The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [105]
"I need to go over the data more closely, but like I said, he sure acts like a player. If he was a New York Mafia subject, I'd figure him for an apprentice consiglieri."
Jack nearly gagged on his cream soda. "That high up?"
"Golden Rule, Jack. He who has the gold makes the rules. Sali has access to a ton of money. His family's richer than you appreciate. We're talking four or five billion dollars here."
"That much?" Ryan was surprised.
"Take another look at the money accounts he's learning to manage. He hasn't played with as much as fifteen percent of it. His father probably limits what he's allowed to do. He's in the capital-preservation business, remember. The guy who owns the money, his father, won't hand him the whole pile to play with, regardless of his educational background. In the money business, it's what you learn after you hang your degrees on the wall that really matters. The boy shows promise, but he's still following his zipper everywhere he goes. That's not an unusual thing for a rich young kid, but if you have a few gigabucks in your wallet, you want to keep your boy on a leash. Besides, what he appears to be funding-well, what we suspect he's funding-isn't really capital-intensive. You spotted some trades on the margins. That was pretty smart. Did you notice that when he flies home to Saudi, he charters a G-V?"
"Uh, no," Jack admitted. "I didn't look into that. I just figured he flies first-class everywhere."
"He does, same way you and your father used to. Real first class. Jack, nothing is too small to check out."
"What do you think of his credit card usage?"
"Entirely routine, but that's noteworthy even so. He could charge anything if he wanted to, but he seems to pay cash for a lot of expenditures-and he spends less cash than he converts to his own use. Like with those hookers. The Saudis don't care about that, so he's paying cash there because he wants to, not because he has to. He's trying to keep some parts of his life covert for reasons not immediately apparent. Maybe just practice. I would not be surprised to find out that he's got more credit cards than the ones we know about-unused accounts. I'll be riffling through his bank accounts later today. He doesn't really know about how to be covert yet. Too young, too inexperienced, no formal training. But, yes, I think he's a player, hoping to move into the big leagues pretty soon. The young and rich are not known for their patience," Cunningham concluded.
I should have guessed that myself, Junior told himself. I need to think this stuff through better. Another important lesson. Nothing too small to be checked out. What sort of guy are we dealing with? How does he see the world? How does he want to change the world? His father had always told him how important it was to look at the world through the eyes of your adversary, to crawl inside his brain and then look out at the world.
Sali is a guy driven by his passions in women-but was there more to it? Was he hiring the hookers because they were good screws or because he was screwing the enemy? The Islamic world thought of America and the U.K. as essentially the same enemy. Same language, same arrogance, damned sure the same military, since the Brits and Americans cooperated so closely on so many things. That was worth considering. Make no assumptions without looking out through his eyeballs. Not a bad lesson for one lunchtime.
Roanoke slid off to their right. Both sides of I-81 were composed of rolling green hills, mostly farms, many of them dairy farms, judging from all the cows. Green highway signs telling of roads that, for his purpose, led nowhere. And more of the white-painted boxy churches. They passed school buses, but no police cars. He'd heard that some American states put highway police in ordinary-looking cars, ones not very different from his own, but probably with additional radio antennas. He wondered if the drivers wore cowboy hats here. That'd be decidedly out of