"It did this time, Director," Sinclair judged.

   "Make sure they send us the write-up on how the operation went down."

   "Yes, sir. I already e-mailed them about that." Less than thirty people in the Bureau knew about Rainbow, though quite a few would be making guesses. Especially those HR. members who'd taken note of the fact that Tim Noonan, a third-generation agent, had dropped off the face of the earth. "How's dinner going?"

   "I prefer Wendy's. More of the basic food groups. Anything else?"

   "The OC case in New Orleans is close to going down, Billy Betz says. Three or four more days. Aside from that, nothing important happening."

   "Thanks, Gordy." Murray thumbed the END button on his phone and pocketed it, then returned to the dining room after a look and a wave at two members of his protective detail. Thirty seconds later, he slid back into his seat, with a muted thump from his holstered Smith & Wesson automatic against the wood.

   "Anything important?" Liz asked.

   A shake of the head. "Routine."

   The affair broke up less than forty minutes after Brightling finished his speech and collected his award plaque. He held court yet again, albeit with a smaller group of fans this time, while drifting toward the door, outside of which waited his car. It was only five minutes to the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House. He had a corner suite on the top floor, and the hotel staff had thoughtfully left him a bottle of the house white in an ice bucket next to the bed, for his companion had come along. It was sad, Dr. John Brightling thought, removing the cork. He'd miss things like this, really miss them. But he had made the decision long before-not knowing when he'd started off that it could possibly work. Now he thought that it would, and the things he'd miss were ultimately of far less value than the things he'd get. And for the moment, he thought, looking at Jessica's pale skin and stunning figure, he'd get something else that was pretty nice.

   It was different for Dr. Carol Brightling. Despite her White House job, she drove her own car without even a bodyguard to her apartment off Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, her only companion there a calico cat named Jiggs, who, at least, came to the door to meet her, rubbing his body along her panty-hosed leg the moment the door was closed, and purring to show his pleasure at her arrival. He followed her into the bedroom, watching her change in the way of cats, interested and detached at the same time, and knowing what came next. Dressed only in a short robe, Carol Brightling walked into the kitchen, opened a cupboard, and got a treat, which she bent down t o feed to Jiggs from her hand. Then she got herself a glass f ice water from the refrigerator door, and drank it down with two aspirin. It had all been her idea. She knew that all too well. But after so many years, it was still as hard as it had been at first. She'd given up so much more. She'd gotten the job she'd craved somewhat to her surprise, as things had turned out, but she had the office in the right building, and now played a role in making policy on the issues that were important to her. Important policy on important topics. But was it worth it?

   Yes! She had to think that, and, truly, she believed it, but the price, the price of it, was often so hard to bear. She bent down to lift up Jiggs, cradling him like the child she'd never had and walking to the bedroom where, again, he'd be the only one to share it with her. Well, a cat was far more faithful than a man could ever be. She'd learned that lesson over the years. In a few seconds, the robe was on the chair next to the bed, and she under the covers, with Jiggs atop them and between her legs. She hoped sleep would come a little more quickly tonight than it usually did. But she knew it would not, for her mind would not stop thinking about what was happening in another bed less than three miles away.

CHAPTER 5
RAMIFICATIONS

   Daily PT started at 0630 and concluded with the five-mile run, timed to last exactly forty minutes. This morning it ended at thirty-eight, and Chavez wondered if he and his team had an additional spring in their step from the successful mission. If so, was that good or bad? Killing fellow human beings wasn't supposed to make you feel good, was it? A deep thought for a foggy English morning.

   By the end of the run, everyone had a good sweat, which the hot showers took care of. Oddly, hygiene was a little more complicated for his team than for uniformed soldiers. Nearly everyone had longer hair than their respective armies permitted, so that they could look like grown-up, if somewhat shabby, businessmen when they donned their coats and ties for their first-class flights to wherever. Ding's hair was the shortest, since at CIA he'd tried to keep it not too different from his time as staff sergeant in the Ninjas. It would have to grow for at least another month before it would be shaggy enough. He grunted at that thought, then stepped out of the shower. As Team-2 leader, he rated his own private facility, and he took the time to admire his body, always an object of pride for Domingo Chavez. Yeah, the exercise that had been so tough the first week had paid off. He hadn't been much tougher than this in Ranger School at Fort Benning – and he'd been, what? Twenty-one then, just an E-4 and one of the smallest men in the class. It was something of an annoyance to Ding that, tall and rangy like her mom, Patsy had half an inch on him. But Patsy only wore flats, which kept it respectable-and nobody messed with him. Like his boss, he had the look of a man with whom one did not trifle. Especially this morning, he thought, while toweling off. He'd zapped a guy the previous night, just as fast and automatic an action as zipping his zipper. Tough shit, Herr Guttenach.

   Back home, Patsy was already dressed in her greens.

   She was on an OB/GYN rotation at the moment, scheduled to perform-well, to assist on-a Cesarean section this morning at the local hospital where she was completing what in America would have been her year of internship. Next would be her pediatric rotation, which struck both of them as totally appropriate. Already on the table t or him was bacon and eggs-the eggs in England seemed to have brighter yolks. He wondered if they fed their chickens differently here.

   "I wish you'd eat better," Patsy observed, again.

   Domingo laughed, reaching for his morning paper, the Daily Telegraph. "Honey, my cholesterol is one-three zero, my resting heart-rate is fifty-six. I am a lean, mean fighting machine, doctor!"

   "But what about ten years from now?" Patricia Chavez, t . D., asked.

   "I'll have ten complete physicals between now and then, A I will adjust my lifestyle according to how those work it," Domingo Chavez, Master of Science (International Relations) answered, buttering his toast. The bread in this country, he'd learned over the past six weeks, was just fabulous. Why did people knock English food? "Hell, Patsy, look at your dad. That old bastard is still in great .Nape." Though he hadn't run this morning-and at his best was hard-pressed to finish the five miles at the pace Team-2 set. Well, he was well over fifty. His shooting, however, hadn't suffered very much at all. John had worked to make that clear to the go-team members. One the best pistoleros Chavez had ever seen, and better still with a sniper rifle. He was dead-level with Weber and Johnston out to 400 meters. Despite the suit he wore to work, Rainbow Six was on everyone's don't-fuck-with list.

   The front page had a story on the previous day's events in Bern. Ding raced through it and found most of the details right. Remarkable. The Telegraph's correspondent ;;gust have had good contacts with the cops . . . whom he gave credit for the takedown. Well, that was okay. Rainbow was supposed to remain black. No comment from the Ministry of Defense on whether the SAS had provided support to the Swiss police. That was a little weak. A flat "no" would have been better . . . but were that to be said, then a "no comment" spoken at some other time would be taken as a "yes." So, yeah, that probably made sense. Politics was not a skill he'd acquired yet, at least not on the instinctive level. Dealing with the media frightened him more than facing loaded weapons-he had training for the latter but not for the former. His next grimace came when he realized that while CIA had an office of public affairs, Rainbow sure as hell didn't. Well, in this business it probably didn't pay to advertise. About that time, Patsy put on her jacket and headed for the door. Ding hurried after her to deliver the goodbye kiss, watched his wife walk to the family car, and hoped she did better driving on the left side of the road than he did. It made him slightly nuts and required steady concentration. The really crazy part was that the gearshift was on the wrong side of the car, but the pedals were the same as in American autos. It made Chavez a little schizophrenic, driving left-handed and right-footed. The worst part was the traffic circles the Brits seemed to like better than real interchanges. Ding kept wanting to turn right instead of left. It would be a hell of a stupid way to get killed. Ten minutes later, dressed in his day uniform, Chavez walked over to the Team-2 building for the second AAR.

   Popov tucked his passbook in his coat pocket. The Swiss banker hadn't even blinked at seeing the suitcase full of cash. A remarkable machine had counted the bills, like mechanical fingers riffling through a deck of playing cards, even checking the denominations as it did the counting. It had taken a total of forty-five minutes to get things fully arranged. The number on the account was his old KGB service number, and tucked in the passbook was the banker's business card, complete with his Internet address for making wire transfers-the proper code-phrase had been agreed upon and written into his bank file. The topic of Model's failed adventure of the previous day hadn't come up. Popov figured he'd read the press reports in the International Herald Tribune, which he'd get at the airport.

   His passport was American. The company had ,it ranged to get him resident-alien status, and he was on !t is way to citizenship, which he found amusing, as he still had his Russian Federation passport, and two others from his previous career-with different names but the same photo-which he could still use if needed. Those were stashed in his travel briefcase, in a small compartment that only a very careful customs examiner would ever find, and then only if told ahead of time that there was something strange about the incoming traveler.

   Two hours before his flight was scheduled to depart, he turned in his rental car, rode the bus to the international terminal, went through the usual rigmarole of checking in, and headed off to the first-class lounge for coffee and a croissant.

   Bill Henricksen was a news junkie of the first order. On waking up, early as always, he immediately flipped his TV to CNN, often flipping to Fox News with his remote while he did his morning treadmill routine, frequently with the paper on the reading board as well. The front page of the New York Times covered the event in Bern, as did Fox News-oddly, CNN talked about it but didn't show much. Fox did, using the feed from Swiss television, which allowed him to watch what could be seen of the takedown. Pure vanilla, Henriksen thought. Flash-bangs on the front doors-made the cameraman jump and go slightly off target, as usual when they were that close-shooters in right behind them. No sounds of gunfire-they used suppressed weapons. In five seconds, it was all over. So, the Swiss had a properly trained SWAT team. No real surprise there, though he hadn't really known about it. A few minutes later, one guy came out and lit a pipe. Whoever that was, probably the team commander, he had a little style, Henriksen thought, checking the mileage on the treadmill. The team dressed as such people usually did, in coal gray fatigues, with Kevlar body armor. Uniformed cops went in to get the hostages out after about the right amount of time. Yeah, nicely and smoothly done-another way of saying that the criminals/terrorists-the news wasn't clear on whether they were just robbers or political types weren't real smart. Well, whoever said they were? They'd have to choose better ones the next time if this thing were going to work. The phone would ring in a few minutes, he was sure, summoning him to do a brief TV spot. A nuisance but a necessary one.

   That happened when he was in the shower. He'd long since had a phone installed just outside the door.

   "Yeah."

   "Mr. Henriksen?"

   "Yeah, who's this?" The voice wasn't familiar.

   "Bob Smith at Fox News New York. Have you seen coverage of the incident in Switzerland?"

   "Yeah, matter of fact I just saw it on your network."

   "Any chance you could come in and give us some commentary?"

   "What time?" Henriksen asked, knowing the response, and what his answer would be. "Just after eight, if you could."

