Teeth of the Tiger

CHAPTER 21 STREETCAR NAME DESIRED

It was a new adventure for Jack in two different ways. He'd never been to Austria before. He'd damned sure never gone into the field as a spook to join up with an assassination team, and while the idea of terminating the lives of people who liked killing Americans seemed quite a good thing at a desk in West Odenton, Maryland — in seat 3A of an Airbus 330, thirty-four thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean, it was suddenly a dicey state of affairs. Well, Granger had told him he wouldn't really have to do anything. And that was fine with Jack. He still knew how to shoot a pistol — he regularly went shooting at the Secret Service's range in downtown D.C., or sometimes at their academy at Beltsville, Maryland, if Mike Brennan was around. But Brian and Dom weren't shooting people, were they? Not according to the MI5 report that had come to his computer. Heart attack — how the hell did you fake a heart attack well enough that a pathologist took the bait? He'd have to ask them about that. Presumably, he was cleared for it.

In any case, the food was better than average for airline slop, and even an airline can't ruin the booze when it is still in the bottle. With enough alcohol in him, sleep came fairly easily, and the first-class seat was the old-fashioned kind instead of the new gollywog with a hundred moving parts, none of which were comfortable. As usual, about half the people up front watched movies all night. Every person had his own way of dealing with travel shock, as his father invariably called it. Jack's was to sleep through it.

The Wiener schnitzel was excellent, as were the local wines.

"Whoever does this needs to talk to Granddad," Dominic said, after the last bite. "He may know something that Pop-Pop can learn from."

"He's probably Italian, bro, or at least somewhere along the line." Brian finished off his glass of the excellent local white the waiter had recommended. About fifteen seconds later, the waiter took note of it and refilled the glass before vanishing again. "Damn, a man could get used to this eatery. Beats the hell out of MREs."

"With luck, you may never have to eat that crap again."

"Sure, if we just continue this line of work," Aldo responded dubiously. They were essentially alone in a corner booth. "So, what do we know about the new subject?"

"Courier, supposedly. He carries messages in his head — the ones they don't send via the 'Net. Would have been useful to pick his brain some, but that's not the mission. We have a physical description, but no photo this time. That's a little worrisome. He doesn't sound all that important. That's worrisome, too."

"Yeah, I hear you. He must have pissed the wrong people off. Tough luck." His pangs of conscience were a thing of the past, but he really wanted to bag one closer to the top of the food chain. The absence of a photo for ID was indeed worrisome. They'd have to be careful. You didn't want to hit the wrong guy.

"Well, he didn't get on the list by singing too loud at church, y'know?"

"And he ain't the Pope's nephew." Brian completed the litany. "I hear you, man." He checked his watch. "Time to hit the rack, bro. We have to see who's coming tomorrow. How are we supposed to meet him?"

"Message said he'd come to us. Hell, maybe he's going to stay here, too."

"The Campus has funny ideas about security, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, it's not like the movies." Dominic had himself a quiet laugh. He waved for the check. They'd pass on dessert. In a place like this, it could be lethal. Five more minutes and they were in their beds.

"Think you're clever, eh?" Hendley asked Granger over the secure phones in both their homes.

"Gerry, you told me to send an intel weenie, right? Who else can we spare out of Rick's shop? Everybody's been telling me how sharp the kid is. Okay, let him prove it at the sharp end."

"But he's a rookie," Hendley protested.

"And the twins aren't?" Granger asked in reply. Gotcha. From now on, you'll let me run my shop my way, he thought just as loudly as he could. "Gerry, he's not going to get his hands wet, and this will probably make him a better analyst. He's related to them. They know him. He knows them. They will trust and believe what he has to say, and Tony Wills says he's the brightest young analyst he's seen since he left Langley. So, he's perfect for the assignment, isn't he?"

"He's too junior." But Hendley knew he was losing this one.

"Who isn't, Gerry? If we had any guys available with experience in this line of work, we would have put 'em on the payroll."

"If this blows up—"

"Then I go up in smoke. I know that. Can I watch some TV now?"

"See you tomorrow," Hendley said.

"'Night, buddy."

