Teeth of the Tiger

CHAPTER 22 SPANISH STEPS

"You're kidding," Jack said at once.

"God, grant me a dumb adversary," Brian responded. "That's one prayer they teach at the Basic School. Trouble is, sooner or later they're going to get smart."

"Like crooks," Dominic agreed. "The problem with law enforcement is that we generally catch the dumb ones. The smart ones we rarely even hear about. That's why it took so long to do the Mafia, and they're not really all that smart. But, yeah, it's a Darwinian process, and we'll be helping to breed brains into them one way or another."

"News from home?" Brian asked.

"Check the time. They won't even be getting in for another hour," Jack explained. "So, the guy really got run over?"

Brian nodded. He'd gone down and been run over like the official Mississippi state animal — a squashed dog on the road. "By a streetcar. Good news is that it covered up the mess." Tough luck, Mr. Raghead.

It wasn't even a mile to the St. Elizabeth's Krankenhaus on Invalidenstrasse, where the ambulance crew carried in the body parts. They'd called ahead, and so there was no particular surprise at the three rubberized bags. These were duly laid on a table in pathology — there was no point in their going to casualty receiving, because the cause of death was so obvious as to be blackly comical. The only hard part was to retrieve blood for a toxicology scan. The body had been so mauled as to be largely drained of blood, but internal organs — mainly the spleen and brain — had enough to be drawn out with a syringe and sent off to the lab, which would look for narcotics and/or alcohol. The only other thing to look for in the postmortem exam was a broken leg, but the passage of the streetcar over the body — they had his name and ID from his wallet, and the police were checking the local hotels to see if maybe he'd left a passport behind, so that the appropriate embassy could be notified — meant that even a broken knee would be almost impossible to discover. Both of his legs had been totally crushed in a matter of less than three seconds. The only surprising thing was that his face was placid. One would have expected open eyes and a grimace of pain from the death, but, then, even traumatic death had few hard-and-fast rules, as the pathologist knew. There was little point in doing an in-depth examination. Maybe if he'd been shot they could find a bullet wound, but there was no reason to suspect that. The police had already talked to seventeen eyewitnesses who'd been within thirty meters of the event. All in all, the pathology report could just as easily have been a form letter as a signed official document.

"Jesus," Granger observed. "How the hell did they arrange that?" Then he lifted his phone. "Gerry? Come on down. Number three is in the bag. You have to see this report." After replacing the phone, he thought aloud, "Okay, now where do we send them next?"

That was settled on a different floor. Tony Wills was copying all of Ryan's downloads, and the one at the top of the download file was impressive in its bloody brevity. So, he lifted his phone for Rick Bell.

It was hardest of all for Max Weber. It took half an hour for the initial denial and shock to wear off. He started vomiting, his eyes replaying the sight of the crumpled body sliding below his field of vision, and the horrible thump-thump of his streetcar. It hadn't been his fault, he told himself. That fool, das Idiot, had just fallen down right before him, like a drunk might do, except it was far too early for a man to have too many beers. He'd had accidents before, mostly fender work on cars that had turned too abruptly in front of him. But he'd never seen and hardly heard of a fatal accident with a streetcar. He'd killed a man. He, Max Weber, had taken a life. It was not his fault, he told himself about once a minute for the next two hours. His supervisor gave him the rest of the day off, and so he clocked out and drove home in his Audi, stopping at a Gasthaus a block from his home because he didn't want to drink alone this day.

Jack was running through his downloads from The Campus, with Dom and Brian standing by, having a late lunch and beers. It was routine traffic, e-mail to and from people suspected of being players, the majority of them ordinary citizens of various countries who'd once or twice written magic words that had been taken note of by the Echelon intercept system at Fort Meade. Then there was one like all the others, except that the addressee was 56MoHa@eurocom.net.

"Hey, guys, our pal on the street was about to have a meet with another courier, looks like. He's writing our old friend Fifty-six MoHa, and requesting instructions."

"Oh?" Dominic came over to look. "What does that tell us?"

"I just have a Internet handle — it's on AOL: Gadfly 097@aol.com. If he gets a reply from MoHa, maybe we'll know something. We think he's an operations officer for the bad guys. NSA tagged him about six months ago. He encrypts his letters, but they know how to crack that one, and we can read most of his e-mails."

"How quick will you see a reply?" Dominic wondered.

"Depends on Mr. MoHa," Jack said. "We just have to sit tight and wait."

"Roger that," Brian said from his seat by the window.

"I see young Jack didn't slow them down," Hendley observed.

"Did you think he would? Jeez, Gerry, I told you," Granger said, having already thanked God for His blessings, but quietly. "Anyway, now they want instructions."

"Your plan was to take down four targets. So, who's number four?" the Senator asked.

It was Granger's turn to be humble. "Not sure yet. To be honest, I didn't expect them to work this efficiently. I've been kinda hoping that the hits so far might generate a target of opportunity, but nobody's prairie-dogging yet. I have a few candidates. Let me run through them this afternoon." His phone rang. "Sure, come on over, Rick." He set the phone down. "Rick Bell says he has something interesting."

The door opened in less than two minutes. "Oh, hey, Gerry. Glad you're here. Sam" — Bell turned his head—"we just had this come in." He handed the rough printout of the e-mail across.

Granger scanned it. "We know this guy…"

"Sure as hell. He's a field ops officer for our friends. We figured he was based in Rome. Well, we figured right." Like all bureaucrats — especially the senior ones — Bell enjoyed patting his own back.

Granger handed the page across to Hendley. "Okay, Gerry, here's number four."

"I don't like serendipity."

"I don't like coincidences either, Gerry, but if you win the lottery you don't give the money back," Granger said, thinking that Coach Darrell Royal had been right: Luck didn't go looking for a stumblebum. "Rick, is this guy worth making go away?"

"Yes, he is," Bell confirmed, with an enthusiastic nod. "We don't know all that much about him, but what we know is all bad. He's an operations guy — of that we are a hundred percent sure, Gerry. And it feels right. One of his people sees another go down, reports in, and this guy gets it and replies. You know, if I ever meet the guy who came up with the Echelon program, I might have to buy him a beer."

"Reconnaissance-by-fire," Granger observed, patting himself very firmly on the back. "Damn, I knew it would work. You shake a hornet's nest, and some bugs are bound to come out."

"Just so they don't sting your ass," Hendley warned. "Okay, now what?"

"Turn 'em loose before the fox goes to ground," Granger replied instantly. "If we can bag this guy, maybe we can really shake something valuable loose from the tree."

Hendley turned his head. "Rick?"

"It works for me. Go-mission," he said.

