by Tom Clancy
Then Emil appeared with lunch—Mittagessen—and that, they both learned, was also okay. But both kept watching the apartment house.
“This potato salad is dynamite, Aldo,” Dominic observed between bites. “I never had anything like it. Lots of vinegar and sugar, kinda crispy on the palate.”
“Good food isn’t all Italian.”
“When we get home, gotta try to find a German restaurant.”
“Roger that. Lookie, lookie, Enzo.”
It wasn’t their subject, but it was his squeeze, Trudl Heinz. Just like the photo on their computers, walking out of the apartment house. Pretty enough to turn a man’s head briefly, but not a movie star. Her hair had been blond once, but that had changed in her midteens, by the look of her. Nice legs, better-than-average figure. A pity she’d linked up with a terrorist. Maybe he’d latched onto her as part of his cover, and so much the better for him that it had side benefits. Unless they were living platonically, which didn’t seem likely. Both Americans wondered how he treated her, but you couldn’t tell something like that from watching her walk. She went up the other side of the street, but passed the mosque. So, she wasn’t heading there at the moment.
“I’m thinking . . . if he goes to church, we can poke him coming out. Lots of anonymous people around, y’know?” Brian thought aloud.
“Not a bad concept. We’ll see how faithful this guy is this afternoon, and what the crowd’s like.”
“Call that a definite maybe,” Dominic replied. “First, let’s finish up here and then get some clothes that’ll fit us in better.”
“Roger that,” Brian said. He checked the time: 14:00. Eight in the morning at home. Only one hour of jet lag from London, easily written off.
JACK CAME in earlier than usual, his interest piqued by what he took to be an ongoing operation in Europe, and wondering what today’s message traffic would show.
It turned out to be fairly routine, with some additional traffic on Sali’s death. Sure enough, MI5 had reported his death to Langley as having been the apparent result of a heart attack, probably caused by the onset of fatal arrhythmia. That’s what the official autopsy read, and his body had been released to a solicitors’ firm representing the family. Arrangements were being made to fly him home to Saudi Arabia. His apartment had been looked at by the London version of a black-bag team, which had not, however, turned up anything of particular interest. That included his office computer, whose hard drive had been copied and the data carted off. It was being examined bit by bit by their electronic weenies, details to follow. That could take a lot of time, Jack knew. Stuff hidden on a computer was technically discoverable, but, theoretically, you could also take the pyramids of Giza apart stone by stone to see what was hidden under them. If Sali had been really clever about burying things into slots only he knew about, or in a code to which only he knew the key . . . well, it would be tough. Had he been that clever? Probably not, Jack thought, but you could only tell by looking, and that was why people always looked. It’d take at least a week, to be sure. A month, if the little bastard was good with keys and codes. But just finding hidden stuff would tell them that he’d been a real player and not just a stringer, and the varsity at GCHQ would be assigned to it. Though none of them would be able to discover what he’d taken away to death with him inside his head.
“Hey, Jack,” Wills said, coming in.
“’Morning, Tony.”
“Nice to be eager. What have they turned on our departed friend?”
“Nothing much. They’re airmailing the box home later today, probably, and the pathologist called it a heart attack. So, our guys are clean.”
“Islam pretty much requires that the body be disposed of quickly, and in an unmarked grave. So, once the body’s gone, it’s all-the-way gone. No exhumation to check for drugs and stuff.”
“So, we did do it? What did we use?” Ryan asked.
“Jack, I do not know, and I do not want to know what, if anything, we had to do with his untimely death. Nor do I have any desire to find out. Nor should you, okay?”
“Tony, how the hell can you be in this business and not be curious?” Jack Jr. demanded.
“You learn what is not good to know, and you learn not to speculate on such things,” Wills explained.
“Uh-huh,” Jack reacted dubiously. Sure, but I’m too young for that shit, he didn’t say. Tony was good at what he did, but he lived inside a box. So did Sali right now, Jack thought, and it wasn’t a good place to be. And besides, we did waste his ass. Exactly how, he didn’t know. He could have asked his mom about what drugs or chemicals there might be that could accomplish this mission, but, no, he couldn’t do that. She’d sure as hell tell his father, and Big Jack would sure as hell want to know why his son had asked such a question—and might even guess the answer. So, no, that was out of the question. All the way out.
With the official government traffic on Sali’s death, Jack started looking for NSA and related intercepts from other interested sources.
