Project Cyclops Part 23

"I'm a friend of Bill Bates, the man supposedly in charge around here."

"I'm Isaac Mannheim. This project--"

"The G.o.dfather." Vance looked him over. "Bill's talked about you. MIT, right?"

"The Cyclops is my--"

"Nice to meet you. Now who in the h.e.l.l are these thugs?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, we can a.s.sume they're not part of Bill's technical support team." He glanced down the hill, toward the drifting cloud of red smoke, then back at the old man. "But if you've been involved in this project, then you must know the layout here."

"I know it very well. But--"

"Good. We're going to have to keep moving, at least till it gets dark, but while we're doing that, I want you to get me up to speed on where things are. Give me the setup. And tell me how many personnel are here and where they are."

Mannheim pointed down the hill, at a point just past the storage sheds.

"The people are housed in the Bates Motel, which is over there, beyond that row of buildings."

Vance looked it over. At the moment it seemed deserted.

"Where's the entrance?"

"You can go in directly from the connecting corridor underground, or you can use the front entrance, there."

"What if the entrance topside were locked? Then it would he secure, right?"

"I suppose so." He still seemed disoriented, though he was recovering.

"Of course there are fire exits at various places in the underground network, as well as the security lobby over there. And then, the storage sheds can be accessed from below."

"But all of those entry-points can be sealed, right?"

"Yes. In fact, they can be sealed electronically, from Command. The staff controls everything from there."

Vance looked down at the white surf rippled across the blue. "So if somebody wanted to take over this place, that's where they would start, right? Hit that and you're in like a bandit. It's the head office."

"That's correct." Mannheim nodded.

"Good. We know where to focus. Now you're going to tell me how I can get there."

CHAPTER SEVEN

2:18 P.M.

Pierre Armont was forty-six, with gray temples and a body appropriate to an Olympic wrestler. He had full cheeks, a heavy mustache, and suspicious dark eyes that constantly searched his surroundings. It was an innate survival instinct.

He never went out without a tie and a perfect shoeshine, not to mention a crisp military bearing that sat as comfortably on him as a birthright. He prided himself on his ability to instill discipline while at the same time leading his men. Although he liked to command, he wanted to do it from the front, where the action was.

Here in Paris he ran a worldwide business from a gray stone townhouse situated on the Left Bank in an obscure cul-de-sac at the intersection of Saint-Andre des Arts and rue de l'Ancienne Comedie. Fifty meters away from his ivy-covered doorway, the rue de Seine wound down to the river, playing host to one of Paris's finer open-air produce markets, while farther down, rows of small galleries displayed the latest in Neo-Deconstructionist painting and sculpture. An avid amateur chef and art collector, he found the location ideal. From his house, where the French aviator Saint-Exupery once wrote, he could march a few paces, along cobblestones as old as Chartres, and acquire a freshly plucked pheasant, a plump grouse, aromatic black truffles just hours away from the countryside, or an abstract landscape whose paint was scarcely dry.

It was the best of all worlds: everything he loved was just meters away, and yet his secretive courtyard provided perfect urban privacy and security, with only the occasional blue-jeaned student from the Academie de Beaux-Arts wandering into his courtyard to sketch. He was rich and he knew how to live well; he also risked his life on a regular basis.

He claimed it made his _foie gras _taste even better.

He worked behind a wide oak desk flanked by a line of state-of-the-art communications equipment, and along one walnut-paneled wall stood rows of files secured inside teak-wood-camouflaged safes. His wide oak desk could have belonged in the office of a travel agent with a very select clientele. However, it served another purpose entirely: it was where he planned operations for ARM.

Pierre Armont headed up the a.s.sociation of Retired Mercenaries, and he had been busy all day. But he was used to emergencies. What other people called problems, ARM thought of as business.

The a.s.sociation of Retired Mercenaries was a secretive but loose group of former members of various ant.i.terrorist organizations. The name was an inside joke, because they were far from retired. Although they were not listed in the Paris phone book, governments who needed their services somehow always knew how to find Pierre. ARM took on nasty counterterrorism actions that could not occur officially. They rescued hostages unreported in newspapers, and they had terminated more than a few unpleasant individuals in covert actions that never made the evening news.

At the moment, as he was thinking over the insertion strategy for Andikythera, he was gazing down on his private courtyard and noticing that the honking from the boulevard Saint-Germain indicated that Paris's mid-afternoon traffic had ground to a halt. Again. He had just hung up the scrambled phone, after a thirty-minute conversation with Reggie Hall, the second today. London was on board, so everything was a go. He was looking forward to this one. Some _batards_ had mucked with an ARM job. They had to be taken down.

Armont was retired from France's ant.i.terrorist Groupement d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, known as GIGN, ideal experience for his present occupation. Over the years "Gigene" had carried out, among other things, VIP protection in high-threat situations and general ant.i.terrorist ops. Mostly commandos in their twenties and early thirties, Gigene operatives had to pa.s.s a grueling series of tests, including firing an H&K MP5 one-handed while swinging through a window in a quick entry called the pendulum technique. Known for their skills in inserting by helicopter, either by rappelling or by parachuting, they could also swim half a mile under water and come out blasting, using their specially loaded Norma ammo.

