by Tom Clancy
“‘Has anyone told the Emir?’ Who the hell is the Emir?” Jack asked.
“That’s a nobleman’s title, like a duke or something,” Wills answered. “What’s the context?”
“Here.” Jack handed a printed sheet across.
“That looks interesting.” Wills turned and queried his computer for EMIR, and got only one reference. “According to this, it’s a name or title that cropped up about a year ago in a tapped conversation, context uncertain, and nothing significant since. The Agency thinks it’s probably shorthand for a medium-sized hitter in their organization.”
“In this context, looks bigger than that to me,” Jack thought aloud.
“Maybe,” Tony conceded. “There’s a lot about these guys that we don’t know yet. Langley will probably write it off to somebody in a supervisory position. That’s what I would do,” he concluded, but not confidently.
“We have anybody on staff who knows Arabic?”
“Two guys who speak the language—from the Monterey school—but no experts on the culture, no.”
“I think it’s worth a look.”
“Then write it up and we’ll see what they think. Langley has a bunch of mind readers, and some of them are pretty good.”
“Mohammed is the most senior guy we know in this outfit. Here, he’s referring to somebody senior to himself. That is something we need to check out,” the younger Ryan pronounced with all the power he possessed.
For his part, Wills knew that his roomie was right. He’d also just implicitly identified the biggest problem in the intelligence business. Too much data, too little analytical time. The best play would be to fake an inquiry to CIA from NSA and to NSA from CIA, asking for some thoughts on this particular issue. But they had to be careful with that. Requests for data happened a million times a day, and, due to the volume, they were never, ever checked—the comm link was secure, after all, wasn’t it? But asking for time from analysts could too easily result in a telephone call, which required both a number and a person to pick up the phone. That could lead to a leak, and leaks were the single thing The Campus could not afford. And so, inquiries of this kind went to the top floor. Maybe twice a year. The Campus was a parasite on the body of the intelligence community. Such creatures were not supposed to have a mouth for speaking, but only for sucking blood.
“Write your ideas up for Rick Bell, and he’ll discuss it with the Senator,” Wills advised.
“Great,” Jack grumbled. He hadn’t learned patience yet. More to the point, he hadn’t learned much about bureaucracies. Even The Campus had one. The funny thing was that if he’d been a midlevel analyst at Langley, he could have picked up a phone, dialed a number, and talked to the right person for an expert opinion, or something close to it. But this wasn’t Langley. CIA was actually pretty good about obtaining and processing information. It was doing something effective with it that constantly befuddled the government agency. Jack wrote up his request and the reasons for it, wondering what would result.
THE EMIR took the news calmly. Uda had been a useful underling, but not an important one. He had many sources of money for his operations. He was tall for his ethnicity, not particularly handsome, with a Semitic nose and olive skin. His family was distinguished and very wealthy, though his brothers—he had nine—controlled most of the family money. His home in Riyadh was large and comfortable, but not a palace. Those he left to the Royal Family, whose numerous princelings paraded about as though each of them were the king of this land and protector of the Holy Places. The Royal Family, whose members he knew well, were objects of silent contempt for him, but his emotions were something buried within his soul.
In his youth, he’d been more demonstrative. He’d come to Islam in his early teens, inspired by a very conservative imam whose preachings had eventually gotten him into trouble, but who had inspired a raft of followers and spiritual children. The Emir was merely the cleverest of the lot. He, too, had spoken his mind, and as a result been sent off to England for his education—really to get him out of the country—but in England, in addition to learning the ways of the world, he’d been exposed to something entirely alien. Freedom of speech and expression. In London, it is mostly celebrated at Hyde Park Corner, a tradition of spleen venting that dates back hundred of years, sort of a safety valve for the British population, and which, like a safety value, merely vents troublesome thoughts into the air without letting them take much hold anywhere. Had he gone to America, it would have been the radical press. But what had struck him as hard as the arrival of a spaceship from Mars was that people were able to challenge the government in any terms they pleased. He’d grown up in one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, where the very soil of the nation belonged to the king, and the law was what the reigning monarch said it was—subject in name if not in substance to the Koran and the Shar’ia, the Islamic legal traditions which dated back to the Prophet himself. These laws were fair—or at least consistent—but very stern indeed. The problem was that not everyone agreed about the words of the Koran, and therefore about how the Shar’ia applied to the physical world. Islam had no pope, no real philosophical hierarchy as other religions understood the concept, and therefore no cohesive standard of application to reality. The Shi’a and the Sunni were often—always—at each other’s throats over that question, and even within Sunni Islam, the Wahabis—the principal sect of the Kingdom—adhered to a stern belief system indeed. But for the Emir this very apparent weakness of Islam was its most useful attribute. One only had to convert a few individual Muslims to his particular belief system, which was remarkably easy, since you didn’t have to go looking for those people. They identified themselves virtually to the point of advertising their identities. And most of them were people educated in Europe or America, where their foreign origin forced them to cleave together just to maintain a comfortable intellectual place of self-identity, and so they built upon a foundation of outsiderness that had led many of them to a revolutionary ethos. That was particularly useful, since along the way they’d acquired a knowledge of the enemy’s culture that was vital in targeting his weaknesses. The religious conversions of these people had largely been preinstalled, as it were. After that, it was just a matter of identifying their objects of hatred—that is, the people to be blamed for their youthful discontent—and then deciding how to do away with their self-generated enemies, one at a time, or as a grand coup de main, which appealed to their sense of drama, if not their scant understanding of reality.
And at the end of it, the Emir, as his associates had taken to calling him, would be the new Mahdi, the ultimate arbiter of all of the global Islamic movement. The intra-religious disputes (Sunnis and Shi’a, for example) he planned to handle through a sweeping fatwa, or religious pronouncement of tolerance—that would look admirable even to his enemies. And, after all, weren’t there a hundred or more Christian sects who had largely ended their own internal strife? He could even reserve to himself tolerance of the Jews, though he would have to save that for later years, after he had settled into the seat of ultimate power, probably with a palace of suitable humility outside the city of Mecca. Humility was a useful virtue for the head of a religious movement, for as the pagan Thucydides had proclaimed, even before the Prophet, of all manifestations of power, that which most impresses men is restraint.
It was the tallest of orders, the thing he wanted to accomplish. It would require time and patience, and its success was hardly guaranteed. It was his misfortune that he had to depend upon zealots, each of whom had a brain, and the consequent strong opinions. Such people could, conceivably, turn on him and seek to replace him with religious outlooks of their own. They might even believe their own concepts—they might be true zealots, as the Prophet Mohammed had been, but Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, had been the most honorable of men, and had fought a good and honorable fight against pagan idolaters, while his own effort was mainly within the community of Faithful. Was he, then, an honorable man? A difficult question
. But didn’t Islam need to be brought into the current world, and not remain trapped in antiquity? Did Allah desire His Faithful to be prisoners of the seventh century? Certainly not. Islam had once been the center of human scholarship, a religion of advancement and learning that had, sadly, lost its way at the hands of the great Khan, and then been oppressed by the infidels of the West. The Emir did believe in the Holy Koran, and the teachings of the imans, but he was not blind to the world around him. Nor was he blind to the facts of human existence. Those who had power guarded it jealously, and religion had little to do with that, because power was a narcotic all its own. And people needed something—preferably someone—to follow if they were to advance. Freedom, as the Europeans and Americans understood the concept, was too chaotic—he’d learned that at Hyde Park Corner, too. There had to be order. He was the man to provide it.
So, Uda bin Sali was dead, he thought, taking a sip of juice. A great misfortune for Uda, but a minor irritation to the Organization. The Organization had access to, if not a sea of money, then a number of comfortably large lakes, a small one of which Uda had managed. A glass of orange juice had fallen off the table, but thankfully it had not stained the carpet under it. It required no action on his part, even at second hand.
“Ahmed, this is sad news, but not a matter of great importance to us. No action need be taken.”
“It shall be as you say,” Ahmed Musa Matwalli responded respectfully. He killed his phone. It was a cloned phone, bought from a street thief for that one purpose, and then he tossed it into the river Tevere—the Tiber—off the Ponte Sant’Angelo. It was a standard security measure for speaking with the great commander of the Organization, whose identity was known to but a few, all of whom were among the most faithful of the Believers. At the higher echelons, security was tight. They all studied various manuals for intelligence officers. The best had been bought from a former KGB officer, who had died after the sale, for so it had been written. Its rules were simple and clear, and they did not deviate from them a dot. Others had been careless, and they’d all paid for their foolishness. The former USSR had been a hated enemy, but its minions had never been fools. Only unbelievers. America, the Great Satan, had done the entire world a favor by destroying that abortion of a nation. They’d done it only for their own benefit, of course, but that, too, must have been written by the Hand of God, because it had also served the interests of the Faithful, for what man could plot better than Allah Himself?
CHAPTER 19
BEER AND HOMICIDE
THE FLIGHT into Munich was silky smooth. German customs were formal but efficient, and a Mercedes-Benz cab took them to the Hotel Bayerischer.
Their current subject was somebody named Anas Ali Atef, reportedly an Egyptian by nationality, and a civil engineer by education, if not by profession. Five feet nine inches or so, 145 pounds, clean-shaven. Black hair and dark brown eyes, supposed to be skilled at unarmed combat and a good man with a gun, if he had one. He was thought to be a courier for the opposition, and also worked to recruit talent—one of whom, for certain, had been shot dead in Des Moines, Iowa. They had an address and a photo on their laptops. He drove an Audi TT sports car, painted battleship gray. They even had the tag number. Problem: He was living with a German national named Trudl Heinz, and was supposedly in love with her. There was a photo of her, too. Not exactly a Victoria’s Secret model, but not a skank, either—brown hair and blue eyes, five feet three inches, 120 pounds. Cute smile. Too bad, Dominic thought, that she had questionable taste in men, but that was not his problem.
