Balance of Power o-5 Read online

  Balance of Power

  ( op-center - 5 )

  Tom Clancy

  Steve Pieczenik

  Jeff Rovin

  Spain is poised to suffer its worst internal strife in a thousand years. Certain well-placed Spanish diplomats sense it. Op-Center intelligence corroborates it. All the United States and Spain have to do is find a way to avert it. Before they can, an Op-Center agent is assassinated in Madrid on her way to a top secret diplomatic meeting. Now all fears are confirmed. Someone very powerful wants another Spanish civil war — no matter what the cost.

  Tom Clancy, Steve Pieczenik, Jeff Rovin

  Balance of Power

  Acknowledgments

  We would like to thank Jeff Rovin for his creative ideas and his invaluable contributions to the preparation of the manuscript. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Tom Mallon, Esq., and the wonderful people at The Putnam Berkley Group, including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Elizabeth Beier. As always, we would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of The William Morris Agency, our agent and friend, without whom this book would never have been conceived. But most important, it is for you, our readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  — Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

  ONE

  Monday, 4:55 P.M. Madrid, Spain

  “You were way out of line,” Martha Mackall said. She was openly disgusted with the young woman standing beside her and it took a moment for her to calm down. Then she bent close to Aideen’s ear so the other passengers wouldn’t hear. “You were out of line and reckless. You know what’s at stake here. To be distracted like that is inexcusable.”

  The statuesque Martha and her slight assistant, Aideen Marley were holding a pole in the aisle near the front door of the bus. Aideen’s full, round cheeks nearly as red as her long hair, she tore absently at the moist towelette she clutched in her right hand.

  “Do you disagree?” Martha asked.

  “No,” Aideen said.

  “I mean, good lord!”

  “I said no,” Aideen repeated. “I don’t disagree. I was wrong. Totally and completely wrong.”

  Aideen believed it, too. She had behaved impulsively in a situation that she probably should have ignored. But like Aideen’s own overreaction a few minutes before, this dressing-down from Martha was excessive and punitive. In the two months since Aideen had joined Op-Center’s Political and Economics Office, she’d been warned more than once by the other three staff members to avoid crossing the boss.

  Now she saw why.

  “I don’t know what you needed to prove,” Martha went on. She was still bent close to Aideen. There was anger in her clipped tone. “But 1 never want you doing it again. Not when you’re touring with me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Aideen said contritely. God, she thought, enough already. Aideen had a flashback to a brain-washing seminar she’d once attended at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. The prisoners were always dunned by their captors when they were at their weakest emotionally. Guilt was an especially effective doorway. She wondered if Martha had studied the technique or came by it naturally.

  And almost at once, Aideen wondered if she were being fair to her boss. After all, this was their first mission together for Op-Center. And it was an important one.

  Martha finally looked away — but only for a moment. “It’s unbelievable,” she said, turning back. Her voice was just loud enough to be heard over the powerful engine. “Tell me something. Did it ever occur to you that we might have been detained by the police? How would we have explained that to our Uncle Miguel?”

  Uncle Miguel was the code name for the man they were here to see, Deputy Isidro Serrador. Until the women arrived for their meeting at the Congreso de los Diputados, the Congress of Deputies, that was how they were supposed to refer to him.

  “Detained by the police for what?” Aideen asked. “Frankly, no. That did not occur to me. We were simply protecting ourselves.”

  “Protecting ourselves?” Martha asked.

  Aideen looked at her. “Yes.”

  “From whom?”

  “What do you mean?” Aideen asked. “Those men—”

  “Those Spanish men,” Martha said, still bent close to Aideen. “It would have been our word against theirs. Two American women crying harassment to policemen who probably do their own share of harassing. The policía would have laughed at us.”

  Aideen shook her head. “I can’t believe it would have gone that far.”

  “I see,” Martha said. “You know that for sure. You can guarantee it wouldn’t have.”

  “No, I can’t,” Aideen admitted. “But even so, at least the situation would have been—”

  “What?” Martha asked. “Ended? What would you have done if we’d been arrested?”

  Aideen looked out the window as the stores and hotels of Madrid’s commercial center passed by. She’d recently partaken in one of Op-Center’s computerized WaSPs — War Simulation Projects — a mandatory exercise for members of the diplomatic staff. It gave them a feeling for what their colleagues had to endure if diplomacy failed. Casualties greater than the mind could process. That exercise was easier than this one.

  “If we’d been arrested,” Aideen said, “I would have apologized. What else could I have done?”

  “Not a thing,” Martha said, “which is exactly my point — though it’s a little late to be thinking about it.”

  “You know what?” said Aideen. “You’re right. You’re right!” She looked back at Martha. “It’s too late. So what I’d like to do now is apologize to you and put this behind us.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Martha replied, “but that’s not my style. When I’m unhappy, I let it out.”

  And out and out, Aideen thought.

  “And when I get real unhappy,” Martha added, “I shut you out. I can’t afford charity.”

