Jack Ryan 2 - Patriot Games (26 page)

“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, Santa would be planning next year's flight before he finished. Jack took a deep breath and swallowed his pride.

“Help.”

Cathy checked her watch. “That took about forty minutes longer than I expected.”

“I must be slowing down.”

“Poor baby, having to drink all that champagne all by himself.” She kissed him on the forehead. “Screwdriver.”

He handed it to her. Cathy took a quick look at the plans. “No wonder, you dummy. You're using a short screw when you're supposed to use a long one.”

“I keep forgetting that I'm married to a high-priced mechanic.”

“That's real Christmas spirit. Jack.” She grinned as she turned the screw into place.

“A very pretty, smart, and extremely lovable high-priced mechanic.” He ran a finger down the back of her neck.

“That's a little better.”

“Who's better with tools than I am, one-handed.”

Her head turned to reveal the sort of smile a wife saves only for the husband she loves. “Give me another screw. Jack, and I'll forgive you.”

“Don't you think you should finish the doll house first?”

“Screw, dammit!” He handed her one. “You have a one-track gutter, but I forgive you anyway.”

“Thanks. If it didn't work, though, I had something else planned.”

“Oh, did Santa come for me, too?”

“I'm not sure. I'll check in a few minutes.”

“You didn't do bad, considering,” his wife said, finishing off the orange plastic roof. “That's it, isn't it?”

“Last one,” Jack confirmed. “Thanks for the assist, babe.”

“Did I ever tell you what -- no, I didn't. It was one of the ladies-in-waiting. I never did find out what they were waiting for. Anyway, this one countess . . . she was right out of Gone With the Wind,” Cathy said with a chuckle. It was his wife's favorite epithet for useless women. “She asked me if I did needlepoint.”

Not the sort of thing you ask my wife. Jack grinned at the windows. “And you said . . . ”

“Only on eyeballs.” A sweet, nasty smile.

“Oooh. I hope that wasn't over lunch.”

“Jack! You know me better than that. She was nice enough, and she played a pretty good piano.”

“Good as yours?”

“No.” His wife smiled at him. Jack reached out to squeeze the tip of her nose.

“Caroline Ryan, MD, liberated woman, instructor in ophthalmic surgery, world-famous player of classical piano, wife and mother, takes no crap off anybody.”

“Except her husband.”

“When's the last time I ever won an exchange with you?” Jack asked.

“Jack, we're not in competition. We're in love.” She leaned toward him.

“I won't argue with you on that,” he said quietly before kissing his wife's offered lips. “How many people do you suppose are still in love after all the time we've been married?”

“Just the lucky ones, you old fart. 'All the time we've been married'!”

Jack kissed her again and rose. He walked carefully around the sea of toys toward the tree and returned with a small box wrapped in green Christmas paper. He sat down beside his wife, his shoulder against hers as he dropped the box in her lap.

“Merry Christmas, Cathy.”

She opened the box as greedily as a child, but neatly, using her nails to slit the paper. She found a white cardboard box, and inside it, a felt-covered one. This she opened slowly.

It was a necklace of fine gold, more than a quarter-inch wide, designed to fit closely around the neck. You could tell the price by the workmanship and the weight. Cathy Ryan took a deep breath. Her husband held his. Figuring out women's fashions was not his strongest point. He'd gotten advice from Sissy Jackson, and a very patient clerk at the jewelry store. Do you like it?

“I better not swim with this on.”

“But you won't have to take it off when you scrub,” Jack said. “Here.” He took it from the box and put it around her neck. He managed to clasp it one-handed on the first try.

“You practiced.” One hand traced over the necklace while her eyes looked deeply into his. “You practiced, just so you could put it on me yourself, didn't you?”

“For a week at the office.” Jack nodded. “Wrapping it was a bitch, too.”

“It's wonderful. Oh, Jack!” Both her arms darted around his neck, and he kissed the base of hers.

“Thanks, babe. Thanks for being my wife. Thanks for having my kids. Thanks for letting me love you.”

Cathy blinked away a tear or two. They gave her blue eyes a gleam that made him happier than any man on earth. Let me count the ways . . .

“Just something I saw,” he explained casually, lying. It was something he'd seen after looking for nine hours, through seven stores in three shopping malls. “And it just said to me, 'I was made for her.' ”

“Jack, I didn't get you anything like --”

“Shut up. Every morning I wake up, and I see you next to me, I get the best present there is.”

“You are a sentimental jerk right out of some book -- but I don't mind.”

“You do like it?” he asked carefully.

“You dummy -- I love it!” They kissed again. Jack had lost his parents years before. His sister lived in Seattle, and most of the rest of his relations were in Chicago. Everything he loved was in this house: a wife, a child -- and a third of another. He'd made his wife smile on Christmas, and now this year went into the ledger book as a success.

About the time Ryan started assembling the doll house, four identical blue vans left the Brixton Prison at five-minute intervals. For each, the first thirty minutes involved driving through the side streets of suburban London. In each, a pair of police officers sat looking out the small windows in the rear doors, watching to see if there might be a car trailing the truck on its random path through the city.

They'd picked a good day for it. It was a fairly typical morning for the English winter. The vans drove through patches of fog and cold rain. There was a moderate storm blowing in from the Channel, and best of all, it was dark. The island's northern latitude guaranteed that the sun would not be up for some hours yet, and the dark blue vans were invisible in the early morning.

