That was another drag. Damn, a teenybopper was so pleased to see the first bunch of peach fuzz turn dark and bristly, and then you got to shave once or twice a week, usually before a date. But every damned morning—what a pain in the ass that was! He remembered watching his father do it, as young boys often do, and thinking how neat it was to be a grown man. Yeah, sure. Growing up just wasn’t worth the hassle. It was better to have a mom and dad to take care of all the administrative bullshit. And yet . . .
And yet, he was doing important stuff now, and that did have its satisfactions, sort of. Once you got past all the housekeeping that accompanied it. Well. Clean shirt. Pick a tie and tie tack. Slide the jacket on. Out the door. At least he had a fun car to drive. He might get himself another. A ragtop, maybe. Summer was coming, and it would be cool to have the wind blowing in your hair. Until some pervert with a knife slashed the canvas top, and you had to call the insurance company and the car vanished into the shop for three days. When you got down to it, growing up. was like going to the shopping mall to buy underwear. Everyone needed it, but there wasn’t much you could do with it except take it off.
The drive to work was about as routine as driving to school, except he didn’t have to worry about an exam anymore. Except that if he screwed up, he’d lose the job, and that black mark would follow him a lot longer than an “F” in sociology would. So, he didn’t want to screw up. The problem with this job was that every day was spent in learning, not in applying knowledge. The whole big lie about college was that it taught you what you needed to know for life. Yeah, right. It probably hadn’t done that for his dad—and for Mom, hell, she never stopped reading her medical journals to learn about new stuff. Not just American journals, either, English and French, too, because she spoke pretty good French and she said that French docs were good. Better than their politicians were, but, then again, anyone who judged America by its political leaders probably thought the U.S. of A. was a nation of fuckups. At least since his dad had checked out of the White House.
He was listening to NPR again. It was his favorite news station, and it beat listening to the current brand of popular music. He’d grown up listening to his mom on the piano, mostly Bach and his peers—maybe a little John Williams in a gesture toward modernity, though he wrote more for brass than the ivories.
Another suicide bomber in Israel. Damn, his dad had tried awfully hard to settle that one down, but despite some earnest efforts, even by the Israelis, it had all come undone. The Jews and Muslims just could not seem to get along. His dad and Prince Ali bin Sultan talked about it whenever they got together, and the frustration they displayed was painful to see. The prince hadn’t been screened for the kingship of his country—which was possibly good luck, Jack thought, since being a king had to be even worse than being President—but he remained an important figure whose words the current king listened to most of the time . . . which brought him to . . .
Uda bin Sali. There’d be more news on him this morning. Yesterday ‘s take from the British SIS, courtesy of the CIA pukes at Langley. CIA pukes? Jack asked himself. His own father had worked there, had served with distinction before moving up in the world, and had told his kids many times not to believe anything they saw in the movies about the intelligence business. Jack Jr. had asked him questions and mainly gotten unsatisfactory answers, and now he was learning what the business was really like. Mostly boring. Too much like accounting, like chasing after mice in Jurassic Park, though at least you had the advantage of being invisible to the raptors. Nobody knew that The Campus existed, and so long as that remained true everyone there was safe. That made for a comfortable feeling, but again, boring. Junior was still young enough to think excitement was fun.
Left off U.S. Route 29 and on to The Campus. The usual parking place. Smile and a wave at the security guard and up to his office. It was then that junior realized he’d driven right past McDonald’s, and so he picked two Danish off the treat tray, and made a cup of coffee on his way to his cubbyhole. Light up the computer and go to work.
