Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger (39 page)

Jack looked at the sheets again, comparing one list of numbers with the others. Then he looked up.

“Fuck,” he breathed.

And Wills thought about the miracle of computers and modern communications. The shooters from Charlottesville had used the Visa cards to purchase gas and food, all right, and their little friend Sali had just pumped some money into the bank account that paid the bills. He'd probably act Monday to kill off the accounts, to drop them off the face of the earth. But he'd be too late.

“Jack, who told Sali to drop money into the bank account?” We got us a target, Wills did not say. Maybe more than one.

RED COATS AND

BLACK HATS

THEY LET
Jack do the computer work, cross-referencing the e-mails to and from Uda bin Sali that day. It was actually fairly miserable work, since Jack had the skills but not yet the soul of an accountant. But he soon learned that the notice to fund the account came from someone named [email protected], who'd logged in over an 800 line from Austria.

They couldn't track him down any more closely than that, but now they had a new name on the Internet to keep track of. It was the cyber identity of somebody who gave orders to a suspected—known—banker for terrorists, and that made [email protected] very interesting indeed. It was up to Wills to twig NSA to keep track of that one, in case they had not already made it a “handle of interest,” as such identities were known. It was widely believed in the computer community that such handles were largely anonymous, and largely they were, but once they became known to the proper agencies they could be pursued. It was usually by illegal means, but if the line between legal and illegal conduct on the Internet could operate in favor of teenaged pranksters, the same was true for the intelligence community, whose computers were difficult to locate, much less to hack. The most immediate problem was that Eurocom.net did not maintain any long-term storage of its message traffic, and once they fell off the server RAM—by being read by the intended recipient—they were essentially gone forever. Maybe NSA would note that this mutt had written to Uda bin Sali, but lots of people did, for money-changing purposes, and even NSA didn't have the manpower to read and analyze every single e-mail that crossed its computerized path.

THE TWINS
arrived just before 11:00 A.M., guided by their in-car GPS computers. The identical C-class Mercedes sedans were directed to the small visitors parking lot located directly behind the building. There Sam Granger met them, shook hands, and walked them inside. They were immediately issued lapel passes to get them past the security personnel, whom Brian immediately typed as former military NCOs.

“Nice place,” Brian observed as they headed for the elevators.

Bell smiled. “Yeah, in private industry we can hire better decorators.” It also helped if you happened to like the decorator's taste in art, which, fortunately, he did.

“You said 'private industry,'” Dominic observed at once. This was not, he thought, a time to enjoy the subtlety of the moment. This was the agency he worked for, and everything here was important.

“You'll get fully briefed today,” Bell said, wondering how much truth he had just relayed to his guests.

The Muzak in the elevators was no more offensive than usual, and the lobby on the top floor—where the boss always was—was pretty vanilla, though it was Breyers vanilla instead of the Safeway house brand.

“SO, YOU
tumbled to this today?” Hendley was asking. This new kid, he thought, really did have his father's nose.

“It just jumped off the screen at me,” Jack replied. About what one would expect him to say, except that it had not leaped off anyone else's screen.

The boss's eyes went to Wills, whose analytical ability he knew well.

“Jack's been looking at this Sali guy for a couple of weeks. We thought he might be a minor-league player, but today he moved up to triple-A status, maybe more,” Tony speculated. “He's indirectly tied to yesterday.”

“NSA twig to this yet?” Hendley asked.

Wills shook his head. “No, and I don't think they will. It's too indirect. They and Langley are keeping an eye on his guy, but as a barometer, not a principal.” Unless somebody at one place or the other has a lightbulb moment, he didn't have to add. They happened, just not very often. In both bureaucracies, an off-the-reservation insight often got lost in the system, or was buried by those to whom it did not immediately occur. Every place in the world had its own orthodoxy, and woe betide the apostates who worked there.

