Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (743 page)

Rome was a difficult city not to love. Conveniently located, international in character, awash with foreigners, and full of hospitable people who bowed and scraped for cash money like the peasants they all were. A good city for women, with shopping such as Riyadh could scarcely offer. His English mother had liked Rome, and the reasons were obvious. Good food and wine and a fine historical atmosphere that antedated even the Prophet himself, blessing and peace be upon him. Many had died here at the hands of the Caesars, butchered for public enjoyment in the Flavian Amphitheater, or killed because they had displeased the emperor in one way or another. The streets had probably been very peaceful here during the empire period. What better way to ensure it than to enforce the laws ruthlessly? Even the weak could recognize the price for bad behavior. So it was in his homeland, and so, he hoped, it would remain after the Royal Family had been done away with—either killed or chased abroad, perhaps to the safety of England or Switzerland, where people with money and noble status were treated well enough to live out their lives in indolent comfort. Either alternative would suit Mohammed and his colleagues. Just so that they would no longer rule his country, filled with corruption, kowtowing to the infidels and selling them oil for money, ruling the people as though they were the sons of Mohammed himself. That would come to an end. His distaste for America quailed before his hatred for the rulers of his own country. But America was his primary target because of its power, whether held to its own use or parceled out for others to use in America’s own imperial interests. America threatened everything he held dear. America was an infidel country, patron and protector of the Jews. America had invaded his own country and stationed troops and weapons there, undoubtedly with the ultimate objective of subordinating all of Islam, and thus ruling a
billion
of the Faithful for its own narrow and parochial interests. Stinging America had become his obsession. Even the Israelis were not as attractive as targets. Vicious though they might be, the Jews were merely America’s cat’s-paws, vassals who did America’s bidding in return for money and weapons, without even knowing how cynically they were being used. The Iranian Shiites had been correct. America was the Great Satan, Iblis himself, so great in power that it was hard to strike decisively at it, but still vulnerable in its evil before the righteous forces of Allah and the Faithful.

THE CONCIERGE
at the Hotel Bayerischer had outdone himself, Dominic thought, securing a Porsche 911 whose forward-mounted trunk barely held their bags, and that only with a little squeezing. But it was enough, and better even than a rented small-engine Mercedes. The 911 had balls. Brian would get to fumble with the maps as they went southeast through the Alps to Vienna. That they were going south to kill someone was beside the point for the moment. They were serving their country, which was about as big as loyalty got.

“Do I need a crash helmet?” Brian asked, getting in, which in the case of this car almost meant sitting on the pavement.

“Not with me driving, Aldo. Come on, bro. It’s time to rock and roll.”

The car was a horrible shade of blue, but the tank was filled, and the six-cylinder engine was properly tuned. The Germans did like things
in Ordnung.
Brian navigated them out of Munich and onto the autobahn southeast to Vienna, and from there Enzo decided to see how fast this Porsche could really go.

“DO YOU
think maybe they need some backup?” Hendley asked Granger, whom he’d just called into his office.

“What do you mean?” Sam responded. “They” had to be the Caruso brothers, of course.

“I mean they do not have much in the way of intelligence support,” the former Senator pointed out.

“Well, we’ve never really thought about that, have we?”

“Exactly.” Hendley leaned back in his chair. “In a sense, they’re operating naked. Neither one has much in the way of intelligence experience. What if they hit the wrong guy? Okay, they probably won’t get bagged doing it, but it won’t help their morale, either. I remember a Mafia guy, in the Atlanta Federal Pen, I think. He killed some poor bastard he thought was trying to kill him, but it was the wrong guy, and he came unglued as a result. Sang like a canary. That’s how we got our first big break on the Mafia and how it was organized, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, it was a Mafia soldier named Joe Valachi, yeah, but he was a criminal, remember?”

“And Brian and Dominic are good guys. So, guilt could hit them worse. Maybe some intel backup is a good idea.”

