Tom Clancy Support and Defend

  “I need to make a phone call.”

  “And I need you to answer my questions. Why would anyone want to kill your friend and his family? On his visa he said his occupation was personal trainer. His wife was a yoga instructor.”

  Dom did not answer. His forearm stung under the dressing now.

  Naidu raised his voice. “Who was Arik Yacoby?”

  “He was my martial-arts instructor. That’s all.”

  “Pakistani terrorists do not often go to such great lengths to kill martial-arts instructors.”

  “They were Pakistani?”

  Naidu looked at Caruso with genuine surprise. “This is India. Who else would they be?”

  Caruso laid his head back on his pillow. This was to be a hostile interview, that much was clear. And Dom was not in the mood. “I have no idea. I’m not the detective constable. If I were you, I’d look into the dairy truck parked at the end of the street.”

  Naidu replied, “I have already taken care of that. The woman who drove it is being sought. She has left the village, but we will find her.”

  Caruso looked around the hospital room, then said, “Pretty sure she’s not in here.”

  “You are more interesting to me than she is.”

  Dom closed his eyes. “Then I’d say your investigation is fucked.”

  Naidu ignored the insult, and instead he looked down at his notepad. “Let’s not waste time with games. We know Yacoby was a former member of the IDF. If he was something more, I need you to tell me.”

  “Something more?”

  “Was he a Jew spy?”

  Dom fought to control his urge to rail at Naidu. Instead, he said. “I want to make a phone call. I will not say anything else until I do.”

  Naidu’s jaw flexed. Slowly he said, “You don’t want to find out who is responsible for your friends’ deaths?”

  Nothing from the man on the bed.

  “You show no respect for our investigation, but perhaps you should. You are not a suspect. We know you fought against the attackers. The blood of one of the men found in the kitchen was all over your hands. I am not going to charge you with murder for that, you might be pleased to know.”

  Dom rolled his eyes. He wasn’t thinking about the implications for himself.

  “I just want you to help me understand why they came for Arik Yacoby.”

  “I can’t help you. I don’t know.”

  Naidu sighed. “Pakistani terrorists. The threat of nuclear war. New conflict with China. Crime. Corruption. Disease. You don’t think my nation has enough problems without Jews coming to our shores and encouraging new enemies?”

  “Do I get my phone call or do you want an international incident when I leave?”

  “You get a phone call when I say you get a phone call. You leave when I say you leave.”

  “Do you always treat guests to your country with such warmth?”

  Naidu laughed. “I am not from the tourism bureau, Mr. John Doe. Maybe you can arrange an elephant ride with them when you get out of prison, but I am here to extract information from you.”

  Prison? Naidu was flailing. Dom knew most everything there was to know about interrogation tactics—he’d been trained by the FBI, after all. He could tell there was something missing from the detective constable’s bluster. The bark was there, but Dom sensed no bite.

  He smiled thinly. “I can hear it in your voice. You are bluffing. You don’t have the authority to do a damn thing to me.”

  Naidu deflated a little. Though he kept his chin up and his voice strong, Dom saw weakness in his eyes. After a long staring contest, Naidu broke his gaze. “I would like to keep you here. You would open your mouth, eventually, I promise you this. But someone thinks you are important. A plane has arrived from the United States. My superiors have ordered me to put you on it as soon as you are fit for travel.”

  With that, Caruso threw off the sheets and kicked his legs out over the side of the bed. He began sitting up, but he’d only flexed his abdominals when he recoiled in pain. It felt as if all his ribs had been broken or, at least, very badly bruised.

  He dropped back flat on the bed.

  The detective constable cracked a slow smile as he noticed the young American’s agony. He stood and walked to the door, then turned back, still with a smile only half hidden under his mustache.

  He said, “Forgive me, John Doe. In this situation, I must find my satisfaction in the little things.”

  4

  ETHAN ROSS ran late for work almost every Monday, and today was no exception. He would never admit it, but arriving fashionably late was by design; he found punctuality to be beneath his station, and chronic tardiness nothing more than a harmless passive-aggressive way to protest the inflexible rules of his organization.

  He’d slept in a little this morning, not at home in Georgetown, but at his girlfriend’s place in Bethesda. Last night he and Eve had gone out to a bar to watch a Lakers game that didn’t end till after eleven here on the East Coast, and then they’d stayed for one more round that had somehow turned into three.

  They’d finally made it to bed at one, and to sleep at two after Ethan’s amorous mood overpowered the five greyhounds he’d consumed. He’d planned on going home to spend the night at his own place, but after sex, all he wanted to do was roll over to the edge of the bed and crash until morning.

  At eight-fifteen Ethan awoke suddenly, roused by a panicked and shrill rendering of his name.

  “Ethan!” The voice was Eve’s, and his eyes opened and fixed on her alarm clock, because she was holding it in front of his face.

  “Calm down,” he said, but she was up and running for the bathroom, because punctuality was more her thing than it was his.

