Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (710 page)

Dominic’s eyes never left Pete’s face during that discourse. He’d just told them something that maybe he hadn’t meant to tell them. The Campus didn’t have any killers yet. They were going to be the first. There had to be a lot of hopes riding on them. That was a lot of responsibility. But it all made sense. It was plain that Alexander was not teaching them from his own real-world experience. A training officer was supposed to be somebody who’d actually gone out and done it. That was why most of the instructors at the FBI Academy were experienced field agents. They could tell you how it felt. Pete could only tell them what had to be done. But why, then, had they picked him and Aldo?

“I see your point, Pete,” Dominic said. “I’m not leaving yet.”

“Neither am I,” Brian told his training officer. “I just want to know what the rules are.”

Pete didn’t tell them they’d be making the rules up as they went along. They’d figure that one out soon enough.

AIRPORTS ARE
the same all over the world. Instructed to be polite, they all checked their bags, waited in the correct lounges, smoked their cigarettes in the designated smoking areas, and read the books they’d purchased in the airport kiosks. Or pretended to. Not all of them had the language skills they would have wished. Once at cruising altitude, they ate their airline meals, and most of them took their airline naps. Nearly all of them were seated in the aft rows of their seating sections, and when they stirred, they wondered which of their seatmates they might meet again in a few days or weeks, however long it took to work out the details. Each of them hoped to meet Allah soon, and to garner the rewards that would come for fighting in their Holy Cause. It occurred to the more intellectual of them that even Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, was limited in his ability to communicate the nature of Paradise. He’d had to explain it to people with no knowledge of passenger jet aircraft, automobiles, and computers. What, then, was its true nature? It had to be so thoroughly wonderful as to defy description, but even so, a mystery yet to be discovered. And they would discover it. There was a degree of excitement in that thought, a sort of anticipation too sublime to discuss with one’s colleagues. A mystery, but an infinitely desirable one. And if others had to meet Allah, too, as a result, well, that also was written in the Great Book of Destiny. For the moment, they all took their naps, sleeping the sleep of the just, the sleep of the Holy Martyrs yet to be. Milk, honey, and virgins.

SALI, JACK
found, had some mystery about him. The CIA file on the guy even had the length of his penis appended in the “Nuts and Sluts” section. The British whores said he was grossly average in size but uncommonly vigorous in application—and a fine tipper, which appealed to their commercial sensibilities. But unlike most men, he didn’t talk about himself much. Talked mainly about the rain and chill of London, and complimentary things about his companion of the moment, which appealed to her vanity. His occasional gift of a nice handbag—Louis Vuitton in most cases—sat well with his “regulars,” two of whom reported to Thames House, the new home of both the British Secret Service and the Security Service. Jack wondered if they were getting paid by both Sali and H.M. Government for services rendered. Probably a good deal for the girls involved, he was sure, though Thames House probably wouldn’t spring for shoes and a bag.

“Tony?”

“Yeah, Jack?” Wills looked up from his workstation.

“How do we know if this Sali is a bad guy?”

“We don’t for sure. Not until he actually does something, or we intercept a conversation between him and somebody we don’t like.”

“So, I’m just checking this bird out.”

“Correct. You’ll be doing a lot of that. Any feel for the guy yet?”

“He’s a horny son of a bitch.”

“It’s hard to be rich and single, in case you haven’t noticed, Junior.”

Jack blinked. Maybe he had that coming. “Okay, but I’ll be damned if I pay for it, and he’s paying a lot.”

“What else?” Wills asked.

“He doesn’t talk a hell of a lot.”

“What’s that tell you?”

