“Just body count,” Mrs. Peters confirmed, to Alexander’s evident annoyance.
That was enough to make Brian’s stomach contract a little. “Uh, guys, I know I’ve asked it before, but what exactly are we training for?” Dominic leaned in visibly as well.
“Patience, fellas,” Pete cautioned.
“Okay.” Dominic nodded submission. “I’ll give you that this time.” But not too much longer, he didn’t have to add.
“SO, YOU’RE not going to exploit this?” Jack asked at closing time.
“We could, but it’s not really worth the time. We’d only turn a couple of hundred thousand at best, probably not that much. But you did okay spotting it,” Granger allowed.
“How much message traffic like this comes through here on a weekly basis?”
“One or two, four in a really busy week.”
“And how many plays do you make?” Junior asked.
“One in five. We do so carefully, but even so, we always run the risk of being noticed. If the Europeans saw that we were outguessing them too much, then they’d look into how we were doing it—they’d probably shake down their own people, looking for a human leaker. That’s how they think over there. It’s a big place for conspiracy theory, you see, because of the way they operate themselves. But the game they play regularly sort of militates against it.”
“What else do you look into?”
“Starting next week, you’ll have access to the secure accounts—people call them numbered accounts because they’re supposedly identified by code numbers. Now it’s mainly code words, because of computer technology. They probably picked that up from the intelligence community. They often hire spooks to look after their security—but not good ones. The good ones stay away from money-management businesses, mainly out of snobbery. It’s not important enough for a senior spook,” Granger explained.
“The ‘secured’ accounts, do they identify the owners?” Jack asked.
“Not always. Sometimes it’s all done via code word, though sometimes the banks have internal memoranda that we can tap into. Not always, though, and the bankers never speculate internally about their clients—at least not in written form. I’m sure they chat back and forth over lunch, but you know, a lot of them, they really don’t care very much about where the money comes from. Dead Jews in Auschwitz, some Mafia capo in Brooklyn—it’s all money fresh off the presses.”
“But if you turned this over to the FBI—”
“We can’t, because it’s illegal, and we don’t, because then we’d lose a way to track the bastards and their money. On the legal side, there’s more than one jurisdiction, and for some of the European countries—well, banking is a big moneymaker, and no government ever turns its back on tax revenue. The dog doesn’t bite anybody in their backyard. What it does down the block, they don’t care about.”
“I wonder what Dad thinks of that?”
“Not much, I’ll bet,” Granger opined.
“Not hardly,” Jack agreed. “So, you track the secured accounts to follow the bad guys and their money?”
“That’s the idea. It’s a lot harder than you might imagine, but when you score, you score big.”
“So, I’m going to be a bird dog?”
“That’s right. If you’re good enough,” Granger added.
MOHAMMED WAS almost directly overhead at that moment. The Great Circle Route from Mexico City to London passed close enough to Washington, D.C., for him to look down from thirty-seven thousand feet and see the American capital laid out like a paper map. Now, were he a member of the Department of Martyrdom, he might have climbed the spiral stairs to the upper level and used a gun to kill the flight crew and dive the aircraft . . . but that had been done before, and now the cockpit doors were protected, and there might well be an armed policeman up there in business class to spoil the show. Worse yet, an armed soldier in civilian clothes. Mohammed had little respect for police officers, but he’d learned the hard way not to disregard Western soldiers. However, he was not a member of the Department of Martyrdom, much as he admired those Holy Warriors. His ability to seek out information made him too valuable to be thrown away in such a noble gesture. That was good, and that was bad, but good or bad, it was a fact, and he lived in the world of facts. He would meet Allah and enter Paradise at the time written by God’s Own Hand in God’s Own Book. For the moment, he had another six and a half more hours of confinement in this seat.
“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 SAYS the 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.
Chapter 6
ADVERSARIES
THE 747-400 touched 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.