The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [180]
In another five minutes, they were settled into their accommodations. Brian came wandering into his brother's room. "God damn, the Residence Level at the White House isn't this good."
"Think so?" Dominic asked.
"Dude, I know so. Been there, done that. Uncle Jack had me up after I got my commission-no, actually it was after I came through the Basic School. Shit, this place is something. I wonder what it costs?"
"What the hell, it's on my card, and our friend is nearby at the Bristol. Kinda interesting to hunt rich bastards, isn't it?" That brought them back to business. Dominic pulled his laptop out of his bag. The Imperial was used to guests with computers, and the setup for it was very efficient indeed. For the moment, he opened the most recent file. He'd only scanned it before. Now he took his time with every single word.
Granger was thinking it through. Gerry wanted somebody to baby-sit the twins, and it seemed as though his mind was fixed on it. There were a lot of good people in the intelligence department under Rick Bell, but as former intelligence officers at CIA and elsewhere, they were all too old to be proper companions for the twins, young as the Caruso kids were. It wouldn't look right to have people in their late twenties chumming around Europe with somebody in his middle fifties. So, better somebody younger. There weren't many of those, but there was one
He picked up his phone.
Fa'ad was only two blocks away on the third floor of the Bristol Hotel, a famous and very upper-crust accommodation known particularly for its superior dining room and its nearness to the State Opera, which sat just across the street, consecrated to the memory of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who had been the court musician for the House of Hapsburg before dying an early death, right here in Vienna. But Fa'ad wasn't the least bit interested in such history. Current events were his obsession. Watching Anas Ali Atef die right before his eyes had shaken him badly. That had not been the death of infidels, something you could watch on TV and smile quietly about. He'd been standing there, watching the life drain invisibly from his friend's body, watching the German paramedics fight vainly for his life-evidently doing their very best even for a person they must have despised. That was a surprise. And, yes, they were Germans just doing their job, but they'd done that job with obstinate determination, then they'd raced his comrade to the nearest hospital, where the German doctors had probably done the same, only to fail. A doctor had come to him in the waiting room and sadly told him the news, saying unnecessarily that they'd done everything that could have been done, and that it had looked like a massive heart attack, and that further laboratory work would be done to make certain that this indeed had been the cause of death, and finally asking for information on his family, if any, and who would see about the body after they were done picking it apart. Strange thing about the Germans, how precise they always were about everything. Fa'ad had made what arrangements he could, and then boarded a train for Vienna, sitting alone in a first-class seat and trying to come to terms with the dreadful event.
He was making his report to the organization. Mohammed Hassan al-Din was his gateway for that. He was probably in Rome at the moment, though Fa'ad Rahman Yasin was not quite sure. He didn't have to be sure. The Internet was a good enough address, formless as it was. It was just so very sad for a young and vigorous and valuable comrade to fall down dead on the street. If it served any purpose at all, only Allah Himself knew what it might be-but Allah had His Plan for everything, and it was not always something for men to know. Fa'ad took a mini-bottle of cognac from his minibar and drank it right out of the glass container instead of pouring it into one of the snifters on top of the cabinet. Sinful or not, it helped steady his nerves, and anyway he never did it in public. Damn such bad luck! He took another