by Tom Clancy
The e-mail arrived at 8:43 from Dominic’s computer, reporting the successful hit in considerable detail, almost like an official investigative report to the FBI. The fact that Atef had had a friend close by was probably a bonus. That an enemy had witnessed the killing probably meant that no suspicion would be attached to the subject’s demise. The Campus would do its best to get the official report on Atef’s departure, however, just to make sure, though that would have its elements of difficulty.
DOWNSTAIRS, RYAN and Wills did not know anything about it, of course. Jack was going through his routine tasks of scanning message traffic within the American intelligence services—which took over an hour—and after that, a scan of Internet traffic to and from known or suspected terrorist addresses. The overwhelming majority of it was so routine it was like e-mails between a husband and wife over what to pick up at the Safeway on the way home from work. Some of those e-mails could easily be coded messages of significant import, but there was no telling that without a program or crib sheet. At least one terrorist had used “hot weather” to mean heavy security at a location of interest to his colleagues, but the message had been sent in July, when the weather was, indeed, warmer than was comfortable. And that message had been copied down by the FBI, and the Bureau hadn’t taken particular notice of it at first. But one new message positively leaped off the screen at him this morning.
“Hey, Tony, you want to look at this one, buddy.”
The addressee was their old friend 56MoHa@euro-com. net, and the content reconfirmed his identity as a nexus for bad-guy message traffic:
ATEF IS DEAD. HE DIED RIGHT BEFORE MY EYES HERE IN MUNICH. AN AMBULANCE WAS SUMMONED AND THEY TREATED HIM ON THE SIDEWALK BUT HE DIED IN THE HOSPITAL OF A HEART ATTACK. REQUIRE INSTRUCTIONS. FA’AD. And his address was [email protected], which was new to Jack’s computer index.
“Honeybear?” Wills observed with a chuckle. “This guy must surf for women on the ’Net.”
“So, he does cybersex, fine. Tony, if we just whacked a guy named Atef over in Germany, here’s confirmation of the event, plus a new target for us to track.” Ryan turned back to his workstation and used his mouse to check sources. “Here, NSA picked up on it, too. Maybe they think he’s a possible player.”
“You sure like making leaps of imagination,” Wills observed tersely.
“My ass!” Jack was actually angry for once. He was beginning to understand why his father had often been so pissed off at intelligence information that arrived in the Oval Office. “God damn it, Tony, how much clearer do things have to be?”
Wills took a deep breath and spoke as calmly as usual. “Settle down, Jack. This is single-source, a single report on something that might or might not have taken place. You don’t throw your hat over the barn about something until it’s confirmed by a known source. This Honeybear identity could be a lot of things, few of which we can certify as a good guy or a bad guy.”
For his part, Jack Jr. wondered if he was being tested—again!—by his training officer. “Okay, let’s walk through it. MoHa Fifty-six is a source that we’re highly confident is a player, probably an operations officer for the bad guys. We’ve been sweeping the ’Net for him since I’ve been here, okay? So, we sweep the ether and this letter turns up in his mailbox at the same time we believe we—us—have a kill team in the field. Unless you’re going to tell me that Uda bin Sali really did have a myocardial infarction while he was daydreaming about his favorite whore in downtown London. And that the Brit Security Service found the event highly interesting only because it’s not every day that a suspected terrorist banker drops dead on the street. Have I missed anything?”
Wills smiled. “Not a bad presentation. A little thin on the evidence, but your proposition was well organized. So, you think I should walk it upstairs?”
“No, Tony, I think you should run it upstairs,” Ryan said, easing back on the obvious anger. Take a deep breath and count to ten.
“Then I guess I’ll do it.”
FIVE MINUTES later, Wills walked into Rick Bell’s office. He handed over two sheets of paper.
“Rick, do we have a team at work in Germany?” Wills asked. The response was not the least bit surprising.
“Why do you ask?” Bell had a poker face that would have impressed a marble statue.
“Read,” Wills suggested.
