Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

It was near closing time when Jerry Rounds came into Sam’s office. It was the job of Jerry and his staff of thirty to go over all the downloads from NSA and CIA. They all had to be speed-readers with sensitive noses. Rounds was the local equivalent of a bloodhound.

“Check this out,” he said, dropping a sheet of paper on Granger’s desk and taking a seat.

“Mossad lost a – Station Chief? Hmmph. How did that happen?”

“The local cops are thinking robbery. Killed with a knife, wallet missing, no sign of a protracted struggle. Evidently, he wasn’t carrying heat with him at the time.”

“Civilized place like Rome, why bother?” Granger observed. But they would now, for a while at least. “How did we find out?”

“Made the local papers that an official at the Israeli Embassy got whacked while taking a leak. The Agency Chief of Station fingered him for a spook. Some people at Langley are running around in circles trying to figure what it all means, but they’ll probably fall back on Occam’s razor and buy what the local cops think. Dead man. No wallet. Robbery where the crook got a little carried away.”

“You think the Israelis will buy that?” Granger wondered.

“About as soon as they serve roast pork at an embassy dinner. He was knifed between the first and second vertebrae. A street hood is more likely to slash the throat, but a pro knows that’s messy and noisy. The Carabinieri are working the case – but it sounds as though they don’t have dick to work with, unless somebody at the restaurant has a hell of a good memory. I wouldn’t want to wager much on that one.”

“So, what’s it all mean?”

Rounds settled back in the chair. “When’s the last time a Station Chief of any service got killed?”

“It’s been a while. The Agency lost one in Greece – that local terrorist group. The COS was fingered by some prick . . . one of their own, defector, skipped over the wall, drinking vodka now and feeling lonely, I imagine. The Brits lost a guy a few years ago in Yemen . . .” He paused. “You’re right. You don’t gain much by killing a Station Chief. Once you know who he is, you watch him, find out who his contacts and sub-officers are. If you whack one, you lose assets instead of gaining any. So, you’re thinking a terrorist, maybe sending a message to Israel?”

“Or maybe eliminating a threat they especially disliked. What the hell, the poor bastard was Israeli, wasn’t he? Embassy official. Maybe just that was enough, but when a spook – especially a senior spook – goes down, you don’t assume it’s an accident, do you?”

“Any chance Mossad will ask for our help?” But Granger knew better. The Mossad was like the kid in the sandbox who never, ever, shared toys. They’d ask for help only if they were, A, desperate, and, B, convinced someone else could give them something they’d never get on their own. Then they’d act like the returning prodigal son.

“They won’t confirm that this guy – named Greengold – was Mossad. That might be a little helpful to the Italian cops, might even get their counter-spook agency involved, but if it’s been said, there is no evidence of it that Langley knows about.”

But Langley would not think in such terms, Granger realized. So did Jerry. He could see it in his eyes. CIA didn’t think in those terms because the intelligence business had become very civilized. You didn’t kill off the other guy’s assets, because that was bad for business. Then he might do something to your assets, and if you were fighting a guerrilla war on the streets of some foreign city, you were not getting the actual job done. The actual job was to get information back to your government, not to carve notches on your pistol grips. So, the Carabinieri would think in terms of a street crime because any diplomat’s person was inviolable to the forces of any other country, protected by international treaty and by a tradition that went all the way back to the Persian Empire under Xerxes.

“Okay, Jerry, you’re the man with the trained nose,” Sam observed. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking there’s a nasty ghost out on the street, maybe. This Mossad guy is at a gilt-edged restaurant in Rome, having lunch and a glass of nice wine. Maybe he’s making a pickup at a dead drop – I checked the map, the restaurant is a brisk walk from the embassy building, a little too far for a regular lunch place, unless this Greengold guy was a jogging type, and it was the wrong time of day for that. So, unless he was really hot for the chef at Giovanni’s, even money it’s a dead drop or a meet of some sort. If so, he was set up. Not set up to be ID’d by his opposition, whoever that may be, but ID’d to be whacked. To the local cops, it may look like a robbery. To me, it looks like a deliberate assassination, and expertly done. The victim was instantly incapacitated. No chance to resist in any way. That’s how you’d want to take a spook down – you never know how good he might be at self-defense, but if I were an Arab, I’d figure a Mossad guy for the bogeyman. I would not take many chances. No pistol, so he left nothing behind in the form of physical evidence, no bullet, no cartridge case. He takes the wallet to make it look like a robbery, but he killed a Mossad rezident, and he delivered a message, probably. Not that he dislikes Mossad, but that he can kill their people as easy as zipping his pants.”

“You planning a book on the subject, Jerry?” Sam asked lightly. The chief analyst was taking a single factoid of hard information and spinning it into a complete soap opera.

Rounds just tapped his nose and smiled. “Since when do you believe in coincidences? Something smells about this one.”

“What’s Langley think?”

“Nothing yet. They’ve assigned it to the Southern Europe Desk for evaluation. I expect we’ll see something in a week or so, and it won’t say much. I know the guy who runs that shop.”

“Dumb?”

Rounds shook his head. “No, that’s not fair. He’s smart enough, but he doesn’t stick his neck out. Nor is he especially creative. I bet this doesn’t even go as far as the Seventh Floor.”

A new CIA Director had replaced Ed Foley, who was now retired and reportedly doing his own “I Was There” book, along with his wife, Mary Pat. In their day, they’d been pretty good, but the new DCI was a politically attractive judge beloved of President Kealty. He didn’t do anything without Presidential approval, which meant it had to be run through the mini-bureaucracy of the National Security Council team in the White House, which was about as leaky as RMS Titanic, and hence beloved of the press. The Directorate of Operations was still growing, still training new field officers at The Farm in Tidewater, Virginia, and the new DDO wasn’t a bad man at all – Congress had insisted on someone who knew how to work the field, somewhat to Kealty’s dismay, but he knew how to play the game with Congress. The Directorate of Operations might be growing back into proper shape, but it would never do anything overtly bad under the current administration. Nothing to make Congress unhappy. Nothing to make the freelance haters of the intelligence community get loud about anything other than their routine complaints about historical wives’ tales and grand conspiracy theories, and how CIA had caused Pearl Harbor and the San Francisco Earthquake.

“So, nothing will come of this, you figure?” Granger asked, knowing the answer.

“Mossad will look around, tell its troops to stay awake, and that’ll work for a month or two, and then most of them will settle down to their normal routines. Same with other services. Mainly, the Israelis will try to figure how their guy got fingered. Hard to speculate on that with the information at hand. Probably something simple. Usually is. Maybe he recruited the wrong guy and it bit him, maybe their ciphers got cracked – a bribed cipher clerk at the embassy, for example – maybe somebody talked to the wrong guy at the wrong cocktail party. The possibilities are pretty wide, Sam. It only takes one little slip to get a guy killed out there, and the best of us can make that sort of error.”