The Matarese Countdown (Matarese Dynasty 1)

"My contact, as you call him, is close to the President, an authority on clandestine activities. I was-am-in a unique position to render a service."

"What position? What service?"

"The enemy, as you called them, kidnapped my son. He was taken from his school in Connecticut. Unless I supposedly do as they ask, they'll kill him."

A final earthshaking explo

sion shook the boathouse. Three windows were blown out, the fragments of glass showering over the Chris-Craft.

Beyond, clearly visible among the debris, was a helium-filled red balloon attached to a destroyed upper window frame. It had miraculously survived, fluttering at the end of a long string.

It was the marker that led the killer aircraft to its target. Someone in the compound had been following Beowulf Agate, and minutes before the strike knew exactly where he was.

The body bags and the wounded were airlifted out of the compound within the hour, the few stunned, uncomprehending local police kept at bay by the federal authorities. The relatively distant neighbors, horrified by the noise but unable to observe the site, which was prohibited, demanded explanations. They were given, in the main, hastily concocted "classified" fictions relative to drug interdiction. Four estates went on the real-estate market immediately, despite assurances that the successful "operation" had been completely shut down.

According to the radar-tracking tapes, it was assumed that the false Silent Horse had maneuvered due east over Delaware's Bethany Beach and out into the Atlantic, where it disappeared off the screen. Supporting confirmation came from the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Nanticoke, southeast of Taylors Island. Their own interceptor screens showed an unidentified aircraft passing rapidly toward open ocean water when it abruptly was erased.

The professionals were in agreement, for it was known strategy where terrorist acts were concerned. The killer helicopter had headed for an Atlantic rendezvous where the crew bailed out, to be picked up by boat. Also, it could be assumed that prior to abandoning the chopper, a preset explosive was activated, blowing up the aircraft moments later, sending the remains to the bottom of the ocean. The Matarese was precise in all things.

Frank Shields walked with Scofield through the once peaceful, lovely compound. All around were painful sights of the carnage, mainly from the smoking debris of the destroyed great house. Shattered doors, windows, walls, and columns were nothing more than smoldering ruins, some as far away as six hundred feet, the length of two football fields.

"It's like a battlefield after a clash between two armies," said Bray solemnly, "only in this case, we didn't even know we were in combat.

The bastards! .. . And it's my fault! I could have stopped the whole thing and I'll never forgive myself." Scofield's words trailed off quietly, painfully.

"I don't think you could have stopped it, Brandon-" "Come on, Frank! You said you wanted us out of here and I said no.

I'm a stubborn, pig-headed old fool who doesn't realize he should stop giving orders! I've been away too long to have the authority."

"I'm not trying to make you feel better, or even absolve you from all responsibility," Shields broke in.

"I'm simply saying you couldn't have stopped it."

"How can you say that?"

"Because it would have happened wherever you were.. .. We're riddled, Bray, right up to interagency memoranda, including office codes and confidential instructions to departments."

"How do you know?"

"When the emergency signal came through and we learned what was taking place here, I called External Security and blew my stack.

Where the hell was our air cover, our on-site sky patrols? They were always on the parameters of the corridor, six in the morning and six at night."

"So where were they?" asked Scofield angrily.

"Goddamn it, we heard them every time the flyboys came in! They woke up Toni in the mornings. Where were they?"

"X-Security told me they received an in-house order under the standard emergency code to stand down the Silent Horse escort fighters due to severe chopper maintenance."

"What? Who authorized it?"

"Certainly not me, Brandon."

"Your office? Who in your office?"

"You don't understand. It could be anyone, but who would dare?""

"Rip your personnel apart!" yelled Bray, furious.

"Put every son of a bitch and female slime on the racks until they bleed! You can't do any less-they may as well have manned the guns and dropped those bombs themselves. Eight people killed and four more who probably won't make it. Do something, Frank! I can't but you can-goddamn it, it's your turf!"

"Yes, it's my turf and it'll be done my way because I have both the authority and the responsibility, and my judgment calls aren't based on obstinacy or a desire to stamp my own imprimatur on anything."

"Oh? ..." Scofield stopped; he reached over and gripped Shields's arm.

"All right, Squinty, I deserved that."

"Yes, I think you did."

"I'm angry as hell!"

"So am I, Brandon," said the deputy director, his narrowed eyes steady.

"But a putsch at the Agency, such as you suggest, would only drive our enemies farther underground while creating an atmosphere in which they could thrive. Dissension can be a very effective diversion."

"Oh, Jesus," said Bray, releasing Shields's arm as they continued walking.