Hendley's eyes swept over the two-page document. “Sure wiggles like a fish, doesn't he?” Then his phone buzzed, and he picked up the receiver. “Okay, Helen, send them in . . . Rick Bell is bringing in those two guys we talked about,” he explained to Wills.

The door opened, and Jack Jr.'s eyes popped somewhat.

So did Brian's. “Jack? What are you doing here?”

Dominic's face changed a moment later. “Hey, Jack! What's happening?” he exclaimed.

For his part, Hendley's eyes twisted into a hurt expression. He hadn't thought this all the way through, a rare error on his part. But the room had only one door, unless you counted the private washroom.

The three cousins shook hands, momentarily ignoring the boss, until Rick Bell took control of the moment.

“Brian, Dominic, this is the big boss, Gerry Hendley.” Handshakes were exchanged in front of the two analysts.

“Rick, thanks for bringing that up. Well done to both of you,” Hendley said in dismissal.

“I guess it's back to the workstation. See you, guys,” Jack said to his cousins.

The surprise of the moment didn't fade immediately, but Brian and Dominic settled into their chairs and filed the happenstance away for the moment.

“Welcome,” Hendley said to them, leaning back in his chair. Well, sooner or later they'd find out, wouldn't they? “Pete Alexander tells me that you've done very well down at the country house.”

“Aside from the boredom,” Brian responded.

“Training is like that,” Bell said in polite sympathy.

“What about yesterday?” Hendley asked.

“It wasn't fun,” Brian said first. “It was a lot like that ambush in Afghanistan. Ka-boom, it started, and then we had to deal with it. Good news, the bad guys weren't all that bright. They acted like free agents instead of a team. If they'd been trained properly—if they'd acted like a team with proper security—it would have gone different. As it was, it was just a matter of taking out one at a time. Any idea on who they were?”

“What the FBI knows to this point, they seem to have come into the country through Mexico. Your cousin ID'd the source of their funding for us. He's a Saudi expatriate living in London, and he may be one of their backers. They were all Arabian in origin. They've positively ID'd five of them as Saudi citizens. The guns were stolen about ten years ago. They rented the cars—all four groups—in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and probably drove independently to their objectives. Their routes have been tracked by gas purchases.”

“Motivation was strictly ideological?” Dominic asked.

Hendley nodded. “Religious—their version of it, yes. So it would seem.”

“Is the Bureau looking for me?” Dominic asked next.

“You'll have to call Gus Werner later today so he can fill out his paperwork, but don't expect any hassles. They have a cover story all cooked up already.”

“Okay.”

This was Brian: “I assume that this is what we've been training for? To hunt down some of these people before they can do any more bad things over here?”

“That's about right,” Hendley confirmed. 

“Okay,” Brian said. “I can live with that.”

“You will go into the field together, covered as people in the banking and trading business. We'll brief you in on the stuff you need to know to maintain that cover. You'll operate mainly out of a virtual office via laptop computer.”

“Security?” Dominic wondered.

“That will not be a problem,” Bell assured him. “The computers are as secure as we can make them, and they can double as Internet phones for times when voice communications are required. The encryption systems are highly secure,” he emphasized.

“Okay,” Dominic said dubiously. Pete had told them much the same, but he'd never trusted any encryption system. The FBI's radio systems, secure as they were supposed to be, had been cracked once or twice by clever bad guys or by computer geeks, the kind who liked to call the local FBI field office to tell them how smart they were. “What about our legal cover?”

“This is the best we can do,” Hendley said, handing a folder across. Dominic took it and flipped it open. His eyeballs widened immediately. “Damn! How the hell did you get this?” he asked. The only presidential pardon he'd ever seen had been in a legal textbook. This one was effectively blank, except that it was signed. A blank pardon? Damn.

“You tell me,” Hendley suggested.

The signature gave him the answer, and his legal education came back. This pardon was bulletproof. Even the Supreme Court couldn't toss this one out, because the President's sovereign authority to pardon was as explicit as freedom of speech. But it would not be very helpful outside American borders. “So, we'll be doing people here at home?”

