as advertised, mushrooming inside the guard’s brain, expending all its energy in a thousandth of a second and stopping, as the autopsy would later show, three inches from the opposite side of the skull.
The guard dropped straight down, dead before he reached the carpet.
Andrea tells me you saved the day,” former President Ryan said twenty minutes later in the limousine.
“Just sent up the flare,” Jack replied.
The whole thing had been a surreal experience, Jack thought, but somehow less surreal than its aftermath. Though the series of events had been brief—five seconds from the time the guard had gotten the woman from her seat to when Andrea’s head shot had dropped him—the mental replay in Jack’s mind moved, predictably, he supposed, in slow motion. So shocked by the shooting was the audience that it had emitted only a few screams, all of those from the attendees before whom the assassin had fallen dead.
For his part, Jack had known better than to move, so he remained standing against the west wall as campus security and Andrea’s agents cleared the auditorium. His dad, at the center of the Secret Service scrum, had been offstage before Andrea had fired the killing shot.
“Even so,” Ryan said. “Thanks.”
It was an awkward moment that drifted into an even more uncomfortable silence. Jack Junior broke it. “Scary shit, huh?”
Former President Ryan nodded at this. “What made you go back there—to check on the janitor, I mean?”
“When I saw him, he was trying to take off the buffer pad with a screwdriver. He needed a crescent wrench.”
“Impressive, Jack.”
“Because of the screwdriver—”
“Partially that. Partially because you didn’t panic. And you let the professionals do their job. Eight outta ten people wouldn’t have noticed the buffer thing. Most of those would have panicked, frozen up. The others would’ve tried to move on the guy themselves. You did it right, from soup to nuts.”
“Thanks.”
Ryan Senior smiled. “Now let’s talk about how to break this to your mother. ...”
15
THEY DIDN’T get far before the plane returned to the gate, the front wheels having never even begun their rotation onto the tarmac proper. There was no explanation offered, only a fixed smile and a curt “Will you come with me, please?” to himself and Chavez, followed by the fixed and firm smile that only a professional flight attendant can mount—and one that told Clark the request wasn’t open to discussion.
“You forget to pay a parking ticket, Ding?” Clark asked his son-in-law.
“Not me, mano. I’m a straight arrow.”
Each of them gave his wife a quick kiss and a “Don’t worry,” then followed the flight attendant up the aisle to the already open door. Waiting for them in the jet bridge was a London Metropolitan Police Service officer. The black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the man’s cap told Clark he wasn’t your run-of-the-mill bobby, and the patch on his sweater told him he belonged to SCD11—intelligence—part of the Specialist Crime Directorate.
“Sorry to interrupt your jaunt home, gentlemen,” the cop said, “but your presence has been requested. If you’ll follow me, please.”
British manners—along with driving on the wrong side of the road and french fries being called “chips”—was one of the things Clark had never quite gotten used to—especially among the upper echelons of the Army. Polite was always better than rude, mind you, but there was something unnerving about being talked to oh, so civilly by a guy who had probably killed more bad guys than most people would ever see in their lifetime. Clark had met some folks here who could explain in detail how they planned to kill you with a fork, drink your blood, then skin you, all the while making it sound like an invitation to afternoon tea.
Clark and Chavez followed the cop down the jetway, through several checkpoints, then through a card reader-controlled door into Heathrow’s security center. They were led to a small conference room where they found Alistair Stanley, still officially second-in-command of Rainbow Six, standing at the diamond-shaped table under the cold glare of fluorescent lights. Stanley was SAS, or Special Air Service, Britain’s premier special warfare unit.
Though Clark was reluctant to admit it in mixed company, as far as he was concerned, when it came to efficacy and longevity, the SAS was without peer. Certainly there were outfits out there that were as good as the SAS—his alma mater, the Navy SEALs, came to mind—but the Brits had long ago set the gold standard for modern-era special ops troops, going back as far as 1941 when a Scots