“Minimum two layers between the head of it all: Is it one man or a committee? We do not and cannot know right now. And the shooters: We can get all those we want, but that’s like cutting grass. You cut it, it grows, you cut it, it grows, ad infinitum. You want to kill a snake, best move is to take off the head. Okay, fine, we all know that. Trick is finding the head, because it’s a virtual head. Whoever it is, or are, they’re operating a lot like we are, Gerry. That’s why we’re doing a recon-by-fire, to see what we can shake loose. And we have all of our analytical troops looking for that, here, and Langley, and Meade.”
A tired sigh. “Yeah, Sam, I know. And maybe something will shake loose. But patience is a mother to live by. The opposition is probably basking in the sun right now, feeling good about stinging us, killing all those women and kids—”
“Nobody likes that, Gerry, but even God took seven days to make the world, remember?”
“You turning preacher on me?” Hendley asked, with narrowed eyes.
“Well, the eye-for-an-eye part works for me, bud, but it takes time to find the eye. We have to be patient.”
“You know, when Big Jack and I talked about the need for a place like this, I was actually dumb enough to think we could solve problems more quickly if we had the authority to do so.”
“We’ll be quicker than the government ever will, but we’re not The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Hey, look, the operational end just got under way. We’ve made only one hit. Three more to go before we can expect to see any real response from the other side. Patience, Gerry.”
“Yeah, sure.” He didn’t add that time zones didn’t help much, either.
“YOU KNOW, there’s one other thing.”
“What’s that, Jack?” Wills asked.
“It would be better if we knew what operations were going on. It would enable us to focus our data hunt a little more efficiently.”
“It’s called ‘compartmentalization.'”
“No, it’s called horseshit,” Jack shot back. “If we’re on the team, we can help. Things that might look like non sequiturs appear different if you know the context that appears out of nowhere. Tony, this whole building is supposed to be a compartment, right? Subdividing it like they do at Langley doesn’t help get the job done, or am I missing something?”
“I see your point, but that’s not how the system works.”
“Okay, I knew you’d say that, but how the hell do we fix what’s broke at CIA if all we do is just to clone their operation?” Jack demanded.
And there wasn’t a ready answer for that which would satisfy the questioner, was there? Wills asked himself. There simply wasn’t, and this kid was catching on way too fast. What the hell had he learned in the White House? For damned sure, he’d asked a lot of questions. And he’d listened to all the answers. And even thought about them.
“I hate to say this, Jack, but I’m only your training officer, not the Big Boss of this outfit”
“Yeah, I know. Sorry about that. I guess I got used to my dad having the ability to make things happen—well, it looked that way to me, at least. Not to him, I know, not all the time. Maybe impatience is a family characteristic.” Doubly so, since his mom was a surgeon, accustomed to fixing things on her own schedule, which was generally right the hell now. It was hard to be decisive sitting at a workstation, a lesson his dad had probably had to learn in his time, back when America had lived in the gunsights of a really serious enemy. These terrorists could sting, but they couldn’t do serious structural harm to America, though it had been tried in Denver once. These guys were like swarming insects rather than vampire bats . . .
But mosquitoes could transmit yellow fever, couldn’t they?
SOUTH OF Munich, in the port city of Piraeus, a container was lifted off its ship by a gantry crane and lowered to a waiting truck trailer. Once secured, the trailer went off, behind the Volvo truck driving out of the port, bypassing Athens, and heading north into the mountains of Greece. The manifest said it was going to Vienna, a lengthy nonstop drive over decent highways, delivering a cargo of coffee from Colombia. It didn’t occur to the port security people to conduct a search, since all the bills of lading were in good order and passed the bar-code scans properly. Already men were assembling to deal with the part of the cargo not intended to be mixed with hot water and cream. It took a lot of men to break down a metric ton of cocaine into dose-sized packets, but they had a single-story warehouse, recently acquired, in which to accomplish the task, and then they would be driving individually all over Europe, taking comfort in the lack of internal borders the continent had adopted since the formation of the European Union. With this cargo, the word of a business partner was being kept, and a psychological profit was being recompensed by a monetary one. The process went on through the night, while Europeans slept the sleep of the just, even those who would soon be making use of the illegal part of the cargo as soon as they found a street dealer.
THEY SAW the subject at 9:30 the following morning. They were having a leisurely breakfast at another Gasthaus half a block from the one that employed their friend Emil, and Anas Ali Atef was walking purposely up the street, and came within twenty feet of the twins, who were breakfasting on strudel and coffee, along with twenty or so German citizens. Atef didn’t notice he was being watched; his eyes looked forward and did not discreetly scan the area as a trained spook would have done. Evidently, he felt safe here. And that was good.
“There’s our boy,” Brian said, spotting him first. As with Sali, there was no neon sign over his head to mark him, but he matched the photo perfectly, and he had come out of the right apartment building. His mustache made an error in identification unlikely. Reasonably well dressed. Except for his skin and mustache, he might have passed for a German. At the end of the block, he boarded a streetcar, destination unknown, but heading east.
“Speculate?” Dominic asked his brother.
“Off to have breakfast with a pal, or to plot the downfall of the Infidel West—we really can’t say, man.”
“Yeah, it’d be nice to have real coverage on him, but we’re not conducting an investigation, are we? This mutt recruited at least one shooter. He’s earned his way onto our shit list, Aldo.”
“Roger that, bro,” Brian agreed. His conversion was complete. Anas Ali Atef was just a face to him now, and an ass to be stuck with his magic pen. Beyond that, he was someone for God to talk to in due course, a jurisdiction that didn’t directly concern either of them at the moment.
“If this was a Bureau op, we’d have a team in the apartment right now, at least to toss his computer.”
Brian conceded the point. “Now what?”
“We see if he goes to church, and, if he does, we see how easy it might be to pop him on the way in or out.”
“Does it strike you that this is going a little fast?” Brian wondered aloud.
“I suppose we could sit in the hotel room and jerk off, but that’s hard on the wrist, y’know?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Finishing breakfast, they left cash on the table but not a large tip. That would too surely mark them as Americans.
THE STREETCAR wasn’t as comfortable as his car, but it was ultimately more convenient because of the necessity of finding a parking place. European cities had not been designed with automobiles in mind. Neither had Cairo, of course, and the traffic jams there could be incredible—even worse than they were here—but at least in German they had reliable mass transportation. The trains were glorious. The quality of the lines impressed the man who’d had engineering training a few—was it really just a few? he asked himself; it seemed like a complete lifetime—years before. The Germans were a curious people. Standoffish and formal, and oh so superior, they thought, to all the other races. They looked down on Arabs—and, indeed, on most other Europeans as well—and opened their doors to foreigners only because their internal laws—imposed upon them sixty years earlier by Americans after World War II—said that they must. But because they were compelled to do so, they did, mostly without open complaint, because these mad people obeyed the law as though it had been delivered to them by God’s own hand. They were the most docile people he’d ever encountered, but underneath that docility was the capacity for violence—organised violence—such as the world hardly knew. Within living memory, they’d risen up to slaughter the Jews. They’d even converted their death camps into museums, but museums in which the pieces and machines undoubtedly still worked, as though standing ready. What a pity they could not summon the political will to make it so.