voice trailed off. His face changed. "Once, it was a Tuesday… I couldn't work that day 'cause the crane was broke, and I didn't much feel like sitting around the house, y'know? So I went out to chop some wood. There was this van coming outa the road. He was having real trouble in the mud. I had to wait like ten minutes 'cause he blocked the whole road, slippin' and slidin', like."
"What kind of van?"
"Dark, mostly. The kind with the sliding door—musta been customized some, it had that dark stuff on the windows, y'know?"
Bingo! Shaw told himself. "Did you see the driver or anybody inside?"
Newton thought for a moment. "Yeah… it was a black dude. He was—yeah, I remember, he was yellin', like. I guess he was pissed at getting stuck like that. I mean, I couldn't hear him, but you could tell he was yelling, y'know? He had a beard, and a leather jacket like the one I wear to work."
"Anything else about the van?"
"I think it made noise, like it had a big V-8. Yeah, it must have been a custom van to have that."
Shaw looked at his men; too excited to smile as they scribbled their notes.
"The papers said all the crooks were white," Newton said.
"The papers don't always get things right," Shaw noted.
"You mean the bastard who killed that cop was black?" Newton didn't like that. So was he. "And he tried to do that family, too… Shit!"
"Mr. Newton, that is secret. Do you understand me? You can't tell anybody about that, not even your son—was he there then?"
"Nah, he was in school."
"Okay, you can't tell anyone. That is to protect you and your family. We're talking about some very dangerous people here."
"Okay, man." Newton looked at the table for a moment. "You mean we got people running around with machine guns, killing people—here? Not in Lebanon and like that, but here?"
"That's about the size of it."
"Hey, man, I didn't spend a year in the Nam so we could have that shit where I live."
Several floors downstairs, two weapons experts had already detail-stripped the Uzi. A small vacuum cleaner was applied to every part in the hope there might be cloth fibers that matched those taken from the van. A final careful look was taken at the parts. The damage from water immersion had done no good to the stampings, made mostly of mild steel. The stronger, corrosion-resistant ballistic steel of the barrel and bolt were in somewhat better shape. The lab chief reassembled the gun himself, just to show his technicians that he still knew how. He took his time, oiling the pieces with care, finally working the action to make sure it functioned properly.
"Okay," he said to himself. He left the weapon on the table, its bolt closed on an empty chamber. Next he pulled an Uzi magazine from a cabinet and loaded twenty 9-millimeter rounds. This he stuck in his pocket.
It always struck visitors as somewhat incongruous. The technicians usually wore white laboratory coats, like doctors, when they fired the guns. The man donned his ear protectors, stuck the muzzle into the slot, and fired a single round to make certain that the gun really worked. It did. Then he held the trigger down, emptying the magazine in a brief span of seconds. He pulled out the magazine, checked that the weapon was safe, and handed it to his assistant.
"I'm going to wash my hands. Let's get those bullets checked out." The chief ballistics technician was a fastidious person.
By the time he was finished drying his hands, he had a collection of twenty spent bullets. The metal jacket on each showed the characteristic marks made by the rifling of the machine gun's barrel. The marks were roughly the same on each bullet, but slightly different, since the gun barrel expanded when it got hot.
He took a small box from the evidence case. This bullet had gone completely through the body of a police officer, he remembered. It seemed such a puny thing to have taken a life, he thought, not even an ounce of lead and steel, hardly deformed at all from its deadly passage. It was hard not to dwell on such thoughts. He placed it on one side of the comparison microscope and took another from the set he'd just fired. Then he removed his glasses and bent down to the eyepieces. The bullets were… close. They'd definitely been fired by the same kind of gun… He switched samples. Closer. The third bullet was closer still. He carefully rotated the sample, comparing it with the round that was kept in the evidence case, and it…
"We got a match." He backed away from the 'scope and another technician bent down to check.
"Yeah, that's a match. One hundred percent," the man agreed. The boss ordered his men to check other rounds and walked to the phone.
"Shaw."
"It's the same gun. One-hundred-percent sure. I have a match on the round that killed the trooper. They're checking the ones from the Porsche now."
"Good work, Paul!"
"You bet. I'll be back to you in a little while."
Shaw replaced the phone and looked at his people. "Gentlemen, we just had a break in the Ryan case."