Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger (24 page)

“Aye, aye, sir.” It was something he'd picked up from the Marines at the White House. They'd even said that to him once in a while, until his father had noticed and put an immediate end to it. Jack turned back to his computer. He kept his real notes on a pad of white lined paper, just because it was easier for him that way, then transferred them to a separate computer file every afternoon. As he wrote, he noted that Tony was leaving their little room for a trip upstairs.

“THIS KID'S
got the eye,” Wills told Rick Bell on the top floor.

“Oh?” It was a little early for any results from the rookie, regardless who his father was, Bell thought.

“I put him on a young Saudi living in London, name of Uda bin Sali—money changer for his family's interests. The Brits have a loose tail on him because he called somebody they found interesting once.”

“And?”

“And Junior has found a couple of hundred thousand pounds that can't be accounted for.”

“How solid is that?” Bell asked.

“We'll have to put a regular on it, but, you know . . . this kid's got the right sort of nose.”

“Dave Cunningham, maybe?” A forensic accountant, he'd joined The Campus out of the Department of Justice, Organized Crime Division. Pushing sixty, Dave had a legendary nose for numbers. The trading department at The Campus mainly used him for “conventional” duties. He could have done very well on Wall Street, but he'd just loved bagging bad guys for a living. At The Campus, he could pursue that avocation well past government retirement rules.

“Dave'd be my pick,” Tony agreed.

“Okay, let's cross-load Jack's computer files to Dave and see what he turns over.”

“Works for me, Rick. You see the take-report from NSA yesterday?”

“Yeah. Got my attention,” Bell answered, looking up. Three days before, message traffic from sources that the government intelligence services found interesting had dropped by seventeen percent and two particularly interesting sources had almost completely stopped. When radio traffic in a military unit did that, it often meant a stand-down prior to real operations. The sort of thing that made signals-intelligence people nervous. The majority of the time, it meant nothing at all, just random chance in operation, but it had developed into something real often enough that the signal-spooks frequently went into a tizzy about it.

“Any ideas?” Wills asked.

Bell shook his head. “I stopped being superstitious about ten years ago.”

Clearly, Tony Wills had not: “Rick, we're due. We've been due for a long time.”

“I know what you're saying, but we can't run this place on that sort of stuff.”

“Rick, this is like sitting at a ball game—dugout seats, maybe, but you still can't go on the field when you want.”

“To do what, kill the umpire?” Bell asked.

“No, just the guy planning to throw a beanball.”

“Patience, Tony, patience.”

“Son of a bitch of a virtue to acquire, isn't it?” Wills had never quite learned it, despite all his experience.

“Think you have it bad? What about Gerry?”

“Yeah, Rick, I know” He stood. “Later, man.”

THEY'D SEEN
not another human being, not a car, not a helicopter. Clearly, there was nothing of value out here. No oil, no gold, not even copper. Nothing worth guarding or protecting. The walk had just been enough to be healthy. Some scrubby bushes, even some stunted trees. A few tire tracks, but none of them recent. This part of America might as well have been Saudi Arabia's Empty Quarter, the Rub' al-Khali, where even a hardy desert camel would have found it grim going.

But clearly the walk was over. As they crested a small rise, they saw five more vehicles sitting all alone, with men standing by them talking among themselves.

“Ah,” Ricardo said, “they are early, too. Excellent.” He could dump these morose foreigners and get on with his business. He stopped and let his clients catch up.

“This is our destination?” Mustafa asked, with hope in his voice. It had been an easy walk, far easier than he'd expected.

“My friends there will take you to Las Cruces. There you can make your travel plans for the future.”

“And you?” Mustafa asked.

“I go home to my family,” Ricardo answered. Wasn't that simple enough? Maybe this guy didn't have a family?

