by Tom Clancy
Via Vittorio Veneto looked more business than touristy. The trees on the sides were rather lame looking. The hotel was, surprisingly, not a tall building at all. Nor did it have an ornate entrance. Jack paid off the cabdriver and went inside, with the doorman bringing his bags. The inside was a celebration of woodwork, and the staff were welcoming as they could be. Perhaps this was an Olympic sport at which all Europeans excelled, but someone led him to his room. There was air-conditioning, and the cool air in the suite was welcoming indeed.
“Excuse me, what’s your name?” he asked the bellman.
“Stefano,” the man replied.
“Do you know if there is a man named Hawkins here—Nigel Hawkins?”
“The Englishman? Yes, he is three doors away, right down the corridor. A friend?”
“He’s a friend of my brother’s. Please don’t say anything to him. Perhaps I can surprise him,” Jack suggested, handing him a twenty-Euro note.
“Of course, signore.”
“Very good. Thank you.”
“Prego,” Stefano responded, and walked back to the lobby.
This had to be dumb operational art, Jack told himself, but if they didn’t have a photo of the bird, they had to get some idea of what he looked like. With that done, he lifted the phone and tried to make a call.
“YOU HAVE an incoming call,” Brian’s phone started saying in low tones, repeating itself three times before he fished it out of his coat pocket.
“Yeah.” Who the hell was calling him? he wondered.
“Aldo, it’s Jack. Hey, I’m in the hotel—the Hotel Excelsior. Want me to see if I can get you guys some rooms here? It’s pretty nice. I think you guys would like it here.”
“Hold on.” He set the phone down in his lap. “You’ll never believe where Junior’s checked in to.” He didn’t have to identify it.
“You’re kidding,” Dominic responded.
“Nope. He wants to know if he should get us a reservation. What do I tell him?”
“Damn . . .” Some quick thought. “Well, he’s our intel backup, isn’t he?”
“Sounds a little too obvious to me, but if you say so”—he picked the phone back up—“Jack, that’s affirmative, buddy.”
“Great. Okay, I’ll set it up. Unless I call back and say no, you come on in here.”
“Roger that one, Jack. See ya.”
“Bye,” Brian heard, and hit the kill button. “You know, Enzo, this doesn’t sound real smart to me.”
“He’s there. He’s on the scene, and he’s got eyes. We can always back out if we have to.”
“Fair enough, I guess. Map says we’re coming up on a tunnel in about five miles.” The clock on the dash said 4:05. They were making good time, but heading straight at a mountain just past the town or city of Badgastein. Either they needed a tunnel or a big team of goats to clear that hill.
JACK LIT up his computer. It took him ten minutes to figure out how to use the phone system for that purpose, but he finally got logged on, to find his mailbox brimming with bits and bytes targeted at him. There was an attaboy from Granger for the completed mission in Vienna, though he hadn’t had a thing to do with it. But below that was an assessment from Bell and Wills on 56MoHa. For the most part, it was disappointing. Fifty-six was an operations officer for the bad guys. He either did things or planned things, and one of the things he’d probably done or planned had gotten a lot of people killed in four shopping malls back at home, and so this bastard needed to meet God. There were no specifics about what he’d done, how he’d been trained, how capable he was, or whether or not he was known to carry a gun, all of which was information he’d like to see, but after reading the decrypted e-mails he reencrypted them and saved them in his ACTION folder to go over with Brian and Dom.
THE TUNNEL was like something in a video game. It went on and on to infinity, though at least the traffic inside wasn’t piled up in a fiery mass as had happened a few years before in the Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Switzerland. After a period of time that seemed to last half of forever, they came out the other side. It looked to be downhill from here.
“Gas plaza ahead,” Brian reported. Sure enough, there was an ELF sign half a mile away, and the Porsche’s tank needed filling.