"Okay, then it's a go-mission," Hendley agreed. "Get the word out."

The nice thing about electronic communications was that they did not take very long. In fact, Jack already had the important part.

"Okay, guys, Fifty-six MoHa's first name is Mohammed — not great news; it's the most common first name in the world — and he says he's in Rome, at the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Vittorio Veneto, number one twenty-five."

"I've heard of that one," Brian said. "It's expensive, pretty nice. Our friends like to stay in nice places, looks like."

"He's checked in under the name Nigel Hawkins. That's English as hell. You suppose he's a Brit citizen?"

"With a first name of Mohammed?" Dominic wondered aloud.

"Could be a cover name, Enzo," Jack replied, pricking Dominic's balloon. "Without a picture, we can't guess about his background. Okay, he's got a cell phone, but Mahmoud — that's the guy who saw the bird go down this morning — must be supposed to know it." Jack paused. "Why didn't he just call in, I wonder? Hmm. Well, the Italian police have sent us stuff that came from electronic intercepts. Maybe they're watching the airwaves, and our boy is being careful…?"

"Makes sense, but why… but why is he sending stuff out over the 'Net?"

"He thinks it's secure. NSA has cracked a lot of the public encryption systems. The vendors don't know that, but the boys at Fort Meade are pretty good at that stuff. Once you crack it, it stays cracked, and the other guy never knows." In fact, he didn't know the real reason. The programmers could be, and often had been, persuaded to insert trapdoors either for patriotism or for cash, and, often enough, for both. 56MoHa was using the most expensive such program, and its literature proclaimed loudly that nobody could crack it because of its proprietary algorithm. That wasn't explained, of course, just that it was a 256-bit encryption process, which was supposed to impress people with the size of the number. The literature didn't say that the software engineer who'd generated it had once worked at Fort Meade — which was why he'd been hired — and was a man who remembered swearing his oath, and, besides, a million dollars of tax-free money had been a hell of a tiebreaker. It had helped him buy his house in the hills of Marin County. And so the California real-estate market was even now serving the security interests of the United States of America.

"So, we can read their mail?" Dominic asked.

"Some of it," Jack confirmed. "The Campus downloads most of what NSA gets at Fort Meade, and when they cross-deck it to CIA for analysis, we intercept that. It's less complicated than it sounds."

Dominic figured a lot out in a matter of seconds. "Fuck…" he breathed, looking up at the high ceiling in Jack's suite. "No wonder…" A pause. "No more beers, Aldo. We're driving to Rome." Brian nodded.

"Don't have room for a third, right?" Jack asked.

"'Fraid not, Junior, not in a 911."

"Okay, I'll catch a plane to Rome." Jack walked to the phone and called downstairs. Within ten minutes, he was booked on an Alitalia 737 to Leonardo da Vinci International, leaving in an hour and a half. He considered changing his socks. If there was anything in life that incurred his loathing, it was taking his shoes off in an airport. He was packed in a few minutes and out the door, stopping only to thank the concierge on the way out. A Mercedes taxi hustled him out of town.

Dominic and Brian had hardly unpacked at all and were ready to go in ten minutes. Dom called the valet while Brian went back to the outside magazine kiosk and got plastic-coated maps to cover the route south and west. Between that and the Euros he'd picked up earlier in the day, he figured they were set, assuming Enzo didn't drive them off an Alp. The ugly-blue Porsche arrived at the front of the hotel, and he came over as the doorman forced their bags in the tiny forward-sited trunk. In another two minutes, he was head-down in the maps looking for the quickest way to the Sudautobahn.

Jack got aboard the Boeing after enduring the humiliation that was now a global cost of flying commercial — it was more than enough to make him think back to Air Force One with nostalgia, though he also remembered that he'd gotten used to the comfort and attention with remarkable speed, and only later learned what normal people had to go through, which was like running into a brick wall. For the moment, he had hotel accommodations to worry about. How to do that from an airplane? There was a pay phone attached to his first-class seat, and so he swiped his black card down the plastic receiver and made his first ever attempt to conquer European telephones. What hotel? Well, why not the Excelsior? On his second attempt, he got through to the front desk and learned that, indeed, they had several rooms available. He bagged a small suite, and feeling very good about himself, he took a glass of Tuscan white from the friendly stewardess. Even a hectic life, he'd learned, could be a good life, if you knew what your next step was, and for the moment his horizon was one step away at a time.

German highway engineers must have taught the Austrians everything they knew, Dominic thought. Or maybe the smart ones had all read the same book. In any case, the road was not unlike the concrete ribbons that crisscrossed America, except that the signage was so different as to be incomprehensible, mainly because it had no language except for city names — and they were foreign, too. He figured out that a black number on a white background inside a red circle was the speed limit, but that was in kilometers, three of which fitted into two miles with parking room left over. And the Austrian speed limits were not quite as generous as the German ones. Maybe they didn't have enough doctors to fix all the screwups, but, even in the growing hills, the curves were properly banked and the shoulders gave you enough bailout room in case somebody got seriously confused with left and right. The Porsche had a cruise control, and he pegged his to five klicks over the posted limit, just to have the satisfaction of going a little too fast. He couldn't be sure that his FBI ID would get him out of a ticket here, as it did all across the U.S. of A.

"How far, Aldo?" he asked the navigator in the Death Seat.

"Looks like a little over a thousand kilometers from where we are now. Call it ten hours, maybe."

"Hell, that's just warming-up time. May need gas in another two hours or so. How you fixed for cash?"

"Seven hundred Monopoly bucks. You can spend these in Italy, too, thank God — with the old lira you went nuts doing the math. Traffic ain't bad," Brian observed.

"No, and it's well behaved," Dominic agreed. "Good maps?"

"Yeah, all the way down. In Italy, we'll need another one for Rome."

"Okay, ought not to be too hard." And Dominic thanked a merciful God that he had a brother who could read maps. "When we stop for gas, we can get something to eat."

"Roger that, bro." Brian looked up to see mountains in the distance — no way to tell how far off they were, but it must have been a forbidding sight back when people walked or rode horses to get around. They must have had a lot more patience than modern man, or maybe a lot less sense. For the moment, the seat was comfortable, and his brother was not quite being maniacal in his driving.

The Italians turned out good airplane drivers in addition to good people for race cars. The pilot positively kissed the runway, and the rollout was as welcome as always. He'd flown too much to be as antsy about it as his father had once been, but, like most people, he felt safer walking or traveling on something he could see. Here also he found Mercedes taxicabs, and a driver who spoke passable English and knew the way to the hotel.