   He even checked his watch, an automatic and wasted gesture that nobody saw. "Yeah, I can do that. How long will I be on this time?"

   "Probably four minutes or so."

   "Okay, I'll be down there in about an hour."

   "Thank you, sir. The guard will be told to expect you."

   "Okay, see you in an hour." The kid must be new, Henriksen thought, not to know that he was a regular commentator – why else would his name have been in the Fox rolodex? – and that the security guards all knew him by sight. A quick cup of coffee and a bagel got him out the door, into his Porsche 911, and across the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan.

   Dr. Carol Brightling awoke, patted Jiggs on the top of his head, and stepped into the shower. Ten minutes later, a towel wrapped around her head, she opened the door and got the morning papers. The coffee machine had already made its two cups of Mountain Grown Folger's, and in the refrigerator was the plastic box full of melon sections. Next she switched on the radio to catch the morning edition of All Things Considered, beginning her news fix, which started here and would go on through most of the day. Her job in the White House was mainly reading . . . and today she had to meet with that bozo from the Department of Energy who still thought it important to build H-bombs, which she would advise the President against, which advice he would probably decline without direct comment to her.

   Why the hell had she been taken in by this administration? Carol wondered. The answer was simple and obvious: politics. This president had tried valiantly to avoid such entanglements in his year and a half of holding office. And she was female, whereas the President's team of insiders was almost entirely male, which had caused some comment in the media and elsewhere, which had befuddled the President in his political innocence, which had amused the press even more and given them a further tool to use, which had worked, after a fashion. And so she had been offered the appointment, and taken it, with the office in the Old Executive Office Building instead of the White House itself, with a secretary and an assistant, and a parking place on West Executive Drive for her fuel efficient six-year-old Honda-the only Japanese-made car on that particular block, which nobody had said anything about, of course, since she was female, and she'd forgotten more about Washington politics than the President would ever learn. That was astounding when she thought about it, though she warned herself that the President was a notoriously quick learner. But not a good listener, at least as far as she was concerned.

   The media let him get away with it. The lesson of that was that the media was nobody's friend. Lacking convictions of its own, it just published what people said, and so she had to speak, off the record, on deep background, or just casually, to various reporters. Some, those who covered the Environment regularly, at least understood the language, and for the most part could be trusted to write their pieces the proper way, but they always included the other side's rubbish science yes, maybe your position has merit, but the science isn't firm enough yet and the computer models are not accurate enough to justify this sort of action, the other side said. As a result of which, the public's opinion-as measured in polls-had stagnated, or even reversed a little bit. The President was anything but an Environmental President, but the bastard was getting away with it at the same time using Carol Brightling as political camouflage, or even political cover! That appalled her. . . or would have under other circumstances. But here she was, Dr. Brightling thought, zipping up her skirt before donning the suit-jacket, a senior advisor to the President of the United States. That meant she saw him a couple of times per week. It meant that he read her position papers and policy recommendations. It meant that she had access to the media's top-drawer people, free to pursue her own agenda . . . within reason.

   But she was the one who paid the price. Always, it was she, Carol thought, reaching down to scratch Jiggs's ears as she made her way to the door. The cat would pass the day doing whatever it was that he did, mainly sleeping in the sun on the windowsill, probably waiting for his mistress to come home and feed him his Frisky treat. Not for the first time, she thought about stopping by a pet store and getting Jiggs a live mouse to play with and eat. A fascinating process to watch, predator and prey, playing their parts . . . the way the world was supposed to be; the way it had been for unnumbered centuries until the last two or so. Until Man had started changing everything, she thought, starting the car, looking at the cobblestoned street-still real cobbles for this traditional Georgetown address, with streetcar tracks still there, too-and brick buildings which had covered up what had probably been a pretty hardwood forest less than two hundred years before. It was even worse across the river, where only Theodore Roosevelt Island was still in its pristine state and that was interfered with by the screech of jet engines. A minute later, she was on M Street, then around the circle onto Pennsylvania Avenue. She was ahead of the daily rush-hour traffic, as usual, heading the mile or so down the wide, straight street before she could turn right and find her parking place-they weren't reserved per se, but everyone had his or her own, and hers was forty yards from the West Entrance-and as a regular, she didn't have to submit to the dog search. The Secret Service used Belgian Malinois dogs-like brown German shepherds keen of nose and quick of brain, to sniff at cars for explosives. Her White House pass got her into the compound, then up the steps into the OEOB, and right to her office. It was a cubbyhole, really, but larger than those of her secretary and assistant. On her desk was the Early Bird, with its clips of articles from various national newspapers deemed important to those who worked in this building, along with her copy of Science Weekly, Science, and, today, Scientific American, plus several medical journals. The environmental publications would arrive two days later. She hadn't yet sat down when her secretary, Margot Evans, came in with the codeword folder on nuclear-weapons policy, which she'd have to review before giving the President advice that he'd reject. The annoying part of that, of course, was that she'd have to think to produce the position paper that the President would not think about before rejecting. But she couldn't give him an excuse to accept, with great public reluctance, her resignation-rarely did anyone at this level ask to leave per se, though the local media had the mantras down and fully understood. Why not take it a step further than usual, and recommend the closure of the dirty reactor at Hanford, Washington? The only American reactor of the same design as Chernobyl-less a power reactor than one designed to produce plutonium-Pull'-for nuclear weapons, the worst gadget the mind of warlike men had ever produced. There were new problems with Hanford, new leaks from the storage tanks there, discovered before the leakage could pollute ground water, but still a threat to the environment, expensive to fix. The chemical mix in those tanks was horribly corrosive, and lethally toxic, and radioactive . . . and the President wouldn't listen to that bit of sound advice either.

   The science of her objections to Hanford was real, even Red Lowell worried about it-but he wanted a new Hanford built! Even this President wouldn't countenance that!

   With that reassuring thought, Dr. Brightling poured herself a cup of coffee and started reading the Early Bird, while her mind pondered how she'd draft her doomed recommendation to the President.

   "So, Mr. Henriksen, who were they?" the morning anchor asked.

   "We don't know much beyond the name of the purported leader, Ernst Model. Model was once part of the BaaderMeinhof gang, the notorious German communist terrorist group from the '70s and '80s. He dropped out of sight about ten years ago. It will be interesting to learn exactly where he's been hiding out."

   "Did you have a file on him during your time with the FBI Hostage Rescue Team?"

   A smile to accompany the terse reply. "Oh, yeah. I know the face, but Mr. Model will now transfer to flit, inactive files."

   "So, was this a terrorist incident or just a hank robbery?"

   "No telling as yet from press reports, but I would not entirely discount robbery as a motive. One of the thing; people forget about terrorists is that they have to eat, too. and you need money to do that. There is ample precedent for supposedly political criminals to break the law just to make money to support themselves. Right here in America, the CSA – the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, as they called themselves-robbed banks to support themselves. Baader-Meinhof in Germany used kidnappings to extort money from their victims corporate and family ties."

   "So, to you they're just criminals?"

   A nod, and a serious expression. "Terrorism is a crime. That's dogma at the FBI, where I came up. And these four who got killed yesterday in Switzerland were criminals. Unfortunately for them, the Swiss police have assembled and trained what appears to be an excellent. professional special-operations team."

   "How would you rate the takedown?"

   "Pretty good. The TV coverage shows no errors at all. All the hostages were rescued, and the criminals all were killed. That's par for the course in an incident like this. In the abstract, you would like to take the criminals down ,t live if possible, but it is not always possible-the lives of t lie hostages have absolute priority in a case like this one."

   "But the terrorists, don't they have rights-"

   "As a matter of principle, yes, they do have the same rights as other criminals. We teach that at the FBI, too, and the best thing you can do as a law enforcement officer in a case like this one is to arrest them, put them in front of a judge and jury, and convict them, but remember that the hostages are innocent victims, and their lives are at risk because of the criminals' actions. Therefore, you try to give them a chance to surrender-really, you try to disarm them if you can.

   "But very often you do not have that luxury," Henriksen went on. "Based on what I saw on TV from this incident, the Swiss police team acted no differently than what we were trained to do at Quantico. You only use deadly force when necessary-but when it's necessary, you do use it."

   "But who decides when it's necessary?"

   "The commander on the scene makes that decision, based on his training, experience, and expertise." Then, Henriksen didn't go on, people like you second-guess the hell out of him for the next couple of weeks.

   "Your company trains local police forces in SWAT tactics, doesn't it?"

   "Yes, it does. We have numerous veterans of the FBI HRT, Delta Force, and other `special' organizations, and we could use this Swiss operation as a textbook example of how it's done," Henriksen said-because his was an international corporation, which trained foreign police forces as well, and being nice to the Swiss wouldn't hurt his bottom line one bit.

   "Well, Mr. Henriksen, thanks for joining us this morning. International terrorism expert William Henriksen, CEO of Global Security, Inc., an international consulting firm. It's twenty-four minutes after the hour." In the studio, Henriksen kept his calm, professional face on until five seconds after the light on the nearest camera went out. At his corporate headquarters, they would have already taped this interview to add to the vast library of such things. GSI was known over most of the world, and their introductory tape included snippets from many such interviews. The floor director walked him off the set to the makeup room, where the powder was removed, then let him walk himself out to where his car was parked.

   That had gone well, he thought, going through the mental checklist. He'd have to find out who'd trained the Swiss. He made a mental note to have one of his contacts chase that one down. If it were a private company, that was serious competition, though it was probably the Swiss army perhaps even a military formation disguised as policemen maybe with some technical assistance from the German GSG9. A couple of phone calls should run that one down.

   Popov's four-engine Airbus A-340 touched down on time at JFK International. You could always trust the Swiss to do everything on time. The police team had probably even had a schedule for the previous night's activities, he thought whimsically. His first-class seat was close to the door, which allowed him to be the third passenger out, then off to claim his bags and go through the ordeal of U.S.Customs. America, he'd long since learned, was the most difficult country to enter as a foreigner-though with his minimal baggage and nothing-to-declare entry, the process was somewhat easier this time. The customs clerks were kind and waved him right through to the cabstand, where, for the usual exorbitant fee, he engaged a Pakistani driver to take him into town, making him wonder idly if the cabbies had a deal with the customs people. But he was on an expense account-meaning he had to get a receipt-and, besides, he had ensured that day that he could afford such things without one, hadn't he? He smiled as he gazed at the passing urban sprawl. It got thicker and thicker on the way to Manhattan.

   The cab dropped him off at his apartment house. The flat was paid for by his employer, which made it a tax-deductible business expense for them-Popov was learning about American tax law-and free for him. He spent a few minutes dumping his dirty laundry and hanging up his good clothes before heading downstairs and having the doorman flag a cab. From there it was another fifteen minutes to the office.