Honeybear was surfing the 'Net, chatting with somebody named Elsa K 69, who said she was twenty-three years old, 160 centimeters in height, and fifty-four kilograms in weight, with decent but not exceptional measurements, brown hair, blue eyes, and a nasty, inventive mind. She also had good typing skills. In fact, though Fa'ad had no way of knowing it, it was a man, fifty years old, half drunk and rather lonely. They chatted in English. The "girl" on the other end said "she" was a secretary in London. It was a city the Austrian accountant knew well.

"She" was real enough for Fa'ad, who soon got deeply into the perverse fantasy. It wasn't as good as a real woman by a long shot, but Fa'ad was careful about indulging his passions in Europe. You never knew if the woman you rented might be someone from the Mossad, who'd be just as happy to cut it off as to take it inside. He didn't fear death much, but like all men he did fear pain. In any case, the fantasy lasted almost half an hour, which left him sated enough to take note of the "handle" in case "she" showed up again. He could not know that the Tyrolean accountant made a similar notation in his Buddy File before retiring to a cold and lonely bed.

When Jack woke up, the window blinds were raised to reveal the purple-gray of mountains about twenty thousand feet below. His watch showed that he'd been aboard about eight hours, and had probably slept for six of them. Not too bad. He had a mild headache from the wine, but the wake-up coffee was good, as was the pastry, which combined to get him semi-awake as Flight 94 cruised in for landing.

The airport was hardly a large one, considering it was the flagship port of entry for a sovereign country, but Austria had about the same population as New York City, which had three airports. The aircraft thumped down, and the captain welcomed them all to his homeland, telling them that the local time was 9:05 A.M. So, he'd have one day of heavy jet lag to deal with, but with luck maybe he'd be approximately okay tomorrow.

He cleared immigration easily — the flight had only been about half full — recovered his bags and headed outside for a cab.

"Hotel Imperial, please."

"Where?" the driver asked.

"Hotel Imperial," Ryan repeated.

The driver thought for a moment. "Ach so, Hotel Imperial , ja?"

"Das ist richtig," Junior assured him, and sat back to enjoy the ride. He had a hundred Euros, and assumed that would be enough, unless this guy had attended the New York City school of taxi driving. In any case, there'd be ATM machines on the street.

The drive took half an hour, fighting the rush-hour traffic. A block or two from the hotel, he passed a Ferrari dealership, which was something new for him — he'd seen Ferraris only on TV before, and wondered, as all young men wonder, what it might be like to drive one.

The hotel staff greeted him like an arriving prince, and delivered him to a fourth-floor suite whose bed looked very inviting indeed. He immediately ordered breakfast and unpacked. Then he remembered why he was here, and picked up the phone, asking for a connection with Dominic Caruso's room.

"Hello?" It was Brian. Dom was in the gold-encrusted shower.

"Hey, cuz, it's Jack," he heard.

"Jack who — wait a minute, Jack?"

"I'm upstairs, Marine. Just flew in an hour ago. Come on up, so we can talk."

"Right. Give me ten minutes," Brian said, and headed into the bathroom. "Enzo, you ain't gonna believe who's upstairs."

"Who?" Dominic asked, toweling himself off.

"Let it be a surprise, man." Brian went back to the sitting room, not sure whether to laugh or barf as he read the International Herald Tribune.

"You gotta be fucking kidding," Dominic breathed as the door opened.

"You ought to see it from my side, Enzo," Jack answered. "Come on in."

"Food's good in Motel 6, isn't it?" Brian observed, following his brother.

"Actually, I prefer Holiday Inn Express. I need to pick up a Ph.D. for my curriculum vitae, y'know?" Jack laughed and waved them to the chairs. "I got extra coffee."

"They do it well here. I see you discovered the croissants." Dominic poured himself a cup and stole a pastry. "Why the hell did they send you?"

"I guess because you both know me." Junior buttered his second. "Tell you what. Let me finish breakfast and we can take a walk down to the Ferrari dealership and talk about it. How do you like Vienna?"

"Just got here yesterday afternoon, Jack," Dominic informed him.

"I didn't know that. I gather you had a productive time in London, though."

"Not bad," Brian answered. "Tell you about it later."

"Right." Jack continued his breakfast while Brian went back to his International Trib. "They're still excited at home about the shootings. Had to take my shoes off at the airport. Good thing I had clean socks. Looks like they're trying to see if anybody's trying to leave town in a hurry."

