There was even a transcript. The conversation had been in Arabic, and the translation… might as well have been instructions from the wife to buy a quart of milk on the way home from work. About that exciting and revealing — except that Uda had replied to a totally innocuous statement with "Are you sure?" Not the sort of thing you said to the wife when she said to get a quart of skim milk on the way home.
"The tone of voice suggests hidden meaning," the Brit analyst had opined gently at the bottom of the report.
Then, later in the day, Uda had left his office early and entered another pub and met with the same guy he'd been talking to on the phone. So, the conversation hadn't been innocuous after all? But, though they hadn't managed to overhear the conversation in a pub booth, neither had the phone chat specified a meeting or a meeting place… and Uda didn't spend much time in that particular pub.
"'Morning, Jack," Wills greeted as he came in and hung up his suit jacket. "What's happening?"
"Our friend Uda is wiggling like a live fish." Jack punched the PRINT command and handed the printout across to his roomie even before he'd had a chance to sit down.
"It seems to suggest that possibility, doesn't it?"
"Tony, this guy is a player," Jack said with some conviction in his voice.
"What did he do after the phone conversation? Any unusual transactions?"
"I haven't checked yet, but if there is, then he was ordered to do it by his friend, and then they met so that he could confirm it over a pint of John Smith's Bitter."
"You're making a leap of imagination. We try to avoid that here," Wills cautioned.
"I know," Junior growled. It was time to check out the previous day's money-moving.
"Oh, you're to be meeting somebody new today."
"Who's that?"
"Dave Cunningham. Forensic accountant, used to work for Justice — organized-crime stuff. He's pretty good at spotting financial irregularities."
"Does he think I found something interesting?" Jack asked with hope in his voice.
"We'll see when he gets here — after lunch. He's probably looking over your stuff right now."
"Okay," Jack responded. Maybe he'd caught the scent of something. Maybe this job really did have an element of excitement to it. Maybe they'd give him some purple ribbon for his adding machine. Sure.
The days were down to a routine. Morning run and PT, followed by breakfast and a talk. In substance, no different from Dominic's time at the FBI Academy, or Brian's at the Basic School. It was this similarity that distantly troubled the Marine. Marine Corps training was directed at killing people and breaking things. So was this.
Dominic was somewhat better at the surveillance part of it, because the FBI Academy taught it out of a book the Marines didn't have. Enzo was also pretty good with his pistol, though Aldo preferred his Beretta to his brother's Smith & Wesson. His brother had whacked a bad guy with his Smith, whereas Brian had done his job with an M16A2 rifle at a decently long range — fifty meters, close enough to see the looks on their faces when the bullets struck home, and far enough that a returning snapshot would not be close enough to be a serious worry. His gunny had chided him on not grabbing some dirt when the AKs had been turned in his direction, but Brian had learned an important lesson in his only exposure to combat. He'd found that, in that moment, his mind and his thinking went into hyperdrive, the world around him seemed to slow down, and his thinking had become extraordinarily clear. In retrospect, it had surprised him that he hadn't seen bullets in flight, his mind had been operating so fast — well, the last five rounds in the AK-47 magazine were usually tracers, and he had seen those in flight, though never in his immediate direction. His mind often went back to that busy five or six minutes, critiquing himself for things he might have done better, and promising that he would not repeat those errors of thinking and command, though Gunny Sullivan had been very respectful to his captain later during Caruso's after-action review with his Marines at their firebase.
"How was the run today, fellas?" Pete Alexander asked.
"Delightful," Dominic answered. "Maybe we should try it wearing fifty-pound backpacks."
"That could be arranged," Alexander replied.
"Hey, Pete, we used to do that in Force Recon. It ain't fun," Brian objected at once. "Turn down the sense of humor, bro," he added for his brother.
"Well, it's good to see you're still in shape," Pete observed comfortably. He didn't have to do the morning runs, after all. "So what's up?"
"I still wish I knew more about our goal here, Pete," Brian said, looking up from his coffee.
"You're not the most patient guy in the world, are you?" the training officer shot back.
"Look, in the Marine Corps we train every day, but even when it isn't clear exactly what we're training for, we know we're Marines, and we aren't getting set up to sell Girl Scout cookies in front of the Wal-Mart."
"What do you think you're getting set up for now?"
"To kill people without warning, with no rules of engagement that I can recognize. It looks a lot like murder." Okay, Brian thought, he'd said it out loud. What would happen next? Probably a drive back to Camp Lejeune and the resumption of his career in the Green Machine. Well, it could be worse.
"Okay, well, I guess it's time," Alexander conceded. "What if you had orders to terminate somebody's life?"
"If the orders are legitimate, I carry them out, but the law — the system — allows me to think about how legit the orders are."
"Okay, a hypothetical. Let's say you are ordered to terminate the life of a known terrorist. How do you react?" Pete asked.
"That's easy. You waste him," Brian answered immediately.
"Why?"
"Terrorists are criminals, but you can't always arrest them. These people make war on my country, and if I'm ordered to make war back, fine. That's what I signed on to do, Pete."
"The system doesn't always allow us to do that," Dominic observed.
"But the system does allow us to waste criminals on the spot, in flagrante delicto, like. You did it, and I haven't heard about any regrets, bro."
"And you won't. It's the same for you. If the President says to do somebody, and you're in uniform, he's the Commander in Chief, Aldo. You have the legal right — hell, the duty — to kill anybody he says."
"Didn't some Germans make that argument back in 1946?" Brian asked.
"I wouldn't worry too much about that. We'd have to lose a war for that to be a concern. I don't see that happening anytime soon."
"Enzo, if what you just said is true, then if the Germans had won World War Two, nobody'd need to care about those six million dead Jews. Is that what you're saying?"
"People," Alexander interrupted, "this isn't a class in legal theory."
"Enzo's the lawyer here," Brian pointed out.
Dominic took the bait: "If the President breaks the law, then the House of Representatives impeaches him and the Senate convicts him, and he's out on the street, and then he's subject to criminal sanctions."