JACK WAS running through his downloads from The Campus, with Dom and Brian standing by, having a late lunch and beers. It was routine traffic, e-mail to and from people suspected of being players, the majority of them ordinary citizens of various countries who’d once or twice written magic words that had been taken note of by the Echelon intercept system at Fort Meade. Then there was one like all the others, except that the addressee was [email protected].
“Hey, guys, our pal on the street was about to have a meet with another courier, looks like. He’s writing our old friend Fifty-six MoHa, and requesting instructions.”
“Oh?” Dominic came over to look. “What does that tell us?”
“I just have a Internet handle—it’s on AOL: Gadfly [email protected]. If he gets a reply from MoHa, maybe we’ll know something. We think he’s an operations officer for the bad guys. NSA tagged him about six months ago. He encrypts his letters, but they know how to crack that one, and we can read most of his e-mails.”
“How quick will you see a reply?” Dominic wondered.
“Depends on Mr. MoHa,” Jack said. “We just have to sit tight and wait.”
“Roger that,” Brian said from his seat by the window.
“I SEE young Jack didn’t slow them down,” Hendley observed.
“Did you think he would? Jeez, Gerry, I told you,” Granger said, having already thanked God for His blessings, but quietly. “Anyway, now they want instructions.”
“Your plan was to take down four targets. So, who’s number four?” the Senator asked.
It was Granger’s turn to be humble. “Not sure yet. To be honest, I didn’t expect them to work this efficiently. I’ve been kinda hoping that the hits so far might generate a target of opportunity, but nobody’s prairie-dogging yet. I have a few candidates. Let me run through them this afternoon.” His phone rang. “Sure, come on over, Rick.” He set the phone down. “Rick Bell says he has something interesting.”
The door opened in less than two minutes. “Oh, hey, Gerry. Glad you’re here. Sam”—Bell turned his head—“we just had this come in.” He handed the rough printout of the e-mail across.
Granger scanned it. “We know this guy . . .”
“Sure as hell. He’s a field ops officer for our friends. We figured he was based in Rome. Well, we figured right.” Like all bureaucrats—especially the senior ones—Bell enjoyed patting his own back.
Granger handed the page across to Hendley. “Okay, Gerry, here’s number four.”
“I don’t like serendipity.”
“I don’t like coincidences either, Gerry, but if you win the lottery you don’t give the money back,” Granger said, thinking that Coach Darrell Royal had been right: Luck didn’t go looking for a stumblebum. “Rick, is this guy worth making go away?”
“Yes, he is,” Bell confirmed, with an enthusiastic nod. “We don’t know all that much about him, but what we know is all bad. He’s an operations guy—of that we are a hundred percent sure, Gerry. And it feels right. One of his people sees another go down, reports in, and this guy gets it and replies. You know, if I ever meet the guy who came up with the Echelon program, I might have to buy him a beer.”
“Reconnaissance-by-fire,” Granger observed, patting himself very firmly on the back. “Damn, I knew it would work. You shake a hornet’s nest, and some bugs are bound to come out.”
“Just so they don’t sting your ass,” Hendley warned. “Okay, now what?”
“Turn ’em loose before the fox goes to ground,” Granger replied instantly. “If we can bag this guy, maybe we can really shake something valuable loose from the tree.”
Hendley turned his head. “Rick?”
“It works for me. Go-mission,” he said.
“Okay, then it’s a go-mission,” Hendley agreed. “Get the word out.”
THE NICE thing about electronic communications was that they did not take very long. In fact, Jack already had the important part.
“Okay, guys, Fifty-six MoHa’s first name is Mohammed—not great news; it’s the most common first name in the world—and he says he’s in Rome, at the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Vittorio Veneto, number one twenty-five.”
“I’ve heard of that one,” Brian said. “It’s expensive, pretty nice. Our friends like to stay in nice places, looks like.”
“He’s checked in under the name Nigel Hawkins. That’s English as hell. You suppose he’s a Brit citizen?”
“With a first name of Mohammed?” Dominic wondered aloud.
“Could be a cover name, Enzo,” Jack replied, pricking Dominic’s balloon. “Without a picture, we can’t guess about his background. Okay, he’s got a cell phone, but Mahmoud—that’s the guy who saw the bird go down this morning—must be supposed to know it.” Jack paused. “Why didn’t he just call in, I wonder? Hmm. Well, the Italian police have sent us stuff that came from electronic intercepts. Maybe they’re watching the airwaves, and our boy is being careful ... ?”
“Makes sense, but why . . . but why is he sending stuff out over the ’Net?”
“He thinks it’s secure. NSA has cracked a lot of the public encryption systems. The vendors don’t know that, but the boys at Fort Meade are pretty good at that stuff. Once you crack it, it stays cracked, and the other guy never knows.” In fact, he didn’t know the real reason. The programmers could be, and often had been, persuaded to insert trapdoors either for patriotism or for cash, and, often enough, for both. 56MoHa was using the most expensive such program, and its literature proclaimed loudly that nobody could crack it because of its proprietary algorithm. That wasn’t explained, of course, just that it was a 256-bit encryption process, which was supposed to impress people with the size of the number. The literature didn’t say that the software engineer who’d generated it had once worked at Fort Meade—which was why he’d been hired—and was a man who remembered swearing his oath, and, besides, a million dollars of tax-free money had been a hell of a tiebreaker. It had helped him buy his house in the hills of Marin County. And so the California real-estate market was even now serving the security interests of the United States of America.
“So, we can read their mail?” Dominic asked.
“Some of it,” Jack confirmed. “The Campus downloads most of what NSA gets at Fort Meade, and when they cross-deck it to CIA for analysis, we intercept that. It’s less complicated than it sounds.”
