'I don't like coincidences either, Gerry, but if you win the lottery you don't give the money back,' Granger said, thinking that Coach Darrell Royal had been right: Luck didn't go looking for a stumblebum. 'Rick, is this guy worth making go away?'
'Yes, he is,' Bell confirmed, with an enthusiastic nod. 'We don't know all that much about him, but what we know is all bad. He's an operations guy — of that we are a hundred percent sure, Gerry. And it feels right. One of his people sees another go down, reports in, and this guy gets it and replies. You know, if I ever meet the guy who came up with the Echelon program, I might have to buy him a beer.'
'Reconnaissance-by-fire,' Granger observed, patting himself very firmly on the back. 'Damn, I knew it would work. You shake a hornet's nest, and some bugs are bound to come out.'
'Just so they don't sting your ass,' Hendley warned. 'Okay, now what?'
'Turn 'em loose before the fox goes to ground,' Granger replied instantly. 'If we can bag this guy, maybe we can really shake something valuable loose from the tree.'
Hendley turned his head. 'Rick?'
'It works for me. Go-mission,' he said.
'Okay, then it's a go-mission,' Hendley agreed. 'Get the word out.'
The nice thing about electronic communications was that they did not take very long. In fact, Jack already had the important part.
'Okay, guys, Fifty-six MoHa's first name is Mohammed — not great news; it's the most common first name in the world — and he says he's in Rome, at the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Vittorio Veneto, number one twenty- five.'
'I've heard of that one,' Brian said. 'It's expensive, pretty nice. Our friends like to stay in nice places, looks like.'
'He's checked in under the name Nigel Hawkins. That's English as hell. You suppose he's a Brit citizen?'
'With a first name of Mohammed?' Dominic wondered aloud.
'Could be a cover name, Enzo,' Jack replied, pricking Dominic's balloon. 'Without a picture, we can't guess about his background. Okay, he's got a cell phone, but Mahmoud — that's the guy who saw the bird go down this morning — must be supposed to know it.' Jack paused. 'Why didn't he just call in, I wonder? Hmm. Well, the Italian police have sent us stuff that came from electronic intercepts. Maybe they're watching the airwaves, and our boy is being careful…?'
'Makes sense, but why… but why is he sending stuff out over the 'Net?'
'He thinks it's secure. NSA has cracked a lot of the public encryption systems. The vendors don't know that, but the boys at Fort Meade are pretty good at that stuff. Once you crack it, it stays cracked, and the other guy never knows.' In fact, he didn't know the real reason. The programmers could be, and often had been, persuaded to insert trapdoors either for patriotism or for cash, and, often enough, for both. 56MoHa was using the most expensive such program, and its literature proclaimed loudly that
'So, we can read their mail?' Dominic asked.
'Some of it,' Jack confirmed. 'The Campus downloads most of what NSA gets at Fort Meade, and when they cross-deck it to CIA for analysis, we intercept
Dominic figured a lot out in a matter of seconds.
'Don't have room for a third, right?' Jack asked.
''Fraid not, Junior, not in a 911.'
'Okay, I'll catch a plane to Rome.' Jack walked to the phone and called downstairs. Within ten minutes, he was booked on an Alitalia 737 to Leonardo da Vinci International, leaving in an hour and a half. He considered changing his socks. If there was anything in life that incurred his loathing, it was taking his shoes off in an airport. He was packed in a few minutes and out the door, stopping only to thank the concierge on the way out. A Mercedes taxi hustled him out of town.
Dominic and Brian had hardly unpacked at all and were ready to go in ten minutes. Dom called the valet while Brian went back to the outside magazine kiosk and got plastic-coated maps to cover the route south and west. Between that and the Euros he'd picked up earlier in the day, he figured they were set, assuming Enzo didn't drive them off an Alp. The ugly-blue Porsche arrived at the front of the hotel, and he came over as the doorman forced their bags in the tiny forward-sited trunk. In another two minutes, he was head-down in the maps looking for the quickest way to the Sudautobahn.
Jack got aboard the Boeing after enduring the humiliation that was now a global cost of flying commercial — it was more than enough to make him think back to Air Force One with nostalgia, though he also remembered that he'd gotten used to the comfort and attention with remarkable speed, and only later learned what normal people had to go through, which was like running into a brick wall. For the moment, he had hotel accommodations to worry about. How to do that from an airplane? There was a pay phone attached to his first-class seat, and so he swiped his black card down the plastic receiver and made his first ever attempt to conquer European telephones. What hotel? Well, why not the Excelsior? On his second attempt, he got through to the front desk and learned that, indeed, they had several rooms available. He bagged a small suite, and feeling very good about himself, he took a glass of Tuscan white from the friendly stewardess. Even a hectic life, he'd learned, could be a good life, if you knew what your next step was, and for the moment his horizon was one step away at a time.
German highway engineers must have taught the Austrians everything they knew, Dominic thought. Or maybe the smart ones had all read the same book. In any case, the road was not unlike the concrete ribbons that crisscrossed America, except that the signage was so different as to be incomprehensible, mainly because it had no language except for city names — and they were foreign, too. He figured out that a black number on a white background inside a red circle was the speed limit, but that was in kilometers, three of which fitted into two miles with parking room left over. And the Austrian speed limits were not quite as generous as the German ones. Maybe they didn't have enough doctors to fix all the screwups, but, even in the growing hills, the curves were properly banked and the shoulders gave you enough bailout room in case somebody got seriously confused with left and right. The Porsche had a cruise control, and he pegged his to five klicks over the posted limit, just to have the satisfaction of going a little too fast. He couldn't be sure that his FBI ID would get him out of a ticket here, as it did all across the U.S. of A.
'How far, Aldo?' he asked the navigator in the Death Seat.
'Looks like a little over a thousand kilometers from where we are now. Call it ten hours, maybe.'
'Hell, that's just warming-up time. May need gas in another two hours or so. How you fixed for cash?'
'Seven hundred Monopoly bucks. You can spend these in Italy, too, thank God — with the old lira you went nuts doing the math. Traffic ain't bad,' Brian observed.
'No, and it's well behaved,' Dominic agreed. 'Good maps?'
'Yeah, all the way down. In Italy, we'll need another one for Rome.'
'Okay, ought not to be too hard.' And Dominic thanked a merciful God that he had a brother who could read maps. 'When we stop for gas, we can get something to eat.'
'Roger that, bro.' Brian looked up to see mountains in the distance — no way to tell how far off they were, but it must have been a forbidding sight back when people walked or rode horses to get around. They must have had a lot more patience than modern man, or maybe a lot less sense. For the moment, the seat was comfortable, and his brother was not quite being maniacal in his driving.