Granger was surprised at the suggestion. “I can see the need for better intelligence evaluation, and this ‘virtual office’ stuff has its limitations, I admit. They can’t ask questions, like, but if they have one, they can still e-mail us for advice—”

“Which they haven’t done,” Hendley pointed out.

“Gerry, they’re only two steps into the mission. It’s not time to panic yet, y’know? These are two very bright and very capable young officers. That’s why we picked them. They know how to think on their own, and that’s precisely what we want in our operations people.”

“We’re not just making assumptions, we’re
launching
assumptions into the future. You think that’s a good idea?” Hendley had learned how to pursue ideas on Capitol Hill, and he was deadly effective at it.

“Assumptions are always a bad thing. I know that, Gerry. But so are complications. How do we know we’re sending the right guy? What if it just
adds
a level of uncertainty? Do we want to do that?” Hendley, thought Granger, was suffering from the deadliest congressional disease. It was too easy to oversight something to death.

“What I’m saying is that it’s a good idea to have somebody out there who thinks a little different, who takes a different kind of approach to the data that goes out there. The Caruso boys are pretty good. I know that. But they are inexperienced. The important thing is to have a different brain out there to take a different view of the facts and the situation.”

Granger felt himself being backed into a corner. “Okay, look, I can see the logic of that, but it’s a level of complication that we don’t need.”

“Okay, so look at it this way—what if they see something for which they are not prepared? In that case, they need a second—whatever you call it—opinion of the data at hand. That will make them less likely to make a mistake in the field. The one thing that bothers me is that they make a mistake, and it’s a fatal mistake for some poor schlub, and that the error affects the way they carry out their missions in the future. Guilt, remorse, and maybe then they start talking about it, okay? Can we completely discount that?”

“No, maybe not entirely, but it also means that we just add an additional element to the equation that can say no when a yes is the right way to go. Saying no is something anybody can do. It isn’t necessarily right. You can take caution too far.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Fine. So, who do you want to send?” Granger asked.

“Let’s think about it. Ought to be—
has
to be somebody they know and trust . . .” His voice trailed off.

Hendley had made his operations chief nervous. He had an idea fixed in his head, and Hendley knew all too well that he was the head of The Campus, and that within this building his word was law, and there was nobody to appeal it to. So, if Granger was to select a name for this notional job, it had to be somebody who would not screw everything up.

THE AUTOBAHN
was superbly, even brilliantly, engineered. Dominic found himself wondering who’d set it up. Then he thought that the road looked as though it had been there for a long time. And it linked Germany and Austria . . . maybe Hitler himself had ordered this road built? Wasn’t that a hoot? In any case, there was no speed limit here, and the Porsche’s six-cylinder engine was purring like a stalking tiger on the scent of some warm meat. And the German drivers were amazingly polite. All you had to do was flash your lights, and they hustled out of your way as though having received a divine edict. Definitely unlike America, where some little old lady in her overage Pinto was in the far-left lane because she was left-handed and
liked
holding up the maniacs in their Corvettes. The Bonneville Salt Flats could scarcely have been more fun.

For his part, Brian was doing his best not to cringe. He closed his eyes occasionally, thinking back to nap-of-the-earth flying in the Recon Marines through mountain passes in the Sierra Nevada, often enough in CH-46 helicopters older than he was. They hadn’t killed him. This probably wouldn’t either, and, as a Marine officer, he wasn’t allowed to show fear or weakness. And it
was
exciting. Rather like riding in a roller coaster without the safety bar across the seat. But he saw that Enzo was having the time of his life, and he consoled himself with the fact that his seat belt
was
attached, and that this little German car was probably engineered by the same design crew that had done the Tiger tank. Getting through the mountains was the scariest part, and when they entered farm country, the land got flatter and the road straighter, thanks be to God.

“The hills are alive with the sound of myoosikkkk,” Dominic sang, horribly.

“If you sing like that in church, God’ll strike your ass dead,” Brian warned, pulling out the city maps for the approach to Wien, as Vienna was known to its citizens.

