Teeth of the Tiger

CHAPTER 7 TRANSIT

It started in Lebanon, with a flight to Cyprus. From there, a KLM flight to Schipol Airport in the Netherlands, and from there to Paris. In France the sixteen men overnighted in eight separate hotels, taking the time to walk the streets and exercise their English — there had been little point in having them learn French, after all — and struggle with a local population that could have been more helpful. The good news, as they saw it, was that certain female French citizens went out of their way to speak decent English, and were very helpful indeed. For a fee.

They were ordinary in most details, all in their late twenties, clean-shaven, average in size and looks, but better dressed than was the average. They all concealed their unease well, albeit with lingering but furtive glances at the cops they saw — they all knew not to attract the attention of anyone in a police officer's uniform. The French police had a reputation for thoroughness which did not appeal to the new visitors. They were traveling on Qatari passports at the moment, which were fairly secure, but a passport issued from the French Foreign Minister himself would not stand up to a directed inquiry. And so they kept a low profile. They had all been briefed not to look around much, to be polite, and to make the effort to smile at everyone they encountered. Fortunately for them, it was tourist season in France, and Paris was jammed with people like them, many of whom also spoke little French, much to the bemused contempt of the Parisians, who in every case took their money anyway.

The next day's breakfast hadn't concluded with any new explosive revelations, and neither had lunch. Both Caruso brothers listened to their lessons from Pete Alexander, doing their best not to doze off, because these lessons seemed pretty straightforward.

"Boring, you think?" Pete asked over lunch.

"Well, none of it's earthshaking," Brian responded after a few seconds.

"You'll find it's a little different in a foreign city, out on the street in a market, say, looking for your subject in a crowd of a few thousand. The important part is to be invisible. We'll work on that this afternoon. You had any experience in that, Dominic?"

"Not really. Just the basic stuff. Don't look too directly at the subject. Reversible clothes. Different ties, if you're in an environment that calls for a necktie. And you depend on others to switch off on coverage. But we won't have the same backup we have in the Bureau for a discreet surveillance, will we?"

"Not even close. So, you keep your distance until it's time to move in. At that point, you move in as quickly as circumstances allow—"

"And whack the guy?" Brian asked.

"Still uneasy about it?"

"I haven't walked out yet, Pete. Let's say I have my concerns, and leave it at that."

Alexander nodded. "Fair enough. We prefer people who know how to think, and we know that thinking carries its own penalties."

"I guess that's how you have to look at it. What if the guy we're supposed to do away with turns out to be okay?" the Marine asked.

"Then you back off and report in. It's theoretically possible that an assignment can be erroneous, but to the best of my knowledge it's never happened."

"Never?"

"Not ever, not once," Alexander assured him.

"Perfect records make me nervous."

"We try to be careful."

"What are the rules? Okay, maybe I don't need to know — right now — who sends us out to kill somebody, but it would be nice to know what the criteria are to write up some fucker's death warrant, y'know?"

"It will be someone who has, directly or indirectly, caused the death of American citizens, or is directly involved in plans to do so in the future. We're not after people who sing too loud in church or who have books overdue at the library."

"You're talking about terrorists, right?"

"Yup," Pete replied simply.

"Why not just arrest them?" Brian asked next.

"Like you did in Afghanistan?"

"That was different," the Marine protested.

"How?" Pete asked.

"Well, for one thing we were uniformed combatants operating in the field under orders from legally constituted command authority."

"You took some initiative, right?"

"Officers are supposed to use their heads. My overall mission orders came from up the chain of command, however."

"And you don't question them?"

"No. Unless they're crazy, you're not supposed to do that."

"What about when not doing something is crazy?" Pete asked. "What if you have a chance to take action against people who are planning to do something very destructive?"

"That's what CIA and FBI are for."

"But when they can't get the job done, for one reason or another, then what? Do you just let the bad guys move ahead with their plans and handle them afterward? That can be expensive," Alexander told him. "Our job is to do the things that are necessary when the conventional methods are unable to accomplish the mission."

