The Teeth of the Tiger

  This is what my dad used to do, Junior reminded himself. Trying to find diamonds in a bucket full of shit. He’d expected it to be easier, somehow. All right, so what he had to do was find money moves that were not easily explained. It was the worst sort of scut work, and he couldn’t even go to his father for advice. His dad would probably have flipped out to learn that he was working here. Mom would not be overly pleased, either.

  Why did that matter? Wasn’t he a man now, able to do what he wanted to do with his life? Not exactly. Parents had power over you that never went away. He’d always be trying to please them, to show them that they’d raised him the right way, and that he was doing the right thing. Or something like that. His father had been lucky. They’d never learned about all the things he’d had to do. Would they have liked it?

  No. They would have been upset—furious—with all the chances he’d taken with his life. And that was just the stuff his son knew about. There were a lot of blank spots in his memory, times his father hadn’t been home, and Mom hadn’t explained why . . . and so, now, here he was, if not doing the same thing, then sure as hell heading in that direction . . . Well, his father had always said that the world was a crazy place, and so here he was, figuring out just how crazy it might really be.

  CHAPTER 7

  TRANSIT

  IT STARTED in Lebanon, with a flight to Cyprus. From there, a KLM flight to Schipol Airport in the Netherlands, and from there to Paris. In France the sixteen men overnighted in eight separate hotels, taking the time to walk the streets and exercise their English—there had been little point in having them learn French, after all—and struggle with a local population that could have been more helpful. The good news, as they saw it, was that certain female French citizens went out of their way to speak decent English, and were very helpful indeed. For a fee.

  They were ordinary in most details, all in their late twenties, clean-shaven, average in size and looks, but better dressed than was the average. They all concealed their unease well, albeit with lingering but furtive glances at the cops they saw—they all knew not to attract the attention of anyone in a police officer’s uniform. The French police had a reputation for thoroughness which did not appeal to the new visitors. They were traveling on Qatari passports at the moment, which were fairly secure, but a passport issued from the French Foreign Minister himself would not stand up to a directed inquiry. And so they kept a low profile. They had all been briefed not to look around much, to be polite, and to make the effort to smile at everyone they encountered. Fortunately for them, it was tourist season in France, and Paris was jammed with people like them, many of whom also spoke little French, much to the bemused contempt of the Parisians, who in every case took their money anyway.

  THE NEXT day’s breakfast hadn’t concluded with any new explosive revelations, and neither had lunch. Both Caruso brothers listened to their lessons from Pete Alexander, doing their best not to doze off, because these lessons seemed pretty straightforward.

  “Boring, you think?” Pete asked over lunch.

  “Well, none of it’s earthshaking,” Brian responded after a few seconds.

  “You’ll find it’s a little different in a foreign city, out on the street in a market, say, looking for your subject in a crowd of a few thousand. The important part is to be invisible. We’ll work on that this afternoon. You had any experience in that, Dominic?”

  “Not really. Just the basic stuff. Don’t look too directly at the subject. Reversible clothes. Different ties, if you’re in an environment that calls for a necktie. And you depend on others to switch off on coverage. But we won’t have the same backup we have in the Bureau for a discreet surveillance, will we?”

  “Not even close. So, you keep your distance until it’s time to move in. At that point, you move in as quickly as circumstances allow—”

  “And whack the guy?” Brian asked.

  “Still uneasy about it?”

  “I haven’t walked out yet, Pete. Let’s say I have my concerns, and leave it at that.”

  Alexander nodded. “Fair enough. We prefer people who know how to think, and we know that thinking carries its own penalties.”

  “I guess that’s how you have to look at it. What if the guy we’re supposed to do away with turns out to be okay?” the Marine asked.

  “Then you back off and report in. It’s theoretically possible that an assignment can be erroneous, but to the best of my knowledge it’s never happened.”

  “Never?”

  “Not ever, not once,” Alexander assured him.

  “Perfect records make me nervous.”

  “We try to be careful.”

  “What are the rules? Okay, maybe I don’t need to know—right now—who sends us out to kill somebody, but it would be nice to know what the criteria are to write up some fucker’s death warrant, y’know?”

  “It will be someone who has, directly or indirectly, caused the death of American citizens, or is directly involved in plans to do so in the future. We’re not after people who sing too loud in church or who have books overdue at the library.”

  “You’re talking about terrorists, right?”

  “Yup,” Pete replied simply.

  “Why not just arrest them?” Brian asked next.

  “Like you did in Afghanistan?”

  “That was different,” the Marine protested.

  “How?” Pete asked.

  “Well, for one thing we were uniformed combatants operating in the field under orders from legally constituted command authority.”

  “You took some initiative, right?”

  “Officers are supposed to use their heads. My overall mission orders came from up the chain of command, however.”

  “And you don’t question them?”

  “No. Unless they’re crazy, you’re not supposed to do that.”

  “What about when not doing something is crazy?” Pete asked. “What if you have a chance to take action against people who are planning to do something very destructive?”

  “That’s what CIA and FBI are for.”