Ryan sat back in his swivel chair to think it over.
He
didn’t talk to his girlfriends much, either, at least not about his new job. As soon as you said “financial management,” most women tended to doze off in self-defense. Did
that
mean anything? Maybe Sali just wasn’t a talker. Maybe he was sufficiently secure that he didn’t feel the need to impress his lady friends with anything but his cash—he always used cash, not credit cards. And why that? To keep his family from knowing? Well, Jack didn’t talk to Mom and Dad about his love life, either. In fact, he rarely took a girlfriend to the family home. His mom tended to scare girls away. Not his dad, strangely enough. The M.D. Dr. Ryan struck other women as powerful, and while most young women found it admirable, many also found it intimidating as hell. His father dialed all the power stuff way back and came off as a slender and distinguished gray-haired teddy bear to family guests. More than anything else, his dad liked to play catch with his son on the grass overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, maybe harkening back to a simpler time. He had Kyle for that. The littlest Ryan was still in grammar school, at the stage where he asked furtive questions about Santa Claus, but only when Mom and Dad weren’t around. There was probably a kid in class who wanted to let everybody know what he knew—there was always one of those—and Katie had wised up by now. She still liked to play Barbies, but she knew that her mom and dad bought them at the Toys R Us in Glen Burnie, and assembled the accoutrements on Christmas Eve, a process his father truly loved, much as he might bitch about it. When you stopped believing in Santa Claus, the whole damn world just started a downhill slide . . .

“It tells us he’s not a talker. Not much else,” Jack said after a moment’s reflection. “We’re not supposed to convert inference into facts, are we?”

“Correct. A lot of people think otherwise, but not here. Assumption is the mother of all fuckups. That shrink at Langley specializes in spinning. He’s good, but you need to learn to distinguish between speculation and facts. So, tell me about Mr. Sali,” Wills commanded.

“He’s horny, and he doesn’t talk much. He plays very conservatively with the family’s money.”

“Anything that makes him look like a bad guy?”

“No, but he’s worth watching because of his religious—well, extremism’s the wrong word. There are some things missing here. He’s not boisterous, not showy the way rich people his age usually are. Who started the file on him?” Jack asked.

“The Brits did. Something about this guy tweaked the interest of one of their senior analysts. Then Langley took a brief look and started a file of their own. Then he was intercepted talking to a guy who’s also got a file at Langley—the conversation wasn’t about anything important, but there it was,” Wills explained. “And you know, it’s a lot easier to open a file than it is to close one. His cell phone is coded in to the NSA computers, and so they report on him whenever he turns it on. I’ve been through the file, too. He’s worth keeping an eye on, I think—but I’m not sure why. You learn to trust your instincts in this business, Jack. So, I’m nominating you to be the in-house expert on this kid.”

“And I’m looking for how he handles his money . . . ?”

“That’s right. You know, it doesn’t take much to finance a bunch of terrorists—at least not much by his reckoning. A million bucks a year is a lot of money to those people. They live hand-to-mouth, and their maintenance expenses aren’t that high. So, you’re supposed to look at the margins. Chances are he’ll try to hide whatever he does in the shadows of his big transactions.”

“I’m not an accountant,” Jack pointed out. His father had gotten his CPA a long time ago, but never used it, even to do his own taxes. He had a law firm for that.

“Can you do arithmetic?”

“Well, yeah.”

“So, attach a nose to it.”

Oh, great,
John Patrick Ryan, Jr., thought. Then he reminded himself that actual intelligence operations weren’t about shoot-the-bad-guy-and-bang-Ursula-Undress while the credits rolled. That was only in the movies. This was the real world.

“OUR FRIEND
is in that much of a hurry?” Ernesto asked in considerable surprise.

“So it would seem. The
norteamericanos
have been hard on them of late. I imagine they want to remind their enemies that they still have fangs. A thing of honor for them, perhaps,” Pablo speculated. His friend would understand that readily enough.

“So, what do we do now?”

“When they are settled in Mexico City, we arrange for transport into America, and, I presume, we arrange for weapons.”

“Complications?”

“If the
norteamericanos
have our organizations penetrated, they might have some prewarning, plus whispers of our involvement. But we have considered this already.”

They’d considered it briefly, yes, Ernesto reflected, but that had been at a convenient distance. Now the knocker on the door was rattling, and it was time for further reflection. But he couldn’t renege on this deal. That, too, was a matter both of honor and of business. They were preparing an initial shipment of cocaine to the E.U. That promised to be a really sizable market.

“How many people are coming?”

