Damn, how will Dad react to this? Jack wondered. He's going to have a cow. And Mom? A real hissy fit. That was good for a laugh as he turned left. But Mom didn't need to find out. The cover story would work for her — and Grandpa — but not for Dad. Dad had helped set this place up. Maybe he needed one of those black helicopters after all. He slid into his own parking place, number 127. The Campus couldn't be all that big and powerful, could it? Not with less than a hundred fifty employees. He locked his car and headed in, remarking to himself that this every-morning-to-work thing sucked. But everybody had to start somewhere.
He walked in the back entrance, like most of the others. There was a reception/security desk. The guy there was Ernie Chambers, formerly a sergeant first class in the 1st Infantry Division. His blue uniform blazer had a miniature of the Combat Infantryman's Badge, just in case you didn't notice the shoulders and the hard black eyes. After the first Persian Gulf War, he'd changed jobs from grunt to MP. He'd probably enforced the law and directed traffic pretty well, Jack thought, waving good-morning at him.
"Hey, Mr. Ryan."
"'Morning, Ernie."
"You have a good one, sir." To the ex-soldier, everybody was named "sir."
It was two hours earlier outside Ciudad Juarez. There, the van pulled into a vehicle-service plaza and stopped by a cluster of four other vehicles. Behind them were the other minivans who'd followed them all the way to the American border. The men roused from their sleep and stumbled into the chill morning air to stretch.
"Here I leave you, senor," the driver said to Mustafa. "You will join the man by the tan Ford Explorer. Vaya con Dios, amigos," he said in that most charming of dismissals: Go with God.
Mustafa walked over and found a tallish man wearing a cowboy-type hat. He didn't appear very clean, and his mustache needed trimming. "Buenos dias, I am Pedro. I will be taking you the rest of the way. There are four of you for my vehicle, yes?"
Mustafa nodded. "That is correct."
"There are water bottles in the truck. You may wish to have something to eat. You can buy anything you like from the shop." He waved to the building. Mustafa did, his colleagues did much the same, and after ten minutes they all boarded the vehicles and headed out.
They went west, mostly along Route 2. Immediately, the vehicles broke up, no longer "flying formation," as it were. There were four of them, all large American-made SUV-TYPE vehicles, all of them coated with a thick coating of dirt and grit so that they did not appear new. The sun had climbed above the horizon to their rear, casting its shadows onto the khaki-colored ground.
Pedro appeared to have spoken his piece back at the plaza. Now he said nothing, except an occasional belch, and chain-smoked his cigarettes. He had the radio on to an AM station, and hummed along with the Spanish music. The Arabs sat in silence.
"Hey, Tony," Jack said in greeting. His workmate was already on his workstation.
"Howdy," Wills responded.
"Anything hot this morning?"
"Not after yesterday, but Langley is talking about putting some coverage on our friend Fa'ad — again."
"Will they really do it?"
"Your guess is as good as mine. The Station Chief in Bahrain is saying that he needs more personnel to make it happen, and the personnel weenies at Langley are probably batting that back and forth right now."
"My dad liked to say that the government is really run by accountants and lawyers."
"He ain't far wrong on that one, buddy. God knows where Ed Kealty fits in that, though. What does your dad think of him?"
"Can't stand the son of a bitch. He won't talk in public about the new administration because he says that's wrong, but if you say something about the guy over dinner, you might end up wearing your wine home. It's funny. Dad hates politics, and he really tries hard to keep his cool, but that guy is definitely not on the Christmas card list. But he keeps it quiet, won't talk to any reporters about it. Mike Brennan tells me the Service doesn't like the new guy, either. And they have to like him."
"There are penalties for being a professional," Wills agreed.
And then Junior lit up his computer and looked at the night traffic between Langley and Fort Meade. It was a lot more impressive in its volume than its content. It seemed that his new friend, Uda, had—
"Our pal Sali had lunch with somebody yesterday," Jack announced.
"Who with?" Wills asked.
"The Brits don't know. Appears Middle Eastern, age about twenty-eight, one of those thin — well, narrow — beards around the jawline, and mustache, but no ident on the guy. They spoke in Arabic, but nobody got close enough to overhear anything."
"Where'd they eat?"
"Pub on Tower Hill called 'Hung, Drawn and Quartered. ' It's on the edge of the financial district. Uda drank Perrier. His pal had a beer. And they had a British plough-man's lunch. They sat in a corner booth, made it hard for whoever was watching to get close and listen in."
"So, they wanted privacy. It doesn't necessarily make them bad guys. Did the Brits tail him?"
"No. That probably means a single-man tail on Uda?"
"Probably," Wills agreed.
"But it says they got a photo of the new guy. Not included in the report."
"It was probably someone from the Security Service — MI5—doing the surveillance. And probably a junior guy. Uda isn't regarded as very important, not enough for full coverage. None of those agencies have all the manpower they want. Anything else?"
"Some money trades that afternoon. Looks pretty routine," Jack said, scrolling through the transactions. I'm looking for something small and harmless, he reminded himself. But small, harmless things were, for the most part, small and harmless. Uda moved money around every day, in large and small amounts. Since he was in the wealth-preservation business, he rarely speculated, dealing mostly in real-estate transactions. London — and Britain in general — was a good place to preserve cash. Real-estate prices were fairly high but very stable. If you bought something, it might not go up very much, but it sure as hell wasn't going to have the bottom drop out. So, Uda's daddy was letting the kid stretch his legs some, but not letting him run out and play in the traffic. How much personal liquidity did Uda have? Since he paid off his whores in cash and expensive handbags, he must have his own cash supply. Maybe modest, but "modest" by Saudi standards wasn't exactly modest by many others. The kid did drive an Aston Martin, after all, and his dwelling was not in a trailer park… so—
"How do I differentiate between Sali's trading his family money and trading his own?"
"You don't. We think he keeps the two accounts close, in the sense both of being covert and near to each other. Your best bet on that is to see how he sets up his quarterly statements to the family."
Jack groaned. "Oh, great, it'll take me a couple of days to add up all the transactions, and then to analyze them."
"Now you know why you're not a real CPA, Jack." Wills managed a chuckle.
Jack nearly snarled, but there was only one way to accomplish this task, and it was his job, wasn't it? First, he tried to see if his program could shortcut the process. Nope. Fourth-grade arithmetic with a nose attached. What fun. At least by the time he finished, he'd probably be better at entering numbers into the numeric keypad on the right side of the keyboard. There was something to look forward to! Why didn't The Campus employ some forensic accountants?