“Gotcha. I could use a stretch and a piss.” The service plaza was pretty clean by American standards, and the eatery was different, without the Burger King or Roy Rogers you expected in Virginia—the men’s room plumbing was all in Ordnung, however—and the gas was sold by the liter, which well disguised the price until Dominic did the mental arithmetic: “Jesus, they really charge for this stuff!”
“Company card, man,” Brian said soothingly, and tossed over a pack of cookies. “Let’s boogie, Enzo. Italy awaits.”
“Fair enough.” The six-cylinder engine purred back to life, and they went back on the road.
“Good to stretch your legs,” Dominic observed as he went to his top gear.
“Yeah, it helps,” Brian agreed. “Four hundred fifty miles to go, if my addition’s right.”
“Walk in the park. Call it six hours, if the traffic’s okay.” He adjusted his sunglasses and shook his shoulders some. “Staying in the same hotel with our subject—damn.”
“I’ve been thinking. He doesn’t know dick about us, maybe doesn’t even know he’s being hunted. Think about it: two heart attacks, one in front of a witness; and a traffic accident, also with a witness he knows. That’s pretty bad luck, but no overt suggestion of hostile action, is there?”
“In his place, I’d be a little nervous,” Dominic thought aloud.
“In his place, he probably already is. If he sees us in the hotel, we’re just two more infidel faces, man. Unless he sees us more than once, we’re down in the grass, not up on the scope. Ain’t no rule says it has to be hard, Enzo.”
“I hope you’re right, Aldo. That mall was scary enough to last me a while.”
“Concur, bro.”
This wasn’t the towering part of the Alps. That lay to the north and west, though it would have been bad on the legs had they been walking it, as the Roman legions had done, thinking their paved roads were a blessing. Probably better than mud, but not that much, especially humping a backpack that weighed about as much as his Marines had carried into Afghanistan. The legions had been tough in their day, and probably not all that different from the guys who did the job today in camouflaged utilities. But back then they’d had a more direct way of dealing with bad guys. They’d killed their families, their friends, their neighbors, and even their dogs, and, more to the point, they were known for doing all that. Not exactly practical in the age of CNN, and, truth be told, there were damned few Marines who would have tolerated participating in wholesale slaughter. But taking them out one at a time was okay, so long as you were sure you weren’t killing off innocent civilians. Doing that shit was the other side’s job. It was really a pity they could not all come out on a battlefield and have it out like men, but, in addition to being vicious, terrorists were also practical. There was no sense committing to a combat action in which you’d not merely lose, but be slaughtered like sheep in a pen. But real men would have built their forces up, trained and equipped them, and then turned them loose, instead of sneaking around like rats to bite babies in their cribs. Even war had rules, promulgated because there were worse things than war, things that were strictly forbidden to men in uniform. You did not hurt noncombatants deliberately, and you tried hard to avoid doing it by accident. The Marines were now investing considerable time, money, and effort in learning city fighting, and the hardest part of it was avoiding civilians, women with kids in strollers—even knowing that some of those women had weapons stashed next to little Johnny, and that they’d love to see the back of a United States Marine, say two or three meters away, just to be sure of bullet placement. Playing by the rules had its limitations. But for Brian that was a thing of the past. No, he and his brother were playing the game by the enemy’s rules, and as long as the e
nemy didn’t know it would be a profitable game. How many lives might they have saved already by taking down a banker, a recruiter, and a courier? The problem was that you could never know. That was complexity theory as applied to real life, and it was a priori impossible. Nor would they ever know what good they’d be doing and what lives they might be saving when they got this 56MoHa bastard. But not being able to quantify it didn’t mean it wasn’t real, like that child killer his brother had dispatched in Alabama. They were doing the Lord’s work, even if the Lord was not an accountant.
At work in the field of the Lord, Brian thought. Certainly these alpine meadows were green and lovely enough, he thought, looking for the lonely goatherd. Odalayeee-oh . . .
“HE’S WHERE?” Hendley asked.
“The Excelsior,” Rick Bell answered. “Says he’s right up the hall from our friend.”
