The Teeth of the Tiger

  RISTORANTE GIOVANNI, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, he replied: 13:30. BE CAREFUL IN YOUR ROUTINE. By which he meant to employ countersurveillance measures. There was no definite reason to suspect foul play in the loss of three field personnel, but he hadn’t lived to the age of thirty-one in the business of intelligence by being foolish. He had the ability to tell the harmless from the dangerous, he thought. He’d gotten David Greengold six weeks earlier, because the Jew hadn’t seen the False Flag play even when it bit him on the ass—well, the back of the neck, Mohammed thought with a lowercase smile, remembering the moment. Maybe he should start carrying the knife again, just for good luck. Many men in his line of work believed in luck, as a sportsman or athlete might. Perhaps the Emir had been right. Killing the Mossad officer had been a gratuitously unnecessary risk, since it courted enemies. The Organization had enough of those, even if the enemies did not know who and what the organization was. Better that they should be a mere shadow to the infidels . . . a shadow in a darkened room, unseen and unknown. Mossad was hated by his colleagues, but it was hated because it was feared. The Jews were formidable. They were vicious, and they were endlessly clever. And who could say what knowledge they had, what Arab traitors bought with American money for Jewish ends. There was not a hint of treachery in the Organization, but he remembered the words of the Russian KGB officer Yuriy: Treason is only possible from those whom you trust. It had probably been a mistake to kill the Russian so quickly. He’d been an experienced field officer who’d operated most of his career in Europe and America, and there’d probably been no end to the stories he could have told, each of them with a lesson to be learned. Mohammed remembered talking to him and remembered being impressed with the breadth of his experience and judgment. Instinct was nice to have, but instinct often merely mimicked mental illness in its rampant paranoia. Yuriy had explained in considerable detail how to judge people, and how to tell a professional from a harmless civilian. He could have told many more stories, except for the 9mm bullet he’d gotten in the back of the head. It had also violated the Prophet’s strict and admirable rules of hospitality. If a man eat your salt, even though he be an infidel, he will have the safety of your house. Well, the Emir was the one who’d violated that rule, saying lamely that he’d been an atheist and therefore beyond the law.

  But he’d learned a few lessons, anyway. All his e-mails were encrypted on the best such program there was, individually keyed to his own computer, and therefore beyond anyone’s capacity to read except himself. So, his communications were secure. He hardly looked Arab. He didn’t sound Arabic. He didn’t dress Arabic. Every hotel he stayed at knew that he drank alcohol, and such places knew that Muslims did not drink. So, he ought be completely safe. Well, yes, the Mossad knew that someone like him had killed that Greengold pig, but he didn’t think they’d ever gotten a photo of him, and unless he’d been betrayed by the man whom he’d hired to fool the Jew, they had no idea of who and what he was. Yuriy had warned him that you could never know everything, but also that being overly paranoid could alert a casual tail as to what he was, because professional intelligence officers knew tricks that no one else would ever use—and they could be seen to use them from careful observation. It was all like a big wheel, always turning, always coming back to the same place and moving on in the same way, never still, but never moving off its primary path. A great wheel . . . and he was just a cog, and whether his function was to help it move or make it slow down, he didn’t really know.

  “Ah.” He shook that off. He was more than a cog. He was one of the motors. Not a great motor, perhaps, but an important one, because while the great wheel might move on without him, it would never move so quickly and surely as it did now. And, God willing, he would keep it moving until it crushed his enemies, the Emir’s enemies, and Allah’s Own Enemies.

  So, he dispatched his message to Gadfly097, and called for coffee to be delivered.

  RICK BELL had arranged for a crew to be on the computers around the clock. Strange that The Campus hadn’t been doing that from the beginning, but now it did. The Campus was learning as it went, just as everyone else did, on both sides of the scrimmage line. At the moment it was Tony Wills, driven by his personal appreciation that there was a six-hour time difference between Central Europe and the American East Coast. A good computer jockey, he downloaded the message from 56 to 097 within five minutes of its dispatch and immediately forwarded it to Jack.

