by Tom Clancy
“He’s too junior.” But Hendley knew he was losing this one.
“Who isn’t, Gerry? If we had any guys available with experience in this line of work, we would have put ’em on the payroll.”
“If this blows up—”
“Then I go up in smoke. I know that. Can I watch some TV now?”
“See you tomorrow,” Hendley said.
“’Night, buddy.”
HONEYBEAR WAS surfing the ’Net, chatting with somebody named Elsa K 69, who said she was twenty-three years old, 160 centimeters in height, and fifty-four kilograms in weight, with decent but not exceptional measurements, brown hair, blue eyes, and a nasty, inventive mind. She also had good typing skills. In fact, though Fa’ad had no way of knowing it, it was a man, fifty years old, half drunk and rather lonely. They chatted in English. The “girl” on the other end said “she” was a secretary in London. It was a city the Austrian accountant knew well.
“She” was real enough for Fa’ad, who soon got deeply into the perverse fantasy. It wasn’t as good as a real woman by a long shot, but Fa’ad was careful about indulging his passions in Europe. You never knew if the woman you rented might be someone from the Mossad, who’d be just as happy to cut it off as to take it inside. He didn’t fear death much, but like all men he did fear pain. In any case, the fantasy lasted almost half an hour, which left him sated enough to take note of the “handle” in case “she” showed up again. He could not know that the Tyrolean accountant made a similar notation in his Buddy File before retiring to a cold and lonely bed.
WHEN JACK woke up, the window blinds were raised to reveal the purple-gray of mountains about twenty thousand feet below. His watch showed that he’d been aboard about eight hours, and had probably slept for six of them. Not too bad. He had a mild headache from the wine, but the wake-up coffee was good, as was the pastry, which combined to get him semi-awake as Flight 94 cruised in for landing.
The airport was hardly a large one, considering it was the flagship port of entry for a sovereign country, but Austria had about the same population as New York City, which had three airports. The aircraft thumped down, and the captain welcomed them all to his homeland, telling them that the local time was 9:05 A.M. So, he’d have one day of heavy jet lag to deal with, but with luck maybe he’d be approximately okay tomorrow.
He cleared immigration easily—the flight had only been about half full—recovered his bags and headed outside for a cab.
“Hotel Imperial, please.”
“Where?” the driver asked.
“Hotel Imperial,” Ryan repeated.
The driver thought for a moment. “Ach so, Hotel Imperial , ja?”
“Das ist richtig,” Junior assured him, and sat back to enjoy the ride. He had a hundred Euros, and assumed that would be enough, unless this guy had attended the New York City school of taxi driving. In any case, there’d be ATM machines on the street.
The drive took half an hour, fighting the rush-hour traffic. A block or two from the hotel, he passed a Ferrari dealership, which was something new for him—he’d seen Ferraris only on TV before, and wondered, as all young men wonder, what it might be like to drive one.
The hotel staff greeted him like an arriving prince, and delivered him to a fourth-floor suite whose bed looked very inviting indeed. He immediately ordered breakfast and unpacked. Then he remembered why he was here, and picked up the phone, asking for a connection with Dominic Caruso’s room.
“HELLO?” It was Brian. Dom was in the gold-encrusted shower.
“Hey, cuz, it’s Jack,” he heard.
“Jack who—wait a minute, Jack?”
“I’m upstairs, Marine. Just flew in an hour ago. Come on up, so we can talk.”
“Right. Give me ten minutes,” Brian said, and headed into the bathroom. “Enzo, you ain’t gonna believe who’s upstairs.”
“Who?” Dominic asked, toweling himself off.
“Let it be a surprise, man.” Brian went back to the sitting room, not sure whether to laugh or barf as he read the International Herald Tribune.
“YOU GOTTA be fucking kidding,” Dominic breathed as the door opened.
“You ought to see it from my side, Enzo,” Jack answered. “Come on in.”
“Food’s good in Motel 6, isn’t it?” Brian observed, following his brother.
