Teeth of the Tiger

'He's honest and very, very smart. He really ought to be a judge. That's where honest lawyers belong.'

'Doesn't pay very much.' Jack's official salary at The Campus was well above anything any federal employee made. Not bad for entry level.

'That is a problem, but—'

'But there's nothing all that admirable about poverty, my dad says. He toyed with the idea of zeroing out salaries for elected officials so that they'd have to know what real work was, but he eventually decided that it would make them even more susceptible to bribery.'

The accountant picked up on that: 'You know, Jack, it's amazing how little you need to bribe a member of Congress. Makes the bribes hard to identify,' the CPA groused. 'Like being down in the weeds for an aircraft.'

'What about our terrorist friends?'

'Some of them like a comfortable life. A lot of them come from moneyed families, and they like their luxuries.'

'Like Sali.'

Dave nodded. 'He has expensive tastes. His car costs a lot of money. Very impractical. The mileage it gets must be awful, especially in a city like London. The gas prices over there are pretty steep.'

'But mainly he takes cabs.'

'He can afford it. It probably makes sense. Parking a car in the financial district must be costly, too, and the cabs in London are good.' He looked up. 'You know that. You've been to London a lot.'

'Some,' Jack agreed. 'Nice city, nice people.' He didn't have to add that a protective detail of Secret Service agents and local cops didn't hurt much. 'Any further thoughts on our friend Sali?'

'I need to go over the data more closely, but like I said, he sure acts like a player. If he was a New York Mafia subject, I'd figure him for an apprentice consiglieri.'

Jack nearly gagged on his cream soda. 'That high up?'

'Golden Rule, Jack. He who has the gold makes the rules. Sali has access to a ton of money. His family's richer than you appreciate. We're talking four or five billion dollars here.'

'That much?' Ryan was surprised.

'Take another look at the money accounts he's learning to manage. He hasn't played with as much as fifteen percent of it. His father probably limits what he's allowed to do. He's in the capital-preservation business, remember. The guy who owns the money, his father, won't hand him the whole pile to play with, regardless of his educational background. In the money business, it's what you learn after you hang your degrees on the wall that really matters. The boy shows promise, but he's still following his zipper everywhere he goes. That's not an unusual thing for a rich young kid, but if you have a few gigabucks in your wallet, you want to keep your boy on a leash. Besides, what he appears to be funding — well, what we suspect he's funding — isn't really capital-intensive. You spotted some trades on the margins. That was pretty smart. Did you notice that when he flies home to Saudi, he charters a G-V?'

'Uh, no,' Jack admitted. 'I didn't look into that. I just figured he flies first-class everywhere.'

'He does, same way you and your father used to. Real first class. Jack, nothing is too small to check out.'

'What do you think of his credit card usage?'

'Entirely routine, but that's noteworthy even so. He could charge anything if he wanted to, but he seems to pay cash for a lot of expenditures — and he spends less cash than he converts to his own use. Like with those hookers. The Saudis don't care about that, so he's paying cash there because he wants to, not because he has to. He's trying to keep some parts of his life covert for reasons not immediately apparent. Maybe just practice. I would not be surprised to find out that he's got more credit cards than the ones we know about — unused accounts. I'll be riffling through his bank accounts later today. He doesn't really know about how to be covert yet. Too young, too inexperienced, no formal training. But, yes, I think he's a player, hoping to move into the big leagues pretty soon. The young and rich are not known for their patience,' Cunningham concluded.

I should have guessed that myself, Junior told himself. I need to think this stuff through better. Another important lesson. Nothing too small to be checked out. What sort of guy are we dealing with? How does he see the world? How does he want to change the world? His father had always told him how important it was to look at the world through the eyes of your adversary, to crawl inside his brain and then look out at the world.

Sali is a guy driven by his passions in women — but was there more to it? Was he hiring the hookers because they were good screws or because he was screwing the enemy? The Islamic world thought of America and the U.K. as essentially the same enemy. Same language, same arrogance, damned sure the same military, since the Brits and Americans cooperated so closely on so many things. That was worth considering. Make no assumptions without looking out through his eyeballs. Not a bad lesson for one lunchtime.

* * *

Roanoke slid off to their right. Both sides of I-81 were composed of rolling green hills, mostly farms, many of them dairy farms, judging from all the cows. Green highway signs telling of roads that, for his purpose, led nowhere. And more of the white-painted boxy churches. They passed school buses, but no police cars. He'd heard that some American states put highway police in ordinary-looking cars, ones not very different from his own, but probably with additional radio antennas. He wondered if the drivers wore cowboy hats here. That'd be decidedly out of place, even in an area with so many cows. 'The Cow,' the Second Sura of the Koran, he thought. If Allah tells you to slaughter a cow, you must slaughter it without asking too many questions. Not an old cow, nor a young one, just a cow pleasing to the Lord. Were not all sacrifices pleasing to Allah, so long as they were not sacrifices founded in conceit? Surely they were, if offered in the humility of the Faithful, for Allah welcomed and was pleased by the offerings of the truly Faithful.

Yes.

And he and his friends would make more sacrifices by slaughtering the unbelievers.

Yes.

Then he saw a sign for INTERSTATE HIGHWAY 64—but it was to the west, the wrong one. They had to go east, to cross the eastern mountains. Mustafa closed his eyes and remembered the map he'd looked at so many times. North for about an hour, then east. Yes.

* * *

'Brian, those shoes are going to come apart in the next few days.'

'Hey, Dom, I ran my first four-and-a-half-minute mile in these,' the Marine objected. You remembered and treasured such moments.

'Maybe so, but next time you try that, they're going to come apart and beat the shit out of your ankle.'

'Think so? Bet you a buck you're wrong.'

'You're on,' Dominic said at once. They shook hands formally on the wager.

'They look pretty scruffy to me, too,' Alexander observed.

'You want me to buy new T-shirts, too, Mom?'

'They'll self-destruct in another month,' Dominic thought aloud.

'Oh, yeah! Well, I outshot your ass with my Beretta this morning.'

'Luck happens,' Enzo sniffed. 'See if you can make it two in a row.'

'I'll put five bucks on that.'

'Deal.' Another handshake. 'I could get rich this way,' Dominic said. Then it was time to think about dinner. Veal Piccata tonight. He had a thing for good veal, and the local stores had nice stuff. Pity about the calf, but he hadn't been the one to cut its throat.

* * *

There: I-64, next exit. Mustafa was tired enough that he might have given the driving over to Abdullah, but he wanted to finish himself, and he figured he could handle another hour. They were heading for a pass in the next range of mountains. Traffic was heavy, but in the other direction. They climbed up the highway toward… yes, there it was, a shallow mountain pass with a hotel on the south side — and then out onto a vista of a most pleasant valley to the south. A sign proclaimed its name, but the letters were too confusing for him to get them into his head