"How often?" This was Dominic, seeking to protect his brother.

"It's picking up."

"How many hits have you made?" Brian again.

"You don't need to know."

"Oh, I do love hearing that one," Dominic observed with a smile.

"Patience, boys. You're not in the club yet," Pete told them, hoping they were smart enough not to object at this point.

"Okay, Pete," Brian said, after a moment's thought. "We both gave our word that what we learn here stays here. Fine. It's just that murdering people in cold blood isn't exactly what I've been trained to do, y'know?"

"You're not supposed to feel good about it. Over in Afghanistan, did you ever shoot anybody looking the other way?"

"Two of them," Brian admitted. "Hey, the battlefield isn't the Olympic Games," he semiprotested.

"Neither is the rest of the world, Aldo." The look on the Marine's face said, Well, you got me there. "It's an imperfect world, guys. If you want to try to make it perfect, go ahead, but it's been tried before. Me, I'd settle for something safer and more predictable. Imagine if somebody had taken care of Hitler back in 1934 or so, or Lenin in 1915 in Switzerland. The world would have been better, right? Or maybe bad in a different way. But we're not in that business. We will not be involved in political assassinations. We're after the little sharks who kill innocent people in such a way that conventional procedures cannot handle them. It's not the best system. I know that. We all know that. But it's something, and we're going to try to see if it works. It can't be much worse than what we have already, can it?"

Dominic's eyes never left Pete's face during that discourse. He'd just told them something that maybe he hadn't meant to tell them. The Campus didn't have any killers yet. They were going to be the first. There had to be a lot of hopes riding on them. That was a lot of responsibility. But it all made sense. It was plain that Alexander was not teaching them from his own real-world experience. A training officer was supposed to be somebody who'd actually gone out and done it. That was why most of the instructors at the FBI Academy were experienced field agents. They could tell you how it felt. Pete could only tell them what had to be done. But why, then, had they picked him and Aldo?

"I see your point, Pete," Dominic said. "I'm not leaving yet."

"Neither am I," Brian told his training officer. "I just want to know what the rules are."

Pete didn't tell them they'd be making the rules up as they went along. They'd figure that one out soon enough.

Airports are the same all over the world. Instructed to be polite, they all checked their bags, waited in the correct lounges, smoked their cigarettes in the designated smoking areas, and read the books they'd purchased in the airport kiosks. Or pretended to. Not all of them had the language skills they would have wished. Once at cruising altitude, they ate their airline meals, and most of them took their airline naps. Nearly all of them were seated in the aft rows of their seating sections, and when they stirred, they wondered which of their seatmates they might meet again in a few days or weeks, however long it took to work out the details. Each of them hoped to meet Allah soon, and to garner the rewards that would come for fighting in their Holy Cause. It occurred to the more intellectual of them that even Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, was limited in his ability to communicate the nature of Paradise. He'd had to explain it to people with no knowledge of passenger jet aircraft, automobiles, and computers. What, then, was its true nature? It had to be so thoroughly wonderful as to defy description, but even so, a mystery yet to be discovered. And they would discover it. There was a degree of excitement in that thought, a sort of anticipation too sublime to discuss with one's colleagues. A mystery, but an infinitely desirable one. And if others had to meet Allah, too, as a result, well, that also was written in the Great Book of Destiny. For the moment, they all took their naps, sleeping the sleep of the just, the sleep of the Holy Martyrs yet to be. Milk, honey, and virgins.

Sali, Jack found, had some mystery about him. The CIA file on the guy even had the length of his penis appended in the "Nuts and Sluts" section. The British whores said he was grossly average in size but uncommonly vigorous in application — and a fine tipper, which appealed to their commercial sensibilities. But unlike most men, he didn't talk about himself much. Talked mainly about the rain and chill of London, and complimentary things about his companion of the moment, which appealed to her vanity. His occasional gift of a nice handbag — Louis Vuitton in most cases — sat well with his "regulars," two of whom reported to Thames House, the new home of both the British Secret Service and the Security Service. Jack wondered if they were getting paid by both Sali and H.M. Government for services rendered. Probably a good deal for the girls involved, he was sure, though Thames House probably wouldn't spring for shoes and a bag.

