The drive to work was about as routine as driving to school, except he didn’t have to worry about an exam anymore. Except that if he screwed up, he’d lose the job, and that black mark would follow him a lot longer than an “F” in sociology would. So, he didn’t want to screw up. The problem with this job was that every day was spent in learning, not in applying knowledge. The whole big lie about college was that it taught you what you needed to know for life. Yeah, right. It probably hadn’t done that for his dad—and for Mom, hell, she never stopped reading her medical journals to learn about new stuff. Not just American journals, either, English and French, too, because she spoke pretty good French and she said that French docs were good. Better than their politicians were, but, then again, anyone who judged America by its political leaders probably thought the U.S. of A. was a nation of fuckups. At least since his dad had checked out of the White House.
He was listening to NPR again. It was his favorite news station, and it beat listening to the current brand of popular music. He’d grown up listening to his mom on the piano, mostly Bach and his peers—maybe a little John Williams in a gesture toward modernity, though he wrote more for brass than the ivories.
Another suicide bomber in Israel. Damn, his dad had tried awfully hard to settle that one down, but despite some earnest efforts, even by the Israelis, it had all come undone. The Jews and Muslims just could not seem to get along. His dad and Prince Ali bin Sultan talked about it whenever they got together, and the frustration they displayed was painful to see. The prince hadn’t been screened for the kingship of his country—which was possibly good luck, Jack thought, since being a king had to be even worse than being President—but he remained an important figure whose words the current king listened to most of the time . . . which brought him to . . .
Uda bin Sali. There’d be more news on him this morning. Yesterday’s take from the British SIS, courtesy of the CIA pukes at Langley. CIA pukes? Jack asked himself. His own father had worked there, had served with distinction before moving up in the world, and had told his kids many times not to believe anything they saw in the movies about the intelligence business. Jack Jr. had asked him questions and mainly gotten unsatisfactory answers, and now he was learning what the business was really like. Mostly boring. Too much like accounting, like chasing after mice in Jurassic Park, though at least you had the advantage of being invisible to the raptors. Nobody knew that The Campus existed, and so long as that remained true everyone there was safe. That made for a comfortable feeling, but again, boring. Junior was still young enough to think excitement was fun.
Left off U.S. Route 29 and on to The Campus. The usual parking place. Smile and a wave at the security guard and up to his office. It was then that Junior realized he’d driven right past McDonald’s, and so he picked two Danish off the treat tray, and made a cup of coffee on his way to his cubbyhole. Light up the computer and go to work.
“Good morning, Uda,” Jack Jr. said to the computer screen. “What have you been up to?” The clock window on the computer said 8:25 AM. That translated to early afternoon in London’s financial district. Bin Sali had an office in the Lloyd’s insurance building, which, Junior remembered from previous hops across the pond, looked like a glassed-in oil refinery. Upscale neighborhood and some very wealthy neighbors. The report didn’t say which floor, but Jack had never been in the building anyway. Insurance. Had to be the most boring job in the world, waiting for a building to burn down. So, yesterday Uda had made some phone calls, one of them to ... aha! “I know that name from somewhere,” the young Ryan told the screen. It was the name of a very rich Middle Eastern fellow who also had been known to play in the wrong playground on occasion, and who was also under surveillance by the Brit Security Service. So, what had they talked about?
There was even a transcript. The conversation had been in Arabic, and the translation . . . might as well have been instructions from the wife to buy a quart of milk on the way home from work. About that exciting and revealing—except that Uda had replied to a totally innocuous statement with “Are you sure?” Not the sort of thing you said to the wife when she said to get a quart of skim milk on the way home.
“The tone of voice suggests hidden meaning,” the Brit analyst had opined gently at the bottom of the report.
Then, later in the day, Uda had left his office early and entered another pub and met with the same guy he’d been talking to on the phone. So, the conversation hadn’t been innocuous after all? But, though they hadn’t managed to overhear the conversation in a pub booth, neither had the phone chat specified a meeting or a meeting place . . . and Uda didn’t spend much time in that particular pub.
