“Hell of a thing for a trained intelligence officer to do,” Jack observed.
“Lots of services enlist the help of hookers,” Wills explained. “They don’t mind talking, and for he right wad of cash they’ll do just about anything. Uda here likes chicken-in-a-basket. Never tried that myself. Asian specialty. Know how to call up his dossier?”
“Nobody taught me,” Jack replied.
“Okay.” Wills frog-walked his swivel chair over and demonstrated. “This is the general index. Your access password is SOUTHWEST91.”
Junior duly typed in the password, and the dossier came up as an Acrobat graphics file.
The first photo was probably from his passport, followed by six more, in a more informal format. Jack Jr. managed not to blush. He’d seen his share of Playboys while growing up, even in Catholic schools. Will continued the day’s lesson.
“You can learn a lot from how a guy does it with women. Langley has a shrink who analyzes that in great detail. It’s probably one of the annexes on this file. At Langley, it’s called ‘Nuts and Sluts’ information. The doc is named Stefan Pizniak. Harvard Medical School professor. As I recall, he says this kid is normal in his drives, given his age, liquidity, and his social background. As you’ll see, he hangs out a lot with merchant bankers in London, like a new kid learning the business. The word is that he’s smart, affable, and handsome. Careful and conservative in his money work. He does not drink. So, he is somewhat religious. Doesn’t flaunt it or lecture others about it, but lives in accordance with the major rules of his religion.”
“What makes him a bad guy?” Jack asked.
“He talks a lot to people we know about. There’s no word on who he hangs with in Saudi. We’ve never put any coverage on him in his own backyard. Even the Brits haven’t, and they have a lot more assets in place. CIA doesn’t have much, and his profile isn’t high enough to merit a closer look, or so they think. It’s a shame. His daddy’s supposed to be a good guy. It’ll break his heart to find out his son’s hanging with the wrong crowd at home.” With that wisdom imparted, Wills went back to his own workstation.
Junior examined the face on his computer screen. His mom was pretty good at reading people from a single look, but it was a skill she hadn’t passed along to him. Jack had trouble enough figuring women out—along with most of the men in the world, he comforted himself. He continued to stare at the face, trying to read the mind of someone six thousand miles away, who spoke a different language and adhered to a different religion. What thoughts circulated behind those eyes? His father, he knew, liked the Saudis. He was especially close to Prince Ali bin Sultan, a prince and senior official in the Saudi government. Young Jack had met him, but only in passing. A beard and a sense of humor were the only two things he remembered. It was one of Jack Sr.’s core beliefs that all men were fundamentally the same, and he’d passed that opinion along to his son. But that also meant that, just as there were bad people in America, so there were also bad people elsewhere in the world, and his country had recently had some hard lessons from that sad fact. Unfortunately, the sitting President hadn’t quite figured out what to do about it yet.
Junior read on through the dossier. So, this was how it began here at The Campus. He was working a case—well, kinda working some sort of case, he corrected himself. Uda bin Sali was working at being an international banker. Sure enough, he moved money around. His father’s money? Jack wondered. If so, his daddy was one very wealthy son of a bitch. He played with all the big London banks—London was still the world’s banking capital. Jack would never have guessed that the National Security Agency had the sort of ability to crack this kind of thing.
A hundred million here, a hundred million there, pretty soon you were talking about real money. Sali was in the capital-preservation business, which meant not so much growing the money entrusted to him as making sure the lockbox had a really good lock. There were seventy-one subsidiary accounts, sixty-three of which were identified by bank, number, and password, so it seemed. Girls? Politics? Sports? Money management? Cars? The oil business? What did rich Saudi princelings talk about? That was a big blank spot in the files. Why didn’t the Brits listen in? The interviews with his hookers hadn’t revealed very much, except that he was a good tipper for those girls who’d shown him an especially good time in his house in Berkeley Square . . . an upscale part of town, Jack noted. He mainly got around by taxi. Owned a car—a black Aston Martin convertible, no less—but didn’t drive it much, the British information revealed. Did not have a chauffeur. Went to the embassy a lot. All in all, it was a lot of information that revealed not very much. He remarked on this to Tony Wills.
“Yeah, I know, but if he turns up hinky, you can be sure there’re two or three things in there that ought to have jumped off the page at you. That’s the problem with this damned business. And, remember, we’re seeing the processed ‘take.’ Some poor schlub had to take really raw data and distill it down to this. Exactly what significant facts got lost along the way? No way to tell, my boy. No way to tell.”
This is what my dad used to do, junior reminded himself. Trying to find diamonds in a bucket full of shit. He’d expected it to be easier, somehow. All right, so what he had to do was find money moves that were not easily explained. It was the worst sort of scut work, and he couldn’t even go to his father for advice. His dad would probably have flipped out to learn that he was working here. Mom would not be overly pleased, either.
Why did that matter? Wasn’t he a man now, able to do what he wanted to do with his life? Not exactly. Parents had power over you that never went away. He’d always be trying to please them, to show them that they’d raised him the right way, and that he was doing the right thing. Or something like that. His father had been lucky. They’d never learned about all the things he’d had to do. Would they have liked it?
No. They would have been upset—furious—with all the chances he’d taken with his life. And that was just the stuff his son knew about. There were a lot of blank spots in his memory, times his father hadn’t been home, and Mom hadn’t explained why . . . and so, now, here he was, if not doing the same thing, then sure as hell heading in that direction. Well, his father had always said that the world was a crazy place, and so here he was, figuring out just how crazy it might really be.
CHAPTER 7
TRANSIT
IT STARTED in Lebanon, with a flight to Cyprus. From there, a KLM flight to Schipol Airport in the Netherlands, and from there to Paris. In France the sixteen men overnighted in eight separate hotels, taking the time to walk the streets and exercise their English—there had been little point in having them learn French, after all—and struggle with a local population that could have been more helpful. The good news, as they saw it, was that certain female French citizens went out of their way to speak decent English, and were very helpful indeed. For a fee.
They were ordinary in most details, all in their late twenties, clean-shaven, average in size and looks, but better dressed than was the average. They all concealed their unease well, albeit with lingering but furtive glances at the cops they saw—they all knew not to attract the attention of anyone in a police officer’s uniform. The French police had a reputation for thoroughness which did not appeal to the new visitors. They were traveling on Qatari passports at the moment, which were fairly secure, but a passport issued from the French Foreign Minister himself would not stand up to a directed inquiry. And so they kept a low profile. They had all been briefed not to look around much, to be polite, and to make the effort to smile at everyone they encountered. Fortunately for them, it was tourist season in France, and Paris was jammed with people like them, many of whom also spoke little French, much to the bemused contempt of the Parisians, who in every case took their money anyway.
THE NEXT day’s breakfast hadn’t concluded with any new explosive revelations, and neither had lunch. Both Caruso brothers listened to their lessons from Pete Alexander, doing their best not to doze off, because these lessons seemed pretty straightforward.