Teeth of the Tiger

CHAPTER 12 ARRIVING

Tennessee passed quickly for those in the back, only because Mustafa and Abdullah shared the wheel for the three hundred fifty kilometers from Memphis to Nashville, during which Rafi and Zuhayr mainly slept. One and three quarters kilometers per minute, he calculated. It translated to another… what? Twenty more hours or so. He thought about speeding up, to make the trip go faster — but, no, that was foolish. Taking unnecessary chances was always foolish. Hadn't they learned that from the Israelis? The enemy was always waiting, like a sleeping tiger. Waking one up unnecessarily was very foolish indeed. You only woke up the tiger when your rifle was already aimed, and only then so that the tiger could know that he'd been outsmarted, and unable to take action. Just to be awake long enough to appreciate his own foolishness, enough to know fear. America would know fear. For all their weapons and their cleverness, all these arrogant people would tremble.

He found himself smiling into the darkness now. The sun had set again, and his car's headlights bored white cones into the darkness, illuminating the white lines on the highway that dashed in and out of his vision as he drove eastward at a steady sixty-five miles per hour.

The twins were now rising at 0600 and going out to do their daily dozen exercises without Pete Alexander's supervision, which, they'd decided, they really didn't need. The run was getting easier for both of them, and the rest of the exercises had also mutated into a routine. By 7:15, they were done and heading in for breakfast and the first skull-session with their training officer.

"Those shoes need some work, bro," Dominic observed.

"Yeah," Brian agreed, taking a sad look at his aging Nike sneaks. "They've served me well for a few years, but it looks like they need to go off to shoe heaven."

"Foot Locker in the mall." He referred to the Fashion Square shopping mall down the hill in Charlottesville.

"Hmm, maybe a Philly cheesesteak for lunch tomorrow?"

"Works for me, bro," Dominic agreed. "Nothing like grease, fat, and cholesterol for lunch, especially with cheese fries on the side. Assuming your shoes will last another day."

"Hey, Enzo, I like the smell. These sneaks and me been around the block a few times."

"Like those dirty T-shirts. God damn it, Aldo, can't you ever dress properly?"

"Just let me wear my utilities again, buddy. I like being a Marine. You always know where you stand."

"Yeah, in the middle of the shit," Dominic observed.

"Maybe so, but you work with a better class of guys there." And, he didn't add, they were all on your side, and they all carried automatic weapons. It made for a feeling of security rarely found in civilian life.

"Going out to lunch, eh?" Alexander said.

"Tomorrow, maybe," Dominic answered. "Then we need to arrange a proper burial for Aldo's running shoes. We got a can of Lysol around here, Pete?"

Alexander had himself a good laugh. "I thought you'd never ask."

"You know, Dominic," Brian said, looking up from his eggs, "if you weren't my brother, I wouldn't take this crap off of you."

"Really?" The FBI Caruso tossed him an English muffin. "I swear, you Marines are all talk. I always used to whip him when we were kids," he added for Pete's benefit.

Brian's eyes nearly popped out of his head: "My ass!"

And another training day got started.

An hour later, Jack was back on his workstation. Uda bin Sali had enjoyed another athletic night, with Rosalie Parker again. He must like her a lot. Ryan wondered how the Saudi would react if he knew that after every session she gave a play-by-play to the British Security Service. But for her, business was business, which would have deflated a lot of male egos in the British capital. Sali surely had one of those, Junior thought. Wills came in at quarter to nine with a bag of Dunkin' Donuts.

"Hey, Anthony. What's shakin'?"

"You tell me," Wills shot back. "Doughnut?"

"Thanks, buddy. Well, Uda had some more exercise last night."

"Ah, youth, a wonderful thing, but wasted on the young."

"George Bernard Shaw, right?"

"I knew you were literate. Sali discovered a new toy a few years back, and I guess he's going to play with it till it breaks — or falls off. Must be tough duty for his shadow team, standing out in the cold rain and knowing he's getting his weasel greased upstairs." It was a line from the Sopranos on HBO, which Wills admired.

"You suppose they're the ones who debrief her?"

"No, that's a job for the guys over at Thames House. Must get old after a while. Pity they don't send us all the transcripts, though," he added with a chuckle. "Might be good for getting the blood flowing in the morning."

"Thanks, I can always buy a Hustler at the magazine store if I feel scuzzy some night."