“Damn,” the chief of analysis reacted. “Who pulled this fish out of the electronic ocean?”
“Take a guess,” Tony suggested.
“Not bad, for the kid.” Bell looked very closely at his guest. “How much does he suspect?”
“At Langley, he’d sure as hell be getting people nervous.”
“Like you are?”
“You might say that,” Wills replied. “He makes good leaps of imagination, Rick.”
Bell made a face this time. “Well, it’s not exactly the Olympic long-jump competition, is it?”
“Rick, Jack puts two and two together about as fast as a computer tells the difference between one and zero. He’s right, isn’t he?”
Bell took a second or two before replying. “What do you think?”
“I think they got that Sali character for sure, and this is probably mission number two. How are they doing it?”
“You really do not want to know. It’s not as clean as it looks,” Bell answered. “This Atef guy was a recruiter. He sent at least one guy to Des Moines.”
“That’s a good enough reason,” Wills judged.
“Sam feels the same way. I’ll turn this over to him. Follow-up?”
“This MoHa guy needs a closer look. Maybe we can track him down,” Wills said.
“Any idea where he is?”
“Italy, looks like, but a lot of people live on the boot. Lots of big cities with lots of ratholes. But Italy is a good place for him. Centrally located. Air service everywhere. And the terrorists have let Italy alone lately, and so nobody’s hunting down the dog that isn’t barking.”
“Same in Germany, France, and the rest of Central Europe?”
Wills nodded. “Looks that way. They’re next, but I don’t think they fully appreciate it. Heads in the sand-like, Rick.”
“True,” Bell agreed. “So, what do we do with your student?”
“Ryan? Good question. Sure as hell, he’s a quick learner. He’s particularly good at connecting things,” Wills thought out loud. “He makes big leaps of imagination, sometimes too far, but, still, it’s not a bad quality for an analyst to have.”
“Grade to this point?”
“B-plus, maybe a low A, and that’s only because he’s new. He’s not as good as I am, but I’ve been in the business since before he was born. He’s a comer, Rick. He’ll go far.”
“That good?” Bell asked. Tony Wills was known as a careful conservative analyst, and one of the best Langley had ever turned out, despite the green eyeshade and the garters on the sleeves.
Wills nodded. “That good.” He was also scrupulously honest. It was his natural character, but he could also afford to be. The Campus paid far better than any government agency. His kids were all grown—the last one was in his final year at the University of Maryland in physics, and, after that, he and Betty could think about the next big step in life, though Wills liked it here and had no immediate plans to leave. “But don’t tell him I said so.”
“Big head?”
“No, that wouldn’t be fair. But I don’t want him to start thinking he knows it all yet.”
“Nobody with half a brain thinks that way,” Bell said.
“Yeah.” Wills stood. “But why take the chance?”
Wills headed out, but Bell still didn’t know what to do with the Ryan kid. Well, something to talk with the Senator about.
“NEXT STOP, Vienna,” Dominic informed his brother. “We got another subject.”
“You wonder how steady this job will be?” Brian wondered aloud.
His brother laughed. “Man, there’s enough mutts in America to keep us busy for t
he rest of our lives.”
“Yeah, save money, fire all the judges and juries.”
“My name ain’t Dirty Harry Callahan, you jarhead.”
“And I’m not Chesty Puller, either. How do we get there? Fly, train—maybe drive?”
“Driving might be fun,” Dominic said. “I wonder if we can rent a Porsche . . . ?”
“Oh, great,” Brian grunted. “Okay, log off so I can download the file, will ya?”
“Sure. I’ll see what the concierge can set up for us.” And he headed out of the room.
“THIS IS the only confirmation we have?” Hendley asked.
“Correct.” Granger nodded. “But it tallies exactly with what our guys on the ground told us.”
“They’re going too fast. What if the other side thinks, ‘Two heart attacks in less than a week’ . . . ? Then what?”