“Fourteen, he says. They have no weapons at all.”

“What will they need, do you suppose?”

“Light automatics should do it, plus pistols, of course,” Pablo said. “We have a supplier in Mexico who can handle it for less than ten thousand dollars. For an additional ten, we can have the weapons delivered to the end users in America, to avoid complications during the crossing.”

“
Bueno,
make it so. Will you fly to Mexico yourself?”

Pablo nodded. “Tomorrow morning. I will coordinate with them and the
coyotes
this first time.”

“You will be careful,” Ernesto pointed out. His suggestions had the force of an explosive device. Pablo took some chances, but his services were very important to the Cartel. He would be hard to replace.

“Of course,
jefe.
I need to evaluate how reliable these people are if they are to assist us in Europe.”

“Yes, that is so,” Ernesto agreed warily. As with most deals, when it came time to take action, there were second thoughts. But he was not an old woman. He had never been afraid to act decisively.

THE AIRBUS
pulled up to its gate, the first-class passengers were allowed to deplane first, and they followed the colored arrows on the floor to immigration and customs, where they assured the uniformed bureaucrats that they had nothing to declare, and their passports were duly stamped, and they walked off to collect their luggage.

The leader of the group was named Mustafa. A Saudi by birth, he was clean-shaven, which he didn’t like, though it exposed skin that the women seemed to like. He and a colleague named Abdullah walked together to get their bags, and then out to where their rides were supposed to be waiting. This would be the first test of their newfound friends in the Western Hemisphere. Sure enough, someone was holding a cardboard square with “MIGUEL” printed on it. That was Mustafa’s code name for this mission, and he walked over to shake the man’s hand. The greeter said nothing, but motioned them to follow him. Outside, a brown Plymouth minivan waited. The bags went in back, and the passengers slid into the middle seat. It was warm in Mexico City, and the air was fouler than anything they’d ever experienced. What ought to have been a sunny day was ruined by a gray blanket over the city—air pollution, Mustafa thought.

The driver continued to say nothing as he drove them to their hotel. This actually impressed them. If there was nothing to say, then one should keep quiet.

The hotel was a good one, as expected. Mustafa checked in using the false Visa card that had been faxed ahead, and in five minutes he and his friend were in their spacious room on the fifth floor. They looked around for obvious bugs before speaking.

“I didn’t think that damned flight would ever end,” Abdullah groused, looking in the minibar for bottled water. They’d been briefed to be careful drinking the stuff that came out of the tap.

“Yes, I agree. How did you sleep?”

“Not well. I thought the one good thing about alcohol was that it made you unconscious.”

“For some. Not for all,” Mustafa told his friend. “There are other drugs for that.”

“Those are hateful to God,” Abdullah observed. “Unless a physician administers them.”

“We have friends now who do not think that way.”

“Infidels,” Abdullah almost spat.

“The enemy of your enemy is your friend.”

Abdullah twisted the top off an Evian bottle. “No. You can trust a true friend. Can we trust these men?”

“Only as far as we must,” Mustafa allowed. Mohammed had been careful in his mission brief. These new allies would help them only as a matter of convenience, because they also wished harm to the Great Satan. That was good enough for now. Someday these allies would become enemies, and they’d have to deal with them. But that day had not yet come. He stifled a yawn. Time to get some rest. Tomorrow would be a busy day.

JACK LIVED
in a condo in Baltimore, a few blocks from Orioles Park at Camden Yards, where he had season tickets, but which was dark tonight because the Orioles were in Toronto. Not a good cook, he ate out as he usually did, alone this time because he didn’t have a date, which was not as unusual as he might have wished. Finished, he walked back to his condo, switched on his TV, and then thought better of it, went to his computer instead, and logged on to check his e-mail and surf the ’Net. That’s when he made a note to himself. Sali lived alone as well, and while he often had whores for company, it wasn’t every night. What did he do on the other nights? Log on to his computer? A lot of people did. Did the Brits have a tap on his phone lines? They must. But the file on Sali didn’t include any e-mails . . . why? Something worth checking out.