Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

“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 AIRBUSpulled 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 LIVEDin 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.

“WHAT YOUthinking, Aldo?” Dominic asked his brother. ESPN had a baseball game on; the Mariners were playing the Yankees, to the current detriment of the former.

“I’m not sure I like the idea of shooting some poor bastard down on the street, bro.”

“What if you know he’s a bad guy?”

“And what if I whack the wrong guy just because he drives the same kind of car and has the same mustache? What if he leaves a wife and kids behind? Then I’m a fucking murderer – a contract killer, at that. That’s not the sort of thing they taught us at the Basic School, y’know?”

“But if you know he’s a bad guy, then what?” the FBI agent asked.

“Hey, Enzo, that’s not what they trained you to do, either.”

“I know that, but this here’s a different situation. If I know the mutt’s a terrorist, and I know we can’t arrest him, and I know he’s got more plans, then I think I can handle it.”

“Out in the hills, in Afghanistan, you know, our intel wasn’t always gold-plated, man. Sure, I learned to put my own ass on the line, but not some poor other schlub’s.”

“The people you were after over there, who’d they kill?”

“Hey, they were part of an organization that made war on the United States of America. They probably weren’t Boy Scouts. But I never saw any direct evidence of it.”

“What if you had?” Dominic asked.

“But I didn’t.”

“You’re lucky,” Enzo responded, remembering a little girl whose throat had been slashed ear to ear. There was a legal adage that hard cases made for bad law, but the books could not anticipate all the things that people did. Black ink on white paper was a little too dry for the real world sometimes. But he’d always been the passionate one of the two. Brian had always been a touch cooler, like Fonzie on Happy Days. Twins, yes, but fraternal ones. Dominic was more like his father, Italian and passionate. Brian had turned out more like Mom, chillier from a more northerly climate. To an outsider, the differences might have appeared less than trivial, but to the twins themselves it was frequently the subject of jabs and jokes. “When you see it, Brian, when it’s right there in front of you, it sets you off, man. It lights a fire in the gut.”

“Hey, been there, done that, got the T-shirt, okay? I whacked five men all by myself. But it was business, not personal. They tried to ambush us, but they didn’t read the manual right, and I used fire and maneuver to fake ’em out and roll ’em up, just like they taught me to do. It’s not my fault they were inept. They could have surrendered, but they preferred to shoot it out. That was a bad call on their part, but ‘a man should do what he thinks is best.’ ” His all-time favorite movie was John Wayne’s Hondo.

“Hey, Aldo, I’m not saying you’re a wuss.”

“I know what you’re saying, but, look, I don’t want to turn into one of them, okay?”

“That’s not the mission here, bro. I got my doubts, too, but I’m going to stay around and see how it plays out. We can always kiss it off whenever we want.”

“I suppose.”

Then Derek Jeter doubled up the middle. Pitchers probably thought of him as a terrorist, didn’t they?

ON THEother side of the building, Pete Alexander was on a secure phone to Columbia, Maryland.

“So, how are they doing?” he heard Sam Granger ask.

Pete sipped at his glass of sherry. “They’re good kids. They both have doubts. The Marine talks openly about it, and the FBI guy keeps his mouth shut about it, but the wheels are turning over slowly.”

“How serious is it?”

“Hard to say. Hey, Sam, we always knew that training would be the hard part. Few Americans want to grow up to be professional killers – at least not the ones we need for this.”