"It's not a clean business we're in, Jack. The kind of people we look at, they aren't the kind you invite over for dinner."

"Hey, White House, remember? Half the people we hosted for a State Dinner — Dad could hardly shake hands with them. But Secretary Adler told him it was business, and so Dad had to be nice to the sunzabitches. Politics attracts some really scummy people, too."

"Amen. So, anything else new on Sali?"

"I haven't gone over yesterday's money moves yet. Hey, if Cunningham stumbles over anything significant, what happens next?"

"That's up to Gerry and the senior staff." You're way too junior to get your panties in a wad about that, he didn't add, though the young Ryan got the message anyway.

"Well, Dave?" Gerry Hendley was asking upstairs.

"He's laundering money and sending some of it off to persons unknown. Liechtenstein bank. If I had to guess, it's to cover credit card accounts. You can get a Visa or MasterCard through that particular bank, and so it could well be to cover credit card accounts for persons unknown. Could be a mistress or a close friend, or somebody in whom we might have direct interest."

"Any way to find out?" Tom Davis asked.

"They use the same accounting program most banks do," Cunningham answered, meaning that with a little patience, The Campus could crack their way inside and learn more. There were firewalls in the way, of course. It was a job better left to the National Security Agency, and so the trick was to get NSA to task one of its computer weenies to do the cracking. That would mean faking a request by CIA to do the job, and that, the accountant figured, was a little harder to accomplish than just typing a note into a computer terminal. He also suspected that The Campus had someone inside both intelligence agencies who could do the faking so that no discernible paper trail would be left behind.

"Is it strictly necessary?"

"Maybe in a week or so, I can find more data. This Sali guy might just be a rich kid playing stickball out in the traffic, but… but my nose tells me he's a player of some sort," Cunningham admitted. He'd developed good instincts over the years, as a result of which two former Mafia kingpins were now living in solitary cells at Marion, Illinois. But he didn't trust his own instincts as well as his former and current superiors did. A career accountant with a foxhound's nose, he was also very conservative in talking about it.

"A week, you think?"

Dave nodded. "About that."

"How's the Ryan kid?"

"Good instincts. He found something most people would have missed. Maybe his youth works for him. Young target, young bloodhound. Usually, it doesn't work. This time… looks like maybe it did. You know, when his dad appointed Pat Martin to be Attorney General, I heard some things about Big Jack. Pat really liked him, and I worked with Mr. Martin enough to respect him a lot. This kid may be going places. It'll take about ten years to be sure of that, of course."

"We're not supposed to believe in breeding over here, Dave," Tom Davis observed.

"Numbers is numbers, Mr. Davis. Some people have a good nose, some don't. He doesn't yet, not really, but he's sure heading that way." Cunningham had helped start the Justice Department's Special Accounting Unit, which specialized in tracking terrorist money. Everyone needed money to operate, and money always left a trail somewhere, but it was often found after the fact more easily than before. Good for investigations, but not as good for active defense.

"Thanks, Dave," Hendley said in dismissal. "Keep us posted, if you would."

"Yes, sir." Cunningham gathered his papers and made his way out.

"You know, he'd be a little more effective if he had a personality," Davis said fifteen seconds after the door closed.

"Nobody's perfect, Tom. He's the best guy they ever had at Justice for this sort of thing. I bet when he fishes, there's nothing left in the lake after he leaves."

"No argument here, Gerry."

"So, this Sali gent might be a banker for the bad guys?"

"It looks like a possibility. Langley and Fort Meade are still in a dither over the current situation," Hendley went on.

"I've seen the paperwork. It's a whole lot of paper for not much hard data." In the business of intelligence analysis, you got into the speculation phase too rapidly, the point when experienced analysts started applying fear to existing data, following it to God knew where, trying to read the minds of people who didn't speak all that much, even to each other. Might there be people out there with anthrax or smallpox in little bottles in their shaving kits? How the hell could you tell? That had been done once to America, but when you got down to it everything had been done once to America, and while it had given the country the confidence that her people could deal with damned near anything, it had also given Americans the realization that bad things could indeed happen here and that those responsible might not always be identifiable. The new President did not convey any assurance that we'd be able to stop or punish such people. That was a major problem in and of itself.

"You know, we're a victim of our own success," the former senator said quietly. "We've managed to handle every nation-state that ever crossed us, but these invisible bastards who work for their vision of God are harder to identify and track. God is omnipresent. So are His perverted agents."

"Gerry, my boy, if it was easy, we wouldn't be here."

"Tom, thank God I can always count on you for moral support."

"We live in an imperfect world, you know. There isn't always enough rain to make the corn grow, and, if there is, sometimes the rivers flood. My father taught me that."

"I always meant to ask you — how the hell did your family ever end up in goddamned Nebraska?"

"My great-grandfather was a soldier — cavalryman, Ninth Cavalry, black regiment. He didn't feel like moving back to Georgia when his hitch ran out. He'd spent some time at Fort Crook outside of Omaha, and the dumbass didn't mind the winters. So, he bought a spread near Seneca and farmed corn. That's how history started for us Davises."

"Wasn't any Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska?"

"No, they stayed in Indiana. Smaller farms there, anyway. My great-grandfather shot himself some buffalo when he got started. There's the biggest damned head over the fireplace at home. Damned thing still smells. Dad and my brother mainly hunt longhorn antelope now, the 'speed-goat,' they call it at home. Never got to like the taste."

"What's your nose say on this new intel, Tom?" Hendley asked.

"I'm not planning to go to New York anytime soon, buddy."

East of Knoxville, the road divided. I-40 went east. I- 81 went north, and the rented Ford took the latter through the mountains explored by Daniel Boone when the western frontier of America had scarcely stretched out of sight of the Atlantic Ocean. A road sign showed the exit for the home of someone named Davy Crockett. Whoever that was, Abdullah thought, driving downhill through a pretty mountain pass. Finally, at a town named Bristol, they were in Virginia, their final major territorial boundary. About six more hours, he calculated. The land here, in the sunlight, was lush in its greenness, with horse and dairy farms on both sides of the road. Even churches, usually white-painted wooden buildings with crosses atop the steeples. Christians. The country was clearly dominated by them.

Unbelievers.

Enemies.

Targets.

They had their guns in the trunk to deal with them. First, I-81 north to I-64. They'd long since memorized their routing. The other three teams were surely in place now. Des Moines, Colorado Springs, and Sacramento. Each a city large enough to have at least one good shopping mall. Two were provincial capitals. None were major cities, however. All were what they called "Middle America," where the "good" people lived, where the "ordinary," "hardworking" Americans made their homes, where they felt safe, far from the great centers of power — and corruption. Few, if any, Jews to be found in those cities. Oh, maybe a few. Jews like to run jewelry stores. Maybe even in the shopping malls. That would be an added bonus, but only something to be scooped up if it accidentally offered itself. Their real objective was to kill ordinary Americans, the ones who considered themselves safe in the womb of ordinary America. They would soon learn that safety in this world was an illusion. They'd learn that the thunderbolt of Allah reached everywhere.

"So, this is it?" Tom Davis asked.

"Yes, it is," Dr. Pasternak replied. "Be careful. It's fully loaded. The red tag, you see. The blue one is not charged."

"What does it deliver?"

"Succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant, essentially a synthetic and more potent form of curare. It shuts down all the muscles, including the diaphragm. You can't breath, speak, or move. You're fully awake. It'll be a miserable death," the physician added in a cold, distant voice.

"Why is that?" Hendley asked.

"You can't breathe. Your heart rapidly goes into anoxia, essentially a massive induced heart attack. It won't feel very good at all."

"Then what?"

"Well, the onset of symptoms would take about sixty seconds. Thirty seconds more for the full effects of the drug to present themselves. The victim would collapse then, say, ninety seconds after the injection. Breathing stops completely about the same time. The heart is starved for oxygen. It will try to beat, but it's not delivering any oxygen to the body, or to itself. Heart tissue will die in about two or three minutes — and will be extremely painful as it does so. Unconsciousness will happen at about the three-minute mark unless the victim had been exercising beforehand — in that case, the brain will be highly infused with oxygen. Ordinarily, the brain has about three minutes' worth of oxygen in it to function without additional oxygen infusion, but at about the three-minute mark — after onset of symptoms, that is; four and a half minutes after being stuck — the victim will lose consciousness. Complete brain death will take another three minutes or so. After that, the succinylcholine will metabolize in the body, even after death. Not entirely, but enough so that only a really sharp pathologist will pick it up on a toxicology scan, and then only if he's prepped to look for it. The only real trick is to get your test subject in the buttocks."

"Why there?" Davis asked.

"The drug works just fine with an IM — intramuscular — injection. When people are posted, it's always faceup so that you can see and remove the organs. They rarely turn the body over. Now, this injection system does leave a mark, but it's hard to spot under the best of circumstances, and then only if you're looking at the right area. Even drug addicts — that will be one of the things they check for — don't inject themselves in the rump. It will appear to be an unexplained heart attack. Those happen every day. Rare, but not at all unknown. Tachycardia can make it happen, for example. The injector pen is a modified insulin pen like the kind Type I diabetics use. Your mechanics did a great job of disguising it. You can even write with it, but if you rotate the barrel, it swaps out the pen part for the insulin part. A gas charge in the back of the barrel injects the transfer agent. The victim will probably notice it, like a bee sting but less painful, but inside a minute and a half, he won't be telling anybody about it. His most likely reaction will be a minor 'Ouch' and then rub the spot — if that much. Like a mosquito bite on the neck. You might slap at it, but you don't call the police."

Davis held the safe "blue" pen. It was a little bulky, like a third-grader might use on his first official introduction to a ballpoint pen after using thick-barrel pencils and crayons for a couple of years. So, as you approached your subject, you took it out of your coat pocket, and swung it in a reverse stabbing motion, and just kept going. Your backup hitter would watch the subject fall to the sidewalk, maybe even stop to render assistance, then watch the bastard die, and get up and go on his way — well, maybe call an ambulance so that his body could get sent to the hospital and be properly dismantled under medical supervision.

"Tom?"

"I like it, Gerry," Davis replied. "Doc, how confident are you about this stuff dissipating after the subject goes down for the count?"

"Confident," Dr. Pasternak answered, and both of his hosts remembered that he was professor of anesthesiology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He probably knew his stuff. Besides, they'd trusted him enough to let him in on the secrets of The Campus. It was a little late to stop trusting him now. "It's just basic biochemistry. Succinylcholine is made up of two acetylcholine molecules. Esterases in the body break the chemical down into acetylcholine fairly rapidly, so it is very likely to be undetectable, even by someone up at Columbia-Presbyterian. The only hard part: to have it done covertly. If you could bring him into a doctor's office, for example, it would just be a matter of infusing potassium chloride. That would put the heart into fibrillation. When cells die, they give off potassium anyway, and so the relative increase would not be noticed, but the IV mark would be hard to hide. There are a lot of ways to do this. I just had to pick one that is applied relatively conveniently by fairly unskilled people. As a practical matter, a really good pathologist might not be able to determine the exact cause of death — and he would know that he didn't know, and that would bother him — but that's only if the body is examined by a really talented guy. Not too many of them around. I mean, the best guy up at Columbia is Rich Richards. He really hates not knowing something. He's a real intellectual, a problem solver, and genius biochemist in addition to being a superb physician. I asked him about this, and he told me it would be extremely difficult to detect even if he had a heads-up on what to look for. Ordinarily, extraneous factors come into play, the specific biochemistry of the victim's body, what he's had to eat or drink, ambient temperature would be a huge factor. On a cold winter day, outside, the esterases might not be able to break down the succinylcholine because of a diminution of chemical processes."

"So, don't do a guy in Moscow in January?" Hendley asked. This deep science stuff was troublesome for him, but Pasternak knew his stuff.

The professor smiled. Cruelly. "Correct. Also Minneapolis."

"Miserable death?" Davis asked.

He nodded. "Decidedly unpleasant."

"Reversible?"

Pasternak shook his head. "Once the succinylcholine is in the bloodstream, there's nothing you can do about it… well, theoretically you could put the guy on a ventilator and breathe for him until the drug metabolizes — I've seen that done with Pavulon in an OR — but that would be a stretch. Theoretically possible to survive, but very, very unlikely. People have survived being shot right between the eyes, gentlemen, but it's not exactly common."

"How hard do you have to hit your target?" Davis asked.

"Not very, just a good poke. Enough to penetrate his clothing. A thick coat might be a problem because of the length of the needle. But ordinary business wear, no problem."

"Is anyone immune to the drug?" Hendley asked.

"Not to this one, no. That would be one in a billion."

"No chance he'd make noise?"

"As I explained, it's like a bee sting at most — more than a mosquito, but not enough to make a man cry out in pain. At most, you'd expect for the victim to be puzzled, maybe to turn around and see what caused it, but your agent will be walking away normally, not running. Under those conditions, without a target to yell at, and since the initial discomfort is transitory, the most likely reaction is to rub the spot and walk on… for about, oh, ten yards or so."

