The Teeth of the Tiger Read online

  “We pick people who can think on their feet, who are self-starters, and who don’t faint at the sight of blood. Both of you have killed people out in the real world. In both of your cases, you were faced with the unexpected, and both of you handled the situation efficiently. Neither of you had any regrets. That will be your job.”

  “What about protection for us?” The FBI agent again.

  “There’s a get-out-of-jail-free card for both of you.”

  “My ass,” Dominic said again. “There isn’t any such thing.”

  “A signed presidential pardon,” Alexander clarified.

  Fuck . . . Brian thought for a second. “It was Uncle Jack, wasn’t it?”

  “I can’t answer that, but if you wish you can see your pardons before you go into the field.” Alexander set down his coffee cup. “Okay, gentlemen. You’ll have a few days to think this one over, but you’ll have to make your decisions. This is not a small thing I’m asking of you. It’s not going to be a fun job, nor will it be easy or pleasant, but it will be a job which will serve the interests of your country. It’s a dangerous world out there. Some people need to be dealt with directly.”

  “And if we whack the wrong guy?”

  “Dominic, there is that possibility, but, no matter who it is, I can promise you that you will not be asked to kill Mother Teresa’s little brother. We’re pretty careful about who we target. You’ll know who it is, plus how and why we need to deal with him or her before we send you out.”

  “Kill women?” Brian asked. That was not part of the Marine ethos.

  “It’s never happened, as far as I know, but it’s a theoretical possibility. So, if that’s enough for breakfast, you guys need to think it over.”

  “Jesus,” Brian said after Alexander left the room. “What’s lunch going to be like?”

  “Surprised?”

  “Not completely, Enzo, but the way he just said it like that . . .”

  “Hey, bro, how many times have you wondered why we couldn’t simply take care of business ourselves?”

  “You’re the cop, Enzo. You’re the guy who’s supposed to say Oh, shit, remember?”

  “Yeah, but that shoot of mine in Alabama—well, I kinda stepped a little over the line some, y’know? All the way driving to D.C., I thought over how I’d explain it to Gus Werner. But he didn’t blink even a little.”

  “So, what do you think?”

  “Aldo, I’m willing to listen some more. There’s a saying in Texas that there’s more men need killin’ than horses need stealin’.”

  The reversal of roles struck Brian as more than a little surprising. After all, he was the gung ho Marine. Enzo was the guy who was trained to give people their constitutional rights before he slapped the cuffs on.

  That they were both able to take a life without having bad dreams later was obvious to the brothers, but this went a little farther than that. This was premeditated murder. Brian usually went into the field with an exquisitely trained sniper under his command, and he knew what they did wasn’t far removed from murder, either. But being in uniform made it different. It put some sort of blessing on it. The target was an enemy, and on the battlefield it was everyone’s job to look after his own life, and if he failed to do it, well, that was his failing, not that of the man who killed him. But this would be more than that. They’d be hunting individual people down with the deliberate intent of killing them, and that wasn’t what he’d been brought up and trained to do. He’d be dressed in civilian clothes—and killing people under those circumstances made him a spy, not an officer of the United States Marine Corps. There was honor in the latter, but damned little in the former, or so he’d been trained to think. The world no longer had a Field of Honor, and real life wasn’t a duel in which men had identical weapons and an open field on which to make use of them. No, he’d been trained to plan his operations in a way that gave his enemy no chance at all, because he had men under his command whose lives he was sworn to preserve. Combat had rules. Harsh rules, to be sure, but rules even so. Now he was being asked to set those rules aside and become—what? A paid assassin? The teeth of some notional wild beast? The masked avenger from some old movie on Nick at Nite? This didn’t fit into his tidy picture of the real world.

  When he’d been sent to Afghanistan, he hadn’t—hadn’t what? He hadn’t disguised himself as a fishmonger on a city street. There’d been no city street in those goddamned mountains. It had been more like a big-game hunt, one in which the game had weapons of its own. And there was honor in such a hunt, and for his efforts he’d gotten the approval of his country: a combat decoration for bravery that he might or might not display.