"Yeah, that was pretty damned bad, man," Dominic observed. "Anybody you know get clobbered?"

"No, thank God. Even Dad didn't, with all the people he knows in the investment crowd. What about you guys?"

Brian gave him a funny look. "Nobody we knew, no." He hoped that little David Prentiss's soul would not be offended.

Jack finished the last croissant. "Let me shower and you guys can show me around."

Brian finished the paper and turned the TV on to CNN — the only American station the Imperial had — to check on the news at 0500 in New York. The last of the victims had been buried the previous day, and the reporters were asking the bereaved how they felt about their loss. What a dumbass question! the Marine raged. You were supposed to leave twisting the knife to the bad guys. And politicians were ranting on about What America Has to Do.

Well, Brian thought, we're doing it for you, guys. But if they found out, they'd probably foul their silk drawers. But that just made him feel better about it. Somebody had to play a little catch-up ball, and that was his job now.

At the Bristol, Fa'ad was just waking up. He, too, had ordered coffee and pastry. He was scheduled to meet a fellow courier the next day to receive a message that he'd then pass on in due course. The Organization operated with great security for its important communications. The really serious messages were all passed exclusively by word of mouth. The couriers knew only their incoming and outgoing counterparts, so that they were organized in cells of three only, another lesson learned from the dead KGB officer. The inbound courier was Mahmoud Mohamed Fadhil, who'd be arriving from Pakistan. Such a system could be broken, but only through painstaking and lengthy police work, which was easily foiled if only one man removed himself from the ratline. The trouble was that the unexpected removal of a rat from the line could prevent a message from reaching its destination entirely, but that had not yet happened, and was not expected to. It was not a bad life for Fa'ad. He traveled a lot, always first-class, resided only in top-of-the-line hostelries, and, all in all, it was rather comfortable. He occasionally felt guilty for this. Others did what he thought were the dangerous and admirable things, but on taking the job he'd been briefed that the organization could not function without him and his eleven comrades, which was good for his morale. So was the knowledge that his function, while of great importance, was also quite safe. He received messages and passed them on, often to the operatives themselves, all of whom treated him with great respect, as though he had originated the mission instructions himself, of which he did not disabuse them. So, in two days, he'd receive more orders for transfer, whether to his nearest geographic colleague — Ibrahim Salih al-Adel, home-based in Paris — or to an operative currently unknown. Today he would find out, and make such communications as were necessary, and act upon developments. The job could be both boring and exciting at the same time, and with the comfortable hours and zero risk to his person, it was easy to be a hero of the movement, as he sometimes allowed himself to think of himself.

They walked east on Kartner Ring, which almost at once angled northeast and changed its name to Schubertring. On the north side of it was the Ferrari dealership.

"So, how are you guys doing?" Jack asked, out in the open, and with the traffic noise beyond the reach of any possible tapping device.

"Two down. One more to go, right here in Vienna, then off somewhere else, wherever it is. I kinda thought you would know," Dominic said.

Jack shook his head. "Nope. I haven't been briefed on that."

"Why did they send you?" This one came from Brian.

"I'm supposed to give you second guesses, I think. Back you up on the intel side and be some sort of consultant. That's what Granger told me, anyway. I know what happened in London. We got lots of inside stuff from the Brits — indirectly, that is. It was written off as a heart attack. Munich I do not know much about. What can you tell me?"

Dominic answered. "I got him coming out of church. He went down on the sidewalk. Ambulance arrived. The paramedics worked him over and carted him off to the hospital. All I know."

"He's dead. We caught that on an intercept," Ryan told them. "He was accompanied by a guy named 'Honeybear' on the 'Net. Saw his buddy go down and reported it in to a guy with the handle Fifty-six MoHa, somewhere in Italy, we think. The Munich guy — his name was Atef — was a recruiter and courier. We know he recruited a shooter in the mess last week. So, you can be sure he earned his way onto the hit list."

"We know. They told us that," Brian said.

"How are you doing these people, exactly?"

