"Yeah, well, Clark's thinking about maybe going a little public on Rainbow. One of his people brought it up, he tells me. If you want to deter terrorism, you might want to let the word get out there's a new sheriff in town, he said. Anyway, he hasn't made any decision for an official recommendation to the Agency, but evidently he's kicking the idea around."
"Interesting," Gus Werner said. "I can see the point, especially after three successful operations. Hey, if I were one of those idiots, I'd think twice before having the Wrath of God descend on me. But they don't think like normal people, do they?"
"Not exactly, but deterrence is deterrence, and John has me thinking about it now. We could leak the data at several levels, let the word out that there's a secret multinational counterterror team now operating." Murray paused. "Not take them black to white, but maybe black to gray."
"What will the Agency say?" Werner asked.
"Probably no, with an exclamation point behind it," the Director admitted. "But like I said, John has me thinking about it a little."
"I can see his point, Dan. If the world knows about it, maybe people will think twice, but then people will start to ask questions, and reporters show up, and pretty soon you have people's faces on the front page of USA Today, along with articles about how they screwed up on a job, written by somebody who can't even put a clip in a gun the right way."
"They can put a D-Notice on stories in England," Murray reminded him. "At least they won't make the local papers."
"Fine, so then they come out in the Washington Post, and nobody reads that, right?" Werner snorted. And he well knew the problems that the FBI's HRT had gotten into with Waco and Ruby Ridge after his tenure as commander of the unit. The media had screwed up the reporting of events in both cases-as usual, he thought, but that was the media for you. "How many people are into Rainbow?"
"About a hundred… pretty big number for a black outfit. I mean, their security hasn't been broken yet that we know of, but-"
"But as Bill Henriksen said, anybody who knows the difference 'tween a Huey and a Black Hawk knows that there was something odd about the Worldpark job. Hard to keep secrets, isn't it?"
"Sure as hell, Gus. Anyway, give the idea some thought, will you?"
"Will do. Anything else?"
"Yeah, also from Clark-does anybody think three terrorist incidents since Rainbow set up is a big number? Might somebody be activating cells of bad guys and turning them loose? If so, who, and if so, what for?"
"Christ, Dan, we get our European intelligence from them, remember? Who's the guy they have working the spook side?"
"Bill Tawney's his chief analyst. `Six' guy, pretty good as a matter of fact-I know him from when I was the legal attach+й in London a few years ago. He doesn't know, either. They're wondering if some old KGB guy or something like that might be traveling around, telling the sleeping vampires to wake up and suck some blood."
Werner considered that for about half a second or so before speaking. "If so, he hasn't been a raving success. The operations have some of the earmarks of professionalism, but not enough of it to matter. Hell, Dan, you know the drill. If the bad guys are in the same place for more than an hour, we descend on them and take them out the instant they screw up. Professional terrorists or not, they are not well-trained people, they don't have anything like our resources, and they surrender the initiative to us sooner or later. All we need to know is where they are, remember? After that, the thunderbolt is in our hands."
"Yeah, and you have zapped a few, Gus. And that's why we need better intelligence, to zap them before they show up on the radarscope of their own accord."
"Well, one thing I can't do is their intel for them. They're closer to the sources than we are," Werner said, "and I bet they don't send us everything they have anyway."
They can't. Too much of it to fax back and forth."
"Okay, yes, three hard incidents looks like a lot, but we can't tell if it's just coincidence or part of a plan unless we have people to ask. Like a live terrorist. Clark's boys haven't taken anyone alive yet, have they?"
"Hope," Murray agreed. "That's not part of their mission statement."
