Patriot Games

down.

'What? Who did it?' the older man asked.

'Here's the father, Jack Ryan.' It was the same picture that the London papers had used. Jack's graduation shot from Quantico. Eddie knew that his uncle always looked at Marine dress blues with pride.

'I've seen him before somewhere…'

'Yeah. He stopped a terrorist attack over in London a few months back. It looks like he offended the terrorists enough that they came after him and his family. The Bureau is working on that.'

'Who did it?'

The last photo went down on the bar. It showed Ryan's hands less than a foot from Paddy O'Neil, and a black man holding him back.

'Who's the jig?' John asked. His nephew almost lost his temper.

'Goddammit, Uncle John! That man is a Navy fighter pilot.'

'Oh.' John was briefly embarrassed. He had little use for blacks, though one who wore a Marine uniform into his bar got his first drink free, too. It was different with the ones in uniform, he told himself. Anyone who served the flag as he had done was okay in his book, John Donoho always said. Some of my best friends in the Corps… He remembered how Navy strike aircraft had supported his outfit all the way back to the sea, holding the Chinese back with rockets and napalm. Well, maybe this one was different, too. He stared at the rest of the picture for a few seconds. 'So, you say Paddy had something to do with this?'

'I've been telling you for years who the bastard fronts for. If you don't believe me, maybe you want to ask Mr. Ryan here. It's bad enough that O'Neil spits on our whole country every time he comes over here. His friends damned near killed this whole family yesterday. We got one of 'em. Two Marine guards at the Naval Academy grabbed him, waiting to shoot Ryan. His name's Eamon Clark, and we know that he used to work for the Provisional Wing of the IRA—we know it, Uncle John, he's a convicted murderer. They caught him with a loaded pistol in his pocket. You still think they're good guys? Dammit, they're going after Americans now! If you don't believe me, believe this!' Eddie Donoho rearranged the photos on the wooden surface. 'This little girl, and her mother, and a kid not even born yet almost died yesterday. This state trooper did. He left a wife and a kid behind. That friend of yours in the back room raises the money to buy the guns, he's connected with the people who did this.'

'But why?'

'Like I said, this girl's dad got in the way of a murder over in London. I guess the people he stopped wanted to get even with him—not just him, though, they went for his whole family,' the agent explained slowly.

'The little girl didn't—'

'Goddammit,' Eddie swore again. 'That's why they're called terrorists!' It was getting through. He could see that he was finally getting the message across.

'You're sure that Paddy is part of this?' his uncle asked.

'He's never lifted a gun that we know of. He's their mouthpiece, he comes over here and raises money so that they can do things like this at home. Oh, he never gets his hands bloody. He's too smart for that. But this is what the money goes for. We are absolutely sure of that. And now they're playing their games over here.' Agent Donoho knew that the money raising was secondary to the psychological reasons for coming over, but now wasn't the time to clutter the issue with details. He watched his uncle stare at the photos of the little girl. His face showed the confusion that always accompanies a completely new thought.

'You're sure? Really sure?'

'Uncle John, we have over thirty agents on the case now, plus the local police. You bet we're sure. We'll get 'em, too. The Director's put the word out on this case. We want 'em. Whatever it takes, we'll get these bastards,' Edward Michael Donoho, Jr., said with cold determination.

John Donoho looked at his nephew, and for the first time he saw a man. Eddie's FBI post was a source of family pride, but John finally knew why this was so. He wasn't a kid anymore. He was a man with a job about which he was deadly serious. More than the photographs, it was this that decided things. John had to believe what he'd been told.

The owner of the Patriots Club stood up straight and walked down the bar to the folding gate. He lifted it and made for the back room, with his nephew trailing behind.

'But our boys are fighting back,' O'Neil was telling the fifteen men in the room. 'Every day they fight back to —joining us, Johnny?'

'Out,' Donoho said quietly.

'What—I don't understand, John,' O'Neil said, genuinely puzzled.

'You must think I'm pretty stupid. I guess maybe I was. Leave.' The voice was more forceful now, and the feigned accent was gone. 'Get out of my club and don't ever come back.'

'But, Johnny—what are you talking about?'

Donoho grabbed the man by his collar and lifted him off his chair. O'Neil's voice continued to protest as he was propelled all the way out the front door. Eddie Donoho waved to his uncle as he followed his charge out onto the street.

'What was that all about?' one of the men from the back room asked. Another of them, a reporter for the Boston Globe, started making notes as the bar owner stumbled through what he had finally learned.

To this point no police agency had implicated any terrorist group by name, and in fact neither had Special Agent Donoho done so. His instructions from Washington on that score had been carefully given and carefully followed. But in the translation through Uncle John and a reporter, the facts got slightly garbled—as surprised no one—and within hours the story was on the AP wire that the attack on Jack Ryan and his family had been made by the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army.

Sean Miller's mission in America had been fully accomplished by an agency of the United States government.

Miller and his party were already back home. As many people in this line of work had done before. Sean reflected on the value of rapid international air travel. In this case it had been off to Mexico from Washington's Duties International, from there to the Netherlands Antilles, to Schiphol International Airport on a KLM flight, and then to Ireland. All one needed were correct travel documents and a little money. The travel documents in question were already destroyed, and the money untraceable cash. He sat across from Kevin O'Donnell's desk, drinking water to compensate for the dehydration normal to flying.

'What about Eamon?' One rule of ULA operations was that no overseas telephone calls ever came to his house.

'Alex's man says he was picked up.' Miller shrugged. 'It was a risk I felt worth taking. I selected Ned for it because he knows very little about us.' He knew that O'Donnell had to agree with that. Clark was one of the new men brought into the Organization, and more of an accident than a recruit. He'd come south because one of his friends from the H-blocks had come. O'Donnell had thought him of possible use, since they had no experienced work-alone assassins. But Clark was stupid. His motivations came from emotion rather than ideology. He was, in fact, a typical PIRA thug, little different from those in the UVF for that matter, useful in the same sense that a trained dog was useful, Kevin told himself. He knew but a few names and faces within the Organization. Most damning of all, he had failed. Clark's one redeeming characteristic was his doglike loyalty. He hadn't broken in Long Kesh prison and he probably wouldn't break now. He lacked the imagination.

'Very well,' Kevin O'Donnell said after a moment's reflection. Clark would be remembered as a martyr, gaining greater respect in failure than he had managed to earn in success. 'The rest?'

'Perfect. I saw the wife and child die, and Alex's people got us away cleanly.' Miller smiled and poured some whiskey to follow his liter of ice water.

'They're not dead, Sean,' O'Donnell said.

'What?' Miller had been on an airplane less than three hours after the shooting, and hadn't seen or heard a snippet of news since. He listened to his boss's explanation in incredulous silence.

'But it doesn't matter,' O'Donnell concluded. He explained that, too. The AP story that had originated in the Boston Globe had been picked up by the Irish Times of Dublin. 'It was a good plan after all, Sean. Despite everything that went wrong, the mission is accomplished.'

Sean didn't allow himself to react. Two operations in a row had gone wrong for him. Before the fiasco in