"With this." Dominic pulled his gold pen from the suit jacket pocket. "You swap the point out by twisting the nib and stick them, preferably in the ass. It injects a drug called succinylcholine, and that ruins the subject's whole day. The drug metabolizes in the bloodstream even after death, and can't be detected easily unless the pathologist's a genius, and a lucky one at that."

"Paralyzes them?"

"Yep. They collapse, and then they can't breathe. Takes about thirty seconds for the drug to take hold, and then they drop down, and, after that, it's just a matter of mechanics. It looks like a heart attack afterward, and it tests out like that, too. Perfect for what we do."

"Damn," Jack said. "So, you guys were in Charlottesville, too, eh?"

"Yeah." This was Brian. "Not much fun. I had a little boy die in my arms, Jack. That was pretty tough."

"Well, nice shooting."

"They weren't very smart," Dominic evaluated them. "No smarter than street hoods. No training. They didn't check their backs. I guess they figured they didn't have to, with automatic weapons. But they learned different. Still, we were lucky — Son of a bitch!" he observed, as they got to the Ferraris.

"Damn. They are pretty," Jack agreed at once. Even Brian was impressed.

"That's the old one," Dominic told them. "575M, V-twelve, five hundred-plus horses, six-speed transmission, two hundred twenty big ones to drive it away. The really cool one's the Ferrari Enzo. That baby's the fucking bomb, guys. Six hundred sixty horses. They even named it after me. See, back in the far corner."

"How much?" Junior asked.

"The far side of six hundred thousand bucks. But if you want to get something hotter, you gotta call Lockheed Bur-bank." And sure enough, the car had twin openings on the front that looked like jet intakes. The entire machine looked like personal transportation for Luke Skywalker's rich uncle.

"Still knows his cars, eh?" Jack observed. A private jet probably got better mileage, too, but the car was sleekly pretty.

"He'd rather sleep with a Ferrari than with Grace Kelly," Brian snorted. His own priorities were rather more conventional, of course.

"You can ride a car longer than a girl, people." Which was one version of efficiency. "Damn, I bet that honey moves pretty fast."

"You could get a private pilot's license," Jack suggested.

Dominic shook his head. "Nah. Too dangerous."

"Son of a bitch." Jack almost laughed out loud. "As compared with what you've been doing?"

"Junior, I'm used to that, y'know?"

"You say so, man." Jack just shook his head. Damn, those were pretty cars. He liked his Hummer at home. In the snow he could drive anywhere, and he'd win any collision on the highway, and, if it wasn't exactly sporty, what the hell? But the little boy in him could understand the list on his cousin's face. If Maureen O'Hara had been born a car, maybe she'd be one of these. The red body color would have gone nicely with her hair. After ten minutes, Dominic figured he'd drooled enough, and they walked on.

"So, we know everything about the subject except for what he looks like?" Brian asked half a block up the street.

"Correct," Jack confirmed. "But how many Arabs do you expect there to be in the Bristol?"

"A lot of them in London. Trick is going to be to ID the subject. Doing the job right on the sidewalk ought not to be too hard." And, looking around, that seemed likely. Street traffic wasn't as thick as in New York or London, but it wasn't Kansas City after dark either, and doing the job in broad daylight had its own attractions. "I guess we stake out the hotel's main entrance, and whatever side entrance there is. Can you see if you can get more data from The Campus?"

Jack checked his watch and did the mental arithmetic. "They should be open for business in two hours or so."

"Then check your e-mail," Dominic told him. "We'll wander around and look for a likely subject."

"Right." They walked across the street and headed back to the Imperial. Once back in his room, Jack flopped onto the bed and grabbed a nap.

There was nothing he had to do right now, Fa'ad thought, so he might as well get some air. Vienna had plenty of things to look at, and he hadn't exhausted them all yet. So, he dressed properly, like a businessman, and walked outside.

"Bingo, Aldo." Dominic had a cop's memory for faces, and they had practically walked into this one.

"Isn't he—"

"Yep. Atef's pal from Munich. You wanna bet he's our boy?"

"Sucker bet, bro." Dominic cataloged the target. Middle Eastern as hell, medium height, five feet ten inches or so, light build at about hundred fifty pounds, black and brown, slightly Semitic nose, dresses well and expensively, like a businessman, walks around with purpose and confidence. They walked within ten feet of him, careful not to stare, even with their sunglasses. Gotcha, sucker. Whoever these people were, they didn't know dick about hiding in plain sight. They walked to the corner.

