Teeth of the Tiger

'Yep. They collapse, and then they can't breathe. Takes about thirty seconds for the drug to take hold, and then they drop down, and, after that, it's just a matter of mechanics. It looks like a heart attack afterward, and it tests out like that, too. Perfect for what we do.'

'Damn,' Jack said. 'So, you guys were in Charlottesville, too, eh?'

'Yeah.' This was Brian. 'Not much fun. I had a little boy die in my arms, Jack. That was pretty tough.'

'Well, nice shooting.'

'They weren't very smart,' Dominic evaluated them. 'No smarter than street hoods. No training. They didn't check their backs. I guess they figured they didn't have to, with automatic weapons. But they learned different. Still, we were lucky — Son of a bitch!' he observed, as they got to the Ferraris.

'Damn. They are pretty,' Jack agreed at once. Even Brian was impressed.

'That's the old one,' Dominic told them. '575M, V-twelve, five hundred-plus horses, six-speed transmission, two hundred twenty big ones to drive it away. The really cool one's the Ferrari Enzo. That baby's the fucking bomb, guys. Six hundred sixty horses. They even named it after me. See, back in the far corner.'

'How much?' Junior asked.

'The far side of six hundred thousand bucks. But if you want to get something hotter, you gotta call Lockheed Bur-bank.' And sure enough, the car had twin openings on the front that looked like jet intakes. The entire machine looked like personal transportation for Luke Skywalker's rich uncle.

'Still knows his cars, eh?' Jack observed. A private jet probably got better mileage, too, but the car was sleekly pretty.

'He'd rather sleep with a Ferrari than with Grace Kelly,' Brian snorted. His own priorities were rather more conventional, of course.

'You can ride a car longer than a girl, people.' Which was one version of efficiency. 'Damn, I bet that honey moves pretty fast.'

'You could get a private pilot's license,' Jack suggested.

Dominic shook his head. 'Nah. Too dangerous.'

'Son of a bitch.' Jack almost laughed out loud. 'As compared with what you've been doing?'

'Junior, I'm used to that, y'know?'

'You say so, man.' Jack just shook his head. Damn, those were pretty cars. He liked his Hummer at home. In the snow he could drive anywhere, and he'd win any collision on the highway, and, if it wasn't exactly sporty, what the hell? But the little boy in him could understand the list on his cousin's face. If Maureen O'Hara had been born a car, maybe she'd be one of these. The red body color would have gone nicely with her hair. After ten minutes, Dominic figured he'd drooled enough, and they walked on.

'So, we know everything about the subject except for what he looks like?' Brian asked half a block up the street.

'Correct,' Jack confirmed. 'But how many Arabs do you expect there to be in the Bristol?'

'A lot of them in London. Trick is going to be to ID the subject. Doing the job right on the sidewalk ought not to be too hard.' And, looking around, that seemed likely. Street traffic wasn't as thick as in New York or London, but it wasn't Kansas City after dark either, and doing the job in broad daylight had its own attractions. 'I guess we stake out the hotel's main entrance, and whatever side entrance there is. Can you see if you can get more data from The Campus?'

Jack checked his watch and did the mental arithmetic. 'They should be open for business in two hours or so.'

'Then check your e-mail,' Dominic told him. 'We'll wander around and look for a likely subject.'

'Right.' They walked across the street and headed back to the Imperial. Once back in his room, Jack flopped onto the bed and grabbed a nap.

* * *

There was nothing he had to do right now, Fa'ad thought, so he might as well get some air. Vienna had plenty of things to look at, and he hadn't exhausted them all yet. So, he dressed properly, like a businessman, and walked outside.

* * *

'Bingo, Aldo.' Dominic had a cop's memory for faces, and they had practically walked into this one.

'Isn't he—'

'Yep. Atef's pal from Munich. You wanna bet he's our boy?'

'Sucker bet, bro.' Dominic cataloged the target. Middle Eastern as hell, medium height, five feet ten inches or so, light build at about hundred fifty pounds, black and brown, slightly Semitic nose, dresses well and expensively, like a businessman, walks around with purpose and confidence. They walked within ten feet of him, careful not to stare, even with their sunglasses. Gotcha, sucker. Whoever these people were, they didn't know dick about hiding in plain sight. They walked to the corner.

'Damn, that was easy enough,' Brian observed. 'Now what?'

'We let Jack check it out with the home office and just be cool, Aldo.'

'Roger, copy that, bro.' He unconsciously checked his coat to make sure the gold pen was in place, as he might have checked his holster for his M9 Beretta automatic in uniform and in the field. It felt as though he were an invisible lion in a Kenyan field full of wildebeest. It didn't get much better than that. He could pick out the one he wanted to kill and eat, and the poor bastard didn't even know he was being stalked. Just like they do it. He wondered if this guy's colleagues would see the irony of having such tactics used against them. It wasn't how Americans were conditioned to act, but then all that stuff about showdowns on main street at high noon was something invented by Hollywood, anyway. A lion was not in the business of risking his life, and as they'd told him in the Basic School, if you found yourself in a fair fight, then you hadn't planned it very well beforehand. Fighting fair was okay in the Olympic Games, but this wasn't that. No big-game hunter walked up to a lion making noise and holding a sword. Instead, he did the sensible thing: He took cover behind a log and did it with a rifle from two hundred yards or so. Even the Masai tribesmen of Kenya, for whom killing a lion was the passage into manhood, had the good sense to do it in a squad-sized unit of ten, and not all of them teenagers, to make sure it was the lion's tail they took back to the kraal. It wasn't about being brave. It was about being effective. Just being in this business was dangerous enough. You did your best to take every element of unnecessary risk out of the equation. It was business, not a sport. 'Do him out here on the street?'

'Worked before, Aldo, didn't it? I don't figure we can hit him in the hotel saloon.'

'Roge-o, Enzo. Now what do we do?'

'Play tourist, I suppose. The opera house looks impressive. Let's take a look…. The sign says they're doing Wagner's The Valkyries. I've never seen that one.'

'I've never seen an opera in my life. I suppose I ought to someday — part of the Italian soul, ain't it?'

'Oh yeah, I got more soul than I can control, but I'm partial to Verdi.'

'My ass. When you been to the opera?'

'I have some of the CDs,' Dominic answered, with a smile. As it turned out, the State Opera House was a magnificent example of imperial architecture, built and executed as though for God Himself to attend a performance, and bedecked in scarlet and gold. Whatever its faults might have been, the House of Hapsburg had shown impressive taste. Dominic thought briefly about checking out the cathedrals in town, but decided it wasn't fitting, given the reason they were here. In all, they walked around for two hours, then headed back to the hotel and up to Jack's room.

* * *

'No joy from the home office,' Jack told them.

'No problem. We saw the guy. He's an old friend from Munich,' Brian reported. They walked into the bathroom and opened the faucets, which would put out enough white noise to annoy any microphones in the room. 'He's a pal of Mr. Atef. He was there when we popped him in Munich.'

'How can you be sure?'

'A hundred percent sure, we can't be — but what are the odds that he just happened to be in both cities, and the right hotel, man?' Brian asked reasonably.

'Hundred percent certainty is better,' Jack objected.

'I agree, but when you're on the right side of thousand-to-one odds, you put the money down and toss the dice,' Dominic responded. 'By Bureau rules, he's at least a known associate, somebody we'd take aside to