“Actually, I prefer Holiday Inn Express. I need to pick up a Ph.D. for my curriculum vitae, y’know?” Jack laughed and waved them to the chairs. “I got extra coffee.”
“They do it well here. I see you discovered the croissants.” Dominic poured himself a cup and stole a pastry. “Why the hell did they send you?”
“I guess because you both know me.” Junior buttered his second. “Tell you what. Let me finish breakfast and we can take a walk down to the Ferrari dealership and talk about it. How do you like Vienna?”
“Just got here yesterday afternoon, Jack,” Dominic informed him.
“I didn’t know that. I gather you had a productive time in London, though.”
“Not bad,” Brian answered. “Tell you about it later.”
“Right.” Jack continued his breakfast while Brian went back to his International Trib. “They’re still excited at home about the shootings. Had to take my shoes off at the airport. Good thing I had clean socks. Looks like they’re trying to see if anybody’s trying to leave town in a hurry.”
“Yeah, that was pretty damned bad, man,” Dominic observed. “Anybody you know get clobbered?”
“No, thank God. Even Dad didn’t, with all the people he knows in the investment crowd. What about you guys?”
Brian gave him a funny look. “Nobody we knew, no.” He hoped that little David Prentiss’s soul would not be offended.
Jack finished the last croissant. “Let me shower and you guys can show me around.”
Brian finished the paper and turned the TV on to CNN—the only American station the Imperial had—to check on the news at 0500 in New York. The last of the victims had been buried the previous day, and the reporters were asking the bereaved how they felt about their loss. What a dumbass question! the Marine raged. You were supposed to leave twisting the knife to the bad guys. And politicians were ranting on about What America Has to Do.
Well, Brian thought, we’re doing it for you, guys. But if they found out, they’d probably foul their silk drawers. But that just made him feel better about it. Somebody had to play a little catch-up ball, and that was his job now.
AT THE Bristol, Fa’ad was just waking up. He, too, had ordered coffee and pastry. He was scheduled to meet a fellow courier the next day to receive a message that he’d then pass on in due course. The Organization operated with great security for its important communications. The really serious messages were all passed exclusively by word of mouth. The couriers knew only their incoming and outgoing counterparts, so that they were organized in cells of three only, another lesson learned from the dead KGB officer. The inbound courier was Mahmoud Mohamed Fadhil, who’d be arriving from Pakistan. Such a system could be broken, but only through painstaking and lengthy police work, which was easily foiled if only one man removed himself from the ratline. The trouble was that the unexpected removal of a rat from the line could prevent a message from reaching its destination entirely, but that had not yet happened, and was not expected to. It was not a bad life for Fa’ad. He traveled a lot, always first-class, resided only in top-of-the-line hostelries, and, all in all, it was rather comfortable. He occasionally felt guilty for this. Others did what he thought were the dangerous and admirable things, but on taking the job he’d been briefed that the organization could not function without him and his eleven comrades, which was good for his morale. So was the knowledge that his function, while of great importance, was also quite safe. He received messages and passed them on, often to the operatives themselves, all of whom treated him with great respect, as though he had originated the mission instructions himself, of which he did not disabuse them. So, in two days, he’d rece
ive more orders for transfer, whether to his nearest geographic colleague—Ibrahim Salih al-Adel, home-based in Paris—or to an operative currently unknown. Today he would find out, and make such communications as were necessary, and act upon developments. The job could be both boring and exciting at the same time, and with the comfortable hours and zero risk to his person, it was easy to be a hero of the movement, as he sometimes allowed himself to think of himself.
THEY WALKED east on Kartner Ring, which almost at once angled northeast and changed its name to Schubertring. On the north side of it was the Ferrari dealership.
“So, how are you guys doing?” Jack asked, out in the open, and with the traffic noise beyond the reach of any possible tapping device.
“Two down. One more to go, right here in Vienna, then off somewhere else, wherever it is. I kinda thought you would know,” Dominic said.
Jack shook his head. “Nope. I haven’t been briefed on that.”
“Why did they send you?” This one came from Brian.
