The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [167]
"Hey, Jack," Wills said, coming in. "'Morning, Tony."
"Nice to be eager. What have they turned on our departed friend?"
"Nothing much. They're airmailing the box home later today, probably, and the pathologist called it a heart attack. So, our guys are clean."
"Islam pretty much requires that the body be disposed of quickly, and in an unmarked grave. So, once the body's gone, it's all-the-way gone. No exhumation to check for drugs and stuff."
"So, we did do it? What did we use?" Ryan asked.
"Jack, I do not know, and I do not want to know what, if anything, we had to do with his untimely death. Nor do I have any desire to find out. Nor should you, okay?"
"Tony, how the hell can you be in this business and not be curious?" Jack Jr. demanded.
"You learn what is not good to know, and you learn not to speculate on such things," Wills explained.
"Uh-huh," Jack reacted dubiously. Sure, but I'm too young for that shit, he didn't say. Tony was good at what he did, but he lived inside a box. So did Sali right now, Jack thought, and it wasn't a good place to be. And besides, we did waste his ass. Exactly how, he didn't know. He could have asked his mom about what drugs or chemicals there might be that could accomplish this mission, but, no, he couldn't do that. She'd sure as hell tell his father, and Big Jack would sure as hell want to know why his son had asked such a question-and might even guess the answer. So, no, that was out of the question. All the way out.
With the official government traffic on Sali's death, Jack started looking for NSA and related intercepts from other interested sources.
There was no further reference to the Emir in the daily traffic. That had just come and gone, and previous references were limited to the one Tony had pulled up. Similarly, his request for a more global search of signals records at Fort Meade and Langley had not been approved by the people upstairs, disappointingly but not surprisingly. Even The Campus had its limits. He understood the unwillingness of the people upstairs to risk having somebody wonder who'd made such a request, and, not finding an answer, to make a deeper query. But there were thousands of such requests back and forth every day, and one more couldn't raise that much of a ruckus, could it? He decided not to ask, however. There was no sense in being identified as a boat rocker this early into his new career. But he did instruct his computer to scan all new traffic for the word "Emir," and, if it came up, he could log it and then have a firmer case for his special inquiry the next time, if there was a next time. Still, a title like that-to his mind, it was indicative of the ID for a specific person, even if the only reference CIA had about it was "probably an in-house joke." The judgment had come from a senior Langley analyst, which carried a lot of weight in that community, and therefore in this one as well. The Campus was supposed to be the outfit that corrected CIA's mistakes and/or inabilities, but since they had fewer people on staff, they had to accept a lot of ideas that came from the supposedly disabled agency. It did not make all that much logical sense, but he hadn't been consulted when Hendley had set the place up, and therefore he had to assume that the senior staff knew their business. But as Mike Brennan had told him about police work, assumption was the mother of all screwups. It was also a widely known adage of the FBI. Everybody made mistakes, and the size of any mistake was directly proportional to the seniority of the man making it. But such people didn't like to be reminded of that universal truth. Well, nobody really did.
They bought the clothes off the rack. They were generally like what one would buy in America, but the differences, while individually subtle, added up to an entirely different look. They also got shoes to match the outfits, and, after changing at their hotel, they went back out on the street.
The passing grade came when Brian was stopped on the street