by Tom Clancy
“NO JOY from the home office,” Jack told them.
“No problem. We saw the guy. He’s an old friend from Munich,” Brian reported. They walked into the bathroom and opened the faucets, which would put out enough white noise to annoy any microphones in the room. “He’s a pal of Mr. Atef. He was there when we popped him in Munich.”
“How can you be sure?”
“A hundred percent sure, we can’t be—but what are the odds that he just happened to be in both cities, and the right hotel, man?” Brian asked reasonably.
“Hundred percent certainty is better,” Jack objected.
“I agree, but when you’re on the right side of thousand-to-one odds, you put the money down and toss the dice,” Dominic responded. “By Bureau rules, he’s at least a known associate, somebody we’d take aside to interview. So, he probably isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross, y’know?” The agent paused. “Okay, it’s not perfect, but it’s the best we got, and I think it’s worth going with.”
It was gut-check time for Jack. Did he have the authority to give a go-no-go on this? Granger hadn’t said so. He was intel backup for the twins. But what, exactly, did that mean? Great. He had a job without a job description, and no assigned authority. This did not make much sense. He remembered his father saying once that headquarters people weren’t supposed to second-guess the troops out in the field, because the troops had eyes, and were supposed to be trained to think on their own. But in this case his training was probably at least as good as theirs. But he hadn’t seen the face of the supposed subject and they had. If he said no, they could just as easily tell him where to stick his opinion, and, since he had no power to enforce it, they’d win the day and he’d just stand around with his dick in his hand, wondering who was right on the call. The spook business was suddenly very unpredictable, and he was stuck in the middle of a swamp without a helicopter to lift his ass out.
“Okay, guys, it’s your call.” This seemed a lot like taking the coward’s way out to Jack, and even more so when he said, “I’d still feel better if we were a hundred percent sure.”
“So would I. But like I said, man, a thousand to one constitutes betting odds. Aldo?”
Brian thought it over and nodded. “It works for me. He looked very concerned over his pal in Munich. If he’s a good guy, he has funny friends. So, let’s do him.”
“Okay,” Jack breathed, bowing to the inevitable. “When?”
“As soon as convenient,” Brian responded. He and his brother would discuss tactics later, but Jack didn’t need to know about that.
HE WAS lucky, Fa’ad decided at 10:14 that night. He got an instant message from Elsa K 69, who evidently remembered him kindly.
WHAT SHALL WE DO TONIGHT? he asked “her.”
I’VE BEEN THINKING. IMAGINE WE ARE IN ONE OF THE K-LAGERS. I AM A JEWESS, AND YOU ARE THE KOMMAN-DANT . . . I DO NOT WISH TO DIE WITH THE REST, AND I OFFER YOU PLEASURE IN RETURN FOR MY LIFE...“she” proposed.
It could scarcely have been a more pleasant fantasy for him. GO AHEAD AND BEGIN, he typed.
And so it went for a while, until: PLEASE, PLEASE, I AM NOT AN AUSTRIAN. I AM AN AMERICAN MUSIC STUDENT TRAPPED BY THE WAR . . .
Better and better. OH, YES? I HAVE HEARD MUCH ABOUT AMERICAN JEWS AND THEIR WHORISH WAYS . . .
And so it went for nearly an hour. At the end, he sent her to the gas anyway. After all, what were Jews good for, really?
PREDICTABLY, Ryan couldn’t sleep. His body hadn’t yet acclimated to the shift of six time zones, despite the decent amount of sleep he’d had on the plane. How flight crews did it was a mystery to him, though he suspected they simply stayed synchronized to wherever they lived, disregarding wherever they happened to be at the time. But you have to stay constantly mobile to do that, and he wasn’t. So, he plugged in his computer and decided to Google his way into Islam. The only Muslim he knew was Prince Ali of Saudi Arabia, and he was not a maniac. He even got along well with Jack’s shy little sister, Katie, who found his neatly trimmed beard fascinating. He was able to download the Koran, and he started reading it. The holy book had forty-two suras, broken down into verses, just like his own Bible. Of course, he rarely looked at it, much less read it, because as a Catholic he expected the priests to tell him about the important parts, letting him skip all the work of reading about who the hell begat what the hell—maybe it had been interesting, and even fun, at the time, but not today, unless you were into genealogy, which wasn’t a subject of dinner-table conversation in the Ryan family. Besides, everyone knew that every Irishman was descended from a horse thief who’d skipped the country to avoid being hanged by the nasty English invaders. A whole collection of wars had come out of that, one of which had come within a whisker of preventing his own birth in Annapolis.