“’Morning, Jack,” Wills greeted as he came in and hung up his suit jacket. “What’s happening?”
“Our friend Uda is wiggling like a live fish.” Jack punched the PRINT command and handed the printout across to his roomie even before he’d had a chance to sit down.
“It seems to suggest that possibility, doesn’t it?”
“Tony, this guy is a player,” Jack said with some conviction in his voice.
“What did he do after the phone conversation? Any unusual transactions?”
“I haven’t checked yet, but if there is, then he was ordered to do it by his friend, and then they met so that he could confirm it over a pint of John Smith’s Bitter.”
“You’re making a leap of imagination. We try to avoid that here,” Wills cautioned.
“I know,” Junior growled. It was time to check out the previous day’s money-moving.
“Oh, you’re to be meeting somebody new today.”
“Who’s that?”
“Dave Cunningham. Forensic accountant, used to work for Justice—organized-crime stuff. He’s pretty good at spotting financial irregularities.”
“Does he think I found something interesting?” Jack asked with hope in his voice.
“We’ll see when he gets here—after lunch. He’s probably looking over your stuff right now.”
“Okay,” Jack responded. Maybe he’d caught the scent of something. Maybe this job really did have an element of excitement to it. Maybe they’d give him some purple ribbon for his adding machine. Sure.
THE DAYS were down to a routine. Morning run and PT, followed by breakfast and a talk. In substance, no different from Dominic’s time at the FBI Academy, or Brian’s at the Basic School. It was this similarity that distantly troubled the Marine. Marine Corps training was directed at killing people and breaking things. So was this.
Dominic was somewhat better at the surveillance part of it, because the FBI Academy taught it out of a book the Marines didn’t have. Enzo was also pretty good with his pistol, though Aldo preferred his Beretta to his brother’s Smith & Wesson. His brother had whacked a bad guy with his Smith, whereas Brian had done his job with an M16A2 rifle at a decently long range—fifty meters, close enough to see the looks on their faces when the bullets struck home, and far enough that a returning snapshot would not be close enough to be a serious worry. His gunny had chided him on not grabbing some dirt when the AKs had been turned in his direction, but Brian had learned an important lesson in his only exposure to combat. He’d found that, in that moment, his mind and his thinking went into hyperdrive, the world around him seemed to slow down, and his thinking had become extraordinarily clear. In retrospect, it had surprised him that he hadn’t seen bullets in flight, his mind had been operating so fast—well, the last five rounds in the AK-47 magazine were usually tracers, and he had seen those in flight, though never in his immediate direction. His mind often went back to that busy five or six minutes, critiquing himself for things he might have done better, and promising that he would not repeat those errors of thinking and command, though Gunny Sullivan had been very respectful to his captain later during Caruso’s after-action review with his Marines at their firebase.
“How was the run today, fellas?” Pete Alexander asked.
“Delightful,” Dominic answered. “Maybe we sho
uld try it wearing fifty-pound backpacks.”
“That could be arranged,” Alexander replied.
“Hey, Pete, we used to do that in Force Recon. It ain’t fun,” Brian objected at once. “Turn down the sense of humor, bro,” he added for his brother.
“Well, it’s good to see you’re still in shape,” Pete observed comfortably. He didn’t have to do the morning runs, after all. “So what’s up?”
“I still wish I knew more about our goal here, Pete,” Brian said, looking up from his coffee.
“You’re not the most patient guy in the world, are you?” the training officer shot back.
“Look, in the Marine Corps we train every day, but even when it isn’t clear exactly what we’re training for, we know we’re Marines, and we aren’t getting set up to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of the Wal-Mart.”
“What do you think you’re getting set up for now?”
“To kill people without warning, with no rules of engagement that I can recognize. It looks a lot like murder.” Okay, Brian thought, he’d said it out loud. What would happen next? Probably a drive back to Camp Lejeune and the resumption of his career in the Green Machine. Well, it could be worse.
