The Teeth of the Tiger

  Sali was a test for him, and probably a very important one. Did that mean that Tony Wills already had Sali figured out, and he was off chasing data already fully analyzed? Or did it mean that he had to make his case and sell it after he’d reached his own conclusions? It was a big thought for standing in front of the bathroom mirror with his Norelco. This wasn’t school anymore. A failing grade here meant failing—life? No, not that bad, but not good, either. Something to think about with coffee and CNN in the kitchen.

  FOR BREAKFAST, Zuhayr walked up the hill, where he purchased two dozen doughnuts and four large coffees. America was such a crazy country. So many natural riches—trees, rivers, magnificent roads, incredible prosperity—but all in the service of idolaters. And here he was, drinking their coffee and eating their doughnuts. Truly, the world was mad, and if it ran on any plan at all, it was Allah’s Own Plan, and not something even for the Faithful to understand. They just had to obey that which was written. On returning to the motel, he found both TVs tuned in to the news—CNN, the global news network—the Jewish-oriented one, that is. Such a pity that no Americans watched Al-Jazeera, which at least tried to speak to Arabs, though to his eyes it had already caught the American disease.

  “Food,” Zuhayr announced. “And drink.” One box of doughnuts went into his room, and the other to Mustafa, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes after eleven hours of snoring slumber.

  “How did you sleep, my brother?” Abdullah asked the team leader.

  “It was a blessed experience, but my legs are still stiff.” His hand shot out for the large cup of coffee, and he snatched a maple-frosted doughnut from the box, downing half of it in one monstrous bite. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the TV to see what was happening in the world this day. The Israeli police had shot and killed another holy martyr before he’d been able to trigger his bodysuit of Semtex.

  “DUMB FUCK,” Brian observed. “How hard can it be to pull a string?”

  “I wonder how the Israelis twigged to him. You gotta figure they have paid informants inside that Hamas bunch. This has got to be a code-worded Major Case for their police, lots of resources assigned, plus help from their spook shops.”

  “They torture people, too, don’t they?”

  Dominic nodded after a second’s consideration. “Yeah, supposedly it’s controlled by their court system and all that, but they interrogate a little more vigorously than we do.”

  “Does it work?”

  “We talked that one around at the Academy. You put a bowie knife to somebody’s dick, chances are he’ll see the wisdom of singing, but it’s not something anybody wanted to think much about. I mean, yeah, in the abstract it can even seem funny, but doing it yourself—probably not very palatable, y’know? The other question is, how much good information does it really generate? The guy’s just as likely to say anything to get the knife away from his little friend, make the pain stop, whatever. Crooks can be really good liars unless you know more than they do. Anyway, we can’t do it. You know, the Constitution and all that. You can threaten them with bad jail time, and scream at them, but even then there’re lines you can’t cross.”

  “They sing anyway?”

  “Mostly. Interrogation’s an art form. Some guys are really good at it. I never really had much of a chance to learn it, but I did see some guys play the game. The real trick is to develop a rapport with the mutt, saying stuff like, yeah, that nasty little girl really asked for it, didn’t she? Makes you want to puke afterward, but the name of the game is getting the bastard to fess up. After he gets into the joint, his neighbors will hassle him a lot worse than I ever would. One thing you don’t want to be in a prison is a child abuser.”

  “I believe it, Enzo. That friend of yours in Alabama, maybe you did him a favor.”

  “Depends on if you believe in hell or not,” Dominic responded. He had his own thoughts about that.

  WILLS WAS early this morning. Jack saw him on his workstation when he came in. “You beat me in, for once.”

  “My wife’s car came back from the shop. Now she can take the kids to school for a change,” he explained. “Check the feed from Meade,” he directed.

  Jack lit up his computer, sat through the start-up procedures, and typed in his personal encryption code to access the interagency traffic download file from the downstairs computer room.

  The top of the electronic pile was a FLASH-priority dispatch from NSA Fort Meade to CIA, and FBI, and Homeland Security, one of whom would have surely briefed the President on it this morning. Strangely, there was almost nothing to it, just a numeric message, a set of numbers.

  “So?” Junior asked.

  “So, it might be a passage from the Koran. The Koran has a hundred fourteen suras—chapters—with a variable number of verses. If this is such a reference, it’s a verse with nothing particularly dramatic in it. Scroll down and see for yourself.”

  Jack clicked his mouse. “That’s all?”

  Woods nodded. “That’s all, but the thinking at Meade is that such a dull message is likely to denote something else—something important. Spooks tend to use a lot of reverse English when they hit the cue ball.”

  “Well, duh! You’re telling me that because it appears to have no importance to it, it may be important? Hell, Tony, you can make that observation about anything! What else do they know? The network, where the guy logged on from, that sort of thing?”

  “It’s a European network, privately owned, with 800 numbers all over the world, and we know some bad guys have used it. You can’t tell where the members log in from.”

  “Okay, so, first, we do not know if the message has any significance. Second, we do not know where the message originated. Third, we do not have any way of knowing who’s read it or where the hell they are. The short version is that we don’t know shit, but everybody’s getting in a flutter about it. What else? The originator, what do we know about him?”