Highways look much the same all over the world, and for a moment Jack wondered where the hell he was. The land outside the airport looked agricultural, but the pitch of the roofs was different than at home. Evidently, it didn't snow much here, they were so shallow. It was late spring, and it was warm enough that he could wear a short-sleeve shirt, but it wasn't oppressive in any way. He'd come to Italy with his father once on official business — an economic meeting of some sort, he thought — but he'd been ridden around by an embassy car all the time. It was fun to pretend to be a prince of the realm, but you didn't learn to navigate that way, and all that stood out in his memory were the places he'd seen. He didn't know a single thing about how the hell he'd gotten there. This was the city of Caesar and a lot of other names that identified people whom history remembered for having done things good and bad. Mostly bad, because that was how history worked. And that, he reminded himself, was why he was in town. A good reminder, really, that he was not the arbiter of good and bad in the world, just a guy working backhandedly for his country, and so the authority to make such a decision did not rest entirely on his shoulders. Being president, as his father had been for just over four years, could not have been a fun job, despite all the power and importance that came with it. With power came responsibility in direct proportion, and if you had a conscience, that had to wear pretty hard on you. There was comfort in just doing things other people thought necessary. And, Jack reminded himself, he could always say no, and while there might be consequences, they would not be all that severe. Not as severe as the things he and his cousins were doing, anyway.

Via Vittorio Veneto looked more business than touristy. The trees on the sides were rather lame looking. The hotel was, surprisingly, not a tall building at all. Nor did it have an ornate entrance. Jack paid off the cabdriver and went inside, with the doorman bringing his bags. The inside was a celebration of woodwork, and the staff were welcoming as they could be. Perhaps this was an Olympic sport at which all Europeans excelled, but someone led him to his room. There was air-conditioning, and the cool air in the suite was welcoming indeed.

"Excuse me, what's your name?" he asked the bellman.

"Stefano," the man replied.

"Do you know if there is a man named Hawkins here — Nigel Hawkins?"

"The Englishman? Yes, he is three doors away, right down the corridor. A friend?"

"He's a friend of my brother's. Please don't say anything to him. Perhaps I can surprise him," Jack suggested, handing him a twenty-Euro note.

"Of course, signore."

"Very good. Thank you."

"Prego," Stefano responded, and walked back to the lobby.

This had to be dumb operational art, Jack told himself, but if they didn't have a photo of the bird, they had to get some idea of what he looked like. With that done, he lifted the phone and tried to make a call.

"You have an incoming call," Brian's phone started saying in low tones, repeating itself three times before he fished it out of his coat pocket.

"Yeah." Who the hell was calling him? he wondered.

"Aldo, it's Jack. Hey, I'm in the hotel — the Hotel Excelsior. Want me to see if I can get you guys some rooms here? It's pretty nice. I think you guys would like it here."

"Hold on." He set the phone down in his lap. "You'll never believe where Junior's checked in to." He didn't have to identify it.

"You're kidding," Dominic responded.

"Nope. He wants to know if he should get us a reservation. What do I tell him?"

"Damn…" Some quick thought. "Well, he's our intel backup, isn't he?"

"Sounds a little too obvious to me, but if you say so" — he picked the phone back up—"Jack, that's affirmative, buddy."

"Great. Okay, I'll set it up. Unless I call back and say no, you come on in here."

"Roger that one, Jack. See ya."

"Bye," Brian heard, and hit the kill button. "You know, Enzo, this doesn't sound real smart to me."

"He's there. He's on the scene, and he's got eyes. We can always back out if we have to."

"Fair enough, I guess. Map says we're coming up on a tunnel in about five miles." The clock on the dash said 4:05. They were making good time, but heading straight at a mountain just past the town or city of Badgastein. Either they needed a tunnel or a big team of goats to clear that hill.

Jack lit up his computer. It took him ten minutes to figure out how to use the phone system for that purpose, but he finally got logged on, to find his mailbox brimming with bits and bytes targeted at him. There was an attaboy from Granger for the completed mission in Vienna, though he hadn't had a thing to do with it. But below that was an assessment from Bell and Wills on 56MoHa. For the most part, it was disappointing. Fifty-six was an operations officer for the bad guys. He either did things or planned things, and one of the things he'd probably done or planned had gotten a lot of people killed in four shopping malls back at home, and so this bastard needed to meet God. There were no specifics about what he'd done, how he'd been trained, how capable he was, or whether or not he was known to carry a gun, all of which was information he'd like to see, but after reading the decrypted e-mails he reencrypted them and saved them in his ACTION folder to go over with Brian and Dom.

The tunnel was like something in a video game. It went on and on to infinity, though at least the traffic inside wasn't piled up in a fiery mass as had happened a few years before in the Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Switzerland. After a period of time that seemed to last half of forever, they came out the other side. It looked to be downhill from here.

"Gas plaza ahead," Brian reported. Sure enough, there was an ELF sign half a mile away, and the Porsche's tank needed filling.

"Gotcha. I could use a stretch and a piss." The service plaza was pretty clean by American standards, and the eatery was different, without the Burger King or Roy Rogers you expected in Virginia — the men's room plumbing was all in Ordnung, however — and the gas was sold by the liter, which well disguised the price until Dominic did the mental arithmetic: "Jesus, they really charge for this stuff!"

"Company card, man," Brian said soothingly, and tossed over a pack of cookies. "Let's boogie, Enzo. Italy awaits."

"Fair enough." The six-cylinder engine purred back to life, and they went back on the road.

"Good to stretch your legs," Dominic observed as he went to his top gear.

"Yeah, it helps," Brian agreed. "Four hundred fifty miles to go, if my addition's right."

"Walk in the park. Call it six hours, if the traffic's okay." He adjusted his sunglasses and shook his shoulders some. "Staying in the same hotel with our subject — damn."

"I've been thinking. He doesn't know dick about us, maybe doesn't even know he's being hunted. Think about it: two heart attacks, one in front of a witness; and a traffic accident, also with a witness he knows. That's pretty bad luck, but no overt suggestion of hostile action, is there?"

"In his place, I'd be a little nervous," Dominic thought aloud.

"In his place, he probably already is. If he sees us in the hotel, we're just two more infidel faces, man. Unless he sees us more than once, we're down in the grass, not up on the scope. Ain't no rule says it has to be hard, Enzo."

"I hope you're right, Aldo. That mall was scary enough to last me a while."

"Concur, bro."

