State of Siege

TWENTY-NINE

Most of the time, Bob Herbert was an easygoing man.

Over a decade and a half before, his injuries and the loss of his wife had tossed him into a depression that lasted for nearly a year. But physical therapy helped him to overcome self-pity, and getting back to work at the CIA bolstered the sense of self-worth that had been destroyed in the Beirut embassy explosion. Since helping to organize and launch Op-Center nearly three years before, Herbert had enjoyed some of the greatest challenges and rewards of his career. His wife would have found it very amusing that the chronic grouch she had married, the man whose spirits she’d always tried to raise, was known around the National Crisis Mangement Center as Mr. Upbeat.

Sitting alone in his dark office, which was lit only by the glow of the computer monitor, Herbert was neither easygoing nor upbeat. He wasn’t only troubled by the fact that Paul Hood’s daughter was one of the United Nations hostages. It wasn’t only the knowledge that situations like this invariably ended in bloodshed. Sometimes it happened quickly, if the host nation or entity ousted the intruders before they could become entrenched. Sometimes it happened slowly, evolving from a standoff to a siege, which turned into an assault as soon as a plan could be formulated. On those rare occasions when a negotiated settlement could be reached, it was usually because the terrorists had only taken hostages to get attention for a cause. When they wanted money or the release of prisoners — which was most of the time — that was when things got messy.

What bothered him most were two things. First, the United Nations was the target. It had never been attacked in this way, and it did not have a record of taking a hard line with hostile agencies under any circumstances. Second, he was concerned about the E-mail he’d just received from Darrell McCaskey about the United Nations party roster. What the hell kind of an organization were those international innocents running?

McCaskey was at the Interpol office in Madrid. The former FBI agent had recently helped his friend Luis Garcia de la Vega break up the coup attempt and had stayed on to spend some time with his injured associate Maria Corneja. Security camera images of the United Nations assault had been sent to Interpol to see if any attacks in their files matched the modus operandi of this team. Interpol had also been sent a list of delegates and guests who attended the Security Council reception. A half hour before, McCaskey had forwarded that information to Herbert in Washington. All of the attendees were legitimate representatives of their nations though that did not, of course, make them diplomats. For over fifty years, innumerable spies, smugglers, assassins, and drug runners had been slipped in and out of the United States under the guise of being diplomats.

However, the United Nations had set a new personal worst for not running checks on two of the party guests. When they came to the UN just two days ago, they had listed biographical data that could not be corroborated in the files of any of the schools or businesses they cited. Either there hadn’t been time for their government to hack those files and insert the data, or the two didn’t expect to be in New York long enough to be found out. The question Herbert needed to answer was, who were they?

McCaskey had obtained their ID photos from the deputy secretary-general of Administration and Head of Personnel at the United Nations. When they were E-mailed over, the Op-Center intelligence chief ran the photographs through a database comprised of images of more than twenty thousand international terrorists, foreign agents, and smugglers.

The two attendees were in that file.

Herbert read what little personal history was available on the pair — their real history, not the fake ones they’d given the United Nations. He didn’t know anything about the people who had taken over the Security Council chamber, but he did know this: However bad those five terrorists were, these two could very well be worse.

Herbert had been informed by Striker that they were returning to Washington without General Rodgers or Colonel August. He didn’t know where August could have gone, but he knew that Rodgers was with Hood. With no time to waste, Herbert called Hood on his cell phone.