And the city streets were a rat warren. The capital of Austria—Osterreich—predated the Roman legions, with no street straight for a longer distance than would be needed by a legion to parade past its
tribunus militaris
on the emperor’s birthday. The map showed inner and outer ring roads, which probably marked the former site of medieval walls—the Turks had come here more than once hoping to add Austria to their empire, but that trinket of military history had not been part of the official Marine Corps reading list. A largely Catholic country, because the ruling House of Hapsburg had been so, it had not kept the Austrians from exterminating its prominent and prosperous Jewish minority after Hitler had subsumed Osterreich into the Greater German Reich. That had been after the
Anschluss
plebiscite of 1938. Hitler had been born here, not in Germany as widely believed, and the Austrians had repaid that loyalty with some of their own, becoming more Nazified than Hitler himself, or so objective history reported, not necessarily the Austrians’ now. It was the one country in the world where
The Sound of Music
had fallen flat at the box office, maybe because the movie had been uncomplimentary toward the Nazi party.

For all that, Vienna looked like what it was, a former imperial city with wide, tree-lined boulevards and classical architecture, and remarkably well-turned-out citizens. Brian navigated them to the Hotel Imperial on Kartner Ring, a building that looked to be an adjunct to the well-known Schonbrunn Palace.

“You have to admit they put us up in nice places, Aldo,” Dominic observed.

It was even more impressive inside, with gilt plaster and lacquered woodwork, every segment of which appeared to have been installed by master craftsmen imported from Renaissance Florence. The lobby was not spacious, but the reception desk was impossible to miss, manned as it was by people wearing clothing that marked them as hotel staff as surely as a Marine in dress blues.

“Good day,” the concierge said in greeting. “Your name is Caruso?”

“Correct,” Dominic said, surprised at the concierge’s ESP. “You should have a reservation for my brother and myself?”

“Yes, sir,” the concierge replied with enthusiastic subordination. His English might have been learned at Harvard. “Two connecting rooms overlooking the street.”

“Excellent.” Dominic fished out his American Express black card and handed it across.

“Thank you.”

“Any messages for us?” Dominic asked.

“No, sir,” the concierge assured him.

“Can you have the valet attend to our car? It’s rented. We’re not sure if we’ll be keeping it or not.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Thank you. Can we see our rooms?”

“Yes. You are on the first floor—excuse me, the second floor, as you say in America. Franz,” he called.

The bellman’s English was just as good. “This way, if you please, gentlemen.” No elevator, but rather a walk up a flight of red-carpeted steps directly toward a full-length portrait of somebody who looked very important indeed, in his white military uniform and beautifully combed-out chin whiskers.

“Who might that be?” Dominic asked the bellman.

“The Emperor Franz Josef, sir. He visited the hotel upon its opening in the nineteenth century.”

“Ah.” It explained the attitude of the staff here, but you couldn’t knock the style of this place. Not by a long shot.

In another five minutes, they were settled into their accommodations. Brian came wandering into his brother’s room. “God damn, the Residence Level at the White House isn’t this good.”

“Think so?” Dominic asked.

“Dude, I
know
so. Been there, done that. Uncle Jack had me up after I got my commission—no, actually it was after I came through the Basic School. Shit, this place is something. I wonder what it costs?”

“What the hell, it’s on my card, and our friend is nearby at the Bristol. Kinda interesting to hunt rich bastards, isn’t it?” That brought them back to business. Dominic pulled his laptop out of his bag. The Imperial was used to guests with computers, and the setup for it was very efficient indeed. For the moment, he opened the most recent file. He’d only scanned it before. Now he took his time with every single word.

GRANGER WAS
thinking it through. Gerry wanted somebody to baby-sit the twins, and it seemed as though his mind was fixed on it. There were a lot of good people in the intelligence department under Rick Bell, but as former intelligence officers at CIA and elsewhere, they were all too old to be proper companions for the twins, young as the Caruso kids were. It wouldn’t look right to have people in their late twenties chumming around Europe with somebody in his middle fifties. So, better somebody younger. There weren’t many of those, but there was one . . .