by Tom Clancy
“It’s a possibility,” Willow allowed.
“Never saw a hint of it, love. If he played with bad boys, it was out of my sight entirely. Love to help you, but there’s nothing to say.” She seemed sincere to the detective, but he reminded himself that when it came to dissimulation, a whore of this class could probably have shamed Dame Judith Anderson.
“Well, thank you for coming in. If anything—anything at all—comes to mind, do give me a call.”
“That I will, love.” She stood and smiled her way out the door. He was a nice chap, this Detective Willow. Pity he couldn’t afford her.
Bert Willow was already back on his computer, typing up his contact report. Miss Parker actually seemed a nice girl, literate and very charming. Part of that had been learned for her business persona, but maybe part of it was genuine. If so, he hoped she’d find a new line of work before her character was completely destroyed. He was a romantic, Willow was, and someday it might be his downfall. And he knew it, but he had no desire to change himself for his job as she had probably done. Fifteen minutes later, he e-mailed the report to Thames House, and then printed it up for the Sali file, which would in due course go to the closed files in Central Records, probably never to be heard from again.
“TOLD YOU,” Jack said to his roomie.
“Well, then you can pat yourself on the back,” Wills responded. “So, what’s the story, or do I have to call up the documents?”
“Uda bin Sali dropped dead of an apparent heart attack. His Security Service tail didn’t see anything unusual, just the guy collapsing on the street. Zap, no more Uda to swap funds for the bad guys.”
“How do you feel about it?” Wills asked.
“It’s fine with me, Tony. He played with the wrong kids, on the wrong playground. End of story,” Ryan the younger said coldly. I wonder how they did it? he wondered more quietly. “Was it our guys helping him along, you think?”
“Not our department. We provide information to others. What they do with it out of our sight is not for us to speculate upon.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The remainder of the day looked as though it would be pretty dull after such a fast beginning.
MOHAMMED GOT the news over his computer—rather, he was told in code to call a cutout named Ayman Ghailani whose cell phone number he had committed to memory. For that purpose, he took a walk outside. You had to be careful using hotel phones. Once on the street, he walked to a park and sat down on a bench, with a pad and pen in his hand.
“Ayman, this is Mohammed. What is new?”
“Uda is dead,” the cutout reported somewhat breathlessly.
“What happened?” Mohammed asked.
“We’re not sure. He fell near his office and was taken to the nearest hospital. He died there,” was the reply.
“He was not arrested, not killed by the Jews?”
“No, there is no report of that.”
“So, it was a natural death?”
“So it appears at this time.”
I wonder if he did the funds transfer before he left this life? Mohammed thought. “I see . . .” He didn’t, of course, but he had to fill the silence with some words. “So, there is no reason to suspect foul play?”
“Not at this time, no. But when one of our people dies, one always—”
“Yes, I know, Ayman. One always suspects. Does his father know?”
“That is how I found out.”
His father will probably be glad to be rid of the wastrel, Mohammed thought. “Who do we have to make sure of the cause of death?”
“Ahmed Mohammed Hamed Ali lives in London. Perhaps through a solicitor . . . ?”
“Good idea. See that it is done.” A pause. “Has anyone told the Emir?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“See to it.” It was a minor matter, but, even so, he was supposed to know everything.
“I shall,” Ayman promised.
“Very well. That is all, then.” And Mohammed thumbed the kill button on his cell phone.
He was back in Vienna. He liked the city. For one thing, they’d handled the Jews here once, and many Viennese managed to control their regrets over it. For another, it was a good place to be a man with money. Fine restaurants staffed by people who knew the value of skilled service to their betters. The former imperial city had a lot of cultural history to appreciate when he was of a mind to be a tourist, which happened more often than one might imagine. Mohammed found that he often did his best thinking when looking at something of no importance to his work. Today, an art museum, perhaps. He’d let Ayman do the scut work for now. A London solicitor would root about for information surrounding Uda’s death, and, being a good mercenary, he’d let them know of anything untoward. But sometimes people simply died. It was the hand of Allah, which was not something easily understood, and never predicted.
OR MAYBE not so dull. NSA cross-decked some new message traffic after lunch. Jack did some mental arithmetic and decided it was evening on the other side of the pond. The electronic weenies of the Italian Carabinieri—their federal police, who walked about in rather spiffy uniforms—had made some intercepts, which they’d forwarded to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, and which had gone right up on the satellite to Fort Belvoir—the main East Coast downlink. Somebody named Mohammed had called somebody named Ayman—they knew this from the recorded conversation, which had also mentioned the death of Uda bin Sali, which had caused an electronic “Bingo” on various computers, flagging it for a signals-intelligence analyst, and causing the embassy puke to squirt the bird.
“‘Has anyone told the Emir?’ Who the hell is the Emir?” Jack asked.
“That’s a nobleman’s title, like a duke or something,” Wills answered. “What’s the context?”
“Here.” Jack handed a printed sheet across.
