Teeth of the Tiger

'Kill women?' Brian asked. That was not part of the Marine ethos.

'It's never happened, as far as I know, but it's a theoretical possibility. So, if that's enough for breakfast, you guys need to think it over.'

'Jesus,' Brian said after Alexander left the room. 'What's lunch going to be like?'

'Surprised?'

'Not completely, Enzo, but the way he just said it like that…'

'Hey, bro, how many times have you wondered why we couldn't simply take care of business ourselves?'

'You're the cop, Enzo. You're the guy who's supposed to say Oh, shit, remember?'

'Yeah, but that shoot of mine in Alabama — well, I kinda stepped a little over the line some, y'know? All the way driving to D.C., I thought over how I'd explain it to Gus Werner. But he didn't blink even a little.'

'So, what do you think?'

'Aldo, I'm willing to listen some more. There's a saying in Texas that there's more men need killin' than horses need stealin'.'

The reversal of roles struck Brian as more than a little surprising. After all, he was the gung ho Marine. Enzo was the guy who was trained to give people their constitutional rights before he slapped the cuffs on.

That they were both able to take a life without having bad dreams later was obvious to the brothers, but this went a little farther than that. This was premeditated murder. Brian usually went into the field with an exquisitely trained sniper under his command, and he knew what they did wasn't far removed from murder, either. But being in uniform made it different. It put some sort of blessing on it. The target was an enemy, and on the battlefield it was everyone's job to look after his own life, and if he failed to do it, well, that was his failing, not that of the man who killed him. But this would be more than that. They'd be hunting individual people down with the deliberate intent of killing them, and that wasn't what he'd been brought up and trained to do. He'd be dressed in civilian clothes — and killing people under those circumstances made him a spy, not an officer of the United States Marine Corps. There was honor in the latter, but damned little in the former, or so he'd been trained to think. The world no longer had a Field of Honor, and real life wasn't a duel in which men had identical weapons and an open field on which to make use of them. No, he'd been trained to plan his operations in a way that gave his enemy no chance at all, because he had men under his command whose lives he was sworn to preserve. Combat had rules. Harsh rules, to be sure, but rules even so. Now he was being asked to set those rules aside and become — what? A paid assassin? The teeth of some notional wild beast? The masked avenger from some old movie on Nick at Nite? This didn't fit into his tidy picture of the real world.

When he'd been sent to Afghanistan, he hadn't — hadn't what? He hadn't disguised himself as a fishmonger on a city street. There'd been no city street in those goddamned mountains. It had been more like a big-game hunt, one in which the game had weapons of its own. And there was honor in such a hunt, and for his efforts he'd gotten the approval of his country: a combat decoration for bravery that he might or might not display.

All in all, it was a lot to consider over his second cup of morning coffee.

'Jesus, Enzo,' he breathed.

'Brian, you know what the dream of every cop is?' Dominic asked.

'To break the law and get away with it?'

Dominic shook his head. 'I had this talk with Gus Werner. No, not to break the law, but just once to be the law. To be God's Own Avenging Sword, was the way he put it — to strike down the guilty without lawyers and other bullshit to get in the way, to see justice done all by yourself. It doesn't happen very often, they say, but, you know, I got to do it down in Alabama, and it felt pretty good. You just have to be sure you're bagging the right mutt.'

'How can you be sure?' Aldo asked.

'If you're not, you back off the mission. They can't hang you for not committing murder, bro.'

'So, it is murder?'

'Not if the mutt has it coming, it isn't.' It was an aesthetic point, but an important one to someone who had already committed murder under the shelter of the law, and had had no bad dreams about it.

* * *

'Immediately?'

'Yes. How many men do we have already?' Mohammed asked.

'Sixteen.'

'Ah.' Mohammed took a sip of a fine French white from the Loire Valley. His guest was drinking Perrier and lemon. 'Their language skills?'

'Sufficient, we think.'

'Excellent. Tell them to make preparations to travel. We'll fly them in to Mexico. There they will meet with our new friends, and travel to America. And once there, they can do their work.'

'Insh'Allah,' he observed. God willing.

'Yes, God willing,' Mohammed said in English, reminding his guest of what language he should be using.

They were in a sidewalk restaurant overlooking the river, off to one side, with no one nearby. Both men spoke normally, two well-dressed men over a friendly dinner, not huddled or conspiratorial in their demeanor. This took some amount of concentration, since some degree of conspiratorial posture came naturally to what they were doing. But neither of them was a stranger to such meetings.

'So, how was it to kill the Jew in Rome?'

'It was very satisfactory, Ibrahim, to feel his body go slack as I cut his spine, and then the surprised look on his face.'

Ibrahim smiled broadly. It wasn't every day they got to kill a Mossad officer, much less a Station Chief. The Israelis would always be their most hated enemies, if not the most dangerous. 'God was good to us that day.'

The Greengold mission had been a recreational exercise for Mohammed. It hadn't even been strictly necessary. Setting up the meet and feeding the Israeli juicy information had been… fun. Not terribly difficult, even. Though it would not soon be repeated. No, Mossad would not let any of its officers do anything without overwatch for some time. They were not fools, and they did learn from their mistakes. But killing a tiger had satisfactions all its own. A pity he had no pelt. But where would he hang it? He had no fixed home anymore, only a collection of safe houses that might or might not be totally safe. But you couldn't worry about everything. You'd never get anything done. Mohammed and his colleagues didn't fear death, only failure. And they had no plans to fail.

'I need the meeting arrangements and so forth. I can take care of travel. Arms will be provided by our new friends?'

A nod. 'Correct.'

'And how will our warriors enter America?'

'That is for our friends to handle. But you will send in a group of three at first, to make sure the arrangements are satisfactorily secure.'

'Of course.' They knew all about operational security. There had been many lessons, none of them gentle. Members of his organization peopled many prisons around the world, those who were unlucky enough to have avoided death. That was a problem, one which his organization had never been able to fix. To die in action, that was noble and courageous. To be caught by a policeman like a common criminal was ignoble and humiliating, but somehow his men found it preferable to die without accomplishing a mission. And Western prisons were not all that terrible for many of his colleagues. Confining, perhaps, but at least the food was regular, and Western nations did not violate their dietary rules.

These nations were so weak and foolish regarding their enemies, they showed mercy to those who gave them none in return. But that was not Mohammed's fault.

* * *

'Damn,' Jack said. It was his first day on the 'black' side of the house. His training in high finance had gone very rapidly, due to his upbringing. His grandfather Muller had taught him well during his infrequent visits to the family home. He and Jack's father were civil to each other, but Grandpa Joe thought real men worked in the trading business rather than in the dirty world of politics — though he had to admit, of course, that his son-in-law had worked out fairly well in Washington. But the money he could have made on Wall Street… why would any man turn