   "So, how did it go?" the boss asked. There was an odd buzz in the office, designed to interfere with any listening devices that a corporate rival might place. Corporate espionage was a major factor in the life of this man's company, and the defenses against it were at least as good as those the KGB had used. And Popov had once believed that governments had the best of everything. That was certainly not true in America.

   "It went much as I expected. They were foolish-really rather amateurish, despite all the training we gave them back in the eighties. I told them to feel free to rob the bank as cover for the real mission-"

   "Which was?"

   "To be killed," Dmitriy Arkadeyevich replied at once. "At least, that is what I understood your intentions to be, sir." His words occasioned a smile of a sort Popov wasn't used to. He made a note to check the stock value of the bank. Had the intention of this "mission" been to affect the standing of the bank? That didn't seem very likely, but though he didn't need to know why he was doing these things, his natural curiosity had been aroused. This man was treating him like a mercenary, and though Popov knew that was precisely what he'd become since leaving the service of his country, it was vaguely and distantly annoying to his sense of professionalism. "Will you require further such services?"

   "What happened to the money?" the boss wanted to know.

   A diffident reply: "I'm sure the Swiss will find a use for it." Certainly his banker would. "Surely you did not expect me to recover it?"

   A shake of the boss's head. "No, not really, and it was a trivial sum anyway."

   Popov nodded his understanding. Trivial sum? No Soviet employed agent had ever gotten so much in a single payment-the KGB had always been niggardly in its payments to those whom it gave money, regardless of the importance of the information that had earned it – nor had the KGB ever been so casual in disposing of cash in any amount. Every single ruble had to be accounted for. else the bean counters at Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square would bring down the devil's own wrath on the field officer who'd been so lax in his operations! The next thing he wondered about was how his employer had laundered the cash. In America if you deposited or withdrew so little His ten thousand dollars in cash, the bank was required to make a written record of it. It was supposedly an inconvenience for drug dealers, but they managed to work with it nevertheless. Did other countries have similar rule,,'.' Popov didn't know. Switzerland did not, he was sure, but that many banknotes didn't just materialize in a bank's vaults, did they? Somehow his boss had handled that, and done it well, Popov reminded himself. Perhaps Ernt Model had been an amateur, but this man was not. Something to keep in mind, the former spy told himself in large, red, mental letters.

   There followed a few seconds of silence. Then: "Yes, I will require another operation."

   "What, exactly?" Popov asked, and got the answer immediately. "Ah." A nod. He even used the correct word: operation. How very strange. Dmitriy wondered if he'd be well advised to check up on his employer, to find out more about him. After all, his own life was now in pawn to him-and the reverse was true as well, of course, but the other man's life was not an immediate concern to Popov. How hard would it be? To one who owned a computer and a modem, it was no longer difficult at all . . . if one had 'he time. For now, it was clear, he'd have but one night in his apartment before traveling overseas again. Well, it was an easy cure for jet lag.

   They looked like robots, Chavez saw, peering around a computer generated corner. The hostages, too, but in this case the hostages were computer-generated children, all girls in red-and-white striped dresses or jumpers-Ding couldn't decide which. It was clearly a psychological effect programmed into the system by whoever had set up the parameters for the program, called SWAT 6.3.2. Some California-based outfit had first produced this for Delta Force under a DOD contract overseen by RAND Corporation.

   It was expensive to use, mainly because of the electronic suit he wore. It was the same weight as the usual black mission suit – lead sheets sewn into the fabric had seen to that – and everything down to the gloves was filled with copper wires and sensors that told the computer – an old Cray YMP – exactly what his body was doing, and in turn projected a computer-generated image into the goggles he wore. Dr. Bellow gave the commentary, playing the roles of bad-guy leader and good-guy advisor in this particular game. Ding turned his head and saw Eddie Price right behind him and Hank Patterson and Steve Lincoln across the way at the other simulated corner-robotic figures with numbers on them to let him know who was who.

   Chavez pumped his right arm up and down three times, calling for flash-bangs, then peered around the corner one more time-

   –at his chair, Clark saw the black line appear on the white corner, then hit the 7 key on his computer keyboard

   –bad-guy #4 trained his weapon on the gaggle of schoolgirls

   "Steve! Now!" Chavez ordered.

   Lincoln pulled the pin on the flash-bang. It was essentially a grenade simulator, heavy in explosive charge to produce noise and magnesium powder for a blinding flash – simulated for the computer program – and designed to blind and disorient through the ear shattering blast, which was loud enough to upset the inner ear's mechanism for balance. That sound, though not quite as bad, came through their earphones as well, along with the white-out of their VR goggles. It still made them jump.

   The echo hadn't even started to fade when Chavez dived into the room, weapon up and zeroing in on Terrorist #1, the supposed enemy leader. Here the computer system was faulty, Chavez thought. The European members of his team didn't shoot the way the Americans did. They pushed their weapons forward against the double looped sling, actually extending their H&Ks before firing them. Chavez and the Americans tended to tuck them in close against the shoulder. Ding got his first burst off before his body hit the floor, but the computer system didn't always score this as a hit which pissed Ding off greatly. He didn't ever miss, as a guy named Guttenach had discovered on finding St. Peter in front of him without much in the way of warning. Hitting the floor, Chavez rolled, repeated the burst, and swung the MP-10 for another target. His earphones produced the too-loud report of the shots (the SWAT 6.3.2 program for some reason didn't allow for suppressed weapons). To his right, Steve Lincoln and Hank Patterson were in the room and shooting at the six terrorists. Their short, controlled bursts rang in his ears, and in his VR goggles, heads exploded into red clouds quite satisfactorily

   –but bad guy #5 depressed his trigger, not at the rescuers, but rather at the hostages, which started going down until at least three of the Rainbow shooters took him out at once-"Clear!" Chavez shouted, jumping to his feet and going to the images of the bad guys. One, the computer said, was still residually alive, albeit bleeding from the head. Ding kicked his weapon loose, but by that time #4's shade had stopped moving.

   "Clear!" "Clear!" shouted his team members.

   "Exercise concluded," Clark's voice told them. Ding and his men removed their Virtual Reality goggles to find a room about double the size of a basketball court, and entirely absent of objects, empty as a high-school gym at midnight. It took a little getting used to. The simulation had been of terrorists who'd taken a kids' school evidently a girls' school, for greater psychological effect.

   "How many did we lose?" Chavez asked the ceiling.

   "Six killed and three wounded, the computer says." Clark entered the room.

   "What went wrong?" Ding asked, suspecting he knew what the answer was.

   "I spotted you looking around the corner, boy," Rainbow Six answered. "That alerted the bad guys."

   "Shit," Chavez responded. "That's a program glitch. In real life I'd use the mirror rig, or take this Kevlar hat off, but the program doesn't let us. The flash-bangs would have gone in clean."

   "Maybe," John Clark allowed. "But your score on this one is a B-minus."

   "Gee, thanks, Mr. C," the Team-2 leader groused. -' Next you gonna say our shooting was off?"

   "Yours was, the machine says."

   "God damn it, John! The program doesn't simulate marksmanship worth a damn, and I will not train my people to shoot in a way the machine likes instead'a doing it the way that puts steel on target!"

   "Settle down, Domingo. I know your troops can shoot. Okay, follow me. Let's watch the replay."

   "Chavez, why did you take this way in?" Stanley asked when everyone was seated.

   "This doorway is wider, and it gives a better field of fire="

   –'For both sides," Stanley observed.

   "Battlefields are like that," Ding countered. "But when you have surprise and speed going for you, that advantage conveys also. I put my backup team on the back door, but the configuration of the building didn't allow them to participate in the takedown. Noonan had the building spiked. We had good coverage of the bad guys, and I timed the assault to catch them all in the gym-"

   "With all six guns co-located with the hostages."

   "Better that than to have to go looking for them. Maybe one of them could flip a grenade around a corner and kill a bunch of the Barbie dolls. No, sir, I thought about coming in from the back, or doing a two-axis assault, but the distances and timing factors didn't look good to me. Are you saying I'm wrong, sir?"

   "In this case, yes."

   Bullshit, Chavez thought. "Okay, show me what you think."

   It was as much a matter of personal style as right and wrong, and Alistair Stanley had been there and done that as much as any man in the world, Ding knew. So he watched and listened. Clark, he saw, did much the same.

   "I don't like it," Noonan said, after Stanley concluded hi s presentation. "It's too easy to put a noisemaker on the doorknob. The damned things only cost ten bucks or so. You can buy one in any airport gift shop – people use them on hotel doors in case somebody tries to come in uninvited. We had a case in the Bureau when a subject used one – nearly blew the whole mission on us, but the flashbang on the outside window covered the noise pretty well."

   "And what if your spikes didn't give us positions on all the subjects?"

   "But they did, sir," Noonan countered. "We had time to track them." In fact the training exercise had compressed the time by a factor of ten, but that was normal for the computer simulations. "This computer stuff is great for planning the takedowns, but it falls a little flat on other stuff. I think we did it pretty well." His concluding sentence also announced the fact that Noonan wanted to be a full member of Team-2, not just their technoweenie, Ding thought. Tim had been spending a lot of time in the shooting range, and was now the equal of any member of the team. Well, he'd worked the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team under Gus Werner. He had the credentials to join the varsity. Werner had been considered for the Six job on Rainbow. But then, so had Stanley.

   "Okay," Clark said next, "let's roll the tape."

   That was the nastiest surprise of all. Terrorist #2, the computer said, had taken his head shot and spun around with his finger depressed on the trigger of his AK-74, and one of his rounds had neatly transfixed Chavez's head. Ding was dead, according to the Cray computer, because the theoretical bullet had gone under the brim of his Kevlar helmet and transited right through his brain. The shock of it to Chavez had surprising magnitude. A random event generated by the computer program, it was also quite real, because real life did include such random events. They'd talked about getting Lexan visors for their helmets, which might or might not stop a bullet, but had decided against it because of the distortion it would impose on their sight, and therefore their shooting. . . maybe we need to re-think that one, Chavez told himself. The bottom line of the computer's opinion was simple: if it was possible, then it could happen, and if it could, sooner or later, it would, and somebody on the team would have to drive to a house on post and tell a wife that she'd just become a widow. Because of a random event-bad luck. A hell of a thing to tell somebody who'd just lost a husband. Cause of death, bad luck. Chavez shivered a little at the thought. How would Patsy take it? Then he shook it off. I t was a very low order of probability, mathematically right down there with being hit by lightning on a golf course or being wasted in a plane crash, and life was risk, and you avoided the risks only by being dead. Or something like that. He turned his head to look at Eddie Price.