Security was so strict that Sergeant Bob Highland of C-13 didn't even know that he was in the third van to leave the jail. He did know that he was sitting only a few feet from Sean Miller, and that their destination was the small port of Lymington. They had a choice of three ports to take them to the Isle of Wight, and three different modes of transport: ordinary ferry, hovercraft, and hydrofoil. They might also have chosen a Royal Navy helicopter out of Gosport, but Highland needed only a quick look at the starless sky to rule that one out. Not a good idea, he thought to himself. Besides, security is airtight. Not more than thirty people knew that Miller was being moved this morning. Miller himself hadn't known until three hours before, and he still didn't know what prison he was heading to. He'd only learn when he got to the island.

Embarrassments to the British prison system had accumulated over the years. The old, forbidding structures that inhabited such desolate places as Dartmoor in Cornwall had turned out to be amazingly easy to escape from, and as a result two new maximum-security facilities, Albany and Parkhurst, had been built on the Isle of Wight. There were many advantages to this. An island by definition was easier to secure, and this one had only four regular entry points. More importantly, this island was a clannish place even by English standards, and any stranger on the loose would at least be noticed, and might even be commented upon. The new prisons were somewhat more comfortable than those constructed in the previous century. It was an accident, but one to which Highland did not object. Along with the better living conditions for the prisoners came facilities designed to make escape very difficult -- nothing made them impossible, but these new prisons had television cameras to cover every inch of wall, electronic alarms in the most unlikely of places, and guards armed with automatic weapons.

Highland stretched and yawned. With luck he'd get home by early afternoon and still salvage something of Christmas Day with his family.

“I don't see anything at all to concern us,” the other constable said, his nose against the small glass rectangle in the door. “Only a handful of vehicles on the street, and none are following us.”

“I shouldn't complain,” Highland observed. He turned around to look at Miller.

The prisoner sat all the way forward on the left-hand bench. His hands were manacled, a chain running from the cuffs to a similar pair on his ankles. With luck and a little assistance, a man so restrained might be able to keep pace with a crawling infant, but he'd have little chance of outracing a two-year-old. Miller just sat there, his head back against the wall of the van, his eyes closed as the vehicle bounced and jolted over the road. He looked to be asleep, but Highland knew better. Miller had withdrawn into himself again, lost in some kind of contemplation.

What are you thinking about, Mr. Miller? the policeman wanted to ask. It wasn't that he'd failed to ask questions. Almost every day since the incident on The Mall, Highland and several other detectives had sat across a rugged wood table from this young man and tried to start some kind of conversation. He was a strong one. Highland admitted to himself. He had spoken but one unnecessary word, and that only nine days before. A jailer with more indignation than professionalism had used the excuse of a plumbing problem in Miller's cell to move him temporarily to another. In the other were two ODCs, as they were called: Ordinary Decent Criminals, as opposed to the political kind that C-13 dealt with. One was awaiting sentencing for a series of vicious street robberies, the other for the gun-murder of a shop owner in Kensington. Both knew who Miller was, and hated him enough to look at the small young man as a way to atone for the crimes which they little regretted in any case. When Highland had shown up for yet another fruitless interrogation session, he'd found Miller facedown on the floor of the cell, his pants gone, and the robber sodomizing him so brutally that the policeman had actually felt sympathy for the terrorist.

The Ordinary Decent Criminals had withdrawn at Highland's command, and when the cell door was opened, Highland had himself picked Miller up and helped him to the dispensary. And there Miller had actually spoken to him as though to another human being. A single word from the puffy, split lips; “Thanks.”

Cop rescues terrorist. Highland thought to himself, some headline that would be. The jailer had pleaded innocence, of course. There was a problem with the plumbing in Miller's cell -- somehow the work order had got mislaid, you see -- and the jailer had been called to quell a disturbance elsewhere. Hadn't heard a sound from that end of the cell block. Not a sound. Miller's face had been beaten to a bloody pulp, and certainly he'd have no toilet problems for a few more days. His sympathy for Miller had been short-lived. Highland was still angry with the jailer. It was his professionalism that was offended. What the jailer had done was, quite simply, wrong, and potentially the first step on a path that could lead back to the rack and hot pincers. The law was not so much designed to protect society from the criminals, but more profoundly to protect society from itself. This was a truth that not even all policemen understood fully, but it was the single lesson that Highland had learned from five years in the Anti-Terrorist Branch. It was a hard lesson to believe when you'd seen the work of the terrorists.

Miller's face still bore some of the marks, but he was a young man and he was healing quickly. Only for a brief few minutes had he been a victim, a human victim. Now he was an animal again. Highland was hard-pressed to think of him as a fellow man -- but that was what his professionalism was for. Even for the likes of you. The policeman looked back out the rear window.

It was a boring drive, as it had to be with no radio, no conversation, only vigilance for something that almost certainly wasn't out there. Highland wished that he'd put coffee in his thermos instead of tea. They watched the truck pass out of Woking, then Aldershot and Farnham. They were in the estate country of Southern England now. All around them were stately homes belonging to the horse crowd, and the less stately homes of those whom they employed. It was a pity it was dark. Highland thought, this could be a very pleasant drive. As it was, the fog hung in the numerous valleys, and rain pelted the flat metal top of the van, and the van's driver had to be especially careful as he negotiated the narrow, twisting roads that characterize the English countryside. The only good news was the near-total absence of traffic. Here and there Highland saw a solitary light over some distant door, but there was little more than that.