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Authors: John R. Maxim

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BOOK: The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series)
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“Those operations fall, for better or worse, under a legally constituted charter. Does this?”
“No, sir. It can't work if it does.”
“Do I gather, then, that I have just been lured into a criminal conspiracy with you, Mr. Hagler, and Mr. Kaplan?”
“Not at all. We're just . . . talking.”
“Funny, you don't look hypothetical,”
9
Fuller said, deadpan. “But as long as we're just talking, what does our expert on counterterrorism think about all this?”
“You know what Hagler wants. He wants his hands untied.”
“Who among us does not? But I'm asking about this.
”
He turned his thumb to the laptop.

“In Harry's words, he would like the freedom to hit those fuckers so hard and so often that they'd be afraid to come up for air. Any way he could. Legally or not.”
9

“That's Harry, all right. Where would he draw the line?
”
”I asked him that. He said he'd let me know when he reached it.”
“Surely he'd stop at murder.”
“Naturally. If that's what it was.”
“What else could it be and still have the same effect?”
“Punitive action. Preemptive strikes. Pest control. Whatever works for him.”
“And Irwin?”
“He was—uneasy in the beginning. He's coming around. It was Kaplan who insisted that I expose this to you before we go any further.”
“In search of a godfather, I take it.”
“On the contrary, Kaplan doesn't think you'll have the stomach for it. Frankly, I think that's what he's hoping for.”
“He might be right. What are you hoping for?”
“That we can all, the four of us, put our minds together. That we can come up with a way to use this technology that is both morally defensible and effective. Above all, sir, I'm with Hagler. I want the enemies of our country to be afraid. TENET can show us how to hit them with random but strategic—
countermeasures.”
He'd almost said
brutality.
“But they will have no idea who is hitting them or why.”
“No idea?” Fuller raised an eyebrow. “Does TENET say these people are all stupid? You don't think they'll make some gesture in our direction such as blowing a few more of our airliners out of the sky?”
“Not if our strikes appear to be the work of rival factions. We can have terrorists killing each other off at two or three times their current rate. We can start wars between drug lords, drive them undercover, paralyze their traffic.”
“And gang wars between mobsters?”
“Eventually, yes.”
“And corporate executives, Roger. Do we start killing them off as well?”
Clew bit his lip. “That was purely ... an exercise. There are corporations with policies every bit as inimical to the interests of the United States as those of the drug cartels. However, I would—”
“Draw the line?”
“Yes.”
Fuller stared at him.

“In any case,” Clew continued, “after these—surgical strikes—our own legally constituted agencies would be employed to move in and pick up the pieces. The computer would have told them exactly—”

”I get the picture.”

“The beauty of it is,” Clew pointed out, “that no one else has to be in on this. Just Kaplan and Hagler. They'll go on directing operations just as they're doing now. No one's going to ask them how they got so smart all of a sudden.”

“No CIA?” Fuller asked.
“Not while Palmer Reid is there.”
Fuller's eyes narrowed. “Which, I gather, means that your chief surgeon is to be your old friend Mama's Boy.”
“There is no more Mama's Boy. He's just Paul Bannerman now. But yes, he'd be my first choice.”
“Does he know about this?”
“No one knows. Just the four of us.”
“What makes you think he'd be interested?”
“He won't be. Not at first. I'd have to work on him.”
Fuller brought his hands to his eyes, rubbing them. He should, he supposed, ask how. Better, probably, not to know. Except he owed that much to Cassie.
“
Cassie Bannerman.”
He spoke her name in his mind. And he saw her face. The one they called “Mama.” He never called her that; to him, she was simply Cassie.
Abruptly, Fuller rose from his chair. He stepped to the sideboard where he filled his mug, slowly, from a thermos pitcher. He kept his back to the younger man. Turning, he wandered toward a painting, a pastoral scene, that hung on the far wall. It was not of any great value. He simply liked it. Or rather she did. Knew the artist. Knew his work. That was why he'd bought it.
“
Yes, Cassie. I still have it. I look at it every day.”
Sixteen . . . almost seventeen years.

He could still feel the emptiness, although the anger had faded over time. It was more than anger. The closest he'd ever come to taking up the gun himself, to wanting to look into a man's face as he killed him, was on the day he was told that Cassie had been murdered.

The odd thing was, they hadn't even been all that close, at least by modern standards. Met her at an embassy party in Vienna. Had dinner a few times. Took long walks. The nearest they'd come to a tryst was a weekend in Paris. Prowled museums. Went dancing. Separate hotels rooms, not even on the same floor. At the end of it, a hug, a peck on the cheek, a long look into her eyes, nothing more. He was, after all, married to Katherine, rest her soul. And happily so. But that fact did little, it seemed, to keep Cassie Ðannerman out of his dreams. Every man, he supposed, has had a fantasy woman. Cassie was his. And, no doubt, that of a few dozen other men as well. More than good looks, there was a tremendous . . . electricity to her. Beautiful, yet totally un-self-conscious about it. Tremendously kind. Quick-witted.
She said she was an art buyer for several museums. Which was true enough. But she was also, as it turned out, an American intelligence operative, code name “Mama,
”
who was the control of a small army of contract agents until she was set up and sold out by her own people.
Her son, Paul—she'd spoken of him. Barely out of college at the time, living back in California. He'd spend his school breaks driving all over Europe with her. Nice young man. Nothing in his history to suggest what he would become. Except that he was Cassie Bannerman's son.
An astonishing story, really: He returned to Europe at the age of twenty-four to find out who and what his mother really was, and why and how she'd been killed. He might well have suffered the same fate had he not been adopted, so to speak, by certain of the contract agents she'd been running.
It was a bit like being raised by wolves. These were men, and women, who did not content themselves with the mere urge to kill. Within a few months, three CIA agents, including one section chief, were dead. So were two, possibly three, corrupt Austrian policemen and a pair of German thugs who were the actual triggermen in Cassie's death.
The CIA, sensible for once, sued for peace. Offered reparations, an apology, and disciplinary action against those involved in his mother's death, that's if any of them still lived. Mostly, they wanted this unexpectedly dangerous young man to go away so that the free-lance agents who had embraced his cause would stop the foolishness and go back to work. They chose as their spokesman a young trade mission diplomat—Roger Clew—in the belief that someone Paul Bannerman's age, borrowed from the State Department, clearly uninvolved, would not be shot on sight.