“I’m supposed to give you second guesses, I think. Back you up on the intel side and be some sort of consultant. That’s what Granger told me, anyway. I know what happened in London. We got lots of inside stuff from the Brits—indirectly, that is. It was written off as a heart attack. Munich I do not know much about. What can you tell me?”
Dominic answered. “I got him coming out of church. He went down on the sidewalk. Ambulance arrived. The paramedics worked him over and carted him off to the hospital. All I know.”
“He’s dead. We caught that on an intercept,” Ryan told them. “He was accompanied by a guy named ‘Honeybear’ on the ’Net. Saw his buddy go down and reported it in to a guy with the handle Fifty-six MoHa, somewhere in Italy, we think. The Munich guy—his name was Atef—was a recruiter and courier. We know he recruited a shooter in the mess last week. So, you can be sure he earned his way onto the hit list.”
“We know. They told us that,” Brian said.
“How are you doing these people, exactly?”
“With this.” Dominic pulled his gold pen from the suit jacket pocket. “You swap the point out by twisting the nib and stick them, preferably in the ass. It injects a drug called succinylcholine, and that ruins the subject’s whole day. The drug metabolizes in the bloodstream even after death, and can’t be detected easily unless the pathologist’s a genius, and a lucky one at that.”
“Paralyzes them?”
“Yep. They collapse, and then they can’t breathe. Takes about thirty seconds for the drug to take hold, and then they drop down, and, after that, it’s just a matter of mechanics. It looks like a heart attack afterward, and it tests out like that, too. Perfect for what we do.”
“Damn,” Jack said. “So, you guys were in Charlottesville, too, eh?”
“Yeah.” This was Brian. “Not much fun. I had a little boy die in my arms, Jack. That was pretty tough.”
“Well, nice shooting.”
“They weren’t very smart,” Dominic evaluated them. “No smarter than street hoods. No training. They didn’t check their backs. I guess they figured they didn’t have to, with automatic weapons. But they learned different. Still, we were lucky—Son of a bitch!” he observed, as they got to the Ferraris.
“Damn. They are pretty,” Jack agreed at once. Even Brian was impressed.
“That’s the old one,” Dominic told them. “575M, V-twelve, five hundred-plus horses, six-speed transmission, two hundred twenty big ones to drive it away. The really cool one’s the Ferrari Enzo. That baby’s the fucking bomb, guys. Six hundred sixty horses. They even named it after me. See, back in the far corner.”
“How much?” Junior asked.
“The far side of six hundred thousand bucks. But if you want to get something hotter, you gotta call Lockheed Bur-bank.” And sure enough, the car had twin openings on the front that looked like jet intakes. The entire machine looked like personal transportation for Luke Skywalker’s rich uncle.
“Still knows his cars, eh?” Jack observed. A private jet probably got better mileage, too, but the car was sleekly pretty.
“He’d rather sleep with a Ferrari than with Grace Kelly,” Brian snorted. His own priorities were rather more conventional, of course.
“You can ride a car longer than a girl, people.” Which was one version of efficiency. “Damn, I bet that honey moves pretty fast.”
“You could get a private pilot’s license,” Jack suggested.
Dominic shook his head. “Nah. Too dangerous.”
“Son of a bitch.” Jack almost laughed out loud. “As compared with what you’ve been doing?”
“Junior, I’m used to that, y’know?”
“You say so, man.” Jack just shook his head. Damn, those were pretty cars. He liked his Hummer at home. In the snow he could drive anywhere, and he’d win any collision on the highway, and, if it wasn’t exactly sporty, what the hell? But the little boy in him could understand the list on his cousin’s face. If Maureen O’Hara had been born a car, maybe she’d be one of these. The red body color would have gone nicely with her hair. After ten minutes, Dominic figured he’d drooled enough, and they walked on.
“So, we know everything about the subject except for what he looks like?” Brian asked half a block up the street.
“Correct,” Jack confirmed. “But how many Arabs do you expect there to be in the Bristol?”