The remaining walk took only ten minutes. Ricardo got in the lead SUV after shaking hands with his party. They were friendly enough, albeit in a guarded fashion. It could have been harder to get them here, but illegal-immigrant traffic was far thicker in Arizona and California, and that was where the U.S. Border Patrol had most of its personnel. The gringos tended to grease the squeaky wheel—like everyone else in the world, perhaps, but still it was not terribly farsighted of them. Sooner or later, they'd realize that there was cross-border traffic here, too. Just not the dramatic sort. Then he might have to find a new way to make a living. He'd done well the past seven years, however—enough to set up a little business and raise his children into a more legitimate line of work.

He watched his party board their transport and motor off. He also headed in the general direction of Las Cruces, then turned south on I-10 toward El Paso. He'd long since stopped wondering what his clients planned to do in America. Probably not tending gardens or doing construction work, he judged, but he'd been paid ten thousand dollars in American cash. So, they were important to someone . . . but not to him.

DESTINATIONS

FOR MUSTAFA
and his friends, the ride to Las Cruces was a surprisingly welcome break, and though they didn't show it, there was obvious excitement now. They were in America. Here were the people they proposed to kill. The mission was now somehow closer to fulfillment, not by a mere handful of kilometers, but by a magical, invisible line. They were in the home of the Great Satan. Here were the people who had rained death upon their homeland, and upon the Faithful throughout the Muslim world, the people who so fawningly supported Israel.

At Deming, they turned east for Las Cruces. Sixty-two miles—a hundred kilometers—to their next intermediate stop, along I-10. There were billboards advertising road hotels and places to eat, tourist attractions of types routine and inconceivable, and more rolling land, and horizons which seemed far even as the car ate up the distances at a steady seventy miles per hour.

Their driver, as before, looked Mexican, and said nothing. Probably another mercenary. Nobody said anything, the driver because he didn't care, his passengers because their English was accented, and the driver might take note of it. This way he'd only remember that he'd picked up some people on a dirt road in southern New Mexico and driven them someplace else.

It was probably harder for the others in his party, Mustafa thought. They had to trust him to know what he was doing. He was the mission commander, the leader of a warrior band about to divide into four parts that would never reunite. The mission had been painstakingly planned. The only future communications would be via computer, and few enough of those. They'd function independently, but to a simple timetable and toward a single strategic objective. This plan would shake America as no other plan had ever done, Mustafa told himself, looking into a station wagon as it passed them. Two parents, and what appeared ; to be two little ones, a boy about four, and a smaller one perhaps a year and a half. Infidels, all of them. Targets.

His operational plan was all written down, of course, in fourteen-point Geneva type on sheets of plain white paper. Four copies. One for each team leader. The other data was in files on the personal computers that all of the men had in their small carry-bags, along with spare shirts and clean underwear and little else. They would not need much, and the plan was to leave very little behind in order to further befuddle the Americans.

It was enough to generate a thin smile at the passing countryside. Mustafa lit up a cigarette—he only had three left—and took a deep breath of tobacco smoke, and the air-conditioning blew cold air on him. Behind them, the sun was declining in the sky. They'd make their next—and last—stop in the darkness, which, he considered, was good tactical planning. He knew it was only an accident, but, if so, it meant that Allah Himself was smiling on their plan. As He ought to do, of course. They were all doing His work.