   "Unforgiving things, dice," the sergeant major observed with a wry smile. "But I got the chappie who killed you, Ding."

   "Thanks, Eddie. Makes me feel a lot better. Shoot faster next time?"

   "I shall make a point of it, sir," Price promised.

   "Cheer up, Ding," Stanley observed, noting the exchange. "Could have been worse. I've yet to see anyone seriously harmed by an electron."

   And you're supposed to learn from training exercises,

   Ding added for himself. But learn what from this one? Shit happens? Something to think about, he supposed, and in any case, Team-2 was now on standby, with Peter Covington's Team-1 on the ready line. Tomorrow they'd do some more shooting, aimed at getting the shots off a little faster, maybe. Problem was, there just wasn't any room for improvement-not much anyway-and pushing too hard might have the effect of dulling the sharp edge already achieved. Ding felt as though he were the head coach of a particularly good football team. The players were all excellent, and hard-working . . . just not quite perfect. But how much of that could be corrected by training, and how much merely reflected the fact that the other side played to win, too? The first job had been too easy. Model and his bunch had cried aloud to be killed. It wouldn't always be that easy.

CHAPTER 6
TRUE BELIEVERS

   The problem was environmental tolerance. They knew the baseline organism was as effective as it needed to be. It was just so delicate. Exposed to air, it died far too easily. They weren't sure why, exactly. It might have beer; temperature or humidity, or too much oxygen-that element so essential to life was a great killer of life at the molecular level-and the uncertainty had been a great annoyance until a member of the team had conic up with a solution. They'd used genetic-engineering technology to graft cancer genes into the organism. Specifically, they'd used genetic material from colon cancer, one of the more robust strains, and the results had been striking. The new organism was only a third of a micron larger and far stronger. The proof was on the electron microscope's TV screen. The tiny strands had been exposed to room air and room light for ten hours before being reintroduced into the culture dish, and already, the technician saw, the minute strands were active, using their RNA to multiply after eating, replicating themselves into millions more little strands, which had only one purpose-to eat tissue. In this case it was kidney tissue, though liver was just as vulnerable. The technician-who had a medical degree from Yale made the proper written notations, and then, because it was her project, she got to name it. She blessed the course in comparative religion she'd taken twenty years before. You couldn't just call it anything. could you?

   Shiva, she thought. Yes, the most complex and interesting of the Hindu gods, by turns the Destroyer and the Restorer, who controlled poison meant to destroy mankind, and one of whose consorts was Kali, the goddess of death herself. Shiva. Perfect. The tech made the proper notations, including her recommended name for the organism. There would be one more test, one more technological hurdle to hop before all was ready for execution. Execution, she thought, a proper word for the project. On rather a grand scale.

   For her next task, she took a sample of Shiva, sealed in a stainless-steel container, and walked out of her lab, an eighth of a mile down the corridor, and into another.

   "Hi, Maggie," the head of that lab said in greeting. "(Jot something for me?"

   "Hey, Steve." She handed the container over. "This is the one."

   "What are we calling it?" Steve took the container and set it on a countertop.

   "Shiva, I think."

   "Sounds ominous," Steve observed with a smile.

   "Oh, it is," Maggie promised him. Steve was another M.D., Ph.D., both of his degrees from Duke University, and the company's best man on vaccines. For this project he'd been pulled off AIDS work that had begun to show some promise.

   "So, the colon cancer genes worked like you predicted?"

   "Ten hours in the open, it shows good UV tolerance. Not too sure about direct sunlight, though."

   "Two hours of that is all we need," Steve reminded her. And really one hour was plenty, as they both knew. "What about the atomization system?"

   "Still have to try it," she admitted, "but it won't be a problem." Both knew that was the truth. The organism should easily tolerate passage through the spray nozzles for the fogging system-which would be checked in one of the big environmental chambers. Doing it outside would be better still, of course, but if Shiva was as robust as Maggie seemed to think, it was a risk better not run.

   "Okay, then. Thanks, Maggie." Steve turned his back, and inserted the container into one of the glove-boxes to open it, in order to begin his work on the vaccine. Much of the work was already done. The baseline agent here was well-known, and the government had funded his company's vaccine work after the big scare the year before, and Steve was known far and wide as one of the best around for generating, capturing, and replicating antibodies to excite a person's immune system. He vaguely regretted the termination of his AIDS work. Steve thought that he might have stumbled across a method of generating broad-spectrum antibodies to combat that agile little bastard-maybe a 20 percent change, he judged, plus the added benefit of leading down a new scientific pathway, the sort of thing to make a man famous . . . maybe even good enough for a flight to Stockholm in ten years or so. But in ten years, it wouldn't matter, would it? Not hardly, the scientist told himself. He turned to look out the triple windows of his lab. A pretty sunset. Soon the night creatures would come out. Bats would chase insects. Owls would hunt mice and voles. Cats would leave their houses to prowl on their own missions of hunger. He had a set of night-vision goggles that he often used to observe the creatures doing work not so very different from his own. But for now he turned back to his worktable, pulled out his computer keyboard, and made some notations for his new project. Many used notebooks for this, but the Project allowed only computers for record-keeping, and all the notes were electronically encrypted. If it was good enough for Bill Gates, then it was good enough for him. The simple ways were not always best. That explained why he was here, part of the newly named Shiva Project, didn't it?

   They needed guys with guns, but they were hard to find at least the right ones, with the right attitudes-and the task was made more difficult by government activities with similar, but divergent aims. It helped them keep away from the more obvious kooks, though.

   "Damn, it's pretty out here," Mark observed. His host snorted. "There's a new house right the other side of that ridge line. On a calm day, I can see the smoke from their chimney."

   Mark had to laugh. "There goes the neighborhood. You and Dan'l Boone, eh?"

   Foster adopted a somewhat sheepish look. "Yeah, well, it is a good five miles."

   "But you know, you're right. Imagine what it looked like before the white man came here. No roads 'cept for the riverbanks and deer trails, and the hunting must have been pretty spectacular."

   "Good enough you didn't have to work that hard to eat, I imagine." Foster gestured at the fireplace wall of his log cabin, covered with hunting trophies, not all of them legal, but here in Montana's Bitterroot Mountains, there weren't all that many cops, and Foster kept pretty much to himself.

   "It's our birthright."

   "Supposed to be," Foster agreed. "Something worth fighting for."

   "How hard?" Mark asked, admiring the trophies. The grizzly bear rug was especially impressive – and probably illegal as hell.

   Foster poured some more bourbon for his guest. "I don't know what it's like back East, but out here, if you fight you fight. All the way, boy. Put one right 'tween the fining lights, generally calms your adversary down a mite."

   "But then you have to dispose of the body," Mark said, ping his drink. The man bought only cheap whiskey. Well, he probably couldn't afford the good stuff.

   A laugh: "Ever hear of a backhoe? How 'bout a nice fire?"

   It was believed by some in this part of the state that Foster had killed a fish-and-game cop. As a result, he was leery of local police-and the highway patrol people didn't like him to go a mile over the limit. But though the car had been found-burned out, forty miles away-the body of the missing officer had not, and that was that. There weren't many people around to be witnesses in this part of the state, even with a new house five miles away. Mark sipped his bourbon and leaned back in the leather chair. "Nice to be part of nature, isn't it?"

   "Yes, sir. It surely is. Sometimes I think I kinda understand the Indians, y'know?"

   "Know any?"

   'Oh, sure. Charlie Grayson, he's a Nez Perce, hunting guide, got my horse off o'him. I do that, too, to make some cash sometimes, mainly take a horse into the high country, really, meet people who get it. And the elk are pretty thick up there."

   "What about bear?"

   "Enough," Foster replied. "Mainly blacks, but some grizz'."

   "What do you use? Bow?"

   A good-natured shake of the head. "No, I admire the Indians, but I ain't one myself. Depends on what I'm hunting, and what country I'm doing it in. Bolt-action .300 Winchester Mag mainly, but in close country, a semi auto slug shotgun. Nothing like drillin' three-quarter-inch holes when you gotta, y'know?"

   "Handload?"

   "Of course. It's a lot more personal that way. Gotta show respect for the game, you know, keep the gods of the mountains happy."

   Foster smiled at the phrase, in just the right sleepy way, Mark saw. In every civilized man was a pagan waiting to come out, who really believed in the gods of the mountains, and in appeasing the spirits of the dead game. And so did he, really, despite his technical education.

   "So, what do you do, Mark?"

   "Molecular biochemistry, Ph.D., in fact."

   "What's that mean?"

   "Oh, figuring out how life happens. Like how does a bear smell so well," he went on, lying. "It can be interesting, but my real life is coming out to places like this, hunting, meeting people who really understand the game better than I do. Guys like you," Mark concluded, with a salute of his glass. "What about you?"

   "Ah, well, retired now. I made some of my own. Would you believe geologist for an oil company?"

   "Where'd you work?"

   "All over the world. I had a good nose for it, and the oil companies paid me a lot for finding the right stuff, y'know? But I had to give it up. Got to the point-well, you fly a lot, right?"

   "I get around," Mark confirmed with a nod.

   "The brown smudge," Foster said next.

   "Huh?"

   "Come on, you see it all over the damned world. Up around thirty thousand feet, that brown smudge. Complex hydrocarbons, mainly from passenger jets. One day I was flying back from Paris – connecting flight from Brunei, I came the wrong way 'round 'cuz I wanted to stop off in Europe and meet a friend. Anyway, there I was, in a fuckin'747, over the middle of the fucking Atlantic Ocean, like four hours from land, y'know? First-class window seat, sitting there drinking my drink, lookin' out the window, and there it was, the smudge – that goddamned brown shit, and I realized that I was helpin' make it happen, dirtyin' up the whole fuckin' atmosphere.

   "Anyway," Foster went on, "that was the moment of my . . . conversion, I guess you'd call it. I tendered my resignation the next week, took my stock options, cashed in half a mil worth, and bought this place. So, now, I hunt and fish, do a little guide work in the fall, read a lot, wrote a little book about what oil products do to the environment, and that's about it."

   It was the book that had attracted Mark's attention, of course. The brown-smudge story was in its poorly written preface. Foster was a believer, but not a screwball. His house had electricity and phone service. Mark saw his high-end Gateway computer on the floor next to his desk. Even satellite TV, plus the usual Chevy pickup truck with a gun-rack in the back window . . . and a diesel-powered backhoe. So, maybe he believed, but he wasn't too crazy about it. That was good, Mark thought. He just had to be crazy enough. Foster was. Killing the fish-and-game cop was proof of that.