“Gerry, the nature of this mission is recon-by-fire, remember? We halfway want the other side to get a little nervous, but soon their arrogance will set in and they’ll write it off as random chance. If this were TV or the movies, they’d think CIA was playing hardball, but it isn’t the movies, and they know that CIA doesn’t play that kind of game. The Mossad, maybe, but they’re already wary of the Israelis. Hey”—a lightbulb went off in Granger’s brain—“what if they’re the guys who offed the Mossad officer in Rome?”
“I don’t pay you to speculate, Sam.”
“It’s a possibility,” Granger persisted.
“It’s also possible that the Mafia hit the poor bastard because they mistook him for a fellow mafioso who owed money to the mob. But I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.”
“Yes, sir.” Granger walked back to his office.
MOHAMMED HASSAN AL-DIN was in Rome at the moment, at the Hotel Excelsior, drinking his coffee and working on his computer. It was bad news about Atef. He was—he’d been—a good recruiter, with just the right mix of intelligence, plausibility, and commitment to persuade others to join the cause. He’d wanted to enter the field himself, to take lives and be a Holy Martyr, but though he might have been good at it, a man who could recruit was more valuable than a man willing to throw away his own life. It was simple arithmetic, something a graduate engineer like Atef should have understood. What was it with him? A brother, wasn’t it, killed by the Israelis back in 1973? A long time to hold a grudge, even for men in his organization, but not without precedent. Atef was with his brother now, though, in Paradise. That was good fortune for him, but bad fortune for the organization. So it was written, Mohammed comforted himself, and so it would be, and so the struggle would go on until the last of their enemies were dead.
He had a pair of cloned phones on his bed, phones he could use without fear of interception. Should he call the Emir about this? It was worth thinking about. Anas Ali Atef was the second heart attack in less than a week, and in both cases they’d been young men, and that was odd, statistically very unusual. Fa’ad had been standing right next to Anas Ali at the time, though, and so he hadn’t been shot or poisoned by an Israeli intelligence officer—a Jew would probably have killed both of them, Mohammed thought—and so with an eyewitness right there, there seemed little cause to suspect foul play. For the other, well, Uda had liked the life of a whoremonger, and he would hardly have been the first man to die of that weakness of the flesh. So, it just seemed like an unlikely coincidence and thus unworthy of an urgent call to the Emir himself. He made a note of the dual incidents on his computer, however, encrypted the file, and shut down. He felt like a walk. It was a pleasant day in Rome. Hot by most European standards, but the very breath of home for him. Just up the street was a pleasant sidewalk restaurant whose Italian food was only average, but the average here was better than in many fine restaurants across the world. You’d think that all Italian women would be obese, but, no, they suffered from the Western female disease of thinness, like West African children, some of them. Like young boys instead of mature, experienced women. So sad. But instead of eating, he crossed the Via Veneto to get a thousand Euros from the cash machine. The Euro had made European travel so much more convenient, praise Allah. It was not yet the equal of the American dollar in terms of stability, but, with luck, it might soon become so, which would ease his travel convenience even more.
Rome was a difficult city not to love. Conveniently located, international in character, awash with foreigners, and full of hospitable people who bowed and scraped for cash money like the peasants they all were. A good city for women, with shopping such as Riyadh could scarcely offer. His English mother had liked Rome, and the reasons were obvious. Good food and wine and a fine historical atmosphere that antedated even the Prophet himself, blessing and peace be upon him. Many had died here at the hands of the Caesars, butchered for public enjoyment in the Flavian Amphitheater, or killed because they had displeased the emperor in one way or another. The streets had probably been very peaceful here during the empire period. What better way to ensure it than to enforce the laws ruthlessly? Even the weak could recognize the price for bad behavior. So it was in his homeland, and so, he hoped, it would remain after the Royal Family had been done away with—either killed or chased abroad, perhaps to the safety of England or Switzerland, where people with money and noble status were treated well enough to live out their lives in indolent comfort. Either alternative would suit Mohammed and his colleagues. Just so that they would no longer rule his country, filled with corruption, kowtowing to the infidels and selling them oil for money, ruling the people as though they were the sons of Mohammed himself. That would come to an end. His distaste for America quailed before his hatred for the rulers of his own country. But America was his primary target because of its power, whether held to its own use or parceled out for others to use in America’s own imperial interests. America threatened everything he held dear. America was an infidel country, patron and protector of the Jews. America had invaded his own country and stationed troops and weapons there, undoubtedly with the ultimate objective of subordinating all of Islam, and thus ruling a billion of the Faithful for its own narrow and parochial interests. Stinging America had become his obsession. Even the Israelis were not as attractive as targets. Vicious though they might be, the Jews were merely America’s cat’s-paws, vassals who did America’s bidding in return for money and weapons, without even knowing how cynically they were being used. The Iranian Shiites had been correct. America was the Great Satan, Iblis himself, so great in power that it was hard to strike decisively at it, but still vulnerable in its evil before the righteous forces of Allah and the Faithful.
