"Thank you, sir," John breathed, setting that one aside.
The amazing part of this job was all the admin stuff. As the commander of Rainbow, Clark had to keep track of when and how money came in and was spent, and he had to defendsuch things as the number of gun rounds his people fired every week. He did his best to slough much of this off on Alistair Stanley end Mrs. Montgomery, but a lot of it still leaded on his desk. He had long experience as a government employee, and at CIA he'd had to report in endless detail on every field operation he'd ever run to keep the desk weenies happy. But this was well beyond that, and it accounted for his time on the firing range, as he found shooting a good means of relief, especially if he imagined the images of his bureacratic tormentors in the center of the targets he perforated with.45-caliber bullets: Justifying a budget was something new and foreign. If it wasn't important, why fund it at all, and if it was important; why quibble oar a few thousand bucks' worth of bullets? It was the bureaucratic mentality, of course, all these people who sat at their desks and felt that the world would collapse around them if they didn't have ail their papers initialed, signed, stamped, and properly filed, and if that inconvenienced others, too bad. So he, John Terrence Clark, CIA field officer for more than thirty years, a quiet legend in has agency, was stuck at his expensive desk, behind a closed door, working on paperwork that any self respecting accountant would have rejected, on top of which he had to supervise and pass judgment on real stuff, which was both more interesting and far more to the point.
And it wasn't as though his budget was all that much to worry about. Less than fifty people, total, scarcely three million dollars in payroll expense, since everyone was paid the usual military rate, plus the fact that Rainbow picked up everyone's housing expense out of its multi-government funding. One inequity was that the American soldiers were better paid than their European counterparts. That bothered John a little, but there was nothing he could do about it, and with housing costs picked up-the housing at Hereford wasn't lavish, but it was comfortable-nobody had any trouble living. The morale of the troops was excellent. He'd expected that. They were elite troopers, and that sort invariably had a good attitude, especially since they trained almost every day, and soldiers loved to train almost as much as they loved to do the things they trained for.
There would be a little discord. Chavez's Team-2 had drawn both field missions, as a result of which they'd swagger a little more, to the jealous annoyance of Peter Covington'sTeam-1, which was slightly ahead on the team/team competition of PT and shooting. Not even a cat's whisker of difference, but people like this, as competitive as any athletes could ever be, worked damned hard for that fifth of a percentage point, and it really came down to who'd had what for breakfast on the mornings of the competitive exercises, or maybe what they'd dreamed about doing the night. Well, that degree of competition was healthy for the team as a whole. And decidedly unhealthy for those against whom his people deployed.
Bill Tawney was at his desk as well, going over the known information on the terrorists of the night before. The Austrians had begun their inquiries with the German-Federal Police Office-the Bundes Kriminal Amt-even before the takedown. The identities of Hans Fiuchtner and Petra fund had been confirmed by fingerprints. The BKA investigators would jump onto the case hard that day. For starters, they'd trace the IDs of the people who'd rented the car that had been driven to the Ostermann home, and search for the house in Germany-probably Germany, Tawney reminded himself-that they'd lived in: The other four would probably be harder. Fingerprints had already been taken and were being compared on the computer scanning systems that everyone had now. Tawney agreed with the initial assessment of the Austrians that the four spear-carriers had probably been from the former East ` Germany, which seemed to be turning out all manner of political aberrants: converts from communism who were now discovering the joys of nazism, lingering true believers in the previous political-economic- model, and just plain thugs who were a major annoyance to the regular German police forces.
But this had to be political. Furchtner and Dortmund were had been, Bill corrected himself-real, believing communists all their lives. They'd been raised in the former West Germany to middle-class families, the way a whole generation of terrorists had, striving all their active lives for socialist perfection or some such illusion. Anti so they had raided the home of a high-end capitalist… seeking what?
Tawney lifted a set of faxes from Vienna. Erwin Ostermann had told the police during his three-hour debrief that they'd sought his "special inside codes" to the international trading system. Were there such things? Probably not, Tawney judged-why not make sure? He lifted his phone and dialed the number of an old friend, Martin Cooker, a former "Six" man who now worked in Lloyd's ugly building in London's financial district.
"Cooper," a voice said.
"Martin, this is Bill Tawney. How are you this rainy morning?"
"Quite well, Bill, and you-what are you doing now?"
"till taking the Queen's shilling, old man. New job, very, hush-hush, I'm afraid."
"What can I do to help you, old man?",
"Rather a stupid question, actually. Are there any insider channels in the international trading system? Special codes and such things?".
"I bloody wish there were, Bill. Make our job here much easier," replied the former station chief for Mexico City. and a few other minor posts for the British Secret Intelligence Service. "What exactly do you mean?"
"Not sure, but the subject just came up."
"Well, people at this level do have personal relationships and often trade information, but I take it you mean something rather more structured, an insider-network marketplace sort of thing?"
"Yes, that's the idea."
"If so, they've all kept it a secret from me and the people I work with, old man. International conspiracies?" Cooper snorted. "And this is a chatty mob, you know. Everyone's into everyone else's business."
"No such thing, then?"
"Not to my knowledge, Bill. It's the sort of thing the uninformed believe in, of course, but it doesn't exist, unless that's the mob who assassinated John Kennedy," Cooper added with a chuckle.
"Much what I'd thought, Martin, but I needed to tick that box. Thanks, my friend"
"Bill, you have any idea on who might have attacked that Ostermann chap in Vienna?"
"Not really. You know him?"
"My boss does. I've met him once. Stems a decent bloke, and bloody smart as well."
"Really all I know is what I saw on the telly this morning." It wasn't entirely a lie, and Martin would understand in any case, Tawney knew.
"Well, whoever did the rescue, my hat is off to them. Smells like SAS to me."
"Really? Well, that wouldn't be a surprise, would. it?"
"Suppose mot. Good hearing from you, Bill. How about dinner sometime?"
"Love to. I'll call you next time fm in London."
"Excellent. Cheers."
Tawney replaced the phone. It seemed that Martin had landed on his feet after being let go from "Six," which had reduced its size with the diminution of the Cold War. Well, that was to be expected. The sort of thing the uninformed believe in, Tawney thought. Yes, that fit. Furchtner and Dortmund were communists, and would not have trusted or believed in the open market. In their universe, people could only get wealthy by cheating, exploiting, and conspiring with others of the same ilk. And what did that mean?…
Why had they attacked the home of Erwin Ostermann? You couldn't rob such a man. He didn't keep his money in cash or gold bars. It was all electronic, theoretical money, really, that existed in computer memories and traveled across telephone wires, and that was difficult to steal, wasn't it?