by Tom Clancy
“Yeah, unless he got an unexpected call, or he saw something in the morning paper that caught his interest, or his favorite shirt wasn’t properly pressed. Reality is analog, Sam, not digital, remember?”
“Don’t we know it,” Granger agreed.
THE FINANCIAL district looked exactly like what it was, though somewhat homier than New York’s tower-targets of steel and glass. There were some of those, too, of course, but they weren’t as oppressive. Half a block from where they got out of the cab was a portion of the original Roman wall that had surrounded the legion town of Londinium, as the British capital had originally been known, a place selected for its good wells and large river. The people here were mostly well dressed, they noticed, and the shops all upscale in a city where few things were low scale. The bustle factor was high, with crowds of people moving about with speed and purpose. There was also a good supply of pubs, most of which had chalkboards near the doors to advertise their food. The twins picked one in easy sight of the Lloyd’s building; agreeably, it had outside tables, as though it were a Roman restaurant near the Spanish Steps. The clear sky belied London’s wet reputation. Both twins were sufficiently well dressed not to appear too obviously to be American tourists. Brian spotted an ATM machine and got some cash, which he split with his brother, and then they ordered coffee—they were too American to get tea—and waited.
IN HIS office, Sali was working on his computer. He had a chance to buy a town house in Belgravia—a neighborhood even more upscale than his own—for eight and a half million pounds, which wasn’t quite a bargain, but neither was it excessive. Certainly he could rent it out for a good sum, and it was a freehold, meaning that in buying the house he’d also own the land, instead of paying ground rent to the Duke of Westminster. It wasn’t excessive, either, but it did add up. He made a note to go look at it this week. Otherwise, the currency valuations were fairly stable. He’d played with currency arbitrage on and off for a few months, but he didn’t really think he had the education to delve deeply into it. At least not yet. Maybe he would talk to a few people skilled in that game. Anything that could be done could also be learned, and with access to more than two hundred million pounds, he was able to play without doing his father’s money too much damage. In fact, he was up this year by nine million pounds, which wasn’t too bad. For the next hour, he sat at his computer and looked for trends—the trend is your friend—trying to make sense out of it. The real trick, he knew, was spotting them early—early enough to get in low before bailing out high—but, though he was closing in on it, he hadn’t learned that particular skill yet. Had he done so, his trading account would have been up by thirty-one million pounds, instead of a mere nine. Patience, he thought, was a damnably hard virtue to acquire. How much better to be young and brilliant.
His office had a TV, too, of course, and he switched it to an American financial channel that spoke of a coming weakness in the pound against the dollar, though the reasons for it were not entirely convincing, and he thought better of buying thirty million dollars on speculation. His father had warned him about speculating before, and since it was his father’s money he had listened attentively and granted the old bastard his wishes. Over the previous nineteen months, he was only down three million pounds, and most of those mistakes were a year behind him. The real-estate portfolio was doing very nicely. He was mostly buying property from older Englishmen and selling a few months later to his own countrymen, who usually paid cash or its electronic equivalent. All in all, he considered himself a real-estate speculator of great and growing talents. And, of course, a superb lover. It was approaching noon, and already his loins were aching for Rosalie. Might she be available this evening? For a thousand pounds, she ought to be, Uda thought. So, just before noon, he lifted his phone and hit the number 9 speed-dial button.
“My beloved Rosalie, this is Uda. If you can come over tonight, about seven-thirty, I will have something nice for you. You know my number, darling.” And he set the phone down. He’d wait until four or so, and if she did not call him back, he’d call Mandy. It was a rare day indeed when both of them were unavailable. He preferred to believe they spent such time shopping or having dinner with friends. After all, who paid them better than he did? And he wanted to see Rosalie’s face when she got the new shoes. English women really liked this Jimmy Choo fellow. To his eye, the designs looked grotesquely uncomfortable, but women were women, not men. For his fantasies, he drove his Aston Martin. Women preferred sore feet. There was no understanding them.
BRIAN GOT bored too easily to just sit and stare at the Lloyd’s building. Besides, it hurt his eyes. It was more than undistinguished, it was positively grotesque, like a glassed-in DuPont plant for making nerve gas or some other noxious chemical. It was also probably bad field craft to stare at any one thing for any length of time. There was some shopping on this street, again none of it cheap. A men’s tailor shop and similarly nice-looking places for women, and what appeared to be a very expensive shoe store. That was one item he didn’t bother with much. He had good black leather dress shoes—he was wearing them now—a good pair of sneaks that he’d bought on a day best forgotten, and four pairs of combat boots, two black and two the buff color the Marine Corps was heading to, except for parades and other official stuff that did not often concern the snake-eating Marines of Force Recon. All Marines were supposed to be “pretty” troops, but the snake-eating ones were thought to be from the side of the family that you didn’t talk much about. And he was still coming to terms with the shoot-out of the previous week. Even the people he’d gone after in Afghanistan hadn’t made any overt attempts to kill women and kids, at least that he knew about. They were barbarians, sure, but even barbarians were supposed to have limits. Except for the bunch of people that this guy played with. It wasn’t manly—even the beard wasn’t manly. The Afghans’ were, but this guy just looked like some sort of pimp. He was, in short, unworthy of the Marine’s steel, not a man to be killed, but a cockroach to be eliminated. Even if he did drive a car worth more than a Marine captain made in ten years, before taxes. A Marine officer might save up for a Chevy Corvette, but, no, this POS had to have the grandson of James Bond’s car, to go along with the whores he rented. You could call him a lot of things, but “man” was definitely not among them, the Marine thought, subconsciously working himself up for the mission.