It was ten minutes later that he realized that the Koran was almost a word-for-word clone of what all the Jewish prophets had scribbled down, divinely inspired to do so, of course, because they said so. And so did this Mohammed guy. Supposedly, God talked to him, and he played executive secretary and wrote it all down. It was a pity there hadn’t been a video camera and tape recorder for all these birds, but there hadn’t, and, as a priest had explained to him at Georgetown, faith was faith, and either you believed as you were supposed to, or you didn’t.
Jack did believe in God, of course. His mom and dad had instructed him in the basics, and sent him through Catholic schools, and he’d learned the prayers and the rules, and he’d done First Communion, and Confession—now called “Reconciliation” in the kinder, gentler Church of Rome—and Confirmation. But he hadn’t seen the inside of a church for quite a while. It wasn’t that he was against the Church, just that he was grown up now, and maybe not going was a (dumb) way of showing Mom and Dad that he was able to make his own decisions about how he’d live his life, and that Mom and Dad couldn’t order him around anymore.
He noted that there was no place in the fifty pages he’d skimmed through that said anything about shooting innocent people so that you could screw the womenfolk among them in heaven. The penalty for suicide was right on the level with what Sister Frances Mary had explained in second grade. Suicide was a mortal sin you really wanted to avoid, because you couldn’t go to confession afterward to scrub it off your soul. Islam said that faith was good, but you couldn’t just think it. You had to live it, too. Bingo, as far as Catholic teaching went.
At the end of ninety minutes, it came to him—rather an obvious conclusion—that terrorism had about as much to do with the Islamic religion as it did with Catholic and Protestant Irishmen. Adolf Hitler, the biographers said, had thought of himself as a Catholic right up until the moment he’d eaten the gun—evidently, he’d never met Sister Frances Mary or he would have known better. But that bozo had obviously been crazy. So, if he was reading this right, Mohammed would probably have clobbered terrorists. He had been a decent, honorable man. Not all of his followers were the same way, though, and those were the ones he and the twins had to deal with.
Any religion could be twisted out of shape by the next crop of madmen, he thought, yawning, and Islam was just the next one on the list.
“Gotta read more of this,” he told himself on the way to the bed. “Gotta.”
FA’AD WOKE up at eight-thirty. He’d be meeting Mahmoud today, just down the street at the drugstore. From there, they’d take a cab somewhere—probably a museum—for the actual message transfer, and he’d learn what was supposed to happen, and what he’d have to do to make it so. It really was a pity that he didn’t have his own residence. Hotels were comfortable, especially the laundry service, but he was approaching his tolerance limit.
Breakfast came. He thanked the waiter and tipped him two Euros, then read the paper that sat on the wheeled table. Nothing of consequence seemed to be happening. There was a coming election in Austria, and each side was enthusiastically blackguarding the other, as the political game was played in Europe. It was a lot more predictable at home, and easier to underst
and. By nine in the morning, he had the TV turned on, and he found himself checking his watch with increasing frequency. These meetings always made him a little anxious. What if Mossad had identified him? The answer to that was clear enough. They’d kill him with no more thought than flicking at an insect.
OUTSIDE, DOMINIC and Brian were walking about, almost aimlessly, or so it might have seemed to a casual observer. The problem was, there were a few of those around. There was a magazine kiosk just by their hotel, and the Bristol had doormen. Dominic considered leaning against a lamppost and reading a paper, but that was one thing they’d told him in the FBI Academy never to do, because even spies had seen the movies where the actors were always doing that. And so, professional or not, realistic or not, the whole world was conditioned to be mindful of anyone who read a newspaper while leaning on a lamppost. Following a guy already outside without being spotted was child’s play compared to waiting for him to appear. He sighed, and kept walking.
