Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

That was Davis’s cue. “We’re going to do reconnaissance by fire. After we whack one or two, we’ll see what reaction, if any, results, and we will take our guidance from there. I agree that Mr. Sali looks like a profitable first target. Question is, is his elimination going to be overt or covert?”

“Explain,” Hendley ordered.

“Well, if he’s found dead on the street, that’s one thing. If he disappears with his daddy’s money and leaves behind a note saying that he wants to stop what he’s doing and just retire, that’s something else,” Sam explained.

“Kidnapping? It’s dangerous.” The Metropolitan Police in London had a closure rate on kidnappings that nibbled at one hundred percent. That was a dangerous game to play, especially on their first move.

“Well, we can hire an actor, dress him up right, fly him to New York Kennedy, and then just have him disappear. In fact, we dispose of the body and keep the money. How much does he have access to, Rick?”

“Direct access? Hell, it’s over three hundred million bucks.”

“Might look good in the corporate exchequer,” Sam speculated. “And it wouldn’t hurt his dad much, would it?”

“His father’s money – all of it? Try the sunny side of three billion,” Bell answered. “He’ll miss it, but it wouldn’t break him. And given his opinion of his son, it might even develop as good cover for our operation,” he hypothesized.

“I am not recommending this as a course of action, but it is an alternative,” Granger concluded.

It had been talked about before, of course. It was too obvious a play to escape notice. And three hundred million dollars would have looked just fine in a Campus account, say in the Bahamas or Liechtenstein. You could hide money anywhere that had telephone lines. It was just electrons anyway, not gold bricks.

Hendley was surprised that Sam had brought this up so soon. Maybe he wanted to get a read on his colleagues. They were clearly not overcome with emotion at the thought of ending this Sali’s life, but to steal from him in the process pushed some very different buttons. A man’s conscience could be a funny thing, Gerry concluded.

“Let’s set that aside for the moment. How hard will the hit be?” Hendley asked.

“With what Rick Pasternak gave us? It’s child’s play, so long as our people don’t make a complete hash of it. Even then the worst thing that can happen is that it’ll look like a mugging that went wrong,” Granger told them.

“What if our guy drops the pen?” Rounds worried.

“It’s a pen. You can write with it. It’ll pass inspection with any cop in the world,” Granger replied confidently. He reached in his pocket and passed his sample around the table. “This one’s cold,” he assured them.

They’d all been briefed in. To all appearances, it was an expensive ballpoint, gold-plated, with obsidian on the clip. By depressing the clip and turning the nib cover, you switched the point from a real pen to a hypodermic with a lethal transfer agent. It would paralyze the victim in fifteen to twenty seconds, and kill him in three minutes, with no cure, and a very transient signature in the body. As the pen went around the conference table, the executives invariably felt the hypo point, and then experimented with using it for a simulated hit, mostly as an ice-pick strike, though Rounds handled it like a diminutive sword.

“It would be nice to try it on a dry run,” he observed quietly.

“Anyone here want to volunteer as the victim?” Granger asked the table. No heads nodded. The mood of the room didn’t surprise him much. It was time for a sober pause, the sort of thing that comes over a man when he signs his application for life insurance, a product that is valuable only if you are dead, which rather takes the fun out of the moment.

“Fly them to London together?” Hendley asked.

“Correct.” Granger nodded, and turned back to his business voice. “We have them scout out the target, pick their moment, and make their hit.”

“And wait to see the results?” Rounds asked, rhetorically.

“Correct. Then they can fly off to the next target. The whole operation should not take more than a week. Then we fly them home and await developments. If somebody taps into his money pile after his demise, we’ll probably know, right?”

“We ought to,” Bell confirmed. “And if anyone purloins it, we’ll know where it goes.”

“Excellent,” Granger observed. After all, that was what “reconnaissance-by-fire” meant.

THEY WOULDN’Tbe here long, the twins both thought. They were quartered in adjoining rooms at the local Holiday Inn, and this Sunday afternoon they were both watching TV with one guest.

“How’s your mom?” Jack asked.

“Fine, doing a lot of stuff with the local schools – parochial ones. A little more than a teacher’s aide, but not actually teaching. Dad’s working some new project – supposedly Boeing is back looking at an SST, supersonic airliner. Dad says they’ll probably never build it, unless Washington coughs up a lot of money, but with the Concorde retired people are thinking about it again, and Boeing likes to keep their engineers busy. They’re a little nervous about the Airbus people, and they don’t want to be caught with their pants down if the French start getting ambitious.”

“How was the Corps?” Jack asked Brian.

“The Corps is the Corps, cuz. It just rolls along, keeping busy for the next war that’ll come along.”

“Dad was worried when you went to Afghanistan.”

“It was a little exciting. The people there, they’re tough, and they’re not dumb, but they’re not trained that well, either. So, when we bumped heads with ’em, we came out ahead. If we saw something that looked hinky, we called air in on it, and that usually took care of things.”

“How many?”

“How many did we take out? Some. Not enough, but some. The Green Berets went in first, and the Afghans learned from that that a stand-up fight was not in their interest. Mostly, we did pursuit and reconnaissance, birddogging for the airedales. We had a CIA guy with us, and a signals-intelligence detachment. The bad guys used their radios a little too much. When we got a hit, we’d move in to about a mile or so and give it a look-see, and if it was interesting enough we’d call in air and scramble the hell out of it. Scary to watch,” Brian summarized.

“I bet.” Jack popped open a can of beer.

“So this Sali guy, the one with the girlfriend, Rosalie Parker?” Dominic asked. Like most cops, he had a good memory for names. “You said that he was jumpin’ up and down about the shootings?”

“Yup,” Jack said. “Thought they were just swell.”

“So who was the cheerleading with?”

“Pals he e-mails to. The Brits have his phones tapped, and the e-mails – well, as I said, I can’t tell you about the e-mails. Those European phone systems aren’t anywhere near as secure as people think – I mean, everybody knows about intercepting cell phones and stuff, but the cops over there pull stuff we can’t do here. The Brits especially, they use intercepts to track the IRA guys. I heard that the rest of the European countries are even freer to act.”

“They are,” Dominic assured him. “At the Academy, we had some in the national Academy program – that’s like a doctoral course for cops. They’d talk about that sort of thing after you got a few drinks into them. So, this Sali guy liked what those mutts did, eh?”

“Like his team won the Super Bowl,” Jack replied at once.

“And he bankrolls them?” Brian asked.

“That’s right.”

“Interesting,” was all Brian had to say after getting that question answered.