Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

“More wine, sir?” the pink-faced stewardess asked. What a prize she might be in Paradise . . .

“Ah, yes, thank you,” he replied in his best Cambridge English. It was contrary to Islam, but not to drink would look suspicious, he thought again, and his mission was much too important to risk. Or, at least, so he often told himself, Mohammed admitted to himself, with a minor chink in his conscience. He soon tossed off the drink and then adjusted the seat controls. Wine might be contrary to the laws of Islam, but it did help one sleep.

“MICHELLE SAYSthe twins are competent for beginners,” Rick Bell told his boss.

“The tracking exercise?” Hendley asked.

“Yeah.” He didn’t have to say that a proper training exercise would have entailed eight to ten cars, two aircraft, and a total of twenty agents, but The Campus didn’t have anything approaching those assets. Instead, it had a wider latitude in dealing with its subjects, a fact which had advantages and disadvantages. “Alexander seems to like them. He says they’re bright enough, and they have mental agility.”

“Good to know. Anything else happening?”

“Rick Pasternak has something new, he says.”

“What might that be?” Gerry asked.

“It’s a variant on succinylcholine, a synthetic version of curare, shuts down the skeletal muscles almost immediately. You collapse and can’t breathe. He says it would be a miserable death, like taking a bayonet through the chest.”

“Traceable?” Hendley asked.

“That is the good news. Esterases in the body break the drug down rapidly into acetylcholine, so it is also likely to be undetectable, unless the target happens to croak right outside a primo medical center with a very sharp pathologist who is looking for something out of the ordinary. The Russians looked at it – would you believe it, back in the 1970s. They were thinking about battlefield applications, but it proved to be impractical. It’s surprising KGB didn’t make use of it. It’ll look like a big-time myocardial infarction, even on a marble slab an hour later.”

“How’d he get it?”

“A Russian colleague was visiting with him at Columbia. Turned out he was Jewish and Rick got him talking. He talked enough that Rick developed a delivery system right there in his lab. It’s being perfected right now.”

“You know, it’s amazing that the Mafia never figured it out. If you want somebody killed, you hire a doc.”

“Goes against the old school tie for most of them.” But most of them didn’t have a brother at Cantor Fitzgerald who’d ridden the ninety-seventh floor down to sea level one Tuesday morning.

“Is this variant better than what we have already?”

“Better than what anyone has, Gerry. He says it’s almost a hundred percent reliable if used properly.”

“Expensive?”

Bell shook his head. “Not hardly.”

“It’s tested, it really works?”

“Rick says it killed six dogs – all big ones – pretty as you please.”

“Okay, approved.”

“Roger that, boss. Ought to have them in two weeks.”

“What’s happening out there?”

“We don’t know,” Bell admitted with downcast eyes. “One of the guys at Langley is saying in his memos that maybe we hurt them badly enough to slow them down, if not shut them down, but I get nervous when I read stuff like that. Like the ‘there’s no top to this market’ shit that you get before the bottom falls out. Hubris ante nemesis. Fort Meade can’t track them on the ’Net, but maybe that means they’re just getting a little smarter. There’s a lot of good encryption programs out on the market, and two of them NSA hasn’t cracked yet – at least, not reliably. They’re working on that one a couple of hours every day with their big mainframes. As you always say, Gerry, the smartest programmers don’t work for Uncle anymore–”

“–they develop video games.” Hendley finished the sentence. The government had never paid people well enough to attract the best – and that would never be fixed. “So, just an itchy nose?”

Rick nodded. “Until they’re dead, in the ground, with a wood stake through the heart, I’m going to worry about them.”

“Kinda hard to get them all, Rick.”

“Sure as hell.” Even their personal Dr. Death at Columbia couldn’t help with that.

THE 747-400touched down gently at Heathrow five minutes early at 12:55 P.M. Like most of the passengers, Mohammed was all too eager to get out of the Boeing wide-body. He cycled through passport control, smiling politely, availed himself of a washroom, and, feeling somewhat human again, walked to the Air France departure lounge for his connecting flight to Nice. It was ninety minutes to departure time, and then ninety minutes to his destination. In the cab, he demonstrated the sort of French that one might learn in a British university. The cab driver corrected him only twice, and on checking in to the hotel he surrendered his British passport – reluctantly, but the passport was a secure document which he’d used many times. The bar-code strip found on the inside of the cover page of the new passports troubled him. His didn’t have that feature, but when it expired in another two years he’d have to worry about some computer tracking him wherever he went. Well, he had three solid and secure British identities, and it was just a matter of getting passports for all three of them, and keeping a very low profile so that no British police constable would check into those identities. No cover could ever stand up to even a casual investigation, much less an in-depth one, and that bar code could someday mean that the immigration officer would get a flashing light on his panel, which would be followed by the appearance of a policeman or two. The infidels were making things hard on the faithful, but that was what infidels did.

The hotel did not have air-conditioning, but the windows could be opened, and the ocean breeze was pleasant. Mohammed hooked up his computer to the phone on the desk. Then the bed beckoned him, and he succumbed to its call. As much as he traveled, he had not found a cure for jet lag. For the next couple of days, he’d live on cigarettes and coffee until his body clock decided that it knew where he was at the moment. He checked his watch. The man meeting him would not be there for another four hours, which, Mohammed thought, was decent of him. He’d be eating dinner when his body would be expecting breakfast. Cigarettes and coffee.

IT WAS breakfast time in Colombia. Pablo and Ernesto both preferred the Anglo-American version, with bacon or ham and eggs, and the excellent local coffee.

“So, do we cooperate with that towel-headed thug?” Ernesto asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Pablo replied, stirring cream into his cup. “We will make a great deal of money, and the opportunity to create chaos within the house of the norteamericanos will serve our interests well. It will set their border guards to looking at people rather than at container boxes, and it will not do any harm to us, either directly or indirectly.”

“What if one of these Muslims is taken alive and made to talk?”

“Talk about what? Who will they meet, except some Mexican coyotes ?” Pablo asked in reply.

“ Sí, there is that,” Ernesto agreed. “You must think me a frightened old woman.”

“ Jefe, the last man who thought that of you is long dead.” That earned Pablo a grunt and a crooked smile.

“Yes, that is true, but only a fool is not cautious when the police forces of two nations pursue him.”