THE CONCIERGE at the Hotel Bayerischer had outdone himself, Dominic thought, securing a Porsche 911 whose forward-mounted trunk barely held their bags, and that only with a little squeezing. But it was enough, and better even than a rented small-engine Mercedes. The 911 had balls. Brian would get to fumble with the maps as they went southeast through the Alps to Vienna. That they were going south to kill someone was beside the point for the moment. They were serving their country, which was about as big as loyalty got.
“Do I need a crash helmet?” Brian asked, getting in, which in the case of this car almost meant sitting on the pavement.
“Not with me driving, Aldo. Come on, bro. It’s time to rock and roll.”
The car was a horrible shade of blue, but the tank was filled, and the six-cylinder engine was properly tuned. The Germans did like things in Ordnung. Brian navigated them out of Munich and onto the autobahn southeast to Vienna, and from there Enzo decided to see how fast this Porsche could really go.
“DO YOU think maybe they need some backup?” Hendley asked Granger, whom he’d just called into his office.
“What do you mean?” Sam responded. “They” had to be the Caruso brothers, of course.
“I mean they do not have much in the way of intelligence support,” the former Senator pointed out.
“Well, we’ve never really thought about that, have we?”
“Exactly.” Hendley leaned back in his chair. �
�In a sense, they’re operating naked. Neither one has much in the way of intelligence experience. What if they hit the wrong guy? Okay, they probably won’t get bagged doing it, but it won’t help their morale, either. I remember a Mafia guy, in the Atlanta Federal Pen, I think. He killed some poor bastard he thought was trying to kill him, but it was the wrong guy, and he came unglued as a result. Sang like a canary. That’s how we got our first big break on the Mafia and how it was organized, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, it was a Mafia soldier named Joe Valachi, yeah, but he was a criminal, remember?”
“And Brian and Dominic are good guys. So, guilt could hit them worse. Maybe some intel backup is a good idea.”
Granger was surprised at the suggestion. “I can see the need for better intelligence evaluation, and this ‘virtual office’ stuff has its limitations, I admit. They can’t ask questions, like, but if they have one, they can still e-mail us for advice—”
“Which they haven’t done,” Hendley pointed out.
“Gerry, they’re only two steps into the mission. It’s not time to panic yet, y’know? These are two very bright and very capable young officers. That’s why we picked them. They know how to think on their own, and that’s precisely what we want in our operations people.”
“We’re not just making assumptions, we’re launching assumptions into the future. You think that’s a good idea?” Hendley had learned how to pursue ideas on Capitol Hill, and he was deadly effective at it.
“Assumptions are always a bad thing. I know that, Gerry. But so are complications. How do we know we’re sending the right guy? What if it just adds a level of uncertainty? Do we want to do that?” Hendley, thought Granger, was suffering from the deadliest congressional disease. It was too easy to oversight something to death.
“What I’m saying is that it’s a good idea to have somebody out there who thinks a little different, who takes a different kind of approach to the data that goes out there. The Caruso boys are pretty good. I know that. But they are inexperienced. The important thing is to have a different brain out there to take a different view of the facts and the situation.”