The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [109]
"Food," Zuhayr announced. "And drink." One box of doughnuts went into his room, and the other to Mustafa, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes after eleven hours of snoring slumber.
"How did you sleep, my brother?" Abdullah asked the team leader.
"It was a blessed experience, but my legs are still stiff." His hand shot out for the large cup of coffee, and he snatched a maple-frosted doughnut from the box, downing half of it in one monstrous bite. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the TV to see what was happening in the world this day. The Israeli police had shot and killed another holy martyr before he'd been able to trigger his bodysuit of Semtex.
"Dumb fuck," Brian observed. "How hard can it be to pull a string?"
"I wonder how the Israelis twigged to him. You gotta figure they have paid informants inside that Hamas bunch. This has got to be a code-worded Major Case for their police, lots of resources assigned, plus help from their spook shops."
"They torture people, too, don't they?"
Dominic nodded after a second's consideration. "Yeah, supposedly it's controlled by their court system and all that, but they interrogate a little more vigorously than we do."
"Does it work?"
"We talked that one around at the Academy. You put a bowie knife to somebody's dick, chances are he'll see the wisdom of singing, but it's not something anybody wanted to think much about. I mean, yeah, in the abstract it can even seem funny, but doing it yourself-probably not very palatable, y'know? The other question is, how much good information does it really generate? The guy's just as likely to say anything to get the knife away from his little friend, make the pain stop, whatever. Crooks can be really good liars unless you know more than they do. Anyway, we can't do it. You know, the Constitution and all that. You can threaten them with bad jail time, and scream at them, but even then there're lines you can't cross."
"They sing anyway?"
"Mostly. Interrogation's an art form. Some guys are really good at it. I never really had much of a chance to learn it, but I did see some guys play the game. The real trick is to develop a rapport with the mutt, saying stuff like, yeah, that nasty little girl really asked for it, didn't she? Makes you want to puke afterward, but the name of the game is getting the bastard to fess up. After he gets into the joint, his neighbors will hassle him a lot worse than I ever would. One thing you don't want to be in a prison is a child abuser."
"I believe it, Enzo. That friend of yours in Alabama, maybe you did him a favor."
"Depends on if you believe in hell or not," Dominic responded. He had his own thoughts about that.
Wills was early this morning. Jack saw him on his workstation when he came in. "You beat me in, for once."
"My wife's car came back from the shop. Now she can take the kids to school for a change," he explained. "Check the feed from Meade," he directed.
Jack lit up his computer, sat through the start-up procedures, and typed in his personal encryption code to access the inter-agency traffic download file from the downstairs computer room.
The top of the electronic pile was a FLASH-priority dispatch from NSA Fort Meade to CIA, and FBI, and Homeland Security, one of whom would have surely briefed the President on it this morning. Strangely, there was almost nothing to it, just a numeric message, a set of numbers.
"So?" Junior asked.
"So, it might be a passage from the Koran. The Koran has a hundred fourteen suras-chapters-with