This wasn't the towering part of the Alps. That lay to the north and west, though it would have been bad on the legs had they been walking it, as the Roman legions had done, thinking their paved roads were a blessing. Probably better than mud, but not that much, especially humping a backpack that weighed about as much as his Marines had carried into Afghanistan. The legions had been tough in their day, and probably not all that different from the guys who did the job today in camouflaged utilities. But back then they'd had a more direct way of dealing with bad guys. They'd killed their families, their friends, their neighbors, and even their dogs, and, more to the point, they were known for doing all that. Not exactly practical in the age of CNN, and, truth be told, there were damned few Marines who would have tolerated participating in wholesale slaughter. But taking them out one at a time was okay, so long as you were sure you weren't killing off innocent civilians. Doing that shit was the other side's job. It was really a pity they could not all come out on a battlefield and have it out like men, but, in addition to being vicious, terrorists were also practical. There was no sense committing to a combat action in which you'd not merely lose, but be slaughtered like sheep in a pen. But real men would have built their forces up, trained and equipped them, and then turned them loose, instead of sneaking around like rats to bite babies in their cribs. Even war had rules, promulgated because there were worse things than war, things that were strictly forbidden to men in uniform. You did not hurt noncombatants deliberately, and you tried hard to avoid doing it by accident. The Marines were now investing considerable time, money, and effort in learning city fighting, and the hardest part of it was avoiding civilians, women with kids in strollers — even knowing that some of those women had weapons stashed next to little Johnny, and that they'd love to see the back of a United States Marine, say two or three meters away, just to be sure of bullet placement. Playing by the rules had its limitations. But for Brian that was a thing of the past. No, he and his brother were playing the game by the enemy's rules, and as long as the enemy didn't know it would be a profitable game. How many lives might they have saved already by taking down a banker, a recruiter, and a courier? The problem was that you could never know. That was complexity theory as applied to real life, and it was a priori impossible. Nor would they ever know what good they'd be doing and what lives they might be saving when they got this 56MoHa bastard. But not being able to quantify it didn't mean it wasn't real, like that child killer his brother had dispatched in Alabama. They were doing the Lord's work, even if the Lord was not an accountant.

At work in the field of the Lord, Brian thought. Certainly these alpine meadows were green and lovely enough, he thought, looking for the lonely goatherd. Odalayeee-oh…

"He's where?" Hendley asked.

"The Excelsior," Rick Bell answered. "Says he's right up the hall from our friend."

"I think our boy needs a little advice on fieldcraft," Granger observed darkly.

"Think it through," Bell suggested. "The opposition doesn't know a thing. They're as likely to be worried about the guy who picks up the wash as about Jack or the twins. They have no names, no facts, no hostile organization — hell, they don't even know for sure that anybody's out to get them."

"It's not very good fieldcraft," Granger persisted. "If Jack gets eyeballed—"

"Then what?" Bell asked. "Okay, fine, I know I'm just an intel weenie, not a field spook, but logic still applies. They do not and cannot know anything about The Campus. Even if Fifty-six MoHa is getting nervous, it will be undirected anxiety, and, hell, he's probably got a lot of that in his system anyway. But you can't be a spook and be afraid of anybody, can you? As long as our people are in the background noise, they have nothing to worry about — unless they do something real dumb, and these kids are not that kind of dumb, if I read them right."

Through all of this, Hendley just sat in his chair, letting his eyes flicker back and forth from one to the other. So, this was what it must have been like to be "M" in the James Bond movies. Being the boss had its moments, but it had its stresses, too. Sure, he had that undated presidential pardon in a safety-deposit box, but that didn't mean he ever wanted to make use of it. That would make him even more of a pariah than he already was, and the newsies would never leave him alone, to his dying day, not exactly his idea of fun.

"Just so they don't pretend to be room service and whack him in the hotel room," Gerry thought aloud.

"Hey, if they were that dumb, they'd already be in some German prison," Granger pointed out.

The crossover into Italy was no more formal than crossing over from Tennessee into Virginia, which was one benefit of the European Union. The first Italian city was Villaco, where the people looked a lot more German than Sicilian to their fellow Italians, and from there southwest on the A23. They still needed to learn a little about interchanges, Dominic thought, but these roads were definitely better than they'd run for the famous Mille Miglia, the thousand-mile sports car race of the 1950s, canceled because too many people got killed watching it from the side of the country roads. The land here was not distinguishable from Austria, and the farm buildings were much the same as well. All in all, it was pretty country, not unlike eastern Tennessee or western Virginia, with rolling hills and cows that probably got milked twice a day to feed children on both sides of the border. Next came Udine, then Mestre, and they changed highways again for the A4 to Padova, switched over to A13, and an hour more to Bologna. The Apennine mountains were to their left, and the Marine part of Brian looked at the hills and shuddered at the battlefield they represented. But then his stomach started growling again.

"You know, Enzo, every town we pass has at least one great restaurant — great pasta, homemade cheese, Vitello Francese, the wine cellar from hell…"

"I'm hungry, too, Brian. And, yeah, we're surrounded by Italian soul food. Unfortunately, we have a mission."

"I just hope the son of a bitch is worth what we're missing, man."

"Ours is not to reason why, bro," Dominic offered.

"Yeah, but you can stick the other half of that sentence up your ass."

Dominic started laughing. He didn't like it, either. The food in Munich and Vienna had been excellent, but all around them was the place where good food had been invented. Napoleon himself had traveled with an Italian chef on his campaigns, and most of modern French cuisine had evolved directly from that one man, as racehorses were all linear descendants of an Arabian stallion named Eclipse. And he didn't even know the man's name. Pity, he thought, passing a tractor-trailer whose driver probably knew the best local places. Shit.

They drove with their lights on — a rule in Italy, enforced by the Polizia Stradale, who were not renowned for their leniency — at a steady 150 kilometers per hour, just over ninety miles to the hour, and the Porsche seemed to love it. Gas mileage was over twenty five — or so Dominic guessed. The arithmetic of kilometers and liters against miles and gallons was too much for him while concentrating on the road. At Bologna, they joined up with the A1 and continued south toward Firenze, the city of origin for the Caruso family. The road cut through the mountains, going southwest, and was beautifully engineered.

Bypassing Florence was very hard. Brian knew of a fine restaurant near the Ponte Vecchio that belonged to distant cousins, where the wine was bellissima, and the food worthy of a king, but Rome was only two more hours away. He remembered going there by train that one time in his undress greens with the Sam Browne belt to proclaim his professional identity, and, sure enough, the Italians had liked the United States Marines, like all civilized people. He'd hated taking the train back to Rome and thence to Naples and his ship, but his time had not been his own.

As it wasn't now. There were more mountains as they headed south, but now some of the signs proclaimed ROMA, and that was good.