Dominic figured a lot out in a matter of seconds. “Fuck . . .” he breathed, looking up at the high ceiling in Jack’s suite. “No wonder . . .” A pause. “No more beers, Aldo. We’re driving to Rome.” Brian nodded.
“Don’t have room for a third, right?” Jack asked.
“’Fraid not, Junior, not in a 911.”
“Okay, I’ll catch a plane to Rome.” Jack walked to the phone and called downstairs. Within ten minutes, he was booked on an Alitalia 737 to Leonardo da Vinci International, leaving in an hour and a half. He considered changing his socks. If there was anything in life that incurred his loathing, it was taking his shoes off in an airport. He was packed in a few minutes and out the door, stopping only to thank the concierge on the way out. A Mercedes taxi hustled him out of town.
Dominic and Brian had hardly unpacked at all and were ready to go in ten minutes. Dom called the valet while Brian went back to the outside magazine kiosk and got plastic-coated maps to cover the route south and west. Between that and the Euros he’d picked up earlier in the day, he figured they were set, assuming Enzo didn’t drive them off an Alp. The ugly-blue Porsche arrived at the front of the hotel, and he came over as the doorman forced their bags in the tiny forward-sited trunk. In another two minutes, he was head-down in the maps looking for the quickest way to the Sudautobahn.
JACK GOT aboard the Boeing after enduring the humiliation that was now a global cost of flying commercial—it was more than enough to make him think back to Air Force One with nostalgia, though he also remembered that he’d gotten used to the comfort and attention with remarkable speed, and only later learn
ed what normal people had to go through, which was like running into a brick wall. For the moment, he had hotel accommodations to worry about. How to do that from an airplane? There was a pay phone attached to his first-class seat, and so he swiped his black card down the plastic receiver and made his first ever attempt to conquer European telephones. What hotel? Well, why not the Excelsior? On his second attempt, he got through to the front desk and learned that, indeed, they had several rooms available. He bagged a small suite, and feeling very good about himself, he took a glass of Tuscan white from the friendly stewardess. Even a hectic life, he’d learned, could be a good life, if you knew what your next step was, and for the moment his horizon was one step away at a time.
GERMAN HIGHWAY engineers must have taught the Austrians everything they knew, Dominic thought. Or maybe the smart ones had all read the same book. In any case, the road was not unlike the concrete ribbons that crisscrossed America, except that the signage was so different as to be incomprehensible, mainly because it had no language except for city names—and they were foreign, too. He figured out that a black number on a white background inside a red circle was the speed limit, but that was in kilometers, three of which fitted into two miles with parking room left over. And the Austrian speed limits were not quite as generous as the German ones. Maybe they didn’t have enough doctors to fix all the screwups, but, even in the growing hills, the curves were properly banked and the shoulders gave you enough bailout room in case somebody got seriously confused with left and right. The Porsche had a cruise control, and he pegged his to five klicks over the posted limit, just to have the satisfaction of going a little too fast. He couldn’t be sure that his FBI ID would get him out of a ticket here, as it did all across the U.S. of A.
“How far, Aldo?” he asked the navigator in the Death Seat.
“Looks like a little over a thousand kilometers from where we are now. Call it ten hours, maybe.”
“Hell, that’s just warming-up time. May need gas in another two hours or so. How you fixed for cash?”
“Seven hundred Monopoly bucks. You can spend these in Italy, too, thank God—with the old lira you went nuts doing the math. Traffic ain’t bad,” Brian observed.
“No, and it’s well behaved,” Dominic agreed. “Good maps?”
“Yeah, all the way down. In Italy, we’ll need another one for Rome.”
“Okay, ought not to be too hard.” And Dominic thanked a merciful God that he had a brother who could read maps. “When we stop for gas, we can get something to eat.”
“Roger that, bro.” Brian looked up to see mountains in the distance—no way to tell how far off they were, but it must have been a forbidding sight back when people walked or rode horses to get around. They must have had a lot more patience than modern man, or maybe a lot less sense. For the moment, the seat was comfortable, and his brother was not quite being maniacal in his driving.
THE ITALIANS turned out good airplane drivers in addition to good people for race cars. The pilot positively kissed the runway, and the rollout was as welcome as always. He’d flown too much to be as antsy about it as his father had once been, but, like most people, he felt safer walking or traveling on something he could see. Here also he found Mercedes taxicabs, and a driver who spoke passable English and knew the way to the hotel.
Highways look much the same all over the world, and for a moment Jack wondered where the hell he was. The land outside the airport looked agricultural, but the pitch of the roofs was different than at home. Evidently, it didn’t snow much here, they were so shallow. It was late spring, and it was warm enough that he could wear a short-sleeve shirt, but it wasn’t oppressive in any way. He’d come to Italy with his father once on official business—an economic meeting of some sort, he thought—but he’d been ridden around by an embassy car all the time. It was fun to pretend to be a prince of the realm, but you didn’t learn to navigate that way, and all that stood out in his memory were the places he’d seen. He didn’t know a single thing about how the hell he’d gotten there. This was the city of Caesar and a lot of other names that identified people whom history remembered for having done things good and bad. Mostly bad, because that was how history worked. And that, he reminded himself, was why he was in town. A good reminder, really, that he was not the arbiter of good and bad in the world, just a guy working backhandedly for his country, and so the authority to make such a decision did not rest entirely on his shoulders. Being president, as his father had been for just over four years, could not have been a fun job, despite all the power and importance that came with it. With power came responsibility in direct proportion, and if you had a conscience, that had to wear pretty hard on you. There was comfort in just doing things other people thought necessary. And, Jack reminded himself, he could always say no, and while there might be consequences, they would not be all that severe. Not as severe as the things he and his cousins were doing, anyway.
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 atta
boy 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!”
the Teeth Of the Tiger (2003) Page 45