Brian was thinking along the same lines. He thought about how cigarettes might help at moments like this. It gave you something to do, like in the movies, Bogart and his unfiltered coffin nails, which had eventually killed him. Bad luck, Bogie, Brian thought. Cancer must have been a bitch of a disease. He wasn’t exactly delivering the breath of spring to his subjects, but at least it didn’t last months. Just a few minutes, and the brain winked out. Besides, they had it coming in one way or another. Maybe they would not have agreed with that, but you had to be careful about the enemies you made. Not all of them would be dumb and defenseless sheep. And surprise was a bitch. The best thing to have on the battlefield, surprise. If you surprised the other guy, he didn’t have a chance to strike back, and that was just fine because this was business, not personal. Like a steer at the stockyards, he walked into a little room, and even if he looked up he’d just see the guy with the air hammer, and after that it was off to cattle heaven, where the grass was always green and the water sweet, and there weren’t any wolves around...
Your mind is wandering, Aldo, Brian thought to himself. Both sides of the street served his purpose just fine. So he crossed over and headed for the ATM machine directly across from the Bristol, took out his card, and punched in the code number, to be rewarded with five hundred Euros. Checked his watch: 10:53. Was this bird coming out? Had they missed him somehow?
Traffic had settled down. The red streetcars rumbled back and forth. People here minded their own business. They walked along without looking sideways, unless they were interested in something specific. No eye contact with strangers, no instinct to greet people at all. A stranger was supposed to stay that way, evidently. He appreciated it here even more than in Munich, just how in Ordnung these people were. You could probably eat dinner right off the floor in their houses, as long as you cleaned up the floor afterward.
Dominic had taken up position on the other side of the street, covering the direction to the opera house. There were only two ways for this character to go. Left or right. He could cross the street or not. No more options than that, unless he had a car coming to pick him up, in which case the mission was a washout. But tomorrow was always another day. 10:56, his watch said. He had to be careful, not look at the hotel’s entrance too much. Doing this made him feel vulnerable . . .
There—bingo! It was the subject, all right, dressed in a blue pin-striped suit and a maroon tie, like a guy going to an important business meeting. Dominic saw him, too, and turned to approach from the northwest. Brian waited to see what he was going to do.
FA’AD DECIDED to trick his arriving friend. He’d approach from across the street, just to be different, and so he crossed over, in the middle of the block, dodging the traffic. As a boy, he’d enjoyed entering the corral for his father’s horses and dodging among them. Horses had brains enough not to run into things unnecessarily, of course, more than could be said for some of the cars heading up Kartner Ring, but he got across safely.
THE ROAD here was curious, with one paved path like a private driveway, a thin grass median, then the road proper with its cars and streetcars, then another grass median, and the final car path before the opposite sidewalk. The subject darted across and started walking west, toward their hotel. Brian took up position ten feet behind and took out his pen, swapping out the point and checking visually to make sure he was ready.
MAX WEBER was a motorman who’d worked for the city transit authority for twenty-three years, driving his streetcar back and forth eighteen times per day, for which he was paid a comfortable salary for a workingman. He was now going north, leaving Schwartzenberg Platz, turning left just as the street changed from Rennweg into Schwartzenberg Strasse to go left on the Kartner Ring. The light was in his favor, and his eye caught the ornate Hotel Imperial, where all the rich foreigners and diplomats liked to stay. Then his eyes came back to the road. You couldn’t steer a streetcar, and it was the job of those in automobiles to keep out of his way. Not that he went very fast, hardly ever more than forty kilometers per hour, even out at the end of the line. It was not an intellectually demanding job, but he did it scrupulously, in accordance with the manual. The bell rang. Somebody needed to get off at the corner of Kartner and Wiedner Hauptstrasse.
