by Tom Clancy
"So, we can read their mail?" Dominic asked.
"Some of it," Jack confirmed. "The Campus downloads most of what NSA gets at Fort Meade, and when they cross-deck it to CIA for analysis, we intercept that. It's less complicated than it sounds."
Dominic figured a lot out in a matter of seconds. "Fuck…" he breathed, looking up at the high ceiling in Jack's suite. "No wonder…" A pause. "No more beers, Aldo. We're driving to Rome." Brian nodded.
"Don't have room for a third, right?" Jack asked.
"'Fraid not, Junior, not in a 911."
"Okay, I'll catch a plane to Rome." Jack walked to the phone and called downstairs. Within ten minutes, he was booked on an Alitalia 737 to Leonardo da Vinci International, leaving in an hour and a half. He considered changing his socks. If there was anything in life that incurred his loathing, it was taking his shoes off in an airport. He was packed in a few minutes and out the door, stopping only to thank the concierge on the way out. A Mercedes taxi hustled him out of town.
Dominic and Brian had hardly unpacked at all and were ready to go in ten minutes. Dom called the valet while Brian went back to the outside magazine kiosk and got plastic-coated maps to cover the route south and west. Between that and the Euros he'd picked up earlier in the day, he figured they were set, assuming Enzo didn't drive them off an Alp. The ugly-blue Porsche arrived at the front of the hotel, and he came over as the doorman forced their bags in the tiny forward-sited trunk. In another two minutes, he was head-down in the maps looking for the quickest way to the Sudautobahn.
* * *
Jack got aboard the Boeing after enduring the humiliation that was now a global cost of flying commercial — it was more than enough to make him think back to Air Force One with nostalgia, though he also remembered that he'd gotten used to the comfort and attention with remarkable speed, and only later learned what normal people had to go through, which was like running into a brick wall. For the moment, he had hotel accommodations to worry about. How to do that from an airplane? There was a pay phone attached to his first-class seat, and so he swiped his black card down the plastic receiver and made his first ever attempt to conquer European telephones. What hotel? Well, why not the Excelsior? On his second attempt, he got through to the front desk and learned that, indeed, they had several rooms available. He bagged a small suite, and feeling very good about himself, he took a glass of Tuscan white from the friendly stewardess. Even a hectic life, he'd learned, could be a good life, if you knew what your next step was, and for the moment his horizon was one step away at a time.
* * *
German highway engineers must have taught the Austrians everything they knew, Dominic thought. Or maybe the smart ones had all read the same book. In any case, the road was not unlike the concrete ribbons that crisscrossed America, except that the signage was so different as to be incomprehensible, mainly because it had no language except for city names — and they were foreign, too. He figured out that a black number on a white background inside a red circle was the speed limit, but that was in kilometers, three of which fitted into two miles with parking room left over. And the Austrian speed limits were not quite as generous as the German ones. Maybe they didn't have enough doctors to fix all the screwups, but, even in the growing hills, the curves were properly banked and the shoulders gave you enough bailout room in case somebody got seriously confused with left and right. The Porsche had a cruise control, and he pegged his to five klicks over the posted limit, just to have the satisfaction of going a little too fast. He couldn't be sure that his FBI ID would get him out of a ticket here, as it did all across the U.S. of A.
"How far, Aldo?" he asked the navigator in the Death Seat.
"Looks like a little over a thousand kilometers from where we are now. Call it ten hours, maybe."
"Hell, that's just warming-up time. May need gas in another two hours or so. How you fixed for cash?"
"Seven hundred Monopoly bucks. You can spend these in Italy, too, thank God — with the old lira you went nuts doing the math. Traffic ain't bad," Brian observed.
"No, and it's well behaved," Dominic agreed. "Good maps?"
"Yeah, all the way down. In Italy, we'll need another one for Rome."
"Okay, ought not to be too hard." And Dominic thanked a merciful God that he had a brother who could read maps. "When we stop for gas, we can get something to eat."