There was no further reference to the Emir in the daily traffic. That had just come and gone, and previous references were limited to the one Tony had pulled up. Similarly, his request for a more global search of signals records at Fort Meade and Langley had not been approved by the people upstairs, disappointingly but not surprisingly. Even The Campus had its limits. He understood the unwillingness of the people upstairs to risk having somebody wonder who’d made such a request, and, not finding an answer, to make a deeper query. But there were thousands of such requests back and forth every day, and one more couldn’t raise that much of a ruckus, could it? He decided not to ask, however. There was no sense in being identified as a boat rocker this early into his new career. But he did instruct his computer to scan all new traffic for the word “Emir,” and, if it came up, he could log it and then have a firmer case for his special inquiry the next time, if there was a next time. Still, a title like that—to his mind, it was indicative of the ID for a specific person, even if the only reference CIA had about it was “probably an in-house joke.” The judgment had come from a senior Langley analyst, which carried a lot of weight in that community, and therefore in this one as well. The Campus was supposed to be the outfit that corrected CIA’s mistakes and/or inabilities, but since they had fewer people on staff, they had to accept a lot of ideas that came from the supposedly disabled agency. It did not make all that much logical sense, but he hadn’t been consulted when Hendley had set the place up, and therefore he had to assume that the senior staff knew their business. But as Mike Brennan had told him about police work, assumption was the mother of all screwups. It was also a widely known adage of the FBI. Everybody made mistakes, and the size of any mistake was directly proportional to the seniority of the man making it. But such people didn’t like to be reminded of that universal truth. Well, nobody really did.
THEY BOUGHT the clothes off the rack. They were generally like what one would buy in America, but the differences, while individually subtle, added up to an entirely different look. They also got shoes to match the outfits, and, after changing at their hotel, they went back out on the street.
The passing grade came when Brian was stopped on the street by a German citizen asking directions to the Hauptbahnhoff, at which time Brian had to respond in English that he was new here, and the German woman backed away with an embarrassed smile and buttonholed somebody else.
“It means the main train station,” Dominic explained.
“So, why can’t she catch a cab?” Brian demanded.
“We live in an imperfect world, Aldo, but now you must look like a good Kraut. If anyone else asks you, just say Ich bin ein Aüslander. It means ‘I’m a foreigner,’ and that’ll get you out of it. Then they’ll probably ask the question in better English than you’d hear in New York.”
“Hey, look!” Brian pointed to the Golden Arches of a McDonald’s, a more welcome sight than the Stars and Stripes over the U.S. Consulate, though neither felt like eating there. The loc
al food was simply too good. By nightfall they were back at the Hotel Bayerischer, enjoying just that.
“WELL, THEY’RE in Munich, and they spotted the subject’s building and mosque, but not him yet,” Granger reported to Hendley. “They eyeballed his lady friend, though.”
“Things going smoothly, then?” the Senator asked.
“No complaints to this point. Our friend is not being looked at by the German police. Their counterintelligence service knows who he is, but they’re not running any sort of case on him. They’ve had some problems with domestic Muslims, and some of them are being covered, but this guy hasn’t popped up on the radar screen yet. And Langley hasn’t pressed the issue. Their relations with Germany aren’t all that good at the moment.”
“Good news and bad news?”
“Right.” Granger nodded. “They can’t feed us much information, but we don’t have to worry about fooling a tail. The Germans are funny. If you keep your nose clean and everything’s in Ordnung, you’re reasonably safe. If you step over the line, they can make your life pretty miserable. Historically, their cops are very good, but their spooks are not. The Soviets and the Stasi both had their spook shop thoroughly penetrated, and they’re still living that down today.”
“They do black ops?”
“Not really. Their culture is too legalistic for that. They raise honest people who play by the rules, and that’s a crippling influence on special operations—those they do try occasionally crater badly. You know, I bet the average German citizen even pays his taxes on time, and in full.”
“Their bankers know how to play the international game,” Hendley objected.
“Yeah, well, maybe that’s because international bankers don’t really recognize the concept of having a country to be loyal to,” Granger responded, sticking the needle in slightly.
“Lenin once said the only country a capitalist knows is the ground he stands on when he makes a deal. There are some like that,” Hendley allowed. “Oh, did you see this?” He handed over the request from downstairs to root around for somebody called “the Emir.”
The director of operations scanned the page and handed it back. “He doesn’t make much of a case for it.”
Hendley nodded. “I know. That’s why I denied it. But . . . but, you know, it caused his instincts to twitch, and he had the brains to ask a question.”
“And the boy’s smart.”
“Yes, he is. That’s why I had Rick set him up with Wills as a roommate and training officer. Tony is bright, but he doesn’t reach outside very much. So, Jack can learn the business and also learn about its limitations. We’ll see how much he chafes from that. If this kid stays with us, he just might go places.”
“You think he has his father’s potential?” Granger wondered. Big Jack had been a king spook before going on to bigger things.
“I think he might grow into it, yes. Anyway, this ‘Emir’ business strikes me as a fundamentally good idea on his part. We don’t know much about how the opposition operates. It’s a Darwinian process out there, Sam. The bad guys learn from their antecedents, and they get smarter—on our nickel. They’re not going to offer themselves up to get a smart bomb in the ass. They’re not going to try to be TV stars. Good for the ego, maybe, but fatal. A herd of gazelles doesn’t knowingly head toward the lion pride.”
“True,” Granger agreed, thinking back to how his own ancestor had handled obstreperous Indians in the Ninth U.S. Cavalry Regiment. Some things didn’t change much. “Gerry, the problem is, all we can do about their organizational model is to speculate. And speculation is not knowledge.”
“So, tell me what you think,” Hendley ordered.
