“Big head?”
“No, that wouldn’t be fair. But I don’t want him to start thinking he knows it all yet.”
“Nobody with half a brain thinks that way,” Bell said.
“Yeah.” Wills stood. “But why take the chance?”
Wills headed out, but Bell still didn’t know what to do with the Ryan kid. Well, something to talk with the Senator about.
“NEXT STOP, Vienna,” Dominic informed his brother. “We got another subject”
“You wonder how steady this job will be?” Brian wondered aloud.
His brother laughed. “Man, there’s enough mutts in America to keep us busy for the rest of our lives.”
“Yeah, save money, fire all the judges and juries.”
“My name ain’t Dirty Harry Callahan, you jarhead.”
“And I’m not Chesty Puller, either. How do we get there? Fly, train—maybe drive?”
“Driving might be fun,” Dominic said. “I wonder if we can rent a Porsche . . . ?”
“Oh, great,” Brian grunted. “Okay, log off so I can download the file, will ya?”
“Sure. I’ll see what the concierge can set up for us.” And he headed out of the room.
“THIS IS the only confirmation we have?” Hendley asked.
“Correct.” Granger nodded. “But it tallies exactly with what our guys on the ground told us.”
“They’re going too fast. What if the other side thinks, ‘Two heart attacks in less than a week’ . . . ? Then what?”
“Gerry, the nature of this mission is recon-by-fire, remember? We halfway want the other side to get a little nervous, but soon their arrogance will set in and they’ll write it off as random chance. If this were TV or the movies, they’d think CIA was playing hardball, but it isn’t the movies, and they know that CIA doesn’t play that kind of game. The Mossad, maybe, but they’re already wary of the Israelis. Hey”—a lightbulb went off in Granger’s brain—”what if they’re the guys who offed the Mossad officer in Rome?”
“I don’t pay you to speculate, Sam.”
“It’s a possibility,” Granger persisted.
“It’s also possible that the Mafia hit the poor bastard because they mistook him for a fellow mafioso who owed money to the mob. But I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.”
“Yes, sir.” Granger walked back to his office.
MOHAMMED HASSAN AL-DIN was in Rome at the moment, at the Hotel Excelsior, drinking his coffee and working on his computer. It was bad news about Atef. He was—he’d been—a good recruiter, with just the right mix of intelligence, plausibility, and commitment to persuade others to join the cause. He’d wanted to enter the field himself, to take lives and be a Holy Martyr, but though he might have been good at it, a man who could recruit was more valuable than a man willing to throw away his own life. It was simple arithmetic, something a graduate engineer like Atef should have understood. What was it with him? A brother, wasn’t it, killed by the Israelis back in 1973? A long time to hold a grudge, even for men in his organization, but not without precedent. Atef was with his brother now, though, in Paradise. That was good fortune for him, but bad fortune for the organization. So it was written, Mohammed comforted himself, and so it would be, and so the struggle would go on until the last of their enemies were dead.
He had a pair of cloned phones on his bed, phones he could use without fear of interception. Should he call the Emir about this? It was worth thinking about. Anas Ali Atef was the second heart attack in less than a week, and in both cases they’d been young men, and that was odd, statistically very unusual. Fa’ad had been standing right next to Anas Ali at the time, though, and so he hadn’t been shot or poisoned by an Israeli intelligence officer—a Jew would probably have killed both of them, Mohammed thought—and so with an eyewitness right there, there seemed little cause to suspect foul play. For the other, well, Uda had liked the life of a whoremonger, and he would hardly have been the first man to die of that weakness of the flesh. So, it just seemed like an unlikely coincidence and thus unworthy of an urgent call to the Emir himself. He made a note of the dual incidents on his computer, however, encrypted the file, and shut down. He felt like a walk. It was a pleasant day in Rome. Hot by most European standards, but the very breath of home for him. Just up the street was a pleasant sidewalk restaurant whose Italian food was only average, but the average here was better than in many fine restaurants across the world. You’d think that all Italian women would be obese, but, no, they suffered from the Western female disease of thinness, like West African children, some of them. Like young boys instead of mature, experienced women. So sad. But instead of eating, he crossed the Via Veneto to get a thousand Euros from the cash machine. The Euro had made European travel so much more convenient, praise Allah. It was not yet the equal of the American dollar in terms of stability, but, with luck, it might soon become so, which would ease his travel convenience even more.
Rome was a difficult city not to love. Conveniently located, international in character, awash with foreigners, and full of hospitable people who bowed and scraped for cash money like the peasants they all were. A good city for women, with shopping such as Riyadh could scarcely offer. His English mother had liked Rome, and the reasons were obvious. Good food and wine and a fine historical atmosphere that antedated even the Prophet himself, blessing and peace be upon him. Many had died here at the hands of the Caesars, butchered for public enjoyment in the Flavian Amphitheater, or killed because they had displeased the emperor in one way or another. The streets had probably been very peaceful here during the empire period. What better way to ensue it than to enforce the laws ruthlessly? Even the weak could recognize the price for bad behavior. So it was in his homeland, and so, he hoped, it would remain after the Royal Family had been done away with—either killed or chased abroad, perhaps to the safety of England or Switzerland, where people with money and noble status were treated well enough to live out their lives in indolent comfort. Either alternative would suit Mohammed and his colleagues. Just so that they would no longer rule his country, filled with corruption, kowtowing to the infidels and selling them oil for money, ruling the people as though they were the sons of Mohammed himself. That would come to an end. His distaste for America quailed before his hatred for the rulers of his own country. But America was his primary target because of its power, whether held to its own use or parceled out for others to use in America’s own imperial interests. America threatened everything he held dear. America was an infidel country, patron and protector of the Jews. America had invaded his own country and stationed troops and weapons there, undoubtedly with the ultimate objective of subordinating all of Islam, and thus ruling a billion of the Faithful for its own narrow and parochial interests. Stinging America had become his obsession. Even the Israelis were not as attractive as targets. Vicious though they might be, the Jews were merely America’s cat’s-paws, vassals who did America’s bidding in return for money and weapons, without even knowing how cynically they were being used. The Iranian Shiites had been correct. America was the Great Satan, Iblis himself, so great in power that it was hard to strike decisively at it, but still vulnerable in its evil before the righteous forces of Allah and the Faithful.
THE CONCIERGE at the Hotel Bayerischer had outdone himself, Dominic thought, securing a Porsche 911 whose forward-mounted trunk barely held their bags, and that only with a little squeezing. But it was enough, and better even than a rented small-engine Mercedes. The 911 had balls. Brian would get to fumble with the maps as they went southeast through the Alps to Vienna. That they were going south to kill someone was beside the point for the moment. They were serving their country, which was about as big as loyalty got.
“Do I need a crash helmet?” Brian asked, getting in, which in the case of this car almost meant sitting on the pavement.
“Not with me driving, Aldo. Come on, bro. It’s time to rock and roll.”
The car was a horrible shade of blue, but the tank was filled, and the six-cylinder engine was properly tuned. The Germans did like things in Ordnung. Brian navigated them out of Munich and onto the autobahn southeast to Vienna, and from there Enzo decided to see how fast this Porsche could really go.
“DO YOU think maybe they need some backup?” Hendley asked Granger, whom he’d just called into his office.