Teeth of the Tiger

'So, what can I do for you?'

'All of us are here as requested. How soon can we go?'

'How soon do you wish?' Pablo asked.

'This afternoon would be fine, but that might be a little soon for your arrangements.'

'Yes. But what about tomorrow, say about thirteen hundred hours?'

'That would be excellent,' Mustafa responded in pleasant surprise. 'How will the crossing be arranged?'

'I will not be directly involved, you understand, but you will be driven to the border and handed over to someone who specializes in getting people and certain goods into America. You will be required to walk about six kilometers. It will be warm, but not greatly so. Once in America, you will be driven to a safe house outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. There you can either fly to your final destinations or rent cars.'

'Weapons?'

'What exactly will you require?'

'Ideally, we would like AK-47s.'

Pablo shook his head at once. 'Those we cannot supply, but we can get you Uzi and Ingram submachine guns. Nine-millimeter Parabellum caliber, with, say, six thirty-round magazines each, fully loaded for your purposes.'

'More ammunition,' Mustafa said at once. 'Twelve magazines, plus three additional boxes of ammunition for each weapon.'

Pablo nodded. 'That is easily done.' The increased expense would be only a couple of thousand dollars. The weapons would have been bought on the open market, along with the ammunition. They were technically traceable to their origin and/or purchaser, but that was only a theoretical problem, not a practical one. The guns would be mainly Ingrams, not the better-made and more accurate Israeli Uzis, but these people wouldn't care. Who knows, they might even have religious or moral objections to touching a Jewish-made weapon. 'Tell me, how are you set for traveling expenses?'

'We have five thousand American dollars each in cash.'

'You can use that for minor expenses, like food and gasoline, but for other things you need credit cards. Americans will not accept cash to rent cars, and never to buy airplane tickets.'

'We have them,' Mustafa replied. He and each member of the team had Visa cards issued to them in Bahrain. They even had consecutive numbers. All were drawn on an account in a Swiss bank, whose account held just over five hundred thousand dollars. Sufficient to their purposes.

The name on the card, Pablo saw, was JOHN PETER SMITH. Good. Whoever had set this up hadn't made the mistake of using explicitly Middle Eastern names. Just as long as the card didn't fall into the hands of a police officer who might ask Mr. Smith where exactly he came from. He hoped they had been briefed on the American police and their habits.

'Other documents?' Pablo asked.

'Our passports are Qatari. We have international driver's licenses. We all speak acceptable English and can read maps. We know about American laws. We will keep within the speed limits and drive carefully. The nail that sticks up is hammered down. So we will not stick up.'

'Good,' Pablo observed. So, they had been briefed. Some might even remember it. 'Remember that one mistake can ruin the entire mission for all of you. And it is easy to make mistakes. America is an easy country in which to live and move about, but their police are very efficient. If you are not noticed, you are safe from them. Therefore, you must avoid being noticed. Fail in that, and you could all be doomed to failure.'

'Diego, we will not fail,' Mustafa promised.

Fail at what? Pablo wondered, but did not ask. How many women and children will you kill? But it didn't really matter to him. It was a cowardly way to kill, but the rules of honor in his 'friend's' culture were very different from his own. This was business, and that was all he needed to know.

* * *

Three miles, push-ups, and a coffee chaser, and that was life in southern Virginia.

'Brian, you used to carrying a firearm?'

'Usually an M16 and five or six extra mags. Some fragmentation grenades, too, go in the basic load, yeah, Pete.'

'I was talking about side arms, actually.'

'M9 Beretta, that's what I'm used to.'

'Any good with it?'

'It's in my package, Pete. I qualified expert at Quantico, but so did most of my class. No big deal.'

'You used to carrying it around?'

'You mean in civilian clothes? No.'

'Okay, get used to it.'

'Is it legal?' Brian asked.

'Virginia is a shall-issue state. If you've got a clean record, the commonwealth will grant you a concealed- carry permit. What about you, Dominic?'

'I'm still FBI, Pete. I'd feel kinda naked out on the street without a friend.'

'What do you carry?'

'Smith & Wesson 1076. Shoots the ten-millimeter cartridge, double action. The Bureau's gone to the Glock lately, but I like the Smith better.' And, no, I didn't carve a notch in the grips, he didn't add. Though he had thought about it.

'Okay, well, when you're off-campus here, I want you both to carry, just to get used to the idea, Brian.'

A shrug. 'Fair enough.' It beat the hell out of a sixty-five-pound rucksack.

* * *

There was a lot more to it than just Sali, of course. Jack was working on a total of eleven different people, all but one of them Middle Eastern, all in the money business. The one European lived in Riyadh. He was German, but had converted to Islam, which had struck someone as odd enough to deserve electronic surveillance. Jack's university German was good enough to read the guy's e-mails, but they didn't reveal very much. He'd evidently gone native in his habits, didn't even drink beer. He was evidently popular with his Saudi friends — one thing about Islam was that if you obeyed the rules and prayed the correct way, they didn't much care what you looked like. It would have been admirable except for the fact that most of the world's terrorists prayed to Mecca. But that, Jack reminded himself, wasn't the fault of Islam. The night he himself had been born, people had tried to kill him while he was still in his mother's womb — and they'd identified themselves as Catholics. Fanatics were fanatics, the world around. The idea that people had tried to murder his mother was enough to make him want to pick his Beretta.40. His father, well, his dad was able to look after himself, but messing with women constituted a big step over the line, and that was a line you could cross only once and in one direction. There was no coming back.

He didn't remember any of it, of course. The ULA terrorists had all gone off to meet their God — courtesy of the State of Maryland — before he'd entered first grade, and his parents had never talked about it. His sister Sally had, though. She still had dreams about it. He wondered if Mom and Dad had them, too. Did events like that go away eventually? He'd seen things on the History Channel to suggest that World War II veterans still had images of combat return to them at night, and that had been over sixty years ago. Such memories had to be a curse.

'Tony?'

'Yeah, Junior?'

'This guy Otto Weber, what's the big deal? He's about as exciting as vanilla ice cream.'

'If you're a bad guy, do you suppose you wear a neon sign on your back, or do you think you try to hide down in the grass?'

'With the snakes,' Junior completed the thought. 'I know — we're looking for little things.'

'Like I told you. You can do fourth-grade arithmetic. Attach a nose to it. And, yes, you're looking for things that are supposed to be damned near invisible, okay? That's why this job is so much fun. And innocent little things are mostly innocent little things. If he downloads kiddie porn off the 'Net, it's not because he's a terrorist. It's because he's a pervert. That's not a capital offense in most countries.'

'I bet it is in Saudi.'

'Probably, but they don't chase after it, I bet.'