The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [138]
"You suppose they have any of our agencies penetrated?" the former senator wondered aloud. The other two in the room winced at the suggestion.
"Depends on what you mean." Davis took the question. "A penetration agent? That would be hard to arrange, absent a really juicy bribe, and even then it would be hard to set up, unless the Agency had a guy who went to them looking for a bankroll. Maybe that is a possibility," he added after a moment's reflection. "The Russians were always niggardly with money-they didn't have that much hard currency to toss around. These people, hell, they have more than they need. So maybe "
"But that works for us," Hendley thought. "Not too many people at the Agency know we exist. So, if they start thinking CIA is offing people, they can use their penetration agent, if any, to tell them it's not happening?"
"So then their expertise is counterproductive to them?" Granger speculated.
"They'd think 'Mossad,' wouldn't they?"
"Who else?" Davis asked in return. "Their own ideology works against them." It had been a ploy rarely-but sometimes successfully-used against KGB. Nothing like making the other guy feel clever. And if it made it tough for the Israelis, nobody in the American intelligence community would lose much sleep over it. "Ally" or not, the Israelis were not entirely beloved by their American counterparts. Even the Saudi spooks played with them, because national interests often overlapped in the most unlikely of ways. And for this series of plays, Americans would be looking out only for the mother country, and doing so completely off the books.
"The targets we have identified, where are they?" Hendley asked.
"All in Europe. They tend to be bankers or communications people. They move money around, or they handle messages, do briefings. One seems to gather intelligence. He travels a lot. Maybe he scouted locations for yesterday, but we haven't been on him long enough to know. We have some targets who do comms, but we want to leave those alone. They're too valuable. The other concern is to avoid targets whose demise will tell the opposition how we twigged to them. It has to appear random. I think for some we set it up in such a way that the opposition think they've gone over the hill. Took the money and bugged out-grabbed a piece of the good life and dropped off the earth. We can even leave e-mail messages like that behind."
"And if they have a code to show it's their messages, and not somebody who's taken charge of their computers?" Davis asked.
"That works for us as much as it works against us. It's a natural play, to arrange your disappearance in such a way as to suggest you've been whacked. Nobody's going to come looking for a dead man, right? They must have that kind of concern. They hate us for corrupting their society, and so they must know that their people can be corrupted. They will have brave ones, and they'll have cowardly ones. These people are not unified in their outlook. They're not robots. Some will be true believers, sure, but others are in it for the ride, the fun, the glamour of what they're doing, but when it comes to the nut-crunching time, life will be more attractive to them than death." Granger knew people and motivations, and, no, they were not robots. In fact, the smarter they were, the less likely they were to be motivated by the simple. Most of the Muslim extremists, interestingly enough, were either in Europe or had been educated there. In a comfortable womb, they'd been isolated by their ethnic background-but also liberated from the repressive societies from which they'd sprung. Revolution had always been a creature of rising expectations-not a product of oppression, but of proto-liberation. It was a time of personal confusion and a time for seeking after identity, a period of psychological vulnerability when an anchor was needed and grasped at, whatever the anchor happened to be. It was sad to have to kill people who were more lost than anything else, but they'd chosen their path freely, if not intelligently, and if that path