  “But when they can’t get the job done, for one reason or another, then what? Do you just let the bad guys move ahead with their plans and handle them afterward? That can be expensive,” Alexander told him. “Our job is to do the things that are necessary when the conventional methods are unable to accomplish the mission.”

  “How often?” This was Dominic, seeking to protect his brother.

  “It’s picking up.”

  “How many hits have you made?” Brian again.

  “You don’t need to know.”

  “Oh, I do love hearing that one,” Dominic observed with a smile.

  “Patience, boys. You’re not in the club yet,” Pete told them, hoping they were smart enough not to object at this point.

  “Okay, Pete,” Brian said, after a moment’s thought. “We both gave our word that what we learn here stays here. Fine. It’s just that murdering people in cold blood isn’t exactly what I’ve been trained to do, y’know?”

  “You’re not supposed to feel good about it. Over in Afghanistan, did you ever shoot anybody looking the other way?”

  “Two of them,” Brian admitted. “Hey, the battlefield isn’t the Olympic Games,” he semiprotested.

  “Neither is the rest of the world, Aldo.” The look on the Marine’s face said, Well, you got me there. “It’s an imperfect world, guys. If you want to try to make it perfect, go ahead, but it’s been tried before. Me, I’d settle for something safer and more predictable. Imagine if somebody had taken care of Hitler back in 1934 or so, or Lenin in 1915 in Switzerland. The world would have been better, right? Or maybe bad in a different way. But we’re not in that business. We will not be involved in political assassinations. We’re after the little sharks who kill innocent people in such a way that conventional procedures cannot handle them. It’s not the best system. I know that. We all know that. But it’s something, and we’re going to try to see if it works. It can’t
be much worse than what we have already, can it?”

  Dominic’s eyes never left Pete’s face during that discourse. He’d just told them something that maybe he hadn’t meant to tell them. The Campus didn’t have any killers yet. They were going to be the first. There had to be a lot of hopes riding on them. That was a lot of responsibility. But it all made sense. It was plain that Alexander was not teaching them from his own real-world experience. A training officer was supposed to be somebody who’d actually gone out and done it. That was why most of the instructors at the FBI Academy were experienced field agents. They could tell you how it felt. Pete could only tell them what had to be done. But why, then, had they picked him and Aldo?

  “I see your point, Pete,” Dominic said. “I’m not leaving yet.”

  “Neither am I,” Brian told his training officer. “I just want to know what the rules are.”

  Pete didn’t tell them they’d be making the rules up as they went along. They’d figure that one out soon enough.

  AIRPORTS ARE the same all over the world. Instructed to be polite, they all checked their bags, waited in the correct lounges, smoked their cigarettes in the designated smoking areas, and read the books they’d purchased in the airport kiosks. Or pretended to. Not all of them had the language skills they would have wished. Once at cruising altitude, they ate their airline meals, and most of them took their airline naps. Nearly all of them were seated in the aft rows of their seating sections, and when they stirred, they wondered which of their seatmates they might meet again in a few days or weeks, however long it took to work out the details. Each of them hoped to meet Allah soon, and to garner the rewards that would come for fighting in their Holy Cause. It occurred to the more intellectual of them that even Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, was limited in his ability to communicate the nature of Paradise. He’d had to explain it to people with no knowledge of passenger jet aircraft, automobiles, and computers. What, then, was its true nature? It had to be so thoroughly wonderful as to defy description, but even so, a mystery yet to be discovered. And they would discover it. There was a degree of excitement in that thought, a sort of anticipation too sublime to discuss with one’s colleagues. A mystery, but an infinitely desirable one. And if others had to meet Allah, too, as a result, well, that also was written in the Great Book of Destiny. For the moment, they all took their naps, sleeping the sleep of the just, the sleep of the Holy Martyrs yet to be. Milk, honey, and virgins.

  SALI, JACK found, had some mystery about him. The CIA file on the guy even had the length of his penis appended in the “Nuts and Sluts” section. The British whores said he was grossly average in size but uncommonly vigorous in application—and a fine tipper, which appealed to their commercial sensibilities. But unlike most men, he didn’t talk about himself much. Talked mainly about the rain and chill of London, and complimentary things about his companion of the moment, which appealed to her vanity. His occasional gift of a nice handbag—Louis Vuitton in most cases—sat well with his “regulars,” two of whom reported to Thames House, the new home of both the British Secret Service and the Security Service. Jack wondered if they were getting paid by both Sali and H.M. Government for services rendered. Probably a good deal for the girls involved, he was sure, though Thames House probably wouldn’t spring for shoes and a bag.

  “Tony?”

  “Yeah, Jack?” Wills looked up from his workstation.

  “How do we know if this Sali is a bad guy?”

  “We don’t for sure. Not until he actually does something, or we intercept a conversation between him and somebody we don’t like.”

  “So, I’m just checking this bird out.”

  “Correct. You’ll be doing a lot of that. Any feel for the guy yet?”

  “He’s a horny son of a bitch.”

  “It’s hard to be rich and single, in case you haven’t noticed, Junior.”