"Tony?"

"Yeah, Jack?" Wills looked up from his workstation.

"How do we know if this Sali is a bad guy?"

"We don't for sure. Not until he actually does something, or we intercept a conversation between him and somebody we don't like."

"So, I'm just checking this bird out."

"Correct. You'll be doing a lot of that. Any feel for the guy yet?"

"He's a horny son of a bitch."

"It's hard to be rich and single, in case you haven't noticed, Junior."

Jack blinked. Maybe he had that coming. "Okay, but I'll be damned if I pay for it, and he's paying a lot."

"What else?" Wills asked.

"He doesn't talk a hell of a lot."

"What's that tell you?"

Ryan sat back in his swivel chair to think it over. He didn't talk to his girlfriends much, either, at least not about his new job. As soon as you said "financial management," most women tended to doze off in self-defense. Did that mean anything? Maybe Sali just wasn't a talker. Maybe he was sufficiently secure that he didn't feel the need to impress his lady friends with anything but his cash — he always used cash, not credit cards. And why that? To keep his family from knowing? Well, Jack didn't talk to Mom and Dad about his love life, either. In fact, he rarely took a girlfriend to the family home. His mom tended to scare girls away. Not his dad, strangely enough. The M.D. Dr. Ryan struck other women as powerful, and while most young women found it admirable, many also found it intimidating as hell. His father dialed all the power stuff way back and came off as a slender and distinguished gray-haired teddy bear to family guests. More than anything else, his dad liked to play catch with his son on the grass overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, maybe harkening back to a simpler time. He had Kyle for that. The littlest Ryan was still in grammar school, at the stage where he asked furtive questions about Santa Claus, but only when Mom and Dad weren't around. There was probably a kid in class who wanted to let everybody know what he knew — there was always one of those — and Katie had wised up by now. She still liked to play Barbies, but she knew that her mom and dad bought them at the Toys R Us in Glen Burnie, and assembled the accoutrements on Christmas Eve, a process his father truly loved, much as he might bitch about it. When you stopped believing in Santa Claus, the whole damn world just started a downhill slide…

"It tells us he's not a talker. Not much else," Jack said after a moment's reflection. "We're not supposed to convert inference into facts, are we?"

"Correct. A lot of people think otherwise, but not here. Assumption is the mother of all fuckups. That shrink at Langley specializes in spinning. He's good, but you need to learn to distinguish between speculation and facts. So, tell me about Mr. Sali," Wills commanded.

"He's horny, and he doesn't talk much. He plays very conservatively with the family's money."

"Anything that makes him look like a bad guy?"

"No, but he's worth watching because of his religious — well, extremism's the wrong word. There are some things missing here. He's not boisterous, not showy the way rich people his age usually are. Who started the file on him?" Jack asked.

"The Brits did. Something about this guy tweaked the interest of one of their senior analysts. Then Langley took a brief look and started a file of their own. Then he was intercepted talking to a guy who's also got a file at Langley — the conversation wasn't about anything important, but there it was," Wills explained. "And you know, it's a lot easier to open a file than it is to close one. His cell phone is coded in to the NSA computers, and so they report on him whenever he turns it on. I've been through the file, too. He's worth keeping an eye on, I think — but I'm not sure why. You learn to trust your instincts in this business, Jack. So, I'm nominating you to be the in-house expert on this kid."

"And I'm looking for how he handles his money…?"

"That's right. You know, it doesn't take much to finance a bunch of terrorists — at least not much by his reckoning. A million bucks a year is a lot of money to those people. They live hand-to-mouth, and their maintenance expenses aren't that high. So, you're supposed to look at the margins. Chances are he'll try to hide whatever he does in the shadows of his big transactions."

