The Teeth of the Tiger

  “Hey, Aldo, that just makes you a better target,” Dominic warned.

  “Oh yeah?” Brian rippled off three rounds and got three satisfying clangs as a result. “Hard to shoot after you take one between the running lights, bro.”

  “And what’s this one-shot/one-kill crap? Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice.”

  “How many did you give that mutt in Alabama?” Brian asked.

  “Three. I didn’t feel like taking any chances,” Dominic explained.

  “You say so, bro. Hey, let me try that Smith of yours.”

  Dominic cleared his weapon before handing it over. The magazine went separately. Brian dry-fired it a few times to get used to the feel, then loaded and cycled the action. His first shot clanged a headplate. So did his second. The third one missed, though number four did not, a third of a second later. Brian handed the weapon back. “Feels different in the hand,” he explained.

  “You get used to it,” Dominic promised.

  “Thanks, but I like the extra six rounds in the magazine.”

  “Well, it’s what you like.”

  “What’s with all the head-shot stuff, anyway?” Brian wondered. “Okay, shooting sniper rifle, it’s the surest one-shot stopper, but not with a pistol.”

  “When you can do a guy in the head from fifteen yards,” Pete Alexander answered, “it’s just a nice talent to have. It’s the best way of ending an argument I know.”

  “Where did you come from?” Dominic asked.

  “You didn’t scan, Agent Caruso. Remember that even Adolf Hitler had friends. Don’t they teach that at Quantico?”

  “Well, yes,” Dominic admitted, somewhat crestfallen.

  “When your primary target is down, you scan the area for any friends he might have had. Or you get the hell out of town. Or both.”

  “You mean run away?” Brian asked.

  “Not unless you’re on a track. You make your way clear in such a way as to be inconspicuous. That can mean walking into a bookstore and making a purchase, getting a coffee, whatever. You have to make your decision based on circumstances, but keep your objective in mind. Your objective is always to get clear of the immediate area as quickly as circumstances allow. Move too fast and people will notice. Move too slow and they might remember seeing you and your subject close together. They will never report the person they didn’t notice. So, you want to be one of those. What you wear out on a job, the way you act out in the field, the way you walk, the way you think—all of that must be designed to make you invisible,” Alexander told them.

  “In other words, Pete, you’re saying that when we kill these people we’re training for,” Brian observed quietly, “you want us to be able to do it and walk away so that we can get away with it.”

  “Would you prefer to be caught?” Alexander asked.

  “No, but the best way to kill somebody is to pop him in the head with a good rifle from a couple of hundred meters away. That works every time.”

  “But what if we want him dead in such a way that nobody knows he was killed?” the training officer asked.

  “How the hell do you manage that?” This was Dominic.

  “Patience, lads. One thing at a time.”

  THERE WERE the remains of some sort of fence. Ricardo just walked through it, using a hole that did not look recent. The fence posts had been painted a rich green, but that had mainly rusted off. The fencing material was in even worse shape. Getting through was the least of their problems. The coyote went a further fifty meters or so, and selected a large rock, then sat down, lit a smoke, and took a drink from his canteen. It was his first stop. The walk had not been difficult at all, and clearly he’d done this many times. Mustafa and his friends did not know that he’d brought several hundred groups across the border along this very route, and had only been arrested once—and that had not amounted to very much, except for stinging his pride. He’d also forfeited his fee, because he was an honorable coyote. Mustafa went over to him.

  “Are your friends okay?” Ricardo asked.

  “It has not been strenuous,” Mustafa replied, “and I have seen no snakes.”

  “Not too many along here. People usually shoot them, or throw rocks. No one cares much for snakes.”

  “Are they dangerous—truly, I mean?”

  “Only if you are a fool, and even then you are unlikely to die. You will be ill for a few days. No more than that, but it can make walking rather painful. We will wait here for a few minutes. We are ahead of schedule. Oh, yes, welcome to America, amigo.”

