"How good are they?"

"Fair," Tawney allowed. John wondered how much of that was Brit understatement. One of his most important but most subtle tasks would be to decode what every member of his staff said when he or she spoke was a task made all the more difficult by linguistic and cultural differences. On inspection, Tawney looked like a real pro, his brown eyes calm and businesslike. His file said that he'd worked directly with SAS for the past five years. Given SAS's record in the field, he hadn't stiffed them with bad intel very often, if at all. Good. "David?" he asked next. David Peled, the Israeli chief his technical branch, looked very Catholic, rather like something from an El Greco painting, a Dominican priest, perhaps, from the fifteenth century, tall, skinny, hollow of cheek and dark of hair (short), with a certain intensity of eye. Well, he'd worked a long time for Avi ben Jakob, whom Clark knew, if not well then well enough. Peled would be here for two reasons, to serve as a senior Rainbow staffer, thus winning allies and prestige for his parent intelligence service, the Israeli Mossad, and also to learn what he could and feed it back to his boss.

"I am putting together a good staff," David said, setting his tea down. "I need three to five weeks to assemble all the equipment I need."

"Faster," Clark responded at once.

David shook his head. "Not possible. Much of our electronics items can be purchased off the shelf, as it were, but some will have to be custom-made. The orders are all placed," he assured his boss, "with high-priority flags from the usual vendors. TRW, IDI, Marconi, you know who they are. But they can't do miracles, even for us. Three to five weeks for some crucial items."

"SAS are willing to hire anything important to us," Stanley assured Clark from his end of the table.

"For training purposes?" Clark asked, annoyed that he hadn't found out the answer to the question already.

"Perhaps.

Ding cut the run off at three miles. which they'd done in twenty minutes. Good time, he thought, somewhat winded, until he turned to see his ten men about as fresh as they'd been at the beginning, one or two with a sly smile for his neighbors at their wimpy new leader.

Damn.

The run had ended at the weapons range, where targets and arms were ready. Here Chavez had made his own change in his team's selection. A longtime Beretta aficionado, he'd decided that his men would use the recent.45 Beretta as their personal sidearms, along with the Hechler amp; Koch MP-10 submachine gun, the new version of the venerable MP-5, chambered instead for the 10-mm Smith amp; Wesson cartridge developed in the 1980s for the American FBI. Without saying anything, Ding picked up his weapon, donned his earprotectors, and started going for the silhouette targets, set five meters away. There, he saw, all eight holes in the head.But Dieter Weber, next to him, had grouped his shots in one ragged hole, and Paddy Connolly had made what appeared to be one not-so-ragged hole less than an inch across, all between the target's eyes, without touching the eyes themselves. Like most American shooters, Chavez had believed that Europeans didn't know pistols worth a damn. Evidently, training corrected that, he saw.

Next, people picked up their H amp;Ks, which just about anyone could shoot well because of the superb diopter sights. Ding walked along the firing line, watching his people engage pop-up steel plates the size and shape of human heads. Driven up by compressed air, they fell back down instantly with a metallic clang. Ding ended up behind First Sergeant Vega, who finished his magazine and turned.

"Told you they were good, Ding."

"How long they been here?"

"Oh, 'bout a week. Used to running five miles, sir."

Julio added with a smile. "Remember the summer camp we went to in Colorado?"

Most important of all, Ding thought, was the steady aim despite the run, which was supposed to get people pumped up, and simulate the stress of a real combat situation. But these bastards were as steady as fucking bronze statues. Formerly a squad leader in the Seventh Light Infantry Division, he'd once been one of the toughest, fittest, and most effective soldiers in his country's uniform, which was why John Clark had tapped him for a job in the Agency - and in that capacity he'd pulled off some tense and tough missions in the field. It had been a very long time indeed since Domingo Chavez had felt the least bit inadequate about anything. But now quiet voices were speaking into his ear.

"Who's the toughest?" he asked Vega.

"Weber. I heard stories about the German mountain school. Well, they be true, 'mano. Dieter isn't entirely human. Good in hand-to-hand, good pistol, damned good with a rifle, and I think he could run a deer down if he had to, then rip it apart barehanded." Chavez had to remind himself that being called "good" in a combat kill by a graduate of Ranger school and Fort Bragg's special-operations schools wasn't quite the same as from guy in a corner bar. Julio was about as tough as they came.

"The smartest?"

"Connolly. All those SAS guys are tops. Us Americans have to play a little catchup ball. But we will," Vega assured him. "Don't sweat it, Ding. You'll keep up with us, after a week or so. Just like it was in Colorado."

Chavez didn't really want to be reminded of that job. Too many friends lost in the mountains of Colombia, doing a job that their country had never acknowledged. Watching his men finish off their training rounds told him much about them. If anyone had missed a single shot, he failed to notice it. Every man fired off exactly a hundred rounds, the standard daily regimen for men who fired five hundred per working week on routine training, as opposed to more carefully directed drill. That would start tomorrow.

"Okay," John concluded. "we'll have a staff meeting every morning at eight-fifteen for routine matters, and a more formal one every Friday afternoon. My door is always open-including the one at home. People, if you need me, there's a phone next to my shower. Now, I want to get out and see the shooters. Anything else? Good. We stand adjourned." Everyone stood and shuffled out the door. Stanley remained.

"That went well," Alistair observed, pouring himself another cup of tea. "Especially for one not accustomed to bureaucratic life."

"Shows, eh?" Clark asked with a grin."One can learn anything, John."

"I hope so."

"When's morning PT around here?"

"Oh-six-forty-five. You plan to run and sweat with the lads?"

"I plan to try," Clark answered.

"You're too old, John. Some of those chaps run marathons for recreation, and you're closer to sixty than to fifty."

"Al, I can't command those people without trying, and you know that."

"Quite," Stanley admitted.

They awoke late, one at a time, over a period of about an hour. For the most part they just lay there in bed, some of them shuffling off to the bathroom, where they also found aspirin and Tylenol for the headaches they all had, along with showers, which half of them decided to take and the other half to forgo. In the adjoining room was a breakfast buffet that surprised them, with pans full of scrambled eggs, pancakes, sausage and bacon. Some of them even remembered how to use napkins, the people in the monitoring room saw.

They met their captor after they'd had a chance to eat breakfast. He offered all of them clean clothes, after they got cleaned rip.

"What is this place?" asked the one known to the staff only as #4. It sure as hell wasn't any Bowery mission he was familiar with.

"My company is undertaking a study," the host said from behind a tightly fitting mask. "You gentlemen will be part of that study. You will be staying with us for a while. During that time, you will have clean beds, clean clothes, good food, good medical care, and" - he pulled a wall panel back - "whatever you want to drink." In a wall alcove which the guests remarkably had not yet discovered were three shelves of every manner of wine, beer, and spirit that could be purchased at the local liquor store, with glasses, water, mixes, and ice.