Teeth of the Tiger

away from that? Muller had never said that to Little Jack, of course, but his opinion was clear enough. In any case, Jack could have gotten an entry-level job in any of the large houses, and probably worked up the line pretty fast from there. But what mattered to him now was that he had skipped through the financial side of The Campus and was now in the Operations Department — it wasn't actually named that, but that's what it was called by its members. 'They're that good?'

'What's that, Jack?'

'NSA intercept.' He handed the sheet across. Tony Wills read it.

The intercept had identified a known associate of terrorists — exactly what function he performed was not known yet, but he'd been positively identified from voiceprint analysis.

'It's the digital phones. They generate a very clean signal, easy for the voiceprint computer to ID the voices. I see they haven't ID'd the other guy.' Wills handed the sheet back.

The nature of the conversation was innocuous, so much so that one might wonder why the call had been placed. But some people just liked to chat on the phone. And, maybe, they were talking in code, discussing biological warfare, or a campaign to set bombs in Jerusalem. Perhaps. More likely, they were just passing the time. There was a lot of that in Saudi Arabia. What impressed Jack was that the call had been picked up and read in real time.

'Well, you know how digital phones work, right? They're always broadcasting the HERE I AM signal to the local cell, and every phone has its unique addressing code. Once we identify that code, it's just a matter of listening in when the phone rings, or the phone holder makes a call. Similarly, we can ID the number and phone of the inbound caller. The hard part is to get the identity in the first place. Now they have another phone ident for the computer to monitor.'

'How many phones do they keep track of?' Jack asked.

'Just over a hundred thousand, and that's just in Southwest Asia. Nearly all of them are dry holes, except for the one in ten thousand that counts — and sometimes they can show real results,' Wills told him.

'So, to bag a cold call, a computer listens in and keys on 'hot' words?'

'Hot words and hot names. Unfortunately, so many people are named Mohammed over there — it's the most popular given name in the world. A lot of them go by patronymics or nicknames. Another problem is that there's a big market in cloned phones — they clone them in Europe, mainly London, where most of the phones have the international software. Or a guy can get six or seven phones and use them once each before tossing them. They're not dumb. They can get overconfident, though. Some of them end up telling us a lot of things, and occasionally it's useful. It all goes in the big NSA/CIA book, to which we have access on our terminals.'

'Okay, who's this guy?'

'His name is Uda bin Sali. Rich family, close friends of the king. The big daddy's a very senior Saudi banker. He has eleven sons and nine daughters. Four wives, a man of commendable vigor. Not a bad guy, supposedly, but he's a little too doting with his kids. Gives them money instead of attention, like a Hollywood big shot. Uda here discovered Allah in a big way back in his late teens, and he's on the extreme right of the Wahabi branch of Sunni Islam. Doesn't like us very much. This boy we keep track of. He might be a gateway into their banking arrangements. His CIA file has a picture. He's about twenty-seven, five-eight, slender build, neatly trimmed beard. Flies to London a lot. Likes the ladies he can purchase by the hour. Not married yet. That's unusual, but if he's gay he conceals it well. The Brits have gotten girls into his bed. They report that he's vigorous, about what you'd expect for his age, and fairly inventive.'

'Hell of a thing for a trained intelligence officer to do,' Jack observed.

'Lots of services enlist the help of hookers,' Wills explained. 'They don't mind talking, and for the right wad of cash they'll do just about anything. Uda here likes chicken-in-a-basket. Never tried that myself. Asian specialty. Know how to call up his dossier?'

'Nobody taught me,' Jack replied.

'Okay.' Wills frog-walked his swivel chair over and demonstrated. 'This is the general index. Your access password is SOUTHWEST 91.'

Junior duly typed in the password, and the dossier came up as an Acrobat graphics file.

The first photo was probably from his passport, followed by six more, in a more informal format. Jack Jr. managed not to blush. He'd seen his share of Playboys while growing up, even in Catholic schools. Will continued the day's lesson.