“Possibly,” Hendley confirmed.

“We're the first shooters on the team?” Brian asked.

“Also correct,” the former senator answered.

“How will we be doing it?”

“That will depend on the mission,” Bell answered. “For most of them, we have a new weapon that is one hundred percent effective, and very covert. You'll be learning about that, probably tomorrow”

“We in a hurry?” Brian asked further.

“The gloves are all the way off now,” Bell told them both. “Your targets will be people who have done, are planning to do, or who support missions aimed at causing serious harm to our country and her citizens. We are not talking about political assassinations. We will only target people who are directly involved in criminal acts.”

“There's more to it than that. We're not the official executioners for the state of Texas, are we?” This was Dominic.

“No, you are not. This is outside the legal system. We're going to try to neutralize enemy forces by the elimination of their important personnel. That should at the least disrupt their ability to do business, and we hope it will also force their senior people to show themselves, so that they can be addressed, too.”

“So this”—Dominic closed the folder and passed it back to his host “is a hunting license, with no bag limit and an open season.”

“Correct, but within reasonable limits.”

“Suits me,” Brian observed. Only twenty-four hours earlier, he remembered, he'd been holding a dying little boy in his arms. “When do we go to work?”

Hendley handled the reply.

“Soon.”

UH, TON
Y,
what are they doing here?"

“Jack, I didn't know they'd be in today.”

“Nonresponsive.” Jack's blue eyes were unusually hard.

“You've figured out why this place was set up, right?”

And that was enough of an answer. Damn. His own cousins? Well, one was a Marine, and the FBI one—the lawyer one, as Jack had thought of him once—had well and truly whacked some pervert down in Alabama. It had made the papers, and he'd even discussed it briefly with his father. It was hard to disapprove of it, assuming the circumstances had been within the law, but Dominic had always been the sort to play by the rules—that was almost the Ryan family motto. And Brian had probably done something in the Marines to get noticed. Brian had been the football type in his high school, while his brother had been the family debater. But Dominic wasn't a pussy. At least one bad guy had found that out the hard way. Maybe some people needed to learn that you didn't mess with a big country that had real men in its employ. Every tiger had teeth and claws . . .

. . . and America grew large tigers.

With that settled, he decided to go back looking for [email protected]. Maybe the tigers would go looking for more food. That made him a bird dog. But that was okay. Some birds needed their flying rights revoked. He'd arrange to query that “handle” via NSA's taps into the world's cybercommunications jungle. Every animal left a trail somewhere, and he'd go sniffing for it. Damn, Jack thought, this job had its diversions after all, now that he saw what the real objective was.

MOHAMMED WAS
at his computer. Behind him, the television was going on about the “intelligence failure,” which made him smile. It could only have the effect of further diminishing American intelligence capabilities, especially with the operational distractions sure to come from the investigative hearings the American Congress would conduct. It was good to have such allies within the target country. They were not very different from the seniors in his own organization, trying to make the world coincide with their vision rather than with the realities of life. The difference was that his seniors at least listened to him, because he did achieve real results, which, fortunately, coincided with their ethereal visions of death and fear. Even more fortunately, there were people out there willing to cast away their lives to make those visions real. That they were fools mattered not to Mohammed. One used such tools as one had, and, in this case, he had hammers to strike down the nails he saw across the world.

He checked his e-mails to see that Uda had complied with his instructions on the banking business. Strictly speaking, he could have just let the Visa accounts die, but then some officious bank employee might have poked around to see why the last set of bills had not been paid. Better, he thought, to leave some surplus cash in the account and to leave the account active but dormant, because a bank would not mind having surplus cash in its electronic vault, and if that account went dormant, no bank employee would do any investigation into it. Such things happened all the time. He made sure that the account number and access code remained hidden on his computer in a document only he knew about.