"Like in England. Beer is a kind of religion in Europe, and everybody goes to church."
Then Emil appeared with lunch—Mittagessen—and that, they both learned, was also okay. But both kept watching the apartment house.
"This potato salad is dynamite, Aldo," Dominic observed between bites. "I never had anything like it. Lots of vinegar and sugar, kinda crispy on the palate."
"Good food isn't all Italian."
"When we get home, gotta try to find a German restaurant."
"Roger that. Lookie, lookie, Enzo."
It wasn't their subject, but it was his squeeze, Trudl Heinz. Just like the photo on their computers, walking out of the apartment house. Pretty enough to turn a man's head briefly, but not a movie star. Her hair had been blond once, but that had changed in her midteens, by the look of her. Nice legs, better-than-average figure. A pity she'd linked up with a terrorist. Maybe he'd latched onto her as part of his cover, and so much the better for him that it had side benefits. Unless they were living platonically, which didn't seem likely. Both Americans wondered how he treated her, but you couldn't tell something like that from watching her walk. She went up the other side of the street, but passed the mosque. So, she wasn't heading there at the moment.
"I'm thinking… if he goes to church, we can poke him coming out. Lots of anonymous people around, y'know?" Brian thought aloud.
"Not a bad concept. We'll see how faithful this guy is this afternoon, and what the crowd's like."
"Call that a definite maybe," Dominic replied. "First, let's finish up here and then get some clothes that'll fit us in better."
"Roger that," Brian said. He checked the time: 14:00. Eight in the morning at home. Only one hour of jet lag from London, easily written off.
Jack came in earlier than usual, his interest piqued by what he took to be an ongoing operation in Europe, and wondering what today's message traffic would show.
It turned out to be fairly routine, with some additional traffic on Sali's death. Sure enough, MI5 had reported his death to Langley as having been the apparent result of a heart attack, probably caused by the onset of fatal arrhythmia. That's what the official autopsy read, and his body had been released to a solicitors' firm representing the family. Arrangements were being made to fly him home to Saudi Arabia. His apartment had been looked at by the London version of a black-bag team, which had not, however, turned up anything of particular interest. That included his office computer, whose hard drive had been copied and the data carted off. It was being examined bit by bit by their electronic weenies, details to follow. That could take a lot of time, Jack knew. Stuff hidden on a computer was technically discoverable, but, theoretically, you could also take the pyramids of Giza apart stone by stone to see what was hidden under them. If Sali had been really clever about burying things into slots only he knew about, or in a code to which only he knew the key… well, it would be tough. Had he been that clever? Probably not, Jack thought, but you could only tell by looking, and that was why people always looked. It'd take at least a week, to be sure. A month, if the little bastard was good with keys and codes. But just finding hidden stuff would tell them that he'd been a real player and not just a stringer, and the varsity at GCHQ would be assigned to it. Though none of them would be able to discover what he'd taken away to death with him inside his head.
"Hey, Jack," Wills said, coming in.
"'Morning, Tony."
"Nice to be eager. What have they turned on our departed friend?"
"Nothing much. They're airmailing the box home later today, probably, and the pathologist called it a heart attack. So, our guys are clean."
"Islam pretty much requires that the body be disposed of quickly, and in an unmarked grave. So, once the body's gone, it's all-the-way gone. No exhumation to check for drugs and stuff."
"So, we did do it? What did we use?" Ryan asked.
"Jack, I do not know, and I do not want to know what, if anything, we had to do with his untimely death. Nor do I have any desire to find out. Nor should you, okay?"
"Tony, how the hell can you be in this business and not be curious?" Jack Jr. demanded.
"You learn what is not good to know, and you learn not to speculate on such things," Wills explained.
"Uh-huh," Jack reacted dubiously. Sure, but I'm too young for that shit, he didn't say. Tony was good at what he did, but he lived inside a box. So did Sali right now, Jack thought, and it wasn't a good place to be. And besides, we did waste his ass. Exactly how, he didn't know. He could have asked his mom about what drugs or chemicals there might be that could accomplish this mission, but, no, he couldn't do that. She'd sure as hell tell his father, and Big Jack would sure as hell want to know why his son had asked such a question — and might even guess the answer. So, no, that was out of the question. All the way out.
With the official government traffic on Sali's death, Jack started looking for NSA and related intercepts from other interested sources.
There was no further reference to the Emir in the daily traffic. That had just come and gone, and previous references were limited to the one Tony had pulled up. Similarly, his request for a more global search of signals records at Fort Meade and Langley had not been approved by the people upstairs, disappointingly but not surprisingly. Even The Campus had its limits. He understood the unwillingness of the people upstairs to risk having somebody wonder who'd made such a request, and, not finding an answer, to make a deeper query. But there were thousands of such requests back and forth every day, and one more couldn't raise that much of a ruckus, could it? He decided not to ask, however. There was no sense in being identified as a boat rocker this early into his new career. But he did instruct his computer to scan all new traffic for the word "Emir," and, if it came up, he could log it and then have a firmer case for his special inquiry the next time, if there was a next time. Still, a title like that — to his mind, it was indicative of the ID for a specific person, even if the only reference CIA had about it was "probably an in-house joke." The judgment had come from a senior Langley analyst, which carried a lot of weight in that community, and therefore in this one as well. The Campus was supposed to be the outfit that corrected CIA's mistakes and/or inabilities, but since they had fewer people on staff, they had to accept a lot of ideas that came from the supposedly disabled agency. It did not make all that much logical sense, but he hadn't been consulted when Hendley had set the place up, and therefore he had to assume that the senior staff knew their business. But as Mike Brennan had told him about police work, assumption was the mother of all screwups. It was also a widely known adage of the FBI. Everybody made mistakes, and the size of any mistake was directly proportional to the seniority of the man making it. But such people didn't like to be reminded of that universal truth. Well, nobody really did.
They bought the clothes off the rack. They were generally like what one would buy in America, but the differences, while individually subtle, added up to an entirely different look. They also got shoes to match the outfits, and, after changing at their hotel, they went back out on the street.
The passing grade came when Brian was stopped on the street by a German citizen asking directions to the Hauptbahnhoff, at which time Brian had to respond in English that he was new here, and the German woman backed away with an embarrassed smile and buttonholed somebody else.