Patriot Games

McKe

"Michael, we do not wish to kill them. Any fool can do that," he said patiently. "Our objective demands that we take them alive."

"But—"

Would they never learn? "No buts, Michael. If I wanted to kill them, they would already be dead, and this Ryan bastard along with them. It is easy to kill, but that will not achieve what we wish."

"Yes, sir." McKe

"They will be processing him in Brixton Prison for another two weeks or so—our friends in C-13 don't want him far from their reach for the moment."

"Does that mean that Sean—"

"Most unlikely," O'Do

"But how will we know?"

"There is a great deal of high-level interest in our comrade," O'Do

McKe

"Anything new with our colleagues?" O'Do

"Yes, as a matter of fact," McKe

"I think we can let that one pass," O'Do

"The bombmaker, Dwyer, has dropped out of sight again," McKe

"The last time that happened… yes, England, wasn't it? Another campaign?"

"Our man doesn't know. He's working on it, but I have told him to be careful."

"Very good." O'Do

McKe

"No." The chief shook his head.

"But he'll slip away again. We needed a month to—"

"No, Michael. Timing—remember the importance of timing. The operation is an integrated whole, not a mere collection of events." The commander of the PIRA's Belfast Brigade—Brigade, less than two hundred men, O'Do

What right moment? What plan? McKe

"Difficult, isn't it, Mike?"

"Yes, sir, it is," McKe

"Just keep in mind where impatience has gotten us," the leader said.

8 Information

"I guess that about covers it, Jimmy. Thanks from the Bureau for tracking that guy down."

"I really don't think he's the sort of tourist we need, Dan," Owens replied. A Floridian who'd embezzled three million dollars from an Orlando bank had made the mistake of stopping off in Britain on his way to another European country, one with slightly different banking laws. "I think the next time we'll let him do some shopping on Bond Street before we arrest him, though. You can call that a fee—a fee for apprehending him."

"Ha!" The FBI representative closed the last folder. It was six o'clock local time. Dan Murray leaned back in his chair. Behind him, the brick Georgian buildings across the street paled in the dusk. Men were discreetly patrolling the roofs there, as with all the buildings on Grosvenor Square. The American Embassy was not so much heavily guarded as minorly fortified, so many terrorist threat warnings had come and gone over the past six years. Uniformed police officers stood in front of the building, where North Audley Street was closed off to traffic. The sidewalk was decorated with concrete «flowerpots» that a tank could surmount only with difficulty, and the rest of the building had a sloped concrete glacis to fend off car bombs. Inside, behind bullet-resistant glass, a Marine corporal stood guard beside a wall safe containing a.357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver. A hell of a thing, Murray thought. A hell of a thing. The wonderful world of the international terrorist. Murray hated working in a building that seemed part of the Maginot Line, hated wondering if there might be some Iranian, or Palestinian, or Libyan, or whatever madman of a terrorist, with an RPG-7 rocket launcher in a building across the street from his office. It wasn't fear for his life. Murray had put his life at risk more than once. He hated the injustice, the insult to his profession, that there were people who would kill their fellow men as a part of some form of political expression. But they're not madmen at all, are they? The behavioral specialists say that they're not. They're romantics—believers, people willing to commit themselves to an ideal, and to commit any crime to further it. Romantics!

"Jimmy, remember the good old days when we hunted bank bandits who were just in the business for a fast buck?"