Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger (29 page)

He'd just crossed a great river. His entire country had no permanent rivers, just wadis that flooded briefly with a rare passing shower and soon went dry again. America was such a rich country. That was probably the source of their arrogance, but his mission, and that of his three colleagues, was to take that arrogance down a few pegs. And that, Insh'Allah
, they would do, in less than two more days.

Two days to Paradise,
was the thought that lingered in his mind.

ARRIVING

TENNES
SEE PASSED
quickly for those in the back, only because Mustafa and Abdullah shared the wheel for the three hundred fifty kilometers from Memphis to Nashville, during which Rafi and Zuhayr mainly slept. One and three quarters kilometers per minute, be calculated. It translated to another . . . what? Twenty more hours or so. He thought about speeding up, to make the trip go faster—but, no, that was foolish. Taking unnecessary chances was always foolish. Hadn't they learned that from the Israelis? The enemy was always waiting, like a sleeping tiger. Waking one up unnecessarily was very foolish indeed. You only woke up the tiger when your rifle was already aimed, and only then so that the tiger could know that he'd been outsmarted, and unable to take action. Just to be awake long enough to appreciate his own foolishness, enough to know fear. America would know fear. For all their weapons and their cleverness, all these arrogant people would tremble.

He found himself smiling into the darkness now. The sun had set again, and his car's headlights bored white cones into the darkness, illuminating the white lines on the highway that dashed in and out of his vision as he drove eastward at a steady sixty-five miles per hour.

THE TWINS
were now rising at 0600 and going out to do their daily dozen exercises without Pete Alexander's supervision, which, they'd decided, they really didn't need. The run was getting easier for both of them, and the rest of the exercises had also mutated into a routine. By seven-fifteen, they were done and heading in for breakfast and the first skull-session with their training officer.

“Those shoes need some work, bro,” Dominic observed.

“Yeah,” Brian agreed, taking a sad look at his aging Nike sneaks. “They've served me well for a few years, but it looks like they need to go off to shoe heaven.”

“Foot Locker in the mall.” He referred to the Fashion Square shopping mall down the hill in Charlottesville.

“Hmm, maybe a Philly cheesesteak for lunch tomorrow?”

“Works for me, bro,” Dominic agreed. “Nothing like grease, fat, and cholesterol for lunch, especially with cheese fries on the side. Assuming your shoes will last another day.”

“Hey, Enzo, I like the smell. These sneaks and me been around the block a few times.”

“Like those dirty T-shirts. God damn it, Aldo, can't you ever dress properly?”

“Just let me wear my utilities again, buddy. I like being a Marine. You always know where you stand.”

“Yeah, in the middle of the shit,” Dominic observed.

“Maybe so, but you work with a better class of guys there.” And, he didn't add, they were all on your side, and they all carried automatic weapons. It made for a feeling of security rarely found in civilian life.

“Going out to lunch, eh?” Alexander said.

“Tomorrow, maybe,” Dominic answered. “Then we need to arrange a proper burial for Aldo's running shoes. We got a can of Lysol around here, Pete?”

Alexander had himself a good laugh. “I thought you'd never ask.”

“You know, Dominic,” Brian said, looking up from his eggs, “if you weren't my brother, I wouldn't take this crap off of you.”

“Really?” The FBI Caruso tossed him an English muffin. “I swear, you Marines are all talk. I always used to whip him when we were kids,” he added for Pete's benefit.

Brian's eyes nearly popped out of his head: “My ass!”

And another training day got started.

AN HOUR
later, Jack was back on his workstation. Uda bin Sali had enjoyed another athletic night, with Rosalie Parker again. He must like her a lot. Ryan wondered how the Saudi would react if he knew that after every session she gave a play-by-play to the British Security Service. But for her, business was business, which would have deflated a lot of male egos in the British capital. Sali surely had one of those, Junior thought. Wills came in at quarter to nine with a bag of Dunkin' Donuts.

“Hey, Anthony. What's shakin'?”

“You tell me,” Wills shot back. “Doughnut?”

“Thanks, buddy. Well, Uda had some more exercise last night.”

