Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

“Agreed.” They finished breakfast without another word.

SAM GRANGERwas already in his office. It was 3:15 A.M. when he got in and lit up his own computer. The twins had gotten to London at about 1:00 A.M. his time, and something in the back of his head told him that they would not dally on their mission. This first mission would validate – or not – The Campus’s idea of a virtual office. If things went according to plan, he’d get notification of the operation’s progress even faster than Rick Bell’s news over the intelligence network’s wire service. Now came the part he always knew he’d hate: waiting for others to effect the mission he’d drawn up in his own mind, here at his own desk. Coffee helped. A cigar would have helped even better, but he didn’t have a cigar. That’s when his door opened.

It was Gerry Hendley.

“You, too?” Sam asked, with both surprise and amusement.

Hendley smiled. “Well, first time, right? I couldn’t sleep at home.”

“I hear you. Got a deck of cards?” he wondered aloud.

“I wish.” Hendley was actually pretty good with a deck of cards. “Any word from the twins?”

“Not a peep. They got in on time, probably at the hotel by now. I imagine they got in, freshened up, and went out for a look-see. The hotel is only a block or so from Uda’s house. Hell, for all I know they might have popped him in the ass already. The timing’s about right. He’d be going to work about now, if the locals have his routine figured out, and I think we can depend on that.”

“Yeah, unless he got an unexpected call, or he saw something in the morning paper that caught his interest, or his favorite shirt wasn’t properly pressed. Reality is analog, Sam, not digital, remember?”

“Don’t we know it,” Granger agreed.

THE FINANCIALdistrict looked exactly like what it was, though somewhat homier than New York’s tower targets of steel and glass. There were some of those, too, of course, but they weren’t as oppressive. Half a block from where they got out of the cab was a portion of the original Roman wall that had surrounded the legion town of Londinium, as the British capital had originally been known, a place selected for its good wells and large river. The people here were mostly well dressed, they noticed, and the shops all upscale in a city where few things were low scale. The bustle factor was high, with crowds of people moving about with speed and purpose. There was also a good supply of pubs, most of which had chalkboards near the doors to advertise their food. The twins picked one in easy sight of the Lloyd’s building; agreeably, it had outside tables, as though it were a Roman restaurant near the Spanish Steps. The clear sky belied London’s wet reputation. Both twins were sufficiently well dressed not to appear too obviously to be American tourists. Brian spotted an ATM machine and got some cash, which he split with his brother, and then they ordered coffee – they were too American to get tea – and waited.

IN HISoffice, Sali was working on his computer. He had a chance to buy a town house in Belgravia – a neighborhood even more upscale than his own – for eight and a half million pounds, which wasn’t quite a bargain, but neither was it excessive. Certainly he could rent it out for a good sum, and it was a freehold, meaning that in buying the house he’d also own the land, instead of paying ground rent to the Duke of Westminster. It wasn’t excessive, either, but it did add up. He made a note to go look at it this week. Otherwise, the currency valuations were fairly stable. He’d played with currency arbitrage on and off for a few months, but he didn’t really think he had the education to delve deeply into it. At least not yet. Maybe he would talk to a few people skilled in that game. Anything that could be done could also be learned, and with access to more than two hundred million pounds, he was able to play without doing his father’s money too much damage. In fact, he was up this year by nine million pounds, which wasn’t too bad. For the next hour, he sat at his computer and looked for trends – the trend is your friend – trying to make sense out of it. The real trick, he knew, was spotting them early – early enough to get in low before bailing out high – but, though he was closing in on it, he hadn’t learned that particular skill yet. Had he done so, his trading account would have been up by thirty-one million pounds, instead of a mere nine. Patience, he thought, was a damnably hard virtue to acquire. How much better to be young and brilliant.

His office had a TV, too, of course, and he switched it to an American financial channel that spoke of a coming weakness in the pound against the dollar, though the reasons for it were not entirely convincing, and he thought better of buying thirty million dollars on speculation. His father had warned him about speculating before, and since it was his father’s money he had listened attentively and granted the old bastard his wishes. Over the previous nineteen months, he was only down three million pounds, and most of those mistakes were a year behind him. The real-estate portfolio was doing very nicely. He was mostly buying property from older Englishmen and selling a few months later to his own countrymen, who usually paid cash or its electronic equivalent. All in all, he considered himself a real-estate speculator of great and growing talents. And, of course, a superb lover. It was approaching noon, and already his loins were aching for Rosalie. Might she be available this evening? For a thousand pounds, she ought to be, Uda thought. So, just before noon, he lifted his phone and hit the number 9 speed-dial button.

“My beloved Rosalie, this is Uda. If you can come over tonight, about seven-thirty, I will have something nice for you. You know my number, darling.” And he set the phone down. He’d wait until four or so, and if she did not call him back, he’d call Mandy. It was a rare day indeed when both of them were unavailable. He preferred to believe they spent such time shopping or having dinner with friends. After all, who paid them better than he did? And he wanted to see Rosalie’s face when she got the new shoes. English women really liked this Jimmy Choo fellow. To his eye, the designs looked grotesquely uncomfortable, but women were women, not men. For his fantasies, he drove his Aston Martin. Women preferred sore feet. There was no understanding them.

BRIAN GOTbored too easily to just sit and stare at the Lloyd’s building. Besides, it hurt his eyes. It was more than undistinguished, it was positively grotesque, like a glassed-in DuPont plant for making nerve gas or some other noxious chemical. It was also probably bad field craft to stare at any one thing for any length of time. There was some shopping on this street, again none of it cheap. A men’s tailor shop and similarly nice-looking places for women, and what appeared to be a very expensive shoe store. That was one item he didn’t bother with much. He had good black leather dress shoes – he was wearing them now – a good pair of sneaks that he’d bought on a day best forgotten, and four pairs of combat boots, two black and two the buff color the Marine Corps was heading to, except for parades and other official stuff that did not often concern the snake-eating Marines of Force Recon. All Marines were supposed to be “pretty” troops, but the snake-eating ones were thought to be from the side of the family that you didn’t talk much about. And he was still coming to terms with the shoot-out of the previous week. Even the people he’d gone after in Afghanistan hadn’t made any overt attempts to kill women and kids, at least that he knew about. They were barbarians, sure, but even barbarians were supposed to have limits. Except for the bunch of people that this guy played with. It wasn’t manly – even the beard wasn’t manly. The Afghans’ were, but this guy just looked like some sort of pimp. He was, in short, unworthy of the Marine’s steel, not a man to be killed, but a cockroach to be eliminated. Even if he did drive a car worth more than a Marine captain made in ten years, before taxes. A Marine officer might save up for a Chevy Corvette, but, no, this POS had to have the grandson of James Bond’s car, to go along with the whores he rented. You could call him a lot of things, but “man” was definitely not among them, the Marine thought, subconsciously working himself up for the mission.