Teeth of the Tiger

They'd all been briefed in. To all appearances, it was an expensive ballpoint, gold-plated, with obsidian on the clip. By depressing the clip and turning the nib cover, you switched the point from a real pen to a hypodermic with a lethal transfer agent. It would paralyze the victim in fifteen to twenty seconds, and kill him in three minutes, with no cure, and a very transient signature in the body. As the pen went around the conference table, the executives invariably felt the hypo point, and then experimented with using it for a simulated hit, mostly as an ice-pick strike, though Rounds handled it like a diminutive sword.

'It would be nice to try it on a dry run,' he observed quietly.

'Anyone here want to volunteer as the victim?' Granger asked the table. No heads nodded. The mood of the room didn't surprise him much. It was time for a sober pause, the sort of thing that comes over a man when he signs his application for life insurance, a product that is valuable only if you are dead, which rather takes the fun out of the moment.

'Fly them to London together?' Hendley asked.

'Correct.' Granger nodded, and turned back to his business voice. 'We have them scout out the target, pick their moment, and make their hit.'

'And wait to see the results?' Rounds asked, rhetorically.

'Correct. Then they can fly off to the next target. The whole operation should not take more than a week. Then we fly them home and await developments. If somebody taps into his money pile after his demise, we'll probably know, right?'

'We ought to,' Bell confirmed. 'And if anyone purloins it, we'll know where it goes.'

'Excellent,' Granger observed. After all, that was what 'reconnaissance-by-fire' meant.

* * *

They wouldn't be here long, the twins both thought. They were quartered in adjoining rooms at the local Holiday Inn, and this Sunday afternoon they were both watching TV with one guest.

'How's your mom?' Jack asked.

'Fine, doing a lot of stuff with the local schools — parochial ones. A little more than a teacher's aide, but not actually teaching. Dad's working some new project — supposedly Boeing is back looking at an SST, supersonic airliner. Dad says they'll probably never build it, unless Washington coughs up a lot of money, but with the Concorde retired people are thinking about it again, and Boeing likes to keep their engineers busy. They're a little nervous about the Airbus people, and they don't want to be caught with their pants down if the French start getting ambitious.'

'How was the Corps?' Jack asked Brian.

'The Corps is the Corps, cuz. It just rolls along, keeping busy for the next war that'll come along.'

'Dad was worried when you went to Afghanistan.'

'It was a little exciting. The people there, they're tough, and they're not dumb, but they're not trained that well, either. So, when we bumped heads with 'em, we came out ahead. If we saw something that looked hinky, we called air in on it, and that usually took care of things.'

'How many?'

'How many did we take out? Some. Not enough, but some. The Green Berets went in first, and the Afghans learned from that that a stand-up fight was not in their interest. Mostly, we did pursuit and reconnaissance, bird- dogging for the airedales. We had a CIA guy with us, and a signals-intelligence detachment. The bad guys used their radios a little too much. When we got a hit, we'd move in to about a mile or so and give it a look-see, and if it was interesting enough we'd call in air and scramble the hell out of it. Scary to watch,' Brian summarized.

'I bet.' Jack popped open a can of beer.

'So this Sali guy, the one with the girlfriend, Rosalie Parker?' Dominic asked. Like most cops, he had a good memory for names. 'You said that he was jumpin' up and down about the shootings?'

'Yup,' Jack said. 'Thought they were just swell.'

'So who was the cheerleading with?'

'Pals he e-mails to. The Brits have his phones tapped, and the e-mails — well, as I said, I can't tell you about the e-mails. Those European phone systems aren't anywhere near as secure as people think — I mean, everybody knows about intercepting cell phones and stuff, but the cops over there pull stuff we can't do here. The Brits especially, they use intercepts to track the IRA guys. I heard that the rest of the European countries are even freer to act.'

'They are,' Dominic assured him. 'At the Academy, we had some in the national Academy program — that's like a doctoral course for cops. They'd talk about that sort of thing after you got a few drinks into them. So, this Sali guy liked what those mutts did, eh?'

'Like his team won the Super Bowl,' Jack replied at once.

'And he bankrolls them?' Brian asked.

'That's right.'

'Interesting,' was all Brian had to say after getting that question answered.

* * *

He could have stayed another night, but he had things to do in the morning, and so he was driving back to London in his Aston Martin Vanquish, Bowland black. Its interior was charcoal, and its handmade twelve-cylinder engine was pushing out most of its 460 horsepower as he headed east on the M4 at a hundred miles per hour. In its way, the car was better than sex. It was a pity Rosalie wasn't with him, but — he looked over at his companion — Mandy was an agreeable bed warmer, if a little too skinny for his usual tastes. If only she could put some meat on her bones, but European fashion did not encourage that. The fools who determined the rules of women's bodies were probably pederasts who wished them all to look like young boys. Madness, Sali thought. Pure madness.

But Mandy enjoyed riding in this car, more than Rosalie did. Rosalie, sadly, was fearful of driving fast, not as trusting of his skills as she should have been. He hoped he could take this car home — he'd fly it there, of course. His brother had a fast car of his own, but the dealer had told him that this four-wheeled rocket topped out at over three hundred kilometers per hour — that was 196 miles per hour — and the Kingdom had some fine, flat, straight roads. Okay, so he had a cousin who flew Tornado fighters for the Royal Saudi Air Force, but this car was his, and that made all the difference. Unfortunately, the police here in England would not allow him to exercise it properly — one more traffic ticket and he might lose his driver's license, the spoilsports — but at home there would be no such problems. And after seeing what it could really do, he'd fly it back to Gatwick and use it to excite women, which was almost as good as just driving it. Certainly Mandy was properly excited by it. He'd have to get her a nice Vuitton bag and have it messengered to her flat tomorrow. It didn't hurt to be generous with women, and Rosalie needed to learn that she had some competition.

Racing into town as rapidly as the traffic and the police allowed, he zoomed past Harrods, through the vehicle tunnel, and past the Duke of Wellington's house before turning right onto Curzon Street and then left onto Berkeley Square. A flash of his lights told the man he paid to guard his parking place to move his car, and he was able to park just in front of his three-story brownstone town house. With continental manners, he got out of the car and raced around to open Mandy's door and gallantly escorted her up the steps to the huge oak front door, and, smiling, held it open for her. In a few minutes, she'd be opening an even nicer door for him, after all.

* * *

'The little bugger's back,' Ernest observed, making the proper note of the time on his clipboard. The two Security Service officers were in a British Telecom van parked fifty yards away. They'd been there for about two hours. This young Saudi madman drove as though he were the reincarnation of Jimmy Clark.

'I suppose he had a better weekend than we did,' Peter agreed. Then he turned to punch the buttons to activate various wiretap systems in the Georgian town house. These included three cameras whose tapes were collected every third day by a penetration team. 'He is a vigorous little bastard.'

'Probably uses Viagra,' Ernest thought aloud, and somewhat enviously.

'One must be a good sport, Ernie, my lad. It will cost him two weeks of our pay. And for what she is about to receive, she will surely be truly grateful.'

'Bugger,' Ernest observed sourly.

'She's thin, but not that thin, boyo.' Peter had himself a good laugh. They knew what Mandy Davis charged her 'tricks,' and, like men everywhere, they wondered what special things she might do to earn it, all while holding her in contempt. As counterintelligence officers, they did not quite have the degree of sympathy a seasoned police constable might have had for relatively unskilled women trying to earn their way. Seven