“Ah, youth, a wonderful thing, but wasted on the young.”

“George Bernard Shaw, right?”

“I knew you were literate. Sali discovered a new toy a few years back, and I guess he's going to play with it till it breaks—or falls off. Must be tough duty for his shadow team, standing out in the cold rain and knowing he's getting his weasel greased upstairs.” It was a line from the Sopranos on HBO, which Wills admired.

“You suppose they're the ones who debrief her?”

“No, that's a job for the guys over at Thames House. Must get old after a while. Pity they don't send us all the transcripts, though,” he added with a chuckle. “Might be good for getting the blood flowing in the morning.”

“Thanks, I can always buy a Hustler at the magazine store if I feel scuzzy some night.”

“It's not a clean business we're in, Jack. The kind of people we look at, they aren't the kind you invite over for dinner.”

“Hey, White House, remember? Half the people we hosted for a State Dinner—Dad could hardly shake hands with them. But Secretary Adler told him it was business, and so Dad had to be nice to the sunzabitches. Politics attracts some really scummy people, too.”

“Amen. So, anything else new on Sali?”

“I haven't gone over yesterday's money moves yet. Hey, if Cunningham stumbles over anything significant, what happens next?”

“That's up to Gerry and the senior staff.” You're way too junior to get your panties in a wad about that, he didn't add, though the young Ryan got the message anyway.

“WELL, DAVE?”
Gerry Hendley was asking upstairs.

“He's laundering money and sending some of it off to persons unknown. Liechtenstein bank. If I had to guess, it's to cover credit card accounts. You can get a Visa or MasterCard through that particular bank, and so it could well be to cover credit card accounts for persons unknown. Could be a mistress or a close friend, or somebody in whom we might have direct interest.”

“Any way to find out?” Tom Davis asked.

“They use the same accounting program most banks do,” Cunningham answered, meaning that with a little patience, The Campus could crack their way inside and learn more. There were firewalls in the way, of course. It was a job better left to the National Security Agency, and so the trick was to get NSA to task one of its computer weenies to do the cracking. That would mean faking a request by CIA to do the job, and that, the accountant figured, was a little harder to accomplish than just typing a note into a computer terminal. He also suspected that The Campus had someone inside both intelligence agencies who could do the faking so that no discernible paper trail would be left behind.

“Is it strictly necessary?”

“Maybe in a week or so, I can find more data. This Sali guy might just be a rich kid playing stickball out in the traffic, but . . . but my nose tells me he's a player of some sort,” Cunningham admitted. He'd developed good instincts over the years, as a result of which two former Mafia kingpins were now living in solitary cells at Marion, Illinois. But he didn't trust his own instincts as well as his former and current superiors did. A career accountant with a foxhound's nose, he was also very conservative in talking about it.

“A week, you think?”

Dave nodded. “About that.”

“How's the Ryan kid?”

“Good instincts. He found something most people would have missed. Maybe his youth works for him. Young target, young bloodhound. Usually, it doesn't work. This time . . . looks like maybe it did. You know, when his dad appointed Pat Martin to be Attorney General, I heard some things about Big Jack. Pat really liked him, and I worked with Mr. Martin enough to respect him a lot. This kid may be going places. It'll take about ten years to be sure of that, of course.”

“We're not supposed to believe in breeding over here, Dave,” Tom Davis observed.

“Numbers is numbers, Mr. Davis. Some people have a good nose, some don't. He doesn't yet, not really, but he's sure heading that way.” Cunningham had helped start the justice Department's Special Accounting Unit, which specialized in tracking terrorist money. Everyone needed money to operate, and money always left a trail somewhere, but it was often found after the fact more easily than before. Good for investigations, but not as good for active defense.

“Thanks, Dave,” Hendley said in dismissal. “Keep us posted, if you would.”

“Yes, sir.” Cunningham gathered his papers and made his way out.

“You know, he'd be a little more effective if he had a personality,” Davis said fifteen seconds after the door closed.

“Nobody's perfect, Tom. He's the best guy they ever had at justice for this sort of thing. I bet when he fishes, there's nothing left in the lake after he leaves.”