  “That fence is all there is?” Mustafa asked in amazement.

  “The norteamericano is rich, yes, and clever, yes, but he is also lazy. My people would not go there except that there is work the gringo is too lazy to do on his own.”

  “How many people do you smuggle into America, then?”

  “I, you mean? Thousands. Many thousands. For this, I am well paid. I have a fine house, and six other coyotes work for me. The gringos worry more about people smuggling drugs across the border, and I avoid doing that. It is not worth the trouble. I let two of my men do that for me. The pay for that is very high, you see.”

  “What kind of drugs?” Mustafa asked.

  “The kind for which I am paid.” He grinned and took another swig from his canteen.

  Mustafa turned as Abdullah came up.

  “I thought this would be a difficult walk,” his number two observed.

  “Only for city dwellers,” Ricardo replied. “This is my country. I was born of the desert.”

  “As was I,” Abdullah observed. “It is a pleasant day.” Better than sitting in the back of a truck, he didn’t have to add.

  Ricardo lit up another Newport. He liked menthol cigarettes, easier on the throat. “It does not get hot for another month, perhaps two. But then it can be truly hot, and the wise man takes a good water supply. People have died out here without water in the August heat. But none of mine. I make sure everyone has water. The Mother Nature, she has no love and no pity,” the coyote observed. At the end of his walk, he knew a place where he could get a few cervezas before driving east to El Paso. From there, it was back to his comfortable home in Ascensión, too far from the border to be bothered with would-be emigrants, who had a bad habit of stealing things they might need for the crossing. He wondered how much stealing they did on the gringo side of the line, but it was not his problem, was it? He finished his cigarette and stood. “Three more kilometers to go, my friends.”

  Mustafa and his friends fell in and restarted the trudge north. Only three kilometers more? At home, they walked farther to a bus stop.

  PUNCHING NUMBERS into a keypad was about as much fun as running naked in a garden of cactus. Jack was the sort to need intellectual stimulation, and while some men might find that in investigative accounting, he was not one of them.

  “Bored, eh?” Tony Wills asked.

  “Mightily,” Jack confirmed.

  “Well, that’s the reality of gathering and processing intelligence information. Even when it’s exciting, it’s pretty dull—well, unless you’re really on the scent of a particularly elusive fox. Then it can be kinda fun, though it’s not like watching your subject out in the field. I’ve never done that.”

  “Neither did Dad,” Jack observed.

  “Depends on which stories you read. Your pop occasionally found his way to the sharp end. I don’t imagine he liked it much. He ever talk about it?”

  “Not ever. Not even once. I don’t even think Mom knows much about that. Well, except the submarine thing, but most of what I know about that comes from books and stuff. I asked Dad once, and all he said was, ‘You believe everything you see in the papers?’ Even when that Russian guy, Gerasimov, got on TV, all Dad did was grunt.”

  “The word on him at Langley was that he was a king spook. Kept all the secrets like he was supposed to. But he mostly worked up in the Seventh Floor. I never made it that high myself.”

  “Maybe you can tell me someth
ing.”

  “Like what?”

  “Gerasimov, Nikolay Borissovich Gerasimov. Was he really the head of KGB? Did my dad really drag his ass out of Moscow?”

  Wills hesitated for a moment, but there was no avoiding it. “Yeah. He was the KGB chairman, and, yes, your dad did arrange his defection.”

  “No shit? How the hell did Dad arrange that one?”

  “That is a very long story and you are not cleared for it.”

  “Then why did he rat Dad out?”