  All in all, it was a lot to consider over his second cup of morning coffee.

  “Jesus, Enzo,” he breathed.

  “Brian, you know what the dream of every cop is?” Dominic asked.

  “To break the law and get away with it?”

  Dominic shook his head. “I had this talk with Gus Werner. No, not to break the law, but just once to be the law. To be God’s Own Avenging Sword, was the way he put it—to strike down the guilty without lawyers and other bullshit to get in the way, to see justice done all by yourself. It doesn’t happen very often, they say, but, you know, I got to do it down in Alabama, and it felt pretty good. You just have to be sure you’re bagging the right mutt.”

  “How can you be sure?” Aldo asked.

  “If you’re not, you back off the mission. They can’t hang you for not committing murder, bro.”

  “So, it is murder?”

  “Not if the mutt has it coming, it isn’t.” It was an aesthetic point, but an important one to someone who had already committed murder under the shelter of the law, and had had no bad dreams about it.

  “IMMEDIATELY?”

  “Yes. How many men do we have already?” Mohammed asked.

  “Sixteen.”

  “Ah.” Mohammed took a sip of a fine French white from the Loire Valley. His guest was drinking Perrier and lemon. “Their language skills?”

  “Sufficient, we think.”

  “Excellent. Tell them to make preparations to travel. We’ll fly them in to Mexico. There they will meet with our new friends, and travel to America. And once there, they can do their work.”

  “Insh’Allah,” he observed. God willing.

  “Yes, God willing,” Mohammed said in English, reminding his guest of what language he should be using.

  They were in a sidewalk restaurant overlooking the river, off to one side, with no one nearby. Both men spoke normally, two well-dressed men over a friendly dinner, not huddled or conspiratorial in their demeanor. This took some amount of concentration, since some degree of conspiratorial posture came naturally to what they were doing. But neither of them was a stranger to such meetings.

  “So, how was it to kill the Jew in Rome?”

  “It was very satisfactory, Ibrahim, to feel his body go slack as I cut his spine, and then the surprised look on his face.”

  Ibrahim smiled broadly. It wasn’t every day they got to kill a Mossad officer, much less a Station Chief. The Israelis would always be their most hated enemies, if not the most dangerous. “God was good to us that day.”

  The Greengold mission had been a recreational exercise for Mohammed. It hadn’t even been strictly necessary. Setting up the meet and feeding the Israeli juicy information had been . . . fun. Not terribly difficult, even. Though it would not soon be repeated. No, Mossad would not let any of its officers do anything without overwatch for some time. They were not fools, and they did learn from their mistakes. But killing a tiger had satisfactions all its own. A pity he had no pelt. But where would he hang it? He had no fixed home anymore, only a collection of safe houses that might or might not be totally safe. But you couldn’t worry about everything. You’d never get anything done. Mohammed and his colleagues didn’t fear death, only failure. And they had no plans to fail.

  “I need the meeting arrangements and so forth. I can take care
of travel. Arms will be provided by our new friends?”

  A nod. “Correct.”

  “And how will our warriors enter America?”

  “That is for our friends to handle. But you will send in a group of three at first, to make sure the arrangements are satisfactorily secure.”

  “Of course.” They knew all about operational security. There had been many lessons, none of them gentle. Members of his organization peopled many prisons around the world, those who were unlucky enough to have avoided death. That was a problem, one which his organization had never been able to fix. To die in action, that was noble and courageous. To be caught by a policeman like a common criminal was ignoble and humiliating, but somehow his men found it preferable to die without accomplishing a mission. And Western prisons were not all that terrible for many of his colleagues. Confining, perhaps, but at least the food was regular, and Western nations did not violate their dietary rules.

  These nations were so weak and foolish regarding their enemies, they showed mercy to those who gave them none in return. But that was not Mohammed’s fault.