“No argument here, Gerry.”

“So, this Sali gent might be a banker for the bad guys?”

“It looks like a possibility. Langley and Fort Meade are still in a dither over the current situation,” Hendley went on.

“I've seen the paperwork. It's a whole lot of paper for not much hard data.” In the business of intelligence analysis, you got into the speculation phase too rapidly, the point when experienced analysts started applying fear to existing data, following it to God knew where, trying to read the minds of people who didn't speak all that much, even to each other. Might there be people out there with anthrax or smallpox in little bottles in their shaving kits? How the hell could you tell? That had been done once to America, but when you got down to it everything had been done once to America, and while it had given the country the confidence that her people could deal with damned near anything, it had also given Americans the realization that bad things could indeed happen here and that those responsible might not always be identifiable. The new President did not convey any assurance that we'd be able to stop or punish such people. That was a major problem in and of itself.

“You know, we're a victim of our own success,” the former senator said quietly. “We've managed to handle every nation-state that ever crossed us, but these invisible bastards who work for their vision of God are harder to identify and track. God is omnipresent. So are His perverted agents.”

“Gerry, my boy, if it was easy, we wouldn't be here.”

“Tom, thank God I can always count on you for moral support.”

“We live in an imperfect world, you know. There isn't always enough rain to make the corn grow, and, if there is, sometimes the rivers flood. My father taught me that.”

“I always meant to ask you—how the hell did your family ever end up in goddamned Nebraska?”

“My great-grandfather was a soldier—cavalryman, Ninth Cavalry, black regiment. He didn't feel like moving back to Georgia when his hitch ran out. He'd spent some time at Fort Crook outside of Omaha, and the dumbass didn't mind the winters. So, he bought a spread near Seneca and farmed corn. That's how history started for us Davises.”

“Wasn't any Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska?”

“No, they stayed in Indiana. Smaller farms there, anyway. My great-grandfather shot himself some buffalo when he got started. There's the biggest damned head over the fireplace at home. Damned thing still smells. Dad and my brother mainly hunt longhorn antelope now, the 'speed-goat,' they call it at home. Never got to like the taste.”

“What's your nose say on this new intel, Tom?” Hendley asked.

“I'm not planning to go to New York anytime soon, buddy.”

EAST OF
Knoxville, the road divided. I-40 went east. I-81 went north, and the rented Ford took the latter through the mountains explored by Daniel Boone when the western frontier of America had scarcely stretched out of sight of the Atlantic Ocean. A road sign showed the exit for the home of someone named Davy Crockett. Whoever that was, Abdullah thought, driving downhill through a pretty mountain pass. Finally, at a town named Bristol, they were in Virginia, their final major territorial boundary. About six more hours, he calculated. The land here, in the sunlight, was lush in its greenness, with horse and dairy farms on both sides of the road. Even churches, usually white-painted wooden buildings with crosses atop the steeples. Christians. The country was clearly dominated by them.

Unbelievers.

Enemies.

Targets.

They had their guns in the trunk to deal with them. First, I-81 north to 1-64. They'd long since memorized their routing. The other three teams were surely in place now. Des Moines, Colorado Springs, and Sacramento. Each a city large enough to have at least one good shopping mall. Two were provincial capitals. None were major cities, however. All were what they called “Middle America,” where the “good” people lived, where the “ordinary,” “hardworking” Americans made their homes, where they felt safe, far from the great centers of power—and corruption. Few, if any, Jews to be found in those cities. Oh, maybe a few. Jews like to run jewelry stores. Maybe even in the shopping malls. That would be an added bonus, but only something to be scooped up if it accidentally offered itself. Their real objective was to kill ordinary Americans, the ones who considered themselves safe in the womb of ordinary America. They would soon learn that safety in this world was an illusion. They'd learn that the thunderbolt of Allah reached everywhere.

“SO, THIS
is it?” Tom Davis asked.

“Yes, it is,” Dr. Pasternak replied. “Be careful. It's fully loaded. The red tag, you see. The blue one is not charged.”