Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (59 page)

His immediate concern was his next target.  He had two more days of availability on the carrier battle group, and he wanted to stage another stealth-bombing if he could.

Clark
was domiciled in a frame house in the outskirts of Bogotá , a safe house the CIA had set up a decade earlier, officially owned by a corporate front and generally rented out commercially to visiting American businessmen.  It had no obvious special features.  The telephone was ordinary until he attached a portable encrypting device—a simple one that wouldn't have passed muster in Eastern Europe, but sufficient for the relatively low-intercept threat down here—and he also had a satellite dish that operated just fine through a not very obvious hole in the roof and also ran through an encrypting system that looked much the same as a portable cassette player.

So what to do next?
he asked himself.  The Untiveros bombing had been carefully executed to look like a car bomb.  Why not another, a real one?  The trick was setting it up to scare hell out of the intended targets, flushing them into a better target area. To accomplish that it had to appear an earnest attempt, but at the same time it couldn't be earnest enough to injure innocent people.  That was the problem with car bombs.

Low-order detonation?
he thought.  That was an idea.  Make the bomb look like an earnest attempt that fizzled.  Too hard to do, he decided.

Best of all would be a simple assassination with a rifle, but that was too hard to set up.  Just getting a perch overlooking the proper place would be difficult and dangerous.  The Cartel overlords kept tabs on every window with a line of sight to their own domiciles.  If an American rented one, and soon thereafter a shot was fired from it—well, that wouldn't exactly be covert, would it?  The whole point was for them not to know exactly what was happening.

Clark
's operational concept was an elegantly simple one.  So elegant and so simple that it hadn't occurred to the supposed experts in “black” operations at
Langley
.  What
Clark
wanted to do, simply, was to kill enough of the people on his list to increase the paranoia within his targeted community.  Killing them all, desirable though it might be, was a practical impossibility.  What he wanted to do was merely to kill enough of them, and to do so in such a way as to spark another reaction entirely.

The Cartel was composed of a number of very ruthless people whose intelligence was manifested in the sort of cunning most often associated with a skilled enemy on the battlefield.  Like good soldiers they were always alert to danger, but unlike soldiers they looked for danger from within in addition to from without.  Despite the success of their collaborative enterprise, these men were rivals.  Flushed with money and power, they didn't and would never have enough.  There was never enough of either for men like this, but power most of all.  It seemed to Clark and others that their ultimate goal was to assume political control of their country, but countries are not run by committees, at least not by large ones.  All
Clark
needed to accomplish was to make the Cartel chieftains think that there was a power grab underway within their own hierarchy, at which point they would merrily start killing one another off in a new version of the Mafia wars of the 1930s.

Maybe, he admitted to himself.  He gave the plan about a 30 percent chance of total success.  But even if it failed, some major players would be removed from the field, and that, too, counted as a tactical success if not a strategic one.  Weakening the Cartel might increase
Colombia
's chances of dealing with it, which was another possible strategic outcome, but not the only one.  There was also the chance that the war he was hoping to start could have the same result as the final act of the Castellammare Wars, remembered as the Night of the Italian Vespers, in which scores of mafiosi had been killed by their own colleagues.  What had grown out of that bloody night was a stronger, better-organized, and more dangerous organized-crime network under the far more sophisticated leadership of Carlo Luchiano and Vito Genovese.  That was a real danger,
Clark
thought.  But things couldn't get much worse than they already were.  Or so
Washington
had decided.  It was a gamble worth the taking.

Larson arrived at the house.  He'd come here only once before, and while it was in keeping with Clark's cover as a visiting prospector of sorts—there were several boxes of rocks lying around the house—it was one aspect of the mission that bothered him.

“Catch the news?”

“Everyone says car bomb,” Larson replied with a sly smile. “We won't be that lucky next time.”

“Probably not.  The next one has to be really spectacular.”

“Don't look at me!  You don't expect that I'm going to find out when the next meet is, do you?”