"Roger that, bro." Brian looked up to see mountains in the distance — no way to tell how far off they were, but it must have been a forbidding sight back when people walked or rode horses to get around. They must have had a lot more patience than modern man, or maybe a lot less sense. For the moment, the seat was comfortable, and his brother was not quite being maniacal in his driving.
* * *
The Italians turned out good airplane drivers in addition to good people for race cars. The pilot positively kissed the runway, and the rollout was as welcome as always. He'd flown too much to be as antsy about it as his father had once been, but, like most people, he felt safer walking or traveling on something he could see. Here also he found Mercedes taxicabs, and a driver who spoke passable English and knew the way to the hotel.
Highways look much the same all over the world, and for a moment Jack wondered where the hell he was. The land outside the airport looked agricultural, but the pitch of the roofs was different than at home. Evidently, it didn't snow much here, they were so shallow. It was late spring, and it was warm enough that he could wear a short-sleeve shirt, but it wasn't oppressive in any way. He'd come to Italy with his father once on official business — an economic meeting of some sort, he thought — but he'd been ridden around by an embassy car all the time. It was fun to pretend to be a prince of the realm, but you didn't learn to navigate that way, and all that stood out in his memory were the places he'd seen. He didn't know a single thing about how the hell he'd gotten there. This was the city of Caesar and a lot of other names that identified people whom history remembered for having done things good and bad. Mostly bad, because that was how history worked. And that, he reminded himself, was why he was in town. A good reminder, really, that he was not the arbiter of good and bad in the world, just a guy working backhandedly for his country, and so the authority to make such a decision did not rest entirely on his shoulders. Being president, as his father had been for just over four years, could not have been a fun job, despite all the power and importance that came with it. With power came responsibility in direct proportion, and if you had a conscience, that had to wear pretty hard on you. There was comfort in just doing things other people thought necessary. And, Jack reminded himself, he could always say no, and while there might be consequences, they would not be all that severe. Not as severe as the things he and his cousins were doing, anyway.
Via Vittorio Veneto looked more business than touristy. The trees on the sides were rather lame looking. The hotel was, surprisingly, not a tall building at all. Nor did it have an ornate entrance. Jack paid off the cabdriver and went inside, with the doorman bringing his bags. The inside was a celebration of woodwork, and the staff were welcoming as they could be. Perhaps this was an Olympic sport at which all Europeans excelled, but someone led him to his room. There was air-conditioning, and the cool air in the suite was welcoming indeed.
"Excuse me, what's your name?" he asked the bellman.
"Stefano," the man replied.
"Do you know if there is a man named Hawkins here — Nigel Hawkins?"
"The Englishman? Yes, he is three doors away, right down the corridor. A friend?"
"He's a friend of my brother's. Please don't say anything to him. Perhaps I can surprise him," Jack suggested, handing him a twenty-Euro note.
"Of course, signore."
"Very good. Thank you."
"Prego," Stefano responded, and walked back to the lobby.
This had to be dumb operational art, Jack told himself, but if they didn't have a photo of the bird, they had to get some idea of what he looked like. With that done, he
lifted the phone and tried to make a call.
* * *
"You have an incoming call," Brian's phone started saying in low tones, repeating itself three times before he fished it out of his coat pocket.
"Yeah." Who the hell was calling him? he wondered.
"Aldo, it's Jack. Hey, I'm in the hotel — the Hotel Excelsior. Want me to see if I can get you guys some rooms here? It's pretty nice. I think you guys would like it here."
"Hold on." He set the phone down in his lap. "You'll never believe where Junior's checked in to." He didn't have to identify it.
"You're kidding," Dominic responded.
"Nope. He wants to know if he should get us a reservation. What do I tell him?"
"Damn…" Some quick thought. "Well, he's our intel backup, isn't he?"
"Sounds a little too obvious to me, but if you say so" — he picked the phone back up—"Jack, that's affirmative, buddy."
"Great. Okay, I'll set it up. Unless I call back and say no, you come on in here."
"Roger that one, Jack. See ya."