  That required fewer seconds than it took to think it. Okay, they knew their subject and they knew where he was going to be, and that was just fine. Jack lifted his phone.

  “You up?” Brian heard.

  “I am now,” he growled back. “What is it?”

  “Come on over for coffee. Bring Dom with you.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Followed by click.

  “I HOPE this is good,” Dominic said. His eyes looked like piss holes in the snow.

  “If you want to soar with the eagles in the morning, buddy, you can’t wallow with the pigs at night. Be cool. I ordered coffee.”

  “Thanks. So, what’s up?”

  Jack walked over to his computer and pointed to the screen. They both leaned down to read.

  “Who is this guy?” Dominic asked, thinking Gadfly097 . . . ?

  “He came in from Vienna yesterday, too.”

  Across the street somewhere, maybe? Brian wondered, followed by, Did he see my face?

  “Okay, I guess we’re up for the appointment,” Brian said, looking at Dom and getting a thumbs-up.

  The coffee arrived in a few more minutes. Jack served, but the brew, they all found, was gritty, Turkish in character, though far worse even than the Turks served. Still, better than no coffee at all. They did not speak on point. Their tradecraft was good enough that they didn’t talk business in a room that hadn’t been swept for bugs—which they didn’t know how to do, and for which they did not have the proper equipment.

  Jack gunned down his coffee and headed into the shower. In it was a red chain, evidently to be pulled in case of a heart attack, but he felt reasonably decent and didn’t use it. He wasn’t so sure about Dominic, who really did look like cat puke on the rug. In his case, the shower worked wonders, and he came back out shaved and scrubbed pink, ready to rumble.

  “The food here is pretty good, but I’m not sure about the coffee,” he announced.

  “Not sure. Jesus, I bet they serve better coffee in Cuba,” Brian said. “MRE coffee is better than this.”

  “Nobody’s perfect, Aldo,” Dominic observed. But he didn’t like it either.

  “So, figure half an hour?” Jack asked. He needed about three more minutes to be ready.

  “If not, send an ambulance,” Enzo said, heading for the door, and hoping the shower gods were merciful this morning. It was hardly fair, he thought. Drinking gave you a hangover, not driving.

  But thirty minutes later, all three were in the lobby, neatly dressed and wearing sunglasses against the bright Italian sun that sparkled outside. Dominic asked the doorman for directions and got pointed to the Via Sistina, which led directly to the Trinità dei Monti church, and the steps were just across the street, and looked to be eighty or so feet down—there was an elevator serving the subway stop, which was farther down still, but going downhill was not too outrageous a task. It hit all three that Rome had churches the way New York City had candy stores. The walk down was pleasant. The scene, indeed, would be wonderfully romantic if you had the right girl on your arm. The steps had been designed to follow the slope of the hill by the architect Francesco De Sanctis, and was the home of the annual Donna sotto le Stelle fashion extravaganza. At the bottom was a fountain in which lay a marble boat commemorating a major flood, something in which a stone boat would be of little use. The piazza was the intersection of only two streets, and was named for the presence of the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See. The playing field, as it were, was not very large—smaller than Times Square, for example—but it bustled with activity and vehicle traffic, and enou
gh pedestrians to make passage there a dicey proposition for all involved.

  Ristorante Giovanni sat on the western side, an undistinguished building of yellow/cream-painted brick, with a large canopied eating area outside. Inside was a bar at which everyone had a lighted cigarette. This included a police officer having a cup of coffee. Dominic and Brian walked in and looked around, scoping the area out before coming back outside.

  “We have three hours, people,” Brian observed. “Now what?”

  “We want to be back here—when?” Jack asked.

  Dominic checked his watch. “Our friend is supposed to show up at about one-thirty. Figure we sit down for lunch about twelve forty-five and await developments. Jack, can you ID the guy by sight?”

  “No problem,” Junior assured them.

  “Then I guess we have about two hours to wander around. I was here a couple years ago. There’s good shopping.”

  “Is that a Brioni store over there?” Jack asked, pointing.

