Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [40]
What did he need for the mission? A few people. Believers, all. Four. No more than that. One needed expertise with explosives. Untraceable automobiles—no problem there, of course. Good language skills. They had to look the part, which wouldn’t be hard, given the target’s location; few people could discern the subtleties of skin color, and he spoke English without much accent, so that wouldn’t present a problem, either.
Most of all, though, each member of his team had to be a true believer. Willing to die. Willing to kill. It was easy for outsiders to think that the former was more important than the latter, but while there were many willing to throw their lives away, it was far more useful to discard your life only for something to advance the cause. They thought of themselves as Holy Warriors and sought after their seventy-two virgins but were in fact young people with few prospects, to whom religion was the path to greatness they would otherwise never achieve. It was remarkable that they were too stupid even to see that. But that was why he was the leader and they the followers.
12
EVEN IF SHE HAD not been to the motel before, she would have had little trouble finding it, sitting beside what the town of Beatty optimistically called Main Street, which was in truth nothing more than a half-mile gap of thirty-mile-per-hour road between highways 95 and 374.
The hotel itself—the Motel 6 of Death Valley—had, despite its outward appearance, relatively clean rooms that smelled of disinfectant soap. Not only had she seen worse, but she had applied her … special skills in worse places. And with worse men, for much less money. If anything, the name of the motel bothered her most of all.
A Keräşen Tatar by birth, Allison—her real name was Aysılu, which in Turkik meant Beauty as Moon—had inherited from her mother and father and ancestors a healthy respect for omens, both subtle and overt, and the name Motel 6 of Death Valley certainly qualified as the latter, she believed.
No matter. Omens were mercurial, and meaning was always open to interpretation. In this case the motel’s name was unlikely to apply to her; her subject was too entranced by her to be of any threat, either directly or indirectly. And what she’d come here to do required little thinking on her part, so well had she been trained. And it helped that men were simple, predictable creatures, driven by the basest of needs. “Men are clay,” her first instructor, a woman named Olga, had once told her, and even at the tender age of eleven she’d known the truth of it, having seen it in the lingering gazes of the boys in her village, and even in the always watching eyes of some of the men.
Even before she’d started going through her changes and her body had begun to blossom, she’d instinctively known which was not only the fairer sex but the stronger one as well. Men were physically strong, and that had its benefits and pleasures, but Allison plied a different kind of strength, one that had served her well, keeping her alive in dangerous situations and keeping her comfortable in hard times. And now, at twenty-two, with her village far behind her, her strength was making her wealthy. Better still, unlike many of her previous employers, her current one hadn’t required an audition from her. Whether that was a function of their strict religious ideals or simply one of professionalism, she didn’t know, but they had taken her bona fides at face value, along with a recommendation—though from whom was unclear. Certainly