Jack ate in the Excelsior's dining room, and the food was everything he'd expected, and the staff treated him like a prodigal member of the family come home after a protracted absence. His only complaint was that nearly everyone here was smoking. Well, perhaps Italy didn't know about secondhand smoke dangers. He'd grown up hearing all about it from his mother — who'd often aimed the remarks at Dad, who was always struggling to quit the habit once and for all, and never quite made it. He took his time with dinner. Only the salad was ordinary. Even the Italians couldn't change lettuce, though the dressings were brilliant. He'd taken a corner table to be able to survey the room. The other diners looked as ordinary as he did. All were well dressed. The guest services book in his room didn't say a tie was required, but he'd just assumed it, and, besides, Italy was the world headquarters of style. He hoped to get a suit while here, if time permitted. There were thirty or forty people here. Jack discounted the ones with wives handy. So, he was looking for someone about thirty years old, eating dinner alone, registered as Nigel Hawkins. He ended up with three possibilities. He decided to look for people who didn't look Arabic in their ethnicity, and that weeded one out. So, what to do now? Was he supposed to do anything at all? How could it hurt, unless he identified himself as an intelligence officer?

But… why take chances? he asked himself. Why not just be cool?

And with that thought, he backed off, mentally at least. Better to ID the guy another way.

Rome was indeed a fine city, Mohammed Hassan al-Din told himself. He periodically thought about renting an apartment, or even a house. You could even rent one in the Jewish Quarter; there were some fine kosher restaurants in that part of the city, where one could order anything on the menu with confidence. He'd looked once at an apartment on the Piazza Campo di Fiori, but while the price — even the tourist price — had not been unreasonable, the idea of being tied down to a single location had frightened him off. Better to be mobile in his business. The enemies couldn't strike at that which they could not find. He'd taken chance enough killing the Jew Greengold — he'd been tongue-lashed by the Emir himself for that bit of personal amusement, and told never to do anything like it ever again. What if the Mossad had gotten a picture of him? How valuable would he be to the Organization then? the Emir had demanded angrily. And that man was known by his colleagues for his volcanic temper. So, no more of that. He didn't even carry the knife with him, but kept it in a place of honor in his shaving kit, where he could take it out and inspect the Jew blood on the folding blade.

So, for now, in Rome, he lived here. Next time — after he went back home — he'd return and stay at another, maybe that nice one by the Trevi Fountain, he thought, though this location suited his activities better. And the food. Well, Italian food was richly excellent, better in his estimation than the simple fare of his home country. Lamb was good, but not every day. And here people didn't look at you like an infidel if you had a small sip of wine. He wondered if Mohammed, his own eponym, had knowingly allowed the Faithful to drink spirits made from honey, or simply hadn't known that mead existed. He'd tried it while at Cambridge University, and concluded that only someone who desperately needed to be drunk would ever sample it, much less spend a night with it. So, Mohammed was not quite perfect. And neither was he, the terrorist reminded himself. He did hard things for the Faith, and so he was allowed to take a few diversions from the true path. If one had to live with rats, better to have a few whiskers, after all. The waiter came to take away his dishes, and he decided to pass on dessert. He had to maintain his trim figure if he was to maintain his cover as an English businessman, and fit into his Brioni suits. So, he left the table and walked out to the elevator lobby.

Ryan thought about a nightcap at the bar, but on reflection decided against it and walked out. There was somebody there already, and he got in the elevator first. There was a casual meeting of the eyes, as Ryan moved to punch the 3 button but saw it already lighted. So, this well-dressed Brit — he looked like a Brit — was on his floor…

… wasn't that interesting…?

It took only a few seconds for the car to stop and the door to open.

The Excelsior is not a tall hotel, but it is an expansive one, and it was a lengthy walk, and the elevator man was heading in the right direction, Ryan slowed his pace to follow from a greater distance, and sure enough, he passed Jack's room and kept going, one… two… and at the third door he stopped and turned. Then he looked back at Ryan, wondering, perhaps, if he was being tailed. But Jack stopped and fished out his own key, then, looking down at the other man, in the casual, stranger-to-stranger voice that all men know, said, "G'nite."

"And to you, sir," was the reply in well-educated English English.

Jack walked into the room, thinking he'd heard that accent before… like the Brit diplomats whom he'd met in the White House, or on trips to London with his dad. It was either the speech of someone to the manor born, or who planned to buy his own when the time came and who'd banked enough pounds sterling to pretend to be a Peer of the Realm. He had the peaches-and-cream skin of a Brit, and the upper-class accent—

— and he was checked in under the name of Nigel Hawkins.

"And I got one of your e-mails, pal," Jack whispered to the rug. "Son of a bitch."

It took almost an hour to navigate through the streets of Rome, whose city fathers may not have been married to the city mothers, and none of whom had known shit about city planning, Brian thought, working to find a way to Via Vittorio Veneto. Eventually, he knew they were close when he passed through what may once have been a gate in the city walls designed to keep Hannibal Barca out, but then a left and a right, and they learned that in Rome streets with the same name do not always go straight, which necessitated a circle on the Palazzo Margherita to return back to the Hotel Excelsior, where Dominic decided he'd had quite enough driving for the next few days. Within three minutes, their bags were out of the trunk and they were at the reception desk.

"You have a message to call Signor Ryan when you get in. Your rooms are just next to his," the clerk told them, then he waved at the bellman, who guided them to the elevator.

"Long drive, man," Brian said, leaning back against the paneled walls.

"Tell me about it," Dominic agreed.

"I mean, I know you like fast cars and fast women, but next time how about a damned airliner? Maybe you can score with a stew, y'know?"

"You friggin' jarhead." Followed by a yawn.

"This way, signori," the bellman suggested, with a wave of his arm.

"The message at the desk, where is he?"

"Signor Ryan? He is right here." The bellman pointed.

"That's convenient," Dominic thought aloud, until he remembered something else. He let himself get moved in, and the connecting door to Brian's room opened, and he gave the bellman a generous tip. Then he took the message slip out of his pocket and called.

"Hello?"

"We're right next door, ace. What's shaking?" Brian asked.

"Two rooms?"

"Roger that."

"Guess who's just down from you?"

"Tell me."

"A British guy, a Mr. Nigel Hawkins," Jack told his cousin, and waited for the shock to subside. "Let's talk."

"Come right on over, Junior."

That took no more time than Jack needed to slip into his loafers.

"Enjoy the drive?" Jack asked.

Dominic had poured his minibar wine into a glass. There wasn't much left. "It was long."

"You did all the driving?"

"Hey, I wanted to get here alive, man."

"You turkey," Brian snarled. "He thinks driving a Porsche is like sex, except better."

