Rainbow Six (1997) (34 page)

“Flying what?”

“I called that Air Force bunch you told us about.

They’re going to lend us an MH-60 for you to play with.”

“Neighborly of them.” That meant to Malloy that he’d have to prove that he was a good driver. The prospect didn’t trouble him greatly. “What about my family? Is this TAD or what?”

“No, it’s a permanent duty station for you. They’ll come over on the usual government package.”

“Fair ’nuf. Will we be getting work here?”

“We’ve had two field operations so far, Bern and Vienna. There’s no telling how busy we’ll be with for-real operations, but you’ll find the training regimen is pretty busy here.”

“Suits me, John.”

“You want to work with us?”

The question surprised Malloy. “This is a volunteer outfit?”

Clark nodded. “Every one of us.”

“Well, how about that. Okay,” Malloy said. “You can sign me up.”

 

 

“May I ask a question?” Popov asked in New York.

“Sure,” the boss said, suspecting what it would be.

“What is the purpose of all this?”

“You really do not need to know at this time” was the expected reply to the expected question.

Popov nodded his submission/agreement to the answer. “As you say, sir, but you are spending a goodly amount of money for no return that I can determine.” Popov raised the money question deliberately, to see how his employer would react.

The reaction was genuine boredom: “The money is not important.”

And though the response was not unexpected, it was nonetheless surprising to Popov. For all of his professional life in the Soviet KGB, he’d paid out money in niggardly amounts to people who’d risked their lives and their freedom for it, frequently expecting far more than they’d ever gotten, because often enough the material and information given
was
worth far more than they’d been paid for it. But this man had already paid out more than Popov had distributed in over fifteen years of field operations—for nothing, for two dismal failures. And yet, there was no disappointment on his face, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich saw. What the hell was this all about?

“What went wrong in this case?” the boss asked.

Popov shrugged. “They were willing, but they made the mistake of underestimating the skill of the police response. It was quite skillful indeed,” he assured his employer. “More so than I expected, but not that great a surprise. Many police agencies across the world have highly trained counterterror groups.”

“It was the Austrian police? . . .”

“So the news media said. I did not press my investigation further. Should I have done so?”

A shake of the head. “No, just idle curiosity on my part.”

So, you don’t care if these operations succeed or fail,
Popov thought.
Then,
why
the hell do you fund them?
There was no logic to this. None at all. That would have been
—should
have been—troubling to Popov, yet it was not seriously so. He was becoming rich on these failures. He knew who was funding the operations, and had all the evidence—the cash—he needed to prove it. So, this man could not turn on him. If anything, he must fear his employee, mustn’t he? Popov had contacts in the terrorist community and could as easily turn them against the man who procured the cash, couldn’t he? It would be a natural fear for this man to hold, Dmitriy reflected.

Or was it? What, if anything, did this man fear? He was funding murder—well, attempted murder in the last case. He was a man of immense wealth and power, and such men feared losing those things more than they feared death. It kept coming down to the same thing, the former KGB officer told himself: What the hell was this all about? Why was he plotting the deaths of people, and asking Popov to—was he doing this to kill off the world’s remaining terrorists? Did
that
make sense? Using Popov as a stalking horse, an
agent provocateur,
to draw them out and be dealt with by the various countries’ highly trained counterterror teams? Dmitriy decided that he’d do a little research on his employer. It ought not to be too hard, and the New York Public Library was only two kilometers distant on Fifth Avenue.

“What sort of people were they?”

“Whom do you mean?” Popov asked.

“Dortmund and Fürchtner,” the boss clarified.

“Fools. They still believed in Marxism-Leninism. Clever in their way, intelligent in the technical sense, but their political judgment was faulty. They were unable to change when their world changed. That is dangerous. They failed to evolve, and for that they died.” It wasn’t much of an epitaph, Popov knew. They’d grown up studying the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and all the rest—the same people whose words Popov had studied through his youth, but even as a boy Popov had known better, and his world travels as a KGB officer had merely reinforced his distrust for the words of those nineteenth century academicians. His first flight on an American-made airliner, chatting in a friendly way with the people next to him, had taught him so much. But Hans and Petra—well, they’d grown up within the capitalist system, sampled all of its wares and benefits, and nevertheless decided that theirs was a system bereft of something that they needed. Perhaps in a way they’d been as he had been, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, just dissatisfied, wanting to be part of something better—but, no, he’d always wanted something better for himself, whereas they’d always wanted to bring others to Paradise, to lead and rule as good communists. And to reach that utopian vision, they’d been willing to walk through a sea of innocent blood. Fools. His employer, he saw, accepted his more abbreviated version of their lost lives and moved on.

“Stay in the city for a few days. I will call you when I need you.”

“As you say, sir.” Popov stood and left the office and caught the next elevator to street level. Once there, he decided to walk south to the library with the lions in front. The exercise might clear his head, and he still had a little thinking to do. “When I need you” could mean another mission, and soon.

“Erwin? George. How are you, my friend?”

“It has been an eventful week,” Ostermann admitted. His personal physician had him on tranquilizers, which, he thought, didn’t work very well. His mind still remembered the fear. Better yet, Ursel had come home, arriving even before the rescue mission, and that night—he’d gotten to bed just after four in the morning, she’d come to bed with him, just to hold him, and in her arms he’d shaken and wept from the sheer terror that he’d been able to control right up to the moment that the man Fürchtner had died less than a meter to his left. There was blood and other tissue particles on his clothing. They’d had to be taken off for cleaning. Dengler had had the worst time of all, and wouldn’t be at work for at least a week, the doctors said. For his part, Ostermann knew that he’d be calling that Britisher who’d come to him with the security proposal, especially after hearing the voices of his rescuers.

“Well, I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you got through it okay, Erwin.”