It would be nice
,
Clark
told himself, but he didn't expect it, and would have disapproved any order requiring it. “No, we have to pray for another intercept.  They have to meet.  They have to get together and discuss what's happened.”

“Agreed.  But it might not be up in the mountains.”

“Oh?”

“They all have places in the lowlands, too.”

Clark
had forgotten about that.  It would make targeting very difficult. “Can we spot in the laser from an aircraft?”

“I don't see why not.  But then I land, refuel, and fly the hell out of this country forever.”

Henry and Harvey Patterson were twin brothers, twenty-seven years of age, and were proof of whatever social theory a criminologist might hold.  Their father had been a professional, if not especially proficient, criminal for all of his abbreviated life—which had ended at age thirty-two when a liquor-store owner had shot him with a 12-gauge double at the range of eleven feet.  That was important to adherents of the behavioral school, generally populated by political conservatives.  They were also products of a one-parent household, poor schooling, adverse peer-group pressure, and an economically depressed neighborhood.  Those factors were important to the environmental school of behavior, whose adherents are generally political liberals.

Whatever the reason for their behavior, they were career criminals who enjoyed their life-style and didn't give much of a damn whether their brains were preprogrammed into it or they had actually learned it in childhood.  They were not stupid.  Had intelligence tests not been biased toward the literate, their IQs would have tested slightly above average.  They had animal cunning sufficient to make their apprehension by police a demanding enterprise, and a street-smart knowledge of law that had allowed them to manipulate the legal system with remarkable success.  They also had principles.  The Patterson brothers were drinkers—each was already a borderline alcoholic—but not drug users.  This marked them as a little odd, but since neither brother cared a great deal for law, the discontinuity with normal criminal profiles didn't trouble them either.

Together, they had robbed, burglarized, and assaulted their way across southern
Alabama
since their mid-teens.  They were treated by their peers with considerable respect.  Several people had crossed one or both—since they were identical twins, crossing one inevitably meant crossing both—and turned up dead.  Dead by blunt trauma (a club), or dead by penetrating trauma (knife or gun).  The police suspected them of five murders.  The problem was, which one of them?  The fact that they were identical twins was a technical complication to every case which their lawyer—a good one they had identified quite early in their careers—had used to great effect.  Whenever the victim of a Patterson was killed, the police could bet their salaries on the fact that one of the brothers—generally the one who had the motive to kill the victim—would be ostentatiously present somewhere miles away.  In addition, their victims were never honest citizens, but members of their own criminal community, which fact invariably cooled the ardor of the police.

But not this time.

It had taken fourteen years since their first officially recorded brush with the law, but Henry and Harvey had finally fucked up big-time, cops all over the state learned from their watch commanders: the police had finally gotten them on a major felony rap and, they noted with no small degree of pleasure, it was because of another pair of identical twins.  Two whores, lovely ones of eighteen years, had smitten the hearts of the Patterson brothers.  For the past five weeks Henry and Harvey had not been able to get enough of Noreen and Doreen Grayson, and as the patrol officers in the neighborhood had watched the romance blossom, the general speculation in the station was how the hell they kept one another straight—the behavioralist cops pronounced that it wouldn't actually matter, which observation was dismissed by the environmentalist cops as pseudoscientific bullshit, not to mention sexually perverse, but both sides of the argument found it roundly entertaining speculation.  In either case, true love had been the downfall of the Patterson brothers.

Henry and Harvey had decided to liberate the Grayson sisters from their drug-dealing pimp, a very disreputable but even more formidable man with a long history of violence, and a suspect in the disappearance of several of his girls.  What had brought it to a head was a savage beating to the sisters for not turning over some presents—jewelry given them by the Pattersons as one-month anniversary presents.  Noreen's jaw had been broken, and Doreen had lost six teeth, plus other indignities that had enraged the Pattersons and put both girls in the University of South Alabama Medical Center.  The twin brothers were not people to bear offense lightly, and one week later, from the unlit shadows of an alley, the two of them had used identical Smith & Wesson revolvers to end the life of Elrod McIlvane.  It was their misfortune that a police radio car had been half a block away at the time.  Even the cops thought that, in this case, the Pattersons had rendered a public service to the city of
Mobile
.

