too. I’ll have my desk cleared out this afternoon.”
“Nobody is firing you.” Thorn heard the unspoken “yet.”
“Fine. Then as long as my name is on the door, nobody is sending me an assistant I don’t want or need. My people will get this job done as soon as it is humanly possible. They won’t go any slower and they can’t go any faster—you standing on the sidelines yelling ‘Hurry, hurry!’ at guys running full out isn’t going to help.”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was at the beck and call of a civilian, the President of the United States, but Thorn guessed he wasn’t used to hearing lip from anybody less than that. Thorn could see it didn’t set well.
“Sir, it’s like sifting a beach, looking for a particular grain of sand. Our guys will know it when they get to it, but they can’t just walk out into the dunes and pick that one grain up and say, ‘Aha!’ ”
Hadden didn’t say anything.
Thorn had dealt with people like him before—CEOs of major corporations tended to be control freaks; that was part of how they got to the top, by attending to all the details. And the United States military was as major as it got. Thorn said, “I understand you are the man in the hot seat, General, and that you are responsible for all kinds of things about which I don’t have a clue. But this is what we do. Once you set the dogs loose, you have to wait until they get the scent and run your game to ground.”
“I don’t like waiting.”
“No, sir, I understand, I don’t either. You don’t have to like it, but you need to understand it. This is how it is done.”
Hadden chewed on that for a moment. “All right. But you put a bug in your man’s ear and make damn sure he is making all due speed.”
“Yes, sir.”
But Thorn wouldn’t say anything to Jay. The general believed that a little bit of time pressure would help keep people on their toes; feeling as if somebody was looking over your shoulder. The general was wrong. With these people, at any rate, that would just make things worse.
As Thorn was leaving the Pentagon, walking to where his car and driver waited, he saw Marissa angling across the walk toward him.
“Why, hey, Tommy, fancy meeting you here.”
He didn’t think for a second that it was a coincidence. “Are you following me?”
“Of course. You didn’t think this was a
He smiled. “Why?”
“Well, sometimes you are pretty dense, so you might have thought I just happened to be in the area—”
“No, Marissa. Why are you following me?”
“Just concerned about you. Worried you might have been in there telling the Chairman of the JCOS to go play with himself.”
“Close. But he didn’t fire me and I didn’t quit.”
“That’s good. You’re learning patience, I like that. Truth is, I have something for you, in my capacity as CIA liaison to Net Force—for whatever that is worth these days.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“That break-in, the one where they got the M-47 Dragon launcher and rockets?”
“The one they used to wipe out the MPs chasing them?”
“Yeah, that one. Well, it turns out we got one of their guys. He was killed by an M-16 round. They tried to burn the body in the truck they used, but it was recovered, and an ID made; dental records confirmed it.”
“That’s great.”
“For you, maybe. Turns out he was one of ours—a CIA asset.”
“No shit?”
“Plenty of that, but, yeah. A contract man, not a direct employee. Name was Stark. Ex-military—he was a Ranger—then he got into mercenary work in Congo, eventually wound up knocking around in Iraq, working private security. Apparently the local station used him for gathering intel—he spoke some Arabic and a little Kurdish. We lost track of him a couple years back. According to his passport, he’s still in the Middle East.”
“If you found his body in the back of a truck in Kentucky, then I’m guessing maybe he was using a different passport,” Thorn said.
“Give the man a cigar. Anyway, I’m having the information couriered to your people—known associates, relatives, his old unit, like that. Maybe Gridley can find something that State missed.”
“I hope so. Those rocket launchers they stole—how easy would it be to take down a passenger jet with one?”
“Well, they are outdated, there are better ones now, but—as easy as pointing your finger and going ‘bang!’ If they can get within half a mile of a target like, say, the White House? They might be able to put a rocket through the President’s window.”
“That’s what Hadden is really afraid of,” Thorn said.
“Sure. And he’s right to be. Bulletproof glass won’t stop an armor-piercing antitank rocket. It’ll go through the wall of a brick building like a hot knife through butter.”
Thorn nodded. “You need a ride?”
“Got one. Call me when you get off work.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As he headed to his car, Thorn considered the new intelligence. He could understand how General Hadden was worried. These people seemed to be able to penetrate the Army’s bases at will, and this last episode gave them weapons that could do a lot of damage.
What might they try and collect next time?
Maybe he did need to at least mention this to Jay Gridley. . . .
19
Jay Gridley, dressed only in a loincloth with a sheath knife strapped to his waist, swung through the trees on a thick and flexible vine. As the hot jungle air rushed past him, he did the yell:
“Uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh-ahhh-uhhh!”
He grinned. He had gotten pretty good at the ape-man’s attention-getting cry. He had watched a lot of Tarzan movies growing up, and he had practiced the yell made famous by Johnny Weissmuller. Yeah, there had been other Tarzan actors, before and after, some good, some terrible, but as far as Jay was concerned, there was only one Tarzan—just as there was only one James Bond, Sean Connery. . . .
He reached a fat tree limb at the end of his swing and let go of the vine. He thought about doing the yell again, but decided that wasn’t necessary. The denizens of the jungle knew that Jay of the Apes was here, no question about that.
As he did for most his scenarios, Jay had blended fact with fiction into what he thought was a seamless whole. The yell, for instance. There were several stories on the genesis of it. Weissmuller’s version had it that he had come up with the cry based on being able to yodel as a boy. Pure fiction, that. Johnny Sheffield, who played “Boy” starting in 1939, remembered that a guy from the sound department hit a note on a piano and taped his voice, then fiddled with it. The truth was, the cry—the original MGM version—had been put together by Douglas Shearer, a technician who taped a shout, probably Weissmuller’s, though the verified identity was forever lost to anonymity, enhanced it using the crude electronics of the day—this was, after all, in the 1940s—spliced it, and then ran it backward. Since the second half of the yell was the reverse of the first part—like a wordless palindrome—it sounded the same from either direction.