"Damn, that was easy enough," Brian observed. "Now what?"

"We let Jack check it out with the home office and just be cool, Aldo."

"Roger, copy that, bro." He unconsciously checked his coat to make sure the gold pen was in place, as he might have checked his holster for his M9 Beretta automatic in uniform and in the field. It felt as though he were an invisible lion in a Kenyan field full of wildebeest. It didn't get much better than that. He could pick out the one he wanted to kill and eat, and the poor bastard didn't even know he was being stalked. Just like they do it. He wondered if this guy's colleagues would see the irony of having such tactics used against them. It wasn't how Americans were conditioned to act, but then all that stuff about showdowns on main street at high noon was something invented by Hollywood, anyway. A lion was not in the business of risking his life, and as they'd told him in the Basic School, if you found yourself in a fair fight, then you hadn't planned it very well beforehand. Fighting fair was okay in the Olympic Games, but this wasn't that. No big-game hunter walked up to a lion making noise and holding a sword. Instead, he did the sensible thing: He took cover behind a log and did it with a rifle from two hundred yards or so. Even the Masai tribesmen of Kenya, for whom killing a lion was the passage into manhood, had the good sense to do it in a squad-sized unit of ten, and not all of them teenagers, to make sure it was the lion's tail they took back to the kraal. It wasn't about being brave. It was about being effective. Just being in this business was dangerous enough. You did your best to take every element of unnecessary risk out of the equation. It was business, not a sport. "Do him out here on the street?"

"Worked before, Aldo, didn't it? I don't figure we can hit him in the hotel saloon."

"Roge-o, Enzo. Now what do we do?"

"Play tourist, I suppose. The opera house looks impressive. Let's take a look…. The sign says they're doing Wagner's The Valkyries. I've never seen that one."

"I've never seen an opera in my life. I suppose I ought to someday — part of the Italian soul, ain't it?"

"Oh yeah, I got more soul than I can control, but I'm partial to Verdi."

"My ass. When you been to the opera?"

"I have some of the CDs," Dominic answered, with a smile. As it turned out, the State Opera House was a magnificent example of imperial architecture, built and executed as though for God Himself to attend a performance, and bedecked in scarlet and gold. Whatever its faults might have been, the House of Hapsburg had shown impressive taste. Dominic thought briefly about checking out the cathedrals in town, but decided it wasn't fitting, given the reason they were here. In all, they walked around for two hours, then headed back to the hotel and up to Jack's room.

"No joy from the home office," Jack told them.

"No problem. We saw the guy. He's an old friend from Munich," Brian reported. They walked into the bathroom and opened the faucets, which would put out enough white noise to annoy any microphones in the room. "He's a pal of Mr. Atef. He was there when we popped him in Munich."

"How can you be sure?"

"A hundred percent sure, we can't be — but what are the odds that he just happened to be in both cities, and the right hotel, man?" Brian asked reasonably.

"Hundred percent certainty is better," Jack objected.

"I agree, but when you're on the right side of thousand-to-one odds, you put the money down and toss the dice," Dominic responded. "By Bureau rules, he's at least a known associate, somebody we'd take aside to interview. So, he probably isn't out collecting for the Red Cross, y'know?" The agent paused. "Okay, it's not perfect, but it's the best we got, and I think it's worth going with."

It was gut-check time for Jack. Did he have the authority to give a go-no-go on this? Granger hadn't said so. He was intel backup for the twins. But what, exactly, did that mean? Great. He had a job without a job description, and no assigned authority. This did not make much sense. He remembered his father saying once that headquarters people weren't supposed to second-guess the troops out in the field, because the troops had eyes, and were supposed to be trained to think on their own. But in this case his training was probably at least as good as theirs. But he hadn't seen the face of the supposed subject and they had. If he said no, they could just as easily tell him where to stick his opinion, and, since he had no power to enforce it, they'd win the day and he'd just stand around with his dick in his hand, wondering who was right on the call. The spook business was suddenly very unpredictable, and he was stuck in the middle of a swamp without a helicopter to lift his ass out.