“Thank you, George,” he said to the American Treasury Secretary. “Do you appreciate your bodyguards more today than last week?”

“You bet. I expect that business in that line of work will be picking up soon.”

“An investment opportunity?” Ostermann asked with a forlorn chuckle.

“I didn’t mean
that,”
Winston replied with an almost-laugh. It was good to laugh about it, wasn’t it?

“George?”

“Yeah?”

“They were not Austrian, not what the television and newspapers said—and they told me not to reveal this, but you can know this. They were Americans and British.”

“I know, Erwin, I know who they are, but that’s all I can say.”

“I owe them my life. How can I repay such a debt?”

“That’s what they are paid to do, my friend. It’s their job.”

“Vielleicht,
but it was
my
life they saved, and those of my employees. I have a personal debt to pay them. Is there any way I might do something for them?”

“I don’t know,” George Winston admitted.

“Could you find out? If you ‘know about’ them, could you find out? They have children, do they not? I can pay for their education, set up a fund of some sort, could I not?”

“Probably not, Erwin, but I can look into it,” the SecTreas said, making a note on his desk. This would be a real pain in the ass for some security people, but there might well be a way, through some D.C. law firm, probably, to double-blind it. It pleased Winston that Erwin wanted to do this.
Noblesse oblige
was not entirely dead. “So, you sure you’re okay, pal?”

“Thanks to them, yes, George, I am.”

“Great. Thanks. Good to hear your voice, pal. See you next time I come over to Europe.”

“Indeed, George. Have a good day.”

“You, too. Bye.” Winston switched buttons on his phone. Might as well check into this right away. “Mary, could you get me Ed Foley over at the CIA?”

Popov hadn’t done this in ages, but he remembered how. His employer had been written about more than many politicians—which was only just, Popov thought, as this man did far more important and interesting things for his country and the world—but these articles were mainly about business, which didn’t help Popov much beyond a further appreciation of the man’s wealth and influence. There was little about his personal life, except that he’d been divorced. A pity of sorts. His former wife seemed both attractive and intelligent, judging by the photos and the appended information on her. Maybe two such intelligent people had difficulty staying together. If so, that was too bad for the woman, the Russian thought. Maybe few American men liked having intellectual equals under their roof. It was altogether too intimidating for the weak ones—and only a weak man would be troubled by it, the Russian thought.

But there was nothing to connect the man with terrorists or terrorism. He’d never been attacked himself, not even a simple street crime, according to the
New York Times.
Such things did not always make the news, of course. Perhaps an incident that had never seen the light of day. But if it had been so major as to change the course of his life—it would had to have become known, wouldn’t it?

Probably. Almost certainly, he thought. But
almost
was a troubling qualifier for a career intelligence officer. This was a man of business. A genius both in his scientific field and in running a major corporation. There, it seemed, was where his passions went. There were many photos of the man with women, rarely the same one twice, while attending various charity or social functions—all nice women, to be sure, Popov noted, like fine trophies, to be used and mounted on the wall in the appropriate empty space, while he searched after another. So, what sort of man was he working for?

Popov had to admit that he really didn’t know, which was more than troubling. His life was now in pawn to a man whose motivations he didn’t understand. In not knowing, he could not evaluate the operational dangers that attached to himself as a result. Should the purpose be discerned by others, and his employer discovered and arrested, then he, Popov, was in danger of arrest on serious charges. Well, the former KGB officer thought, as he returned the last of the periodicals to the clerk, there was an easy solution to that. He’d always have a bag packed, and two false identities ready to be used. Then, at the first sign of trouble, he’d get to an international airport and be off to Europe as quickly as possible, there to disappear and make use of the cash he’d banked. He already had enough to ensure a comfortable life for a few years, perhaps longer if he could find a really good investment counselor. Disappearing off the face of the earth wasn’t all that hard for one with proper training, he told himself, walking back out on Fifth Avenue. All you needed was fifteen or twenty minutes of warning. . . . Now how could he be sure to get that? . . .

 

 

The German federal police were as efficient as ever, Bill Tawney saw. All six of the terrorists had been identified within forty-eight hours, and while detailed interviews of their friends, neighbors, and acquaintances were still underway, the police already knew quite a lot and had forwarded it to the Austrians, from there to the British Embassy in Vienna, and from there to Hereford. The package included a photo and blueprints of the home owned by Fürchtner and Dortmund. One of the couple, Tawney saw, had been a painter of moderate talent. The report said that they’d sold paintings at a local gallery, signed, of course, with a pseudonym. Perhaps they’d become more valuable now, the Six man thought idly, turning the page. They’d had a computer there, but the documents on it were not very useful. One of them, probably Fürchtner, the German investigators thought, had written long political diatribes, appended but not yet translated—Dr. Bellow would probably want to read them, Tawney thought. Other than that, there was little remarkable. Books, many of them political in character, most of them printed and purchased in the former DDR. A nice TV and stereo system, and plenty of records and CDs of classical music. A decent middle-class car, properly maintained, and insured through a local company, under their cover names, Siegfried and Hanna Kolb. They’d had no really close friends in their neighborhood, had kept largely to themselves, and every public aspect of their lives had been
in Ordnung,
thus arousing no comment of any kind. And yet, Tawney thought, they’d sat there like coiled springs . . . awaiting what?

What had turned them loose? The German police had no explanation for that. A neighbor reported that a car had visited their house a few weeks before—but who had come and to what purpose, no one knew. The tag number of the car had never been noted, nor the make, though the interview transcript said that it had been a German-made car, probably white or at least light in color. Tawney couldn’t evaluate the importance of that. It might have been a buyer for a painting, an insurance agent—or the person who had brought them out of cover and back into their former lives as radical left-wing terrorists.