Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (367 page)

“D’accord?”
René asked the people around the table, and again he got his nods. Their eyes were stronger now. Doubts would be set aside. The mission lay before them. The decision to undertake it was far behind. The waiter arrived with two new carafes, and the wine was poured around. The ten men savored their drinks, knowing they might be the last for a very long time, and in the alcohol they found their resolve.

“Don’t you just love it?” Chavez asked. “Only Hollywood. They hold their weapons like they’re knives or something, and then they hit a squirrel in the left nut at twenty yards. Damn, I wish
I
could do that!”

“Practice, Domingo,” John suggested with a chuckle. On the TV screen, the bad guy flew about four yards backward, as though he’d been hit with an anti-tank rocket instead of a mere 9-mm pistol round. “I wonder where you buy those.”

“We can’t afford them, O great accounting expert!”

John almost spilled his remaining beer at that one. The movie ended a few minutes later. The hero got the girl. The bad guys were all dead. The hero left his parent agency in disgust at their corruption and stupidity and walked off into the sunset, content at his unemployment. Yeah, Clark thought, that was Hollywood. With that comfortable thought, the evening broke up. Ding and Patsy went home to sleep, while John and Sandy did the same.

It was all a big movie set, Andre told himself, walking into the park an hour before it opened to the guests already piling up at the main gate. How very American, despite all the effort that had gone into building the place as a European park. The whole idea behind it, of course, was American, that fool Walt Disney with his talking mice and children’s tales that had stolen so much money from the masses. Religion was no longer the opiate of the people. No, today it was escapism, to depart from the dull day-to-day reality they all lived and all hated, but which they couldn’t see for what it was, the bourgeois fools. Who led them here? Their children with their shrill little demands to see the Trolls and the other characters from Japanese cartoons, or to ride the hated Nazi Stuka. Even Russians, those who’d gotten enough money out of their shattered economy to throw it away here, even
Russians
rode the Stuka! Andre shook his head in amazement. Perhaps the children didn’t have the education or memory to appreciate the obscenity, but surely their
parents
did! But they came here anyway.

“Andre?”

The park policeman turned to see Mike Dennis, the chief executive officer of Worldpark, looking at him.

“Yes, Monsieur Dennis?”

“The name’s Mike, remember?” The executive tapped his plastic name tag. And, yes, it was a park rule that everyone called everyone else by his Christian name—something else doubtless learned from the Americans.

“Yes, Mike, excuse me.”

“You okay, Andre? You looked a little upset about something.”

“I did? No . . .
Mike,
no, I am fine. Just a long night for me.”

“Okay.” Dennis patted him on the shoulder. “Busy day planned. How long you been with us?”

“Two weeks.”

“Like it here?”

“It is a unique place to work.”

“That’s the idea, Andre. Have a good one.”

“Yes, Mike.” He watched the American boss walk quickly away, toward the castle and his office.
Damned Americans,
they expected everyone to be happy all the time, else something must be wrong, and if something went wrong, it had to be fixed. Well, Andre told himself, something
was
wrong, and it
would
be fixed this very day. But Mike wouldn’t like that very much, would he?

One kilometer away, Jean-Paul transferred his weapons from his suitcase to his backpack. He’d ordered room service to bring breakfast in, a big American breakfast, he’d decided, since it might have to stand him in good stead for most of this day, and probably part of another. Elsewhere in this hotel and other hotels in the same complex, the others would be doing the same. His Uzi submachine gun had a total of ten loaded magazines, with six more spares for his 9-mm pistol, and three fragmentation hand grenades in addition to his radio. It made for a heavy backpack, but he wouldn’t be carrying it all day. Jean-Paul checked his watch and took one final look at his room. All the toiletries were recently bought. He’d wiped all of them with a damp cloth to make sure he left no fingerprints behind, then the table and desktops, and finally his breakfast dishes and silverware. He didn’t know if the French police might have his prints on file somewhere, but if so, he didn’t want to give them another set, and if not, why make it easy for them to start a file? He wore long khaki trousers and a short-sleeve shirt, plus the stupid white hat he’d bought the previous day. It would mark him as just one more guest in this absurd place, totally harmless. With all that done, he picked up his backpack and walked out the door, taking a final pause to wipe the doorknob both inside and outside before walking to the elevator bank. He pressed the DOWN button with a knuckle instead of a fingertip, and in a few seconds was on his way out the hotel door and walking casually to the train station, where his room key-card was his passport to the Worldpark Transportation System. He took off the backpack to sit down and found himself joined in the compartment by a German, also carrying a backpack, with his wife and two children. The backpack bumped loudly when the man set it on the seat next to him.