"I'm not an accountant," Jack pointed out. His father had gotten his CPA a long time ago, but never used it, even to do his own taxes. He had a law firm for that.

"Can you do arithmetic?"

"Well, yeah."

"So, attach a nose to it."

Oh, great, John Patrick Ryan, Jr., thought. Then he reminded himself that actual intelligence operations weren't about shoot-the-bad-guy-and-bang-Ursula-Undress while the credits rolled. That was only in the movies. This was the real world.

"Our friend is in that much of a hurry?" Ernesto asked in considerable surprise.

"So it would seem. The norteamericanos have been hard on them of late. I imagine they want to remind their enemies that they still have fangs. A thing of honor for them, perhaps," Pablo speculated. His friend would understand that readily enough.

"So, what do we do now?"

"When they are settled in Mexico City, we arrange for transport into America, and, I presume, we arrange for weapons."

"Complications?"

"If the norteamericanos have our organizations penetrated, they might have some prewarning, plus whispers of our involvement. But we have considered this already."

They'd considered it briefly, yes, Ernesto reflected, but that had been at a convenient distance. Now the knocker on the door was rattling, and it was time for further reflection. But he couldn't renege on this deal. That, too, was a matter both of honor and of business. They were preparing an initial shipment of cocaine to the E.U. That promised to be a really sizable market.

"How many people are coming?"

"Fourteen, he says. They have no weapons at all."

"What will they need, do you suppose?"

"Light automatics should do it, plus pistols, of course," Pablo said. "We have a supplier in Mexico who can handle it for less than ten thousand dollars. For an additional ten, we can have the weapons delivered to the end users in America, to avoid complications during the crossing."

"Bueno, make it so. Will you fly to Mexico yourself?"

Pablo nodded. "Tomorrow morning. I will coordinate with them and the coyotes this first time."

"You will be careful," Ernesto pointed out. His suggestions had the force of an explosive device. Pablo took some chances, but his services were very important to the Cartel. He would be hard to replace.

"Of course, jefe. I need to evaluate how reliable these people are if they are to assist us in Europe."

"Yes, that is so," Ernesto agreed warily. As with most deals, when it came time to take action, there were second thoughts. But he was not an old woman. He had never been afraid to act decisively.

The Airbus pulled up to its gate, the first-class passengers were allowed to deplane first, and they followed the colored arrows on the floor to immigration and customs, where they assured the uniformed bureaucrats that they had nothing to declare, and their passports were duly stamped, and they walked off to collect their luggage.

The leader of the group was named Mustafa. A Saudi by birth, he was clean-shaven, which he didn't like, though it exposed skin that the women seemed to like. He and a colleague named Abdullah walked together to get their bags, and then out to where their rides were supposed to be waiting. This would be the first test of their newfound friends in the Western Hemisphere. Sure enough, someone was holding a cardboard square with "MIGUEL" printed on it. That was Mustafa's code name for this mission, and he walked over to shake the man's hand. The greeter said nothing, but motioned them to follow him. Outside, a brown Plymouth minivan waited. The bags went in back, and the passengers slid into the middle seat. It was warm in Mexico City, and the air was fouler than anything they'd ever experienced. What ought to have been a sunny day was ruined by a gray blanket over the city — air pollution, Mustafa thought.

The driver continued to say nothing as he drove them to their hotel. This actually impressed them. If there was nothing to say, then one should keep quiet.

The hotel was a good one, as expected. Mustafa checked in using the false Visa card that had been faxed ahead, and in five minutes he and his friend were in their spacious room on the fifth floor. They looked around for obvious bugs before speaking.

"I didn't think that damned flight would ever end," Abdullah groused, looking in the minibar for bottled water. They'd been briefed to be careful drinking the stuff that came out of the tap.

"Yes, I agree. How did you sleep?"

"Not well. I thought the one good thing about alcohol was that it made you unconscious."

"For some. Not for all," Mustafa told his friend. "There are other drugs for that."

"Those are hateful to God," Abdullah observed. "Unless a physician administers them."

