“What if a policeman is too aggressive, can we—”
Juan knew that question was coming. “Kill one? Yes, it is possible to do so, but then you will have many more police chasing you. When a police officer pulls you over, the very first thing he will do is radio his location, and the license number of your car, and a description, to his headquarters. So, even if you kill him, his comrades will look for you in a matter of minutes—and in large numbers. It is not worth the satisfaction of killing the policeman. You will only invite more trouble on yourselves. American police forces have many cars, and even aircraft. Once they start looking for you, they will find you. So, your only defense against that is to escape notice. Do not speed. Do not break their traffic laws. Do that and you will be safe. Violate those laws, and you will be caught, guns or not. Do you understand this?”
“We understand,” Mustafa assured him. “Thank you for your assistance.”
“We have maps for all of you. They are good maps, from the American Automobile Association. You all have cover stories, yes?” Juan asked, hoping to get this over as quickly as he could.
Mustafa looked at his friends for additional inquiries, but they were too eager to get on with their business to be sidetracked now. Satisfied, he turned to Juan. “Thank you for your help, my friend.”
Friend be damned, Juan thought, but he took the man’s hand and walked them around to the front of the building. Bags were quickly transferred from the SUVs to the sedans, and then he watched them pull off, heading back to State Route 185. It was only a few miles to Radium Springs, and the entrance onto I-25 North. The foreigners gathered one last time, to shake hands—and even share a few kisses, Juan was surprised to see. Then they split up into four teams of four men each and entered their rental cars.
Mustafa settled in his car. He set his cigarette packs on the seat next to him, made sure that the mirrors were properly aligned for his eyes, and buckled his seat belt he’d been told that not buckling was as likely ; as speeding to get himself pulled over. About all things, he didn’t want to be pulled over by a policeman. Despite the briefing instructions he’d received from Juan, it was a risk he felt no desire to run. Passing by, a cop might not recognize them for what they were, but face-to-face was something else again, and he had no illusions about how Americans thought of Arabs. For that reason, all copies of the Holy Koran were tucked away in the trunk.
It would be a long time, Abdullah would spell him at the wheel, but the first stint would be his. North on I-25 to Albuquerque, then east on I-40 almost all the way to their target. Over three thousand kilometers. He’d have to start thinking in miles now, Mustafa told himself. One point six kilometers to a mile. He’d have to multiply every number by that constant, or just disregard metric altogether as far as his car was concerned. Whatever, he drove north on Route 185 until he saw the leaf-green sign and the arrow for I-25 North. He settled back in his seat, checked traffic as he merged, and increased speed to sixty-five miles per hour, setting the Ford’s cruise control right on that number. After that, it was just a matter of steering, and watching all of the anonymous traffic which, like him and his friends, was headed north to Albuquerque . . .
JACK DIDN’T know why it was hard to go to sleep. It was past eleven in the evening, he’d seen his nightly take of TV, and had his two or three—tonight it had been three—drinks. He should have been sleepy. He was sleepy, as a matter of fact, but sleep wasn’t coming. And he didn’t know why. Just close your eyes and think happy thoughts, his mom had told him as a little boy. But thinking happy thoughts was the hard part now that he wasn’t a kid anymore. He’d entered into a new world that had few enough of those in it. His job was to examine the known and suspected facts concerning people he’d probably never meet, try to decide if they wanted to kill other people he’d never meet, then pass the information on to other people who might or might not try to do something about it. Exactly what they would try to do he did not know, though he had his suspicions . . . and ugly suspicions they were. Roll over, refluff the pillow, try to find a cool spot in the pillowcase, head back down, get some sleep . . .
. . . it wasn’t happening. It would, eventually. It always did, seemingly half a second before the clock radio went off.
God damn it! he raged at the ceiling.
He was hunting terrorists. Most of them believed something good—no, something heroic—about themselves as they went about their crimes. To them it wasn’t a crime at all. For Muslim terrorists, it was the illusion that they were doing God’s work. Except the Holy Koran didn’t really say that. It particularly disapproved of killing innocent people, noncombatants. How did that really work? Did Allah greet suicide bombers with a smile, or something else? In Catholicism, personal conscience was sovereign. If you truly believed you were doing the right thing, then God couldn’t slam you for it. Was Islam the same in its rules? Besides, since there was only one God, maybe the rules were the same for everybody. Problem was, which set of religious rules came closest to what God really thought? And how the hell did you tell which was which? The Crusades had done some pretty vile things. But that was a classic case of someone giving a religious title for a war that was really about economics and simple ambition. A nobleman just didn’t want to appear to be fighting for money—and with God on your side, there was nothing you couldn’t do. Swing the sword, and whatever neck you severed was okay. The bishop said so.
Right. The real problem was that religion and political power made a shitty mix, though one easily adopted by the young and enthusiastic, for whom adventure was something that just pulled at your sleeve. His father had talked about that, sometimes, over dinner on the Residence Level of the White House, explaining that one of the things you had to tell young soldier and Marine recruits was that even war had rules, and that breaking them carried stiff penalties. American soldiers learned that pretty easily, Jack Sr. had told his son, because they came from a society in which undisciplined violence was harshly punished, which was better than abstract principle for teaching right and wrong. After a smack or two, you kinda picked up the message.
He sighed, and rolled over again. He was really too young to think about such Great Questions of Life, even though his degree from Georgetown suggested otherwise. Colleges typically did not tell you that ninety percent of your education came after you hung the parchment on the wall. People might ask for a rebate.
IT WAS past closing time at The Campus. Gerry Hendley was in his top-floor office, going over data that he hadn’t been able to fit into the normal working day. It was the same for Tom Davis, who had reports from Pete Alexander.
“Trouble?” Hendley asked.
“The twins are still thinking a little too much, Gerry. We should have anticipated it. They’re both smart, and they’re both people who play within the rules, for the most part, so when they see themselves being trained to violate those rules it worries them. The funny part, Pete says, is that the Marine’s the one who’s worrying so much. The FBI one is playing along much better.”
“I would have expected it to go the other way.”
“So did I. And Pete.” Davis reached for his ice water. He never drank coffee this late at night. “Anyway, Pete says he’s unsure how it’s going to play out, but he has no choice other than to continue the training. Gerry, I should have warned you more about this. I figured we’d have this problem. Hell, it’s our first time. The sort of people we want like I said, they’re not psychopaths. They will ask questions. They will want to know why. They will have second thoughts. We can’t recruit robots, can we?”
“Like when they tried to whack Castro,” Hendley observed. He’d read into the classified files on that mad, failed adventure. Bobby Kennedy had ramrodded Operation MONGOOSE. They’d probably decided over drinks, or maybe after some touch football, to play that game. After all, Eisenhower had used CIA for similar purposes during his presidency, so why shouldn’t they? Except that a former lieutenant in the Navy who’d lost his command to ramming, and a lawyer who’d never practiced law, did not instinctively know all the things that a career soldier who’d gone to five stars fully understood from the very beginning. And besides, they’d had the power. The Constitution itself had made Jack Kennedy Commander in Chief, and with that sort of power invariably came the urge to make use of it, and so reshape the world into something more amenable to his personal outlook. And so, CIA had been ordered to make Castro go away. But CIA had never had an assassination department, and had never trained people to perform such missions. And so, the Agency had gone to the Mafia, whose commission members had little reason to admire Fidel Castro—who had shut down what had been about to become their most profitable venture ever. It’d been so sure a thing that some of the organized-crime big shots had invested their own, personal, money in the Havana casinos, only to have them closed down by the communist dictator.