   Foster returned the friendly stare. He'd met guys like this during his time in Exxon. A suit, but a clever one, the kind who didn't mind getting his hands dirty. Molecular biochemistry. They hadn't had that major at the Colorado School of Mines, but Foster also subscribed to Science News, and knew what it was all about. A meddler with life . . . but, strangely, one who understood about the deer and elk. Well, the world was a complex place. Just then, his visitor saw the Lucite block on the coffee table. Mark picked it up.

   "What's this?"

   Foster grinned over his drink. "What's it look like?"

   "Well, it's either iron pyrite or it's-"

   "Ain't iron. I do know my rocks, sir."

   "Gold? Where from?"

   "Found it in my stream, 'bout three hundred yards over yonder." Foster pointed.

   "That's a fair-sized nugget."

   "Five and a half ounces. About two thousand dollars. You know, people – white people – been living right on this ranch on this spot for over a hundred years, but nobody ever saw that in the creek. One day I'll have to backtrack up, see if it's a good formation. Ought to be, that's quartz on the bottom of the big one. Quartz-and-gold formations tend to be pretty rich, 'cuz of the way the stuff bubbled up from the earth's core. This area's fairly volcanic, all the hot springs and stuff," he reminded his guest. "We even get the occasional earth tremor."

   "So, you might own your own gold mine?"

   A good laugh. "Yep. Ironic, ain't it? I paid the going rate for grazing land – not even that much 'cuz o' the hills. The last guy to ranch around here bitched that his cattle lost every pound they gained grazin' by climbing up to where the grass was."

   "How rich?"

   A shrug. "No tellin', but if I showed that to some guys I went to school with, well, some folks would invest ten or twenty million finding out. Like I said, it's a quartz formation. People gamble big time on those. Price of gold is depressed, but if it comes out of the ground pretty pure well, it's a shitload more valuable than coal, y'know?"

   "So, why don't you?. . ."

   "'Cuz I don't need it, and it's an ugly process to watch. Worsen drilling oil, even. You can pretty much clean that up. But a mine -no way. Never goes away. The tailing don't go away. The arsenic gets into the ground water and takes forever to leach out. Anyway, it's a pretty coupla rocks in the plastic, and if I ever need the money, well, I know what to do."

   "How often you check the creek?"

   "When I fish-brown trout here, see?" He pointed to a big one hanging on the log wall. "Every third or fourth time, I find another one. Actually, I figure the deposit must have been uncovered fairly recently, else folks would have spotted it a long time ago. Hell, maybe I should track it down, see where it starts, but I'd just be tempting myself. Why bother?" Foster concluded. "I might have a weak moment and go against my principles. Anyway, not like it's gonna run away, is it?"

   Mark grunted. "Guess not. Got any more of these?"

   "Sure." Foster rose and pulled open a desk drawer. He tossed a leather pouch over. Mark caught it, surprised by the weight, almost ten pounds. He pulled the drawstring and extracted a nugget. About the size of a half-dollar, half gold, half quartz, all the more beautiful for the imperfection.

   "You married?" Foster asked.

   "Yeah. Wife, two kids."

   "Keep it, then. Make a pendant out of it, give it to her for her birthday or something."

   "I can't do that. This is worth a couple of thousand dollars."

   Foster waved his hand. "Shit, just takin' up space in my desk. Why not make somebody happy with it? 'Sides, you understand, Mark. I think you really do."

   Yep, Mark thought, this was a recruit. "What if I told you there was a way to make that brown smudge go away? . . .'

   A quizzical look. "You talking about some organism to eat it or something?"

   Mark looked up. "No, not exactly . . ." How much could he tell him now? He'd have to be very careful. It was only their first meeting.

   "Getting the aircraft is your business. Where to fly it, that we can help with," Popov assured his host.

   "Where?" the host asked.

   "The key is to become lost to air-traffic-control radar and also to travel far enough that fighter aircraft cannot track you, as you know. Then if you can land in a friendly place, and dispose of the flight crew upon reaching your destination, repainting the aircraft is no great task. It can he destroyed later, even dismantled for sale of the important parts, the engines and such. They can easily disappear into the international black market, with the change of a few identity plates," Popov explained. "This has happened more than once, as you know. Western intelligence and police agencies do not advertise the fact, of course."

   "The world is awash with radar systems," the host objected.

   "True," Popov conceded, "but air-traffic radars do not see aircraft. They see the return signals from aircraft radar transponders. Only military radars see the aircraft themselves, and what African country has a proper air-defense network? Also, with the addition of a simple jammer to the aircraft's radio systems, you can further reduce the ability of anyone to track you. Your escape is not a problem, if you get as far as an international airport, my friend. That," he reminded them, "is the difficult part. Once you disappear over Africa-well, that is your choice then. Your country of destination can be selected for ideological purity or for a monetary exchange. Your choice. I recommend the former, but the latter is possible," Popov concluded. Africa was not yet a hotbed of international law and integrity, but it did have hundreds of airports capable of servicing jetliners.

   "A pity about Ernst," the host said quietly.

   "Ernst was a fool!" his lady friend countered with an angry gesture. "He should have robbed a smaller bank. All the way in the middle of Bern. He was trying to make a statement," Petra Dortmund sneered. Popov had known her only by reputation until today. She might have been pretty, even beautiful, once, but now her once-blond hair was dyed brown, and her thin face was severe, the cheeks sunken and hollow, the eyes rimmed in dark circles. She was almost unrecognizable, which explained why European police hadn't snatched her up yet, along with her longtime lover, Hans Furchtner.

   Furchtner had gone the other way. He was a good thirty kilos overweight, his thick dark hair had either fallen out or been shaved, and the beard was gone. He looked like a banker now, fat and happy, no longer the driven, serious, committed communist he'd been in the '70s and '80s-at least not visibly so. They lived in a decent house in the mountains south of Munich. What neighbors they had thought them to be artists-both of them painted, a hobby unknown to their country's police. They even sold the occasional work in small galleries, which was enough to feed them, though not to maintain their lifestyle.

   They must have missed the safe houses in the old DDR and Czechoslovakia, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought. Just get off the aircraft and get taken away by car to comfortable if not quite lavish quarters, leave there to shop in the 'special' stores maintained for the local Party elite, get visited frequently by serious, quiet intelligence officers who would feed them information with which to plan their next operation. Furchtner and Dortmund had accomplished several decent operations, the best being the kidnapping and interrogation of an American sergeant who serviced nuclear artillery shells-this mission had been assigned them by the Soviet GRU. Much had been learned from that, most of it still useful, as the sergeant had been an expert on the American PAL-permissible action link-safety systems. His body had later been discovered in the snowy mid-winter mountains of southern Bavaria, apparently the result of a nasty traffic accident. Or so GRU thought, based on the reports of its agents within the NATO high command.

   "So, what is it that you want to learn?" she asked.

   "Electronic access codes to the international trading system."

  "So, you, too, are a common thief now?" Hans asked, before Petra could sneer.

   "A very uncommon thief, my sponsor is. If we are to restore a socialist, progressive alternative to capitalism, we need both funding and to instill a certain lack of confidence in the capitalist nervous system, do we not?" Popov paused for a second. "You know who I am. You know where I worked. Do you think I have forgotten my Motherland? Do you think I have forsaken my beliefs? My father fought at Stalingrad and Kursk. He knew what it was to be pushed back, to suffer defeat-and yet not give ever!" Popov said heatedly. "Why do you think I risk life here? The counterrevolutionaries in Moscow would not look kindly upon my mission . . . but they are not the only political force in Mother Russia!"

   "Ahhh," Petra Dortmund observed. Her face turned serious. "So, you think all is not lost?"

   "Did you ever think the forward march of humanity would be absent of setbacks? It is true we lost our way. I saw it myself in KGB, the corruption in high places. That is what defeated us-not the West! I saw it myself as a captain, Brezhnev's daughter-looting the Winter Palace for her wedding reception. As though she were the Grand Duchess Anastasia herself! It was my function in KGB to learn from the West, learn their plans and secrets, but our Kameraden learned only their corruption. Well, we have learned that lesson, in more ways than one, my friends. You are a communist or you are not. You believe or you do not. You act in accordance with those beliefs or you do not."

   "You ask us to give up much," Hans Furchtner pointed out.

   "You will be properly provided for. My sponsor-"

   "Who is that?" Petra asked.

   "This you may not know," Popov replied quietly. "You suppose that you take risks here? What about me? As for my sponsor, no, you may not know his identity. Operational security is paramount. You are supposed to know these things," he reminded them. They took the mild rebuke well, as he'd expected. These two fools were true believers, as Ernst Model had been, though they were somewhat brighter and far more vicious, as that luckless American sergeant had learned, probably staring with disbelief into the still-lovely blue eyes of Petra Dortmund as she'd used the hammer on his various body parts.

   "So, Iosef Andreyevich," Hans said-they knew Popov by one of his many cover names, in this case I. A. Serov. "When do you wish us to act?"

   "As quickly as possible. I will call you in a week, to see if you are indeed willing to take this mission and-"

   "We are willing," Petra assured him. "We need to make our plans."

   "Then I shall call you in a week for your schedule. I will need four days to activate my part of the operation. An additional concern, the mission depends on the placement of the American navy carrier in the Mediterranean. You may not execute the mission if it is in the western Mediterranean, because in such a case their aircraft might track your flight. We wish this mission to succeed, my friends." Then they negotiated the price. It didn't prove hard. Hans and Petra knew Popov from the old days and actually trusted him personally to make the delivery.

   Ten minutes later, Popov shook hands and took his leave, this time driving a rented BMW south toward the Austrian border. The road was clear and smooth, the scenery beautiful, and Dmitriy Arkadeyevich wondered again about his hosts. The one bit of truth he'd given them was that his father was indeed a veteran of the Stalingrad and Kursk campaign, and had told his son much about his life as a tank commander in the Great Patriotic War. There was something odd about the Germans, he'd learned from his professional experience in the Committee for State Security. Give them a man on a horse, and they'd follow him to the death. It seemed that the Germans craved someone or something to follow. How very strange. But it served his purposes, and those of his sponsor, and if these Germans wanted to follow a red horse a dead red horse, Popov reminded himself with a smile and a grunt-well, that was their misfortune. The only really innocent people involved were the bankers whom they would attempt to kidnap. But at least they wouldn't be subjected to torture, as that black American sergeant had been. Popov doubted that Hans and Petra would get that far, though the capabilities of the Austrian police and military were largely unknown to him. He'd find out, he was sure, one way or another.

