The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [51]
"More wine, sir?" the pink-faced stewardess asked. What a prize she might be in Paradise
"Ah, yes, thank you," he replied in his best Cambridge English. It was contrary to Islam, but not to drink would look suspicious, he thought again, and his mission was much too important to risk. Or, at least, so he often told himself, Mohammed admitted to himself, with a minor chink in his conscience. He soon tossed off the drink and then adjusted the seat controls. Wine might be contrary to the laws of Islam, but it did help one sleep.
"Michelle says the twins are competent for beginners," Rick Bell told his boss.
"The tracking exercise?" Hendley asked.
"Yeah." He didn't have to say that a proper training exercise would have entailed eight to ten cars, two aircraft, and a total of twenty agents, but The Campus didn't have anything approaching those assets. Instead, it had a wider latitude in dealing with its subjects, a fact which had advantages and disadvantages. "Alexander seems to like them. He says they're bright enough, and they have mental agility."
"Good to know. Anything else happening?"
"Rick Pasternak has something new, he says."
"What might that be?" Gerry asked.
"It's a variant on succinylcholine, a synthetic version of curare, shuts down the skeletal muscles almost immediately. You collapse and can't breathe. He says it would be a miserable death, like taking a bayonet through the chest."
"Traceable?" Hendley asked.
"That is the good news. Esterases in the body break the drug down rapidly into acetylcholine, so it is also likely to be undetectable, unless the target happens to croak right outside a primo medical center with a very sharp pathologist who is looking for something out of the ordinary. The Russians looked at it-would you believe it, back in the 1970s. They were thinking about battlefield applications, but it proved to be impractical. It's surprising KGB didn't make use of it. It'll look like a big-time myocardial infarction, even on a marble slab an hour later."
"How'd he get it?"
"A Russian colleague was visiting with him at Columbia. Turned out he was Jewish and Rick got him talking. He talked enough that Rick developed a delivery system right there in his lab. It's being perfected right now."
"You know, it's amazing that the Mafia never figured it out. If you want somebody killed, you hire a doc."
"Goes against the old school tie for most of them." But most of them didn't have a brother at Cantor Fitzgerald who'd ridden the ninety-seventh floor down to sea level one Tuesday morning.
"Is this variant better than what we have already?"
"Better than what anyone has, Gerry. He says it's almost a hundred percent reliable if used properly."
"Expensive?"
Bell shook his head. "Not hardly."
"It's tested, it really works?"
"Rick says it killed six dogs-all big ones-pretty as you please."
"Okay, approved."
"Roger that, boss. Ought to have them in two weeks."
"What's happening out there?"
"We don't know," Bell admitted with downcast eyes. "One of the guys at Langley is saying in his memos that maybe we hurt them badly enough to slow them down, if not shut them down, but I get nervous when I read stuff like that. Like the 'there's no top to this market' shit that you get before the bottom falls out. Hubris ante nemesis. Fort Meade can't track them on the 'Net, but maybe that means they're just getting a little smarter. There's a lot of good encryption programs out on the market, and two of them NSA hasn't cracked yet-at least, not reliably. They're working on that one a couple of hours every day with their big mainframes. As you always say,