“Yes,” Adams said, “that would be awkward.”
“Ed still owns a house on an island in Maine, Islesboro. He says he wants to go there to die. It’s a long way from Washington.”
“You’ve spoken with Ed?” Adams asked.
She shook her head. “No. He’s written to me a couple of times.”
She looked at her DDO, who was staring into his coffee cup. “Hugh?”
English raised his head and looked at her. “If there were a way to have him tortured, I’d vote for that. I will never, ever acquiesce in having him pardoned.”
“That’s pretty vociferous, Hugh,” Koppel said. “What are your reasons?”
Kate was glad he had asked, because she didn’t want to.
“Well, let’s see,” English said, and began ticking things off on his fingers. “He’s betrayed his country and this agency, and he did it for money. He’s humiliated all of us. And he’s directly responsible for the deaths of two of our best people in the Stockholm embassy, and they were my friends. Is that enough?”
“Just to set the record straight,” Adams interjected, “he was blackmailed by the Soviets. It was sex, not money, that was his downfall, and as bad as that was, I knew Ed well, and I don’t think he would have ever knowingly done anything that would have caused the deaths of Lewis and Barbara Moore. They were his friends, too, and Ed had a gift for friendship.”
“You’re in denial, Creighton,” English said. “You’re unable to see the facts clearly.”
Koppel spoke up, and there was an edge in his voice. “Nobody is ever able to see the facts as clearly as you do, Hugh.”
English stood up. “That’s it for me. You asked for my opinion, Kate, and I’ve given it to you. Now, if you’ll excuse me…” He walked out of the room and closed the door behind him.
“I suppose I should have expected that,” Kate said.
“I didn’t expect it,” Adams replied. “I’ve never heard Hugh mention Ed’s name in any context whatever. Kate, will you go to the president with the support of three of the four of us?”
“Three out of four ain’t bad,” Koppel said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think it would be easier for the president if he could say that the management of the Agency unanimously supported him.”
“He can still say that a majority-a large majority of management supports him,” Adams said.
“Then you’re on board, Creighton?”
“On reflection, I am.”
“Mort?”
“Count me in.”
“Thank you both. We’ll see where this leads.”
She watched them leave and reflected that even though she couldn’t bring Hugh English on board, at least he had had the effect of strengthening the resolve of Koppel and Adams.
Her secretary buzzed. “Ms. Rule, do you have anything on your calendar for dinner the day after tomorrow? There’s something at the British embassy, and we haven’t responded.”
Kate looked at her calendar. “Yes, we have the new Russian president for dinner that night,” she said.
“I’ll send regrets, then.”
Kate regretted it, too. She liked the British crowd and enjoyed their dinners. Still, she’d have an opportunity to get to know Georgi Majorov. He was ex-KGB, and that made him very interesting to her.
32
CARPENTER GATHERED WITH the small group of Royal Marines in a sterile conference room at a training establishment far down the Thames Estuary. They were all dressed in jeans or foul-weather gear and with a variety of headgear- baseball caps, woolen watch caps, and navy blue yachting caps with yacht club insignia. They looked like the crew of a world-class racing yacht-young, fit, and eager-as long as one didn’t know how quickly and quietly they could kill.
General Sir Ewan Southby-Tailyour stood at the foot of the conference table, manipulating transparencies on a projector. His first was taken from an admiralty nautical chart. “Now, you see here the position of the island in relation to the coast and the Thames Estuary,” he said. “We’ll have about a six-hour sail with the wind giving us a nice close reach, and in bright sunshine for most of the afternoon. The met office tells us conditions will deteriorate rapidly after sunset: the wind will back to the southwest and increase to around force seven, giving us a cross-swell and a very dark night, which should suit our purposes admirably.” He switched to a satellite photograph in which Sealand filled the entire frame.
“Now you see the landing, just here.” He pointed on the transparency with a pencil. “It’s certainly not what one would call a harbor, but it has some shelter from the southwesterlies, so we shouldn’t have much more than a light chop inside the point. There’s a dock, here.
“Now the buildings: There are six Portocabins, all identical from the outside, and I am indebted to Carpenter and her people for supplying us with some intelligence about the interiors. The southernmost is sleeping quarters and bathrooms; the next up the line is a mess hall and lounge for the inhabitants. These accommodations should be quite comfortable for them, since the island has a standing population of eight to ten. Provisions and mail are brought over from an East Anglian port twice a week, but never at night, which suits us.
“The third building in line is the computer installation and some offices, and the fourth houses the cellular telephone equipment and offices. The other two are purely for utility-storage, tools, et cetera. It is the third building, here, that interests us, but we will place guards on buildings one, two, and four as well, so that our workers are not disturbed.
“Carpenter’s intelligence tells us that there is one man each on duty in the computer and telephone buildings, so they should be easy to deal with. Sergeant Simpson, please show us how we will deal with them.”
A thick-set man in his early thirties stood up and placed one end of a yard-long tube in his mouth, pointing it at a dartboard at the other end of the room. His cheeks puffed out, there was a whfft! noise and a dart struck the board at dead center. Carpenter was impressed.
“Very good,” Sir Ewan said, walking to the board and extracting the dart. He held it up for the group to see. “Since our orders are not to damage any of the inhabitants, this will be our means of subduing any who require subduing. It is, in fact, a syringe, as well as a dart, and it will hold up to two cc’s of whatever we care to put into it. In this case, Carpenter’s people have supplied a liquid which they call ”Sleepytime Down South‘ or just “Sleepytime,” for short.
“The injection of this fluid causes nearly immediate unconsciousness for a period of two to four hours, depending on how much is administered, but the really sweet thing about this drug is that, when the subject awakes, he has no memory of what occurred up to an hour before he received the dose. He will believe that he simply fell asleep.”
Sir Ewan held up a shorter tube. “This is a compressed-air version of the sergeant’s blowpipe; each of you will carry one and two doses of the drug. Two of our team will carry sawn-off shotguns with beanbag loads that are the equivalent of a strong punch. In the event that it becomes necessary to use these, the preferred target is the abdomen. You are not to aim at the heads of these people because of the risk of breaking their necks.
“I must stress most strongly that no team member is to carry any other weapon, not a knife or even a truncheon, and should you have to counteract violence, you will use only those means prescribed and you will employ restraint. It is not our task to cause the death or significant injury of anyone. I know that goes against your training, but there it is.