"Remember Bill Henriksen?" Augustus Werner asked Dan Murray.

"Used to work for you on HRT, bit of a nut, wasn't he?"

"Well, he was heavily into the environmental stuff, hugging trees and all that crap, but he knew the job at Quantico. He laid a good one on me for Rainbow."

"Oh?" The FBI Director looked up and instantly focused at the use of the codeword.

"In Spain they were using an Air Force chopper. The media hasn't caught on to it, but it's there on the videotapes if anyone cares to notice. Bill said it wasn't real bright. He's got a point."

"Maybe," the FBI Director allowed. "But as a practical matter"

"I know, Dan, there are the practical considerations, but it is a real problem."

"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."

"So tell them that if they want hard intel, they have to have somebody with a live brain and a mouth after the shooting stops." But Werner knew that that wasn't easy under the best of circumstances. Just as taking tigers alive was far harder than taking them dead, it was difficult to capture someone possessing a loaded submachine gun and the will to use it. Even the HRT shooters, who were trained to bring them in alive in order to toss them in front of a Federal District Court judge for proper sentencing and caging at Marion, Illinois, hadn't done well in that area. And Rainbow was made up of soldiers for whom the niceties of law were somewhat foreign. The Hague Convention established rules for war that were looser than anything found in the United States Constitution. You couldn't kill prisoners, but you had to capture them alive before they were prisoners, and that was something armies generally didn't emphasize.

"Does our friend Mr. Clark require any more guidance from us?" Werner asked.

"Hey, he's on our side, remember?"

"He's a good guy, yes. Hell, Dan, I met with him while they were setting Rainbow up, and I let him have one of our best troops in Timmy Noonan, and I'll grant you he's done a great job-three of them so far. But he's not one of us, Dan. He doesn't think like a cop, but if he wants better intel, that's what he has to do. Tell him that, will ya?"

"I will, Gus," Murray promised. Then they moved on to other things.

"So what are we supposed to do?" Stanley asked. "Shoot the bloody guns out of their hands? That only happens in the cinema, John."

"Weber did exactly that, remember?"

"Yes, and that was against policy, and we damned well can't encourage it," Alistair replied.

"Come on, Al, if we want better intelligence information, we have to capture some alive, don't we?"

"Fine, if possible, which it rarely will be, John. Blood rarely."

"I know," Rainbow Six conceded. "But can we at least get the boys to think about it?"

"It's possible, but to make that sort of decision on the fly is difficult at best."

"We need the intel, Al," Clark persisted.

"True, but not at the cost of death or injury to one of our men."

"All things in life are a compromise of some sort," Rainbow Six observed. "Would you like to have some hard intelligence information on these people?"

"Of course, but-"

"'But,' my ass. If we need it, let's figure a way to get it," Clark persisted.

"We're not police constables, John. That is not part of our mission."

"Then we're going to change the mission. If it becomes possible to take a subject alive, then we'll give it a try. You can always shoot'em in the head if it's not. The guy Homer took with that gut shot. We could have taken him alive, Al. He wasn't a direct threat to anyone. Okay, he deserved it, and he was standing out in the open with a weapon, and our training said kill, and sure enough, Johnston took the shot, and decided to make a statement of his own because he wanted to-but it would have been just as easy to take out his kneecap, in which case we'd have somebody to talk to now, and maybe he would have sung like most of them do, and then maybe we'd know something we'd sure as hell like to know now, wouldn't we?"