The Teeth of the Tiger

by Tom Clancy

  A lengthy monologue, plus a tag question.

  “Yes, I know. That’s why we’re here. Soon, Jack. Soon . . . Thanks, buddy. You, too. See ya sometime.” And he hung up, knowing that he wouldn’t actually be seeing his friend anytime soon . . . maybe never again in person. And that was a goddamned shame. There weren’t many people who understood things like this, and more was the pity. One more call to make, and this on a regular phone.

  CALLER ID told Granger who it was before he picked up.

  “Yeah, Gerry?”

  “Sam, those two recruits. You sure they’re ready to play in the bigs?”

  “Ready as they need to be,” the chief of operations assured his boss.

  “Get ’em up here for lunch. You, me, them, and Jerry Rounds.”

  “I’ll call Pete first thing in the morning.” No sense doing it right away. It was barely a two-hour drive, after all.

  “Good. You have any misgivings?”

  “Gerry, the proof of the pudding, you know? We have to see sooner or later.”

  “Yeah, right. See you tomorrow.”

  “’Night, Gerry.” Granger hung the phone back up and went back to his book.

  THE MORNING news was particularly sensational all over America—all over the world, for that matter. The satellite feeds from CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and every other agency that owned TV cameras and an uplink truck provided the world with a lead story that could not be buried by anything less than a nuclear detonation. The European papers expressed ritual sympathy with America for its newest travail—soon to be forgotten and retracted, in effect if not in particulars. The American news media talked about how frightened American citizens were. Not with any poll numbers to back it up, of course, but across the country citizens were suddenly buying firearms for their own personal protection, which purpose would not be served well, or at all. Police knew without being told to take a close look at anyone who might have come from a country east of Israel, and if some dumbass lawyers called that ethnic profiling, then to hell with him. The crimes of the previous day had not been committed by a tour group from Norway.

  Church attendance was up, a little.

  All across America, people went to work and did their jobs, with a “What do you think of all this?” aimed at coworkers, who invariably shook their heads and went back to the business of making steel, automobiles, or delivering the mail. They were not terribly fearful, in fact, because even with four such incidents, it had all happened far from where most of them lived, and such events happened very rarely, and not enough to be a seriously personal threat. But all the working men in the country knew in their hearts that somebody, somewhere, really needed to have his ass kicked.

  Twelve miles away, Gerry Hendley saw his papers—the New York Times was delivered by special messenger, while the Washington Post had arrived by a normal pickup truck. In both cases, the editorials could have been written by the same clone, urging calm and circumspection, noting that the country had a President to react to these dreadful events, and calmly instructing the President to think before acting. The Op-Ed pieces were somewhat more interesting. Some columnists actually reflected the average citizen. There would be a national cry for vengeance on this day, and for Hendley the good news was that he might just be able to respond to it. The bad news was that no one would ever know, if he did it right.

  All in all, this Saturday would not be a slow news day.

  And The Campus’s parking lot would be full, which would escape the notice of those who drove past the place. The cover story, if one were needed, was that the four massacres of the previous day had caused some instability in the financial markets—which, it turned out later in the day, was true.

  Jack Jr. correctly assumed it would be a casual-dress day, and drove his Hummer 2 into work wearing jeans, a pullover shirt, and sneaks. The security people were fully uniformed, of course, and as stone-faced as ever.

  Tony Wills was just lighting up his computer when Jack came in at 8:14.

  “Hey, Tony,” the young Ryan said in greeting. “What’s the traffic like?”

  “See for yourself. They’re not asleep,” Wills told his trainee.

  “Roger that.” He set down his coffee on the desk and slid into his comfortable swivel chair before lighting up his computer and getting through the security systems that protected what was on it. The morning “take” from NSA—that outfit never slept. And it was immediately clear that the people he kept track of paid attention to the news.

  It was to be expected that the people in whom NSA had so much interest were not friends of the United States of America, but, even so, Jack Jr. was surprised—even shocked—by the content of some of the e-mails he read. He remembered his own feelings when the United States Army had charged into Saudi Arabia after the forces of the now defunct United Islamic Republic, and the rush of satisfaction when he’d seen a tank explode from direct fire. He hadn’t thought for a moment about the three men who’d just perished within their steel tomb, rationalizing that they had taken up arms against America, and that was something that bore a price, a wager of sorts, and if the coin came up tails, well, that was why they called it gambling. Partly that had been his youth, since for a child everything seems directed to him as the center of the known universe, an illusion that takes time to discard. But for the most part the people killed the day before had been innocent civilians, noncombatants, mostly women and children, and to take pleasure in their deaths was just plain barbarism. But here it was. Twice now, America had expended blood to save the mother country of Islam, and some Saudis were talking like this?

  “Damn,” he whispered. Prince Ali wasn’t like this. He and Jack’s father were friends. They were pals. They’d visited each other’s homes. He himself had spoken with the guy, picked his brain, listened closely to what he’d had to say. Okay, sure, he’d mostly been a kid then, but Ali wasn’t this sort of guy. But neither had his own father ever been Ted Bundy, and Bundy had been an American citizen, had probably even voted. So, living in a country did not make you a roving ambassador.

