Teeth of the Tiger

technical reasons. The laws of physics could be exploited, but not changed to suit the needs of the moment.

The bandwidth on the microwave channel was immense, due to compression algorithms that were little different from those used on personal computer networks. The King James Version of the Holy Bible could have flown from one building to another in seconds. These links were always up and running, most of the time swapping nonsense and random characters in order to befuddle anyone who might try to crack the encryption — but since this system was TAPDANCE encrypted, it was totally secure. Or so the wizards at NSA claimed. The system depended on CD-ROMs stamped with totally random transpositions, and unless you could find a key to atmospheric RF noise, that was the end of that. But every week, one of the guard detail from Hendley, accompanied by two of his colleagues — all of them randomly chosen from the guard force — drove to Fort Meade and picked up the week's encryption disks. These were inserted in the jukebox attached to the cipher machine, and when each was ejected after use, it was hand-carried to a microwave oven to be destroyed, under the eyes of three guards, all of them trained by years of service not to ask questions.

This somewhat laborious procedure gave Hendley access to all of the activity of the two agencies, since they were government agencies and they wrote everything down, from the 'take' from deep-cover agents to the cost of the mystery meat served in the cafeteria.

Much — even most — of the information was of no interest to Hendley's crew, but nearly all of it was stored on high-density media and cross-referenced on a Sun Microsystems mainframe computer that had enough power to administer the entire country, if need be. This enabled Hendley's staff to look in on the stuff the intelligence services were generating, along with the top-level analysis being done by experts in a multitude of areas and then cross- decked to others for comment and further analysis. NSA was getting better at this sort of work than CIA, or so Hendley's own top analyst thought, but many heads on a single problem often worked well — until the analysis became so convoluted as to paralyze action, a problem not unknown to the intelligence community. With the new Department of Homeland Security — for whose authorization Hendley thought he would have voted 'Nay' — in the loop, CIA and NSA were both recipients of FBI analysis. That often just added a new layer of bureaucratic complexity, but the truth of the matter was the FBI agents took a slightly different take on raw intelligence. They thought in terms of building a criminal case to be put before a jury, and that was not at all a bad thing when you got down to it.

Each agency had its own way of thinking. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was composed of cops who had one slant. The Central Intelligence Agency had quite another, and it did have the power — occasionally exercised — to take some action, though that was quite rare. The National Security Agency, on the third hand, just got information, analyzed it, and passed it on to others — whether those individuals did anything with it was a question beyond Agency purview.

Hendley's chief of Analysis/Intelligence was Jerome Rounds. Jerry to his friends, he had a doctorate in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He'd worked in the State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research — I&R — before moving on to Kidder, Peabody as a different sort of analyst for a different sort of paycheck, before then-Senator Hendley had personally spotted him during lunch in New York. Rounds had made a name for himself in the trading house as the in-house mind reader, but though he'd made himself a goodly pile of money, he'd found that money faded in importance once your kids' education was fully guaranteed and your sailboat was paid off. He'd chafed on Wall Street, and he'd been ready for the offer Hendley had made four years earlier. His duties included reading the minds of other international traders, which was something he'd learned to do in New York. He worked very closely with Sam Granger, who was both the head of currency trading at The Campus and also chief of the Operations Department.

It was near closing time when Jerry Rounds came into Sam's office. It was the job of Jerry and his staff of thirty to go over all the downloads from NSA and CIA. They all had to be speed-readers with sensitive noses. Rounds was the local equivalent of a bloodhound.

'Check this out,' he said, dropping a sheet of paper on Granger's desk and taking a seat.

'Mossad lost a — Station Chief? Hmmph. How did that happen?'

'The local cops are thinking robbery. Killed with a knife, wallet missing, no sign of a protracted struggle. Evidently, he wasn't carrying heat with him at the time.'

'Civilized place like Rome, why bother?' Granger observed. But they would now, for a while at least. 'How did we find out?'

