The Teeth of the Tiger

  “Bueno, make it so. Will you fly to Mexico yourself?”

  Pablo nodded. “Tomorrow morning. I will coordinate with them and the coyotes this first time.”

  “You will be careful,” Ernesto pointed out. His suggestions had the force of an explosive device. Pablo took some chances, but his services were very important to the Cartel. He would be hard to replace.

  “Of course, jefe. I need to evaluate how reliable these people are if they are to assist us in Europe.”

  “Yes, that is so,” Ernesto agreed warily. As with most deals, when it came time to take action, there were second thoughts. But he was not an old woman. He had never been afraid to act decisively.

  THE AIRBUS pulled up to its gate, the first-class passengers were allowed to deplane first, and they followed the colored arrows on the floor to immigration and customs, where they assured the uniformed bureaucrats that they had nothing to declare, and their passports were duly stamped, and they walked off to collect their luggage.

  The leader of the group was named Mustafa. A Saudi by birth, he was clean-shaven, which he didn’t like, though it exposed skin that the women seemed to like. He and a colleague named Abdullah walked together to get their bags, and then out to where their rides were supposed to be waiting. This would be the first test of their newfound friends in the Western Hemisphere. Sure enough, someone was holding a cardboard square with “MIGUEL” printed on it. That was Mustafa’s code name for this mission, and he walked over to shake the man’s hand. The greeter said nothing, but motioned them to follow him. Outside, a brown Plymouth minivan waited. The bags went in back, and the passengers slid into the middle seat. It was warm in Mexico City, and the air was fouler than anything they’d ever experienced. What ought to have been a sunny day was ruined by a gray blanket over the city—air pollution, Mustafa thought.

  The driver continued to say nothing as he drove them to their hotel. This actually impressed them. If there was nothing to say, then one should keep quiet.

  The hotel was a good one, as expected. Mustafa checked in using the false Visa card that had been faxed ahead, and in five minutes he and his friend were in their spacious room on the fifth floor. They looked around for obvious bugs before speaking.

  “I didn’t think that damned flight would ever end,” Abdullah groused, looking in the minibar for bottled water. They’d been briefed to be careful drinking the stuff that came out of the tap.

  “Yes, I agree. How did you sleep?”

  “Not well. I thought the one good thing about alcohol was that it made you unconscious.”

  “For some. Not for all,” Mustafa told his friend. “There are other drugs for that.”

  “Those are hateful to God,” Abdullah observed. “Unless a physician administers them.”

  “We have friends now who do not think that way.”

  “Infidels,” Abdullah almost spat.

  “The enemy of your enemy is your friend.”

  Abdullah twisted the top off an Evian bottle. “No. You can trust a true friend. Can we trust these men?”

  “Only as far as we must,” Mustafa allowed. Mohammed had been careful in his mission brief. These new allies would help them only as a matter of convenience, because they also wished harm to the Great Satan. That was good enough for now. Someday these allies would become enemies, and they’d have to deal with them. But that day had not yet come. He stifled a yawn. Time to get some rest. Tomorrow would be a busy day.

  JACK LIVED in a condo in Baltimore, a few blocks from Orioles Park at Camden Yards, where he had season tickets, but which was dark tonight because the Orioles were in Toronto. Not a good cook, he ate out as he usually did, alone this time because he didn’t have a date, which was not as unusual as he might have wished. Finished, he walked back to his condo, switched on his TV, and then thought better of it, went to his computer instead, and logged on to check his e-mail and surf the ’Net. That’s when he made a note to himself. Sali lived alone as well, and while he often had whores for company, it wasn’t every night. What did he do on the other nights? Log on to his computer? A lot of people did. Did the Brits have a tap on his phone lines? They must. But the file on Sali didn’t include any e-mails . . . why? Something worth checking out.

  “WHAT YOU thinking, Aldo?” Dominic asked his brother. ESPN had a baseball game on; the Mariners were playing the Yankees, to the current detriment of the former.