“Tallyho, Aldo,” Dominic said, putting cash down on the table to cover the bill. Both stood and walked away from the target at first. At the corner, both stopped and turned as though looking around for something. There was Sali . . .
. . . and there was Sali’s tail. Dressed as a working man, expensively. He’d also appeared out of a pub, Dominic saw. He was indeed a rookie. His eyes were too obviously fixed on the subject, though he did stay back, fifty yards or so, clearly unconcerned about being spotted by his target. Sali was probably not the most alert of subjects, unschooled in countersurveillance. He doubtless thought himself perfectly safe. Probably thought himself pretty clever, too. All men had their illusions. This one’s would prove to be more serious than normal.
The brothers scanned the street. Hundreds of people were in direct view. Lots of cars moving on the street. Visibility was good—a little too good—but Sali was presenting himself to them as though it were deliberate, and it was just too good to pass up . . .
“Plan A, Enzo?” Brian asked quickly. They had three plans thought out, plus the wave-off signal.
“Roger that, Aldo. Let’s do it.” They split up, heading in opposite directions in the hope that Sali would turn toward the pub where they’d endured the bad coffee. Both wore sunglasses to hide the direction of their gaze. In Aldo’s case, this meant the spook who was tailing Sali. It was probably routine as hell for him, something he’d been doing for a few weeks, and you couldn’t do anything that long without settling into a routine, anticipating what your subject was going to do, fixing on him and not scanning the street as you were supposed to do. But he was working in London
, maybe his home turf, a place where he figured he knew all that was knowable and had nothing to fear. More dangerous illusions. His only job was to watch a not very intriguing subject in whom Thames House had some unexplained interest. The subject’s habits were well established, and he was not a danger to anyone, at least not on this turf. A spoiled rich kid, that was all. Now he was turning left after crossing the street. Shopping today, it looked like. Shoes for one of his ladies, the Security Service officer surmised. Better presents than he could afford for his significant other, and he was engaged, the spook groused within his own mind.
THEY HAD a nice pair of shoes in the window, Sali saw, black leather and gold hardware. He hopped boyishly up onto the curb, then turned left toward the store entrance, smiling in anticipation of the look Rosalie would have in her eyes when she opened the box.
Dominic took out his Chichester map of central London, a small red book that he opened as he walked past the subject, without taking so much as a glance, letting his peripheral vision do the work. His eyes were fixed on the tail. Looked even younger than he and his brother were, probably his first job out of whatever academy the Security Service conducted, assigned to an easy target for that very reason. He’d probably be a little nervous, hence his fixed eyes and balled-fist hands. Dominic hadn’t been all that different only a year or so before, in Newark, young and earnest. Dominic stopped and turned quickly, gauging the distance from Brian to Sali. Brian would be doing exactly the same thing, of course, and his job was to synchronize movement with his brother, who had the lead. Okay. Again his peripheral vision took over, until the last few steps.
Then his eyes fixed on the tail. The Brit’s eyes noted this, and his gaze shifted as well. He stopped almost automatically and heard the Yank tourist ask stupidly: “Excuse me, could you tell me where . . .” He held up his map book to illustrate how lost he was.
BRIAN REACHED into his coat pocket and pulled out the gold pen. He twisted the nib and the black point changed to an iridium tip when he pressed down on the obsidian clip. His eyes locked on the subject. At a range of three feet, he took half a step right as though to avoid someone who wasn’t there at all, and bumped into Sali.
“THE TOWER of London. Why, you go right there,” the MI5 guy said, turning to point.
Perfect.
“EXCUSE ME,” Brian said, and let the man pass with a half step to his left, and the pen came down in a backward stabbing motion, and caught the subject square in the right ass cheek. The hollow syringe point penetrated perhaps as much as three millimeters. The CO2 charge fired, injecting its seven milligrams of succinylcholine into the tissue of the largest muscle on Sali’s anatomy. And Brian Caruso kept right on walking.
