“Then check your e-mail,” Dominic told him. “We’ll wander around and look for a likely subject.”
“Right” They walked across the street and headed back to the Imperial. Once back in his room, Jack flopped onto the bed and grabbed a nap.
THERE WAS nothing he had to do right now, Fa’ad thought, so he might as well get some air. Vienna had plenty of things to look at, and he hadn’t exhausted them all yet. So, he dressed properly, like a businessman, and walked outside.
“BINGO, ALDO.” Dominic had a cop’s memory for faces, and they had practically walked into this one.
“Isn’t he—”
“Yep. Atef’s pal from Munich. You wanna bet he’s our boy?”
“Sucker bet, bro.” Dominic cataloged the target. Middle Eastern as hell, medium height, five feet ten inches or so, light build at about hundred fifty pounds, black and brown, slightly Semitic nose, dresses well and expensively, like a businessman, walks around with purpose and confidence. They walked within ten feet of him, careful not to stare, even with their sunglasses. Gotcha, sucker. Whoever these people were, they didn’t know dick about hiding in plain sight. They walked to the corner.
“Damn, that was easy enough,” Brian observed. “Now what?”
“We let Jack check it out with the home office and just be cool, Aldo.”
“Roger, copy that, bro.” He unconsciously checked his coat to make sure the gold pen was in place, as he might have checked his holster for his M9 Beretta automatic in uniform and in the field. It felt as though he were an invisible lion in a Kenyan field full of wildebeest. It didn’t get much better than that. He could pick out the one he wanted to kill and eat, and the poor bastard didn’t even know he was being stalked. Just like they do it. He wondered if this guy’s colleagues would see the irony of having such tactics used against them. It wasn’t how Americans were conditioned to act, but then all that stuff about showdowns on main street at high noon was something invented by Hollywood, anyway. A lion was not in the business of risking his life, and as they’d told him in the Basic School, if you found yourself in a fair fight, then you hadn’t planned it very well beforehand. Fighting fair was okay in the Olympic Games, but this wasn’t that. No big-game hunter walked up to a lion making noise and holding a sword. Instead, he did the sensible thing: He took cover behind a log and did it with a rifle from two hundred yards or so. Even the Masai tribesmen of Kenya, for whom killing a lion was the passage into manhood, had the good sense to do it in a squad-sized unit of ten, and not all of them teenagers, to make sure it was the lion’s tail they took back to the kraal. It wasn’t about being brave. It was about being effective. Just being in this business was dangerous enough. You did your best to take every element of unnecessary risk out of the equation. It was business, not a sport. “Do him out here on the street?”
“Worked before, Aldo, didn’t it? I don’t figure we can hit him in the hotel saloon.”
“Roge-o, Enzo. Now what do we do?”
“Play tourist, I suppose. The opera house looks impressive. Let’s take a look. . . . The sign says they’re doing Wagner’s The Valkyries. I’ve never seen that one.”
“I’ve never seen an opera in my life. I suppose I ought to someday part of the Italian soul, ain’t it?”
“Oh yeah, I got more soul than I can control, but I’m partial to Verdi.”
“My ass. When you been to the opera?”
“I have some of the CDs,” Dominic answered, with a smile. As it turned out, the State Opera House was a magnificent example of imperial architecture, built and executed as though for God Himself to attend a performance, and bedecked in scarlet and gold. Whatever its faults might have been, the House of Hapsburg had shown impressive taste. Dominic thought briefly about checking out the cathedrals in town, but decided it wasn’t fitting, given the reason they were here. In all, they walked around for two hours, then headed back to the hotel and up to Jack’s room.
“NO JOY from the home office,” Jack told them.
“No problem. We saw the guy. He’s an old friend from Munich,” Brian reported. They walked into the bathroom and opened the faucets, which would put out enough white noise to annoy any microphones in the room. “He’s a pal of Mr. Atef. He was there when we popped him in Munich.”
“How can you be sure?”
“A hundred percent sure, we can’t be—but what are the odds that he just happened to be in both cities, and the right hotel, man?” Brian asked reasonably.