  “I’m not sure I like the idea of shooting some poor bastard down on the street, bro.”

  “What if you know he’s a bad guy?”

  “And what if I whack the wrong guy just because he drives the same kind of car and has the same mustache? What if he leaves a wife and kids behind? Then I’m a fucking murderer—a contract killer, at that. That’s not the sort of thing they taught us at the Basic School, y’know?”

  “But if you know he’s a bad guy, then what?” the FBI agent asked.

  “Hey, Enzo, that’s not what they trained you to do, either.”

  “I know that, but this here’s a different situation. If I know the mutt’s a terrorist, and I know we can’t arrest him, and I know he’s got more plans, then I think I can handle it.”

  “Out in the hills, in Afghanistan, you know, our intel wasn’t always gold-plated, man. Sure, I learned to put my own ass on the line, but not some poor other schlub’s.”

  “The people you were after over there, who’d they kill?”

  “Hey, they were part of an organization that made war on the United States of America. They probably weren’t Boy Scouts. But I never saw any direct evidence of it.”

  “What if you had?” Dominic asked.

  “But I didn’t.”

  “You’re lucky,” Enzo responded, remembering a little girl whose throat had been slashed ear to ear. There was a legal adage that hard cases made for bad law, but the books could not anticipate all the things that people did. Black ink on white paper was a little too dry for the real world sometimes. But he’d always been the passionate one of the two. Brian had always been a touch cooler, like Fonzie on Happy Days. Twins, yes, but fraternal ones. Dominic was more like his father, Italian and passionate. Brian had turned out more like Mom, chillier from a more northerly climate. To an outsider, the differences might have appeared less than trivial, but to the twins themselves it was frequently the subject of jabs and jokes. “When you see it, Brian, when it’s right there in front of you, it sets you off, man. It lights a fire in the gut.”

  “Hey, been there, done that, got the T-shirt, okay? I whacked five men all by myself. But it was business, not personal. They tried to ambush us, but they didn’t read the manual right, and I used fire and maneuver to fake ’em out and roll ’em up, just like they taught me to do. It’s not my fault they were inept. They could have surrendered, but they preferred to shoot it out. That was a bad call on their part, but ‘a man should do what he thinks is best.’” His all-time favorite movie was John Wayne’s Hondo.

  “Hey, Aldo, I’m not saying you’re a wuss.”

  “I know what you’re saying, but, look, I don’t want to turn into one of them, okay?”

  “That’s not the mission here, bro. I got my doubts, too, but I’m going to stay around and see how it plays out. We can always kiss it off whenever we want.”

  “I suppose.”

  Then Derek Jeter doubled up the middle. Pitchers probably thought of him as a terrorist, didn’t they?

  ON THE other side of the building, Pete Alexander was on a secure phone to Columbia, Maryland.

  “So, how are they doing?” he heard Sam Granger ask.

  Pete sipped at his glass of sherry. “They’re good kids. They both have doubts. The Marine talks openly about it, and the FBI guy keeps his mouth shut about it, but the wheels are turning over slowly.”

  “How serious is it?”

  “Hard to say. Hey, Sam, we always knew that training would be the hard part. Few Americans want to grow up to be professional killers—at least not the ones we need for t
his.”

  “There was a guy at the Agency who would have fit right in—”

  “But he’s too damned old, and you know it,” Alexander countered at once. “Besides, he has his sunset job over across the pond in Wales, and he seems to be comfortable in it.”

  “If only . . .”

  “If only your aunt had balls, she’d be your uncle,” Pete pointed out. “Selecting candidates is your job. Getting them trained up is mine. These two have the brains and they have the skills. The hard part is temperament. I’m working on that. Be patient.”

  “In the movies, it’s a lot easier.”

  “In the movies, everybody is borderline psychopath. Is that who we want on the payroll?”