"We have friends now who do not think that way."

"Infidels," Abdullah almost spat.

"The enemy of your enemy is your friend."

Abdullah twisted the top off an Evian bottle. "No. You can trust a true friend. Can we trust these men?"

"Only as far as we must," Mustafa allowed. Mohammed had been careful in his mission brief. These new allies would help them only as a matter of convenience, because they also wished harm to the Great Satan. That was good enough for now. Someday these allies would become enemies, and they'd have to deal with them. But that day had not yet come. He stifled a yawn. Time to get some rest. Tomorrow would be a busy day.

Jack lived in a condo in Baltimore, a few blocks from Orioles Park at Camden Yards, where he had season tickets, but which was dark tonight because the Orioles were in Toronto. Not a good cook, he ate out as he usually did, alone this time because he didn't have a date, which was not as unusual as he might have wished. Finished, he walked back to his condo, switched on his TV, and then thought better of it, went to his computer instead, and logged on to check his e-mail and surf the 'Net. That's when he made a note to himself. Sali lived alone as well, and while he often had whores for company, it wasn't every night. What did he do on the other nights? Log on to his computer? A lot of people did. Did the Brits have a tap on his phone lines? They must. But the file on Sali didn't include any e-mails… why? Something worth checking out.

"What you thinking, Aldo?" Dominic asked his brother. ESPN had a baseball game on; the Mariners were playing the Yankees, to the current detriment of the former.

"I'm not sure I like the idea of shooting some poor bastard down on the street, bro."

"What if you know he's a bad guy?"

"And what if I whack the wrong guy just because he drives the same kind of car and has the same mustache? What if he leaves a wife and kids behind? Then I'm a fucking murderer — a contract killer, at that. That's not the sort of thing they taught us at the Basic School, y'know?"

"But if you know he's a bad guy, then what?" the FBI agent asked.

"Hey, Enzo, that's not what they trained you to do, either."

"I know that, but this here's a different situation. If I know the mutt's a terrorist, and I know we can't arrest him, and I know he's got more plans, then I think I can handle it."

"Out in the hills, in Afghanistan, you know, our intel wasn't always gold-plated, man. Sure, I learned to put my own ass on the line, but not some poor other schlub's."

"The people you were after over there, who'd they kill?"

"Hey, they were part of an organization that made war on the United States of America. They probably weren't Boy Scouts. But I never saw any direct evidence of it."

"What if you had?" Dominic asked.

"But I didn't."

"You're lucky," Enzo responded, remembering a little girl whose throat had been slashed ear to ear. There was a legal adage that hard cases made for bad law, but the books could not anticipate all the things that people did. Black ink on white paper was a little too dry for the real world sometimes. But he'd always been the passionate one of the two. Brian had always been a touch cooler, like Fonzie on Happy Days. Twins, yes, but fraternal ones. Dominic was more like his father, Italian and passionate. Brian had turned out more like Mom, chillier from a more northerly climate. To an outsider, the differences might have appeared less than trivial, but to the twins themselves it was frequently the subject of jabs and jokes. "When you see it, Brian, when it's right there in front of you, it sets you off, man. It lights a fire in the gut."

"Hey, been there, done that, got the T-shirt, okay? I whacked five men all by myself. But it was business, not personal. They tried to ambush us, but they didn't read the manual right, and I used fire and maneuver to fake 'em out and roll 'em up, just like they taught me to do. It's not my fault they were inept. They could have surrendered, but they preferred to shoot it out. That was a bad call on their part, but 'a man should do what he thinks is best.'" His all-time favorite movie was John Wayne's Hondo.

"Hey, Aldo, I'm not saying you're a wuss."

"I know what you're saying, but, look, I don't want to turn into one of them, okay?"

"That's not the mission here, bro. I got my doubts, too, but I'm going to stay around and see how it plays out. We can always kiss it off whenever we want."

"I suppose."

Then Derek Jeter doubled up the middle. Pitchers probably thought of him as a terrorist, didn't they?

