Jack Ryan Books 7-12

by Tom Clancy

  “Was darf es sein?” the waiter asked, appearing at the table.

  “Zwei Dunkelbieren, bitte,” Dominic replied, using about a third of his remaining high-school German. Most of the rest was about finding the Herrnzimmer, always a useful word to know, in any language.

  “American, yes?” the waiter went on.

  “Is my accent that bad?” Dominic asked, with a limp smile.

  “Your speech is not Bavarian, and your clothes look American,” the waiter observed matter-of-factly, as though to say the sky was blue.

  “Okay, then two glasses of dark beer, if you please, sir.”

  “Two Kulmbachers, sofort,” the man responded and hurried back inside.

  “I think we just learned a little lesson, Enzo,” Brian observed.

  “Buy some local clothes, first chance we get. Everybody’s got eyes,” Dominic agreed. “Hungry?”

  “I could eat something.”

  “We’ll see if they have a menu in English.”

  “That must be the mosque our friend uses, down the road a block, see?” Brian pointed discreetly.

  “So, figure he’ll probably walk this way . . . ?”

  “Seems likely, bro.”

  “And there’s no clock on this, is there?”

  “They don’t tell us ‘how,’ they just tell us ‘what,’ the man said,” Brian reminded his brother.

  “Good,” Enzo observed as the beer arrived. The waiter looked to be about as efficient as a reasonable man could ask. “Danke sehr. Do you have a menu in English?”

  “Certainly, sir.” And he produced one from an apron pocket as though by magic.

  “Very good, and thank you, sir.”

  “He must have gone to Waiter University,” Brian said as the man walked away again. “But wait till you see Italy. Those guys are artists. That time I went to Florence, I thought the bastard was reading my mind. Probably has a doctorate in waitering.”

  “No inside parking at that building. Probably around back,” Dominic said, coming back to business.

  “Is the Audi TT any good, Enzo?”

  “It’s a German car. They make decent machines over here, man. The Audi isn’t a Mercedes, but it ain’t no Yugo, either. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one outside of Motor Trend. But I know what they look like, kinda curvy, slick, like it goes fast. Probably does, with the autobahns they have here. Driving in Germany can be like running the Indy 500, or so they say. I don’t really see a German driving a slow car.”

  “Makes sense.” Brian scanned the menu. The names of the dishes were in German, of course, but with English subtitles. It looked as though the commentary was for Brits rather than Americans. They still had NATO bases here, maybe to guard against the French rather than the Russians, Dominic thought with a chuckle. Though, historically, the Germans didn’t need much help from that direction.

  “What do you wish to have, mein Herrn?” the waiter asked, reappearing as though transported down by Scottie himself.

  “First, what is your name?” Dominic asked.

  “Emil. Ich heisse Emil.”

  “Thank you. I’ll have the sauerbraten and potato salad.”

  Then it was Brian’s turn. “And I’ll have the bratwurst. Mind if I ask a question?”

  “Of course,” Emil responded.

  “Is that a mosque down the street?” Brian asked, pointing.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?” Brian pushed the issue.

  “We have many Turkish guest workers in Germany, and they are also Mohammedans. They will not eat the sauerbraten or drink the beer. They do not get on well with us Germans, but what can one do about it?” The waiter shrugged, with only a hint of distaste.

  “Thank you, Emil,” Brian said, and Emil hurried back inside.

  “What does that mean?” Dominic wondered.

  “They don’t like ’em very much, but they don’t know what to do about it, and they’re a democracy, just like we are, so they have to be polite to ’em. The average Fritz in the street isn’t all that keen on their ‘guest workers,’ but there’s not much real trouble about it, just scuffles and like that. Mainly bar fights, so I’m told. So, I guess the Turks have learned to drink the beer.”

  “How’d you learn that?” Dominic was surprised.

  “There’s a German contingent in Afghanistan. We were neighbors—our camps, like—and I talked some with the officers there.”

  “Any good?”

  “They’re Germans, bro, and this bunch was professionals, not draftees. Yeah, they’re pretty good,” Aldo assured him. “It was a reconnaissance group. Their physical routine is tough as ours, they know mountains pretty good, and they are well drilled at the fundamentals. The noncoms got along like thieves, swapped hats and badges a lot. They also brought beer along with their TO and E, so they were kinda popular with my people. You know, this beer is pretty damned good.”

  “Like in England. Beer is a kind of religion in Europe, and everybody goes to church.”

  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 w
hy 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 local 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 a
bout 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.”