  “I guess not.” There were plenty of psychopaths to be found. Every large police department knew of several. And they’d kill people for modest monetary considerations, or a small quantity of drugs. The problem with such people was that they didn’t take orders well, and they were not very smart. Except in the movies. Where was that little Nikita girl when you really needed her?

  “So, we have to deal with good, reliable people who have brains. Such people think, and they do not always think predictably, do they? A guy with a conscience is nice to have, but every so often he’s going to wonder if he’s doing the right thing. Why did you have to send two Catholics? Jews are bad enough. They’re born with guilt—but Catholics learn it all in school.”

  “Thank you, Your Holiness,” Granger responded, dead-pan.

  “Sam, we knew going in that this was not going to be easy. Jesus, you send me a Marine and an FBI agent. Why not a couple of Eagle Scouts, y’know?”

  “Okay, Pete. It’s your job. Any idea on timing? There’s some work piling up on us,” Granger observed.

  “Maybe a month and I’ll know if they’ll play or not. They will need to know the why in addition to the who, but I always told you that,” Alexander reminded his boss.

  “True,” Granger admitted. It really was a lot easier in the movies, wasn’t it? Just let your fingers do the walking to “Assassins R Us” in the Yellow Pages. They had thought about hiring former KGB officers at first. They all had expert training, and all wanted money—the going rate was less than twenty-five thousand dollars per kill, a pittance—but such people would probably report back to Moscow Centre in the hope of being rehired, and The Campus would then become known within the global “black” community. They couldn’t have that.

  “What about the new toys?” Pete asked. Sooner or later, he’d have to train the twins with the new tools of the trade.

  “Two weeks, they tell me.”

  “That long? Hell, Sam, I proposed them nine months ago.”

  “It’s not something you get at the local Western Auto. They have to be manufactured from scratch. You know, highly skilled machinists in out-of-the-way places, people who don’t ask questions.”

  “I told you, get the guys who do this sort of thing for the Air Force. They’re always making up clever little gadgets.” Like tape recorders that fit in cigarette lighters. Now, that was probably inspired by the movies. And for the really good things, the government almost never had the right people in-house, which was why they employed civilian contractors, who took the money, did the job, and kept their mouths shut because they wanted more such contracts.

  “They’re all being worked on, Pete. Two weeks,” he emphasized.

  “Roger that. Until then, I have all the suppressed pistols I need. They’re both doing nicely with the tracking and tailing drills. Helps that they’re so ordinary-looking.”

  “So, bottom line, things are going well?” Granger asked.

  “Except for the conscience thing, yeah.”

  “Okay, keep me posted.”

  “Will do.”

  “See ya.”

  Alexander set the receiver back down. Goddamned consciences, he thought. It would be nice to have robots, but somebody might notice Robby striding down the street. And they couldn’t have that. Or maybe the Invisible Man, but in the H. G. Wells story, the drug that made him transparent also made him mad, and this gig was already crazy enough, wasn’t it? He tossed off the last of his sherry, and then on reflection, went off to refill his glass.

  CHAPTER 8

  CONVICTION

  MUSTAFA AND Abdullah arose at dawn, said their morning prayers, and ate, and then hooked up their computers and checked their e-mail. Sure enough, Mustafa had an e-mail from Mohammed, forwarding a message from someone else, supposedly named Diego, with instructions for a meeting at...10:30 A.M. local time. He sorted through the rest of his electronic mail, most of it something the Americans called “spam.” He’d learned that this was a canned pig product, which seemed entirely appropriate. Both of them walked outside—but separately—just after 9:00, mainly to get the blood moving and examine the neighborhood. They checked carefully but furtively for tails and found none. They got to the planned rendezvous point at 10:25.

  Diego was already there, reading a paper, wearing a white shirt with blue stripes.

  “Diego?” Mustafa asked pleasantly.

  “You must be Miguel,” the contact replied with a smile, rising to shake hands. “Please be seated.” Pablo scanned around. Yes, there was “Miguel’s” backup, sitting alone and ordering coffee, doing overwatch like a professional. “So, how do you like Mexico City?”