“That looks interesting.” Wills turned and queried his computer for EMIR, and got only one reference. “According to this, it’s a name or title that cropped up about a year ago in a tapped conversation, context uncertain, and nothing significant since. The Agency thinks it’s probably shorthand for a medium-sized hitter in their organization.”
“In this context, looks bigger than that to me,” Jack thought aloud.
“Maybe,” Tony conceded. “There’s a lot about these guys that we don’t know yet. Langley will probably write it off to somebody in a supervisory position. That’s what I would do,” he concluded, but not confidently.
“We have anybody on staff who knows Arabic?”
“Two guys who speak the language—from the Monterey school—but no experts on the culture, no.”
“I think it’s worth a look.”
“Then write it up and we’ll see what they think. Langley has a bunch of mind readers, and some of them are pretty good.”
“Mohammed is the most senior guy we know in this outfit. Here, he’s referring to somebody senior to himself. That is something we need to check out,” the younger Ryan pronounced with all the power he possessed.
For his part, Wills knew that his roomie was right. He’d also just implicitly identified the biggest problem in the intelligence business. Too much data, too little analytical time. The best play would be to fake an inquiry to CIA from NSA and to NSA from CIA, asking for some thoughts on this particular issue. But they had to be careful with that. Requests for data happened a million times a day, and, due to the volume, they were never, ever checked—the comm link was secure, after all, wasn’t it? But asking for time from analysts could too easily result in a telephone call, which required both a number and a person to pick up the phone. That could lead to a leak, and leaks were the single thing The Campus could not afford. And so, inquiries of this kind went to the top floor. Maybe twice a year. The Campus was a parasite on the body of the intelligence community. Such creatures were not supposed to have a mouth for speaking, but only for sucking blood.
“Write your ideas up for Rick Bell, and he’ll discuss it with the Senator,” Wills advised.
THE EMIR took the news calmly. Uda had been a useful underling, but not an important one. He had many sources of money for his operations. He was tall for his ethnicity, not particularly handsome, with a Semitic nose and olive skin. His family was distinguished and very wealthy, though his brothers—he had nine—controlled most of the family money. His home in Riyadh was large and comfortable, but not a palace. Those he left to the Royal Family, whose numerous princelings paraded about as though each of them were the king of this land and protector of the Holy Places. The Royal Family, whose members he knew well, were objects of silent contempt for him, but his emotions were something buried within his soul.
In his youth, he’d been more demonstrative. He’d come to Islam in his early teens, inspired by a very conservative imam whose preachings had eventually gotten him into trouble, but who had inspired a raft of followers and spiritual children. The Emir was merely the cleverest of the lot. He, too, had spoken his mind, and as a result been sent off to England for his education—really to get him out of the country—but in England, in addition to learning the ways of the world, he’d been exposed to something entirely alien. Freedom of speech and expression. In London, it is mostly celebrated at Hyde Park Corner, a tradition of spleen venting that dates back hundred of years, sort of a safety valve for the British population, and which, like a safety value, merely vents troublesome thoughts into the air without letting them take much hold anywhere. Had he gone to America, it would have been the radical press. But what had struck him as hard as the arrival of a spaceship from Mars was that people were able to challenge the government in any terms they pleased. He’d grown up in one of the world’s last absolute monarchies, where the very soil of the nation belonged to the king, and the law was what the reigning monarch said it was—subject in name if not in substance to the Koran and the Shar’ia, the Islamic legal traditions which dated back to the Prophet himself. These laws were fair—or at least consistent—but very stern indeed. The problem was that not everyone agreed about the words of the Koran, and therefore about how the Shar’ia applied to the physical world. Islam had no pope, no real philosophical hierarchy as other religions understood the concept, and therefore no cohesive standard of application to reality. The Shi’a and the Sunni were often—always—at each other’s throats over that question, and even within Sunni Islam, the Wahabis—the principal sect of the Kingdom—adhered to a stern belief system indeed. But for the Emir this very apparent weakness of Islam was its most useful attribute. One only had to convert a few individual Muslims to his particular belief system, which was remarkably easy, since you didn’t have to go looking for those people. They identified themselves virtually to the point of advertising their identities. And most of them were people educated in Europe or America, where their foreign origin forced them to cleave together just to maintain a comfortable intellectual place of self-identity, and so they built upon a foundation of outsiderness that had led many of them to a revolutionary ethos. That was particularly useful, since along the way they’d acquired a knowledge of the enemy’s culture that was vital in targeting his weaknesses. The religious conversions of these people had largely been preinstalled, as it were. After that, it was just a matter of identifying their objects of hatred—that is, the people to be blamed for their youthful discontent—and then deciding how to do away with their self-generated enemies, one at a time, or as a grand coup de main, which appealed to their sense of drama, if not their scant understanding of reality.
