The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [196]
Via Vittorio Veneto looked more business than touristy. The trees on the sides were rather lame looking. The hotel was, surprisingly, not a tall building at all. Nor did it have an ornate entrance. Jack paid off the cabdriver and went inside, with the doorman bringing his bags. The inside was a celebration of woodwork, and the staff were welcoming as they could be. Perhaps this was an Olympic sport at which all Europeans excelled, but someone led him to his room. There was air-conditioning, and the cool air in the suite was welcoming indeed.
"Excuse me, what's your name?" he asked the bellman.
"Stefano," the man replied.
"Do you know if there is a man named Hawkins here-Nigel Hawkins?"
"The Englishman? Yes, he is three doors away, right down the corridor. A friend?"
"He's a friend of my brother's. Please don't say anything to him. Perhaps I can surprise him," Jack suggested, handing him a twenty-Euro note.
"Of course, signore."
"Very good. Thank you."
"Prego," Stefano responded, and walked back to the lobby.
This had to be dumb operational art, Jack told himself, but if they didn't have a photo of the bird, they had to get some idea of what he looked like. With that done, he lifted the phone and tried to make a call.
"You have an incoming call," Brian's phone started saying in low tones, repeating itself three times before he fished it out of his coat pocket.
"Yeah." Who the hell was calling him? he wondered.
"Aldo, it's Jack. Hey, I'm in the hotel-the Hotel Excelsior. Want me to see if I can get you guys some rooms here? It's pretty nice. I think you guys would like it here."
"Hold on." He set the phone down in his lap. "You'll never believe where junior's checked in to." He didn't have to identify it.
"You're kidding," Dominic responded.
"Nope. He wants to know if he should get us a reservation. What do I tell him?"
"Damn " Some quick thought. "Well, he's our intel backup, isn't he?"
"Sounds a little too obvious to me, but if you say so"-he picked the phone back up-"Jack, that's affirmative, buddy."
"Great. Okay, I'll set it up. Unless I call back and say no, you come on in here."
"Roger that one, Jack. Seeya."
"Bye," Brian heard, and hit the kill button. "You know, Enzo, this doesn't sound real smart to me."
"He's there. He's on the scene, and he's got eyes. We can always back out if we have to."
"Fair enough, I guess. Map says we're coming up on a tunnel in about five miles." The clock on the dash said 4:05. They were making good time, but heading straight at a mountain just past the town or city of Badgastein. Either they needed a tunnel or a big team of goats to clear that hill.
Jack lit up his computer. It took him ten minutes to figure out how to use the phone system for that purpose, but he finally got logged on, to find his mailbox brimming with bits and bytes targeted at him. There was an attaboy from Granger for the completed mission in Vienna, though he hadn't had a thing to do with it. But below that was an assessment from Bell and Wills on 56MoHa. For the most part, it was disappointing. Fifty-six was an operations officer for the bad guys. He either did things or planned things, and one of the things he'd probably done or planned had gotten a lot of people killed in four shopping malls back at home, and so this bastard needed to meet God. There were no specifics about what he'd done, how he'd been trained, how capable he was, or whether or not he was known to carry a gun, all of which was information he'd like to see, but after reading the decrypted e-mails he re-encrypted them and saved them in his ACTION folder to go over with Brian and Dom.
The tunnel was like something in a video game. It went on and on to infinity, though at least the traffic inside wasn't piled up in a fiery mass as had happened a few years before