by Tom Clancy
“Yes, sir.” Caruso responded ambiguously. “Mr. Werner—”
“Name’s Gus,” the Assistant Director corrected.
“Sir,” Caruso persisted. Senior people who used first names tended to make him nervous. “Sir, were I to say something like that, I’d be confessing to the next thing to murder, in an official government document. He did pick up that knife, he was getting up to face me, he was just ten or twelve feet away, and at Quantico they taught us to regard that as an immediate and lethal threat. So, yes, I took the shot, and it was righteous, in accordance with FBI policy on the use of lethal force.”
Werner nodded. “You have your law degree, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I’m admitted to the bar in Virginia and D.C. both. I haven’t taken the Alabama bar exam yet.”
“Well, stop being a lawyer for a minute,” Werner advised. “This was a righteous shooting. I still have the revolver I whacked that bastard with. Smith Model 66 four-inch. I even wear it to work sometimes. Dominic, you got to do what every agent would like to do just once in his career. You got to deliver justice all by yourself. Don’t feel bad about it.”
“I don’t, sir,” Caruso assured him. “That little girl, Penelope—I couldn’t save her, but at least that bastard won’t ever do it again.” He looked Werner right in the eye. “You know what it feels like.”
“Yeah.” He looked closely at Caruso. “And you’re sure you have no regrets?”
“I caught an hour’s nap on the flight up, sir.” He delivered the statement without a visible smile.
But it generated one on Werner’s face. He nodded. “Well, you’ll be getting an official attaboy from the office of the Director. No OPR.”
OPR was the FBI’s own “Internal Affairs” office, and while respected by rank-and-file FBI agents, was not beloved of them. There was a saying, “If he tortures small animals and wets his bed, he’s either a serial killer or he works for the Office of Professional Responsibility.”
Werner lifted Caruso’s folder. “Says here you’re pretty smart... good language skills, too . . . Interested in coming to Washington? I’m looking for people who know how to think on their feet, to work in my shop.”
Another move, was what Special Agent Dominic Caruso heard.
GERRY HENDLEY was not an overly formal man. He wore a jacket and tie to work, but the jacket ended up on a clothes tree in his office within fifteen seconds of arrival. He had a fine executive secretary—like himself, a native of South Carolina—named Helen Connolly, and after running through his day’s schedule with her, he picked up his Wall Street Journal and checked the front page. He’d already devoured the day’s New York Times and Washington Post to get his political fix for the day, grumbling as always how they never quite got it right. The digital clock on his desk told him that he had twenty minutes before his first meeting, and he lit up his computer to get the morning’s Early Bird as well, the clipping service that went to senior government officials. This he scanned to see if he’d missed anything in his morning read of the big-time papers. Not much, except for an interesting piece in the Virginia Pilot about the annual Fletcher Conference, a circle-think held by the Navy and Marine Corps every year at the Norfolk Navy Base. They talked about terrorism, and fairly intelligently, Hendley thought. People in uniform often did. As opposed to elected officials.
We kill off the Soviet Union, Hendley thought, and we expected everything in the world to settle down. But what we didn’t see coming was all these lunatics with leftover AK-47s and education in kitchen chemistry, or simply a willingness to trade their own lives for those of their perceived enemies.
And the other thing they hadn’t done was prepare the intelligence community to deal with it. Even a president experienced in the black world and the best DCI in American history hadn’t managed to get all that much done. They’d added a lot more people—an extra five hundred personnel in an agency of twenty thousand didn’t sound like a lot, but it had doubled the operations directorate. That had given the CIA a force only half as horribly inadequate as it had been before, but that wasn’t the same as adequate. And in return for it, the Congress had further tightened oversight and restrictions, thus further crippling the new people hired to flesh out the governmental skeleton crew. They never learned. He himself had talked at infinite length to his colleagues in the World’s Most Exclusive Men’s Club, but while some listened, others did not, and almost all of the remainder vacillated. They paid too much attention to the editorial pages, often of newspapers not even native to their home states, because that, they foolishly figured, was what the American People thought. Maybe it was this simple: Any newly elected official was seduced into the game the same way Cleopatra had snookered Gaius Julius Caesar. It was the staffs, he knew, the “professional” political helpers who “guided” their employers into the right way to be reelected, which had become the Holy Grail of public service. America did not have a hereditary ruling class, but it did have plenty of people happy to lead their employers onto the righteous path of government divinity.
And working inside the system just didn’t work.
So, to accomplish anything, you just had to be outside the system.
Way the hell outside the system.
And if anybody noticed, well, he was already disgraced anyway, wasn’t he?
He spent his first hour discussing financial matters with some of his staff, because that was how Hendley Associates made its money. As a commodities trader, and as a currency arbitrageur, he’d been ahead of the curve almost from the beginning, sensing the momentary valuation differences—he always called them “Deltas”—which were generated by psychological factors, by perceptions that might or might not turn out to be real.
He did all his business anonymously through foreign banks, all of which liked having large cash accounts, and none of which were overly fastidious about where the money came from, so long as it was not overtly dirty, which his certainly was not. It was just another way of keeping outside the system.
Not that every one of his dealings was strictly legal. Having Fort Meade’s intercepts on his side made the game a lot easier. In fact, it was illegal as hell, and not the least bit ethical. But in truth Hendley Associates did little in the way of damage on the world stage. It could have been otherwise, but Hendley Associates operated on the principle that pigs got fed and hogs got slaughtered, and so they ate only a little out of the international trough. And, besides, there was no real governing authority for crimes of this type and this magnitude. And tucked away in a safe within the company vault was an official Charter signed by the former President of the United States.
Tom Davis came in. The titulary head of bond trading, Davis’s background was similar in some ways to Hendley’s, and he spent his days glued to his computer. He didn’t worry about security. In this building all of the walls had metal sheathing to contain electronic emanations, and all of the computers were tempest-protected.
“What’s new?” asked Hendley.
“Well,” Davis answered, “we have a couple of potential new recruits.”
“Who might they be?”
Davis slid the files across Hendley’s desk. The CEO took them and opened both.
“Brothers?”
“Twins. