by Tom Clancy
Saeed’s team had been the first to arrive at its destination of Colorado Springs, Colorado—the city was identified only by a code name—and was comfortably camped out in a motel ten kilometers from its objective. Sabawi, the Iraqi, was in Des Moines, Iowa, and Mehdi in Provo, Utah. Both of those teams were also in place and ready for the operation to commence. Less than thirty-six hours to execute their mission.
He’d let Mustafa do the replies. The reply was, in fact, already programmed: “190, 2” designating the 190th verse of the Second Sura. Not exactly a battle cry, but rather an affirmation of the Faith that had brought them here. The meaning was: Proceed with your mission.
BRIAN AND Dominic were watching the History Channel on their cable system, something about Hitler and the Holocaust. It had been studied so much you’d think it’d defy efforts to find something new, yet somehow historians managed every so often. Some of it was probably because of the voluminous records the Germans had left behind in the Hartz Mountain caves, which would probably be the subject of scholarly study for the next few centuries, as people continued to try to discern the thought processes of the human monsters who’d first envisioned and then committed such crimes.
“Brian,” Dominic asked, “what do you make of this stuff?”
“One pistol shot could have prevented it, I suppose. Problem is, nobody can see that far into the future—not even gypsy fortune-tellers. Hell, Adolf whacked a bunch of them, too. Why didn’t they get the hell out of town?”
“You know, Hitler lived most of his life with only one bodyguard. In Berlin, he lived in a second-floor apartment, with a downstairs entrance, right? He had one SS troop, probably not even a sergeant, guarding the door. Pop him, open the door, go upstairs, and waste the motherfucker. Would have saved a lot of lives, bro,” Dominic concluded, reaching for his white wine.
“Damn. You sure about that?”
“The Secret Service teaches that. They send one of their instructors down to Quantico to lecture every class on security issues. The fact surprised us, too. A lot of questions on it. The guy said you could walk right past the SS guard on your way to the liquor store, like. Easy hit, man. Easier’n hell. The thinking is that Adolf thought he was immortal, that there wasn’t a bullet anywhere with his name on it. Hey, we had a President whacked on a train platform waiting for his train to arrive. Which one was it? Chester Arthur, I think. McKinley got shot by a guy who walked right up to him with a bandage around his hand. I guess people were a little careless back then.”
“Damn. It’d make our job a lot easier, but I’d still prefer a rifle from five hundred meters or so.”
“No sense of adventure, Aldo?”
“Ain’t nobody paying me enough money to play kamikaze, Enzo. No future in that, y’know?”
“What about those suicide bombers over in the Mideast?”
“Different culture, man. Don’t you remember from second grade? You can’t commit suicide because it’s a mortal sin and you can’t go to confession after. Sister Frances Mary made that pretty clear, I thought.”
Dominic laughed. “Damn, haven’t thought of her in a while, but she always thought you were the cat’s ass.”
“That’s ’cause I didn’t screw around in class like you did.”
“What about in the Marines?”
“Screwing around? The sergeants took care of that before it came to my attention. Nobody messed with Gunny Sullivan, not even Colonel Winston.” He looked at the TV for another minute or so. “You know, Enzo, maybe there are times when one bullet can prevent a lot of grief. That Hitler needed his ticket punched. But even trained military officers couldn’t bring it off.”
“The guy who placed the bomb just assumed that everybody in the building had to be dead, without going back inside to make sure. They say it every day in the FBI Academy, bro—assumptions are the mother of all fuckups.”
“You want to make sure, yeah. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice.”
“Amen,” Dominic agreed.
IT HAD gotten to the point that Jack Ryan, Jr., woke up to the morning news on NPR expecting to hear about something dreadful. He guessed that came from seeing so much raw intelligence information, but without the judgment to know what was hot and what was not.
But though he did not know all that much, what he did know was more than a little worrying. He’d become fixated by Uda bin Sali—probably because Sali was the only “player” he knew much about. And that had to be because Sali was his personal case study. He had to figure this bird out, because if he didn’t he’d be . . . encouraged to seek other employment ... ? He hadn’t seen that possibility until now, which by itself did not speak well for his future in the spook business. Of course, his father had taken a long time to find something he was good at—nine years, in fact, after graduating Boston College—and he himself had not yet lived one whole year past his Georgetown sheepskin. So, would he make the grade at The Campus? He was about the youngest person there. Even the secretary pool was composed of women older than he was. Damn, that was an entirely new thought.
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 ca
n 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?”