The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy

“I guess it’s back to the workstation. See you, guys,” Jack said to his cousins.

The surprise of the moment didn’t fade immediately, but Brian and Dominic settled into their chairs and filed the happenstance away for the moment.

“Welcome,” Hendley said to them, leaning back in his chair. Well, sooner or later they’d find out, wouldn’t they? “Pete Alexander tells me that you’ve done very well down at the country house.”

“Aside from the boredom,” Brian responded.

“Training is like that,” Bell said in polite sympathy.

“What about yesterday?” Hendley asked.

“It wasn’t fun,” Brian said first. “It was a lot like that ambush in Afghanistan. Ka-boom, it started, and then we had to deal with it. Good news, the bad guys weren’t all that bright. They acted like free agents in­stead of a team. If they’d been trained properly—if they’d acted like a team with proper security—it would have gone different. As it was, it was just a matter of taking out one at a time. Any idea on who they were?”

“What the FBI knows to this point, they seem to have come into the country through Mexico. Your cousin ID’d the source of their funding for us. He’s a Saudi expatriate living in London, and he may be one of their backers. They were all Arabian in origin. They’ve positively ID’d five of them as Saudi citizens. The guns were stolen about ten years ago. They rented the cars—all four groups—in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and probably drove independently to their objectives. Their routes have been tracked by gas purchases.”

“Motivation was strictly ideological?” Dominic asked.

Hendley nodded. “Religious—their version of it, yes. So it would seem.”

“Is the Bureau looking for me?” Dominic asked next.

“You’ll have to call Gus Werner later today so he can fill out his pa­perwork, but don’t expect any hassles. They have a cover story all cooked up already.”

“Okay.”

This was Brian: “I assume that this is what we’ve been training for? To hunt down some of these people before they can do any more bad things over here?”

“That’s about right,” Hendley confirmed.

“Okay,” Brian said. “I can live with that.”

“You will go into the field together, covered as people in the banking and trading business. We’ll brief you in on the stuff you need to know to maintain that cover. You’ll operate mainly out of a virtual office via laptop computer.”

“Security?” Dominic wondered.

“That will not be a problem,” Bell assured him. “The computers are as secure as we can make them, and they can double as Internet phones for times when voice communications are required. The encryption sys­tems are highly secure,” he emphasized.

“Okay,” Dominic said dubiously. Pete had told them much the same, but he’d never trusted any encryption system. The FBI’s radio systems, secure as they were supposed to be, had been cracked once or twice by clever bad guys or by computer geeks, the kind who liked to call the lo­cal FBI field office to tell them how smart they were. “What about our legal cover?”

“This is the best we can do,” Hendley said, handing a folder across. Dominic took it and flipped it open. His eyeballs widened immediately. “Damn! How the hell did you get this?” he asked. The only presiden­tial pardon he’d ever seen had been in a legal textbook. This one was ef­fectively blank, except that it was signed. A blank pardon? Damn.

“You tell me,” Hendley suggested.

The signature gave him the answer, and his legal education came back. This pardon was bulletproof. Even the Supreme Court couldn’t toss this one out, because the President’s sovereign authority to pardon was as explicit as freedom of speech. But it would not be very helpful outside American borders. “So, we’ll be doing people here at home?”

“Possibly,” Hendley confirmed.

“We’re the first shooters on the team?” Brian asked.

“Also correct,” the former senator answered.

“How will we be doing it?”

“That will depend on the mission,” Bell answered. “For most of them, we have a new weapon that is one hundred percent effective, and very covert. You’ll be learning about that, probably tomorrow”

“We in a hurry?” Brian asked further.

“The gloves are all the way off now,” Bell told them both. “Your tar­gets will be people who have done, are planning to do, or who support missions aimed at causing serious harm to our country and her citizens. We are not talking about political assassinations. We will only target people who are directly involved in criminal acts.”

“There’s more to it than that. We’re not the official executioners for the state of Texas, are we?” This was Dominic.

“No, you are not. This is outside the legal system. We’re going to try to neutralize enemy forces by the elimination of their important per­sonnel. That should at the least disrupt their ability to do business, and we hope it will also force their senior people to show themselves, so that they can be addressed, too.”

