Teeth of the Tiger

body's gone, it's all-the-way gone. No exhumation to check for drugs and stuff.'

'So, we did do it? What did we use?' Ryan asked.

'Jack, I do not know, and I do not want to know what, if anything, we had to do with his untimely death. Nor do I have any desire to find out. Nor should you, okay?'

'Tony, how the hell can you be in this business and not be curious?' Jack Jr. demanded.

'You learn what is not good to know, and you learn not to speculate on such things,' Wills explained.

'Uh-huh,' Jack reacted dubiously. Sure, but I'm too young for that shit, he didn't say. Tony was good at what he did, but he lived inside a box. So did Sali right now, Jack thought, and it wasn't a good place to be. And besides, we did waste his ass. Exactly how, he didn't know. He could have asked his mom about what drugs or chemicals there might be that could accomplish this mission, but, no, he couldn't do that. She'd sure as hell tell his father, and Big Jack would sure as hell want to know why his son had asked such a question — and might even guess the answer. So, no, that was out of the question. All the way out.

With the official government traffic on Sali's death, Jack started looking for NSA and related intercepts from other interested sources.

There was no further reference to the Emir in the daily traffic. That had just come and gone, and previous references were limited to the one Tony had pulled up. Similarly, his request for a more global search of signals records at Fort Meade and Langley had not been approved by the people upstairs, disappointingly but not surprisingly. Even The Campus had its limits. He understood the unwillingness of the people upstairs to risk having somebody wonder who'd made such a request, and, not finding an answer, to make a deeper query. But there were thousands of such requests back and forth every day, and one more couldn't raise that much of a ruckus, could it? He decided not to ask, however. There was no sense in being identified as a boat rocker this early into his new career. But he did instruct his computer to scan all new traffic for the word 'Emir,' and, if it came up, he could log it and then have a firmer case for his special inquiry the next time, if there was a next time. Still, a title like that — to his mind, it was indicative of the ID for a specific person, even if the only reference CIA had about it was 'probably an in-house joke.' The judgment had come from a senior Langley analyst, which carried a lot of weight in that community, and therefore in this one as well. The Campus was supposed to be the outfit that corrected CIA's mistakes and/or inabilities, but since they had fewer people on staff, they had to accept a lot of ideas that came from the supposedly disabled agency. It did not make all that much logical sense, but he hadn't been consulted when Hendley had set the place up, and therefore he had to assume that the senior staff knew their business. But as Mike Brennan had told him about police work, assumption was the mother of all screwups. It was also a widely known adage of the FBI. Everybody made mistakes, and the size of any mistake was directly proportional to the seniority of the man making it. But such people didn't like to be reminded of that universal truth. Well, nobody really did.

* * *

They bought the clothes off the rack. They were generally like what one would buy in America, but the differences, while individually subtle, added up to an entirely different look. They also got shoes to match the outfits, and, after changing at their hotel, they went back out on the street.

The passing grade came when Brian was stopped on the street by a German citizen asking directions to the Hauptbahnhoff, at which time Brian had to respond in English that he was new here, and the German woman backed away with an embarrassed smile and buttonholed somebody else.

'It means the main train station,' Dominic explained.

'So, why can't she catch a cab?' Brian demanded.

'We live in an imperfect world, Aldo, but now you must look like a good Kraut. If anyone else asks you, just say Ich bin ein Auslander. It means 'I'm a foreigner,' and that'll get you out of it. Then they'll probably ask the question in better English than you'd hear in New York.'

'Hey, look!' Brian pointed to the Golden Arches of a McDonald's, a more welcome sight than the Stars and Stripes over the U.S. Consulate, though neither felt like eating there. The local food was simply too good. By nightfall they were back at the Hotel Bayerischer, enjoying just that.

* * *

'Well, they're in Munich, and they spotted the subject's building and mosque, but not him yet,' Granger reported to Hendley. 'They eyeballed his lady friend, though.'

'Things going smoothly, then?' the Senator asked.

'No complaints to this point. Our friend is not being looked at by the German police. Their counterintelligence service knows who he is, but they're not running any sort of case on him. They've had some problems with domestic Muslims, and some of them are being covered, but this guy hasn't popped up on the radar screen yet. And Langley hasn't pressed the issue. Their relations with Germany aren't all that good at the moment.'

'Good news and bad news?'

'Right.' Granger nodded. 'They can't feed us much information, but we don't have to worry about fooling a tail. The Germans are funny. If you keep your nose clean and everything's in Ordnung, you're reasonably safe. If you step over the line, they can make your life pretty miserable. Historically, their cops are very good, but their spooks are not. The Soviets and the Stasi both had their spook shop thoroughly penetrated, and they're still living that down today.'

'They do black ops?'

'Not really. Their culture is too legalistic for that. They raise honest people who play by the rules, and that's a crippling influence on special operations — those they do try occasionally crater badly. You know, I bet the average German citizen even pays his taxes on time, and in full.'

'Their bankers know how to play the international game,' Hendley objected.

'Yeah, well, maybe that's because international bankers don't really recognize the concept of having a country to be loyal to,' Granger responded, sticking the needle in slightly.

'Lenin once said the only country a capitalist knows is the ground he stands on when he makes a deal. There are some like that,' Hendley allowed. 'Oh, did you see this?' He handed over the request from downstairs to root around for somebody called 'the Emir.'

The director of operations scanned the page and handed it back. 'He doesn't make much of a case for it.'

Hendley nodded. 'I know. That's why I denied it. But… but, you know, it caused his instincts to twitch, and he had the brains to ask a question.'

'And the boy's smart.'

'Yes, he is. That's why I had Rick set him up with Wills as a roommate and training officer. Tony is bright, but he doesn't reach outside very much. So, Jack can learn the business and also learn about its limitations. We'll see how much he chafes from that. If this kid stays with us, he just might go places.'

'You think he has his father's potential?' Granger wondered. Big Jack had been a king spook before going on to bigger things.

'I think he might grow into it, yes. Anyway, this 'Emir' business strikes me as a fundamentally good idea on his part. We don't know much about how the opposition operates. It's a Darwinian process out there, Sam. The bad guys learn from their antecedents, and they get smarter — on our nickel. They're not going to offer themselves up to get a smart bomb in the ass. They're not going to try to be TV stars. Good for the ego, maybe, but fatal. A herd of gazelles doesn't knowingly head toward the lion pride.'

'True,' Granger agreed, thinking back to how his own ancestor had handled obstreperous Indians in the Ninth U.S. Cavalry Regiment. Some things didn't change much. 'Gerry, the problem is, all we can do about their organizational model is to speculate. And speculation is not knowledge.'

'So, tell me what you think,' Hendley ordered.

'Minimum two layers between the head of it all: Is it one man or a committee? We do not and cannot know right now. And the shooters: We can get all those we want, but that's like cutting grass. You cut it, it grows, you cut it, it grows, ad infinitum. You want to kill a snake, best move is to take off the head. Okay, fine, we all know that. Trick is finding the head, because it's a virtual head. Whoever it is, or are, they're operating a lot like we are, Gerry. That's why we're doing a recon-by-fire, to see what we can shake loose. And we have all of our analytical troops looking for that, here, and at Langley, and Meade.'