"So, rapid-acting, lethal, and undetectable, right?"

"All of the above," Dr. Pasternak agreed.

"How do you reload it?" Davis required. Damn, how has CIA not developed something this good? he wondered. Or KGB, for that matter.

"You unscrew the barrel, like this" — he demonstrated—"and take it apart. You use an ordinary syringe to inject a new supply of the drug, and swap out the gas charge. These little gas capsules are the only hard part to manufacture. You toss the used one into a trash can or the gutter — they're only four millimeters long and two millimeters wide — and reinsert the fresh one. When you screw in the replacement, a little spike in the back of the barrel punctures it and recharges the system. The gas capsules are coated with sticky stuff to make them harder to drop." And just that fast, the blue one was "hot" except for the absence of succinylcholine. "You want to be careful with the syringe, of course, but you'd have to be pretty stupid to stick yourself. If you cover your man as a diabetic, you can explain away the presence of syringes. There's an ID card to get insulin refills that works just about anywhere in the world, and diabetes has no outward symptoms."

"Damn, Doc," Tom Davis observed. "Anything else you could deliver this way?"

"Botulism toxin is similarly lethal. It's a neurotoxin; it blocks nerve transmissions, and it causes death by asphyxia, also fairly rapidly, but it's readily detectable in the blood during a post-, and kind of hard to explain away. It's available fairly readily around the world, but in microgram doses, because of its use in cosmetic surgery."

"Docs shoot women in the face with that, don't they?"

"Only the dumb ones," Pasternak replied. "It takes wrinkles away, sure, but since it kills the nerves in the face, it also takes away your ability to smile much. That's not my field, exactly. There are a lot of toxic and lethal chemicals. It's the combination of rapid action and difficult detectability that made this a problem. Another quick way to kill someone is to use a small knife at the back of the skull, where the spinal cord enters the base of the brain. The trick is getting right behind your victim and then hitting a fairly small target with the knife, and not having the knife jam between the vertebrae — at that range, why not a silenced.22 pistol? It's fast enough, but it leaves something behind. This method can easily be misdiagnosed as a heart attack. It's just about perfect," the physician concluded, in a voice sufficiently cold as to sprinkle snow on the carpet.

"Richard," Hendley said, "you have earned your fee on this one."

The professor of anesthesiology stood, checking his watch. "No fee, Senator. This one's for my little brother. Let me know if you need me for anything else. I have a train to catch back to New York."

"Jesus," Tom Davis said, after he left. "I always knew docs had to have evil thoughts."

Hendley picked up a package on his desk. There were a total of ten "pens" in it, with computer-printed instructions for this use, a plastic bag full of gas capsules, and twenty large vials of succinylcholine, plus a bunch of throwaway syringes. "He and his brother must have been pretty close."

"Know him?" Davis asked.

"Yeah, I did. Good guy, wife and three kids. Name was Bernard, Harvard Business School graduate, smart guy, very astute trader. Worked on the ninety-seventh floor of Tower One. Left a lot of money behind — anyway, his family's well taken care of. That's something."

"Rich is a nice guy to have on our side," Davis thought aloud, suppressing the shiver that came along with the opinion.

"That he is," Gerry agreed.

The drive ought to have been pleasant. The weather was fair and clear, the road not at all crowded and mostly straight northeast. But it was not pleasant. Mustafa kept getting "How far now?" and "Are we there yet?" from Rafi and Zuhayr in the backseat, to the point that more than once he considered pulling the car over and strangling them. Maybe it was hard sitting in the backseat, but he had to drive this Goddamned car!!! Tension. He was feeling it, and they probably were, too, and so he took a deep breath and commanded himself to be calm. The end of their journey was hardly four hours away, and what was that compared to their transcontinental trek? Certainly it was farther than the Holy Prophet ever walked or rode from Mecca to Medina and back — but he stopped that thought at once. He had no standing to compare himself with Mohammed, did he? No, you do not. One thing he was sure of. On getting to his destination, he was going to bathe and sleep just as long as he could. Four hours to rest was what he kept saying to himself, as Abdullah slept in the right-front seat.