"Bye," Brian heard, and hit the kill button. "You know, Enzo, this doesn't sound real smart to me."
"He's there. He's on the scene, and he's got eyes. We can always back out if we have to."
"Fair enough, I guess. Map says we're coming up on a tunnel in about five miles." The clock on the dash said 4:05. They were making good time, but heading straight at a mountain just past the town or city of Badgastein. Either they needed a tunnel or a big team of goats to clear that hill.
* * *
Jack lit up his computer. It took him ten minutes to figure out how to use the phone system for that purpose, but he finally got logged on, to find his mailbox brimming with bits and bytes targeted at him. There was an attaboy from Granger for the completed mission in Vienna, though he hadn't had a thing to do with it. But below that was an assessment from Bell and Wills on 56MoHa. For the most part, it was disappointing. Fifty-six was an operations officer for the bad guys. He either did things or planned things, and one of the things he'd probably done or planned had gotten a lot of people killed in four shopping malls back at home, and so this bastard needed to meet God. There were no specifics about what he'd done, how he'd been trained, how capable he was, or whether or not he was known to carry a gun, all of which was information he'd like to see, but after reading the decrypted e-mails he reencrypted them and saved them in his ACTION folder to go over with Brian and Dom.
* * *
The tunnel was like something in a video game. It went on and on to infinity, though at least the traffic inside wasn't piled up in a fiery mass as had happened a few years before in the Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Switzerland. After a period of time that seemed to last half of forever, they came out the other side. It looked to be downhill from here.
"Gas plaza ahead," Brian reported. Sure enough, there was an ELF sign half a mile away, and the Porsche's tank needed filling.
"Gotcha. I could use a stretch and a piss." The service plaza was pretty clean by American standards, and the eatery was different, without the Burger King or Roy Rogers you expected in Virginia — the men's room plumbing was all in Ordnung, however — and the gas was sold by the liter, which well disguised the price until Dominic did the mental arithmetic: "Jesus, they really charge for this stuff!"
"Company card, man," Brian said soothingly, and tossed over a pack of cookies. "Let's boogie, Enzo. Italy awaits."
"Fair enough." The six-cylinder engine purred back to life, and they went back on the road.
"Good to stretch your legs," Dominic observed as he went to his top gear.
"Yeah, it helps," Brian agreed. "Four hundred fifty miles to go, if my addition's right."
"Walk in the park. Call it six hours, if the traffic's okay." He adjusted his sunglasses and shook his shoulders some. "Staying in the same hotel with our subject — damn."
"I've been thinking. He doesn't know dick about us, maybe doesn't even know he's being hunted. Think about it: two heart attacks, one in front of a witness; and a traffic accident, also with a witness he knows. That's pretty bad luck, but no overt suggestion of hostile action, is there?"
"In his place, I'd be a little nervous," Dominic thought aloud.
"In his place, he probably already is. If he sees us in the hotel, we're just two more infidel faces, man. Unless he sees us more than once, we're down in the grass, not up on the scope. Ain't no rule says it has to be hard, Enzo."
"I hope you're right, Aldo. That mall was scary enough to last me a while."
"Concur, bro."
