Teeth of the Tiger jrj-1

by Tom Clancy

  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 w
ooden 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.

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