“Good morning, Uda,” Jack Jr. said to the computer screen. “What have you been up to?” The clock window on the computer said 8:25 AM. That translated to early afternoon in London’s financial district. Bin Sali had an office in the Lloyd’s insurance building, which, Junior remembered from previous hops across the pond, looked like a glassed-in oil refinery. Upscale neighborhood and some very wealthy neighbors. The report didn’t say which floor, but Jack had never been in the building anyway. Insurance. Had to be the most boring job in the world, waiting for a building to burn down. So, yesterday Uda had made some phone calls, one of them to . . . aha! “I know that name from somewhere,” the young Ryan told the screen. It was the name of a very rich Middle Eastern fellow who also had been known to play in the wrong playground on occasion, and who was also under surveillance by the Brit Security Service. So, what had they talked about?
There was even a transcript. The conversation had been in Arabic, and the translation . . . might as well have been instructions from the wife to buy a quart of milk on the way home from work. About that exciting and revealing—except that Uda had replied to a totally innocuous statement with “Are you sure?” Not the sort of thing you said to the wife when she said to get a quart of skim milk on the way home.
“The tone of voice suggests hidden meaning,” the Brit analyst had opined gently at the bottom of the report.
Then, later in the day, Uda had left his office early and entered another pub and met with the same guy he’d been talking to on the phone. So, the conversation hadn’t been innocuous after all? But, though they hadn’t managed to overhear the conversation in a pub booth, neither had the phone chat specified a meeting or a meeting place . . . and Uda didn’t spend much time in that particular pub.
“‘Morning, Jack,” Wills greeted as he came in and hung up his suit jacket. “What’s happening?”
“Our friend Uda is wiggling like a live fish.” Jack punched the PRINT command and handed the printout across to his roomie even before he’d had a chance to sit down.
“It seems to suggest that possibility, doesn’t it?”
“Tony, this guy is a player,” Jack said with some conviction in his voice.
“What did he do after the phone conversation? Any unusual transactions?”
“I haven’t checked yet, but if there is, then he was ordered to do it by his friend, and then they met so that he could confirm it over a pint of John Smith’s Bitter.”
“You’re making a leap of imagination. We try to avoid that here,” Wills cautioned.
“I know,” Junior growled. It was time to check out the previous day’s money-moving.
“Oh, you’re to be meeting somebody new today.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dave Cunningham. Forensic accountant, used to work for Justice—organized-crime stuff. He’s pretty good at spotting financial irregularities.”
“Does he think I found something interesting?” Jack asked with hope in his voice.
“We’ll see when he gets here—after lunch. He’s probably looking over your stuff right now”
“Okay,” Jack responded. Maybe he’d caught the scent of something. Maybe this job really did have an element of excitement to it. Maybe they’d give him some purple ribbon for his adding machine. Sure.
THE DAYS were down to a routine. Morning run and PT, followed by breakfast and a talk. In substance, no different from Dominic’s time at the FBI Academy, or Brian’s at the Basic School. It was this similarity that distantly troubled the Marine. Marine Corps training was directed at killing people and breaking things. So was this.
Dominic was somewhat better at the surveillance part of it, because the FBI Academy taught it out of a book the Marines didn’t have. Enzo was also pretty good with his pistol, though Aldo preferred his Beretta to his brother’s Smith & Wesson. His brother had whacked a bad guy with his Smith, whereas Brian had done his job with an M16A2 rifle at a decently long range—fifty meters, close enough to see the looks on their faces when the bullets struck home, and far enough that a returning snapshot would not be close enough to be a serious worry. His gunny had chided him on not grabbing some dirt when the AKs had been turned in his direction, but Brian had learned an important lesson in his only exposure to combat. He’d found that, in that moment, his mind and his thinking went into hyperdrive, the world around him seemed to slow down, and his thinking had become extraordinarily clear. In retrospect, it had surprised him that he hadn’t seen bullets in flight, his mind had been operating so fast—well, the last five rounds in the AK-47 magazine were usually tracers, and he had seen those in flight, though never in his immediate direction. His mind often went back to that busy five or six minutes, critiquing himself for things he might have done better, and promising that he would not repeat those errors of thinking and command, though Gunny Sullivan had been very respectful to his captain later during Caruso’s after-action review with his Marines at their firebase.