And at the end of it, the Emir, as his associates had taken to calling him, would be the new Mahdi, the ultimate arbiter of all of the global Islamic movement. The intra-religious disputes (Sunnis and Shi’a, for example) he planned to handle through a sweeping fatwa, or religious pronouncement of tolerance—that would look admirable even to his enemies. And, after all, weren’t there a hundred or more Christian sects who had largely ended their own internal strife? He could even reserve to himself tolerance of the Jews, though he would have to save that for later years, after he had settled into the seat of ultimate power, probably with a palace of suitable humility outside the city of Mecca. Humility was a useful virtue for the head of a religious movement, for as the pagan Thucydides had proclaimed, even before the Prophet, of all manifestations of power, that which most impresses men is restraint.
It was the tallest of orders, the thing he wanted to accomplish. It would require time and patience, and its success was hardly guaranteed. It was his misfortune that he had to depend upon zealots, each of whom had a brain, and the consequent strong opinions. Such people could, conceivably, turn on him and seek to replace him with religious outlooks of their own. They might even believe their own concepts—they might be true zealots, as the Prophet Mohammed had been, but Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, had been the most honorable of men, and had fought a good and honorable fight against pagan idolaters, while his own effort was mainly within the community of Faithful. Was he, then, an honorable man? A difficult question. But didn’t Islam need to be brought into the current world, and not remain trapped in antiquity? Did Allah desire His Faithful to be prisoners of the seventh century? Certainly not. Islam had once been the center of human scholarship, a religion of advancement and learning that had, sadly, lost its way at the hands of the great Khan, and then been oppressed by the infidels of the West. The Emir did believe in the Holy Koran, and the teachings of the imans, but he was not blind to the world around him. Nor was he blind to the facts of human existence. Those who had power guarded it jealously, and religion had little to do with that, because power was a narcotic all its own. And people needed something—preferably someone—to follow if they were to advance. Freedom, as the Europeans and Americans understood the concept, was too chaotic—he’d learned that at Hyde Park Corner, too. There had to be order. He was the man to provide it.
So, Uda bin Sali was dead, he thought, taking a sip of juice. A great misfortune for Uda, but a minor irritation to the Organization. The Organization had access to, if not a sea of money, then a number of comfortably large lakes, a small one of which Uda had managed. A glass of orange juice had fallen off the table, but thankfully it had not stained the carpet under it. It required no action on his part, even at second hand.
“Ahmed, this is sad news, but not a matter of great importance to us. No action need be taken.”
“It shall be as you say,” Ahmed Musa Matwalli responded respectfully. He killed his phone. It was a cloned phone, bought from a street thief for that one purpose, and then he tossed it into the river Tevere—the Tiber—off the Ponte Sant’Angelo. It was a standard security measure for speaking with the great commander of the Organization, whose identity was known to but a few, all of whom were among the most faithful of the Believers. At the higher echelons, security was tight. They all studied various manuals for intelligence officers. The best had been bought from a former KGB officer, who had died after the sale, for so it had been written. Its rules were simple and clear, and they did not deviate from them a dot. Others had been careless, and they’d all paid for their foolishness. The former USSR had been a hated enemy, but its minions had never been fools. Only unbelievers. America, the Great Satan, had done the entire world a favor by destroying that abortion of a nation. They’d done it only for their own benefit, of course, but that, too, must have been written by the Hand of God, because it had also served the interests of the Faithful, for what man could plot better
than Allah Himself?
CHAPTER 19
BEER AND HOMICIDE
THE FLIGHT into Munich was silky smooth. German customs were formal but efficient, and a Mercedes-Benz cab took them to the Hotel Bayerischer.
Their current subject was somebody named Anas Ali Atef, reportedly an Egyptian by nationality, and a civil engineer by education, if not by profession. Five feet nine inches or so, 145 pounds, clean-shaven. Black hair and dark brown eyes, supposed to be skilled at unarmed combat and a good man with a gun, if he had one. He was thought to be a courier for the opposition, and also worked to recruit talent—one of whom, for certain, had been shot dead in Des Moines, Iowa. They had an address and a photo on their laptops. He drove an Audi TT sports car, painted battleship gray. They even had the tag number. Problem: He was living with a German national named Trudl Heinz, and was supposedly in love with her. There was a photo of her, too. Not exactly a Victoria’s Secret model, but not a skank, either—brown hair and blue eyes, five feet three inches, 120 pounds. Cute smile. Too bad, Dominic thought, that she had questionable taste in men, but that was not his problem.
Anas worshipped regularly at one of the few mosques in Munich, which was conveniently located a block from his apartment building. After checking in and changing their clothes, Dominic and Brian caught a cab to that location and found a very nice Gasthaus—a bar and grill—with outside tables from which to observe the area.
“Do all Europeans like to sit on the sidewalk and eat?” Brian wondered.
“Probably easier than going to the zoo,” Dominic said.
The apartment house was four stories, proportioned like a cement block, painted white with a flat but strangely barnlike roof. There was a remarkably clean aspect to it, as though it was normal in Germany for everything to be as pristine as a Mayo Clinic operating room, but that was hardly cause for criticism. Even the cars here were not as dirty as they tended to be in America.