'You can learn a lot from how a guy does it with women. Langley has a shrink who analyzes that in great detail. It's probably one of the annexes on this file. At Langley, it's called 'Nuts and Sluts' information. The doc is named Stefan Pizniak. Harvard Medical School professor. As I recall, he says this kid is normal in his drives, given his age, liquidity, and his social background. As you'll see, he hangs out a lot with merchant bankers in London, like a new kid learning the business. The word is that he's smart, affable, and handsome. Careful and conservative in his money work. He does not drink. So, he is somewhat religious. Doesn't flaunt it or lecture others about it, but lives in accordance with the major rules of his religion.'

'What makes him a bad guy?' Jack asked.

'He talks a lot to people we know about. There's no word on who he hangs with in Saudi. We've never put any coverage on him in his own backyard. Even the Brits haven't, and they have a lot more assets in place. CIA doesn't have much, and his profile isn't high enough to merit a closer look, or so they think. It's a shame. His daddy's supposed to be a good guy. It'll break his heart to find out his son's hanging with the wrong crowd at home.' With that wisdom imparted, Wills went back to his own workstation.

Junior examined the face on his computer screen. His mom was pretty good at reading people from a single look, but it was a skill she hadn't passed along to him. Jack had trouble enough figuring women out — along with most of the men in the world, he comforted himself. He continued to stare at the face, trying to read the mind of someone six thousand miles away, who spoke a different language and adhered to a different religion. What thoughts circulated behind those eyes? His father, he knew, liked the Saudis. He was especially close to Prince Ali bin Sultan, a prince and senior official in the Saudi government. Young Jack had met him, but only in passing. A beard and a sense of humor were the only two things he remembered. It was one of Jack Sr.'s core beliefs that all men were fundamentally the same, and he'd passed that opinion along to his son. But that also meant that, just as there were bad people in America, so there were also bad people elsewhere in the world, and his country had recently had some hard lessons from that sad fact. Unfortunately, the sitting President hadn't quite figured out what to do about it yet.

Junior read on through the dossier. So, this was how it began here at The Campus. He was working a case — well, kinda working some sort of case, he corrected himself. Uda bin Sali was working at being an international banker. Sure enough, he moved money around. His father's money? Jack wondered. If so, his daddy was one very wealthy son of a bitch. He played with all the big London banks — London was still the world's banking capital. Jack would never have guessed that the National Security Agency had the sort of ability to crack this kind of thing.

A hundred million here, a hundred million there, pretty soon you were talking about real money. Sali was in the capital-preservation business, which meant not so much growing the money entrusted to him as making sure the lockbox had a really good lock. There were seventy-one subsidiary accounts, sixty-three of which were identified by bank, number, and password, so it seemed. Girls? Politics? Sports? Money management? Cars? The oil business? What did rich Saudi princelings talk about? That was a big blank spot in the files. Why didn't the Brits listen in? The interviews with his hookers hadn't revealed very much, except that he was a good tipper for those girls who'd shown him an especially good time in his house in Berkeley Square… an upscale part of town, Jack noted. He mainly got around by taxi. Owned a car — a black Aston Martin convertible, no less — but didn't drive it much, the British information revealed. Did not have a chauffeur. Went to the embassy a lot. All in all, it was a lot of information that revealed not very much. He remarked on this to Tony Wills.

'Yeah, I know, but if he turns up hinky, you can be sure there're two or three things in there that ought to have jumped off the page at you. That's the problem with this damned business. And, remember, we're seeing the processed 'take.' Some poor schlub had to take really raw data and distill it down to this. Exactly what significant facts got lost along the way? No way to tell, my boy. No way to tell.'

This is what my dad used to do, Junior reminded himself. Trying to find diamonds in a bucket full of shit. He'd expected it to be easier, somehow. All right, so what he had to do was find money moves that were not easily explained. It was the worst sort of scut work, and he couldn't