Anas worshipped regularly at one of the few mosques in Munich, which was conveniently located a block from his apartment building. After checking in and changing their clothes, Dominic and Brian caught a cab to that location and found a very nice Gasthaus—a bar and grill—with outside tables from which to observe the area.
“Do all Europeans like to sit on the sidewalk and eat?” Brian wondered.
“Probably easier than going to the zoo,” Dominic said.
The apartment house was four stories, proportioned like a cement block, painted white with a flat but strangely barnlike roof. There was a remarkably clean aspect to it, as though it was normal in Germany for everything to be as pristine as a Mayo Clinic operating room, but that was hardly cause for criticism. Even the cars here were not as dirty as they tended to be in America.
“Was darf es sein?” the waiter asked, appearing at the table.
“Zwei Dunkelbieren, bitte,” Dominic replied, using about a third of his remaining high-school German. Most of the rest was about finding the Herrnzimmer, always a useful word to know, in any language.
“American, yes?” the waiter went on.
“Is my accent that bad?” Dominic asked, with a limp smile.
“Your speech is not Bavarian, and your clothes look American,” the waiter observed matter-of-factly, as though to say the sky was blue.
“Okay, then two glasses of dark beer, if you please, sir.”
“Two Kulmbachers, sofort,” the man responded and hurried back inside.
“I think we just learned a little lesson, Enzo,” Brian observed.
“Buy some local clothes, first chance we get. Everybody’s got eyes,” Dominic agreed. “Hungry?”
“I could eat something.”
“We’ll see if they have a menu in English.”
“That must be the mosque our friend uses, down the road a block, see?” Brian pointed discreetly.
“So, figure he’ll probably walk this way . . . ?”
“Seems likely, bro.”
“And there’s no clock on this, is there?”
“They don’t tell us ‘how,’ they just tell us ‘what,’ the man said,” Brian reminded his brother.
“Good,” Enzo observed as the beer arrived. The waiter looked to be about as efficient as a reasonable man could ask. “Danke sehr. Do you have a menu in English?”
“Certainly, sir.” And he produced one from an apron pocket as though by magic.
“Very good, and thank you, sir.”
“He must have gone to Waiter University,” Brian said as the man walked away again. “But wait till you see Italy. Those guys are artists. That time I went to Florence, I thought the bastard was reading my mind. Probably has a doctorate in waitering.”
“No inside parking at that building. Probably around back,” Dominic said, coming back to business.
“Is the Audi TT any good, Enzo?”
“It’s a German car. They make decent machines over here, man. The Audi isn’t a Mercedes, but it ain’t no Yugo, either. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one outside of Motor Trend. But I know what they look like, kinda curvy, slick, like it goes fast. Probably does, with the autobahns they have here. Driving in Germany can be like running the Indy 500, or so they say. I don’t really see a German driving a slow car.”
“Makes sense.” Brian scanned the menu. The names of the dishes were in German, of course, but with English subtitles. It looked as though the commentary was for Brits rather than Americans. They still had NATO bases here, maybe to guard against the French rather than the Russians, Dominic thought with a chuckle. Though, historically, the Germans didn’t need much help from that direction.
“What do you wish to have, mein Herrn?” the waiter asked, reappearing as though transported down by Scottie himself.
“First, what is your name?” Dominic asked.
“Emil. Ich heisse Emil.”
“Thank you. I’ll have the sauerbraten and potato salad.”
Then it was Brian’s turn. “And I’ll have the bratwurst. Mind if I ask a question?”
“Of course,” Emil responded.
“Is that a mosque down the street?” Brian asked, pointing.
“Yes, it is.”
“Isn’t that unusual?” Brian pushed the issue.
“We have many Turkish guest workers in Germany, and they are also Mohammedans. They will not eat the sauerbraten or drink the beer. They do not get on wel
l with us Germans, but what can one do about it?” The waiter shrugged, with only a hint of distaste.
“Thank you, Emil,” Brian said, and Emil hurried back inside.
“What does that mean?” Dominic wondered.
“They don’t like ’em very much, but they don’t know what to do about it, and they’re a democracy, just like we are, so they have to be polite to ’em. The average Fritz in the street isn’t all that keen on their ‘guest workers,’ but there’s not much real trouble about it, just scuffles and like that. Mainly bar fights, so I’m told. So, I guess the Turks have learned to drink the beer.”
“How’d you learn that?” Dominic was surprised.
“There’s a German contingent in Afghanistan. We were neighbors—our camps, like—and I talked some with the officers there.”
“Any good?”
“They’re Germans, bro, and this bunch was professionals, not draftees. Yeah, they’re pretty good,” Aldo assured him. “It was a reconnaissance group. Their physical routine is tough as ours, they know mountains pretty good, and they are well drilled at the fundamentals. The noncoms got along like thieves, swapped hats and badges a lot. They also brought beer along with their TO and E, so they were kinda popular with my people. You know, this beer is pretty damned good.”
“Like in England. Beer is a kind of religion in Europe, and everybody goes to church.”