   It was odd the way it worked. Team-1 was now the Go Team, ready to depart Hereford at a moment's notice while Chavez's Team-2 stood down; but it was the latter that was running complex exercises while the former did little but morning PT and routine marksmanship training. Technically, they were worried about a training accident that could hurt or even cripple a team member, thus breaking up a field team at a delicate moment.

   Master Chief Machinist's Mate Miguel Chin belonged to Peter Covington's team. A former U.S. Navy SEAL, he'd been taken from Norfolk-based SEAL Team Six for Rainbow. The son of a Latino mother and a Chinese father, he, like Chavez, had grown up in East L.A. Ding spotted him smoking a cigar outside the Team-1 building and walked over.

   "Hey, Chief," Chavez said from ten feet away.

   "Master Chief," Chin corrected. "Like being a CSM in the army, sir."

   "Name's Ding, 'mano."

   "Mike." Chin extended a hand. Chin's face could have passed for damned near anything. He was an iron-pumper like Oso Vega, and his rep was of a guy who'd been around the block about a hundred times. Expert with all types of weapons, his handshake announced his further ability to tear a man's head right off his shoulders.

   "Those are bad for you," Chavez noted.

   "So's what we do for a livin', Ding. What part of L.A.?"

   Ding told him.

   "No kiddin'? Hell, I grew up half a mile from there. You were Banditos country."

   "Don't tell me-"

   The master chief nodded. "Piscadores, till I grew out of it. A judge suggested that I might like enlisting better 'n jail, and so I tried for the Marines, but they didn't want me. Pussies," Chin commented, spitting some tobacco off his cigar. "So, went through Great Lakes, they made me a machinist . . . but then I heard about the SEALS, an', well, ain't a bad life, y'know? You're Agency, I hear."

   "Started off as an Eleven-Bravo. Took a little trip to South America that went totally to shit, but I met our Six on the job and he kinda recruited me. Never looked back."

   "Agency send you to school?"

   "George Mason, just got my master's. International relations," Chavez replied with a nod. "You?"

   "Yeah, shows, I guess. Psychology, just a bachelor's, Old Dominion University. The doc on the team, Bellow.

   Smart son of a bitch. Mind-reader. I got three of his books :a my place." '

   "How's Covington to work for?"

   "Good. He's been there before. Listens good. Thoughtful kinda guy. Good team here, but as usual, not a hell of it to do. Liked your takedown at the bank, Chavez. and clean." Chin blew smoke into the sky.

   "Well, thank you, Master Chief."

   "Chavez!" Peter Covington came out the door just then. "Trying to steal my number-one?"

   "Just found out we grew up a few blocks apart, Peter."

   "Indeed? That's remarkable," the Team-1 commander said.

   "Harry's aggravated his ankle some this morning. No big deal, he's chewing some aspirin," Chin told his boss. "He banged it up two weeks ago zip-lining down from the helo," he added for Ding's benefit.

   Damn training accidents, the chief didn't have to add. That was the problem with this sort of work, they all knew. The Rainbow members had been selected for many reasons, not the least of which was their brutally competitive nature. Every man deemed himself to be in competition with every other, and each one of them pushed himself to the limit in everything. It made for injuries and training accidents-and the miracle was that they'd yet to place one of the team into the base hospital. It was sure to happen soon. The Rainbow members could no more turn that aspect of their personalities off than they could stop breathing. Olympic team members hardly had a tougher outlook on what they did. Either you were the very best, or you were nothing. And so every man could run a mile within thirty or forty seconds of the world record, wearing boots instead of track shoes. It did make sense in the abstract. Half a second could easily be the difference between life and death in a combat situation-worse, not the death of one of their own, but of an innocent party, a hostage, the person whom they were sworn to protect and rescue. But the really ironic part was that the Go-Team was not allowed heavy training for fear of a training accident, and so their skills degraded slightly over time-in this case, the two weeks of being stood-to. Three more days to go for Covington's Team-1, and then, Chavez knew, it would be his turn.

   "I hear you don't like the SWAT program," Chin said next.

   "Not all that much. It's good for planning movement and stuff, but not so good for the takedowns."

   "We've been using it for years," Covington said. "Much better than it used to be."

   "I'd prefer live targets and MILES gear," Chavez persisted. He referred to the training system the U.S. military often used, in which every soldier had laser-receivers mounted on his body.

   "Not as good at close range as at long," Peter informed his colleague.

   "Oh, never used it that way," Ding had to admit. "But as a practical matter, once we get close, it's decided. Our people don't miss many targets."

   "True," Covington conceded. Just then came the crack of a sniper rifle. Rainbow's long-riflemen were practicing over on the thousand-yard range, competing to see who could fire the smallest group. The current leader was Homer Johnston, Ding's Rifle TwoOne, an eighth of an inch better than Sam Houston, Covington's leading longrifleman, at five hundred yards-at which range either could put ten consecutive shots inside a two-inch circle, which was considerably smaller than the human head both men practiced exploding with their hollow-point match rounds. The fact of the matter was that two misses from any of the Rainbow shooters in a given week of drills was remarkable, and usually explained by tripping on something in the shooting house. The riflemen had yet to miss anything, of course. The problem with their mission wasn't shooting. It was getting in close enough-more than that, making a well-timed decision to move and take down the subjects, for which they most often depended on Dr. Paul Bellow. The shooting part, which they practiced daily, was the tensest part, to be sure, but also technically and operationally the easiest. It seemed perverse in that respect, but theirs was a perverse business.

   "Anything on the threat board?" Covington asked.

  "I was just heading over. but I doubt it. Peter." Whatever bad guys were still thinking about making mischief somewhere in Europe had seen TV coverage of the Bern bank, and that would have calmed them down some, both team leaders thought.

   "Very good, Ding. I have some paperwork to do," Covington said, heading back inside his building. On that cue, Chin tossed his cigar into the smokers' bucket and did the same.

   Chavez continued his walk to the headquarters building, returning the salute of the door guard as he went inside. The Brits sure saluted funny, he thought. Once inside, he found Major Bennett at his desk.

   "Hey, Sam,"

   "Good morning, Ding. Coffee?" The Air Force officer gestured to his urn.

   No, thanks. Anything happening anywhere?"

   A shake of the head. "Quiet day. Not even much in the wad of crime."

   Bennett's primary sources for normal criminal activity were the teleprinters for the various European news services. Experience showed that the services notified those who were interested about illegal activity more quickly than the official channels, which generally sent information via secure fax from the American or British embassies across Europe. With that input source quiet, Bennett was working on his computerized list of known terrorists, shifting through the photos and written summaries of what was positively known about these people (generally not much) and what was suspected (not much more).

   "What's this? Who's that?" Ding asked, pointing at the computer.

   "A new toy we're using. Got it from the FBI. It ages the subject photos. This one is Petra Dortmund. We only have two photos of her, both almost fifteen years old. So, I'm aging her by fifteen years, playing with hair color, too. Nice thing about women no beards," Bennett observed with a chuckle. "And they're usually too vain to pork up, like our pal Carlos did. This one, check out the eyes."

   "Not a girl I'd try to pick up in a bar," Chavez observed.

   "Probably a bad lay anyway, Domingo," Clark said from behind. "That's impressive stuff, Sam."

   "Yes, sir. Just set it up this morning. Noonan got it for me from Headquarters Division Technical Services. They invented it to help ID kidnap victims years after they disappeared. It's been pretty useful for that. Then somebody figured that if it worked on children growing up, why not try it on grown-up hoods. Helped 'em find a top-ten bank robber earlier this year. Anyhow, here's what Fraulein Dortmund probably looks like now."

   "What's the name of her significant other?"

   "Huns Furchtner." Bennett played with his computer mouse to bring up that photo. "Christ, this must be his high-school yearbook pictorial." Then he scanned the words accompanying the photo. "Okay, likes to drink beer . . . so, let's give him another fifteen pounds." In seconds, the photo changed. "Mustache . . . beard . . ." And then there were four photos for this one.

   "These two must get along just great," Chavez noted, remembering his file on the pair. "Assuming they're still together." That started a thought moving, and Chavez walked over to Dr. Bellow's office.

   "Hey, doc."

   Bellow looked up from his computer. "Good morning, Ding. What can I do for you?"

   "We were just looking at photos of two bad guys, Petra von Dortmund and Hans Fiirchtner. I got a question for you."

   "Shoot," Bellow replied.

   "How likely are people like that to stay together?" Bellow blinked a little, then leaned back in his chair. "Not a bad question at all. Those two . . . I did the evaluation for their active files .... They're probably still together. Their political ideology is probably a unifying factor, an important part of their commitment to each other. Their belief system is what brought them together in the first place, and in a psychological sense they took their wedding vows when they acted out on it-their terrorist jobs. As I recall, they are suspected to have kidnapped and killed a soldier, among other things, and activity like that creates a strong interpersonal bond."

   "But most of the people, you say, are sociopaths," Ding objected. "And sociopaths don't-"

   "Been reading my books?" Bellow asked with a smile. Ever hear the one about how when two people marry they become as one?"

   "Yeah. So?"

   "So in a case like this, it's real. They are sociopaths, but ideology gives their deviance an ethos-and that makes it important. Because of that, sharing the ideology makes them one, and their sociopathic tendencies merge. For those two, I would suspect a fairly stable married relationship. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they were formally married, in fact, but probably not in a church," he added with a smile.

   "Stable marriage . . . kids?"

   Bellow nodded. "Possible. Abortion is illegal in Germany – the Western part, I think, still. Would they choose to have kids? . . . That's a good question. I need to think about that."

   "I need to learn more about these people. How they think, how they see the world, that sort of thing."

   Bellow smiled again, rose from his chair, and walked to his bookcase. He took one of his own books and tossed it to Chavez. "Try that for starters. It's a text at the FBI academy, and it got me over here a few years ago to lecture to the SAS. I guess it got me into this business."

   "Thanks, doc." Chavez hefted the book for weight and leaded out the door. The Enraged Outlook: Inside the Terrorist Mind was the title. It wouldn't hurt to understand them a little better, though he figured the best thing about the inside of a terrorist's mind was a 185-grain 10-mm hollowpoint bullet entering at high speed. Popov could not give them a phone number to call. It would have been grossly unprofessional. Even a cellular phone whose ownership had been carefully concealed would give police agencies a paper-even deadlier today, an electronic-trail that they could run down, much to his potential embarrassment. And so he called them every few days at their number. They didn't know how that was handled, though there were ways to step a long-distance call through multiple instruments.

   "I have the money. Are you prepared?"

   "Hans is there now, checking things out," Petra replied. "I expect we can be ready in forty-eight hours. What of your end?"

