Part IV
Chapter 29
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Harry watched Stacy Bennett, now sitting beside the pool behind Avi's house at the Tel Aviv compound, as she took her morning coffee and, like Jim Parish, he was getting increasingly worried about her fragile - and rapidly deteriorating - emotional state. Since returning from her 'assignment' in Boston, and with so much fresh blood on her hands, she had at first reflected a stoic acceptance of the 'work' she'd done, but soon she bounced between deepening bouts of depression and raging fits of aggressive mania. When Stacy and Jim arrived in Davos for Harry's wedding - and, as it happened, after a particularly violent outburst on the flight from Tel Aviv to Zurich - Parish asked Harry to keep an eye on her between dances at the impromptu wedding reception. After Sara Callahan returned to the clinic to wrap-up treatment, both Harry and Jim continued to watch Stacy when the team left for Zurich, first by train, and then on the flight back to Israel.
And Harry was upset by what he saw on the train, enough so that he decided to bring up the matter with the Colonel after they boarded the El Al 707 for the return flight to Tel Aviv.
"Yes," Goodman said, almost matter-of-factly - like he was remarking on the weather, "I've noticed, but Harry, I've often seen this happen after a first kill. Odds are she'll get over it..."
But now, after a few days at the compound, he looked at Stacy by the pool and he could see other changes.
She was biting her nails, her fingers never stopped moving, and her left leg twitched every few seconds. Worse still, she refused to talk to anyone about what was obviously bothering her, and Parish was growing more concerned by the hour. She was, he told Callahan, an obvious candidate for suicide.
He watched her for a while that morning then decided to act; he returned to the house and called Dr. Adler, Sara's attending psychiatrist at the clinic. After a few minutes wait for her to come to the phone, Callahan told Adler about his concerns, as well as Parish's.
Adler replied thoughtfully, and directly: "I noticed something odd about her at the reception. Not knowing the circumstances I felt it best to ignore the situation, but with what I know now I would concur. Suicide is a real possibility."
"Do you know what's going on? What we should do to help?"
"What you are describing, these suddenly emerging extreme manic-depressive swings, the tremors, the nail-biting...all may well be manifestations of an impending psychotic break."
"What can we do?"
"Can you get her to me?"
"Of course."
"And, uh, do you suppose your father could come along, too?"
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Goodman and the team had other concerns now. Growing concerns.
Walter Chalmers woke up one morning and simply left the compound; without a word said he took a taxi to the American Embassy in Tel Aviv; the team learned the next day Chalmers had returned to his Senate office in Washington, D.C. and was, apparently, hard at work. Then, two days later, he was gunned down outside of a restaurant in Georgetown, the apparent victim of a random robbery - at least according to breathless reports on NBC News, anyway.
The murder of a U.S. Senator stirred up a hornet's nest of activity inside the FBI, and at Treasury - who controlled the Secret Service, because the move was seen by some as an open declaration of war between the government and a hidden, but growing, movement that few really understood. Regardless, the growing affiliation between the various vigilante groups on the east and west coasts with a new network of criminal enterprises was trouble enough, because this link-up was now seen as yielding ominous results. Chalmers' open assassination was therefore regarded by insiders at the Bureau for what it really was.
War, pure and simple.
Yet, this was to be a war that played-out far from public view, and both sides knew it had to be that way. If the vigilantes moved to directly confront American political sovereignty they wouldn't stand a chance, so the Bureau's upper echelons remained uncertain what the group's ultimate aims were.
While a decades-long war of attrition was the furthest thing from their minds, few had come to terms with the Escobar dilemma that Harry Callahan had uncovered. Was this somehow linked to the drug trade? No, it couldn't be, the old hands at the FBI said. The Columbians surely weren't that sophisticated.
Goodman's team, however, was not laboring under any such uncertainty. Goodman knew the assassination was Pablo Escobar's opening move, and it was also Goodman's opinion that Escobar wanted to - initially - destabilize the federal law enforcement community, and then force their hand, lead them to move on these various vigilante groups - one by one. So engaged, and once so distracted, Goodman assumed the Medellin Cartel would begin to pour product into the U.S. through their underground network of associated criminal enterprises, like the Danson chop-shop Callahan had worked at; from this modest start, the Cartel could then expand their initial dealer network to major cities coast to coast.
"With so much cocaine and heroin hitting the streets all at once your government will never know what hit them," the Colonel mused, "at least not until long after the dust settles. And by then it will be too late, won't it? It will take decades to repair the damage, if it ever can be."
"And you still think this is all the work on one Columbian drug dealer?" Sam Bennett said.
But then Goodman shook his head. "No, I don't think so, Captain. I think this operation has KGB written all over it; we just can't prove it yet. Personally, I doubt this Escobar even knows the difference between a State and a U.S. Senator, because if he did he certainly wouldn't have gone after Chalmers for his first move. That hit signaled the opening move of a decades-long campaign to destabilize the United States from within."
"So," Bullitt sighed, "this isn't just about drugs?"
"I doubt it," Goodman replied. "I'd say this is a political operation first, one that will utilize criminal enterprises to undermine social cohesion while at the same time these ethnic infiltrations of police departments will ultimately undermine the credibility of law enforcement. Once that happens whoever is pulling the strings will move to destabilize the federal political system."
"So," Sam Bennett grumbled, "after that comes revolution?"
"If I were setting this up," Goodman said, "I'd foment civil war. If that happens the United States drops off the world stage, the dollar plummets and what's left of the country is left to pick up the pieces. It's asymmetric warfare, gentlemen, and no one does that better than the KGB."
"Do we know what's going on in San Francisco?" Bullitt asked, clearly shaken by this talk.
"More or less. There's been a lot of confusion since Harry took out that Danson character. The Threlkis gang has a big reward out for you, by the way," Goodman said, nodding at Callahan. "Paddy Chalmers is gone; they took him out while he was still in the hospital three nights ago. A couple of salesmen at one of the Chalmers' dealerships have gone missing, too. We've found just one of the bodies. Some good news, though; we are establishing new phone traces one-by-one as we locate the crew that went underground, as some of them start moving around again. All-in-all, we're getting back up to speed, but slowly."
Bullitt looked angry now. "What about McKay? What's he up to?"
"Playing it straight as an arrow, Frank. Back at work like nothing happened."
"Maybe he had a 'Come to Jesus Moment,'" Callahan said, grinning at Frank.
"I doubt it. Maybe we ought to put Delgetti and Stanton on him," Bullitt said, now sounding frustrated.
Sam Bennett growled at that suggestion: "No way, Frank. We don't want to tip our hand or expose those two at the same time..."
"I agree, Captain," Goodman added. "Our problem now, at least as far as this team is concerned, is that you have all been, in a word, compromised. When you return it will be to make a little statement of our own."
"Meaning?" Callahan asked.
"We will assign each of you a group of targets. Your assignment will be to get into place and take out as many of these characters as you can."
With that, Goodman let his words settle over the team while he looked at them one by one.
"Like the Munich squads..." Sam Bennett said quietly...