"It is if you have the right technique, but even sex can wear a man out. Okay." Dominic set his glass down. "Did you say…?"

"Yeah, right there." Jack pointed at the wall. And moved his hand to his eyes. I've seen the mutt. The reply was just nods. "Well, you guys get some sleep. I'll call you tomorrow, and we can think about our appointment. Cool?"

"Very cool," Brian agreed. "Ring us up about nine, okay?"

"You bet. Later." And Jack headed for the door. Soon thereafter, he was back on his computer. And then it hit him. He wasn't the only guy here with one of those, was he? That might be valuable…

Eight o'clock came earlier than it should have. Mohammed was up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and on his machine checking his e-mail. Mahmoud was in Rome as well, having arrived the previous night, and near the top of 56MoHa's mailbox was a letter from Gadfly097, requesting a meeting site. Mohammed thought about that and then decided to exercise his sense of humor.

RISTORANTE GIOVANNI, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, he replied: 13:30. BE CAREFUL IN YOUR ROUTINE. By which he meant to employ countersurveillance measures. There was no definite reason to suspect foul play in the loss of three field personnel, but he hadn't lived to the age of thirty-one in the business of intelligence by being foolish. He had the ability to tell the harmless from the dangerous, he thought. He'd gotten David Greengold six weeks earlier, because the Jew hadn't seen the False Flag play even when it bit him on the ass — well, the back of the neck, Mohammed thought with a lowercase smile, remembering the moment. Maybe he should start carrying the knife again, just for good luck. Many men in his line of work believed in luck, as a sportsman or athlete might. Perhaps the Emir had been right. Killing the Mossad officer had been a gratuitously unnecessary risk, since it courted enemies. The Organization had enough of those, even if the enemies did not know who and what the organization was. Better that they should be a mere shadow to the infidels… a shadow in a darkened room, unseen and unknown. Mossad was hated by his colleagues, but it was hated because it was feared. The Jews were formidable. They were vicious, and they were endlessly clever. And who could say what knowledge they had, what Arab traitors bought with American money for Jewish ends. There was not a hint of treachery in the Organization, but he remembered the words of the Russian KGB officer Yuriy: Treason is only possible from those whom you trust. It had probably been a mistake to kill the Russian so quickly. He'd been an experienced field officer who'd operated most of his career in Europe and America, and there'd probably been no end to the stories he could have told, each of them with a lesson to be learned. Mohammed remembered talking to him and remembered being impressed with the breadth of his experience and judgment. Instinct was nice to have, but instinct often merely mimicked mental illness in its rampant paranoia. Yuriy had explained in considerable detail how to judge people, and how to tell a professional from a harmless civilian. He could have told many more stories, except for the 9mm bullet he'd gotten in the back of the head. It had also violated the Prophet's strict and admirable rules of hospitality. If a man eat your salt, even though he be an infidel, he will have the safety of your house. Well, the Emir was the one who'd violated that rule, saying lamely that he'd been an atheist and therefore beyond the law.

But he'd learned a few lessons, anyway. All his e-mails were encrypted on the best such program there was, individually keyed to his own computer, and therefore beyond anyone's capacity to read except himself. So, his communications were secure. He hardly looked Arab. He didn't sound Arabic. He didn't dress Arabic. Every hotel he stayed at knew that he drank alcohol, and such places knew that Muslims did not drink. So, he ought be completely safe. Well, yes, the Mossad knew that someone like him had killed that Greengold pig, but he didn't think they'd ever gotten a photo of him, and unless he'd been betrayed by the man whom he'd hired to fool the Jew, they had no idea of who and what he was. Yuriy had warned him that you could never know everything, but also that being overly paranoid could alert a casual tail as to what he was, because professional intelligence officers knew tricks that no one else would ever use — and they could be seen to use them from careful observation. It was all like a big wheel, always turning, always coming back to the same place and moving on in the same way, never still, but never moving off its primary path. A great wheel… and he was just a cog, and whether his function was to help it move or make it slow down, he didn't really know.

"Ah." He shook that off. He was more than a cog. He was one of the motors. Not a great motor, perhaps, but an important one, because while the great wheel might move on without him, it would never move so quickly and surely as it did now. And, God willing, he would keep it moving until it crushed his enemies, the Emir's enemies, and Allah's Own Enemies.

So, he dispatched his message to Gadfly097, and called for coffee to be delivered.

Rick Bell had arranged for a crew to be on the computers around the clock. Strange that The Campus hadn't been doing that from the beginning, but now it did. The Campus was learning as it went, just as everyone else did, on both sides of the scrimmage line. At the moment it was Tony Wills, driven by his personal appreciation that there was a six-hour time difference between Central Europe and the American East Coast. A good computer jockey, he downloaded the message from 56 to 097 within five minutes of its dispatch and immediately forwarded it to Jack.

That required fewer seconds than it took to think it. Okay, they knew their subject and they knew where he was going to be, and that was just fine. Jack lifted his phone.

"You up?" Brian heard.

"I am now," he growled back. "What is it?"

"Come on over for coffee. Bring Dom with you."

"Aye, aye, sir." Followed by click.

"I hope this is good," Dominic said. His eyes looked like piss holes in the snow.

"If you want to soar with the eagles in the morning, buddy, you can't wallow with the pigs at night. Be cool. I ordered coffee."

"Thanks. So, what's up?"

Jack walked over to his computer and pointed to the screen. They both leaned down to read.

"Who is this guy?" Dominic asked, thinking Gadfly097…?

"He came in from Vienna yesterday, too."

Across the street somewhere, maybe? Brian wondered, followed by, Did he see my face?

"Okay, I guess we're up for the appointment," Brian said, looking at Dom and getting a thumbs-up.

The coffee arrived in a few more minutes. Jack served, but the brew, they all found, was gritty, Turkish in character, though far worse even than the Turks served. Still, better than no coffee at all. They did not speak on point. Their tradecraft was good enough that they didn't talk business in a room that hadn't been swept for bugs — which they didn't know how to do, and for which they did not have the proper equipment.

Jack gunned down his coffee and headed into the shower. In it was a red chain, evidently to be pulled in case of a heart attack, but he felt reasonably decent and didn't use it. He wasn't so sure about Dominic, who really did look like cat puke on the rug. In his case, the shower worked wonders, and he came back out shaved and scrubbed pink, ready to rumble.

"The food here is pretty good, but I'm not sure about the coffee," he announced.

"Not sure. Jesus, I bet they serve better coffee in Cuba," Brian said. "MRE coffee is better than this."

"Nobody's perfect, Aldo," Dominic observed. But he didn't like it either.

"So, figure half an hour?" Jack asked. He needed about three more minutes to be ready.