  He made it downstairs to his red Mercedes coupe a few minutes later, cranked up some music and drove south to his town house on 34th Street, where he indulged in a long, leisurely shower and then took all the time he needed styling his blond hair with molding clay. He dressed, then stepped in front of his full-length mirror so he could check the fit, cut, and sheen of his gray Ralph Lauren sharkskin suit. Satisfied that his purple polka-dot tie wasn’t too much with the sharkskin, he slipped on a pair of cherry loafers and gave himself one more long appraisal in the mirror, assessing and then approving his style and looks.

  At nine he sauntered down the front steps of his row house, still unhurried and unstressed, and he climbed back into his warm Mercedes and headed off to work, music blaring again.

  Traffic on Wisconsin Avenue wasn’t too bad, but he hit his first snag of the day when he found Pennsylvania to be mired in gridlock. While he crept forward he sang along with his Blaupunkt stereo. Neil Young’s On the Beach was a 1974 release that would have been a unique listening choice for most thirty-two-year-olds, but Ross had grown up with it. Revolution music, his mother used to call it, although Ethan realized there was a certain dissonance to the concept of singing along with anti-establishment songs while driving his luxury car on his way to his government job.

  No matter. Ethan still considered himself something of a rebel, albeit one with a more realistic worldview.

  He’d been listening to his old albums since he got off work on Friday, both alone and then with Eve. She didn’t much care for them, but she didn’t complain, and he didn’t really give a damn. Eve was a brilliant but hopelessly submissive Korean girl who would walk on glass for him if he told her to do so, and sometimes Ethan liked to unplug on the weekends, to go from five p.m. Friday to nine a.m. Monday without checking his phone, his iPad, or watching any TV. He didn’t do it often, but there were times when his job was too stifling: endless boring meetings and conference calls and lunches with people he didn’t want to eat with or trips with people he didn’t want to travel with. He’d had a few months like this, his work was frustrating him and interfering with his well-cultivated self-image as a D.C. power player, and only detoxifying himself from work and inoculating himself with the music of his childhood could refresh him and get him
ready to face work again on Monday.

  Eve didn’t complain; Ethan was certain she was just happy to have him to herself for two full days.

  He checked his hair in the rearview, turned up Neil Young even louder, and sang along, pitching his voice in and out of key and fighting the power the only prudent way to do so at present.

  ETHAN ROSS LIKED TO tell people he worked at t he White House, and it was true, with a caveat. His office was in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing, and while the Eisenhower EOB housed many offices for White House personnel, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, the White House. West Wing employees distinguished themselves from Eisenhower Building employees by saying they worked “inside the gates,” while the EOB staff worked “outside the gates.” Ross didn’t see any distinction himself. He was a White House staffer to anyone who asked, or anyone who would listen, for that matter.

  He had spent the last three years here, spanning two administrations, serving as deputy assistant director for Near East and North African affairs in the National Security Council. He prepared policy papers for the President of the United States, or at least he coordinated the preparation of policy papers for the national security adviser, who then determined if the president should see a summary of them. The papers came from the work of the Department of State and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as a series of domestic and international think tanks and academic institutions.

  His job, as he described it, was to give POTUS the best information available for him to conduct policy.

  But his job, as he actually saw it, was to push paper while others made key decisions.

  Ethan worked closely with the U.S. intelligence community, getting data from most all of the sixteen agencies related to his region. Not just the CIA, but also the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, sometimes even the military intelligence agencies. Coordination was his role, he wasn’t a decision-maker himself, but he did have his finger on the pulse of happenings in his region.

  It was a moderately high position for someone his age, although, as far as Ross was concerned, it was far beneath him. He had considered the work just barely impressive at twenty nine when he was put in the post, but now, two weeks before his thirty-third birthday, each and every day he lamented what he saw as his slow rise to the ranks of the power players.

  His work no longer pushed him. Ethan thought he was smart enough to phone it in, and so that’s exactly what he had been doing for some time.

  He hoped to advance out of this job soon—not into something higher at NSC, this had just been a placeholder for him— rather, he wanted to make his way into the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. He had been bred for a life of high-level work in an international organization. His father had worked as a staffer in the UN for twenty-five years before becoming an international-studies professor, both at universities abroad and then back home in Georgetown. His mother had served in the Carter administration as an undersecretary in the United States Mission to the United Nations, then as ambassador to Jordan during the Clinton years, before herself becoming a professor at Georgetown and a best-selling author of political biographies.

  Ross was a government employee, a federal worker, but he was also something of a contrarian. He got it from his academic upbringing. He felt most people he worked with in government were unintelligent and boring. He didn’t talk about his personal political beliefs around his coworkers—he didn’t have that sort of a White House job—but he quietly considered himself ideologically opposed to the administration in power.

  Just like every workday, Ethan parked his red E-Class coupe in a parking facility a block away from the Eisenhower Building and, just like every workday, it pissed him off when he walked to the EOB and saw open parking spaces in the lot. His position did not merit a reserved parking space; only the highest-ranking two dozen or so execs had such privileges.

