The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy

THEY HAD a nice pair of shoes in the window, Sali saw, black leather and gold hardware. He hopped boyishly up onto the curb, then turned left toward the store entrance, smiling in anticipation of the look Rosalie would have in her eyes when she opened the box.

Dominic took out his Chichester map of central London, a small red book that he opened as he walked past the subject, without taking so much as a glance, letting his peripheral vision do the work. His eyes were fixed on the tail. Looked even younger than he and his brother were, probably his first job out of whatever academy the Security Service con­ducted, assigned to an easy target for that very reason. He’d probably be a little nervous, hence his fixed eyes and balled-fist hands. Dominic hadn’t been all that different only a year or so before, in Newark, young and earnest. Dominic stopped and turned quickly, gauging the distance from Brian to Sali. Brian would be doing exactly the same thing, of course, and his job was to synchronize movement with his brother, who had the lead. Okay. Again his peripheral vision took over, until the last few steps.

Then his eyes fixed on the tail. The Brit’s eyes noted this, and his gaze shifted as well. He stopped almost automatically and heard the Yank tourist ask stupidly: “Excuse me, could you tell me where . . . ” He held up his map book to illustrate how lost he was.

BRIAN REACHED into his coat pocket and pulled out the gold pen. He twisted the nib and the black point changed to an iridium tip when he pressed down on the obsidian clip. His eyes locked on the sub­ject. At a range of three feet, he took half a step right as though to avoid someone who wasn’t there at all, and bumped into Sali.

“THE TOWER of London. Why, you go right there,” the MI5 guy said, turning to point.

Perfect.

“EXCUSE ME,” Brian said, and let the man pass with a half step to his left, and the pen came down in a backward stabbing motion, and caught the subject square in the right ass cheek. The hollow syringe point penetrated perhaps as much as three millimeters. The CO2 charge fired, injecting its seven milligrams of succinylcholine into the tissue of the largest muscle on Sali’s anatomy. And Brian Caruso kept right on walking.

“OH, THANKS, buddy,” Dominic said, tucking the Chichester’s back into his pocket and taking a step in the proper direction. When he was clear of the tail, he stopped and turned—this was bad tradecraft, and he knew it—to see Brian putting the pen back into his coat pocket. His brother then rubbed his nose in the prearranged signal of MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

SALI WINCED ever so slightly at the bump or stick—whatever it was—on his ass, but it was nothing serious. His right hand reached back to rub the spot, but the pain faded immediately, and he shrugged it off and kept heading for the shoe store. He took perhaps ten more steps and then he realized­—

—his right hand was trembling ever so slightly. He stopped to look at it, reaching over with his left hand­—

—that was trembling, too. Why was­—

—his legs collapsed under him, and his body fell vertically down to the cement sidewalk. His kneecaps positively bounced on the surface, and they hurt, rather a lot in fact. He tried to take in a deep breath to ward off the pain and the embarrassment­—

—but he didn’t breathe. The succinylcholine had fully infused his body now, and had neutralized every nerve-muscle interface that existed in his body. The last to go were his eyelids, and Sali, his face now rapidly approaching the sidewalk, didn’t see himself hit. Instead, he was en­veloped by blackness—actually, redness from the low-frequency light that penetrated the thin tissue of his eyelids. Very rapidly, his brain was overwhelmed first by the confusion that had to come before panic.

What is this? his mind demanded of itself. He could feel what was hap­pening. His forehead was against the rough surface of semifinished ce­ment. He could hear the footsteps of people to his left and right, He tried to turn his head—no, first he had to open his eyes­—

—but they did not open. What is this?!!!­—

—he wasn’t breathing­—

—he commanded himself to breathe. As though in a swimming pool underwater, and coming to the surface after holding his breath for an uncomfortably long time, he told his mouth to open and his diaphragm to expand­—

—but nothing happened!­—

—What is this? his mind shouted at itself.

His body operated on its own programming. As carbon dioxide built up in his lungs, automatic commands went from there to his diaphragm to expand his lungs to take in more air to replace the poison in his lungs. But nothing happened, and, with that bit of information, his body went into panic all by itself. Adrenal glands flooded the bloodstream—the heart was still pumping—with adrenaline, and, with that natural stimulant, his awareness increased and his brain went into overdrive . . .

What is this? Sali asked himself urgently yet again, for now the panic was beginning to take over. His body was betraying him in ways that sur­passed imagination. He was suffocating in the dark on a sidewalk in the middle of central London in broad daylight. The overload of CO2 in his lungs did not really cause pain, but his body reported the fact to his mind as such. Something was going very wrong, and it made no sense, like being hit in the street by a lorry—no, like being run over by a lorry in his living room. It was happening too fast for him to grasp it all. It made no sense, and it was so—surprising, astonishing, astounding.

But neither could it be denied.

He continued to command himself to breathe. It had to happen. It had never not happened, and so it must. He felt his bladder emptying next, but the flash of shame was immediately overcome by the building panic. He could feel everything. He could hear everything. But he couldn’t do anything, nothing at all. It was like being caught naked in the King’s own court in Riyadh with a pig in his arms­—

—and then the pain started. His heart was beating frantically, now at 160 beats per minute, but in doing so it was only sending unoxygenated blood out into his cardiovascular system, and in doing that the heart­—the only really active organ in his body—had used up all of the free and reserve oxygen in his body­—

—and denied of oxygen, the faithful heart cells, immune to the mus­cle relaxant that it had itself infused throughout its owner’s body, started to die.

It was the greatest pain the body can know, as each separate cell started to die, starting at the heart, the danger to which was immediately reported to the body as a whole, and the cells were now dying by the thousands, each connected to a nerve that screamed into the brain that DEATH was happening, and happening now­—

He couldn’t even grimace. It was like a fiery dagger in his chest, twist­ing, pushing deeper and deeper. It was the feel of Death, something de­livered by the hand by Iblis himself, by Lucifer’s own hand . . .

And that was the instant Sali saw Death coming, riding across a field of fire to take his soul, to Perdition. Urgently, but in a state of internal panic, Uda bin Sali thought as loudly as he could the words of the Sha­hada: There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger . . . There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger . . . There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger­—

—Thereisnogodbutallahandmohammedishismessenger.

His brain cells, too, were deprived of oxygen, and they, too, started to die, and in that process the data they contained was dumped into a di­minishing awareness. He saw his father, his favorite horse, his mother before a table full with food—and Rosalie, Rosalie riding him from on top, her face full of delight, that somehow became more distant . . . fad­ing . . . fading . . . fading . . .

. . . to black.

People had gathered around him. One bent down and said, “Hello, are you all right?” A stupid question, but that’s what people asked in such circumstances. Then the person—he was a salesman of computer peripherals heading to the nearby pub for a pint and a British plough­man’s lunch—shook his shoulder. There was no resistance at all, like turning over a piece of meat in the butcher’s shop . . . And that fright­ened him more than a loaded pistol would have done. At once he rolled the body over and felt for a pulse. There was one. The heart was beating frantically—but the man wasn’t breathing. Bloody hell . . .