"If not, send an ambulance," Enzo said, heading for the door, and hoping the shower gods were merciful this morning. It was hardly fair, he thought. Drinking gave you a hangover, not driving.

But thirty minutes later, all three were in the lobby, neatly dressed and wearing sunglasses against the bright Italian sun that sparkled outside. Dominic asked the doorman for directions and got pointed to the Via Sistina, which led directly to the Trinita dei Monti church, and the steps were just across the street, and looked to be eighty or so feet down — there was an elevator serving the subway stop, which was farther down still, but going downhill was not too outrageous a task. It hit all three that Rome had churches the way New York City had candy stores. The walk down was pleasant. The scene, indeed, would be wonderfully romantic if you had the right girl on your arm. The steps had been designed to follow the slope of the hill by the architect Francesco De Sanctis, and was the home of the annual Donna sotto le Stelle fashion extravaganza. At the bottom was a fountain in which lay a marble boat commemorating a major flood, something in which a stone boat would be of little use. The piazza was the intersection of only two streets, and was named for the presence of the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See. The playing field, as it were, was not very large — smaller than Times Square, for example — but it bustled with activity and vehicle traffic, and enough pedestrians to make passage there a dicey proposition for all involved.

Ristorante Giovanni sat on the western side, an undistinguished building of yellow/cream-painted brick, with a large canopied eating area outside. Inside was a bar at which everyone had a lighted cigarette. This included a police officer having a cup of coffee. Dominic and Brian walked in and looked around, scoping the area out before coming back outside.

"We have three hours, people," Brian observed. "Now what?"

"We want to be back here — when?" Jack asked.

Dominic checked his watch. "Our friend is supposed to show up at about one-thirty. Figure we sit down for lunch about twelve forty-five and await developments. Jack, can you ID the guy by sight?"

"No problem," Junior assured them.

"Then I guess we have about two hours to wander around. I was here a couple years ago. There's good shopping."

"Is that a Brioni store over there?" Jack asked, pointing.

"Looks like it," Brian answered. "Won't hurt our cover to do some shopping."

"Then let's do it." He'd never gotten an Italian suit. He had several English ones, from No. 10 Savile Row in London. Why not try here? This spook business was crazy, he reflected. They were here to kill a terrorist, but beforehand they'd do some clothes shopping. Even women wouldn't do that… expect maybe for shoes.

In fact, there were all manner of stores to be seen on the Via del Babuino—"Baboon Street," of all things — and Jack took the time to look in many of them. Italy was indeed the world capital of style, and he tried on a light gray silk jacket that seemed to have been custom-made for him by a master tailor, and he purchased it on the spot, for eight hundred Euros. Then he had to carry the plastic bag over his shoulder, but was this not beautiful cover? What secret agent man would hobble himself with such an unlikely burden?

Mohammed Hassan left the hotel at 12:15, taking the same walking route that the twins had done two hours earlier. He knew it well. He'd walked the same path on his way for Greengold's killing, and the thought comforted him. It was a fine, sunny day, the temperature reaching to about 30 degrees Celsius, a warm day, but not really a hot one. A good day for American tourists. Christian ones. American Jews went to Israel so that they could spit on Arabs. Here they were just Christian infidels looking to take photographs and buy clothes. Well, he'd bought his suits here as well. There was that Brioni shop just off the Piazza di Spagna. The salesman there, Antonio, always treated him well, the better to take his money. But Mohammed came from a trading culture as well, and you couldn't despise a man for that.

It was time for the midday meal, and the Ristorante Giovanni was as good as any Roman restaurant, and better than most. His favorite waiter recognized him and waved him to his regular table on the right side, under the canopy.

"That's our boy," Jack told them, waving with his glass. The three Americans watched his waiter bring a bottle of Pellegrino water to the table, along with a glass of ice. You didn't see much ice in Europe, where people thought it something to ski or skate on, but evidently 56 liked his water cold. Jack was better placed to look in his direction. "I wonder what he likes to eat."

"The condemned is supposed to have a decent last meal," Dominic noted. Not that mutt in Alabama, of course. He'd probably had bad taste anyway. Then he wondered what they served for lunch in hell. "His guest is supposed to show at one-thirty, right?"

"Correct. Fifty-six told him to be careful in his routine. That might mean to check for a tail."

"Suppose he's nervous about us?" Brian wondered.

"Well," Jack observed, "they have had some bad luck lately."

"You have to wonder what he's thinking," Dominic said. He leaned back in his chair and stretched, catching a glance at their subject. It was a little warm to be wearing a jacket and tie, but they were supposed to look like businessmen, not tourists. Now he wondered if that was a good cover or not. You had to take temperature into account. Was he sweating because of the mission or the ambient temperature? He hadn't been overly tense in London, Munich, or Vienna, had he? No, not then. But this was a more crowded — no, the landscape in London had been more crowded, hadn't it?

There are good serendipities and bad ones. This time, a bad one happened. A waiter with a tray of glasses of Chianti tripped on the big feet of a woman from Chicago, in Rome to check out her roots. The tray missed the table, but the glasses got both twins in the lap. Both were wearing light-colored suits to deal with the heat, and—

"Oh, shit!" Dominic exclaimed, his biscuit-colored Brooks Brothers trousers looking as though he had been hit in the groin with a shotgun. Brian was in even worse shape.

The waiter was aghast. "Scusi, scusi, signori!" he gasped. But there was nothing to be done about it. He started jabbering about sending their clothes to the cleaners. Dom and Brian just looked at each other. They might as easily have borne the mark of Cain.

"It's okay," Dominic said in English. He'd forgotten all of his Italian oaths. "Nobody died." The napkins would not do much about this. Maybe a good dry cleaner, and the Excelsior probably had one on staff, or at least close by. A few people looked over, either in horror or amusement, and so his face was as well marked as his clothing. When the waiter retreated in shame, the FBI agent asked, "Okay, now what?"

"Beats the hell out of me," Brian responded. "Random chance has not acted in our favor, Captain Kirk."

"Thanks a bunch, Spock," Dom snarled back.

"Hey, I'm still here, remember?" Jack told them both.

"Junior, you can't—" But Jack cut Brian off.

"Why the hell not?" He asked quietly. "How hard is it?"

"You're not trained," Dominic told him.

"It's not playing golf at the Masters, is it?"

"Well—" It was Brian again.

"Is it?" Jack demanded.

Dominic pulled his pen out of his coat pocket and handed it across.

"Twist the nib and stick it in his ass, right?"

"It's all ready to go," Enzo confirmed. "But be careful, for Christ's sake."