“I think our boy needs a little advice on fieldcraft,” Granger observed darkly.
“Think it through,” Bell suggested. “The opposition doesn’t know a thing. They’re as likely to be worried about the guy who picks up the wash as about Jack or the twins. They have no names, no facts, no hostile organization—hell, they don’t even know for sure that anybody’s out to get them.”
“It’s not very good fieldcraft,” Granger persisted. “If Jack gets eyeballed—”
“Then what?” Bell asked. “Okay, fine, I know I’m just an intel weenie, not a field spook, but logic still applies. They do not and cannot know anything about The Campus. Even if Fifty-six MoHa is getting nervous, it will be undirected anxiety, and, hell, he’s probably got a lot of that in his system anyway. But you can’t be a spook and be afraid of anybody, can you? As long as our people are in the background noise, they have nothing to worry about—unless they do something real dumb, and these kids are not that kind of dumb, if I read them right.”
Through all of this, Hendley just sat in his chair, letting his eyes flicker back and forth from one to the other. So, this was what it must have been like to be “M” in the James Bond movies. Being the boss had its moments, but it had its stresses, too. Sure, he had that undated presidential pardon in a safety-deposit box, but that didn’t mean he ever wanted to make use of it. That would make him even more of a pariah than he already was, and the newsies would never leave him alone, to his dying day, not exactly his idea of fun.
“Just so they don’t pretend to be room service and whack him in the hotel room,” Gerry thought aloud.
“Hey, if they were that dumb, they’d already be in some German prison,” Granger pointed out.
THE CROSSOVER into Italy was no more formal than crossing over from Tennessee into Virginia, which was one benefit of the European Union. The first Italian city was Villaco, where the people looked a lot more German than Sicilian to their fellow Italians, and from there southwest on the A23. They still needed to learn a little about interchanges, Dominic thought, but these roads were definitely better than they’d run for the famous Mille Miglia, the thousand-mile sports car race of the 1950s, canceled because too many people got killed watching it from the side of the country roads. The land here was not distinguishable from Austria, and the farm buildings were much the same as well. All in all, it was pretty country, not unlike eastern Tennessee or western Virginia, with rolling hills and cows that probably got milked twice a day to feed children on both sides of the border. Next came Udine, then Mestre, and they changed highways again for the A4 to Padova, switched over to A13, and an hour more to Bologna. The Apennine mountains were to their left, and the Marine part of Brian looked at the hills and shuddered at the battlefield they represented. But then his stomach started growling again.
“You know, Enzo, every town we pass has at least one great restaurant—great pasta, homemade cheese, Vitello Francese, the wine cellar from hell . . .”
“I’m hungry, too, Brian. And, yeah, we’re surrounded by Italian soul food. Unfortunately, we have a mission.”
“I just hope the son of a bitch is worth what we’re missing, man.”
“Ours is not to reason why, bro,” Dominic offered.
“Yeah, but you can stick the other half of that sentence up your ass.”
Dominic started laughing. He didn’t like it, either. The food in Munich and Vienna had been excellent, but all around them was the place where good food had been invented. Napoleon himself had traveled with an Italian chef on his campaigns, and most of modern French cuisine had evolved directly from that one man, as racehorses were all linear descendants of an Arabian stallion named Eclipse. And he didn’t even know the man’s name. Pity, he thought, passing a tractor-trailer whose driver probably knew the best local places. Shit.
They drove with their lights on—a rule in Italy, enforced by the Polizia Stradale, who were not renowned for their leniency—at a steady 150 kilometers per hour, just over ninety miles to the hour, and the Porsche seemed to love it. Gas mileage was over twenty five—or so Dominic guessed. The arithmetic of kilometers and liters against miles and gallons was too much for him while concentrating on the road. At Bologna, they joined up with the A1 and continued south toward Firenze, the city of origin for the Caruso family. The road cut through the mountains, going southwest, and was beautifully engineered.