The Campus had its own cafeteria, whose food was catered from a variety of outside sources. Today it was from a Baltimore deli called Atman's whose corned beef was pretty good, if not quite New York class — saying that might result in a fistfight, he thought, as he picked up a corned beef on a kaiser roll. What to drink? If he was having a New York lunch, then cream soda, but Utz, the local potato chips, of course, because they'd even had them in the White House — at his father's insistence. They probably had something from Boston there now. It was not exactly a renowned restaurant town, but every city has at least one good eatery, even Washington, D.C.

Tony Wills, his normal luncheon mate, was nowhere to be seen. So, he looked around and spotted Dave Cunningham, not surprisingly eating alone. Jack headed that way.

"Hey, Dave, mind if I sit down?" he asked.

"Take a seat," Cunningham said, cordially enough.

"How's the numbers business?"

"Exciting," was the implausible reply. Then he elaborated. "You know, the access we have into those European banks is amazing. If the Department of Justice had this sort of access, they'd really clean up — except you can't introduce this kind of evidence into a court of law."

"Yeah, Dave, the Constitution can really be a drag. And all those damned civil-rights laws."

Cunningham nearly choked on his egg salad on white. "Don't you start. The FBI runs a lot of operations that are a little shady — usually because some informant lays stuff on us, maybe because somebody asked, or maybe not, and they spin that off — but within the rules of criminal procedure. Usually it's part of a plea bargain. There are not enough crooked lawyers to handle all of their needs. The Mafia guys, I mean."

"I know Pat Martin. Dad thinks a lot of him."

"He's honest and very, very smart. He really ought to be a judge. That's where honest lawyers belong."

"Doesn't pay very much." Jack's official salary at The Campus was well above anything any federal employee made. Not bad for entry level.

"That is a problem, but—"

"But there's nothing all that admirable about poverty, my dad says. He toyed with the idea of zeroing out salaries for elected officials so that they'd have to know what real work was, but he eventually decided that it would make them even more susceptible to bribery."

The accountant picked up on that: "You know, Jack, it's amazing how little you need to bribe a member of Congress. Makes the bribes hard to identify," the CPA groused. "Like being down in the weeds for an aircraft."

"What about our terrorist friends?"

"Some of them like a comfortable life. A lot of them come from moneyed families, and they like their luxuries."

"Like Sali."

Dave nodded. "He has expensive tastes. His car costs a lot of money. Very impractical. The mileage it gets must be awful, especially in a city like London. The gas prices over there are pretty steep."

"But mainly he takes cabs."

"He can afford it. It probably makes sense. Parking a car in the financial district must be costly, too, and the cabs in London are good." He looked up. "You know that. You've been to London a lot."

"Some," Jack agreed. "Nice city, nice people." He didn't have to add that a protective detail of Secret Service agents and local cops didn't hurt much. "Any further thoughts on our friend Sali?"

"I need to go over the data more closely, but like I said, he sure acts like a player. If he was a New York Mafia subject, I'd figure him for an apprentice consiglieri."

Jack nearly gagged on his cream soda. "That high up?"

"Golden Rule, Jack. He who has the gold makes the rules. Sali has access to a ton of money. His family's richer than you appreciate. We're talking four or five billion dollars here."

"That much?" Ryan was surprised.

"Take another look at the money accounts he's learning to manage. He hasn't played with as much as fifteen percent of it. His father probably limits what he's allowed to do. He's in the capital-preservation business, remember. The guy who owns the money, his father, won't hand him the whole pile to play with, regardless of his educational background. In the money business, it's what you learn after you hang your degrees on the wall that really matters. The boy shows promise, but he's still following his zipper everywhere he goes. That's not an unusual thing for a rich young kid, but if you have a few gigabucks in your wallet, you want to keep your boy on a leash. Besides, what he appears to be funding — well, what we suspect he's funding — isn't really capital-intensive. You spotted some trades on the margins. That was pretty smart. Did you notice that when he flies home to Saudi, he charters a G-V?"

"Uh, no," Jack admitted. "I didn't look into that. I just figured he flies first-class everywhere."

"He does, same way you and your father used to. Real first class. Jack, nothing is too small to check out."

"What do you think of his credit card usage?"