  Aideen didn’t agree with that policy of excommunication. You build a good team, you fight hard to keep it; a wise and effective manager understands that passion needs to be nurtured and channeled, not crushed. But this was a side of Martha she’d simply have to get used to. As Op-Center’s Deputy Director, General Mike Rodgers, had put it when he hired her, Every job has politics. They just happen to be more pronounced in politics. He went on to point out that in every profession, people have agendas. Often, only dozens or hundreds of people are affected by those agendas. In politics, the ramifications from even tiny ripples are incalculable. And there was only one way to fight that.

  Aideen had asked him how.

  Rodgers’s answer had been simple. With a better agenda.

  Aideen was too annoyed to contemplate what Martha’s agenda was right now. That was a popular topic of discussion at Op-Center. People were divided as to whether the Political and Economics Liaison worked hard doing what was best for the nation or for Martha Mackall. The truth, most felt, was that she was looking out for both.

  Aideen looked around the bus. She could tell that some of the people gathered around her were also unhappy, though that had very little to do with what was going on between the young woman and Martha. The bus was packed with people returning to work after the afternoon lunch break — which lasted from one o’clock to four — as well as camera-carrying tourists. A number of them had seen what the young woman had done at the bus stop. Word had spread very rapidly. The riders nearest Aideen were pressing away from her. A few of them cast disapproving glances at the young woman’s hands.

  Martha remained silent as the brakes ground noisily. The large red bus stopped on Calle Fernanflor and the two women got off quickly. D
ressed as tourists in jeans and windbreakers, and carrying backpacks and cameras, they stood on the curb of the crowded avenue. Behind them, the bus snarled away. Dark faces bobbed in the windows, looking down at the women.

  Martha regarded her assistant. Despite the reprimand, Aideen’s gray eyes still had a glint of steel beneath her lightly freckled lids.

  “Look,” Martha said, “you’re new in this arena. I brought you along because you’re a helluva linguist and you’re smart. You have a lot of potential in foreign affairs.”

  “I’m not exactly new at it,” Aideen replied defensively.

  “No, but you’re new on the European stage and to my way of doing things,” Martha replied. “You like frontal assaults, which is probably why General Rodgers hired you away from Ambassador Carnegie. Our Deputy Director believes in attacking problems head on. But I warned you about that when you came to work for me. I told you to turn down the heat. What worked in Mexico is not necessarily going to work here. I told you when you accepted the position that if you work for me you have to do things my way. And I prefer end runs. Skirt the main force. Finesse the enemy rather than launch an assault. Especially when the stakes are as high as they are here.”

  “I understand,” Aideen said. “Like I said, I may be new at this type of situation. But I’m not green. When I know the rules I can play by them.”

  Martha relaxed slightly. “Okay. I’ll buy that.” She watched as Aideen tossed the tattered towelette into a trash can. “Are you okay? Do you want to find a restroom?”

  “Do I need one?”

  Martha sniffed the air. “I don’t think so.” She scowled. “You know, I still can’t believe you did what you did.”

  “I know you can’t and I’m truly sorry,” Aideen said. “What else can I possibly say?”

  “Nothing,” Martha said. She shook her head slowly. “Not a thing. I’ve seen street fighters in my day, but I have to admit I’ve never seen that.”

  Martha was still shaking her head as they turned toward the imposing Palacio de las Cortes, where they were scheduled to meet very unofficially and very quietly with Deputy Serrador. According to what the veteran politician had told Ambassador Barry Neville in a very secret meeting, tension was escalating between the impoverished Andalusians in the south and the rich and influential Castilians of northern and central Spain. The government wanted help gathering intelligence. They needed to know from which direction the tension was coming — and whether it also involved the Catalonians, Galicians, Basques, and other ethnic groups. Serrador’s fear was that a concerted effort by one faction against another could rend the loosely woven quilt of Spain. Sixty years before, a civil war, which pitted the aristocracy, the military, and the Roman Catholic Church against insurgent Communists and other anarchic forces, had nearly destroyed Spain. A modern war would draw in ethnic sympathizers from France, Morocco, Andorra, Portugal, and other nearby nations. It would destabilize the southern flank of NATO and the results would be catastrophic — particularly as NATO sought to expand its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

  Ambassador Neville had taken the problem back to the State Department. Secretary of State Av Lincoln decided that the State Department couldn’t afford to become involved at this early stage. If the matter exploded and they were shown to have had a hand in it, it would be difficult for the United States to help negotiate a peace. Lincoln asked Op-Center to make the initial contact and ascertain what, if anything, the United States could do to defuse the potential crisis.

  Martha zipped her blue windbreaker against the sudden chill of night. “I can’t stress this enough,” she said. “Madrid is not the underbelly of Mexico City. The briefings at Op-Center didn’t cover this because we didn’t have time. But as different as the various peoples of Spain are, they all believe in one thing: honor. Yes, there are aberrations. There are bad seeds in any society. And yes, the standards aren’t consistent and they definitely aren’t always humanistic. There may be one kind of honor among politicians and another kind among killers. But they always play by the rules of the profession.”

  “So those three little pigs who insisted that they show us around when we left the hotel,” Aideen said sharply, “the one who put his hand on my butt and kept it there. They were acting according to some kind of honorable sexual harassers’ code?”

