The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [137]
But his e-mail line never chirped without an echo chirp at Thames House, and those fragments of signals went to GCHQ-Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham, north and west of London, from which they were relayed via satellite to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and from there to Fort Meade, Maryland, via fiber-optic cable, for inspection mainly by one of the supercomputers in the headquarters buildings' enormous and strangely dungeonlike basement. From there, material regarded as important went to CIA's Langley, Virginia, headquarters, after transiting a certain building's flat roof, after which the signals were digested by yet another set of computers.
"Something new here, from Mr. Fifty-six," Junior said almost to himself, meaning 56MoHa@eurocom.net. He had to think for a few seconds. It was mostly numbers. But one of the numbers was the electronic address of a European commercial bank. Mr. 56 wanted some money, or so it appeared, and now that they knew that Mr. 56 was a "player," they had a new bank account to look at. That would happen the following day. It might even develop a name and a mailing address, depending on the individual bank's in-house procedures. But probably not. All the international banks were gravitating toward identical procedures, the better to maintain their competitive advantages, one over the other, until the playing field was as flat as a football pitch, as everyone adopted the most depositor-friendly procedures possible. Every person had his own version of reality, but everyone's money was equally green-or orange in the case of the Euro, decorated as it was with buildings never built and bridges never crossed. Jack made appropriate notes and shut his machine down. He'd be having dinner tonight with Brian and Dominic, just to catch up with family stuff. There was a new seafood restaurant on U.S. 29 that he wanted to check out. And his working day was done. Jack made a few notes for the next Monday morning-he didn't expect to be in on Sunday, national emergency or not. Uda bin Sali merited a very close examination. Exactly how close, he wasn't sure, though he'd begun to suspect that Sali would be meeting one or two people he knew well.
"How soon?" It had been a bad question from Brian Caruso, but coming from Hendley's mouth it had rather more immediacy.
"Well, we have to put a plan of some sort together," Sam Granger replied. For everyone here, it was the same. What had been a slam dunk in the abstract became more complex when you had to face the reality of it. "First, we need a set of targets who make sense, and then a plan for servicing them in a way that also makes some sort of sense."
"Operational concept?" Tom Davis wondered aloud.
"The idea is to move logically-from our point of view, but to an outsider it should appear random-from target to target, making people stick their heads up like prairie dogs so's we can take them one at a time. It's simple enough in concept, but more difficult in the practical world." It was a lot easier to move chess pieces around a board than it was to manage people to move, on command, to the squares desired, a fact often lost on movie directors. Something as prosaic as a missed bus connection or a traffic accident, or the need to take a piss, could play hell with the most elegant theoretical plan. The world, one had to remember, was analog, not digital, in the way it operated. And "analog" actually meant "sloppy."
"So, you saying we need a psychiatrist?"
Sam shook his head. "They have some of those at Langley. It hasn't helped them very much."
"Ain't that the truth." Davis laughed. But this was not a time for humor. "Speed," he observed.
"Yes, the faster the better," Granger agreed. "Deny them the time to react and think."
"Also, better to deny them the ability to know anything's going on," said Hendley.
"Make people disappear?"
"Too many people have apparent heart attacks, and