“Minimum two layers between the head of it all: Is it one man or a committee? We do not and cannot know right now. And the shooters: We can get all those we want, but that’s like cutting grass. You cut it, it grows, you cut it, it grows, ad infinitum. You want to kill a snake, best move is to take off the head. Okay, fine, we all know that. Trick is finding the head, because it’s a virtual head. Whoever it is, or are, they’re operating a lot like we are, Gerry. That’s why we’re doing a recon-by-fire, to see what we can shake loose. And we have all of our analytical troops looking for that, here, and at Langley, and Meade.”
A tired sigh. “Yeah, Sam, I know. And maybe something will shake loose. But patience is a mother to live by. The opposition is probably basking in the sun right now, feeling good about stinging us, killing all those women and kids—”
“Nobody likes that, Gerry, but even God took seven days to make the world, remember?”
“You turning preacher on me?” Hendley asked, with narrowed eyes.
“Well, the eye-for-an-eye part works for me, bud, but it takes time to find the eye. We have to be patient.”
“You know, when Big Jack and I talked about the need for a place like this, I was actually dumb enough to think we could solve problems more quickly if we had the authority to do so.”
“We’ll be quicker than the government ever will, but we’re not The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Hey, look, the operational end just got under way. We’ve made only one hit. Three more to go before we can expect to see any real response from the other side. Patience, Gerry.”
“Yeah, sure.” He didn’t add that time zones didn’t help much, either.
“YOU KNOW, there’s one other thing.”
“What’s that, Jack?” Wills asked.
“It would be better if we knew what operations were going on. It would enable us to focus our data hunt a little more efficiently.”
“It’s called ‘compartmentalization.’”
“No, it’s called horseshit,” Jack shot back. “If we’re on the team, we can help. Things that might look like non sequiturs appear different if you know the context that appears out of nowhere. Tony, this whole building is supposed to be a compartment, right? Subdividing it like they do at Langley doesn’t help get the job done, or am I missing something?”
“I see your point, but that’s not how the system works.”
“Okay, I knew you’d say that, but how the hell do we fix what’s broke at CIA if all we do is just to clone their operation?” Jack demanded.
And there wasn’t a ready answer for that which would satisfy the questioner, was there? Wills asked himself. There simply wasn’t, and this kid was catching on way too fast. What the hell had he learned in the White House? For damned sure, he’d asked a lot of questions. And he’d listened to all the answers. And even thought about them.
“I hate to say this, Jack, but I’m only your training officer, not the Big Boss of this outfit.”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. I guess I got used to my dad having the ability to make things happen—well, it looked that way to me, at least. Not to him, I know, not all the time. Maybe impatience is a family characteristic.” Doubly so, since his mom was a surgeon, accustomed to fixing things on her own schedule, which was generally right the hell now. It was hard to be decisive sitting at a workstation, a lesson his dad had probably had to learn in his time, back when America had lived in the gunsights of a really serious enemy. These terrorists could sting, but they couldn’t do serious structural harm to America, though it had been tried in Denver once. These guys were like swarming insects rather than vampire bats . . .
But mosquitoes could transmit yellow fever, couldn’t they?
SOUTH OF Munich, in the port city of Piraeus, a container was lifted off its ship by a gantry crane and lowered to a waiting truck trailer. Once secured, the trailer went off, behind the Volvo truck driving out of the port, bypassing Athens, and heading north into the mountains of Greece. The manifest said it was going to Vienna, a lengthy non-stop drive over decent highways, delivering a cargo of coffee from Colombia. It didn’t occur to the port security people to conduct a search, since all the bills of lading were in good order and passed the bar-code scans properly. Already men were assembling to deal with the part of the cargo not intended to be mixed with hot water and cream. I
t took a lot of men to break down a metric ton of cocaine into dose-sized packets, but they had a single-story warehouse, recently acquired, in which to accomplish the task, and then they would be driving individually all over Europe, taking comfort in the lack of internal borders the continent had adopted since the formation of the European Union. With this cargo, the word of a business partner was being kept, and a psychological profit was being recompensed by a monetary one. The process went on through the night, while Europeans slept the sleep of the just, even those who would soon be making use of the illegal part of the cargo as soon as they found a street dealer.
THEY SAW the subject at 9:30 the following morning. They were having a leisurely breakfast at another Gasthaus half a block from the one that employed their friend Emil, and Anas Ali Atef was walking purposely up the street, and came within twenty feet of the twins, who were breakfasting on strudel and coffee, along with twenty or so German citizens. Atef didn’t notice he was being watched; his eyes looked forward and did not discreetly scan the area as a trained spook would have done. Evidently, he felt safe here. And that was good.
“There’s our boy,” Brian said, spotting him first. As with Sali, there was no neon sign over his head to mark him, but he matched the photo perfectly, and he had come out of the right apartment building. His mustache made an error in identification unlikely. Reasonably well dressed. Except for his skin and mustache, he might have passed for a German. At the end of the block, he boarded a streetcar, destination unknown, but heading east.
“Speculate?” Dominic asked his brother.
“Off to have breakfast with a pal, or to plot the downfall of the Infidel West—we really can’t say, man.”
“Yeah, it’d be nice to have real coverage on him, but we’re not conducting an investigation, are we? This mutt recruited at least one shooter. He’s earned his way onto our shit list, Aldo.”
