Teeth of the Tiger

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…

'My ass is tired,' Rafi said from the backseat.

'That cannot be helped, my brother,' Abdullah replied from the driver's seat. As driver, he deemed himself to be in temporary command.

'I know that, but my ass is still tired,' Rafi observed.

'We could have taken horses, but they would be too slow, and they can also be hard on the ass, my friend,' Mustafa observed. This pronouncement was greeted by laughter, and Rafi went back to his copy of Playboy.

The map showed easy going until they reached the city of Small Stone. They'd have to be fully awake for that. But for now, the road wound through pleasant hills covered with green trees. It was quite a change from northern Mexico, which had been so much like the sandy hills of home… to which they would never return…

For Abdullah, the driving was a pleasure. The car was not so fine as the Mercedes his father drove, but it sufficed for the moment, and the feel of the wheel was sweet in his hands, as he leaned back and smoked his Winston with a contented smile on his lips. There were people in America who raced cars like this on great oval tracks, and what a pleasure that must be! To drive as fast as you could, to be in competition with others — and to defeat them! That must be better than having a woman… well, almost… or just different, he corrected himself. Now, to have a woman after winning a race, that would be pleasurable indeed. He wondered if there were cars in Paradise. Good, fast ones, like the Formula One cars favored in Europe, hugging the corners, then really letting it go on the straightaways, to drive as fast as car and road allowed. He could try that here. The car was probably good for two hundred kilometers per hour — but, no, their mission was more important.

He flipped his cigarette butt out the window. Just then a white police car went zipping by, with blue stripes on the side. Arkansas State Police. Now that looked like a fast car, and the man inside had a splendid cowboy hat, Abdullah thought. Like every human being on the planet, he'd seen his share of American movies, including the cowboy sort, men on horseback herding cattle, or just shooting it out with handguns in their drinking saloons, settling issues of honor. The imagery appealed to him — but that was what it was supposed to do, he reminded himself. One more attempt by the infidel to seduce the Faithful. To be fair, though, American movies were made mainly for the American audience. How many Arab movies had he seen showing the forces of Salah ad-Din — a Kurd, of all things — crushing the invading Christian Crusaders? They were there to teach history, and to encourage manhood in Arab men, the better to crush the Israelis, which, alas, had not yet happened. So it was, probably, with American Westerns. Their concept of manhood was not all that different from the Arabs', except that they used revolvers instead of the manlier sword. The pistol did, of course, have superior reach, and so Americans were practical fighters, in addition to being very clever at it. No braver than Arabs, of course, just cleverer.

He'd have to be careful of Americans and their handguns, Abdullah told himself. If any of them shot like movie cowboys, their mission could come to a premature end, and that wouldn't do.

He wondered what the policeman in the passing white car carried on his belt — and was he a proficient shot? They could find out, of course, but there was only one way to do that and it would endanger their mission. So, Abdullah watched the police car pull ahead until it faded from view, and he settled down to watching tractor-trailers whiz past while he cruised eastward at a steady sixty-five miles and three cigarettes per hour, plus a grumbling stomach. SMALL STONE 30 MILES.

* * *

'They're getting excited over at Langley again,' Davis told Hendley.

'What did you hear?' Gerry asked.

'A field officer got something strange from a source-agent over in Saudi. Something about how some suspected players were out of town, so to speak, location unknown, but he thinks Western Hemisphere, like ten or so of them.'

'How solid is that?' Hendley asked.

'A 'three' in terms of reliability, though the source is ordinarily well regarded. Some headquarters puke decided to downgrade it, reason unknown.' That was one of the problems at The Campus. They were dependent on others for most of their analysis. Though they had some particularly fine people in their own analysis offices, the real work was done on the other side of the Potomac River, and CIA had blown its share of calls in the past few