by Tom Clancy
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 particularly 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.
They needed three body bags to collect the body. An inspector from the transit authority arrived to question the motorman, whom the police already had in hand, of course. All in all, it took about an hour to remove the body, inspect the streetcar, and clear the road. It was done rather efficiently, in fact, and by 12:30 everything was back in Ordnung.
Except for Mahmoud Mohamed Fadhil, who had to go to his hotel and light up his computer to send an e-mail to Mohammed Hassan al-Din, now in Rome, for instructions.
By that time, Dominic was on his own computer, composing an e-mail for The Campus to tell them of the day's work, and ask for instructions on the next assignment.
CHAPTER 22
SPANISH STEPS
"You're kidding," Jack said at once.
"God, grant me a dumb adversary," Brian responded. "That's one prayer they teach at the Basic School. Trouble is, sooner or later they're going to
get smart."
"Like crooks," Dominic agreed. "The problem with law enforcement is that we generally catch the dumb ones. The smart ones we rarely even hear about. That's why it took so long to do the Mafia, and they're not really all that smart. But, yeah, it's a Darwinian process, and we'll be helping to breed brains into them one way or another."
"News from home?" Brian asked.
"Check the time. They won't even be getting in for another hour," Jack explained. "So, the guy really got run over?"
Brian nodded. He'd gone down and been run over like the official Mississippi state animal — a squashed dog on the road. "By a streetcar. Good news is that it covered up the mess." Tough luck, Mr. Raghead.
* * *
It wasn't even a mile to the St. Elizabeth's Krankenhaus on Invalidenstrasse, where the ambulance crew carried in the body parts. They'd called ahead, and so there was no particular surprise at the three rubberized bags. These were duly laid on a table in pathology — there was no point in their going to casualty receiving, because the cause of death was so obvious as to be blackly comical. The only hard part was to retrieve blood for a toxicology scan. The body had been so mauled as to be largely drained of blood, but internal organs — mainly the spleen and brain — had enough to be drawn out with a syringe and sent off to the lab, which would look for narcotics and/or alcohol. The only other thing to look for in the postmortem exam was a broken leg, but the passage of the streetcar over the body — they had his name and ID from his wallet, and the police were checking the local hotels to see if maybe he'd left a passport behind, so that the appropriate embassy could be notified — meant that even a broken knee would be almost impossible to discover. Both of his legs had been totally crushed in a matter of less than three seconds. The only surprising thing was that his face was placid. One would have expected open eyes and a grimace of pain from the death, but, then, even traumatic death had few hard-and-fast rules, as the pathologist knew. There was little point in doing an in-depth examination. Maybe if he'd been shot they could find a bullet wound, but there was no reason to suspect that. The police had already talked to seventeen eyewitnesses who'd been within thirty meters of the event. All in all, the pathology report could just as easily have been a form letter as a signed official document.
* * *
"Jesus," Granger observed. "How the hell did they arrange that?" Then he lifted his phone. "Gerry? Come on down. Number three is in the bag. You have to see this report." After replacing the phone, he thought aloud, "Okay, now where do we send them next?"
That was settled on a different floor. Tony Wills was copying all of Ryan's downloads, and the one at the top of the download file was impressive in its bloody brevity. So, he lifted his phone for Rick Bell.
* * *
It was hardest of all for Max Weber. It took half an hour for the initial denial and shock to wear off. He started vomiting, his eyes replaying the sight of the crumpled body sliding below his field of vision, and the horrible thump-thump of his streetcar. It hadn't been his fault, he told himself. That fool, das Idiot, had just fallen down right before him, like a drunk might do, except it was far too early for a man to have too many beers. He'd had accidents before, mostly fender work on cars that had turned too abruptly in front of him. But he'd never seen and hardly heard of a fatal accident with a streetcar. He'd killed a man. He, Max Weber, had taken a life. It was not his fault, he told himself about once a minute for the next two hours. His supervisor gave him the rest of the day off, and so he clocked out and drove home in his Audi, stopping at a Gasthaus a block from his home because he didn't want to drink alone this day.
* * *
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.