The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [127]
"It's a guy he chats on the 'Net with. He mainly talks to him about money moves."
"Finally!" Wills observed, checking the document on his own workstation. "They want photos of the guy, a whole spread. Maybe Langley is finally going to put some coverage on him. Praise the Lord!" He paused. "Got a list of the people he e-mails to?"
"Yep. Want it?" Jack keyed it up and hit the PRINT command. In just fifteen seconds, he handed the sheet over to his roomie. "Numbers and dates of e-mails. I can print up all the interesting ones, and the reasons I find them interesting, if you want."
"We'll let that sit for the moment. I'll get this up to Rick Bell."
"I'll hold the fort."
DID YOU SEE THE NEWS ON TV, Sali had written to a semi-regular correspondent. THIS OUGHT TO GIVE THE AMERICANS A STOMACHACHE!
"Yeah, it sure will," Jack told the screen. "But you just tipped your hand, Uda. Oops."
Sixteen more martyrs, Mohammed thought, watching a TV in Vienna's Bristol Hotel. It was only painful in the abstract. Such people were, really, expendable assets. They were less important than he, and that was the truth, because of his value to the organization. He had the looks and the language skills to travel anywhere, and the brainpower to plan his missions well.
The Bristol was an especially fine hotel, just across the street from the even more ornate Imperial, and the minibar had some good cognac, and he liked good cognac. The mission had not gone all that well he'd hoped for hundreds of dead Americans, instead of several dozen, but with all the armed police and even some armed citizens, the high end of his expectations had been overly optimistic. But the strategic objective had been achieved. All Americans now knew that they were not safe. No matter where they might live, they could be struck by his Holy Warriors, who were willing to trade their lives for the Americans' sense of security. Mustafa, Saeed, Sabawi, and Mehdi were now in Paradise-if that place really existed. He sometimes thought it was a tale told to impressionable children, or to the simpleminded who actually listened to the preaching of the imams. You had to choose your preachers carefully, since not all the imams saw Islam the way Mohammed did. But they did not want to rule all of it. He did-or maybe just a piece of it, just so long as it included the Holy Places.
He couldn't talk aloud about matters like this. Some senior members of the organization really did believe, they were more to the conservative-reactionary-side of the Faith than were those such as the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia. To his eyes the latter were just the corrupt rich of that hideously corrupt country, people who mouthed the words while indulging their vices at home and abroad, spending their money. And money was easily spent. You could not take it to the afterlife, after all. Paradise, if it truly existed, had no need of money. And if it did not exist, then there was no use for money, either. What he wanted, what he hoped to-no, what he would have in his lifetime-was power, the ability to direct people, to bend others to his will. For him, religion was the matrix that set the shape of the world that he would be controlling. He even prayed on occasion, lest he forget that shape-more so when he met with his "superiors." But as the chief of operations, it was he and not they who determined their organization's course through the obstacles placed in their path by the idolaters of the West. And in choosing the path, he also chose the nature of their strategy, which came from their religious beliefs, which were easily guided by the political world in which they operated. Your enemy shaped your strategy, after all, since his strategy was that which had to be thwarted.
So, now, the Americans would know fear as they'd not known it before. It was not their political capital or their financial capital