State of Siege

kept Downer from lashing out at the younger man was they both knew that if the little Uruguayan ever crossed the line too far, the six-foot-four-inch Australian could and would pull him in two.

Vandal put the case on the table and popped the tape from the camera. He walked over to the TV.

“I think the surveillance went fine,” Vandal said.

“The traffic patterns appear to be the same as they were last week. But we’ll compare the tapes, just to make sure.”

“For the last time, I hope,” Barone said.

“We all hope,” Downer said.

“Yes, but I’m anxious to move,” the twenty-nine-year-old officer said. He did not say where he wanted to move. A group of foreigners meeting in a rundown flat never knew who might be eavesdropping.

Sazanka sat silently on the sofa and untied his Nikes. He massaged his thick feet. Barone tossed him a bottled water from the refrigerator in the kitchenette. The Japanese grunted his thanks. Sazanka’s command of English was the weakest, and he tended to say very little. Downer shared his uncle’s view of the Japanese, and Sazanka’s silence made him happy. Ever since Downer was a child, Japanese sailors, tourists, and speculators had been all over the harbor in Sydney. If they didn’t act as though they owned it, they acted as though one day they would. Unfortunately, Sazanka could fly a variety of aircraft. The group needed his skills.

Barone handed a bottle to Georgiev, who was standing behind him.

“Thank you,” Georgiev said.

They were the first words Downer had heard the Bulgarian speak since dinner the night before — even though he spoke nearly perfect English, having worked for almost ten years as a Central Intelligence Agency contact in Sofia. Georgiev hadn’t talked a lot in Cambodia, either. He’d kept an eye out for their Khmer Rouge contacts as well as undercover government police or UN human rights observers. The Bulgarian preferred to listen, even when nothing was being discussed. Downer wished he himself had the patience for that. Good listeners could hear things in casual conversation, when people had their guard down, that often proved valuable.

“Want one?” Barone asked Vandal.

The Frenchman shook his head.

Barone looked at Downer. “I’d offer you a bottle, but I know you’d refuse. You like it hot. Boiling.”

“Warm beverages are better for you,” Downer replied. “They make you sweat. Cleans the system.”

“As if we don’t sweat enough,” Barone commented.

“I don’t,” Downer said. “And it’s a good sensation. Makes you feel productive. Alive.”

“When you’re with a lady, sweating is great,” Barone said. “In here, it’s self-punishment.”

“That can be a good feeling, too,” Downer said.

“To a psychotic, maybe.”

Downer grinned. “And aren’t we, mate?”

“Enough,” Vandal said as the videotape began to play.

Downer was a talker, too. In his case, the sound of his own voice comforted him. He used to talk himself to sleep when he was a kid, tell himself stories to drown out the sound of his drunken dockworker father slapping around whatever cheap woman he was with in their rickety wooden apartment. Talking was a habit Downer never gave up.

Barone walked into the room. He popped the seal on his own water bottle, chugged it down in a long swallow, then pulled up a chair and sat beside Downer. He snatched a graham cracker and chomped it down as they all watched the nineteen-inch TV set. He leaned toward Downer.

“I don’t like what you said,” Barone whispered. “A psychotic is irrational. I am not.”

“If you say so.”

“Ah dew,” Barone said, imitating Downer, this time with an edge.

Downer let it go. Unlike Barone, he realized that he only needed the man’s skills, not his approval.

The men watched the twenty-minute tape through once, then watched it again. Before watching it a third time, Vandal joined Downer and Barone at the rickety table. Barone had gotten himself focused. He was a former revolutionary who had helped found the short-lived Consejo de Seguridad Nacional, which had ousted the corrupt President Bordaberry. His expertise was explosives. Downer’s experience was firearms, rockets, and hand-to-hand combat. Sazanka flew. Georgiev had the contacts to obtain whatever they needed through the black market, which was tapped into all the resources of the former Soviet Union, its clients in the Middle and Far East, and in the United States. Georgiev had recently returned from New York, where he spent time arranging for weapons through a Khmer Rouge arms supplier and working with his intelligence contact, going over the target itself. All of that would be needed during the second part of the operation.

But part two was not on their minds right now. First part one had to succeed. Together, the three men single-framed through the tape, making sure that the explosion they planned would get them through the target zone without destroying anything else.

After spending four hours on the tape and the rest of the afternoon meeting in the field with Vandal’s local contacts to review the truck, helicopter, and other equipment they’d be using here, the team ate at a sidewalk cafe. Then they returned to the room to rest.

As anxious as the men were, they all slept. They had to.

Tomorrow, they would begin to inaugurate a new era in international relations. One that would not only change the world by calling attention to a big lie but would also make them rich. As Downer lay on top of his sleeping bag, he enjoyed the gentle breeze of the open window. He pictured himself being somewhere else. His own island, perhaps. Maybe even his own country. And he calmed himself by listening to the voice in his head telling him all the things he could do with his share of two hundred and fifty million dollars.

TWO

Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland

Sunday, 12:10 A.M.

When he’d ended his tenure as the mayor of Los Angeles, Paul Hood decided that cleaning out one’s desk was a misnomer. What you were really doing was mourning, just like at a funeral. You were remembering the good and the sad, the bittersweet and the rewards, the accomplishments and the unfinished business, the love and sometimes the hate.

The hate, he thought, his hazel eyes narrowing. He was full of it now, though he wasn’t sure at whom or what or why.

Hate wasn’t the reason he’d resigned as the first director of Op-Center, the U.S. government’s elite crisis management team. He’d done that to spend more time with his wife, his daughter, and his son. To keep his family intact. But he was full of it just the same.

At Sharon? he wondered suddenly, half-ashamed. Are you mad at your wife for making you choose?

He tried to sort through that as he cleaned out his desk, dropping declassified memories into a cardboard box — the classified files and even personal letters therein had to stay. He couldn’t believe he’d only been here two and one-half years. That wasn’t a long time compared to many jobs. But he’d worked cockpit-close with the people here and he was going to miss them. There was also what his intelligence chief Bob Herbert once described as “a pornographic excitement” in the work. Lives, sometimes millions of them, were affected by the wise or instinctive or occasionally desperate decisions he and his team had made here. It was like Herbert had said. Hood never felt like a god making those decisions. He felt like an animal. Every sense hair-trigger alert, nervous energy at a high boil.

He was going to miss those feelings, too.

He opened a small plastic box that held a paper clip General Sergei Orlov had given him. Orlov was the head of the Russian op-center, a facility code-named Mirror Image. Op-Center had helped Mirror Image prevent renegade Russian officers and politicians from throwing Eastern Europe into war. The paper clip had a fiber-thin microphone inside. It had been used by Colonel Leonid Rossky to spy on potential rivals of Minister of the Interior Nikolai Dogin,