“Hundred percent certainty is better,” Jack objected.
“I agree, but when you’re on the right side of thousand-to-one odds, you put the money down and toss the dice,” Dominic responded. “By Bureau rules, he’s at least a known associate, somebody we’d take aside to interview. So, he probably isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross, y’know?” The agent paused. “Okay, it’s not perfect, but it’s the best we got, and I think it’s worth going with.”
It was gut-check time for Jack. Did he have the authority to give a go-no-go on this? Granger hadn’t said so. He was intel backup for the twins. But what, exactly, did that mean? Great. He had a job without a job description, and no assigned authority. This did not make much sense. He remembered his father saying once that headquarters people weren’t supposed to second-guess the troops out in the field, because the troops had eyes, and were supposed to be trained to think on their own. But in this case his training was probably at least as good as theirs. But he hadn’t seen the face of the supposed subject and they had. If he said no, they could just as easily tell him where to stick his opinion, and, since he had no power to enforce it, they’d win the day and he’d just stand around with his dick in his hand, wondering who was right on the call. The spook business was suddenly very unpredictable, and he was stuck in the middle of a swamp without a helicopter to lift his ass out.
“Okay, guys, it’s your call.” This seemed a lot like taking the coward’s way out to Jack, and even more so when he said, “I’d still feel better if we were a hundred percent sure.”
“So would I. But like I said, man, a thousand to one constitutes betting odds. Aldo?”
Brian thought it over and nodded. “It works for me. He looked very concerned over his pal in Munich. If he’s a good guy, he has funny friends. So, let’s do him.”
“Okay,” Jack breathed, bowing to the inevitable. “When?”
“As soon as convenient,” Brian responded. He and his brother would discuss tactics later, but Jack didn’t need to know about that.
HE WAS lucky, Fa’ad decided at 10:14 that night. He got an instant message from Elsa K 69, who evidently remembered him kindly.
WHAT SHALL WE DO TONIGHT? he asked “her.”
I’VE BEEN THINKING. IMAGINE WE ARE IN ONE OF THE K-LAGERS. I AM A JEWESS, AND YOU ARE THE KOMMANDANT . . . I DO NOT WISH TO DIE WITH THE REST, AND I OFFER YOU PLEASURE IN RETURN FOR MY LIFE . . . “she” proposed.
It could scarcely have been a more pleasant fantasy for him. GO AHEAD AND BEGIN, he typed.
And so it went for a while, until: PLEASE, PLEASE, I AM NOT AN AUSTRIAN. I AM AN AMERICAN MUSIC STUDENT TRAPPED BY THE WAR . . .
Better and better. OH, YES? I HAVE HEARD MUCH ABOUT AMERICAN JEWS AND THEIR WHORISH WAYS . . .
And so it went for nearly an hour. At the end, he sent her to the gas anyway. After all, what were Jews good for, really?
PREDICTABLY Ryan couldn’t sleep. His body hadn’t yet acclimated to the shift of six time zones, despite the decent amount of sleep he’d had on the plane. How flight crews did it was a mystery to him, though he suspected they simply stayed synchronized to wherever they lived, disregarding wherever they happened to be at the time. But you have to stay constantly mobile to do that, and he wasn’t. So, he plugged in his computer and decided to Google his way into Islam. The only Muslim he knew was Prince Ali of Saudi Arabia, and he was not a maniac. He even got along well with Jack’s shy little sister, Katie, who found his neatly trimmed beard fascinating. He was able to download the Koran, and he started reading it. The holy book had forty-two suras, broken down into verses, just like his own Bible. Of course, he rarely looked at it, much less read it, because as a Catholic he expected the priests to tell him about the important parts, letting him skip all the work of reading about who the hell begat what the hell—maybe it had been interesting, and even fun, at the time, but not today, unless you were into genealogy, which wasn’t a subject of dinner-table conversation in the Ryan family. Besides, everyone knew that every Irishman was descended from a horse thief who’d skipped the country to avoid being hanged by the nasty English invaders. A whole collection of wars had come out of that, one of which had come within a whisker of preventing his own birth in Annapolis.