The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

in her wildest dreams had she expected a moment like this.
The entire floor of the hotel was reserved for the President's party, and the
two floors under it. Italian and American guards stood at all the entrances, and
at various places in the buildings along the street. But the corridor outside
the President's suite of rooms was the exclusive domain of the Presidential
Protective Detail. Connor and D'Agustino made their own final check before
retiring for the evening. A full squad of ten agents were in view, and another
ten were behind various closed doors. Three of the visible agents had FAG-bags,
black satchels across their chests. Officially called fast-action-gun bags, each
contained an Uzi sub-machinegun, which could be extracted and fired in about a
second and a half. Anyone who got this far would find a warm reception.
'I see HAWK and HARPY are discussing affairs of state,' Daga observed quietly.
'Helen, I didn't think you were so much of a prude,' Pete Connor replied with a
sly grin.
'None of my business, but in the old days people outside the door had to be
eunuchs or something.'
'Keep talking like that and Santa will drop coal in your stocking.'
'I'd settle for that new automatic the FBI adopted,' Daga said with a chuckle.
'They're like teenagers. It's unseemly.'
'Daga . . .'
'I know, he's The Boss, and he's a big boy, and we have to look the other way.
Relax, Pete, you think I'm going to blab to a reporter?' She opened the door to
the fire stairs and saw three agents, two of whom had their FAG-bags at the
ready.
'And I was about to offer you a drink, too . . .' Connor said deadpan. It was a
joke. He and Daga were nondrinkers while on duty, and they were nearly always on
duty. It wasn't that he had never thought about getting into her pants. He was
divorced, as was she, but it would never have worked, and that was that. She
knew it, too, and grinned at him.
'I could use one – the stuff they have here is what I was raised on. What a
crummy job this is!' A final look down the corridor. 'Everybody's in place,
Pete. I think we can call it a night.'
'You really like the ten-millimeter?'
'Fired one last week up at Greenbelt. Got a possible with my first string. It
doesn't get much better than that, lover.'
Connor stopped dead in his tracks and laughed. 'Christ, Daga!'
'People might notice?' D'Agustino batted her eyes at him. 'See what I mean,
Pete?'
'God, who ever heard of a Guinea puritan?'
Helen D'Agustino elbowed the senior agent in the ribs and made her way to the
elevator. Pete was right. She was turning into a damned prude, and she'd never
ever been like that. A passionate woman whose single attempt at marriage had
collapsed because one household wasn't large enough for two assertive egos – at
least not two Italian ones – she knew she was allowing her prejudices to color
her judgment. That was not a healthy thing, even over something both trivial and
divorced from her job. What HAWK did on his own time was his business, but the
look in his eyes . . . He was infatuated with the bitch. Daga wondered if any