“My Minicam,” the man explained, in English, oddly enough.

“I, also. Heavy things to carry about, aren’t they?”

“Ah, yes, but this way we will have much to remember from our day in the park.”

“Yes, you will,” Jean-Paul said in reply. The whistle blew, and the train lurched forward. The Frenchman checked his pocket for his park ticket. He actually had three more days of paid entry into the theme park. Not that he’d need it. In fact, nobody in the area would.

“What the hell?” John mumbled, reading the fax on the top of his pile. “Scholarship fund?” And who had violated security? George Winston, Secretary of the Treasury? What the hell? “Alice?” he called.

“Yes, Mr. Clark,” Mrs. Foorgate said on coming into his office. “I rather thought that would cause a stir. It seems that Mr. Ostermann feels it necessary to reward the team for rescuing him.”

“What’s the law on this?” John asked next.

“I haven’t a clue, sir.”

“How do we find out?”

“A solicitor, I imagine.”

“Do we have a lawyer on retainer?”

“Not to my knowledge. And you will probably need one, a Briton and an American as well.”

“Super,” Rainbow Six observed. “Could you ask Alistair to come in?”

“Yes, sir.”

CHAPTER 14

SWORD OF THE LEGION

The company outing for Thompson CSF had been planned for some months. The three hundred children had been working overtime to get a week ahead in their schoolwork, and the event had business implications as well. Thompson was installing computerized control systems in the park—it was part of the company’s transition from being mainly a military-products producer to a more generalized electronics-engineering firm—and here their military experience helped. The new control systems, with which Worldpark management could monitor activities throughout the establishment, were a linear development of data-transfer systems developed for NATO ground forces. They were multilingual, user-friendly gadgets that transmitted their data through ether-space rather than over copper land-lines, which saved a few million francs, and Thompson had brought the systems in on time and on budget, which was a skill that they, like many defense contractors all over the globe, were struggling to learn.

In recognition of the successful fulfillment of the contract to a high-profile commercial customer, senior Thompson management had cooperated with Worldpark to arrange this company picnic. Everyone in the group, children included, wore red T-shirts with the company logo on the front, and for the moment they were mainly together, moving toward the center of the park in a group escorted by six of the park Trolls, who were dancing their way to the castle with their absurdly large bare-feet shoes and hairy head-bodies. The group was further escorted by legionnaires, two wolfskin-wearing
signifers
bearing cohort standards, and the one lion-skinned
aquilifer,
carrying the gold eagle, the hallowed emblem of the VI
Legio Victrix,
now quartered at Worldpark, Spain, as its antecedent had been under the Emperor Tiberius in 20 A.D. The park employees tasked to be part of the resident legion had developed their own esprit, and took to their marching with a will, their Spanish-made
spatha
swords scabbarded awkwardly, but accurately, high up on their right sides, and their shields carried in their left hands. They moved in a group as proudly as their notional
Victrix
or “victorious” legion had once done twenty centuries before—their predecessors once the first and only line of defense for the Roman colony that this part of Spain had been.

About the only thing the group didn’t have was a coterie of people leading them with flags, which was mainly a Japanese affectation, anyway. After the first day’s ceremonies, the Thompson people would wander off on their own, and enjoy their four days here as normal tourists.