  “DAMN,” Jack said. It was his first day on the “black” side of the house. His training in high finance had gone very rapidly, due to his upbringing. His grandfather Muller had taught him well during his infrequent visits to the family home. He and Jack’s father were civil to each other, but Grandpa Joe thought real men worked in the trading business rather than in the dirty world of politics—though he had to admit, of course, that his son-in-law had worked out fairly well in Washington. But the money he could have made on Wall Street... why would any man turn away from that? Muller had never said that to Little Jack, of course, but his opinion was clear enough. In any case, Jack could have gotten an entry-level job in any of the large houses, and probably worked up the line pretty fast from there. But what mattered to him now was that he had skipped through the financial side of The Campus and was now in the Operations Department—it wasn’t actually named that, but that’s what it was called by its members. “They’re that good?”

  “What’s that, Jack?”

  “NSA intercept.” He handed the sheet across. Tony Wills read it.

  The intercept had identified a known associate of terrorists—exactly what function he performed was not known yet, but he’d been positively identified from voiceprint analysis.

  “It’s the digital phones. They generate a very clean signal, easy for the voiceprint computer to ID the voices. I see they haven’t ID’d the other guy.” Wills handed the sheet back.

  The nature of the conversation was innocuous, so much so that one might wonder why the call had been placed. But some people just liked to chat on the phone. And, maybe, they were talking in code, discussing biological warfare, or a campaign to set bombs in Jerusalem. Perhaps. More likely, they were just passing the time. There was a lot of that in Saudi Arabia. What impressed Jack was that the call had been picked up and read in real time.

  “Well, you know how digital phones work, right? They’re always broadcasting the HERE I AM signal to the local cell, and every phone has its unique addressing code. Once we identify that code, it’s just a matter of listening in when the phone rings, or the phone holder makes a call. Similarly, we can ID the number and phone of the inbound caller. The hard part is to get the identity in the first place. Now they have another phone ident for the computer to monitor.”

  “How many phones do they keep track of?” Jack asked.

  “Just over a hundred thousand, and that’s just in Southwest Asia. Nearly all of them are dry holes, except for the one in ten thousand that counts—and sometimes they can show real results,” Wills told him.

  “So, to bag a cold call, a computer listens in and keys on ‘hot’ words?”

  “Hot words and hot names. Unfortunately, so many people are named Mohammed over there—it’s the most popular given name in the world. A lot of them go by patronymics or nicknames. Another problem is that there’s a big market in cloned phones—they clone them in Europe, mainly London, where most of the phones have the international software. Or a guy can get six or seven phones and use them once each before tossing them. They’re not dumb. They can get overconfident, though. Some of them end up telling us a lot of things, and occasionally it’s useful. It all goes in the big NSA/CIA book, to which we have access on our terminals.”

  “Okay, who’s this guy?”

  “His name is Uda bin Sali. Rich family, close friends of the king. The big daddy’s a very senior Saudi banker. He has eleven sons and nine daughters. Four wives, a man of commendable vigor. Not a bad guy, supposedly, but he’s a little too doting with his kids. Gives them money instead of attention, like a Hollywood big shot. Uda here discovered Allah in a big way back in his late teens, and he’s on the extreme right of the Wahabi branch of Sunni Islam. Doesn’t like us very much. This boy we keep track of. He might be a gateway into their banking arrangements. His CIA file has a picture. He’s about twenty-seven, five-eight, slender build, neatly trimmed beard. Flies to London a lot. Likes the ladies he can purchase by the hour. Not married yet. That’s unusual, but if he’s gay he conceals it well. The Brits have gotten girls into his bed. They report that he’s vigorous, about what you’d expect for his age, and fairly inventive.”

  “Hell of a thing for a trained intelligence officer to do,” Jack observed.

  “Lots of services enlist the help of hookers,” Wills explained. “They don’t mind talking, and for the right wad of cash they’ll do just about anything. Uda here likes chicken-in-a-basket. Never tried that myself. Asian specialty. Know how to call up his dossier?”

  “Nobody taught me,” Jack replied.

  “Okay.” Wills frog-walked his swivel chair over and demonstrated. “This is the general index. Your access password is SOUTHWEST 91.”