The police lieutenant had both of them in an interrogation room.  Their customary defiance was a wilted flower.  The guns had been recovered less than fifty yards from the crime scene.  Though there had been no usable fingerprints on either—firearms do not always lend themselves to this purpose—the four rounds recovered from McIlvane's body did match up with both; the Pattersons had been apprehended four blocks away; their hands bore powder signatures from having fired guns of some sort; and their motive for eliminating the pimp was well known.  Criminal cases didn't get much better than that.  The only thing the police didn't have was a confession.  The twins' luck had finally run out.  Even their lawyer had told them that.  There was no hope of a plea-bargain—the local prosecutor hated them even more than the police did—and while they stood to do hard time for murder, the good news was that they probably wouldn't get the chair, since the jurors probably would not want to execute people for killing a drug-dealing pimp who'd put two of his whores in the hospital and probably killed a few more.  This was arguably a crime of passion, and under American law such motives are generally seen as mitigating circumstances.

In identical prison garb, the Pattersons sat across the table from the senior police officer.  The lieutenant couldn't even tell them apart, and didn't bother asking which was which, because they would probably have lied about it out of pure spite.

“Where's our lawyer?” Henry or Harvey asked.

“Yeah,” Harvey or Henry emphasized.

“We don't really need him here for this.  How'd you boys like to do a little favor for us?” the lieutenant asked. “You do us a little favor and maybe we can do you a little favor.” That settled the problem of legal counsel.

“Bullshit!” one of the twins observed, just as a bargaining position, of course.  They were at the straw-grasping stage.  Prison beckoned, and while neither had ever served a serious stretch, they'd done enough county time to know that it wouldn't be fun.

“How do you like the idea of life imprisonment?” the lieutenant asked, unmoved by the show of strength. “You know how it works, seven or eight years before you're rehabilitated and they let you out.  If you're lucky, that is.  Awful long time, eight years.  Like that idea, boys?”

“We're not fools.  Watchu here for?” the other Patterson asked, indicating that he was ready to discuss terms.

“You do a job for us, and, well, something nice might happen.”

“What job's that?” Already both brothers were amenable to the arrangement.

“You seen Ramón and Jesús?”

“The pirates?” one asked. “Shit.” In the criminal community as with any other, there is a hierarchy of status.  The abusers of women and children are at the bottom.  The Pattersons were violent criminals, but had never abused women.  They only assaulted men—men much smaller than themselves for the most part, but men nonetheless.  That was important to their collective self-image.

“Yeah, we seen the fucks,” the other said to emphasize his brother's more succinct observation. “Actin' like king shit last cupla days.  Fuckin' spics.  Hey, man, we bad dudes, but we ain't never raped no little girl, ain't never killed no little girl neither—and they be gettin' off, they say?  Shit!  We waste a fuckin' pimp likes to beat on his ladies, and we lookin' at life.  What kinda justice you call that, mister policeman?  Shit!”

“If something were to happen to Ramón and Jesús, something really serious,” the lieutenant said quietly, “maybe something else might happen.  Something beneficial to you boys.”

“Like what?”

“Like you get to see Noreen and Doreen on a very regular basis.  Maybe even settle down.”

“Shit!” Henry or Harvey said.

“That's the best deal in town, boys,” the lieutenant told them.

“You want us to kill the motherfuckers?” It was Harvey who asked this question, disappointing his brother, who thought of himself as the smart one.

The lieutenant just stared at them.

“We hear you,” Henry said. “How we know you keep your word?”

“What word is that?” The lieutenant paused. “Ramón and Jesús killed a family of four, raped the wife and the little girl first, of course, and they probably had a hand in the murder of a
Mobile
police officer and his wife.  But something went wrong with the case against them, and the most they'll get is twenty years, walk in seven or eight, max.  For killing six people.  Hardly seems fair, does it?”