"Okay, guys, it's your call." This seemed a lot like taking the coward's way out to Jack, and even more so when he said, "I'd still feel better if we were a hundred percent sure."

"So would I. But like I said, man, a thousand to one constitutes betting odds. Aldo?"

Brian thought it over and nodded. "It works for me. He looked very concerned over his pal in Munich. If he's a good guy, he has funny friends. So, let's do him."

"Okay," Jack breathed, bowing to the inevitable. "When?"

"As soon as convenient," Brian responded. He and his brother would discuss tactics later, but Jack didn't need to know about that.

He was lucky, Fa'ad decided at 10:14 that night. He got an instant message from Elsa K 69, who evidently remembered him kindly.

WHAT SHALL WE DO TONIGHT? he asked "her."

I'VE BEEN THINKING. IMAGINE WE ARE IN ONE OF THE K-LAGERS. I AM A JEWESS, AND YOU ARE THE KOMMAN-DANT… I DO NOT WISH TO DIE WITH THE REST, AND I OFFER YOU PLEASURE IN RETURN FOR MY LIFE…"she" proposed.

It could scarcely have been a more pleasant fantasy for him. GO AHEAD AND BEGIN, he typed.

And so it went for a while, until: PLEASE, PLEASE, I AM NOT AN AUSTRIAN. I AM AN AMERICAN MUSIC STUDENT TRAPPED BY THE WAR…

Better and better. OH, YES? I HAVE HEARD MUCH ABOUT AMERICAN JEWS AND THEIR WHORISH WAYS…

And so it went for nearly an hour. At the end, he sent her to the gas anyway. After all, what were Jews good for, really?

Predictably, Ryan couldn't sleep. His body hadn't yet acclimated to the shift of six time zones, despite the decent amount of sleep he'd had on the plane. How flight crews did it was a mystery to him, though he suspected they simply stayed synchronized to wherever they lived, disregarding wherever they happened to be at the time. But you have to stay constantly mobile to do that, and he wasn't. So, he plugged in his computer and decided to Google his way into Islam. The only Muslim he knew was Prince Ali of Saudi Arabia, and he was not a maniac. He even got along well with Jack's shy little sister, Katie, who found his neatly trimmed beard fascinating. He was able to download the Koran, and he started reading it. The holy book had forty-two suras, broken down into verses, just like his own Bible. Of course, he rarely looked at it, much less read it, because as a Catholic he expected the priests to tell him about the important parts, letting him skip all the work of reading about who the hell begat what the hell — maybe it had been interesting, and even fun, at the time, but not today, unless you were into genealogy, which wasn't a subject of dinner-table conversation in the Ryan family. Besides, everyone knew that every Irishman was descended from a horse thief who'd skipped the country to avoid being hanged by the nasty English invaders. A whole collection of wars had come out of that, one of which had come within a whisker of preventing his own birth in Annapolis.

It was ten minutes later that he realized that the Koran was almost a word-for-word clone of what all the Jewish prophets had scribbled down, divinely inspired to do so, of course, because they said so. And so did this Mohammed guy. Supposedly, God talked to him, and he played executive secretary and wrote it all down. It was a pity there hadn't been a video camera and tape recorder for all these birds, but there hadn't, and, as a priest had explained to him at Georgetown, faith was faith, and either you believed as you were supposed to, or you didn't.

Jack did believe in God, of course. His mom and dad had instructed him in the basics, and sent him through Catholic schools, and he'd learned the prayers and the rules, and he'd done First Communion, and Confession — now called "Reconciliation" in the kinder, gentler Church of Rome — and Confirmation. But he hadn't seen the inside of a church for quite a while. It wasn't that he was against the Church, just that he was grown up now, and maybe not going was a (dumb) way of showing Mom and Dad that he was able to make his own decisions about how he'd live his life, and that Mom and Dad couldn't order him around anymore.

He noted that there was no place in the fifty pages he'd skimmed through that said anything about shooting innocent people so that you could screw the womenfolk among them in heaven. The penalty for suicide was right on the level with what Sister Frances Mary had explained in second grade. Suicide was a mortal sin you really wanted to avoid, because you couldn't go to confession afterward to scrub it off your soul. Islam said that faith was good, but you couldn't just think it. You had to live it, too. Bingo, as far as Catholic teaching went.