  “He—or she, for all we know—is thought to be a possible player.”

  “What team?”

  “Guess. The NSA profilers say that this guy’s syntax seems to indicate Arabic as a first language—based on previous traffic. The shrinks at CIA agree. They’ve copied messages from this bird before. He says nasty things to nasty people on occasion, and they’re time-linked with some other very bad things.”

  “Is it possible that he’s making some signal related to the bomber the Israeli police bagged earlier today?”

  “Possible, yes, but not terribly likely. The originator isn’t linked to Hamas, as far as we know.”

  “But we don’t really know, do we?”

  “With these guys you can’t be totally sure about anything.”

  “So, we’re back to where we started. Some people are running around over something they don’t really know shit about.”

  “That’s the problem. In these bureaucracies it’s better to cry wolf and be wrong than to have your mouth shut when the big gray critter runs off with a sheep in his mouth.”

  Ryan sat back in his chair. “Tony, how many years were you at Langley?”

  “A few,” Wills answered.

  “How the hell did you stand it?”

  The senior analyst shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder.”

  Jack turned back to his computer to scan the rest of the morning’s message traffic. He decided to see if Sali had been doing anything unusual over the last few days, just to cover his own ass, and in thinking that, John Patrick Ryan, Jr., started thinking like a bureaucrat, without even knowing it.

  “TOMORROW IT’S going to be a little different,” Pete told the twins. “Michelle is your target, but this time she’ll be disguised. Your mission is to ID her and track her to her destination. Oh, did I tell you, she’s really good at disguises.”

  “She’s going to take an invisible pill, right?” Brian asked.

  “That’s her mission,” Alexander elucidated.

  “You going to issue us magic glasses to see through the makeup?”

 
“Not even if we had any—which we don’t.”

  “Some pal you are,” Dominic observed coldly.

  BY ELEVEN that morning, it was time to scout the objective.

  Conveniently located just a quarter mile north on U.S. Route 29, the Charlottesville Fashion Square Mall was a medium-sized shopping mall that catered to a largely upscale clientele of local gentry and students at the nearby University of Virginia. It was anchored by a JCPenney at one end and a Sears at the other, with Belk’s men’s and women’s stores in the middle. Unexpectedly, there was no food court per se—whoever had done the reconnaissance had been sloppy. A disappointment, but not all that uncommon. The advance teams the organization employed were often mere stringers, for whom missions of this sort were something of a lark. But, Mustafa saw on going in, it would do little harm.

  A central courtyard opened into all four of the mall’s main corridors. An information stand even supplied diagrams of the mall, showing store locations. Mustafa looked one over. A six-pointed Star of David leaped off the page at his eyes. A synagogue, here? Was that possible? He walked down to see, halfway hoping that it was indeed possible.

  But it wasn’t. It was, rather, the mall’s security office, where sat a male employee in a uniform of light blue shirt and dark blue pants. On inspection, the man did not have a gun belt. And that was good. He did have a phone, which would undoubtedly call the local police. So, this black man would have to be the first. With that decided, Mustafa reversed directions, walked past the restrooms and the Coke machine, and turned right, away from the men’s store.

  This was a fine target place, he saw. Only three main entrances, and a clear field of fire from the Central Court. The individual stores were mainly rectangular, with open access from the corridors. On the following day, at about this time, it would be even more crowded. He estimated two hundred people in his immediate sight, and though he’d hoped all the way into this city that they’d have the chance to kill perhaps a thousand, anything over two hundred would be a victory of no small dimension. There were all manner of stores here, and unlike Saudi malls, men and women shopped on the same floor. Many children, too. There were four stores listed as specialty children’s goods—and even a Disney Store! That he had not expected, and to attack one of America’s most treasured icons would be sweet indeed.

  Rafi appeared at his side. “Well?”

  “It could be a larger target, but the arrangement is nearly perfect for us. All on one level,” Mustafa replied quietly.

  “Allah is beneficent as always, my friend,” Rafi said, unable to conceal his enthusiasm.

  People circulated about. Many young women were pushing their little ones about in strollers—he saw that you could rent them from a stand just by the hair salon.

  There was one purchase he had to make. He accomplished it in the Radio Shack next to a Zales Jewelers. Four portable radios and batteries, for which he paid in cash, and for which he got a brief lecture on how the radios worked.

  All in all, it could have been better, in a theoretical sense, but it wasn’t supposed to be a busy city street. Besides, there would be policemen on the street with guns who would interfere with their mission. So, as always in life, you measured the bitter against the sweet, and here there was much of the sweet for all of them to taste. The four of them all got pretzels from Auntie Anne’s and headed out past the JCPenney back to their car. Formal planning would take place at their motel rooms, with more doughnuts and coffee.