  “Not everybody loves us, kid,” Wills said, looking over at his face.

  “What have we ever done to hurt them?” Junior asked.

  “We’re the biggest, richest kid on the block. What we say goes, even when we don’t tell people what to do. Our culture is overpowering, whether it’s Coca-Cola or Playboy magazine. That sort of thing can offend people’s religious beliefs, and in some parts of the world religious beliefs define how they think. They do not recognize our principle of religious freedom, and if we allow something that offends their closely held beliefs, then in their mind it’s our fault.”

  “Are you defending these birds?” Jack Jr. demanded.

  “No, I am explaining how they think. To understand something does not mean approval of it.” Commander Spock had said that once, but evidently Jack had missed that episode. “Your job, remember, is to understand how they think.”

  “Fine. They think fucked-up. I understand that. Now I have numbers to check out,” and Jack set the e-mail transcripts aside and started looking into money moves. “Hey, Uda is working today. Hmm, he does some of this from his home, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s right. Nice thing about computers,” Wills said. “He doesn’t have the lash-up at home he has at the office, though. Any interesting moves?”

  “Just two, into the Liechtenstein bank. Let me run this account . . .” Ryan did some mouse work and came up with an ID on the account. It wasn’t an especially big one. In fact, by Sali’s standards it was downright tiny. Just half a million Euros, used mostly for credit card expenditures, his own and . . . others . . .

  “Hey, this account supports a bunch of Visa cards,” he said to Wills.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, like a dozen or so. No, it’s . . . sixteen, aside from the ones he uses . . .”

  “Tell me about the account,” Wills ordered. Sixteen suddenly seemed a very important number.

  “It’s a number
ed one. NSA got it because of the trapdoor in the bank’s accounting program. It’s not big enough to be very important, but it is covert.”

  “Can you pull up the Visa numbers?”

  “The account numbers? Sure.” Jack selected the account numbers, cut-and-pasted them to a new document, and printed it. Then he handed it across.

  “No, you look at this,” Wills said, handing across a sheet of his own.

  Jack took it, and instantly the account numbers looked familiar. “What’s your list about?”

  “Those bad boys in Richmond all had Visa cards, used ’em to buy gas across the country—looks like their trip originated in New Mexico, by the way. Jack, you tied Uda bin Sali to yesterday. It looks like he’s the guy who bankrolled their expense accounts.”

  Jack looked at the sheets again, comparing one list of numbers with the others. Then he looked up.

  “Fuck,” he breathed.

  And Wills thought about the miracle of computers and modern communications. The shooters from Charlottesville had used the Visa cards to purchase gas and food, all right, and their little friend Sali had just pumped some money into the bank account that paid the bills. He’d probably act Monday to kill off the accounts, to drop them off the face of the earth. But he’d be too late.

  “Jack, who told Sali to drop money into the bank account?” We got us a target, Wills did not say. Maybe more than one.

  CHAPTER 15

  RED COATS AND BLACK HATS

  THEY LET Jack do the computer work, cross-referencing the e-mails to and from Uda bin Sali that day. It was actually fairly miserable work, since Jack had the skills but not yet the soul of an accountant. But he soon learned that the notice to fund the account came from someone named 56MoHa@eurocom.net, who’d logged in over an 800 line from Austria.

  They couldn’t track him down any more closely than that, but now they had a new name on the Internet to keep track of. It was the cyber identity of somebody who gave orders to a suspected—known—banker for terrorists, and that made 56MoHa@eurocom.net very interesting indeed. It was up to Wills to twig NSA to keep track of that one, in case they had not already made it a “handle of interest,” as such identities were known. It was widely believed in the computer community that such handles were largely anonymous, and largely they were, but once they became known to the proper agencies they could be pursued. It was usually by illegal means, but if the line between legal and illegal conduct on the Internet could operate in favor of teenaged pranksters, the same was true for the intelligence community, whose computers were difficult to locate, much less to hack. The most immediate problem was that Eurocom.net did not maintain any long-term storage of its message traffic, and once they fell off the server RAM—by being read by the intended recipient—they were essentially gone forever. Maybe NSA would note that this mutt had written to Uda bin Sali, but lots of people did, for money-changing purposes, and even NSA didn’t have the manpower to read and analyze every single e-mail that crossed its computerized path.

  THE TWINS arrived just before 11:00 A.M., guided by their in-car GPS computers. The identical C-class Mercedes sedans were directed to the small visitors’ parking lot located directly behind the building. There Sam Granger met them, shook hands, and walked them inside. They were immediately issued lapel passes to get them past the security personnel, whom Brian immediately typed as former military NCOs.

  “Nice place,” Brian observed as they headed for the elevators.

  Bell smiled. “Yeah, in private industry we can hire better decorators.” It also helped if you happened to like the decorator’s taste in art, which, fortunately, he did.

  “You said ‘private industry,’” Dominic observed at once. This was not, he thought, a time to enjoy the subtlety of the moment. This was the agency he worked for, and everything here was important.

  “You’ll get fully briefed today,” Bell said, wondering how much truth he had just relayed to his guests.

