The sum of all fears - Tom Clancy [338]
"We have enriched the Soviet Union to the tune of ten thousand marks."
The driver grunted. "Doch, and that "merchandise" must have cost at least two thousand to manufacture! What is it they call that ?"
"A "volume discount"." Keitel couldn't decide whether to laugh or not. "Our Russian friends learn fast. Or perhaps the muzhik cannot count past ten."
"What we plan to do is dangerous."
"That is true, but we are being well paid."
"You think I do this for money?" the man asked, an edge on his voice.
"No, nor do I. But if we must risk our lives, we might as well be rewarded for it."
"As you say, Colonel."
It never occurred to Keitel that he really did not know what he was doing, that Bock had not told him everything. For all his professionalism, Keitel had neglected to remind himself that he was doing business with a terrorist.
The air was wonderfully still, Ghosn thought. He'd never experienced really heavy snow. The storm was lingering longer than expected, was expected to continue for another hour or so. It had dropped half a meter, which, along with the flakes still in the air, muffled sound to a degree he had never known. It was a silence you could hear, he told himself standing on the porch.
"Like it, eh?" Marvin asked.
"Yes."
"When I was a boy, we got really big storms, not like this one, storms that dropped feet of snow - like a whole meter at once, man - and then it would really get cold, like twenty or thirty below. You go outside, and it's like you're on another planet or something, and you wonder what it was like a hundred years ago, living in a tipi with your woman and your babies and your horses outside, everything clean and pure like it's supposed to be. It must have been something, man, it must have really been something."
The man was poetic, but foolish, Ibrahim thought. So primitive a life, most of your children died before their first year had ended, starving in winter because there was no game to hunt. What fodder was there for the horses, and how did they get to it under the snow? How many people and animals froze to death? Yet he idolized the life. That was foolish. Marvin had courage. He had tenacity, and strength, and devotion, but the fact of the matter was that he didn't understand the world, didn't know God, and lived according to a fantasy. It really was unfortunate. He could have been a valuable asset.
"When do we leave?"
"We'll give the highway boys a couple of hours to scrape the roads. You take the car - it has front-wheel drive and you won't have any problem driving. I'll take the van. There's no hurry, right? We don't want to take chances?"
"That is right."
"Let's go inside 'fore we both freeze."
"They really gotta clean up the air in this place," Clark said, when he finished coughing.
"It is pretty bad," Chavez agreed.
They'd rented a small place near the airport. Everything they needed was tucked away in closets. They'd made their contacts on the ground. The usual service team would be sick when the 747 came in. It would be a fiscal illness, of course. It turned out that getting the two CIA officers aboard wasn't all that hard. The Mexicans did not especially like the Japanese, at least not the government kind, whom they regarded as more arrogant than Americans - which, to a Mexican citizen, was remarkable. Clark checked his watch. Nine more hours until it swooped in through the pollution. Just a brief courtesy visit to see the Mexican president, supposedly, then off to Washington to see Fowler. Well, that made things easy for Clark and Chavez.
They started off for Denver just at midnight. The Colorado state-roads teams had done their usual professional job. What could not be scraped was salted and sanded, and the usual one-hour drive took merely an additional fifteen minutes. Marvin handled the check-in, paying for three nights with cash, and making a show of getting a receipt for his expense account. The desk clerk noted