Teeth of the Tiger

spilled out, and there was no saving him. The police were there, too, and a police captain, who'd arrived from his station on nearby Friedrichstrasse, told Max Weber to back his streetcar off the body. It revealed much — and little. The body had been chopped into four irregular pieces, as though ripped apart by a predatory creature from prehistory. The ambulance, which had come, was stopped not quite in the middle of the street — the street cops were waving the cars along, but the drivers and passengers took the time to look at the carnage, with half of them staring with grim fascination and the other half turning away in horror and disgust. Even some reporters were there, with their cameras and notepads — and Minicams for the TV scribblers.

They needed three body bags to collect the body. An inspector from the transit authority arrived to question the motorman, whom the police already had in hand, of course. All in all, it took about an hour to remove the body, inspect the streetcar, and clear the road. It was done rather efficiently, in fact, and by 12:30 everything was back in Ordnung.

Except for Mahmoud Mohamed Fadhil, who had to go to his hotel and light up his computer to send an e-mail to Mohammed Hassan al-Din, now in Rome, for instructions.

By that time, Dominic was on his own computer, composing an e-mail for The Campus to tell them of the day's work, and ask for instructions on the next assignment.

CHAPTER 22 SPANISH STEPS

'You're kidding,' Jack said at once.

'God, grant me a dumb adversary,' Brian responded. 'That's one prayer they teach at the Basic School. Trouble is, sooner or later they're going to get smart.'

'Like crooks,' Dominic agreed. 'The problem with law enforcement is that we generally catch the dumb ones. The smart ones we rarely even hear about. That's why it took so long to do the Mafia, and they're not really all that smart. But, yeah, it's a Darwinian process, and we'll be helping to breed brains into them one way or another.'

'News from home?' Brian asked.

'Check the time. They won't even be getting in for another hour,' Jack explained. 'So, the guy really got run over?'

Brian nodded. He'd gone down and been run over like the official Mississippi state animal — a squashed dog on the road. 'By a streetcar. Good news is that it covered up the mess.' Tough luck, Mr. Raghead.

* * *

It wasn't even a mile to the St. Elizabeth's Krankenhaus on Invalidenstrasse, where the ambulance crew carried in the body parts. They'd called ahead, and so there was no particular surprise at the three rubberized bags. These were duly laid on a table in pathology — there was no point in their going to casualty receiving, because the cause of death was so obvious as to be blackly comical. The only hard part was to retrieve blood for a toxicology scan. The body had been so mauled as to be largely drained of blood, but internal organs — mainly the spleen and brain — had enough to be drawn out with a syringe and sent off to the lab, which would look for narcotics and/or alcohol. The only other thing to look for in the postmortem exam was a broken leg, but the passage of the streetcar over the body — they had his name and ID from his wallet, and the police were checking the local hotels to see if maybe he'd left a passport behind, so that the appropriate embassy could be notified — meant that even a broken knee would be almost impossible to discover. Both of his legs had been totally crushed in a matter of less than three seconds. The only surprising thing was that his face was placid. One would have expected open eyes and a grimace of pain from the death, but, then, even traumatic death had few hard-and- fast rules, as the pathologist knew. There was little point in doing an in-depth examination. Maybe if he'd been shot they could find a bullet wound, but there was no reason to suspect that. The police had already talked to seventeen eyewitnesses who'd been within thirty meters of the event. All in all, the pathology report could just as easily have been a form letter as a signed official document.

* * *

'Jesus,' Granger observed. 'How the hell did they arrange that?' Then he lifted his phone. 'Gerry? Come on down. Number three is in the bag. You have to see this report.' After replacing the phone, he thought aloud, 'Okay, now where do we send them next?'

That was settled on a different floor. Tony Wills was copying all of Ryan's downloads, and the one at the top of the download file was impressive in its bloody brevity. So, he lifted his phone for Rick Bell.

* * *

It was hardest of all for Max Weber. It took half an hour for the initial denial and shock to wear off. He started vomiting, his eyes replaying the sight of the crumpled body sliding below his field of vision, and the horrible thump-thump of his streetcar. It hadn't been his fault, he told himself. That fool, das Idiot, had just fallen down right before him, like a drunk might do, except it was far too early for a man to have too many beers. He'd had accidents before, mostly fender work on cars that had turned too abruptly in front of him. But he'd never seen and hardly heard of a fatal accident with a streetcar. He'd killed a man. He, Max Weber, had taken a life. It was not his fault, he told himself about once a minute for the next two hours. His supervisor gave him the rest of the day off, and so he clocked out and drove home in his Audi, stopping at a Gasthaus a block from his home because he didn't want to drink alone this day.

* * *

Jack was running through his downloads from The Campus, with Dom and Brian standing by, having a late lunch and beers. It was routine traffic, e-mail to and from people suspected of being players, the majority of them ordinary citizens of various countries who'd once or twice written magic words that had been taken note of by the Echelon intercept system at Fort Meade. Then there was one like all the others, except that the addressee was 56MoHa@eurocom.net.

'Hey, guys, our pal on the street was about to have a meet with another courier, looks like. He's writing our old friend Fifty-six MoHa, and requesting instructions.'

'Oh?' Dominic came over to look. 'What does that tell us?'

'I just have a Internet handle — it's on AOL: Gadfly 097@aol.com. If he gets a reply from MoHa, maybe we'll know something. We think he's an operations officer for the bad guys. NSA tagged him about six months ago. He encrypts his letters, but they know how to crack that one, and we can read most of his e-mails.'

'How quick will you see a reply?' Dominic wondered.

'Depends on Mr. MoHa,' Jack said. 'We just have to sit tight and wait.'

'Roger that,' Brian said from his seat by the window.

* * *

'I see young Jack didn't slow them down,' Hendley observed.

'Did you think he would? Jeez, Gerry, I told you,' Granger said, having already thanked God for His blessings, but quietly. 'Anyway, now they want instructions.'

'Your plan was to take down four targets. So, who's number four?' the Senator asked.

It was Granger's turn to be humble. 'Not sure yet. To be honest, I didn't expect them to work this efficiently. I've been kinda hoping that the hits so far might generate a target of opportunity, but nobody's prairie-dogging yet. I have a few candidates. Let me run through them this afternoon.' His phone rang. 'Sure, come on over, Rick.' He set the phone down. 'Rick Bell says he has something interesting.'

The door opened in less than two minutes. 'Oh, hey, Gerry. Glad you're here. Sam' — Bell turned his head —'we just had this come in.' He handed the rough printout of the e-mail across.

Granger scanned it. 'We know this guy…'

'Sure as hell. He's a field ops officer for our friends. We figured he was based in Rome. Well, we figured right.' Like all bureaucrats — especially the senior ones — Bell enjoyed patting his own back.

Granger handed the page across to Hendley. 'Okay, Gerry, here's number four.'

'I don't like serendipity.'