At the end of ninety minutes, it came to him — rather an obvious conclusion — that terrorism had about as much to do with the Islamic religion as it did with Catholic and Protestant Irishmen. Adolf Hitler, the biographers said, had thought of himself as a Catholic right up until the moment he'd eaten the gun — evidently, he'd never met Sister Frances Mary or he would have known better. But that bozo had obviously been crazy. So, if he was reading this right, Mohammed would probably have clobbered terrorists. He had been a decent, honorable man. Not all of his followers were the same way, though, and those were the ones he and the twins had to deal with.

Any religion could be twisted out of shape by the next crop of madmen, he thought, yawning, and Islam was just the next one on the list.

"Gotta read more of this," he told himself on the way to the bed. "Gotta."

Fa'ad woke up at eight-thirty. He'd be meeting Mahmoud today, just down the street at the drugstore. From there, they'd take a cab somewhere — probably a museum — for the actual message transfer, and he'd learn what was supposed to happen, and what he'd have to do to make it so. It really was a pity that he didn't have his own residence. Hotels were comfortable, especially the laundry service, but he was approaching his tolerance limit.

Breakfast came. He thanked the waiter and tipped him two Euros, then read the paper that sat on the wheeled table. Nothing of consequence seemed to be happening. There was a coming election in Austria, and each side was enthusiastically blackguarding the other, as the political game was played in Europe. It was a lot more predictable at home, and easier to understand. By nine in the morning, he had the TV turned on, and he found himself checking his watch with increasing frequency. These meetings always made him a little anxious. What if Mossad had identified him? The answer to that was clear enough. They'd kill him with no more thought than flicking at an insect.

Outside, Dominic and Brian were walking about, almost aimlessly, or so it might have seemed to a casual observer. The problem was, there were a few of those around. There was a magazine kiosk just by their hotel, and the Bristol had doormen. Dominic considered leaning against a lamppost and reading a paper, but that was one thing they'd told him in the FBI Academy never to do, because even spies had seen the movies where the actors were always doing that. And so, professional or not, realistic or not, the whole world was conditioned to be mindful of anyone who read a newspaper while leaning on a lamppost. Following a guy already outside without being spotted was child's play compared to waiting for him to appear. He sighed, and kept walking.

Brian was thinking along the same lines. He thought about how cigarettes might help at moments like this. It gave you something to do, like in the movies, Bogart and his unfiltered coffin nails, which had eventually killed him. Bad luck, Bogie, Brian thought. Cancer must have been a bitch of a disease. He wasn't exactly delivering the breath of spring to his subjects, but at least it didn't last months. Just a few minutes, and the brain winked out. Besides, they had it coming in one way or another. Maybe they would not have agreed with that, but you had to be careful about the enemies you made. Not all of them would be dumb and defenseless sheep. And surprise was a bitch. The best thing to have on the battlefield, surprise. If you surprised the other guy, he didn't have a chance to strike back, and that was just fine because this was business, not personal. Like a steer at the stockyards, he walked into a little room, and even if he looked up he'd just see the guy with the air hammer, and after that it was off to cattle heaven, where the grass was always green and the water sweet, and there weren't any wolves around…

Your mind is wandering, Aldo, Brian thought to himself. Both sides of the street served his purpose just fine. So he crossed over and headed for the ATM machine directly across from the Bristol, took out his card, and punched in the code number, to be rewarded with five hundred Euros. Checked his watch: 10:53. Was this bird coming out? Had they missed him somehow?

Traffic had settled down. The red streetcars rumbled back and forth. People here minded their own business. They walked along without looking sideways, unless they were interested in something specific. No eye contact with strangers, no instinct to greet people at all. A stranger was supposed to stay that way, evidently. He appreciated it here even more than in Munich, just how in Ordnung these people were. You could probably eat dinner right off the floor in their houses, as long as you cleaned up the floor afterward.