This wasn't the towering part of the Alps. That lay to the north and west, though it would have been bad on the legs had they been walking it, as the Roman legions had done, thinking their paved roads were a blessing. Probably better than mud, but not that much, especially humping a backpack that weighed about as much as his Marines had carried into Afghanistan. The legions had been tough in their day, and probably not all that different from the guys who did the job today in camouflaged utilities. But back then they'd had a more direct way of dealing with bad guys. They'd killed their families, their friends, their neighbors, and even their dogs, and, more to the point, they were known for doing all that. Not exactly practical in the age of CNN, and, truth be told, there were damned few Marines who would have tolerated participating in wholesale slaughter. But taking them out one at a time was okay, so long as you were sure you weren't killing off innocent civilians. Doing that shit was the other side's job. It was really a pity they could not all come out on a battlefield and have it out like men, but, in addition to being vicious, terrorists were also practical. There was no sense committing to a combat action in which you'd not merely lose, but be slaughtered like sheep in a pen. But real men would have built their forces up, trained and equipped them, and then turned them loose, instead of sneaking around like rats to bite babies in their cribs. Even war had rules, promulgated because there were worse things than war, things that were strictly forbidden to men in uniform. You did not hurt noncombatants deliberately, and you tried hard to avoid doing it by accident. The Marines were now investing considerable time, money, and effort in learning city fighting, and the hardest part of it was avoiding civilians, women with kids in strollers — even knowing that some of those women had weapons stashed next to little Johnny, and that they'd love to see the back of a United States Marine, say two or three meters away, just to be sure of bullet placement. Playing by the rules had its limitations. But for Brian that was a thing of the past. No, he and his brother were playing the game by the enemy's rules, and as long as the enemy didn't know it would be a profitable game. How many lives might they have saved already by taking down a banker, a recruiter, and a courier? The problem was that you could never know. That was complexity theory as applied to real life, and it was a priori impossible. Nor would they ever know what good they'd be doing and what lives they might be saving when they got this 56MoHa bastard. But not being able to quantify it didn't mean it wasn't real, like that child killer his brother had dispatched in Alabama. They were doing the Lord's work, even if the Lord was not an accountant.
At work in the field of the Lord, Brian thought. Certainly these alpine meadows were green and lovely enough, he thought, looking for the lonely goatherd. Odalayeee-oh…
* * *
"He's where?" Hendley asked.
"The Excelsior," Rick Bell answered. "Says he's right up the hall from our friend."
"I think our boy needs a little advice on fieldcraft," Granger observed darkly.
"Think it through," Bell suggested. "The opposition doesn't know a thing. They're as likely to be worried about the guy who picks up the wash as about Jack or the twins. They have no names, no facts, no hostile organization — hell, they don't even know for sure that anybody's out to get them."
"It's not very good fieldcraft," Granger persisted. "If Jack gets eyeballed—"
"Then what?" Bell asked. "Okay, fine, I know I'm just an intel weenie, not a
field spook, but logic still applies. They do not and cannot know anything about The Campus. Even if Fifty-six MoHa is getting nervous, it will be undirected anxiety, and, hell, he's probably got a lot of that in his system anyway. But you can't be a spook and be afraid of anybody, can you? As long as our people are in the background noise, they have nothing to worry about — unless they do something real dumb, and these kids are not that kind of dumb, if I read them right."
Through all of this, Hendley just sat in his chair, letting his eyes flicker back and forth from one to the other. So, this was what it must have been like to be "M" in the James Bond movies. Being the boss had its moments, but it had its stresses, too. Sure, he had that undated presidential pardon in a safety-deposit box, but that didn't mean he ever wanted to make use of it. That would make him even more of a pariah than he already was, and the newsies would never leave him alone, to his dying day, not exactly his idea of fun.
"Just so they don't pretend to be room service and whack him in the hotel room," Gerry thought aloud.
"Hey, if they were that dumb, they'd already be in some German prison," Granger pointed out.
* * *
The crossover into Italy was no more formal than crossing over from Tennessee into Virginia, which was one benefit of the European Union. The first Italian city was Villaco, where the people looked a lot more German than Sicilian to their fellow Italians, and from there southwest on the A23. They still needed to learn a little about interchanges, Dominic thought, but these roads were definitely better than they'd run for the famous Mille Miglia, the thousand-mile sports car race of the 1950s, canceled because too many people got killed watching it from the side of the country roads. The land here was not distinguishable from Austria, and the farm buildings were much the same as well. All in all, it was pretty country, not unlike eastern Tennessee or western Virginia, with rolling hills and cows that probably got milked twice a day to feed children on both sides of the border. Next came Udine, then Mestre, and they changed highways again for the A4 to Padova, switched over to A13, and an hour more to Bologna. The Apennine mountains were to their left, and the Marine part of Brian looked at the hills and shuddered at the battlefield they represented. But then his stomach started growling again.