  “Because he was an unwilling defector. Your father forced him to bug out. He wanted to get even after your dad became President. But, you know, Nikolay Borissovich sang—maybe not like a canary, but he sang anyway. He’s in the Witness Protection Program right now. They still bring him in every so often to get him to sing some more. The people you bag, they never give you everything all at once, and so you go back to them periodically. It makes them feel important—enough that they sing some more, usually. He’s still not a happy camper. He can’t go home. They’d shoot his ass. The Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. Well, neither are we. So, he lives here with federal protection. Last I heard, he took up golf. His daughter got married to some old-money aristocrat asshole in Virginia. She’s a real American now, but her dad will die an unhappy man. He wanted to take the Soviet Union over, by which I mean he really wanted that job, but your father screwed that one up for all time, and Nick still carries the grudge.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Anything new with Sali?” Wills asked, bringing things back to reality.

  “There’s some little stuff. You know, fifty thousand here, eighty thousand there—pounds, not dollars. Into accounts I don’t know much about. He goes through anywhere from two to eight thousand pounds a week in what he probably considers petty cash.”

  “Where does that cash originate?” Wills asked.

  “Not entirely clear, Tony. I figure he skims some off his family account, maybe two percent that he can write off as expenses. Not quite enough to alert his father that’s he stealing from Mom and Pop. I wonder how they’d react to that?” Jack speculated.

  “They wouldn’t cut his hand off, but they could do something worse—cut his money off. You see this guy working for a living?”

  “You mean real work?” Jack had himself a brief laugh. “Somehow I don’t see that happening. He’s been on the gravy train too long to like driving spikes into the ties. I’ve been to London a lot. Hard to figure how a working stiff survives there.”

  Wills began humming. “‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they seen Paree?’”

  Jack flushed. “Look, Tony, yeah, I know I grew up rich, but Dad always made sure I had a summer job. I even worked construction for two months. Made life hard for Mike Brennan and his pals. But Dad wanted me to know what it was like to do real work. I hated it at first, but, looking back, it was probably a good thing, I guess. Mr. Sali here has never done that. I mean, I could survive in a real-world entry-level job if I had to. It’d be a lot harder adjustment for this guy.”

  “Okay, how much unexplained money, total?”

  “Maybe two hundred thousand pounds—three hundred thousand bucks, call it. But I haven’t really pinned it down yet, and it’s not all that much money.”

  “How much longer to narrow it down?”

  “At this rate? Hell, maybe a week if I’m lucky. This is like tracking a single car during New York rush hour, y’know?”

  “Keep it up. Isn’t supposed to be easy, or fun.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” It was something he’d picked up from the Marines at the White House. They’d even said that to him once in a while, until his father had noticed and put an immediate end to it. Jack turned back to his computer. He kept his real notes on a pad of white lined paper, just because it was easier for him that way, then transferred them to a separate computer file every afternoon. As he wrote, he noted that Tony was leaving their little room for a trip upstairs.

  “THIS KID’S got the eye,” Wills told Rick Bell on the top floor.

  “Oh?” It was a little early for any results from the rookie, regardless who his father was, Bell thought.

  “I put him on a young Saudi living in London, name of Uda bin Sali—money changer for his family’s interests. The Brits have a loose tail on him because he called somebody they found interesting once.”

  “And?”

  “And Junior has found a couple of hundred thousand pounds that can’t be accounted for.”

  “How solid is that?” Bell asked.

  “We’ll have to put a regular on it, but, you know . . . this kid’s got the right sort of nose.”

  “Dave Cunningham, maybe?” A forensic accountant, he’d joined The Campus out of the Department of Justice, Organized Crime Division. Pushing sixty, Dave had a legendary nose for numbers. The trading department at The Campus mainly used him for “conventional” duties. He could have done very well on Wall Street, but he’d just loved bagging bad guys for a living. At The Campus, he could pursue that avocation well past government retirement rules.

  “Dave’d be my pick,” Tony agreed.

  “Okay, let’s cross-load Jack’s computer files to Dave and see what he turns over.”

  “Works for me, Rick. You see the take-report from NSA yesterday?”