   "All is in readiness. I will call you in two days," he said, breaking the connection. He walked out of the phone booth at Charles De Gaulle International Airport and headed toward the taxi stand, carrying his attaché case, which was largely full of hundred D-mark banknotes. He found himself impatient for the currency change in Europe. The equivalent amount of euros would be much easier to obtain than the multiple currencies of Europe

CHAPTER 7
FINANCE

   It was unusual for a. European to work out of his home, but Ostermann did. It was large, a former baronial schloss (translated as "castle," though in this case "palace" would have been more accurate) thirty kilometers outside Vienna. Erwin Ostermann liked the schloss; it was totally in keeping with his stature in the financial community. It was a dwelling of six thousand square meters divided into three floors, on a thousand hectares of land, most of which was the side of a mountain steep enough to afford his own skiing slopes. In the summer, he allowed local farmers to graze their sheep and goats there . -. . not unlike what the peasants once indentured to the schloss had done for the Herr, to keep the grass down to a reasonable height. Well, it was far more democratic now, wasn't it? It even gave him a break on the complex taxes put in place by the leftwing government of his country, and more to the point, it looked good.

   His personal car was a Mercedes stretch-two of them, in fact-and a Porsche when he felt adventurous enough to drive himself to the nearby village for drinks and dinner in the outstanding Gasthaus there. 'He was a tall man, one meter eighty-six centimeters, with regal gray hair and a trim, fit figure that looked good on the back of one of his Arabian horses-you couldn't live in a home such as this one without horses, of course. Or when holding a business conference in a suit made in Italy or on London's Savile Row. His office, on the second floor had been the spacious library of the original owner and eight of his descendants, but it was now aglow with computer displays linked to the world's financial markets and arrayed on the credenza behind a desk.

   After a light breakfast, he headed upstairs to his office, where three employees, two female and one male, kept him supplied with coffee, breakfast pastry, and information. The room was large and suitable for entertaining a group of twenty or so. The walnut-paneled walls were covered with bookshelves filled with books that had been conveyed with the schloss, and whose titles Ostermann had never troubled himself to. examine. He read the financial papers rather than literature, and in his spare time caught movies in a private screening room in the basement-a former wine cellar converted to the purpose. All in all, he was a man who lived a comfortable and private life in the most comfortable and private of surroundings. On his desk when he sat down was a list of people to visit him today. Three bankers and two traders like himself, the former to discuss loans for a new business he was underwriting, and the latter to seek his counsel on market trends. It fed Ostermann's already sizable ego to be consulted on such things, and he welcomed all manner of guests.

   Popov stepped off his airliner and walked onto the concourse alone, like any other businessman, carrying his attache case with its combination lock, and not a single piece of metal inside, lest some magnetometer operator ask him to open it and so reveal the paper currency inside terrorists had really ruined air travel for everyone, the former KGB officer thought to himself. Were someone to make the baggage-scanners more sophisticated, enough to count money inside carry-on baggage, for example, it would further put a dent in the business affairs of many people, including himself. Traveling by train was so boring.

   Their tradecraft was good. Hans was at his designated location, sitting there, reading Der Spiegel and wearing the agreed-upon brown leather jacket, and he saw Dmitriy Arkadeyevich, carrying his black attaché case in his left hand, striding down the concourse with all the other business travelers. Furchtner finished his coffee and left to follow him, trailing Popov by about twenty, meters, angling off to the left so that they took different exits, crossing over to the parking garage by different walkways. Popov allowed his head to turn left and right, caught Hans on the first sweep and observed how he moved. The man had to be tense, Popov knew. Betrayal was how most of the people like Furchtner got caught, and though Dmitriy was known and trusted by them, you could only be betrayed by someone whom you trusted, a fact known to every covert operator in the world. And though they knew Popov both by sight and reputation, they, couldn't read minds which, of course, worked quite well for Popov in this case. He allowed himself a quiet smile as he walked into the parking garage, turned left, stopped as though disoriented, and then looked around for any overt signs that he was being followed before finding his bearings and moving-on his way. Furchtner's car proved to be in. a distant corner on the first level, a blue Volkswagen Golf.

   "tauten Tag, " he said; on sitting in the right-front seat.

   "Good morning, Herr Popov," Furchtner replied in English. It was American in character and almost without accent. He must have watched a lot of television, Dmitriy thought.

   The Russian dialed the combinations into the locks of the case, opened the lid; and placed it in his host's lap. "You should find everything in order."

   "Bulky," the man observed.

   "It is a sizable sum," Popov agreed.

   Just then suspicion appeared in Furchtner's eyes: That surprised the Russian, until he thought about it. for a moment. The KGB had never been lavish in their payments to their agents, but in this attaché case was enough– cash to enable two people to live comfortably in any of several African countries for a period of some years. Hans was just realizing that, Dmitriy saw, and while part of the German was content just to take the money, the smart portion of his brain suddenly wondered where the money had come from. Better not to wait for the question, Dmitriy thought."Ah, yes," Popov said quietly. "As you know, many of my colleagues have outwardly turned capitalist in order to survive in my country's new political environment. But we are still the Sword and Shield of the Party, my young friend. That has not changed. It is ironic, I grant you, that now we are better able to compensate our friends for their services. It turns out to be less expensive than maintaining the safe houses which you once enjoyed. I personally find that amusing. In any case, here -is your payment, in cash, in advance, in the amount you specified."

   "Danke, " Hans Furchtner observed, staring down into the attaché case's ten centimeters of depth. Then he hefted the case. "It's heavy."

   "True," Dmitriy Arkadeyevich agreed. "But it could be worse. I might have paid you in gold," he joked, to lighten the moment, then decided to make his own play. "Too heavy to carry on the mission?"

   "It is a complication, Iosef Andreyevich."

   "Well, I can hold the money for you and come to you to deliver it upon the completion of your mission. That is your choice, though I do not recommend it."

   "Why is that?" Hans asked. "Honestly, it makes me nervous to travel with so much cash. The West, well, what if I am robbed? This money is my responsibility," he replied theatrically.

   Furchtner found that very amusing. "Here, in Osterreich, robbed on the street? My friend, these capitalist sheep are very closely regulated."

   "Besides, I do not even know where you will be going, and I really do not need to know-at this time, anyway."

   "The Central African Republic is our ultimate destination. We have a friend there who graduated Patrice Lumumba University back in the sixties. He trades in arms to progressive elements. He will put us up for a while, until Petra and I can find suitable housing."

   They were either very brave or very foolish to go to that country, Popov thought. Not so long before it had been called the Central African Empire, and had been ruled by "Emperor Bokassa I," a former colonel in the French colonial army, which had once garrisoned this small, poor nation, Bokassa had killed his way to the top, as had so many African chiefs of state, before-dying, remarkably enough; of natural causes--so the papers said, anyway; you could never really be-sure, could you? The country he'd left behind, a ,small diamond producer, was somewhat better off economically than -was the norm on the dark continent, though not by much. But then, who was to say that Hans and Petra would ever get there?

   "Well, my friend, it is your decision," Popov said, patting the attaché case still open in Furchtner's lap.

   The German considered that for half a minute or so. "I have seen the money," he concluded, to his guest's utter delight. Fiirchtner lifted a thousand-note packet of the cash and riffled it like a deck of cards before putting it back. Next he scribbled a note and placed it inside the case. "There is the name. We will be with him starting . . . late tomorrow, I imagine. All is ready on your end?"

   "The American aircraft carrier is in the eastern Mediterranean. Libya will allow your aircraft to pass without interference, but will not allow overflights of any NATO aircraft following you. Instead, their air force will provide the coverage and will lose you due to adverse weather conditions. I will advise you not to use more violence than is necessary. Press and diplomatic pressure has more strength today than it once did."

   "We have thought that one through," Hans assured his guest.

   Popov wondered briefly about that. But he'd be surprised if they even boarded an aircraft, much less got it to Africa. The problem with "missions" like this one was that no matter how carefully most of its parts had been considered, this chain was decidedly no stronger than its weakest link, and the strength of that link was all too often determined by others, or by chance, which was even worse. Hans and Petra were believers in their political philosophy, and like earlier people who'd believed so much in their religious faith so as to take the most absurd of chances, they would pretend to plan this "mission" through with their limited resources-and when you got down to it, their only resource was their willingness to apply violence to the world; and lots of people had that and substitute hope for expectations,* belief for knowledge. They would accept random chance, one of their deadliest enemies, as a neutral element, when a true professional would have sought to eliminate it entirely.

   And so their belief structure was really a blindfold, or perhaps a set of blinkers, which denied the two Germans the ability to look objectively at a world that had passed them by, and to which they were unwilling to adapt. But for Popov the real meaning of this was their willingness to let him hold the money. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich had adapted himself quite well to changing circumstances.

   "Are you sure, my young friend?"

   "Ja, I am sure." Furchtner closed the case, reset the locks, and passed it over to Popov's lap. The Russian accepted the responsibility with proper gravity.

   "I will guard this carefully." All the way to my bank in Bern. Then he extended his hand. "Good luck, and please be careful:"

   "Danke. We will get you the information you require."

   "My employer needs that badly, Hans. We depend on you." Dmitriy left the car and walked back in the direction of the terminal, where he'd get a taxi to his hotel. He wondered when Hans and Petra would make their move. Perhaps today? Were they that precipitous? No, he thought, they would say that they were that professional. The young fools.

   Sergeant First Class Homer Johnston extracted the bolt from his rifle, which he lifted to examine the bore. The ten shots had dirtied it some, but not much, and there was no erosion damage that he could see in the throat forward of the chamber. None was to be expected until he'd fired a thousand or so rounds, and he'd only put five hundred forty through it to this point. Still, in another week or so he'd have to start using a fiber-optic instrument to check, because the 7mm Remington Magnum cartridge did develop high temperatures when fired, and the excessive heat burned up barrels a little faster than he would have preferred. In a few months, he'd have to replace the barrel, a tedious and fairly difficult exercise even for a skilled armorer, which he was. The difficulty was in matching the barrel perfectly with the receiver, which would then require fifty or so rounds on the known-distance range to make sure that it delivered its rounds as accurately as it was intended to do. But that was in the future. Johnston sprayed a moderate amount of BreakFree onto the cleaning patch and ran it through the barrel, back to front. The patch came out dirty. He removed it from the cleaning rod, then put a new one on the tip, and repeated the motion six times until the last patch came through totally clean. A final clean patch dried the bore of the select-grade Hart barrel, though the Break-Free -cleaning solvent left a thin not much more than' a molecule's thickness coating of silicon on the steel, which protected against corrosion without altering the microscopic tolerances of the barrel. Finished and satisfied, he replaced the bolt, closing it on an empty chamber with the final act of pulling. the trigger, which decocked the rifle as it dropped the bolt into proper position.