It was 1:21 now. Mohammed Hassan had finished his glass of water and poured another. Mahmoud would soon be here. Why take the chance of interrupting an important meeting? He shrugged to himself and stood, walking inside for the men's room, which had pleasant memories.

"You sure you want to do this?" Brian asked.

"He's a bad guy, isn't he? How long does this stuff take to work?"

"About thirty seconds, Jack. Use your head. If it doesn't feel right, back away and let him go," Dominic told him. "This isn't a fucking game, man."

"Right." What the hell, Dad did this once or twice, he told himself. Just to make sure, he bumped into a waiter and asked where the men's room was. The waiter pointed, and Jack went that way.

It was an ordinary wooden door with a symbolic label rather than words because of Giovanni's international clientele. What if there's more than one guy in there? he asked himself.

Then you blow it off, dumbass.

Okay…

He walked in, and there was somebody else, drying his hands. But then he walked out, and Ryan was alone with 56MoHa, who was just zipping up and starting to turn. Jack pulled the pen from his inside jacket pocket and turned the tip to expose the iridium syringe tip. He resisted the instinctive urge to check the tip with his finger as not a very smart move, and slid past the well-suited stranger, and then, as told, dropped his hand and got him right in the left cheek. He expected to hear the discharge of the gas but didn't.

Mohammed Hassan al-Din jumped at the sudden sharp pain, and turned to see what looked like an ordinary young man — Wait, he'd seen this face at the hotel…

"Oh, sorry to bump into you, pal."

The way he said it lit off warning lights in his consciousness. He was an American, and he'd bumped into him, and he'd felt a stick in his buttocks, and—

And he'd killed the Jew here, and—

"Who are you?"

Jack had counted off fifteen seconds or so, and he was feeling his oats—

"I'm the man who just killed you, Fifty-six MoHa," he replied evenly.

The man's face changed into something feral and dangerous. His right hand went into his pocket and came out with a knife, and suddenly it wasn't at all funny anymore.

Jack instinctively backed away with a jump. The terrorist's face was the very image of death. He opened his folding knife and locked onto Jack's throat as his target. He brought the knife up and took half a step forward and—

The knife dropped from his hand — he looked down at his hand in amazement, then looked back up—

— or tried to. His head didn't move. His legs lost their strength. He fell straight down. His knees bounced painfully on the tile floor. And he fell forward, turning left as he did so. His eyes stayed open, and then he was faceup, looking at the metal plate glued to the bottom of the urinal, where Greengold had wanted to retrieve the package from before, and…

"Greetings from America, Fifty-six MoHa. You fucked with the wrong people. I hope you like it in hell, pal." His peripheral vision saw the shape move to the door, and the increase and decrease of light as the door opened and closed.

Ryan stopped there and decided to go back. There was a knife by the guy's hand. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and grasped the knife, then just slid it under the body. Better not to dick with it anymore, he thought. Better to — no, one more thing entered his mind. He reached into 56's pants pocket and found what he sought. Then he took his leave. The crazy part was that he felt a great need to urinate at the moment, and walked fast to make that urge subside. In a matter of seconds, he was back at the table.

"That went okay," he told the twins. "I guess we need to get you guys back to the hotel, eh? There's something I need to do. Come on," he commanded.

Dominic left enough Euros to cover the meal, with a tip. The clumsy waiter chased after them, offering to pay for laundering their clothes, but Brian waved him off with a smile, and they walked across the Piazza di Spagna. Here they took the elevator up to the church, and then walked down the street toward the hotel. They were back to the Excelsior in about eight minutes, with both twins feeling rather stupid to have red stains on their clothes.

The reception clerk saw this and asked if they needed a cleaning service.

"Yes, could you send somebody up?" Brian asked in reply.

"Of course, signore. In five minutes."

The elevator, they felt, was not bugged. "Well?" Dominic asked.

"Got him, and I got this," Jack said, holding up a room key just like theirs.

"What's that for?"

"He's got a computer, remember?"

"Oh, yeah."

When they got to MoHa's room, they found it had already been cleaned. Jack stopped off in his room and brought his laptop and the FireWire external drive that he used. It had ten gigabytes of empty space that he figured he could fill up. Inside his victim's room, he attached the connector cable to the port and lit up the Dell laptop Mohammed Hassan had used.

There was no time for finesse; both his 'puter and the Arab's used the same operating system, and he effected a global transfer of everything off the Arab's computer into the FireWire drive. It took six minutes, and then he wiped everything with his handkerchief and walked out of the room, wiping the doorknob as well. He came out in time to see the valet taking Dominic's wine-stained suit.

"Well?" Dominic asked.

"Done. The guys at home might like to get this." He held up the FireWire to emphasize his point.

"Good thinking, man. Now what?"

"Now I gotta fly home, fella. Get an e-mail off to the home office, okay?"

"Roger that, Junior."

Jack got himself repacked and called the concierge, who told him there was a British Airways flight at Da Vinci Airport for London, with connecting service to D.C. Dulles, but he'd have to hurry. That he did, and ninety minutes later was pulling away from the Jetway, sitting in seat 2A.

Mahmoud was there when the police arrived. He recognized the face of his colleague as the gurney was wheeled out of the men's room, and was thunderstruck. What he didn't know was that the police had taken the knife and made note of the bloodstains on it. This would be sent to their laboratory, which had a DNA lab whose personnel had been trained by the London Metropolitan Police, the world leaders in DNA evidence. Without anyone to report to, Mahmoud went back to his hotel and booked passage on a flight to Dubai on Emirate Airways for the following day. He had to report today's misfortune to someone, perhaps the Emir himself, whom he'd never met and knew only by his forbidding reputation. He'd seen one colleague die, and watched the body of another. What horrendous misfortune was this? He'd consider this with some wine. Allah the Merciful would surely forgive him for the transgression. He'd seen too much in too little time.

Jack Jr. got a mild case of the shakes on the flight to Heathrow. He needed somebody to talk to, but that would take a long time to make happen, and so he gunned down two miniatures of Scotch before landing in England. Two more followed in the front cabin of the 777 inbound to Dulles, but sleep would not come. He'd not only killed somebody but had taunted him as well. Not a good thing, but neither was it something to pray to God about, was it? The FireWire drive had three gigabytes off 56's Dell laptop. Exactly what was on it? That he could not know for now. He could have attached it to his own laptop and gone exploring, but, no, that was a job for a real computer geek. They'd killed four people who had struck out at America, and now America had struck back on their turf and by their rules. The good part was that the enemy could not possibly know what kind of cat was in the jungle. They'd hardly met the teeth.

Next, they'd meet the brain.