  The Muzak in the elevators was no more offensive than usual, and the lobby on the top floor—where the boss always was—was pretty vanilla, though it was Breyers vanilla instead of the Safeway house brand.

  “SO, YOU tumbled to this today?” Hendley was asking. This new kid, he thought, really did have his father’s nose.

  “It just jumped off the screen at me,” Jack replied. About what one would expect him to say, except that it had not leaped off anyone else’s screen.

  The boss’s eyes went to Wills, whose analytical ability he knew well. “Jack’s been looking at this Sali guy for a couple of weeks. We thought he might be a minor-league player, but today he moved up to triple-A status, maybe more,” Tony speculated. “He’s indirectly tied to yesterday.”

  “NSA twig to this yet?” Hendley asked.

  Wills shook his head. “No, and I don’t think they will. It’s too indirect. They and Langley are keeping an eye on his guy, but as a barometer, not a principal.” Unless somebody at one place or the other has a lightbulb moment, he didn’t have to add. They happened, just not very often. In both bureaucracies, an off-the-reservation insight often got lost in the system, or was buried by those to whom it did not immediately occur. Every place in the world had its own orthodoxy, and woe betide the apostates who worked there.

  Hendley’s eyes swept over the two-page document. “Sure wiggles like a fish, doesn’t he?” Then his phone buzzed, and he picked up the receiver. “Okay, Helen, send them in . . . Rick Bell is bringing in those two guys we talked about,” he explained to Wills.

  The door opened, and Jack Jr.’s eyes popped somewhat.

  So did Brian’s. “Jack? What are you doing here?”

  Dominic’s face changed a moment later. “Hey, Jack! What’s happening?” he exclaimed.

  For his part, Hendley’s eyes twisted into a hurt expression. He hadn’t thought this all the way through, a rare error on his part. But the room had only one door, unless you counted the private washroom.

  The three cousins shook hands, momentarily ignoring the boss, until Rick Bell took control of the moment.

  “Brian, Dominic, this is the big boss, Gerry Hendley.” Handshakes were exchanged in front of the two analysts.

  “Rick, thanks for bringing that up. Well done to both of you,” Hendley said in dismissal.

  “I guess it’s back to the workstation. See you, guys,” Jack said to his cousins.

  The surprise of the moment didn’t fade immediately, but Brian and Dominic settled into their chairs and filed the happenstance away for the moment.

  “Welcome,” Hendley said to them, leaning back in his chair. Well, sooner or later they’d find out, wouldn’t they? “Pete Alexander tells me that you’ve done very well down at the country house.”

  “Aside from the boredom,” Brian responded.

  “Training is like that,” Bell said in polite sympathy.

  “What about yesterday?” Hendley asked.

  “It wasn’t fun,” Brian said first. “It was a lot like that ambush in Afghanistan. Ka-boom, it started, and then we had to deal with it. Good news, the bad guys weren’t all that bright. They acted like free agents instead of a team. If they’d been trained properly—if they’d acted like a team with proper security—it would have gone different. As it was, it was just a matter of taking out one at a time. Any idea on who they were?”

  “What the FBI knows to this point, they seem to have come into the country through Mexico. Your cousin ID’d the source of their funding for us. He’s a Saudi expatriate living in London, and he may be one of their backers. They were all Arabian in origin. They’ve positively ID’d five of them as Saudi citizens. The guns were stolen about ten years ago. They rented the cars—all four groups—in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and probably drove independently to their objectives. Their routes have been tracked by gas purchases.”

  “Motivation was strictly ideological?” Dominic asked.

  Hendley nodded. “Religious—their version of it, yes. So it would seem.”

  “
Is the Bureau looking for me?” Dominic asked next.

  “You’ll have to call Gus Werner later today so he can fill out his paperwork, but don’t expect any hassles. They have a cover story all cooked up already.”

  “Okay.”

  This was Brian: “I assume that this is what we’ve been training for? To hunt down some of these people before they can do any more bad things over here?”

  “That’s about right,” Hendley confirmed.

  “Okay,” Brian said. “I can live with that.”

  “You will go into the field together, covered as people in the banking and trading business. We’ll brief you in on the stuff you need to know to maintain that cover. You’ll operate mainly out of a virtual office via laptop computer.”

  “Security?” Dominic wondered.

  “That will not be a problem,” Bell assured him. “The computers are as secure as we can make them, and they can double as Internet phones for times when voice communications are required. The encryption systems are highly secure,” he emphasized.

  “Okay,” Dominic said dubiously. Pete had told them much the same, but he’d never trusted any encryption system. The FBI’s radio systems, secure as they were supposed to be, had been cracked once or twice by clever bad guys or by computer geeks, the kind who liked to call the local FBI field office to tell them how smart they were. “What about our legal cover?”

  “This is the best we can do,” Hendley said, handing a folder across. Dominic took it and flipped it open. His eyeballs widened immediately.

  “Damn! How the hell did you get this?” he asked. The only presidential pardon he’d ever seen had been in a legal textbook. This one was effectively blank, except that it was signed. A blank pardon? Damn.