Dominic had taken up position on the other side of the street, covering the direction to the opera house. There were only two ways for this character to go. Left or right. He could cross the street or not. No more options than that, unless he had a car coming to pick him up, in which case the mission was a washout. But tomorrow was always another day. 10:56, his watch said. He had to be careful, not look at the hotel's entrance too much. Doing this made him feel vulnerable…

There — bingo! It was the subject, all right, dressed in a blue pin-striped suit and a maroon tie, like a guy going to an important business meeting. Dominic saw him, too, and turned to approach from the northwest. Brian waited to see what he was going to do.

Fa'ad decided to trick his arriving friend. He'd approach from across the street, just to be different, and so he crossed over, in the middle of the block, dodging the traffic. As a boy, he'd enjoyed entering the corral for his father's horses and dodging among them. Horses had brains enough not to run into things unnecessarily, of course, more than could be said for some of the cars heading up Kartner Ring, but he got across safely.

The road here was curious, with one paved path like a private driveway, a thin grass median, then the road proper with its cars and streetcars, then another grass median, and the final car path before the opposite sidewalk. The subject darted across and started walking west, toward their hotel. Brian took up position ten feet behind and took out his pen, swapping out the point and checking visually to make sure he was ready.

Max Weber was a motorman who'd worked for the city transit authority for twenty-three years, driving his streetcar back and forth eighteen times per day, for which he was paid a comfortable salary for a workingman. He was now going north, leaving Schwartzenberg Platz, turning left just as the street changed from Rennweg into Schwartzenberg Strasse to go left on the Kartner Ring. The light was in his favor, and his eye caught the ornate Hotel Imperial, where all the rich foreigners and diplomats liked to stay. Then his eyes came back to the road. You couldn't steer a streetcar, and it was the job of those in automobiles to keep out of his way. Not that he went very fast, hardly ever more than forty kilometers per hour, even out at the end of the line. It was not an intellectually demanding job, but he did it scrupulously, in accordance with the manual. The bell rang. Somebody needed to get off at the corner of Kartner and Wiedner Hauptstrasse.

There. There was Mahmoud. Looking the other way. Good, Fa'ad thought, maybe he could surprise his colleague, and have a joke for the day. He stopped on the sidewalk and scanned the miniroad for traffic before dashing across the street.

Okay, raghead, Brian thought, closing the distance in just three steps and—

Ouch, Fa'ad thought. It was quite literally a slight pain in the ass. He ignored it and kept going, cutting through a gap in the traffic on the street. There was a streetcar coming, but it was too far away to be a matter of concern. Traffic was not coming from his right, and so…

Brian just kept walking. He figured he'd go to the magazine stand. It would give him a good chance to turn and watch while he ostensibly made a purchase.

Weber saw the idiot making ready to dash across the tracks. Didn't these fools know only to do that at the Ecke, where he had to stop for the red lights like everyone else? They taught children to do that at the Kindergarten. Some people thought their time was more valuable than gold, as though they were Franz Josef himself, risen from the hundred-year dead. He didn't change his speed. Idiot or not, he'd get well clear of the tracks before—

— Fa'ad felt his right leg collapse under him. What was this? Then his left leg, and he was falling for no reason at all — and then other things started happening faster than he could understand them, and as though from an outside vantage point he saw himself falling down — and there was a streetcar… coming!

Max reacted a little too slowly. He could hardly believe what his eyes told him. But it could not be denied. He tromped his foot down on the brakes, but the fool was less than two meters away, and—lieber Gott!

The streetcar had a pair of bars running horizontally under its nose to prevent exactly this, but they hadn't been checked in several weeks, and Fa'ad was a slender man — slender enough that his feet slid right under the safe bars and his body then pushed them vertically upward and out of the way—

— and Max felt the dreadful thump-thump of his passage over the man's body. Somebody would call for an ambulance, but they would be far better off calling a priest. This poor schlemiel would not ever get to where he was going, the fool, saving time at the cost of his life. The fool!

Across the street, Mahmoud turned just in time to see his friend die. His eyes imagined more than saw the streetcar jump upward, as though to avoid killing Fa'ad, and just that fast his world changed, as Fa'ad's world ended for all time to be.

"Jesus," Brian thought, twenty yards away, holding a magazine in his hands. That poor fucker hadn't lived long enough to die of the poison. He saw that Enzo had moved down the opposite side of the street, perhaps figuring to pop him if and when he'd gotten across, but the succinylcholine had worked as advertised. He'd just picked a 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.