“Okay, well, I guess it’s time,” Alexander conceded. “What if you had orders to terminate somebody’s life?”
“If the orders are legitimate, I carry them out, but the law—the system—allows me to think about how legit the orders are.”
“Okay, a hypothetical. Let’s say you are ordered to terminate the life of a known terrorist. How do you react?” Pete asked.
“That’s easy. You waste him,” Brian answered immediately.
“Why?”
“Terrorists are criminals, but you can’t always arrest them. These people make war on my country, and if I’m ordered to make war back, fine. That’s what I signed on to do, Pete.”
“The system doesn’t always allow us to do that,” Dominic observed.
“But the system does allow us to waste criminals on the spot, in flagrante delicto, like. You did it, and I haven’t heard about any regrets, bro.”
“And you won’t. It’s the same for you. If the President says to do somebody, and you’re in uniform, he’s the Commander in Chief, Aldo. You have the legal right—hell, the duty—to kill anybody he says.”
“Didn’t some Germans make that argument back in 1946?” Brian asked.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that. We’d have to lose a war for that to be a concern. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”
“Enzo, if what you just said is true, then if the Germans had won World War Two, nobody’d need to care about those six million dead Jews. Is that what you’re saying?”
“People,” Alexander interrupted, “this isn’t a class in legal theory.”
“Enzo’s the lawyer here,” Brian pointed out.
Dominic took the bait: “If the President breaks the law, then the House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate convicts him, and he’s out on the street, and then he’s subject to criminal sanctions.”
“Okay. But what about the guys who carry out his orders?” Brian responded.
“That all depends,” Pete told them both. “If the outgoing President has given them presidential pardons, what liability do they have?”
That answer jerked Dominic’s head back. “None, I suppose. The President has sovereign power to pardon under the Constitution, the way a king did back in the old days. Theoretically, a president could pardon himself, but that would be a real legal can of worms. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. In effect, the Constitution is God, and there is no appeal from that. You know, except when Ford pardoned Nixon, it’s an area that has never really been looked into. But the Constitution is designed to be reasonably applied by reasonable men. That may be its only weakness. Lawyers are advocates, and that means they’re not always reasonable.”
“So, theoretically speaking, if the President gives you a pardon for killing somebody, you cannot be punished for the crime, right?”
“Correct.” Dominic’s face screwed in on itself somewhat. “What are you telling me?”
“Just a hypothetical,” Alexander answered, backing up perceptibly. In any case, it ended the class on legal theory, and Alexander congratulated himself for telling them an awful lot and nothing at all at the same time.
THE CITY names were so alien to him, Mustafa remarked quietly to himself. Shawnee. Okemah. Weleetka. Pharaoh. That was strangest of all. They were not in Egypt, after all. That was a Muslim nation, albeit a confused one, with politics that didn’t recognize the importance of the Faith. But that would be turned around sooner or later. Mustafa stretched in his seat and reached for a smoke. Half a tank of gas still. This Ford surely had a capacious fuel tank in which to burn Muslim oil. They were such ungrateful bastards, the Americans. Islamic countries sold them oil, and what did America give in return? Weapons to the Israelis to kill Arabs with, damned little else. Dirty magazines, alcohol, and other corruption to afflict even the Faithful. But which was worse, to corrupt, or to be corrupted, to be a victim of unbelievers? Someday all would be put right, when the Rule of Allah spanned the world. It would come, someday, and he and his fellow warriors were even now on the leading wave of Allah’s Will. Theirs would be martyrs’ deaths, and that was a proud thing. In due course their families would learn of their fates—they could probably depend on Americans for that—and mourn their deaths, but celebrate their faithfulness. The American police agencies loved to show their efficiency after the battle was already lost. It was enough to make him smile.