  JERRY ROUNDS’S official job was as head of strategic planning for The Campus’s white side. This job he performed fairly well—he might have been the very Wolf of Wall Street had he not chosen to become an Air Force intelligence officer on leaving the University of Pennsylvania. The service had even paid for his master’s degree from the Wharton School of Business before he’d made full-bull colonel. This had given him an unexpected master’s degree to hang on the wall, which also gave him a superb excuse to be in the trading business. It was even a fun diversion for the former chief USAF analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s headquarters building at Bolling AFB in Washington. But along the way he’d found that being an “un-rated weenie”—he’d never worn the silver wings of a USAF aviator—didn’t compensate for being a second-class citizen in a service completely run by those who did poke holes in the sky, even if he were smarter than twenty of them in the same room. Coming to The Campus had seriously broadened his horizons in a lot of ways.

  “What is it, Jerry?” Hendley asked.

  “The folks at Meade and over across the river just got excited about something,” Rounds replied, handing some papers across.

  The former senator read the traffic for a minute or so and handed it all back. In a moment, he knew he’d seen most of it before. “So?”

  “So, this time they may be right, boss. I’ve been keeping an eye on the background stuff. The thing is, we have a combination of reduced message traffic from known players, and then this flies over the transom. I spent my life in DIA looking at coincidences. This here’s one of them.”

  “Okay, what are they doing about it?”

  “Airport security is going to be a little tighter starting today. The FBI is going to set people at some departure gates.”

  “Nothing on TV about it?”

  “Well, the boys and girls at Homeland Security may have gotten a little smarter about advertising. It’s counterproductive. You don’t catch a rat by shouting at him. You do it by showing him what he wants to see, and then breaking his goddamned neck.”

  Or maybe by having a cat spring on him unexpectedly, Hendley didn’t say. But that was a harder mission.

  “Any ideas for us?” he asked instead.

  “Not at the moment. It’s like seeing a front move in. There may be heavy rain and hail in it, but there’s no convenient way to stop it.”

  “Jerry, how good is our data on the planning guys, the ones who give the orders?”

  “Some of it’s pretty good. But it’s the people who convey the orders, not the ones who originate them.”

  “And if they drop off the table?”

  Rounds nodded immediate agreement. “Now you’re talking, boss. Then the real big shots might poke their heads up out of their holes. Especially if they don’t know that storm’s coming in.”

  “For now, what’s the biggest threat?”

  “The FBI is thinking car bombs, or maybe somebody with a C-4 overcoat, like in Israel. It’s possible, but from an operational point of view, I’m not so sure.” Round sat down in the offered chair. “It’s one thing to give the guy his explosives package and put him on a city bus for the ride to his objective, but, as applied to us, it’s more complicated. Bring the bomber here, get him outfitted—which means having the explosives in place, which is a further complication—then getting him familiar with the objective, then getting him there. The bomber is then expected to maintain his motivation a long way from his support network. A lot of things can go wrong, and that’s why black operations are kept as simple as possible. Why go out of your way to purchase trouble?”

  “Jerry, how many hard targets do we have?” Hendley asked.

  “Total? Six or so. Of those, four are real, no-shit targets.”

  “Can you get me locations and profiles?”

  “Any time you say.”

  “Monday.” No sense thinking about it over the weekend. He had two days of riding all planned out. He was entitled to a couple of days off once in a while.

  “Roger that, boss.” Rounds stood and headed out. Then he stopped at the door. “Oh, there’s a guy at Morgan and Steel, bond department. He’s a crook. He’s playing fast and very loose with some client money, about one-fifty worth.” By which he meant a hundred and fifty million dollars of other people’s money.

  “Anybody on to him?”

  “Nope, I ID’d this guy on my own. Met him two months ago up in New York, and he didn’t sound quite right, and so I put a watch on his personal computer. Want to see his notes?” br />
  “Not our job, Jerry.”

  “I know, I shorted our business with him to make sure he didn’t dick with our funds, but I think he knows it’s time to leave town, like maybe a trip overseas, one-way ticket. Somebody ought to have a look. Maybe Gus Werner?”

  “I’ll have to think about that. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Roger that.” And Rounds disappeared out the door.

  “SO, WE just try to sneak up on her without being noticed, right?” Brian asked.

  “That’s the mission,” Pete agreed.

  “How close?”

  “Close as you can get.”

  “You mean close enough to put one in the back of her head?” the Marine asked.

  “Close enough to see her earrings,” Alexander decided was the most polite way of putting it. It was even accurate, since Mrs. Peters wore her hair fairly long.

  “So, not to shoot her in the head, but to cut her throat?” Brian pressed the question.

  “Look, Brian, you can put it any way you want. Close enough to touch her, okay?”

  “Okay, just so’s I understand,” Brian said. “We have to wear our fanny packs?”

  “Yes,” Alexander replied, though it wasn’t true. Brian was being a pain in the ass again. Who’d ever heard of a Marine with conscience attacks?

  “It’ll make us easier to spot,” Dominic objected.

  “So, disguise it somehow. Be creative,” the training officer suggested a little testily.

  “When do we find out what all of this is for, exactly?” Brian asked.

  “Soon.”

  “You keep saying that, man.”

  “Look, you can drive back to North Carolina whenever you want.”