The Italians turned out good airplane drivers in addition to good people for race cars. The pilot positively kissed the runway, and the rollout was as welcome as always. He'd flown too much to be as antsy about it as his father had once been, but, like most people, he felt safer walking or traveling on something he could see. Here also he found Mercedes taxicabs, and a driver who spoke passable English and knew the way to the hotel.
Highways look much the same all over the world, and for a moment Jack wondered where the hell he was. The land outside the airport looked agricultural, but the pitch of the roofs was different than at home. Evidently, it didn't snow much here, they were so shallow. It was late spring, and it was warm enough that he could wear a short-sleeve shirt, but it wasn't oppressive in any way. He'd come to Italy with his father once on official business — an economic meeting of some sort, he thought — but he'd been ridden around by an embassy car all the time. It was fun to pretend to be a prince of the realm, but you didn't learn to navigate that way, and all that stood out in his memory were the places he'd seen. He didn't know a single thing about how the hell he'd gotten there. This was the city of Caesar and a lot of other names that identified people whom history remembered for having done things good and bad. Mostly bad, because that was how history worked. And that, he reminded himself, was why he was in town. A good reminder, really, that he was not the arbiter of good and bad in the world, just a guy working backhandedly for his country, and so the authority to make such a decision did not rest entirely on his shoulders. Being president, as his father had been for just over four years, could not have been a fun job, despite all the power and importance that came with it. With power came responsibility in direct proportion, and if you had a conscience, that had to wear pretty hard on you. There was comfort in just doing things other people thought necessary. And, Jack reminded himself, he could always say no, and while there might be consequences, they would not be all that severe. Not as severe as the things he and his cousins were doing, anyway.
Via Vittorio Veneto looked more business than touristy. The trees on the sides were rather lame looking. The hotel was, surprisingly, not a tall building at all. Nor did it have an ornate entrance. Jack paid off the cabdriver and went inside, with the doorman bringing his bags. The inside was a celebration of woodwork, and the staff were welcoming as they could be. Perhaps this was an Olympic sport at which all Europeans excelled, but someone led him to his room. There was air-conditioning, and the cool air in the suite was welcoming indeed.
'Excuse me, what's your name?' he asked the bellman.
'Stefano,' the man replied.
'Do you know if there is a man named Hawkins here — Nigel Hawkins?'
'The Englishman? Yes, he is three doors away, right down the corridor. A friend?'
'He's a friend of my brother's. Please don't say anything to him. Perhaps I can surprise him,' Jack suggested, handing him a twenty-Euro note.
'Of course, signore.'
'Very good. Thank you.'
This had to be dumb operational art, Jack told himself, but if they didn't have a photo of the bird, they had to get some idea of what he looked like. With that done, he lifted the phone and tried to make a call.
'You have an incoming call,' Brian's phone started saying in low tones, repeating itself three times before he fished it out of his coat pocket.
'Yeah.' Who the hell was calling him? he wondered.
'Aldo, it's Jack. Hey, I'm in the hotel — the Hotel Excelsior. Want me to see if I can get you guys some rooms here? It's pretty nice. I think you guys would like it here.'
'Hold on.' He set the phone down in his lap. 'You'll never believe where Junior's checked in to.' He didn't have to identify it.
'You're kidding,' Dominic responded.
'Nope. He wants to know if he should get us a reservation. What do I tell him?'
'Damn…' Some quick thought. 'Well, he's our intel backup, isn't he?'
'Sounds a little too obvious to me, but if you say so' — he picked the phone back up—'Jack, that's affirmative, buddy.'
'Great. Okay, I'll set it up. Unless I call back and say no, you come on in here.'
'Roger that one, Jack. See ya.'
'Bye,' Brian heard, and hit the kill button. 'You know, Enzo, this doesn't sound real smart to me.'
'He's there. He's on the scene, and he's got eyes. We can always back out if we have to.'
'Fair enough, I guess. Map says we're coming up on a tunnel in about five miles.' The clock on the dash said 4:05. They were making good time, but heading straight at a mountain just past the town or city of Badgastein. Either they needed a tunnel or a big team of goats to clear that hill.
Jack lit up his computer. It took him ten minutes to figure out how to use the phone system for that purpose, but he finally got logged on, to find his mailbox brimming with bits and bytes targeted at him. There was an attaboy from Granger for the completed mission in Vienna, though he hadn't had a thing to do with it. But below that was an assessment from Bell and Wills on 56MoHa. For the most part, it was disappointing. Fifty-six was an operations officer for the bad guys. He either did things or planned things, and one of the things he'd probably done or planned had gotten a lot of people killed in four shopping malls back at home, and so this bastard needed to meet God. There were no specifics about what he'd done, how he'd been trained, how capable he was, or whether or not he was known to carry a gun, all of which was information he'd like to see, but after reading the decrypted e-mails he reencrypted them and saved them in his ACTION folder to go over with Brian and Dom.
The tunnel was like something in a video game. It went on and on to infinity, though at least the traffic inside wasn't piled up in a fiery mass as had happened a few years before in the Mont Blanc tunnel between France and Switzerland. After a period of time that seemed to last half of forever, they came out the other side. It looked to be downhill from here.
'Gas plaza ahead,' Brian reported. Sure enough, there was an ELF sign half a mile away, and the Porsche's tank needed filling.
'Gotcha. I could use a stretch and a piss.' The service plaza was pretty clean by American standards, and the eatery was different, without the Burger King or Roy Rogers you expected in Virginia — the men's room plumbing was all
'Company card, man,' Brian said soothingly, and tossed over a pack of cookies. 'Let's boogie, Enzo. Italy awaits.'
'Fair enough.' The six-cylinder engine purred back to life, and they went back on the road.
'Good to stretch your legs,' Dominic observed as he went to his top gear.
'Yeah, it helps,' Brian agreed. 'Four hundred fifty miles to go, if my addition's right.'
'Walk in the park. Call it six hours, if the traffic's okay.' He adjusted his sunglasses and shook his shoulders some. 'Staying in the same hotel with our subject — damn.'
'I've been thinking. He doesn't know dick about us, maybe doesn't even know he's being hunted. Think about it: two heart attacks, one in front of a witness; and a traffic accident, also with a witness he knows. That's pretty bad luck, but no overt suggestion of hostile action, is there?'
'In his place, I'd be a little nervous,' Dominic thought aloud.
'In his place, he probably already is. If he sees us in the hotel, we're just two more infidel faces, man. Unless he sees us more than once, we're down in the grass, not up on the scope. Ain't no rule says it
'I hope you're right, Aldo. That mall was scary enough to last me a while.'
'Concur, bro.'
This wasn't the towering part of the Alps. That lay to the north and west, though it would have been bad on the legs had they been walking it, as the Roman legions had done, thinking their paved roads were a blessing. Probably better than mud, but not that much, especially humping a backpack that weighed about as much as his Marines had carried into Afghanistan. The legions had been tough in their day, and probably not all that different from the guys who did the job today in camouflaged utilities. But back then they'd had a more direct way of dealing with bad guys. They'd killed their families, their friends, their neighbors, and even their dogs, and, more to the
