“Yeah, that was pretty damned bad, man,” Dominic observed. “Anybody you know get clobbered?”
“No, thank God. Even Dad didn’t, with all the people he knows in the investment crowd. What about you guys?”
Brian gave him a funny look. “Nobody we knew, no.” He hoped that little David Prentiss’s soul would not be offended.
Jack finished the last croissant. “Let me shower and you guys can show me around.”
Brian finished the paper and turned the TV on to CNN—the only American station the Imperial had—to check on the news at 0500 in New York. The last of the victims had been buried the previous day, and the reporters were asking the bereaved how they felt about their loss. What a dumbass question! the Marine raged. You were supposed to leave twisting the knife to the bad guys. And politicians were ranting on about What America Has to Do.
Well, Brian thought, we’re doing it for you, guys. But if they found out, they’d probably foul their silk drawers. But that just made him feel better about it. Somebody had to play a little catch-up ball, and that was his job now.
AT THE Bristol, Fa’ad was just waking up. He, too, had ordered coffee and pastry. He was scheduled to meet a fellow courier the next day to receive a message that he’d then pass on in due course. The Organization operated with great security for its important communications. The really serious messages were all passed exclusively by word of mouth. The couriers knew only their incoming and outgoing counterparts, so that they were organized in cells of three only, another lesson learned from the dead KGB officer. The inbound courier was Mahmoud Mohamed Fadhil, who’d be arriving from Pakistan. Such a system could be broken, but only through painstaking and lengthy police work, which was easily foiled if only one man removed himself from the ratline. The trouble was that the unexpected removal of a rat from the line could prevent a message from reaching its destination entirely, but that had not yet happened, and was not expected to. It was not a bad life for Fa’ad. He traveled a lot, always first-class, resided only in top-of-the-line hostelries, and, all in all, it was rather comfortable. He occasionally felt guilty for this. Others did what he thought were the dangerous and admirable things, but on taking the job he’d been briefed that the organization could not function without him and his eleven comrades, which was good for his morale. So was the knowledge that his function, while of great importance, was also quite safe. He received messages and passed them on, often to the operatives themselves, all of whom treated him with great respect, as though he had originated the mission instructions himself, of which he did not disabuse them. So, in two days, he’d receive more orders for transfer, whether to his nearest geographic colleague—Ibrahim Salih al-Adel, home-based in Paris—or to an operative currently unknown. Today he would find out, and make such communications as were necessary, and act upon developments. The job could be both boring and exciting at the same time, and with the comfortable hours and zero risk to his person, it was easy to be a hero of the movement, as he sometimes allowed himself to think of himself.
THEY WALKED east on Kartner Ring, which almost at once angled northeast and changed its name to Schubertring. On the north side of it was the Ferrari dealership.
“So, how are you guys doing?” Jack asked, out in the open, and with the traffic noise beyond the reach of any possible tapping device.
“Two down. One more to go, right here in Vienna, then off somewhere else, wherever it is. I kinda thought you would know,” Dominic said.
Jack shook his head. “Nope. I haven’t been briefed on that.”
“Why did they send you?” This one came from Brian.
“I’m supposed to give you second guesses, I think. Back you up on the intel side and be some sort of consultant. That’s what Granger told me, anyway. I know what happened in London. We got lots of inside stuff from the Brits—indirectly, that is. It was written off as a heart attack. Munich I do not know much about. What can you tell me?”
Dominic answered. “I got him coming out of church. He went down on the sidewalk. Ambulance arrived. The paramedics worked him over and carted him off to the hospital. All I know”
“He’s dead. We caught that on an intercept,” Ryan told them. “He was accompanied by a guy named ‘Honeybear’ on the ‘Net. Saw his buddy go down and reported it in to a guy with the handle Fifty-six MoHa somewhere in Italy, we think. The Munich guy—his name was Atef—was a recruiter and courier. We know he recruited a shooter in the mess last week. So, you can be sure he earned his way onto the hit list.”
“We know. They told us that,” Brian said.
“How are you doing these people, exactly?”
“With this.” Dominic pulled his gold pen from the suit jacket pocket. “You swap the point out by twisting the nib and stick them, preferably in the ass. It injects a drug called succinylcholine, and that ruins the subject’s whole day. The drug metabolizes in the bloodstream even after death, and can’t be detected easily unless the pathologist’s a genius, and a lucky one at that.”
“Paralyzes them?”
“Yep. They collapse, and then they can’t breathe. Takes about thirty seconds for the drug to take hold, and then they drop down, and, after that, it’s just a matter of mechanics. It looks like a heart attack afterward, and it tests out like that, too. Perfect for what we do.”
“Damn,” Jack said. “So, you guys were in Charlottesville, too, eh?”
“Yeah.” This was Brian. “Not much fun. I had a little boy die in my arms, Jack. That was pretty tough.”
“Well, nice shooting.”
“They weren’t very smart,” Dominic evaluated them. “No smarter than street hoods. No training. They didn’t check their backs. I guess they figured they didn’t have to, with automatic weapons. But they learned different. Still, we were lucky—Son of a bitch!” he observed, as they got to the Ferraris.
“Damn. They are pretty,” Jack agreed at once. Even Brian was impressed.
“That’s the old one,” Dominic told them. “575M, V -twelve, five hundred–plus horses, six-speed transmission, two hundred twenty big ones to drive it away. The really cool one’s the Ferrari Enzo. That baby’s the fucking bomb, guys. Six hundred sixty horses. They even named it after me. See, back in the far corner.”
“How much?” Junior asked.
“The far side of six hundred thousand bucks. But if you want to get something hotter, you gotta call Lockheed Burbank.” And sure enough, the car had twin openings on the front that looked like jet intakes. The entire machine looked like personal transportation for Luke Skywalker’s rich uncle.
“Still knows his cars, eh?” Jack observed. A private jet probably got better mileage, too, but the car was sleekly pretty.
“He’d rather sleep with a Ferrari than with Grace Kelly,” Brian snorted. His own priorities were rather more conventional, of course.
“You can ride a car longer than a girl, people.” Which was one version of efficiency. “Damn, I bet that honey moves pretty fast.”
“You could get a private pilot’s license,” Jack suggested.
Dominic shook his head. “Nah. Too dangerous.”
“Son of a bitch.” Jack almost laughed out loud. “As compared with what you’ve been doing?”
“Junior, I’m used to that, y’know?”
“You say so, man.” Jack just shook his head. Damn, those were pretty cars. He liked his Hummer at home. In the snow he could drive anywhere, and he’d win any collision on the highway, and, if it wasn’t exactly sporty, what the hell? But the little boy in him could understand the list on his cousin’s face. If Maureen O’Hara had been born a car, maybe she’d be one of these. The red body color would have gone nicely with her hair. After ten minutes, Dominic figured he’d drooled enough, and they walked on.
“So, we know everything about the subject except for what he looks like?” Brian asked half a block up the street.
“Correct,” Jack confirmed. “But how many Arabs do you expect there to be in the Bristol?”
“A lot of them in London. Trick is going to be to ID the subject. Doing the job right on the sidewalk ought not to be too hard.” And, looking around, that seemed likely. Street traffic wasn’t as thick as in New York or London, but it wasn’t Kansas City after dark either, and doing the job in broad daylight had its own attractions. “I guess we stake out the hotel’s main entrance, and whatever side entrance there is. Can you see if you can get more data from The Campus?”
Jack checked his watch and did the mental arithmetic. “They should be open for business in two hours or so.”