State of Siege

TEN

Mike Rodgers was going through a Gary Cooper phase. Not in his real life but in his movie life — though at the moment, the two lives were entirely codependent.

Op-Center’s forty-five-year-old former deputy director, now acting director, had never been confused or insecure. He had his nose broken four times playing college basketball because he saw the basket and went for it, damning the Torpedoes — as well as the Badgers, the Ironmen, the Thrashers, and the other teams he played. When he’d served two tours of duty in Vietnam and commanded a mechanized brigade in the Gulf War, he was given objectives and had met them all. Every damn one of them. On his first mission with Striker, to North Korea, he’d kept a fanatical officer from nuking Japan. When he returned from Vietnam, he’d even found time to get a Ph.D. in world history. But now—

It wasn’t just Paul Hood resigning that depressed him, though that was part of the problem. It was ironic. Two and a half years ago, Rodgers had found it difficult to report to the man — a civilian who had been attending fund-raisers with movie stars while Rodgers was chasing Iraq out of Kuwait. But Hood had proven himself a steady, politically savvy manager. Rodgers was going to miss the man and his leadership.

Dressed in a loose-fitting gray sweat suit and Nikes, Rodgers shifted carefully on the leather sofa. He slumped back slowly. Just two weeks before, he’d been captured by terrorists in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. The second- and third-degree burns he’d suffered during torture were still not completely healed. Neither were the internal wounds.

Rodgers’s gaze had wandered. He looked back at the TV, profound sadness in his light brown eyes. He was watching Vera Cruz, one of Cooper’s last films. He was playing a former Civil War officer who went south of the border to work as a mercenary and ended up embracing the cause of local revolutionaries. Strength, dignity, and honor — that was Coop.

That used to be Mike Rodgers, he reflected sadly.

He’d lost more than some flesh and his freedom in Lebanon. Being strung up in a cave and burned with a blowtorch had cost him his confidence. And not because he’d been afraid to die. He believed passionately in the Viking code, that the process of death began with the moment of birth, and that death in combat was the most honorable way of reaching one’s inevitable end. But he was nearly denied that. Extreme pain, like a high fever, robs the mind of orderliness. The calm and collected torturer becomes the voice of reason and tells the mind where to touch down. And Rodgers was perilously close to that point, to telling the terrorists how to operate the Regional Op-Center they’d captured.

That’s why Rodgers needed Gary Cooper. Not to heal his soul — he didn’t think that was possible. He’d seen his breaking point, and he could never lose that knowledge, that awareness of his own limitations. It reminded him of the first time he twisted his ankle playing basketball and it didn’t heal overnight. The sense of invulnerability was gone forever.

A broken spirit was worse.

What Mike Rodgers needed now was to try to prop up the confidence his captors had taken from him. Fortify himself enough to run Op-Center until the president decided on a replacement for Paul Hood. Then he could make decisions about his own future.

Rodgers looked back at the TV screen. Movies had always been a haven for him, a source of nourishment. When his alcoholic father used to punch the hell out of him — not just hit but punch, with his Yale class ring — young Mike Rodgers would get on his bicycle, go to the local movie theater, pay his twenty-five cents, and crawl into a Western or war film or historical epic. Over the years, he modeled his morality, his life, his career after the characters played by John Wayne and Charlton Heston and Burt Lancaster.

He couldn’t remember a time when any of them came close to breaking under torture, though. He felt very alone.

Coop had just rescued a Mexican girl who was being abused by renegade soldiers when the cordless phone rang. Rodgers picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Mike, thank God you’re in—”

“Paul?”

“Yeah. Listen,” Hood said. “I’m inside the United Nations Correspondents’ room across from the Security Council chambers. Four guards have just been gunned down in the corridor.”

Rodgers sat up. “By whom?”

“I don’t know,” Hood said. “But it looks like the people who did it went inside.”

“Where’s Harleigh?” Rodgers asked.

“She’s in there,” Hood said. “Most of the members of the Security Council and the entire string ensemble were in the chambers.”

Rodgers grabbed the remote, switched off the DVD, and turned on CNN. Reporters were live at the United Nations. It didn’t sound as if they knew much about what was going on.

“Mike, you know what the security setup is here,” Hood said. “If this is a multinational hostage situation, depending on who the perpetrators are, the UN could argue about jurisdiction for hours before they even address the issue of getting the people out.”

“Understood,” Rodgers said. “I’ll call Bob and put him on this. Are you on your cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Keep me apprised when you can,” Rodgers said.

“All right,” Hood replied. “Mike—”

“Paul, we’re going to take care of this,” Rodgers assured him. “You know there’s usually some kind of cooling-down period immediately after a takeover. Demands stated, attempts to negotiate. We won’t waste any of that time. You and Sharon just have to try and stay calm.”

Hood thanked him and hung up. Rodgers turned up the volume on the TV, listening as he rose slowly. The newscaster had no idea who had driven the van or why they’d attacked the United Nations. There had been no official announcement, and no communication from the five people who’d apparently gone into the Security Council chambers.

Rodgers shut off the television. While the general headed to his bedroom to dress, he punched in Bob Herbert’s mobile phone number. Op-Center’s intelligence chief was at dinner with Andrea Fortelni, a deputy assistant secretary of state. Herbert hadn’t dated much in the years since his wife was killed in Beirut, but he was a chronic intel collector. Foreign governments, his own government, it didn’t matter. As in the Japanese movie Rashomon—which was the only thing besides sushi and The Seven Samurai that Rodgers enjoyed from Japan — there was rarely any truth in government affairs. Just different perspectives. And professional that Herbert was, he liked having as many perspectives as possible.

Herbert was also a man who was devoted to his friends and coworkers. When Rodgers called to tell him what had happened, Herbert said he’d be at Op-Center within the half hour. Rodgers told him to have Matt Stoll come in as well. They might need to get into UN computers, and Matt was a peerless hacker. Meanwhile, Rodgers said that he’d call Striker and put them on yellow alert, in case they were needed. Along with the rest of Op-Center, the elite, twenty-one-person rapid-deployment force was based at the FBI Academy in Quantico. They could get to the United Nations in well under an hour if necessary.

Rodgers hoped the precautions would not be necessary. Unfortunately, terrorists who started out with murder had nothing to lose by killing again. Besides, for nearly half a century, terrorism had proven impervious to conciliatory, United Nations-style diplomacy.

Hope, he thought bitterly. What was it some play-wright or scholar had once written? That hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.

Rodgers finished dressing, then hurried into the fading light and climbed into his car. His own concerns were forgotten as he headed south along the George Washington Memorial Parkway to Op-Center.

To help rescue a girl from renegades.