  “Looks like it,” Brian answered. “Won’t hurt our cover to do some shopping.”

  “Then let’s do it.” He’d never gotten an Italian suit. He had several English ones, from No. 10 Savile Row in London. Why not try here? This spook business was crazy, he reflected. They were here to kill a terrorist, but beforehand they’d do some clothes shopping. Even women wouldn’t do that . . . expect maybe for shoes.

  In fact, there were all manner of stores to be seen on the Via del Babuino—“Baboon Street,” of all things—and Jack took the time to look in many of them. Italy was indeed the world capital of style, and he tried on a light gray silk jacket that seemed to have been custom-made for him by a master tailor, and he purchased it on the spot, for eight hundred Euros. Then he had to carry the plastic bag over his shoulder, but was this not beautiful cover? What secret agent man would hobble himself with such an unlikely burden?

  MOHAMMED HASSAN left the hotel at 12:15, taking the same walking route that the twins had done two hours earlier. He knew it well. He’d walked the same path on his way for Greengold’s killing, and the thought comforted him. It was a fine, sunny day, the temperature reaching to about 30 degrees Celsius, a warm day, but not really a hot one. A good day for American tourists. Christian ones. American Jews went to Israel so that they could spit on Arabs. Here they were just Christian infidels looking to take photographs and buy clothes. Well, he’d bought his suits here as well. There was that Brioni shop just off the Piazza di Spagna. The salesman there, Antonio, always treated him well, the better to take his money. But Mohammed came from a trading culture as well, and you couldn’t despise a man for that.

  It was time for the midday meal, and the Ristorante Giovanni was as good as any Roman restaurant, and better than most. His favorite waiter recognized him and waved him to his regular table on the right side, under the canopy.

  “THAT’S OUR boy,” Jack told them, waving with his glass. The three Americans watched his waiter bring a bottle of Pellegrino water to the table, along with a glass of ice. You didn’t see much ice in Europe, where people thought it something to ski or skate on, but evidently 56 liked his water cold. Jack was better placed to look in his direction. “I wonder what he likes to eat.”

  “The condemned is supposed to have a decent last meal,” Dominic noted. Not that mutt in Alabama, of course. He’d probably had bad taste anyway. Then he wondered what they served for lunch in hell. “His guest is supposed to show at one-thirty, right?”

  “Correct. Fifty-six told him to be careful in his routine. That might mean to check for a tail.”

  “Suppose he’s nervous about us?” Brian wondered.

  “Well,” Jack observed, “they have had some bad luck lately.”

  “You have to wonder what he’s thinking,” Dominic said. He leaned back in his chair and stretched, catching a glance at their subject. It was a little warm to be wearing a jacket and tie, but they were supposed to look like businessmen, not tourists. Now he wondered if that was a good cover or not. You had to take temperature into account. Was he sweating because of the mission or the ambient temperature? He hadn’t been overly tense in London, Munich, or Vienna, had he? No, not then. But this was a more crowded—no, the landscape in London had been more crowded, hadn’t it?

  There are good serendipities and bad ones. This time, a bad one happened. A waiter with a tray of glasses of Chianti tripped on the big feet of a woman from Chicago, in Rome to check out her roots. The tray missed the table, but the glasses got both twins in the lap. Both were wearing light-colored suits to deal with the heat, and—

  “Oh, shit!” Dominic exclaimed, his biscuit-colored Brooks Brothers trousers looking as though he had been hit in the groin with a shotgun. Brian was in even worse shape.

  The waiter was aghast. “Scusi, scusi, signori!” he gasped. But there was nothing to be done about it. He started jabbering about sending their clothes to the cleaners. Dom and Brian just looked at each other. They might as easily have borne the mark of Cain.

  “It’s okay,” Dominic said in English. He’d forgotten all of his Italian oaths. “Nobody died.” The napkins would not do much about this. Maybe a good dry cleaner, and the Excelsior probably had one on staff, or at least close by. A few people looked over, either in horror or amusement, and so his face was as well marked as his clothing. When the waiter retreated in shame, the FBI agent asked, “Okay, now what?”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Brian responded. “Random chance has not acted in our favor, Captain Kirk.”