“OH, THANKS, buddy,” Dominic said, tucking the Chichester’s back into his pocket and taking a step in the proper direction. When he was clear of the tail, he stopped and turned—this was bad tradecraft, and he knew it—to see Brian putting the pen back into his coat pocket. His brother then rubbed his nose in the prearranged signal of MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
SALI WINCED ever so slightly at the bump or stick—whatever it was—on his ass, but it was nothing serious. His right hand reached back to rub the spot, but the pain faded immediately, and he shrugged it off and kept heading for the shoe store. He took perhaps ten more steps and then he realized—
—his right hand was trembling ever so slightly. He stopped to look at it, reaching over with his left hand—
—that was trembling, too. Why was—
—his legs collapsed under him, and his body fell vertically down to the cement sidewalk. His kneecaps positively bounced on the surface, and they hurt, rather a lot in fact. He tried to take in a deep breath to ward off the pain and the embarrassment—
—but he didn’t breathe. The succinylcholine had fully infused his body now, and had neutralized every nerve-muscle interface that existed in his body. The last to go were his eyelids, and Sali, his face now rapidly approaching the sidewalk, didn’t see himself hit. Instead, he was enveloped by blackness—actually, redness from the low-frequency light that penetrated the thin tissue of his eyelids. Very rapidly, his brain was overwhelmed first by the confusion that had to come before panic.
What is this? his mind demanded of itself. He could feel what was happening. His forehead was against the rough surface of semifinished cement. He could hear the foot-steps of people to his left and right. He tried to turn his head—no, first he had to open his eyes—
—but they did not open. What is this?!!!—
—he wasn’t breathing—
—he commanded himself to breathe. As though in a swimming pool underwater, and coming to the surface after holding his breath for an uncomfortably long time, he told his mouth to open and his diaphragm to expand—
—but nothing happened!—
—What is this? his mind shouted at itself.
His body operated on its own programming. As carbon dioxide built up in his lungs, automatic commands went from there to his diaphragm to expand his lungs to take in more air to replace the poison in his lungs. But nothing happened, and, with that bit of information, his body went into panic all by itself. Adrenal glands flooded the bloodstream—the heart was still pumping—with adrenaline, and, with that natural stimulant, his awareness increased and his brain went into overdrive . . .
What is this? Sali asked himself urgently yet again, for now the panic was beginning to take over. His body was betraying him in ways that surpassed imagination. He was suffocating in the dark on a sidewalk in the middle of central London in broad daylight. The overload of CO2 in his lungs did not really cause pain, but his body reported the fact to his mind as such. Something was going very wrong, and it made no sense, like being hit in the street by a lorry—no, like being run over by a lorry in his living room. It was happening too fast for him to grasp it all. It made no sense, and it was so—surprising, astonishing, astounding.
But neither could it be denied.
He continued to command himself to breathe. It had to happen. It had never not happened, and so it must. He felt his bladder emptying next, but the flash of shame was immediately overcome by the building panic. He could feel everything. He could hear everything. But he couldn’t do anything, nothing at all. It was like being caught naked in the King’s own court in Riyadh with a pig in his arms—
—and then the pain started. His heart was beating frantically, now at 160 beats per minute, but in doing so it was only sending unoxygenated blood out into his cardiovascular system, and in doing that the heart—the only really active organ in his body—had used up all of the free and reserve oxygen in his body—
—and denied of oxygen, the faithful heart cells, immune to the muscle relaxant that it had itself infused throughout its owner’s body, started to die.
It was the greatest pain the body can know, as each separate cell started to die, starting at the heart, the danger to which was immediately reported to the body as a whole, and the cells were now dying by the thousands, each connected to a nerve that screamed into the brain that DEATH was happening, and happening now—
He couldn’t even grimace. It was like a fiery dagger in his chest, twisting, pushing deeper and deeper. It was the feel of Death, something delivered by the hand by Iblis himself, by Lucifer’s own hand...
And that was the instant Sali saw Death coming, riding across a field of fire to take his soul, to Perdition. Urgently, but in a state of internal panic, Uda bin Sali thought as loudly as he could the words of the Shahada: There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger... There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger . . . There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger—
—Thereisnogodbutallahandmohammedishismessenger.
His brain cells, too, were deprived of oxygen, and they, too, started to die, and in that process the data they contained was dumped into a diminishing awareness. He saw his father, his favorite horse, his mother before a table full with food—and Rosalie, Rosalie riding him
from on top, her face full of delight, that somehow became more distant . . . fading . . . fading . . . fading . . .
. . . to black.
People had gathered around him. One bent down and said, “Hello, are you all right?” A stupid question, but that’s what people asked in such circumstances. Then the person—he was a salesman of computer peripherals heading to the nearby pub for a pint and a British ploughman’s lunch—shook his shoulder. There was no resistance at all, like turning over a piece of meat in the butcher’s shop . . . And that frightened him more than a loaded pistol would have done. At once he rolled the body over and felt for a pulse. There was one. The heart was beating frantically—but the man wasn’t breathing. Bloody hell . . .
Ten meters away, Sali’s tail had his cell phone out and was dialing 999 for emergency services. There was a fire station only blocks away, and Guy’s Hospital was just across Tower Bridge. Like many spooks, he had started to identify with his subject, even though detesting him, and the sight of the man crumpled on the sidewalk had shaken him deeply. What had happened? Heart attack? But he was a young man . . .
BRIAN AND Dominic rendezvoused at a pub, just uphill from the Tower of London. They picked a booth, and scarcely had they sat down when a waitress came to them and asked what they wanted.
“Two pints,” Enzo told her.