“Boring, you think?” Pete asked over lunch.
“Well, none of it’s earthshaking,” Brian responded after a few seconds.
“You’ll find it’s a little different in a foreign city, out on the street in a market, say, looking for your subject in a crowd of a few thousand. The important part is to be invisible. We’ll work on that this afternoon. You had any experience in that, Dominic?”
“Not really. Just the basic stuff. Don’t look too directly at the subject. Reversible clothes. Different ties, if you’re in an environment that calls for a necktie. And you depend on others to switch off on coverage. But we won’t have the same backup we have in the Bureau for a discreet surveillance, will we?”
“Not even close. So, you keep your distance until it’s time to move in. At that point, you move in as quickly as circumstances allow—”
“And whack the guy?” Brian asked.
“Still uneasy about it?”
“I haven’t walked out yet, Pete. Let’s say I have my concerns, and leave it at that”
Alexander nodded. “Fair enough. We prefer people who know how to think, and we know that thinking carries its own penalties.”
“I guess that’s how you have to look at it. What if the guy we’re supposed to do away with turns out to be okay?” the Marine asked.
“Then you back off and report in. It’s theoretically possible that an assignment can be erroneous, but to the best of my knowledge it’s never happened.”
“Never?”
“Not ever, not once,” Alexander assured him.
“Perfect records make me nervous.”
“We try to be careful.”
“What are the rules? Okay, maybe I don’t need to know—right now—who sends us out to kill somebody, but it would be nice to know what the criteria are to write up some fucker’s death warrant, y’know?”
“It will be someone who has, directly or indirectly, caused the death of American citizens, or is directly involved in plans to do so in the future. We’re not after people who sing too loud in church or who have books overdue at the library.”
“You’re talking about terrorists, right?”
“Yup,” Pete replied simply.
“Why not just arrest them?” Brian asked next.
“Like you did in Afghanistan?”
“That was different,” the Marine protested.
“How?” Pete asked.
“Well, for one thing we were uniformed combatants operating in the field under orders from legally constituted command authority.”
“You took some initiative, right?”
“Officers are supposed to use their heads. My overall mission orders came from up the chain of command, however.”
“And you don’t question them?”
“No. Unless they’re crazy, you’re not supposed to do that.”
“What about when not doing something is crazy?” Pete asked. “What if you have a chance to take action against people who are planning to do something very destructive?”
“That’s what CIA and FBI are for.”
“But when they can’t get the job done, for one reason or another, then what? Do you just let the bad guys move ahead with their plans and handle them afterward? That can be expensive,” Alexander told him. “Our job is to do the things that are necessary when the conventional methods are unable to accomplish the mission.”
“How often?” This was Dominic, seeking to protect his brother.
“It’s picking up.”
“How many hits have you made?” Brian again.
“You don’t need to know”
“Oh, I do love hearing that one,” Dominic observed with a smile.
“Patience, boys. You’re not in the club yet,” Pete told them, hoping they were smart enough not to object at this point.
“Okay, Pete,” Brian said, after a moment’s thought. “We both gave our word that what we learn here stays here. Fine. It’s just that murdering people in cold blood isn’t exactly what I’ve been trained to do, y’know?”
“You’re not supposed to feel good about it. Over in Afghanistan, did you ever shoot anybody looking the other way?”
“Two of them,” Brian admitted. “Hey, the battlefield isn’t the Olympic Games,” he semiprotested.
“Neither is the rest of the world, Aldo.” The look on the Marine’s face said, Well, you got me there. “It’s an imperfect world, guys. If you want to try to make it perfect, go ahead, but it’s been tried before. Me, I’d settle for something safer and more predictable. Imagine if somebody had taken care of Hitler back in 1934 or so, or Lenin in 1915 in Switzerland. The world would have been better, right? Or maybe bad in a different way. But we’re not in that business. We will not be involved in political assassinations. We’re after the little sharks who kill innocent people in such a way that conventional procedures cannot handle them. It’s not the best system. I know that. We all know that. But it’s something, and we’re going to try to see if it works. It can’t be much worse than what we have already, can it?”
Dominic’s eyes never left Pete’s face during that discourse. He’d just told them something that maybe he hadn’t meant to tell them. The Campus didn’t have any killers yet. They were going to be the first. There had to be a lot of hopes riding on them. That was a lot of responsibility. But it all made sense. It was plain that Alexander was not teaching them from his own real-world experience. A training officer was supposed to be somebody who’d actually gone out and done it. That was why most of the instructors at the FBI Academy were experienced field agents. They could tell you how it felt. Pete could only tell them what had to be done. But why, then, had they picked him and Aldo?
“I see your point, Pete,” Dominic said. “I’m not leaving yet.”
“Neither am I,” Brian told his training officer. “I just want to know what the rules are.”
Pete didn’t tell them they’d be making the rules up as they went along. They’d figure that one out soon enough.
AIRPORTS ARE, the same all over the world. Instructed to be polite, they all checked their bags, waited in the correct lounges, smoked their cigarettes in the designated smoking areas, and read the books they’d purchased in the airport kiosks. Or pretended to. Not all of them had the language skills they would have wished. Once at cruising altitude, they ate their airline meals, and most of them took their airline naps. Nearly all of them were seated in the aft rows of their seating sections, and when they stirred, they wondered which of their seatmates they might meet again in a few days or weeks, however long it took to work out the details. Each of them hoped to meet Allah soon, and to garner the rewards that would come for fighting in their Holy Cause. It occurred to the more intellectual of them that even Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, was limited in his ability to communicate the nature of Paradise. He’d had to explain it to people with no knowledge of passenger jet aircraft, automobiles, and computers. What, then, was its true nature? It had to be so thoroughly wonderful as to defy description, but even so, a mystery yet to be discovered. And they would discover it. There was a degree of excitement in that thought, a sort of anticipation too sublime to discuss with one’s colleagues. A mystery, but an infinitely desirable one. And if others had to meet Allah, too, as a result, well, that also was written in the Great Book of Destiny. For the moment, they all took their naps, sleeping the sleep of the just, the sleep of the Holy Martyrs yet to be. Milk, honey, and virgins.
SALI, JACK found, had some mystery about him. The CIA file on the guy even had the length of his penis appended in the “Nuts and Sluts” section. The British whores said he was grossly average in size but uncommonly vigorous in application—and a fine tipper, which appealed to their commercial sensibilities. But unlike most men, he didn’t talk about himself much. Talked mainly about the rain and chill of London, and complimentary things about his companion of the moment, which appealed to her vanity. His occasional gift of a nice handbag—Louis Vuitton in most cases—sat well with his “regulars,” two of whom reported to Thames House, the new home of both the British Secret Service and the Security Service. Jack wondered if they were getting paid by both Sali and H.M. Government for services rendered. Probably a good deal for the girls involved, he was sure, though Thames House probably wouldn’t spring for shoes and a bag.
“Tony?”
“Yeah, Jack?” Wills looked up from his workstation.
“How do we know if this Sali is a bad guy?”
“We don’t for sure. Not until he actually does something, or we intercept a conversation between him and somebody we don’t like.”
“So, I’m just checking this bird out.”
“Correct. You’ll be doing a lot of that. Any feel for the guy yet?”