ANOTHER DULL
day's work done, Jack told himself on the way to his car. One bad thing about The Campus was that he couldn't discuss it with anybody. Nobody was cleared for this stuff, though it was not yet evident why. He could, surely, kick this around with his dad—the President was by definition cleared for anything, and ex-Presidents had the same access to information, if not by law, then by the rules of practicality. But, no, he couldn't do that. Dad would not be pleased by his new job. Dad could make a phone call and screw all of that up, and Jack had had enough of a taste to keep himself hungry for a few months at least. Even so, the ability to kick a few things around with somebody who knew what was going on would have been a blessing of sorts. Just someone to say, yes, it really is important, and, yes, you really are contributing to Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Could he really make a difference? The world worked the way it worked, and he couldn't change it much. Even his father, for all the power that had come to him, had been unable to do that. How much less could he, a junior prince of sorts, be able to accomplish? But if the broken parts of the world were ever to be fixed, it would have to be at the hands of someone who didn't care if it were impossible or not. Probably someone too young and dumb to know that impossible things were . . . impossible. But neither his mother nor his father believed in that word, and that's the way they had raised him. Sally was graduating medical school soon, and she was going into oncology—the one thing their mother had regretted not doing with her own medical career—and she told everyone who asked that she was going to be there when the cancer dragon was finally slain once and for all. So, believing in impossibility was not part of the Ryan creed. He just didn't know how yet, but the world was full of things to learn, wasn't it? And he was smart and well educated, and having a sizable trust fund meant that he could go forward without fear of starving if he offended the wrong person. That was the most important freedom his father had bequeathed him, and John Patrick Ryan, Jr., was smart enough to know just how important it was—if not to grasp the responsibility that such freedom carried with it.

INSTEAD OF
cooking their own dinner, they decided to go to a local steak house that night. It was full of college kids from the University of Virginia. You could tell—they all looked bright, but not as bright as they thought they were, and they were all a little too loud, a little too confident in themselves. That was one of the advantages of being children—much as they would have detested that appellation—kids whose needs were still looked after by loving parents, albeit at a comfortable distance. To the two Caruso boys, it was a humorous look at what they'd themselves been only a few short years ago, before harsh training and experience in the real world had turned them into something else. Exactly what, they were not yet sure. What had seemed so simple in school had become infinitely complex after leaving the academic womb. The world was not digital, after all—it was an analog reality, always untidy, always with loose ends that could never be tied up neatly like shoelaces, and so it was possible to trip and fall with every incautious step. And caution only came with experience—with a few trip-and-falls that brought pain, only the worst of which taught remembered lessons. Those lessons had come early to the brothers. Not as early as they'd come to other generations, but still soon enough for them to realize the consequences of errors in a world that had never learned to forgive.

“Not a bad place,” Brian judged, halfway through his filet mignon.

“Hard to mess up a decent piece of beef, no matter how dumb the cook is.” This place obviously had a cook, not a chef, but the steak fries were pretty good for nearly raw carbohydrates, and the broccoli was fresh out of the freezer bag, Dominic thought.

“I really ought to eat better than this,” the Marine major observed. “Enjoy it while you can. We're not thirty yet, are we?”

That was good for a laugh. “Used to seem like an awfully big number, didn't it?”

“Where old age starts? Oh yeah. Well, you're pretty young for a major, right?”

Aldo shrugged. “I suppose. My boss liked me, and I had some good people working for me. I never did take a liking to MREs, though. They keep you going, but that's about all I can say for them. My gunny loved the things, said they were better than what he'd grown up in the Corps with.”

“In the Bureau, you tend to live on Dunkin' Donuts and—well, they make about the best industrial coffee in
America
. It's hard to keep your belt loose on that kind of diet.”

“You're in decent shape for a deskbound warrior, Enzo,” Brian observed rather generously. At the end of the morning run, his brother occasionally looked as though he was about to drop. But a three-mile run was just like morning coffee for a Marine, something to open the eyes. “I still wish I knew exactly what we're training for,” Aldo said after another bite.

“Bro, we're training to kill people, that's all we need to know. Sneak up without being seen, and then get the hell away without being noticed.”

“With pistols?” Brian responded dubiously. “Kinda noisy, and not as sure as a rifle. I had a sniper with my team in
Afghanistan
. He did some bad guys at damned near a mile. Used a Barrett .50 rifle, big mother, like an old BAR on steroids. Shoots the .50 round from the Ma Deuce machine gun. Accurate as hell, and it makes for a definitive hit, y'know? Kinda hard to walk away with a half-inch hole in you.” Especially since his sniper, Corporal Alan Roberts, a black kid from
Detroit
, had preferred head shots, and the .50 really did the job on heads.