'Made the local papers that an official at the Israeli Embassy got whacked while taking a leak. The Agency Chief of Station fingered him for a spook. Some people at Langley are running around in circles trying to figure what it all means, but they'll probably fall back on Occam's razor and buy what the local cops think. Dead man. No wallet. Robbery where the crook got a little carried away.'

'You think the Israelis will buy that?' Granger wondered.

'About as soon as they serve roast pork at an embassy dinner. He was knifed between the first and second vertebrae. A street hood is more likely to slash the throat, but a pro knows that's messy and noisy. The Carabinieri are working the case — but it sounds as though they don't have dick to work with, unless somebody at the restaurant has a hell of a good memory. I wouldn't want to wager much on that one.'

'So, what's it all mean?'

Rounds settled back in the chair. 'When's the last time a Station Chief of any service got killed?'

'It's been a while. The Agency lost one in Greece — that local terrorist group. The COS was fingered by some prick… one of their own, defector, skipped over the wall, drinking vodka now and feeling lonely, I imagine. The Brits lost a guy a few years ago in Yemen…' He paused. 'You're right. You don't gain much by killing a Station Chief. Once you know who he is, you watch him, find out who his contacts and sub-officers are. If you whack one, you lose assets instead of gaining any. So, you're thinking a terrorist, maybe sending a message to Israel?'

'Or maybe eliminating a threat they especially disliked. What the hell, the poor bastard was Israeli, wasn't he? Embassy official. Maybe just that was enough, but when a spook — especially a senior spook — goes down, you don't assume it's an accident, do you?'

'Any chance Mossad will ask for our help?' But Granger knew better. The Mossad was like the kid in the sandbox who never, ever, shared toys. They'd ask for help only if they were, A, desperate, and, B, convinced someone else could give them something they'd never get on their own. Then they'd act like the returning prodigal son.

'They won't confirm that this guy — named Greengold — was Mossad. That might be a little helpful to the Italian cops, might even get their counter-spook agency involved, but if it's been said, there is no evidence of it that Langley knows about.'

But Langley would not think in such terms, Granger realized. So did Jerry. He could see it in his eyes. CIA didn't think in those terms because the intelligence business had become very civilized. You didn't kill off the other guy's assets, because that was bad for business. Then he might do something to your assets, and if you were fighting a guerrilla war on the streets of some foreign city, you were not getting the actual job done. The actual job was to get information back to your government, not to carve notches on your pistol grips. So, the Carabinieri would think in terms of a street crime because any diplomat's person was inviolable to the forces of any other country, protected by international treaty and by a tradition that went all the way back to the Persian Empire under Xerxes.

'Okay, Jerry, you're the man with the trained nose,' Sam observed. 'What are you thinking?'

'I'm thinking there's a nasty ghost out on the street, maybe. This Mossad guy is at a gilt-edged restaurant in Rome, having lunch and a glass of nice wine. Maybe he's making a pickup at a dead drop — I checked the map, the restaurant is a brisk walk from the embassy building, a little too far for a regular lunch place, unless this Greengold guy was a jogging type, and it was the wrong time of day for that. So, unless he was really hot for the chef at Giovanni's, even money it's a dead drop or a meet of some sort. If so, he was set up. Not set up to be ID'd by his opposition, whoever that may be, but ID'd to be whacked. To the local cops, it may look like a robbery. To me, it looks like a deliberate assassination, and expertly done. The victim was instantly incapacitated. No chance to resist in any way. That's how you'd want to take a spook down — you never know how good he might be at self-defense, but if I were an Arab, I'd figure a Mossad guy for the bogeyman. I would not take many chances. No pistol, so he left nothing behind in the form of physical evidence, no bullet, no cartridge case. He takes the wallet to make it look like a robbery, but he killed a Mossad rezident, and he delivered a message, probably. Not that he dislikes Mossad, but that he can kill their people as easy as zipping his pants.'

'You planning a book on the subject, Jerry?' Sam asked lightly. The chief analyst was taking a single factoid of