"I guess that's why you're an analyst and I'm not.. .. But what I can't understand is that if I'm the one they want deep-dead, why not an assassin's bullet in my head? Simple, clean, and quick, with minimum risk and maximum percentage of a kill. God knows we've got our own mole inside here. That red balloon wasn't put there by one of Santa Claus's elves."

"No, but it answers your question. Whoever it was had to know that you, Antonia, and Pryce were rarely, if ever, out of sight of compound surveillance."

"Is that a fact?"

"Certainly. We tried to consider every contingency we could dream up. We didn't invest all this effort and materials, to say nothing of money, to have you taken out from in here."

"How come I didn't spot it? Or Toni or Cameron? None of us is an amateur."

"It was done mostly by remote, according to sectors. A sergeant might call a corporal on his walkie-talkie and say "Bomba'-that was you-'is leaving Sector Six, pick him up Seven." We divided the compound into grids-you know the rest."

"Alternating vehicles," agreed Scofield. "

"Brown sedan turning off Eighth Avenue, tail it Forty-sixth Street."

" "Precisely. That tactic never loses its efficiency."

"The old ones are usually the best, Frank.. .. What the hell are we talking about? We're up to our necks in bullshit and we sound like a couple of trainees!"

"We're talking like this so we can think, Brandon. It's all we've got left."

"We'd better stop thinking and start doing, Junior."

"Really, Bray, I can tolerate the "Squinty," but not "Junior." Besides, as I told Pryce, I'm older than you."

"You are?"

"Eighteen months and eleven days, boy.. .. Since you'd rather not think, what've you got in the doing department?"

"First," answered Scofield, "piece together what we have. The young corporal shot on the outside road; the infiltrator who scaled the wall to blow away Toni and me; Bracket and Denny poisoned, killed at a breakfast meant for me; the bombing strike we can't trace with a target marker placed in here by a mole or moles we can't find. Finally, there's the Montrose woman's contact at the White House. What does it all add up to?"

"Now you're back to thinking," said a sad but bemused Shields.

"However, as to the Montrose flap, she's clean, even if she did panic.

How she can even function is beyond me. She's got to be consumed by what may happen to her son."

"How did she get involved with Sixteen Hundred?"

"Colonel Bracket. He and his wife are-were, in his case of course-close friends of Montrose's. When the kidnapping took place and she was reached by what we can assume to be the Matarese, she was close to a breakdown. She had nowhere to turn, certainly not to the loose-lipped bureaucracy. According to Mrs. Bracket, who's under a great deal of stress herself right now, Montrose confided in her husband, Everett, a military colleague and in some ways a mentor."

"That sounds reasonable," said Bray, nodding as they rounded

the tarmac that was the Black Hawk helicopter's touchdown.

"She confided in him because he was a friend, a fellow West Pointer, and a confidant; she trusted him. But what about the White House?"

"Bracket was sent to graduate school at Yale and one of his classmates was Thomas Cranston-" "I know that name," interrupted Scofield.

"He was one of us, wasn't he?"

"Right up the ladder and damned good. In addition to his natural talents, he was a terrific salesman. If he'd stayed in Langley, he might have been plucked for the directorship, and I would have supported him."

"Squinty, that could have been your job! Don't you have any normal, jealous, hate-filled bones in that frail body of yours?"

"Not when I know I'm not qualified and enjoy what I do-which I do well. Cranston left the Agency to head up one of those think tanks funded by international academic wannabes From there it was a quick jump into the political maelstrom. He's now the President's chief aide for national security."

"So Bracket sent Montrose to him."

"Yes, it seemed logical, and in light of what's happened, it was sound. We have expertise and clout, but we're obviously cancerous.

Her son would have been killed if she'd come to us."

"But what can this Thomas Cranston do?"

"I have no idea, but whatever it is, it'll be very back-channel."

"To whom?"

"I don't know."

"Then we should find out."

"I've requested an off-limits meeting with him. Maybe we'll learn something Sixteen Hundred doesn't want us to know-at this juncture."

"Aren't we on the same goddamned side?" asked Bray, raising his voice.

"We sometimes work at cross-purposes."

"That's crap!"

"No question about it, but that's the way things are."

"All right, all right. Naturally, I insist on being at that meeting. Also Pryce and Antonia. We're the experts, remember?"

"You'll be included," agreed Shields.

"Not, however, Colonel Montrose. Cranston's worried about her anxiety level."

"Understandable.. .. Now, about all these financial doings, the mergers, the corporations getting together, and, as I see it, corralling markets. I can help us here. I'm no computer but I remember names, relationships, friends of the Matarese, and the enemies they either swallowed up or destroyed. I just need methods of operation, backgrounds of company lineage-that's important, it's vital. The Matarese's ultimate weakness is that they're incestuous; they always call in their own, going back years, blackmailing or enlisting on greed.