THE TUNNEL was like something in a video game. It went on and on to infinity, though at least the traffic inside wasn’t piled up in a fiery mass as had happened a few years before in the Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Switzerland. After a period of time that seemed to last half of forever, they came out the other side. It looked to be downhill from here.
“Gas plaza ahead,” Brian reported. Sure enough, there was an ELF sign half a mile away, and the Porsche’s tank needed filling.
“Gotcha. I could use a stretch and a piss.” The service plaza was pretty clean by American standards, and the eatery was different, without the Burger King or Roy Rogers you expected in Virginia—the men’s room plumbing was all in Ordnung, however—and the gas was sold by the liter, which well disguised the price until Dominic did the mental arithmetic: “Jesus, they really charge for this stuff!”
“Company card, man,” Brian said soothingly, and tossed over a pack of cookies. “Let’s boogie, Enzo. Italy awaits.”
“Fair enough.” The six-cylinder engine purred back to fife, and they went back on the road.
“Good to stretch your legs,” Dominic observed as he went to his top gear.
“Yeah, it helps,” Brian agreed. “Four hundred fifty miles to go, if my addition’s right.”
“Walk in the park. Call it six hours, if the traffic’s okay.” He adjusted his sunglasses and shook his shoulders some. “Staying in the same hotel with our subject—damn.”
“I’ve been thinking. He doesn’t know dick about us, maybe doesn’t even know he’s being hunted. Think about it: two heart attacks, one in front of a witness; and a traffic accident, also with a witness he knows. That’s pretty bad luck, but no overt suggestion of hostile action, is there?”
“In his place, I’d be a little nervous,” Dominic thought aloud.
“In his place, he probably already is. If he sees us in the hotel, we’re just two more infidel faces, man. Unless he sees us more than once, we’re down in the grass, not up on the scope. Ain’t no rule says it has to be hard, Enzo.”
“I hope you’re right, Aldo. That mall was scary enough to last me a while.”
“Concur, bro.”
This wasn’t the towering part of the Alps. That lay to the north and west, though it would have been bad on the legs had they been walking it, as the Roman legions had done, thinking their paved roads were a blessing. Probably better than mud, but not that much, especially humping a backpack that weighed about as much as his Marines had carried into Afghanistan. The legions had been tough in their day, and probably not all that different from the guys who did the job today in camouflaged utilities. But back then they’d had amore direct way of dealing with bad guys. They’d killed their families, their friends, their neighbors, and even their dogs, and, more to the point, they were known for doing all that. Not exactly practical in the age of CNN, and, truth be told, there were damned few Marines who would have tolerated participating in wholesale slaughter. But taking them out one at a time was okay, so long as you were sure you weren’t killing off innocent civilians. Doing that shit was the other side’s job. It was really a pity they could not all come out on a battlefield and have it out like men, but, in addition to being vicious, terrorists were also practical. There was no sense committing to a combat action in which you’d not merely lose, but be slaughtered like sheep in a pen. But real men would have built their forces up, trained and equipped them, and then turned them loose, instead of sneaking around like rats to bite babies in their cribs. Even war had rules, promulgated because there were worse things than war, things that were strictly forbidden to men in uniform. You did not hurt noncombatants deliberately, and you tried hard to avoid doing it by accident. The Marines were now investing considerable time, money, and effort in learning city fighting, and the hardest part of it was avoiding civilians, women with kids in strollers—even knowing that some of those women had weapons stashed next to little Johnny, and that they’d love to see the back of a United States Marine, say two or three meters away, just to be sure of bullet placement. Playing by the rules had its limitations. But for Brian that was a thing of the past. No, he and his brother were playing the game by the enemy’s rules, and as long as the enemy didn’t know it would be a profitable game. How many lives might they have saved already by taking down a banker, a recruiter, and a courier? The problem was that you could never know. That was complexity theory as applied to real life, and it was a priori impossible. Nor would they ever know what good they’d be doing and what lives they might be saving when they got this 56MoHa bastard. But not being able to quantify it didn’t mean it wasn’t real, like that child killer his brother had dispatched in Alabama. They were doing the Lord’s work, even if the Lord was not an accountant.
At work in the field of the Lord, Brian thought. Certainly these alpine meadows were green and lovely enough, he thought, looking for the lonely goatherd. Odalayeee-oh . . .
“HE’S WHERE?” Hendley asked.
“The Excelsior,” Rick Bell answered. “Says he’s right up the hall from our friend.”
“I think our boy needs a little advice on fieldcraft,” Granger observed darkly.
“Think it through,” Bell suggested. “The opposition doesn’t know a thing. They’re as likely to be worried about the guy who picks up the wash as about Jack or the twins. They have no names, no facts, no hostile organization—hell, they don’t even know for sure that anybody’s out to get them.”
“It’s not very good fieldcraft,” Granger persisted. “If Jack gets eyeballed—”
“Then what?” Bell asked. “Okay, fine, I know I’m just an intel weenie, not a field spook, but logic still applies. They do not and cannot know anything about The Campus. Even if Fifty-six MoHa is getting nervous, it will be undirected anxiety, and, hell, he’s probably got a lot of that in his system anyway. But you can’t be a spook and be afraid of anybody, can you? As long as our people are in the background noise, they have nothing to worry about—unless they do something real dumb, and these kids are not that kind of dumb, if I read them right.”
Through all of this, Hendley just sat in his chair, letting his eyes flicker back and forth from one to the other. So, this was what it must , have been like to be “M” in the James Bond movies. Being the boss had its moments, but it had its stresses, too. Sure, he had that undated presidential pardon in a safety-deposit box, but that didn’t mean he ever wanted to make use of it. That would make him even more of a pariah than he already was, and the newsies would never leave him alone, to his dying day, not exactly his idea of fun.
“Just so they don’t pretend to be room service and whack him in the hotel room,” Gerry thought aloud.
“Hey, if they were that dumb, they’d already be in some German prison,” Granger pointed out.
THE CROSSOVER into Italy was no more formal than crossing over from Tennessee into Virginia, which was one benefit of the European Union. The first Italian city was Villaco, where the people looked a lot more German than Sicilian to their fellow Italians, and from there southwest on the A23. They still needed to learn a little about interchanges, Dominic thought, but these roads were definitely better than they’d run for the famous Mille Miglia, the thousand-mile sports car race of the 1950s, canceled because too many people got killed watching it from the side of the country roads. The land here was not distinguishable from Austria, and the farm buildings were much the same as well. All in all, it was pretty country, not unlike eastern Tennessee or western Virginia, with rolling hills and cows that probably got milked twice a day to, feed children on both sides of the border. Next came Udine, then Mestre, and they changed highways again for the A4 to Padova, switched over to A13, and an hour more to Bologna. The Apennine mountains were to their left, and the Marine part of Brian looked at the hills and shuddered at the battlefield they represented. But then his stomach started growling again.
“You know, Enzo, every town we pass has at least one great restaurant—great pasta, homemade cheese, Vitello Francese, the wine cellar from hell . . .”
“I’m hungry, too, Brian. And, yeah, we’re surrounded by Italian soul food. Unfortunately, we have a mission.”