  “Thanks a bunch, Spock,” Dom snarled back.

  “Hey, I’m still here, remember?” Jack told them both.

  “Junior, you can’t—” But Jack cut Brian off.

  “Why the hell not?” He asked quietly. “How hard is it?”

  “You’re not trained,” Dominic told him.

  “It’s not playing golf at the Masters, is it?”

  “Well—” It was Brian again.

  “Is it?” Jack demanded.

  Dominic pulled his pen out of his coat pocket and handed it across.

  “Twist the nib and stick it in his ass, right?”

  “It’s all ready to go,” Enzo confirmed. “But be careful, for Christ’s sake.”

  It was 1:21 now. Mohammed Hassan had finished his glass of water and poured another. Mahmoud would soon be here. Why take the chance of interrupting an important meeting? He shrugged to himself and stood, walking inside for the men’s room, which had pleasant memories.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Brian asked.

  “He’s a bad guy, isn’t he? How long does this stuff take to work?”

  “About thirty seconds, Jack. Use your head. If it doesn’t feel right, back away and let him go,” Dominic told him. “This isn’t a fucking game, man.”

  “Right.” What the hell, Dad did this once or twice, he told himself. Just to make sure, he bumped into a waiter and asked where the men’s room was. The waiter pointed, and Jack went that way.

  It was an ordinary wooden door with a symbolic label rather than words because of Giovanni’s international clientele. What if there’s more than one guy in there? he asked himself.

  Then you blow it off, dumbass.

  Okay . . .

  He walked in, and there was somebody else, drying his hands. But then he walked out, and Ryan was alone with 56MoHa, who was just zipping up and starting to turn. Jack pulled the pen from his inside jacket pocket and turned the tip to expose the iridium syringe tip. He resisted the instinctive urge to check the tip with his finger as not a very smart move, and slid past the well-suited stranger, and then, as told, dropped his hand and got him right in the left cheek. He expected to hear the discharge of the gas but didn’t.

  Mohammed Hassan al-Din jumped at the sudden sharp pain, and turned to see what looked like an ordinary young man—Wait, he’d seen this face at the hotel . . .

  “Oh, sorry to bump into you, pal.”

  The way he said it lit off warning lights in his consciousness.
He was an American, and he’d bumped into him, and he’d felt a stick in his buttocks, and—

  And he’d killed the Jew here, and—

  “Who are you?”

  Jack had counted off fifteen seconds or so, and he was feeling his oats—

  “I’m the man who just killed you, Fifty-six MoHa,” he replied evenly.

  The man’s face changed into something feral and dangerous. His right hand went into his pocket and came out with a knife, and suddenly it wasn’t at all funny anymore.

  Jack instinctively backed away with a jump. The terrorist’s face was the very image of death. He opened his folding knife and locked onto Jack’s throat as his target. He brought the knife up and took half a step forward and—

  The knife dropped from his hand—he looked down at his hand in amazement, then looked back up—

  —or tried to. His head didn’t move. His legs lost their strength. He fell straight down. His knees bounced painfully on the tile floor. And he fell forward, turning left as he did so. His eyes stayed open, and then he was faceup, looking at the metal plate glued to the bottom of the urinal, where Greengold had wanted to retrieve the package from before, and . . .

  “Greetings from America, Fifty-six MoHa. You fucked with the wrong people. I hope you like it in hell, pal.” His peripheral vision saw the shape move to the door, and the increase and decrease of light as the door opened and closed.

  Ryan stopped there and decided to go back. There was a knife by the guy’s hand. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and grasped the knife, then just slid it under the body. Better not to dick with it anymore, he thought. Better to—no, one more thing entered his mind. He reached into 56’s pants pocket and found what he sought. Then he took his leave. The crazy part was that he felt a great need to urinate at the moment, and walked fast to make that urge subside. In a matter of seconds, he was back at the table.