  “Yeah. Got my attention,” Bell answered, looking up. Three days before, message traffic from sources that the government intelligence services found interesting had dropped by seventeen percent and two particularly interesting sources had almost completely stopped. When radio traffic in a military unit did that, it often meant a stand-down prior to real operations. The sort of thing that made signals-intelligence people nervous. The majority of the time, it meant nothing at all, just random chance in operation, but it had developed into something real often enough that the signal-spooks frequently went into a tizzy about it.

  “Any ideas?” Wills asked.

  Bell shook his head. “I stopped being superstitious about ten years ago.”

  Clearly, Tony Wills had not: “Rick, we’re due. We’ve been due for a long time.”

  “I know what you’re saying, but we can’t run this place on that sort of stuff.”

  “Rick, this is like sitting at a ball game—dugout seats, maybe, but you still can’t go on the field when you want.”

  “To do what, kill the umpire?” Bell asked.

  “No, just the guy planning to throw a beanball.”

  “Patience, Tony, patience.”

  “Son of a bitch of a virtue to acquire, isn’t it?” Wills had never quite learned it, despite all his experience.

  “Think you have it bad? What about Gerry?”

  “Yeah, Rick, I know.” He stood. “Later, man.”

  THEY’ D SEEN not another human being, not a car, not a helicopter. Clearly, there was nothing of value out here. No oil, no gold, not even copper. Nothing worth guarding or protecting. The walk had just been enough to be healthy. Some scrubby bushes, even some stunted trees. A few tire tracks, but none of them recent. This part of America might as well have been Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter, the Rub’ al-Khali, where even a hardy desert camel would have found it grim going.

  But clearly the walk was over. As they crested a small rise, they saw five more vehicles sitting all alone, with men standing by them talking among themselves.

  “Ah,” Ricardo said, “they are early, too. Excellent.” He could dump these morose foreigners and get on with his business. He stopped and let his clients catch up.

  “This is our destination?” Mustafa asked, with hope in his voice. It had been an easy walk, far easier than he’d expected.

  “My friends there will take you to Las Cruces. There you can make your travel plans for the future.”

  “And you?” Mustafa asked.

  “I go home to my family,” Ricardo answered. Wasn’t that simple enough? Maybe this guy didn’t have a family?

  The remaining walk took only
ten minutes. Ricardo got in the lead SUV after shaking hands with his party. They were friendly enough, albeit in a guarded fashion. It could have been harder to get them here, but illegal-immigrant traffic was far thicker in Arizona and California, and that was where the U.S. Border Patrol had most of its personnel. The gringos tended to grease the squeaky wheel—like everyone else in the world, perhaps, but still it was not terribly farsighted of them. Sooner or later, they’d realize that there was cross-border traffic here, too. Just not the dramatic sort. Then he might have to find a new way to make a living. He’d done well the past seven years, however—enough to set up a little business and raise his children into a more legitimate line of work.

  He watched his party board their transport and motor off. He also headed in the general direction of Las Cruces, then turned south on I-10 toward El Paso. He’d long since stopped wondering what his clients planned to do in America. Probably not tending gardens or doing construction work, he judged, but he’d been paid ten thousand dollars in American cash. So, they were important to someone . . . but not to him.

  CHAPTER 10

  DESTINATIONS

  FOR MUSTAFA and his friends, the ride to Las Cruces was a surprisingly welcome break, and though they didn’t show it, there was obvious excitement now. They were in America. Here were the people they proposed to kill. The mission was now somehow closer to fulfillment, not by a mere handful of kilometers, but by a magical, invisible line. They were in the home of the Great Satan. Here were the people who had rained death upon their homeland, and upon the Faithful throughout the Muslim world, the people who so fawningly supported Israel.

  At Deming, they turned east for Las Cruces. Sixty-two miles—a hundred kilometers—to their next intermediate stop, along I-10. There were billboards advertising road hotels and places to eat, tourist attractions of types routine and inconceivable, and more rolling land, and horizons which seemed far even as the car ate up the distances at a steady seventy miles per hour.