THERE. THERE was Mahmoud. Looking the other way. Good, Fa’ad thought, maybe he could surprise his colleague, and have a joke for the day. He stopped on the sidewalk and scanned the miniroad for traffic before dashing across the street.
OKAY, RAGHEAD, Brian thought, closing the distance in just three steps and—
OUCH, FA’AD thought. It was quite literally a slight pain in the ass. He ignored it and kept going, cutting through a gap in the traffic on the street. There was a streetcar coming, but it was too far away to be a matter of concern. Traffic was not coming from his right, and so . . .
BRIAN JUST kept walking. He figured he’d go to the magazine stand. It would give him a good chance to turn and watch while he ostensibly made a purchase.
WEBER SAW the idiot making ready to dash across the tracks. Didn’t these fools know only to do that at the Ecke, where he had to stop for the red lights like everyone else? They taught children to do that at the Kindergarten. Some people thought their time was more valuable than gold, as though they were Franz Josef himself, risen from the hundred-year dead. He didn’t change his speed. Idiot or not, he’d get well clear of the tracks before—
—FA’AD FELT his right leg collapse under him. What was this? Then his left leg, and he was falling for no reason at all—and then other things started happening faster than he could understand them, and as though from an outside vantage point he saw himself falling down—and there was a streetcar . . . coming!
MAX REACTED a little too slowly. He could hardly believe what his eyes told him. But it could not be denied. He tromped his foot down on the brakes, but the fool was less than two meters away, and—lieber Gott!
The streetcar had a pair of bars running horizontally under its nose to prevent exactly this, but they hadn’t been checked in several weeks, and Fa’ad was a slender man—slender enough that his feet slid right under the safe bars and his body then pushed them vertically upward and out of the way—
—and Max felt the dreadful thump-thump of his passage over the man’s body. Somebody would call for an ambulance, but they would be far better off calling a priest. This poor schlemiel would not ever get to where he was going, the fool, saving time at the cost of his life. The fool!
ACROSS THE street, Mahmoud turned just in time to see his friend die. His eyes imagined more than saw the streetcar jump upward, as though to avoid killing Fa’ad, and just that fast his world changed, as Fa’ad’s world ended for all time to be.
“JESUS,” BRIAN thought, twenty yards away, holding a magazine in his hands. That poor fucker hadn’t lived long enough to die of the poison. He saw that Enzo had moved down the opposite side of the street, perhaps figuring to pop him if and when he’d gotten across, but the succinylcholine had worked as advertised. He’d just picked a partic
ularly bad place to collapse. Or a lucky one, depending on your point of view. He took the magazine and crossed the street. There was an Arab-looking guy by the drugstore whose face was even more upset than the citizens around him. There were screams, a lot of hands to mouths, and, damned sure, it was not a pretty sight, though the streetcar had stopped directly over the body.
“Somebody’s going to have to hose down the street,” Dominic said quietly. “Nice pop, Aldo.”
“Well, I guess a five-point-six from the East German judge. Let’s get moving.”
“Roger that, bro.”
And they headed right, past the cigarette store, toward Schwartzenberg Platz.
Behind them there was a little screaming from the women, while the men took it all more soberly, with many turning away. There was not a thing to be done. The doorman at the Imperial darted inside to summon an ambulance and the Feuerwehr. They took about ten minutes to arrive. The firemen got there first, and for them the grim sight was immediate and decisive. His whole blood supply, so it seemed, had spilled out, and there was no saving him. The police were there, too, and a police captain, who’d arrived from his station on nearby Friedrichstrasse, told Max Weber to back his streetcar off the body. It revealed much—and little. The body had been chopped into four irregular pieces, as though ripped apart by a predatory creature from prehistory. The ambulance, which had come, was stopped not quite in the middle of the street—the street cops were waving the cars along, but the drivers and passengers took the time to look at the carnage, with half of them staring with grim fascination and the other half turning away in horror and disgust. Even some reporters were there, with their cameras and notepads—and Minicams for the TV scribblers.