  Jack blinked. Maybe he had that coming. “Okay, but I’ll be damned if I pay for it, and he’s paying a lot.”

  “What else?” Wills asked.

  “He doesn’t talk a hell of a lot.”

  “What’s that tell you?”

  Ryan sat back in his swivel chair to think it over. He didn’t talk to his girlfriends much, either, at least not about his new job. As soon as you said “financial management,” most women tended to doze off in self-defense. Did that mean anything? Maybe Sali just wasn’t a talker. Maybe he was sufficiently secure that he didn’t feel the need to impress his lady friends with anything but his cash—he always used cash, not credit cards. And why that? To keep his family from knowing? Well, Jack didn’t talk to Mom and Dad about his love life, either. In fact, he rarely took a girlfriend to the family home. His mom tended to scare girls away. Not his dad, strangely enough. The M.D. Dr. Ryan struck other women as powerful, and while most young women found it admirable, many also found it intimidating as hell. His father dialed all the power stuff way back and came off as a slender and distinguished gray-haired teddy bear to family guests. More than anything else, his dad liked to play catch with his son on the grass overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, maybe harkening back to a simpler time. He had Kyle for that. The littlest Ryan was still in grammar school, at the stage where he asked furtive questions about Santa Claus, but only when Mom and Dad weren’t around. There was probably a kid in class who wanted to let everybody know what he knew—there was always one of those—and Katie had wised up by now. She still liked to play Barbies, but she knew that her mom and dad bought them at the Toys R Us in Glen Burnie, and assembled the accoutrements on Christmas Eve, a process his father truly loved, much as he might bitch about it. When you stopped believing in Santa Claus, the whole damn world just started a downhill slide . . .

  “It tells us he’s not a talker. Not much else,” Jack said after a moment’s reflection. “We’re not supposed to convert inference into facts, are we?”

  “Correct. A lot of people think otherwise, but not here. Assumption is the mother of all fuckups. That shrink at Langley specializes in spinning. He’s good, but you need to learn to distinguish between speculation and facts. So, tell me about Mr. Sali,” Wills commanded.

  “He’s horny, and he doesn’t talk much. He plays very conservatively with the family’s money.”

  “Anything that makes him look like a bad guy?”

  “No, but he’s worth watching because of his religious—well, extremism’s the wrong word. There are some things missing here. He’s not boisterous, not showy the way rich people his age usually are. Who started the file on him?” Jack asked.

  “The Brits did. Something about this guy tweaked the interest of one of their senior analysts. Then Langley took a brief look and started a file of their own. Then he was intercepted talking to a guy who’s also got a file at Langley—the conversation wasn’t about anything important, but there it was,” Wills explained. “And you know, it’s a lot easier to open a file than it is to close one. His cell phone is coded in to the NSA computers, and so they report on him whenever he turns it on. I’ve been through the file, too. He’s worth keeping an eye on, I think—but I’m not sure why. You learn to trust your instincts in this business, Jack. So, I’m nominating you to be the in-house expert on this kid.”

  “And I’m looking for how he handles his money . . . ?”

  “That’s right. You know, it doesn’t take much to finance a bunch of terrorists—at least not much by his reckoning. A million bucks a year is a lot of money to those people. They live hand-to-mouth, and their maintenance expenses aren’t that high. So, you’re supposed to look at the margins. Chances are he’ll try to hide whatever he does in the shadows of his big transactions.”

  “I’m not an accountant,” Jack pointed out. His father had gotten his CPA a long time ago, but never used it, even to do his own taxes. He had a law firm for that.

  “Can you do arithmetic?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “So, attach a nose to it.”

  Oh, great, John Patrick Rya
n, Jr., thought. Then he reminded himself that actual intelligence operations weren’t about shoot-the-bad-guy-and-bang-Ursula-Undress while the credits rolled. That was only in the movies. This was the real world.

  “OUR FRIEND is in that much of a hurry?” Ernesto asked in considerable surprise.

  “So it would seem. The norteamericanos have been hard on them of late. I imagine they want to remind their enemies that they still have fangs. A thing of honor for them, perhaps,” Pablo speculated. His friend would understand that readily enough.

  “So, what do we do now?”

  “When they are settled in Mexico City, we arrange for transport into America, and, I presume, we arrange for weapons.”

  “Complications?”

  “If the norteamericanos have our organizations penetrated, they might have some prewarning, plus whispers of our involvement. But we have considered this already.”

  They’d considered it briefly, yes, Ernesto reflected, but that had been at a convenient distance. Now the knocker on the door was rattling, and it was time for further reflection. But he couldn’t renege on this deal. That, too, was a matter both of honor and of business. They were preparing an initial shipment of cocaine to the E.U. That promised to be a really sizable market.

  “How many people are coming?”

  “Fourteen, he says. They have no weapons at all.”

  “What will they need, do you suppose?”

  “Light automatics should do it, plus pistols, of course,” Pablo said. “We have a supplier in Mexico who can handle it for less than ten thousand dollars. For an additional ten, we can have the weapons delivered to the end users in America, to avoid complications during the crossing.”