  “I did not know it was so large and bustling.” Mustafa waved around. The sidewalks were crowded with people heading in all directions. “And the air is so foul.”

  “That is a problem here. The mountains hold in the pollution. It takes strong winds to clear the air. So, coffee?”

  Mustafa nodded. Pablo waved to the waiter and held up the coffeepot. The sidewalk café was European in character, but not overly crowded. The tables were about half occupied, in knots of people meeting for business or socially, doing their talking and minding their own business. The new coffeepot arrived. Mustafa poured and waited for the other to speak.

  “So, what can I do for you?”

  “All of us are here as requested. How soon can we go?”

  “How soon do you wish?” Pablo asked.

  “This afternoon would be fine, but that might be a little soon for your arrangements.”

  “Yes. But what about tomorrow, say about thirteen hundred hours?”

  “That would be excellent,” Mustafa responded in pleasant surprise. “How will the crossing be arranged?”

  “I will not be directly involved, you understand, but you will be driven to the border and handed over to someone who specializes in getting people and certain goods into America. You will be required to walk about six kilometers. It will be warm, but not greatly so. Once in America, you will be driven to a safe house outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. There you can either fly to your final destinations or rent cars.”

  “Weapons?”

  “What exactly will you require?”

  “Ideally, we would like AK-47s.”

  Pablo shook his head at once. “Those we cannot supply, but we can get you Uzi and Ingram submachine guns. Nine-millimeter Parabellum caliber, with, say, six thirty-round magazines each, fully loaded for your purposes.”

  “More ammunition,” Mustafa said at once. “Twelve magazines, plus three additional boxes of ammunition for each weapon.”

  Pablo nodded. “That is easily done.” The increased expense would be only a couple of thousand dollars. The weapons would have been bought on the open market, along with the ammunition. They were technically traceable to their origin and/or purchaser, but that was only a theoretical problem, not a practical one. The guns would be mainly Ingrams, not the better-made and more accurate Israeli Uzis, but these people wouldn’t care. Who knows, they might even have religious or moral objections to touching a Jewish-made weapon. “Tell me, how are you set for traveling expenses?”

  “We have five thousand American dollars each in cash.”

  “You can use that for minor expenses, like food and gasoline, but for ot
her things you need credit cards. Americans will not accept cash to rent cars, and never to buy airplane tickets.”

  “We have them,” Mustafa replied. He and each member of the team had Visa cards issued to them in Bahrain. They even had consecutive numbers. All were drawn on an account in a Swiss bank, whose account held just over five hundred thousand dollars. Sufficient to their purposes.

  The name on the card, Pablo saw, was JOHN PETER SMITH. Good. Whoever had set this up hadn’t made the mistake of using explicitly Middle Eastern names. Just as long as the card didn’t fall into the hands of a police officer who might ask Mr. Smith where exactly he came from. He hoped they had been briefed on the American police and their habits.

  “Other documents?” Pablo asked.

  “Our passports are Qatari. We have international driver’s licenses. We all speak acceptable English and can read maps. We know about American laws. We will keep within the speed limits and drive carefully. The nail that sticks up is hammered down. So we will not stick up.”

  “Good,” Pablo observed. So, they had been briefed. Some might even remember it. “Remember that one mistake can ruin the entire mission for all of you. And it is easy to make mistakes. America is an easy country in which to live and move about, but their police are very efficient. If you are not noticed, you are safe from them. Therefore, you must avoid being noticed. Fail in that, and you could all be doomed to failure.”

  “Diego, we will not fail,” Mustafa promised.

  Fail at what? Pablo wondered, but did not ask. How many women and children will you kill? But it didn’t really matter to him. It was a cowardly way to kill, but the rules of honor in his “friend’s” culture were very different from his own. This was business, and that was all he needed to know.

  THREE MILES, push-ups, and a coffee chaser, and that was life in southern Virginia.

  “Brian, you used to carrying a firearm?”