  Junior duly typed in the password, and the dossier came up as an Acrobat graphics file.

  The first photo was probably from his passport, followed by six more, in a more informal format. Jack Jr. managed not to blush. He’d seen his share of Playboys while growing up, even in Catholic schools. Will continued the day’s lesson.

  “You can learn a lot from how a guy does it with women. Langley has a shrink who analyzes that in great detail. It’s probably one of the annexes on this file. At Langley, it’s called ‘Nuts and Sluts’ information. The doc is named Stefan Pizniak. Harvard Medical School professor. As I recall, he says this kid is normal in his drives, given his age, liquidity, and his social background. As you’ll see, he hangs out a lot with merchant bankers in London, like a new kid learning the business. The word is that he’s smart, affable, and handsome. Careful and conservative in his money work. He does not drink. So, he is somewhat religious. Doesn’t flaunt it or lecture others about it, but lives in accordance with the major rules of his religion.”

  “What makes him a bad guy?” Jack asked.

  “He talks a lot to people we know about. There’s no word on who he hangs with in Saudi. We’ve never put any coverage on him in his own backyard. Even the Brits haven’t, and they have a lot more assets in place. CIA doesn’t have much, and his profile isn’t high enough to merit a closer look, or so they think. It’s a shame. His daddy’s supposed to be a good guy. It’ll break his heart to find out his son’s hanging with the wrong crowd at home.” With that wisdom imparted, Wills went back to his own workstation.

  Junior examined the face on his computer screen. His mom was pretty good at reading people from a single look, but it was a skill she hadn’t passed along to him. Jack had trouble enough figuring women out—along with most of the men in the world, he comforted himself. He continued to stare at the face, trying to read the mind of someone six thousand miles away, who spoke a different language and adhered to a different religion. What thoughts circulated behind those eyes? His father, he knew, liked the Saudis. He was especially close to Prince Ali bin Sultan, a prince and senior official in the Saudi government. Young Jack had met him, but only in passing. A beard and a
sense of humor were the only two things he remembered. It was one of Jack Sr.’s core beliefs that all men were fundamentally the same, and he’d passed that opinion along to his son. But that also meant that, just as there were bad people in America, so there were also bad people elsewhere in the world, and his country had recently had some hard lessons from that sad fact. Unfortunately, the sitting President hadn’t quite figured out what to do about it yet.

  Junior read on through the dossier. So, this was how it began here at The Campus. He was working a case—well, kinda working some sort of case, he corrected himself. Uda bin Sali was working at being an international banker. Sure enough, he moved money around. His father’s money? Jack wondered. If so, his daddy was one very wealthy son of a bitch. He played with all the big London banks—London was still the world’s banking capital. Jack would never have guessed that the National Security Agency had the sort of ability to crack this kind of thing.

  A hundred million here, a hundred million there, pretty soon you were talking about real money. Sali was in the capital-preservation business, which meant not so much growing the money entrusted to him as making sure the lockbox had a really good lock. There were seventy-one subsidiary accounts, sixty-three of which were identified by bank, number, and password, so it seemed. Girls? Politics? Sports? Money management? Cars? The oil business? What did rich Saudi princelings talk about? That was a big blank spot in the files. Why didn’t the Brits listen in? The interviews with his hookers hadn’t revealed very much, except that he was a good tipper for those girls who’d shown him an especially good time in his house in Berkeley Square . . . an upscale part of town, Jack noted. He mainly got around by taxi. Owned a car—a black Aston Martin convertible, no less—but didn’t drive it much, the British information revealed. Did not have a chauffeur. Went to the embassy a lot. All in all, it was a lot of information that revealed not very much. He remarked on this to Tony Wills.

  “Yeah, I know, but if he turns up hinky, you can be sure there’re two or three things in there that ought to have jumped off the page at you. That’s the problem with this damned business. And, remember, we’re seeing the processed ‘take.’ Some poor schlub had to take really raw data and distill it down to this. Exactly what significant facts got lost along the way? No way to tell, my boy. No way to tell.”