DAVE CUNNINGHAM looked his age. He was pushing sixty pretty hard, Jack judged. Thinning gray hair. Bad skin. He’d quit smoking, but not soon enough. But his gray eyes sparkled with the curiosity of a weasel in the Dakotas, seeking after prairie dogs to eat.
“You’re Jack Junior?” he asked on coming in.
“Guilty,” Jack admitted. “What did you make of my numbers?”
“Not bad for an amateur,” Cunningham allowed. “Your subject appears to be warehousing and laundering money—for himself, and for somebody else.”
“Who is somebody else?” Wills asked.
“Not sure, but he’s Middle Eastern, and he’s rich, and he’s tight with a buck. Funny. Everybody thinks they throw money around like drunken sailors. Some do,” the accountant observed. “But some are misers. When they let go of the nickel, the buffalo screams.” That showed his age. Buffalo nickels were a thing so far in the past that Jack didn’t even get the joke. Then Cunningham laid some paper on the desk between Ryan and Wills. Three transactions were circled in red.
“He’s a little sloppy. All his questionable transfers are done in ten-thousand-pound slugs. It makes them easy to spot. He disguises them as personal expenses—it goes into that account, probably to hide it from his parents. Saudi accountants tend to be sloppy. I guess it takes over a million of something to get them upset. They probably figure a kid like this can cut loose ten thousand pounds for a particularly nice night with the ladies, or at a casino. Young rich kids like to gamble, though they’re not very good at it. If they live closer to Vegas or Atlantic City, it would do wonders for our balance of trade.”
“Maybe they like European hookers better than ours?” Jack wondered aloud.
“Sonny, in Vegas you can order up a blond, blue-eyed Cambodian donkey and it’ll be at your door half an hour after you set the phone down.” Mafia kingpins had their favorite activities as well, Cunningham had learned over the years. It had originally offended the Methodist grandfather, but with the realization that it was just one more way to track criminals, he’d learned to welcome such expenditures. Corrupt people did corrupt things. Cunningham had also been part of Operation ELEGANT SERPENTS, which had sent six members of Congress to the federal country-club prison at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, using methods just like this one to track his quarry. He figured it made for high-class caddies for the young fighter pilots who flew
out of there, and probably good exercise for the former representatives of the people.
“Dave, is our friend Uda a player?” Jack asked.
Cunningham looked up from his papers. “He surely does wiggle like one, son.”
Jack sat back in his chair with a great feeling of satisfaction. He’d actually accomplished something . . . maybe something important?
THE LAND got a little hilly as they entered Arkansas. Mustafa found that his reactions were a little slow after driving four hundred miles, and so he pulled off at a service plaza and, after filling the car, let Abdullah take the wheel. It was good to stretch. Then it was back onto the highway. Abdullah drove conservatively. They passed only elderly people, and stayed in the right lane to avoid being crushed by the passing truck traffic. In addition to their desire to avoid police notice, there was no real hurry. They had two more days to identify their objective and accomplish their mission. And that was plenty. He wondered what the other three teams were doing. They’d all had shorter distances to cover. One of them was probably already in its target city. Their orders were to select a decent but not opulent hotel less than an hour’s drive from the objective, to conduct a reconnaissance of the objective, and then to confirm their readiness via e-mail, and sit tight until released by Mustafa to accomplish their missions. The simpler the orders, the better, of course, less chance for confusion and mistakes. They were good men, fully briefed. He knew them all. Saeed and Mehdi were, like himself, Saudi in origin, like himself children of wealthy families who’d come to despise their parents for their habit of bootlicking Americans and others like them. Sabawi was Iraqi in origin. Not born to wealth, he had come to be a true believer. A Sunni like the rest, he wanted to be remembered even by the Shi’a majority in his country as a faithful follower of the Prophet. The Shi’a in Iraq, so recently liberated—by unbelievers!—from Sunni rule paraded about their country as though they alone were the Faithful. Sabawi wanted to show the error in that false belief. Mustafa hardly ever concerned himself with such trivia. For him, Islam was a large tent, with room for nearly all . . .