“A lot of them in London. Trick is going to be to ID the subject. Doing the job right on the sidewalk ought not to be too hard.” And, looking around, that seemed likely. Street traffic wasn’t as thick as in New York or London, but it wasn’t Kansas City after dark either, and doing the job in broad daylight had its own attractions. “I guess we stake out the hotel’s main entrance, and whatever side entrance there is. Can you see if you can get more data from The Campus?”
Jack checked his watch and did the mental arithmetic. “They should be open for business in two hours or so.”
“Then check your e-mail,” Dominic told him. “We’ll wander around and look for a likely subject.”
“Right.” They walked across the street and headed back to the Imperial. Once back in his room, Jack flopped onto the bed and grabbed a nap.
THERE WAS nothing he had to do right now, Fa’ad thought, so he might as well get some air. Vienna had plenty of things to look at, and he hadn’t exhausted them all yet. So, he dressed properly, like a businessman, and walked outside.
“BINGO, ALDO.” Dominic had a cop’s memory for faces, and they had practically walked into this one.
“Isn’t he—”
“Yep. Atef’s pal from Munich. You wanna bet he’s our boy?”
“Sucker bet, bro.” Dominic cataloged the target. Middle Eastern as hell, medium height, five feet ten inches or so, light build at about hundred fifty pounds, black and brown, slightly Semitic nose, dresses well and expensively, like a businessman, walks around with purpose and confidence. They walked within ten feet of him, careful not to stare, even with their sunglasses. Gotcha, sucker. Whoever these people were, they didn’t know dick about hiding in plain sight. They walked to the corner.
“Damn, that was easy enough,” Brian observed. “Now what?”
“We let Jack check it out with the home office and just be cool, Aldo.”
“Roger, copy that, bro.” He unconsciously checked his coat to make sure the gold pen was in place, as he might have checked his holster for his M9 Beretta automatic in uniform and in the field. It felt as though he were an invisible lion in a Kenyan field full of wildebeest. It didn’t get much better than that. He could pick out the one he wanted to kill and eat, and the poor bastard didn’t even know he was being stalked. Just like they do it. He wondered if this guy’s colleagues would see the irony of having such tactics used against them. It wasn’t how Americans were conditioned to act, but then all that stuff about showdowns on main street at high noon was something invented by Hollywood, anyway. A lion was not in the business of risking his life, and as they�
�d told him in the Basic School, if you found yourself in a fair fight, then you hadn’t planned it very well beforehand. Fighting fair was okay in the Olympic Games, but this wasn’t that. No big-game hunter walked up to a lion making noise and holding a sword. Instead, he did the sensible thing: He took cover behind a log and did it with a rifle from two hundred yards or so. Even the Masai tribesmen of Kenya, for whom killing a lion was the passage into manhood, had the good sense to do it in a squad-sized unit of ten, and not all of them teenagers, to make sure it was the lion’s tail they took back to the kraal. It wasn’t about being brave. It was about being effective. Just being in this business was dangerous enough. You did your best to take every element of unnecessary risk out of the equation. It was business, not a sport. “Do him out here on the street?”
“Worked before, Aldo, didn’t it? I don’t figure we can hit him in the hotel saloon.”
“Roge-o, Enzo. Now what do we do?”
“Play tourist, I suppose. The opera house looks impressive. Let’s take a look.... The sign says they’re doing Wagner’s The Valkyries. I’ve never seen that one.”
“I’ve never seen an opera in my life. I suppose I ought to someday—part of the Italian soul, ain’t it?”
“Oh yeah, I got more soul than I can control, but I’m partial to Verdi.”
“My ass. When you been to the opera?”
“I have some of the CDs,” Dominic answered, with a smile. As it turned out, the State Opera House was a magnificent example of imperial architecture, built and executed as though for God Himself to attend a performance, and bedecked in scarlet and gold. Whatever its faults might have been, the House of Hapsburg had shown impressive taste. Dominic thought briefly about checking out the cathedrals in town, but decided it wasn’t fitting, given the reason they were here. In all, they walked around for two hours, then headed back to the hotel and up to Jack’s room.