Mike Dennis watched the procession on his office TV monitors while he gathered his notes. The Roman soldiers were a signature item for his theme park, and, for some reason or other, had proven to be wildly popular, enough so that he’d recently increased their number from fifty to over a hundred and established a trio of centurions to command them. You could spot them by the sideways plumes on their helmets instead of the fore-and-aft on the helms of the ordinary legionnaires. The guys in the outfit had taken to real sword practice, and it was rumored that some of the swords actually had edges, which Dennis hadn’t bothered to verify and which he’d have to put a stop to if he did. But anything that was good for employee morale was good for the park, and it was his practice to let his people run their departments with minimal interference from his command center in the castle. He used his computer mouse to zoom in on the approaching mob. They were about twenty minutes early, and that was . . . oh, yeah, it was Francisco de la Cruz leading the parade. Francisco was a retired sergeant in the Spanish army’s paratroops, and the guy just grooved to leading parades and such, didn’t he? Tough-looking old bastard, over fifty, with burly arms and so heavy a beard—Worldpark allowed mustaches but not beards for its employees—that he had to shave twice a day. The little kids found him intimidating, but Francisco had a way of scooping them up like a bearish grandfather and putting them instantly at ease—the kids especially liked playing with his red horsehair plume. Dennis made a mental note to have lunch with Francisco sometime soon. He ran his little department well, and deserved some attention from topside.

Dennis pulled the manila folder from his action tray. He had to give a welcoming speech to the Thompson guests, to be followed by music from one of the park’s roving bands and a parade of the Trolls, then dinner in the castle restaurant. He checked his watch and rose, heading for the corridor that led to a disguised passage with a “secret” door into the castle courtyard. The architects for this place had been handed a blank check, and they’d utilized the Gulf oil money well, though the castle wasn’t totally authentic. It had fire escapes, sprinklers, and structural steel, not just blocks piled up and mortared together.

“Mike?” a voice called. The park manager turned.

“Yeah, Pete?”

“Telephone, it’s the chairman calling.”

The executive turned and hustled back to his office, still clutching his prepared speech.

Francisco—Pancho to his friends—de la Cruz was not a tall man, only five-seven, but wide across the chest, and his pillarlike legs made the ground shake when he marched, stiff-legged, as an historian had told him was the custom of the legions. His iron helmet was heavy, and he could feel the flopping of the plume atop it. His left arm held the large and heavy
scutum,
the shield of the legionnaire that reached almost from neck to ankles, made of glue-laminated wood, but with a heavy iron boss in the center in the image of the Medusa, and metal edges. The Romans, he’d long since learned, had been tough soldiers to march into battle with this heavy gear—almost sixty pounds of it at full load with food and mess kit, about what he’d marched with as a soldier in the field. The park had duplicated all of it, though the quality of the metal was surely better than that which had been produced in the blacksmith shops of the Roman empire. Six young boys had formed up on him, emulating his heavy-footed march. De la Cruz liked that. His own sons were now in the Spanish army, following in their father’s footsteps, just as these French boys were now doing. For de la Cruz the world was in its proper shape.

Only a few meters away, it was getting that way as well for Jean-Paul, René, and Esteban, the last of them with a cloud of balloons affixed to his wrist, selling one even now. The others were all wearing their white Worldpark hats, all getting into position around the crowd. None of the terrorists were wearing the red Thompson shirts, though doing so would not have been all that difficult. Instead, they wore black Worldpark shirts to go with the hats, and all but Esteban and Andre were also wearing backpacks, like so many other visitors to Worldpark.

The Trolls had everyone in place a few minutes early, they all saw. The adults were joking among themselves, and the children pointing and laughing, their faces illuminated with joy that would soon change to something else, some racing around the taller adults, playing games of hide-and-seek within the crowd . . . and two were in wheelchairs—no, Esteban saw, they were not part of the Thompson group. They wore their special-access buttons, but not the red shirts.