   He loved the rifle, though somewhat surprisingly he hadn't named it. Built by the same technicians who made sniper rifles for the United States Secret Service, it was a 7-mm Remington Magnum caliber, with A Remington match-quality receiver, a select-grade Hart barrel, and Leupold ten-power Gold Ring telescopic sight, all married to an ugly Kevlar stock-wood would have been much prettier, but wood warped over time, whereas Kevlar was dead, chemically inert, unaffected by moisture or time. Johnston had just proven, again, that his rifle could fire at about one quarter of a minute of angle's accuracy, meaning that he could fire three consecutive rounds inside the diameter of a nickel at one hundred yards. Someday somebody might design a laser weapon, Johnston thought, and maybe that could improve on the accuracy of this handmade rifle. But nothing else could. At a range of one thousand yards, he could put three consecutive rounds into a circle of four inches – that required more than a rifle. That meant gauging the wind for speed and direction to compensate for drift-deflection. It also meant controlling his breathing and the way his finger touched the two and-a-half-pound double-set trigger. His cleanup tasks done, Johnston lifted the rifle and carried it to its place in the gun vault, which was climate-controlled, and nestled it where it belonged before going back to the bullpen. The target he'd shot was on his desk.

   Homer Johnston lifted it. He'd shot three rounds at 400 meters, three at 500, two at 700, and his last two at 900. All ten were inside the head-shape of the silhouette target, meaning that all ten would have been instantly fatal to a human target. He shot only cartridges that he'd loaded himself: Sierra 175-grain hollow-point boat-tailed match bullets traveling in front of 63.5 grains of IMR 4350 smokeless powder seemed to be the best combination for that particular rifle, taking 1.7 seconds to reach a target 1,000 yards downrange. That was an awfully long time, especially against. a moving target, Sergeant Johnston thought, but it couldn't be helped. A hand came down on his shoulder.

   "Homer," a familiar voice said.

   "Yeah, Dieter," Johnston said, without looking up from the target. He was in the zone, all the way in. Shame it wasn't hunting season.

   "You did better than me today. The wind was good for you." It was Weber's favorite excuse. He knew guns pretty well for a European, Homer thought, but guns were American .things, and that was that. .

   "I keep telling you, that semiautomatic action doesn't headspace properly." Both of Weber's 900-meter rounds were marginal. They would have incapacitated 'the target, but not definitely killed it, even though they scored as hits. Johnston was the best rifle in Rainbow, even better than Houston, by about half a cunt hair on a good day, Homer admitted to himself.

   "I like to get my second round off more quickly than you," Weber pointed out. And that was the end of the argument. Soldiers were as loyal to their firearms as they were to their religions. The German was far better in rate of fire with his golliwog Walthersniper rifle, but that weapon didn't have the inherent accuracy of a bolt-action and also fired a less-speedy cartridge. The two riflemen had debated the point over many a beer already, and neither would ever move the other.

   In any case, Weber patted his holster. "Some pistol, Homer?"

   "Yeah." Johnston stood. "Why not?" Handguns were not serious weapons for serious work, but they. were fun, and the rounds were free here. Weber had him faded. in handguns by about one percent or so. On the way to the range, they passed Chavez, Price and the rest, coming out with their MP-1 Os, joking with one another as they passed. Evidently everyone had had a good morning on the range.

   "Ach, " Weber snorted, "anyone can shoot at five meters!"

   "Morning, Robert," Homer said to the rangemaster. "Want to set up some Qs for us?"

   "Quite so, Sergeant Johnston," Dave Woods replied, grabbing two of the American-style targets--called "Q targets" for the letter Q in the middle, about where the heart would be. Then he got a third for himself. A lavishly mustached color sergeant in the British Army military police regiment, he was pretty damned good with a 9-mm Browning. The targets motored down to the ten-meter line and turned sideways while the three sergeants donned their ear protectors. Woods was, technically, a pistol instructor, but the quality of the men at Hereford made that a dull job, and as a result he himself fired close to a thousand rounds per week, perfecting his own skills. He was known to shoot with the men of Rainbow, and to challenge them to friendly competition, which, to the dismay of the shooters, was almost a break-even proposition. Woods was a traditionalist and held his pistol in one hand, as Weber did, though Johnston preferred the two-hand Weaver stance. The targets turned without warning, and three handguns came up to address them.

   The home of Erwin Ostermann was magnificent, Hans Ffrchtner thought for the tenth time, just the sort of thing for an arrogant class-enemy. Their research into the target hadn't revealed any aristocratic lineage for the current owner of this schloss, but he doubtless thought of himself in those terms. For now, Hans thought, as he turned onto the two kilometer driveway of brown gravel and drove past the manicured gardens and bushes arranged with geometric precision by workers who were at the moment nowhere to be seen. Pulling up close to the palace, he stopped the rented Mercedes and turned right, as though looking for a parking place. .Coming around the rear of the building, he saw the Sikorsky S-76B helicopter they'd be using later, sitting on the usual asphalt pad with a yellow circle painted on it. Good. Furchtner continued the circuit around the schloss and parked in front, about fifty meters from the main entrance.

   "Are you ready, Petra?"

   "Ja" was her terse, tense reply. It had been years since either had ran an operation, and the immediate reality of it was different from the planning they'd spent a week to accomplish, going over charts and diagrams. There were things they did not yet know for certain, like the exact number of servants in the building. They started walking to the front door when a delivery truck came up, arriving there just as they did. The truck doors opened, and two men got out, both carrying large boxes in their arms. One waved to Hans and Petra to go up the stone steps, which they did. Hans hit the button, and a moment later the door opened. "Tauten Tag," Hans said. "We have an appointment with Herr Ostermann."

   "Your name?"

   "Bauer," Furchtner said. "Hans Bauer."

   "Flower delivery," one of the other two men said.

   "Please come in. I will. call Herr Ostermann," the butler whatever he was-said.

   "Danke, " Furchtner replied, waving for Petra to precede him through the ornate door. The deliverymen came in behind, carrying their boxes. The butler closed the door, then turned to walk left toward a phone. He lifted it and started to punch a button. Then he stopped.

   "Why don't you take us upstairs?" Petra asked. There was a pistol in her hand aimed right into his face.

   "What is this?"

   "This," Petra Dortmund replied with a warm smile, "is my appointment." It was a Walther P-38 automatic pistol.

   The butler swallowed hard as he saw-the deliverymen open their boxes and reveal light submachine guns, which they loaded in front of him. Then one of them opened the front door and waved. In seconds, two more young men entered, both similarly armed.

   Furchtner ignored the new at-rivals, and took a few steps to look around. They were in the large entrance foyer, its high, four-meter walls covered with artwork. Late Renaissance, he thought, noteworthy artists, but not true masters, large paintings of domestic scenes in gilt frames, which were in their way more impressive than the paintings themselves. The floor was white marble with black-diamond inserts at the joins, the furniture also largely gilt and French=looking. More to the point, there were no other servants in view, though he could hear a distant vacuum cleaner working. Mirchtner pointed to the two most recent arrivals and pointed them west on the first floor. The kitchen was that way, and there would, doubtless be people there to control.

   "Where is Herr Ostermann?" Petra asked next.

   "He is not here, he-"

   This occasioned a movement of her pistol, right against his mouth. "His automobiles and helicopter are here: Now, tell us where he is."

   "In the library, upstairs." .

   "Gut. Take us there," she ordered. The butler looked into her eyes for the first time and found them far more intimidating than the pistol in her hand. He nodded and turned toward the main staircase.

   This, too, was gift, with a rich red carpet held in place with brass bars, sweeping on an elegant curve to the right as they climbed to the second floor. Ostermann was a wealthy man, a quintessential capitalist who'd made his fortune trading shares in various industrial concerns, never taking ownership in one, a string-puller, Petra Dortmund thought, a Spinne, a spider, and this was the center of his web, and they'd entered it of their own accord, and, here the spider would learn a few things about webs and traps.

   More paintings on the staircase, she saw, far larger than anything she'd ever done, paintings of men, probably the men who'd built and lived in this massive edifice, this monument to greed. and exploitation : . . she already hated its owner who lived so well, so opulently, so publicly proclaiming that he was better than everyone else while he built up his wealth and exploited the ordinary workers. At the top of the staircase was a huge oil portrait of the Emperor Franz Josef himself, the last of his. .wretched fine, who'd died just a few years before the even more hated Romanovs. The butler, this worker for the evil one, turned right, leading them down a wide hall into a doorless room. Three people were there, a man and two. women, better dressed than the butler, all working away at computers.

   "This is Herr Bauer," the butler said in a shaky voice. "He wishes to see Herr Ostermann."

   "You have an appointment?" the senior secretary asked.

   "You will take us in now, " Petra announced. Then the gun came into view, and the three people in the anteroom stopped what they were doing and looked at the intruders with open mouths and pale faces.

   Ostermann's home was several hundred years old, but not entirely a thing of the past. The male secretary – in America he would have been called an executive assistant – was named Gerhardt Dengler. Under the edge of his desk was an alarm button. He thumbed this hard and long while he stared at the visitors: The wire led to the schloss's central alarm panel, and from there to the alarm company.

   Twenty kilometers away, the employees at the central station responded to the buzzer and flashing light by immediately calling the office of the Staatspolizei. Then one of them called the schloss for confirmation. "May I answer it?" Gerhardt asked Petra, who seemed to him to be in charge. He got a nod and lifted the receiver.

   "Herr Ostermann's office."

   "Hier ist Traudl, " the alarm company's secretary said.

   "Tauten Tag, Traudl. Hier ist Gerhardt," the executive assistant said. "Have you called about the horse?" That was the phrase for serious trouble, called a duress code.

   "Yes, when is the foal due?" she asked, carrying on to protect the man on the other end, should someone be listening in on the line. .

   "A few more weeks, still. We will tell you when the time comes," he told her brusquely, staring at Petra and her pistol.

   "Danke, Gerhardt. Auf Wiederhoren." With that, she hung up and waved to her watch supervisor.

   "It is about the horses," he explained to Petra, "We have a mare in foal and-"

   "Silence," Petra said quietly, waving for Hans to approach the double doors into Ostermann's office. So far, she thought, so good. There was even some cause for amusement. Ostermann was right through those double doors, doing the work he did as though things were entirely normal; when they decidedly were not. Well,-now it was time for him to find out. She pointed to the executive assistant. "Your name is?..." "Dengler," the man replied.

   "Gerhardt Dengler"