  He stepped through the gate at the 17th Street entrance, then pulled his badge out of his coat. He was late enough that the security line was short, so in under a minute he left the drab gray outbuilding and headed up the steps into the main building.

  The Eisenhower EOB used to be known as the State, War, and Navy Building, and it had been the nexus of American foreign power at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century—the era when America emerged as a world leader. It had been constructed over a seventeen-year period in the late 1800s, and crafted in the ornate architectural style known as French Second Empire. The elaborate symmetrical iron cresting, balustrades, and cornices were meant to portray permanence and character, and many felt the huge structure, in many ways, overshadowed its next-door neighbor, the White House.

  Ethan wasn’t as impressed with the architecture as others were, because Ethan knew the Eisenhower Building wasn’t the power center it used to be, and certainly nothing like the building next door at 1600 Penn.

  He made it into the third-floor NSC wing at 9:39, entered his small office, put his coat on the rack, and frowned. His secretary, Angela, always had his coffee ready for him, a Venti mocha from Starbucks that she picked up on her way in to work and placed next to his telephone to the right of his desk.

  Angela was here, he had seen her sweater hanging over the back of her chair in his outer office when he entered, but his coffee was nowhere to be found.

  Ross sighed. You had one job, Angie, and you dropped the ball first thing on Monday morning.

  A moment later he heard movement outside his office, and he called out as he sat down. “Angie?”

  His fifty-four-year-old secretary appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Good. You’re here.”

  With both a look and a tone crafted to convey just a hint of displeasure, he said, “Did you forget my coffee?”

  “No, sir. I put it at your place in the conference room. Everyone else is waiting.”

  Ethan jerked his head to his morning agenda lying on his blotter, worried he’d forgotten a meeting. Rarely did he have any planned events so early on a Monday. But his agenda confirmed he was free. “I don’t have anything till ten-thirty, and that’s off-site.”

  “They said they were calling everyone on their way in. I thought you’d gotten the message.”

  Ethan had heard his phone ring through the sound system in his Mercedes, but he’d muted the call without looking at it. The speakers had been pouring out Neil Young, after all, and by the time the last smoky notes of Ambulance Blues drifted away, he’d been pulling into the parking lot and he’d forgotten about the call.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, but it must be a big deal. Everyone was supposed to be in the conference room at nine-thirty.”

  Ethan looked at his watch. It was 9:41.

  He sighed again, and headed off for the conference room.

  5

  ETHAN ENTERED the open double doors of the NSC conference room and saw a full house looking back at him. The U-shaped table was completely occupied, and it was standing room only against the walls. He knew the table could accommodate sixteen, so he estimated there were at least twenty-five in attendance.

  His Venti mocha was right there on the table, but sitting in front of it was Walter Pak from the South and Central Asia desk, and Ross couldn’t muster the gall to push his way through the crowd and grab his drink when all eyes were on him.

  As he headed for an open spot by the wall, he scanned faces quickly in an attempt to discern the reason for this morning’s emergency meeting.

  He saw the deputy directors and assistant deputies for all the other regions: Europe, Russia and Eurasia, Asia, South Asia, Central Africa—even the Western Hemisphere. Whatever new problem had popped up seemed to be impossibly wide in scope. Ross half smiled to himself, wondering if NASA had gotten word that aliens were poised to attack.

  He also noticed several men and women from the IT depart
ment. This he considered odd, but not especially so, as they were higher-level system administrators and they found their way into many staff meetings when questions about access and networks came into play.

  He located a spot on the wall and then turned to face the front, and now he noticed someone who didn’t belong. A fit looking male in his late thirties wearing a dark blue suit stood at the front of the room behind Madeline Crossman and Henry Delvecchio, who were positioned side by side at the lectern and had obviously been addressing the group.

  Ethan didn’t know blue-suit guy, but he did know Delvecchio and Crossman.

  Delvecchio was the deputy for regional affairs, the head of all the regions. He worked directly for the national security adviser, and that made him one of the top men in the NSC.

  Crossman, on the other hand, was not a big deal as far as Ethan was concerned. Any worries Ethan had that this was something of major import vanished the instant he saw Maddy Crossman standing at the lectern. She was a compliance and security director, an administrator in charge of making sure everyone filled out requisition forms correctly and didn’t leave their key cards at their desks when they went to the john.

  Ethan gave a contrite half-wave at Crossman and Delvecchio and said, “Sorry, folks. Car trouble.”

  Henry Delvecchio gave an understanding nod and returned his attention to the room. “Again, I apologize for rushing everyone in first thing, but we have an issue that needs your attention. I trust you all have heard about the events in India last night.”

  Ethan looked around to other faces. There were nods, clear indications of understanding.

  Ethan Ross, on the other hand, didn’t have a clue what had happened in India. Suddenly he felt like he was back in his undergrad days, walking in late to class with a hangover only to find out there would be a pop quiz, and he didn’t have any idea of the topic of the test.