  “No,” Martha said. “They were acting according to a street extortionists’ code.”

  Aideen’s eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

  “Those men wouldn’t have hurt us,” Martha said. “That would have been against the rules. And the rules are that they follow women, pester them, and keep at it until they get a payoff to leave them alone. I was about to give them one when you acted.”

  “You were?”

  Martha nodded. “That’s how it’s done here. As for the police you would have gone to, many of them collect kickbacks from the street extortionists to look the other way. Get it through your head. Playing the game, however corrupt it seems, is still diplomacy.”

  “But what if you hadn’t known about their ‘profession,’ their code? I didn’t.” Aideen lowered her voice. “I was worried about having our backpacks stolen and our covers blown.”

  “An arrest would have blown our covers a whole lot faster,” Martha said. She took Aideen by the arm and pulled her aside. They stood next to a building, away from pedestrian traffic. “The truth is, eventually someone would have told us how to get rid of them. People always do. That’s how the game is played, and I believe in obeying the rules of whatever game or whatever country I’m in. When I started out in diplomacy in the early 1970s on the seventh floor of the State Department, I was excited as hell. I was on the seventh floor, where all the real, heavy-duty work is done. But then I found out why I was there. Not because I was so damn talented, though I hoped I was. I was there to deal with the apartheid leaders in South Africa. I was State’s ‘in-your-face’ figure. I was a wagging finger that said, ‘If you want to deal with the U.S., you‘ll have to deal with blacks as equals.’ ” Martha scowled. “Do you know what that was like?”

  Aideen made a face. She could just imagine.

  “It’s not like having your fanny patted, I can tell you that,” Martha said. “But I did what I was supposed to do because I learned one thing very early. If you infract the rules or bend them to suit your temperament, even a little, it becomes a habit. When it becomes a habit you get sloppy. And a sloppy diplomat is no use to the country — or to me.”

  Aideen was suddenly disgusted with herself. The thirty-four-year-old foreign service officer would be the first to admit that she wasn’t the diplomat her forty-nine-year-old superior was. Few people were. Martha Mackall not only knew her way around European and Asian political circles — partly the result of summers and vacations she’d spent touring the world with her father, popular 1960s soul singer and Civil Rights activist Mack Mackall. She was also a summa cum laude MIT financial wizard who was tight with the world’s top bankers and well connected on Capitol Hill. Martha was feared but she was respected. And Aideen had to admit that in this case she was also right.

  Martha looked at her watch. “Come on,” she said. “We’re due at the palace in less than five minutes.”

  Aideen nodded and walked alongside her boss. The younger woman was no longer angry. She was disgusted with herself and brooded, as she usually did when she screwed up. She hadn’t been able to screw up much during her four years in army intelligence at Fort Meade. That was paint-by-numbers courier work, moving cash and top secret information to operatives domestically and abroad. Toward the end of her tenure there she interpreted ELINT — electronic intelligence — and passed it on to the Pentagon. Since the satellites and computers did all the heavy lifting there, she took special classes on elite tactics and stakeout techniques — just to get experience in those areas. Aideen didn’t have a chance to mess things up either when she left the military and became a junior political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. Most of the time she
was using ELINT to help keep track of drug dealers in the Mexican military, though occasionally she was permitted to go out in the field and use some of the undercover skills she’d acquired. One of the most valuable aspects of the three years Aideen had spent in Mexico was learning the ploy that had proved so effective this afternoon — as well as offensive to Martha and the busload of commuters. After she and her friend Ana Rivera of the Mexican attorney general’s office were cornered by a pair of drug cartel muscle-men one night, Aideen discovered that the best way to fight off an attacker wasn’t by carrying a whistle or knife or by trying to kick them in the groin or scratch out their eyes. It was by keeping moist towelettes in your handbag. That’s what Ana used to clean her hands and arms after tossing around some mierda de perro.

  Dog droppings. Ana had casually scooped them off the street and flung them at the toughs who were following them. Then she’d rubbed some on her arms to make sure no one grabbed them. Ana said there wasn’t an attacker she’d ever encountered who stuck around after that. Certainly the three “street extortionists” in Madrid had not.

  Martha and Aideen walked in silence toward the towering white columns of the Palacio de las Cortes. Built in 1842, the palace was the seat of the Congreso de los Diputados; along with the Senado, the Senate, it comprised the two houses of the Spanish parliament. Though the sun had set, spotlights illuminated two larger-than-life bronze lions. Each lion rested a paw atop a cannonball. The statues had been cast using guns taken from the enemies of Spain. They flanked the stone steps that led to a high metal door, a door used only for ceremonies. To the left of the main entrance was a very tall iron fence, which was spiked along the top. Beside the fence gate stood a small guardhouse with bulletproof windows. This was where the deputies entered the halls of parliament.

  Neither woman spoke as they walked past the imposing granite facade of the palace. Though Aideen had only worked at Op-Center a short while, she knew that in spirit her boss was already at the meeting. Martha was quietly reviewing things she’d want to say to Serrador. Aideen’s own role was to draw on her experience with Mexican insurrectionists and her knowledge of the Spanish language to make sure nothing was misstated or misinterpreted.