They were too late. Cassie Bannerman's son had grown larger than life. Paul Ðannerman, by that time, had become Mama's Boy. The stuff of legends. A name spoken in a lowered voice. That astonished no one more than Paul Bannerman himself. His newfound friends informed him that, just as they relied on Cassie Bannerman to represent them, negotiate for them, protect their interests, they would now rely on him. He is, after all, his mother's son. He bears her genes as well as her name. He is intelligent, articulate, multilingual, and cool under fire. If he were to abandon them now, any settlement negotiated with the CIA would soon be forgotten. They would be picked off one by one.

And so, at the tender age of twenty-four, Cassie Bannerman's son began running what would soon grow into the most tightly knit, and deadliest, network of contract agents in all of Western Europe. He would work, within limits, for most of the Western intelligence services, including certain of the American services, but he would never again trust the CIA. And Roger Clew, the young innocent who was borrowed via that long-ago phone call to Barton Fuller, built a career on being the only man in the entire United States government with whom Mama's Boy would negotiate.
Pity, thought Fuller, that he hadn't left well enough alone. Bannerman, and Roger, would still be there. But twelve years of that were enough. Roger had earned his reward. Barton Fuller had called in his loan. Still, he should have realized that Palmer Reid would rush into the vacuum left by Roger and try to to reclaim what he considered his feifdom.
“Mr. Fuller?” Roger's voice, behind him.
”Um-hum?”
“Are you okay, sir?”
“Yes.” He nodded, still looking at the painting. “Just woolgathering, Roger.”
He could not recall ever discussing Cassie with Roger. Certainly not his special feelings for the woman. But they'd certainly discussed the son. Perhaps, on one of those occasions, Roger had seen something in his eyes. And had gone back to his damned computer. God knows what was in those things. Good man, Roger. Could do with being a bit less manipulative, however. Well, Fuller thought, let's see. Roger is not the only one who knows how to access a computer file.
“From what I hear”—he turned from the painting, and from Cassie Bannerman—“Mama's Boy has been knocking off more of us than them lately.”
“Palmer Reid's people are not
us,
”
Clew answered evenly. “If the CIA had its way, he wouldn't be
them,
either. As for Bannerman, Reid tried to hit him at least twice, and he got bloodied each time. Bannerman warned him what would happen. So did I.”
“It won't surprise you that Reid has a different view. He insists that Bannerman and his killers are a pack of mad dogs, that they have invaded this country, and that Banner-man himself is insubordinate, a thief, and a traitor.
”
“With all respect, sir, I think you know better.
”
Fuller shrugged. ”I know that he and a dozen or so of his killers returned to this country three years ago, waltzed into a CIA training facility up in Connecticut and handed Reid and his people their walking papers.
”
“It's not a training facility. That town was one big safe house for Reid's private army and it's illegal as hell.
”
“The fact remains—
”
“And Bannerman didn't waltz in. Reid lured him there. Reid meant to kill him.
”
“He denies that as well.
9
*
Clew made a face.
Fuller tried not to smile. “The fact remains,
”
he pressed, “that Bannerman and his people have taken over an entire American town. Wouldn't you say that borders on bending the law?”
“Bannerman took and held a number of properties that Reid acquired with unaudited funds. There's a clinic, a restaurant, some houses, and a few retail businesses to give his people something to do. Bannerman himself runs a travel agency. He has not taken over the town. He simply lives there.”
“Westport, Connecticut.
”
Fuller returned to his seat at the machine. ”A nice place. I'm told the crime rate is remarkably low.”
“Bannerman takes care of his own. He always has.”
“The local residents—they know nothing?
”

“There's no reason why they should. Bannerman doesn't bother them. If anything, he protects them.”

“Still, you'd think someone would notice that—
”

Clew shook his head. “Westport is a commuter town. New people come and go all the time. Bannerman's people don't have horns. Most were born in this country. They look like everyone else.”

“Back to Reid. You say he's tried to dislodge them?”
“Not dislodge them, kill them.”
“Then what's kept Mama's Boy from killing Reid?”

“My opinion? He uses the threat of Reid to keep his people on their toes. You can lose your edge in a place like Westport. Anyway, he knows Reid won't try to retake the place in force because that would leave bodies all over the street. The media would notice.”

BOOK: The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series)
13.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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