The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [142]
That was Davis's cue. "We're going to do reconnaissance by fire. After we whack one or two, we'll see what reaction, if any, results, and we will take our guidance from there. I agree that Mr. Sali looks like a profitable first target. Question is, is his elimination going to be overt or covert?"
"Explain," Hendley ordered.
"Well, if he's found dead on the street, that's one thing. If he disappears with his daddy's money and leaves behind a note saying that he wants to stop what he's doing and just retire, that's something else," Sam explained.
"Kidnapping? It's dangerous." The Metropolitan Police in London had a closure rate on kidnappings that nibbled at one hundred percent. That was a dangerous game to play, especially on their first move.
"Well, we can hire an actor, dress him up right, fly him to New York, Kennedy, and then just have him disappear. In fact, we dispose of the body and keep the money. How much does he have access to, Rick?"
"Direct access? Hell, it's over three hundred million bucks."
"Might look good in the corporate exchequer," Sam speculated. "And it wouldn't hurt his dad much, would it?"
"His father's money-all of it? Try the sunny side of three billion," Bell answered. "He'll miss it, but it wouldn't break him. And given his opinion of his son, it might even develop as good cover for our operation," he hypothesized.
"I am not recommending this as a course of action, but it is an alternative," Granger concluded.
It had been talked about before, of course. It was too obvious a play to escape notice. And three hundred million dollars would have looked just fine in a Campus account, say in the Bahamas or Liechtenstein. You could hide money anywhere that had telephone lines. It was just electrons anyway, not gold bricks.
Hendley was surprised that Sam had brought this up so soon. Maybe he wanted to get a read on his colleagues. They were clearly not overcome with emotion at the thought of ending this Sali's life, but to steal from him in the process pushed some very different buttons. A man's conscience could be a funny thing, Gerry concluded.
"Let's set that aside for the moment. How hard will the hit be?" Hendley asked.
"With what Rick Pasternak gave us? It's child's play, so long as our people don't make a complete hash of it. Even then the worst thing that can happen is that it'll look like a mugging that went wrong," Granger told them.
"What if our guy drops the pen?" Rounds worried.
"It's a pen. You can write with it. It'll pass inspection with any cop in the world," Granger replied confidently. He reached in his pocket and passed his sample around the table. "This one's cold," he assured them.
They'd all been briefed in. To all appearances, it was an expensive ballpoint, gold-plated, with obsidian on the clip. By depressing the clip and turning the nib cover, you switched the point from a real pen to a hypodermic with a lethal transfer agent. It would paralyze the victim in fifteen to twenty seconds, and kill him in three minutes, with no cure, and a very transient signature in the body. As the pen went around the conference table, the executives invariably felt the hypo point, and then experimented with using it for a simulated hit, mostly as an ice-pick strike, though Rounds handled it like a diminutive sword.
"It would be nice to try it on a dry run," he observed quietly.
"Anyone here want to volunteer as the victim?" Granger asked the table. No heads nodded. The mood of the room didn't surprise him much. It was time for a sober pause, the sort of thing that comes over a man when he signs his application for life insurance, a product that is valuable only if you are dead, which rather takes the fun out of the moment.
"Fly them to London together?" Hendley asked.
"Correct." Granger nodded, and turned back to his business voice. "We have them scout out the target, pick their moment, and make their hit."
"And wait to see the results?" Rounds asked, rhetorically.
"Correct. Then they