On the other side of the building, Pete Alexander was on a secure phone to Columbia, Maryland.

"So, how are they doing?" he heard Sam Granger ask.

Pete sipped at his glass of sherry. "They're good kids. They both have doubts. The Marine talks openly about it, and the FBI guy keeps his mouth shut about it, but the wheels are turning over slowly."

"How serious is it?"

"Hard to say. Hey, Sam, we always knew that training would be the hard part. Few Americans want to grow up to be professional killers — at least not the ones we need for this."

"There was a guy at the Agency who would have fit right in—"

"But he's too damned old, and you know it," Alexander countered at once. "Besides, he has his sunset job over across the pond in Wales, and he seems to be comfortable in it."

"If only…"

"If only your aunt had balls, she'd be your uncle," Pete pointed out. "Selecting candidates is your job. Getting them trained up is mine. These two have the brains and they have the skills. The hard part is temperament. I'm working on that. Be patient."

"In the movies, it's a lot easier."

"In the movies, everybody is borderline psychopath. Is that who we want on the payroll?"

"I guess not." There were plenty of psychopaths to be found. Every large police department knew of several. And they'd kill people for modest monetary considerations, or a small quantity of drugs. The problem with such people was that they didn't take orders well, and they were not very smart. Except in the movies. Where was that little Nikita girl when you really needed her?

"So, we have to deal with good, reliable people who have brains. Such people think, and they do not always think predictably, do they? A guy with a conscience is nice to have, but every so often he's going to wonder if he's doing the right thing. Why did you have to send two Catholics? Jews are bad enough. They're born with guilt — but Catholics learn it all in school."

"Thank you, Your Holiness," Granger responded, dead-pan.

"Sam, we knew going in that this was not going to be easy. Jesus, you send me a Marine and an FBI agent. Why not a couple of Eagle Scouts, y'know?"

"Okay, Pete. It's your job. Any idea on timing? There's some work piling up on us," Granger observed.

"Maybe a month and I'll know if they'll play or not. They will need to know the why in addition to the who, but I always told you that," Alexander reminded his boss.

"True," Granger admitted. It really was a lot easier in the movies, wasn't it? Just let your fingers do the walking to "Assassins R Us" in the Yellow Pages. They had thought about hiring former KGB officers at first. They all had expert training, and all wanted money — the going rate was less than twenty-five thousand dollars per kill, a pittance — but such people would probably report back to Moscow Centre in the hope of being rehired, and The Campus would then become known within the global "black" community. They couldn't have that.

"What about the new toys?" Pete asked. Sooner or later, he'd have to train the twins with the new tools of the trade.

"Two weeks, they tell me."

"That long? Hell, Sam, I proposed them nine months ago."

"It's not something you get at the local Western Auto. They have to be manufactured from scratch. You know, highly skilled machinists in out-of-the-way places, people who don't ask questions."

"I told you, get the guys who do this sort of thing for the Air Force. They're always making up clever little gadgets." Like tape recorders that fit in cigarette lighters. Now, that was probably inspired by the movies. And for the really good things, the government almost never had the right people in-house, which was why they employed civilian contractors, who took the money, did the job, and kept their mouths shut because they wanted more such contracts.

"They're all being worked on, Pete. Two weeks," he emphasized.

"Roger that. Until then, I have all the suppressed pistols I need. They're both doing nicely with the tracking and tailing drills. Helps that they're so ordinary-looking."

"So, bottom line, things are going well?" Granger asked.

"Except for the conscience thing, yeah."

"Okay, keep me posted."

"Will do."

"See ya."

Alexander set the receiver back down. Goddamned consciences, he thought. It would be nice to have robots, but somebody might notice Robby striding down the street. And they couldn't have that. Or maybe the Invisible Man, but in the H. G. Wells story, the drug that made him transparent also made him mad, and this gig was already crazy enough, wasn't it? He tossed off the last of his sherry, and then on reflection, went off to refill his glass.