Patriot Games

very much. One problem with hi-tech issues was that so many investors wanted big returns very quickly, or they'd move on to something else, forgetting that things didn't necessarily happen that way. This company had found a small though somewhat precarious niche, and was ready to try something bold. Ryan made a mental estimate of what the Navy contract would be worth and compared it with the company's total revenues…

'Okay!' he told himself before exiting the system completely and shutting his computer down. Next he called his broker. Ryan worked through a discount brokerage firm that had people on duty around the clock. Jack always dealt with the same man.

'Hi, Mort, it's Jack. How's the family?'

'Hello again, Doctor Ryan. Everything's fine with us. What can we do for you tonight?'

'An outfit called Holoware, one of the hi-tech bunch on Highway 128 outside Boston. It's on the AMEX.'

'Okay.' Ryan heard tapping on a keyboard. Everyone used computers. 'Here it is. Going at four and seven- eighths, not a very active issue… until lately. There has been some modest activity over the past month.'

'What kind?' Ryan asked. This was another sign to look for.

'Oh, I see. The company is buying itself back a little. No big deal, but they're buying their own stock out.'

Bingo! Ryan smiled to himself. Thank you, Robby. You gave me a tip on a real live one. Jack asked himself if this constituted trading on inside information. His initial tip might be called that, but his decision to buy was based on confirmation made legally, on the basis of his experience as a stock trader. Okay, it's legal. He could do whatever he wanted.

'How much do you think you can get for me?'

'It's not a very impressive stock.'

'How often am I wrong, Mort?'

'How much do you want?'

'At least twenty-K, and if there's more, I want all of it you can find.' There was no way he'd get hold of more than fifty thousand shares, but Ryan made a snap decision to grab all he could. If he lost, it was only money, and it had been over a year since he'd last had a hunch like this one. If they got the Navy contract, that stock would increase in value tenfold. The company must have had a tip, too. Buying back their own stock on the slim resources they had would, if Ryan was guessing right, dramatically increase the firm's capital, enabling a rapid expansion of operations. Holoware was betting on the future, and betting big.

There was five seconds of silence on the phone.

'What do you know, Jack?' the broker asked finally.

'I'm playing a hunch.'

'Okay… twenty-K plus… I'll call you at ten tomorrow. You think I should…?'

'It's a toss of the dice, but I think it's a good toss.'

'Thanks. Anything else?'

'No. I have to go eat dinner. Good night, Mort.'

'See ya.' Both men hung up. At the far end of the phone, the broker decided that he'd go in for a thousand shares, too. Ryan was occasionally wrong, but when he was right, he tended to be very right.

'Christmas Day,' O'Donnell said quietly. 'Perfect.'

'Is that the day they're moving Sean?' McKenney asked.

'He leaves London by van at four in the morning. That's bloody good news. I was afraid they'd use a helicopter. No word on the route they'll use…' He read on. 'But they're going to take him across on the Lymington ferry at eight-thirty Christmas morning. Excellent timing, when you think about it. Too early for heavy traffic. Everyone'll be opening his presents and getting dressed for church. The van might even have the ferry to itself— who'd expect a prisoner transfer on Christmas Day?'

'So, we are going to break Sean out, then?'

'Michael, our men do us little good when they're inside, don't they? You and I are flying over tomorrow morning. I think we'll drive down to Lymington and look at the ferry.'

9 A Day for Celebration

'God, it'll be nice to have two arms again,' Ryan observed.

'Two more weeks, maybe three,' Cathy reminded him. 'And keep your hand still inside the damned sling!'

'Yes, dear.'

It was about two in the morning, and things were going badly—and well. Part of the Ryan family tradition—a tradition barely three years old, but a tradition nevertheless—was that after Sally was in bed and asleep, her parents would creep down to the basement storage area—a room with a padlocked door—and bring the toys upstairs for assembly. The previous two years, this ceremony had been accompanied by a couple of bottles of champagne. Assembling toys was a wholly different sort of exercise when the assemblers were half blasted. It was their method of relaxing into the Christmas spirit.

So far things had gone well. Jack had taken his daughter to the seven o'clock children's mass at St. Mary's, and gotten her to bed a little after nine. His daughter had slid her head around the fireplace wall only twice before a loud command from her father had banished her to her bedroom for good, her arm clasping an overly talkative AG Bear to her chest. By midnight it was decided that she was asleep enough for her parents to make a little noise. This had begun the toy trek, as Cathy called it. Both parents removed their shoes to minimize noise on the hardwood steps and went downstairs. Of course, Jack forgot the key to the padlock, and had to climb back upstairs to the master bedroom to search for it. Five minutes later the door was opened and the two of them made four trips each, setting up a lavish pile of multicolored boxes near the tree, next to Jack's tool kit.

'You know what the two most obscene words in the English language are, Cathy?' Ryan asked nearly two hours later.

' 'Assembly required, ' his wife answered with a giggle. 'Honey, last year I said that.'

'A small Phillips.' Jack held his hand out. Cathy smacked the screwdriver into his hand like a surgical instrument. Both of them were sitting on the rug, fifteen feet from the eight-foot tree. Around them was a crescent of toys, some in boxes, some already assembled by the now-exasperated father of a little girl.

'You ought to let me do that.'

'This is man's work,' her husband said. He sat the screwdriver down and sipped at a glass of champagne.

'You chauvinist pig! If I let you do this by yourself, you wouldn't be finished by Easter.'

She was right, Jack told himself. Doing it half-drunk wasn't all that hard. Doing it one-handed was hard but not insurmountable. Doing it one-handed and half-drunk was… The damned screws didn't want to stay in the plastic, and the instructions for putting a V-8 engine together had to be easier than this!

'Why is it that a doll needs a house?' Jack asked plaintively. 'I mean, the friggin' doll's already in a house, isn't she?'

'It must be hard, being a chauvinist pig. You dodos just don't understand anything,' Cathy noted sympathetically. 'I guess men never get over baseball bats—all those simple, one-piece toys.'

Jack's head turned slowly. 'Well, the least you could do is have another glass of wine.'

'One's the weekly limit, Jack. I did have a big glass,' she reminded him.

'And made me drink the rest.'

'You bought the bottle, Jack.' She picked it up. 'Big one, too.'

Ryan turned back to the Barbie Doll house. He thought he remembered when the Barbie Doll had been invented, a simple, rather curvy doll, but still just a damned doll, something that girls played with. It hadn't occurred to him then that he might someday have a little girl of his own. The things we do for our kids, he told himself. Then he laughed quietly at himself. Of course we do, and we enjoy it. Tomorrow this will be a funny memory, like the Christmas morning last year when I nearly put this very screwdriver through the palm of my hand. If he didn't enlist his wife's assistance, Ryan told himself,