Bypassing Florence was very hard. Brian knew of a fine restaurant near the Ponte Vecchio that belonged to distant cousins, where the wine was bellissima, and the food worthy of a king, but Rome was only two more hours away. He remembered going there by train that one time in his undress greens with the Sam Browne belt to proclaim his professional identity, and, sure enough, the Italians had liked the United States Marines, like all civilized people. He’d hated taking the train back to Rome and thence to Naples and his ship, but his time had not been his own.
As it wasn’t now. There were more mountains as they headed south, but now some of the signs proclaimed ROMA, and that was good.
JACK ATE in the Excelsior’s dining room, and the food was everything he’d expected, and the staff treated him like a prodigal member of the family come home after a protracted absence. His only complaint was that nearly everyone here was smoking. Well, perhaps Italy didn’t know about secondhand smoke dangers. He’d grown up hearing all about it from his mother—who’d often aimed the remarks at Dad, who was always struggling to quit the habit once and for all, and never quite made it. He took his time with dinner. Only the salad was ordinary. Even the Italians couldn’t change lettuce, though the dressings were brilliant. He’d taken a corner table to be able to survey the room. The other diners looked as ordinary as he did. All were well dressed. The guest services book in his room didn’t say a tie was required, but he’d just assumed it, and, besides, Italy was the world headquarters of style. He hoped to get a suit while here, if time permitted. There were thirty or forty people here. Jack discounted the ones with wives handy. So, he was looking for someone about thirty years old, eating dinner alone, registered as Nigel Hawkins. He ended up with three possibilities. He decided to look for people who didn’t look Arabic in their ethnicity, and that weeded one out. So, what to do now? Was he supposed to do anything at all? How could it hurt, unless he identified himself as an intelligence officer?
But... why take chances? he asked himself. Why not just be cool?
And with that thought, he backed off, mentally at least. Better to ID the guy another way.
ROME WAS indeed a fine city, Mohammed Hassan al-Din told himself. He periodically thought about renting an apartment, or even a house. You could even rent one in the Jewish Quarter; there were some fine kosher restaurants in that part of the city, where one could order anything on the menu with confidence. He’d looked once at an apartment on the Piazza Campo di Fiori, but while the price—even the tourist price—had not been unreasonable, the idea of being tied down to a single location had frightened him off. Better to be mobile in his business. The enemies couldn’t strike at that which they could not find. He’d taken chance enough killing the Jew Greengold—he’d been tongue-
lashed by the Emir himself for that bit of personal amusement, and told never to do anything like it ever again. What if the Mossad had gotten a picture of him? How valuable would he be to the Organization then? the Emir had demanded angrily. And that man was known by his colleagues for his volcanic temper. So, no more of that. He didn’t even carry the knife with him, but kept it in a place of honor in his shaving kit, where he could take it out and inspect the Jew blood on the folding blade.
So, for now, in Rome, he lived here. Next time—after he went back home—he’d return and stay at another, maybe that nice one by the Trevi Fountain, he thought, though this location suited his activities better. And the food. Well, Italian food was richly excellent, better in his estimation than the simple fare of his home country. Lamb was good, but not every day. And here people didn’t look at you like an infidel if you had a small sip of wine. He wondered if Mohammed, his own eponym, had knowingly allowed the Faithful to drink spirits made from honey, or simply hadn’t known that mead existed. He’d tried it while at Cambridge University, and concluded that only someone who desperately needed to be drunk would ever sample it, much less spend a night with it. So, Mohammed was not quite perfect. And neither was he, the terrorist reminded himself. He did hard things for the Faith, and so he was allowed to take a few diversions from the true path. If one had to live with rats, better to have a few whiskers, after all. The waiter came to take away his dishes, and he decided to pass on dessert. He had to maintain his trim figure if he was to maintain his cover as an English businessman, and fit into his Brioni suits. So, he left the table and walked out to the elevator lobby.