"Entirely routine, but that's noteworthy even so. He could charge anything if he wanted to, but he seems to pay cash for a lot of expenditures — and he spends less cash than he converts to his own use. Like with those hookers. The Saudis don't care about that, so he's paying cash there because he wants to, not because he has to. He's trying to keep some parts of his life covert for reasons not immediately apparent. Maybe just practice. I would not be surprised to find out that he's got more credit cards than the ones we know about — unused accounts. I'll be riffling through his bank accounts later today. He doesn't really know about how to be covert yet. Too young, too inexperienced, no formal training. But, yes, I think he's a player, hoping to move into the big leagues pretty soon. The young and rich are not known for their patience," Cunningham concluded.

I should have guessed that myself, Junior told himself. I need to think this stuff through better. Another important lesson. Nothing too small to be checked out. What sort of guy are we dealing with? How does he see the world? How does he want to change the world? His father had always told him how important it was to look at the world through the eyes of your adversary, to crawl inside his brain and then look out at the world.

Sali is a guy driven by his passions in women — but was there more to it? Was he hiring the hookers because they were good screws or because he was screwing the enemy? The Islamic world thought of America and the U.K. as essentially the same enemy. Same language, same arrogance, damned sure the same military, since the Brits and Americans cooperated so closely on so many things. That was worth considering. Make no assumptions without looking out through his eyeballs. Not a bad lesson for one lunchtime.

Roanoke slid off to their right. Both sides of I-81 were composed of rolling green hills, mostly farms, many of them dairy farms, judging from all the cows. Green highway signs telling of roads that, for his purpose, led nowhere. And more of the white-painted boxy churches. They passed school buses, but no police cars. He'd heard that some American states put highway police in ordinary-looking cars, ones not very different from his own, but probably with additional radio antennas. He wondered if the drivers wore cowboy hats here. That'd be decidedly out of place, even in an area with so many cows. "The Cow," the Second Sura of the Koran, he thought. If Allah tells you to slaughter a cow, you must slaughter it without asking too many questions. Not an old cow, nor a young one, just a cow pleasing to the Lord. Were not all sacrifices pleasing to Allah, so long as they were not sacrifices founded in conceit? Surely they were, if offered in the humility of the Faithful, for Allah welcomed and was pleased by the offerings of the truly Faithful.

Yes.

And he and his friends would make more sacrifices by slaughtering the unbelievers.

Yes.

Then he saw a sign for INTERSTATE HIGHWAY 64—but it was to the west, the wrong one. They had to go east, to cross the eastern mountains. Mustafa closed his eyes and remembered the map he'd looked at so many times. North for about an hour, then east. Yes.

"Brian, those shoes are going to come apart in the next few days."

"Hey, Dom, I ran my first four-and-a-half-minute mile in these," the Marine objected. You remembered and treasured such moments.

"Maybe so, but next time you try that, they're going to come apart and beat the shit out of your ankle."

"Think so? Bet you a buck you're wrong."

"You're on," Dominic said at once. They shook hands formally on the wager.

"They look pretty scruffy to me, too," Alexander observed.

"You want me to buy new T-shirts, too, Mom?"

"They'll self-destruct in another month," Dominic thought aloud.

"Oh, yeah! Well, I outshot your ass with my Beretta this morning."

"Luck happens," Enzo sniffed. "See if you can make it two in a row."

"I'll put five bucks on that."

"Deal." Another handshake. "I could get rich this way," Dominic said. Then it was time to think about dinner. Veal Piccata tonight. He had a thing for good veal, and the local stores had nice stuff. Pity about the calf, but he hadn't been the one to cut its throat.

There: I-64, next exit. Mustafa was tired enough that he might have given the driving over to Abdullah, but he wanted to finish himself, and he figured he could handle another hour. They were heading for a pass in the next range of mountains. Traffic was heavy, but in the other direction. They climbed up the highway toward… yes, there it was, a shallow mountain pass with a hotel on the south side — and then out onto a vista of a most pleasant valley to the south. A sign proclaimed its name, but the letters were too confusing for him to get them into his head as a coherent word. He did take in the view, off to his right. Paradise itself could scarcely have been more lovely — there was even a place to pull over, get out and take in the sight. But, of course, they had not the time. It was fitting that the drive was gently downhill, and it changed his mood entirely. Less than an hour to go. One more smoke to celebrate the timing. In the back, Rafi and Zuhayr were awake again, taking in the scenery. It would be their last such opportunity.

One day of rest and reconnaissance — time to coordinate via e-mail with their three other teams — and then they could accomplish their mission. That would be followed by Allah's Own Embrace. A very happy thought.