“So this”—Dominic closed the folder and passed it back to his host “is a hunting license, with no bag limit and an open season.”

“Correct, but within reasonable limits.”

“Suits me,” Brian observed. Only twenty-four hours earlier, he re­membered, he’d been holding a dying little boy in his arms. “When do we go to work?”

Hendley handled the reply.

“Soon.”

UH, TONY, what are they doing here?”

“Jack, I didn’t know they’d be in today.”

“Nonresponsive.” Jack’s blue eyes were unusually hard.

“You’ve figured out why this place was set up, right?”

And that was enough of an answer. Damn. His own cousins? Well, one was a Marine, and the FBI one—the lawyer one, as Jack had thought of him once—had well and truly whacked some pervert down in Alabama. It had made the papers, and he’d even discussed it briefly with his father. It was hard to disapprove of it, assuming the circum­stances had been within the law, but Dominic had always been the sort to play by the rules—that was almost the Ryan family motto. And Brian had probably done something in the Marines to get noticed. Brian had been the football type in his high school, while his brother had been the family debater. But Dominic wasn’t a pussy. At least one bad guy had found that out the hard way. Maybe some people needed to learn that you didn’t mess with a big country that had real men in its employ. Every tiger had teeth and claws . . .

. . . and America grew large tigers.

With that settled, he decided to go back looking for 56MoHa@eurocom.net. Maybe the tigers would go looking for more food. That made him a bird dog. But that was okay. Some birds needed their flying rights revoked. He’d arrange to query that “handle” via NSA’s taps into the world’s cybercommunications jungle. Every animal left a trail somewhere, and he’d go sniffing for it. Damn, Jack thought, this job had its diversions after all, now that he saw what the real objective was.

MOHAMMED WAS at his computer. Behind him, the television was going on about the “intelligence failure,” which made him smile. It could only have the effect of further diminishing American intelligence capabilities, especially with the operational distractions sure to come from the investigative hearings the American Congress would conduct. It was good to have such allies within the target country. They were not very different from the seniors in his own organization, trying to make the world coincide with their vision rather than with the realities of life. The difference was that his seniors at least listened to him, because he did achieve real results, which, fortunately, coincided with their ethereal visions of death and fear. Even more fortunately, there were people out there willing to cast away their lives to make those visions real. That they were fools mattered not to Mohammed. One used such tools as one had, and, in this case, he had hammers to strike down the nails he saw across the world.

He checked his e-mails to see that Uda had complied with his in­structions on the banking business. Strictly speaking, he could have just let the Visa accounts die, but then some officious bank employee might have poked around to see why the last set of bills had not been paid. Better, he thought, to leave some surplus cash in the account and to leave the account active but dormant, because a bank would not mind having surplus cash in its electronic vault, and if that account went dor­mant, no bank employee would do any investigation into it. Such things happened all the time. He made sure that the account number and ac­cess code remained hidden on his computer in a document only he knew about.

He considered sending a letter of thanks to his Colombian contacts, but nonessential messages were a waste of time and an invitation to vul­nerability. You didn’t send messages for fun or for good manners. Only what was strictly necessary, and as brief as possible. He knew enough to fear the American ability to gather electronic intelligence. The Western news media often talked about “intercepts,” and so his organization had sworn completely off the satellite telephones they’d used for conve­nience. Instead they most often used messengers, who relayed informa­tion they’d carefully memorized. It was inconveniently slow, but it had the virtue of being completely secure . . . unless the messenger was cor­rupted somehow. Nothing was totally secure. Every system had its weaknesses. But the Internet was the best thing going. Individual ac­counts were beautifully anonymous, since they could be set up by anonymous third parties, and their identities relayed to the real end users, and therefore they existed only as electrons or photons—as alike as grains of sand in the Empty Quarter, as secure and anonymous as anything could be. And there were literally billions of Internet messages every day. Perhaps Allah could keep track of them, but only because Al­lah knew the mind and heart of every man, a capability He had not granted even to the Faithful. And so Mohammed, who rarely stayed in the same location for more than three days, felt free to use his computer at will.