Armont's particular claim to fame was the invention of a sophisticated slingshot that fired deadly steel b.a.l.l.s for a silent kill. He had trained ant.i.terrorist units in a number of France's former colonies, and had secretly provided tactical guidance for the Saudi National Guard when they ejected radical Muslims from the Great Mosque at Mecca.

These days, however, he was a private citizen and ran a simple business. And as with all well-run businesses, the customer was king.

If problems arose, they had to be resolved; if a job did not stick, you sent in a repair team. An American member of ARM named Michael Vance, who normally did not partic.i.p.ate in the operations end of the business, had turned up at the wrong place at the right time. A Reuters confirmation of the loss of the U.S. communications ship definitely meant some bad action had gone down in the eastern Med. Vance's a.n.a.lysis that it was a preliminary to seizure of the SatCom facility on Andikythera probably was correct. Armont's secretary had spent the day on the phone trying to reach the island, but all commercial communications with the site were down. There was no way that should have happened, even with last night's rough storm.

He had liked Michael Vance the minute he met him, three years earlier.

He considered Mike reliable in completing his a.s.signments--be they quick access to a "secure" bank computer file or a paper trail of wire transfers stretching from Miami to Na.s.sau to Geneva to Bogota. Vance's regular missions for ARM, however, were those kinds of transactions, not the street action, and Armont could only hope he could also manage the rougher end of the business.

The organization had checked out the man extensively, as they did all new members, and ARM's computer probably knew as much about him as he did himself. It was an oddball story: son of a famous Penn archaeologist, he had been by turns an archaeologist himself, a yachtsman, and a low-level spook. After he finished his doctorate at Yale and had taught there for two semesters, he had published his dissertation--claiming the famous Palace of Minos in Crete was actually a hallowed necropolis--as a book. It had caused a lot of flap, and to get away for a while, he had taken a vacation in Na.s.sau to do some big- game fishing. Before the trip ended, he had bought an old forty-four- foot Bristol sailboat in need of ma.s.sive restoration. It was a cla.s.sic wooden vessel, which meant that no sooner had he finished varnishing the thing from one end to the other than he had to start over again.

But he apparently liked the life. Or maybe he just enjoyed giving the academic snakepit a rest. The computer could not get into his mind.

Whatever the reason, however, the sailboat, which had begun as a diversion, soon became something else. By the time he had finished refurbishing her, she was the most beautiful yacht in the Caribbean, and everybody around Na.s.sau wanted a shot at the helm. He had a charter business on his hands.

Then his saga took yet another turn. The Na.s.sau Yacht Club, and the new Hurricane Hole Marina across the bridge on Paradise Island, comprised a yachting fraternity that included a lot of bankers. Na.s.sau, after all, had over three hundred foreign commercial banks, and its "see no evil"

approach to regulation and reporting made it a natural haven for drug receipts. With a lot of bankers as clients, before long Vance knew more than any man should about offsh.o.r.e money laundering. He did not like that part of the scene, but the bankers loved his yacht, and they paid cash.

As he once told it, he eventually found out why. At least for one of them. One sunny afternoon the vice president of the European Consolidated Commercial Bank, an attractive blond-haired young Swiss mover known to Vance only as "Werner," was docking _The Ulysses_ at Hurricane Hole, bringing her back from a three-day sail, when the DEA swooped down, flanked by the local Bahamian police. Armed with warrants, they searched the boat and soon uncovered fifty kilos of Colombian export produce. Seems "Werner" had sailed _The Ulysses _to some prearranged point and taken it on, planning to have divers stash the packages in the rudder-trunk air pocket of one of the giant cruise ships that tied up at Na.s.sau's four-berth dock. Vance heard about it when he got a call from the harbormaster advising him that his prized Bristol had just been seized as evidence in a c.o.ke bust. He was out of business.

That afternoon Bill Bates had coincidentally flown in on Merv Griffin's Paradise Island commuter airline and come over to Hurricane Hole, wanting to charter _The Ulysses _for a week of sailing and fishing.

Vance had to inform him his favorite Bahamian yacht had just acquired a new owner.

Bates could not believe he had flown into such a screw-up. Vance was having his own problems with disbelief, too, but paying the mortgage was his more immediate concern. The DEA had the boat, but before long he wouldn't have to worry about that any more. That problem, and the boat, would soon belong to the mortgage-holding bank over on Bay Street.

He immediately slapped the DEA with a two-million-dollar lawsuit, just to put on some heat. His lawyer claimed he didn't have a hope in h.e.l.l.

But two weeks later a Bahamian judge, after lunch with the mortgage- holding banker, summarily ordered the DEA to release the yacht. To Vance's surprise, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cheerfully complied and turned it over the same afternoon. He immediately dropped the lawsuit, writing off the whole affair as a triumph for truth, justice, and the Bahamian way of banking. Or so it seemed.

Only later did he unearth the Byzantine complexities of what really had happened. The affair had somehow come to the attention of The Company, and there had been a flurry of phone calls to the DEA in New Orleans from Langley, Virginia. A month later, while he was in the States attending a Yale alumni function, he'd found himself talking to two earnest Washington bureaucrats, who congratulated him on beating the system. Huh?