Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

“The condemned is supposed to have a decent last meal,” Dominic noted. Not that mutt in Alabama, of course. He’d probably had bad taste anyway. Then he wondered what they served for lunch in hell. “His guest is supposed to show at one-thirty, right?”

“Correct. Fifty-six told him to be careful in his routine. That might mean to check for a tail.”

“Suppose he’s nervous about us?” Brian wondered.

“Well,” Jack observed, “they have had some bad luck lately.”

“You have to wonder what he’s thinking,” Dominic said. He leaned back in his chair and stretched, catching a glance at their subject. It was a little warm to be wearing a jacket and tie, but they were supposed to look like businessmen, not tourists. Now he wondered if that was a good cover or not. You had to take temperature into account. Was he sweating because of the mission or the ambient temperature? He hadn’t been overly tense in London, Munich, or Vienna, had he? No, not then. But this was a more crowded – no, the landscape in London had been more crowded, hadn’t it?

There are good serendipities and bad ones. This time, a bad one happened. A waiter with a tray of glasses of Chianti tripped on the big feet of a woman from Chicago, in Rome to check out her roots. The tray missed the table, but the glasses got both twins in the lap. Both were wearing light-colored suits to deal with the heat, and–

“Oh, shit!” Dominic exclaimed, his biscuit-colored Brooks Brothers trousers looking as though he had been hit in the groin with a shotgun. Brian was in even worse shape.

The waiter was aghast. “Scusi, scusi, signori!” he gasped. But there was nothing to be done about it. He started jabbering about sending their clothes to the cleaners. Dom and Brian just looked at each other. They might as easily have borne the mark of Cain.

“It’s okay,” Dominic said in English. He’d forgotten all of his Italian oaths. “Nobody died.” The napkins would not do much about this. Maybe a good dry cleaner, and the Excelsior probably had one on staff, or at least close by. A few people looked over, either in horror or amusement, and so his face was as well marked as his clothing. When the waiter retreated in shame, the FBI agent asked, “Okay, now what?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” Brian responded. “Random chance has not acted in our favor, Captain Kirk.”

“Thanks a bunch, Spock,” Dom snarled back.

“Hey, I’m still here, remember?” Jack told them both.

“Junior, you can’t–” But Jack cut Brian off.

“Why the hell not?” He asked quietly. “How hard is it?”

“You’re not trained,” Dominic told him.

“It’s not playing golf at the Masters, is it?”

“Well–” It was Brian again.

“Is it?” Jack demanded.

Dominic pulled his pen out of his coat pocket and handed it across.

“Twist the nib and stick it in his ass, right?”

“It’s all ready to go,” Enzo confirmed. “But be careful, for Christ’s sake.”

It was 1:21 now. Mohammed Hassan had finished his glass of water and poured another. Mahmoud would soon be here. Why take the chance of interrupting an important meeting? He shrugged to himself and stood, walking inside for the men’s room, which had pleasant memories.

“You sure you want to do this?” Brian asked.

“He’s a bad guy, isn’t he? How long does this stuff take to work?”

“About thirty seconds, Jack. Use your head. If it doesn’t feel right, back away and let him go,” Dominic told him. “This isn’t a fucking game, man.”

“Right.” What the hell, Dad did this once or twice, he told himself. Just to make sure, he bumped into a waiter and asked where the men’s room was. The waiter pointed, and Jack went that way.

It was an ordinary wooden door with a symbolic label rather than words because of Giovanni’s international clientele. What if there’s more than one guy in there? he asked himself.

Then you blow it off, dumbass.

Okay. . .

He walked in, and there was somebody else, drying his hands. But then he walked out, and Ryan was alone with 56MoHa, who was just zipping up and starting to turn. Jack pulled the pen from his inside jacket pocket and turned the tip to expose the iridium syringe tip. He resisted the instinctive urge to check the tip with his finger as not a very smart move, and slid past the well-suited stranger, and then, as told, dropped his hand and got him right in the left cheek. He expected to hear the discharge of the gas but didn’t.

Mohammed Hassan al-Din jumped at the sudden sharp pain, and turned to see what looked like an ordinary young man – Wait, he’d seen this face at the hotel . . .

“Oh, sorry to bump into you, pal.”

The way he said it lit off warning lights in his consciousness. He was an American, and he’d bumped into him, and he’d felt a stick in his buttocks, and–

And he’d killed the Jew here, and–

“Who are you?”

Jack had counted off fifteen seconds or so, and he was feeling his oats–

“I’m the man who just killed you, Fifty-six MoHa,” he replied evenly.

The man’s face changed into something feral and dangerous. His right hand went into his pocket and came out with a knife, and suddenly it wasn’t at all funny anymore.

Jack instinctively backed away with a jump. The terrorist’s face was the very image of death. He opened his folding knife and locked onto Jack’s throat as his target. He brought the knife up and took half a step forward and–

The knife dropped from his hand – he looked down at his hand in amazement, then looked back up–

–or tried to. His head didn’t move. His legs lost their strength. He fell straight down. His knees bounced painfully on the tile floor. And he fell forward, turning left as he did so. His eyes stayed open, and then he was faceup, looking at the metal plate glued to the bottom of the urinal, where Greengold had wanted to retrieve the package from before, and . . .

“Greetings from America, Fifty-six MoHa. You fucked with the wrong people. I hope you like it in hell, pal.” His peripheral vision saw the shape move to the door, and the increase and decrease of light as the door opened and closed.

Ryan stopped there and decided to go back. There was a knife by the guy’s hand. He took the handkerchief from his pocket and grasped the knife, then just slid it under the body. Better not to dick with it anymore, he thought. Better to – no, one more thing entered his mind. He reached into 56’s pants pocket and found what he sought. Then he took his leave. The crazy part was that he felt a great need to urinate at the moment, and walked fast to make that urge subside. In a matter of seconds, he was back at the table.

“That went okay,” he told the twins. “I guess we need to get you guys back to the hotel, eh? There’s something I need to do. Come on,” he commanded.

Dominic left enough Euros to cover the meal, with a tip. The clumsy waiter chased after them, offering to pay for laundering their clothes, but Brian waved him off with a smile, and they walked across the Piazza di Spagna. Here they took the elevator up to the church, and then walked down the street toward the hotel. They were back to the Excelsior in about eight minutes, with both twins feeling rather stupid to have red stains on their clothes.

The reception clerk saw this and asked if they needed a cleaning service.

“Yes, could you send somebody up?” Brian asked in reply.

“Of course, signore. In five minutes.”

The elevator, they felt, was not bugged. “Well?” Dominic asked.

“Got him, and I got this,” Jack said, holding up a room key just like theirs.

“What’s that for?”