Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger (56 page)

Except for Mahmoud Mohamed Fadhil, who had to go to his hotel and light up his computer to send an e-mail to Mohammed Hassan al-Din, now in
Rome
, for instructions.

By that time, Dominic was on his own computer, composing an e-mail for The Campus to tell them of the day's work, and ask for instructions on the next assignment.

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.

J
ACK 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 [email protected]

“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: [email protected] 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.

GERMA
N 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.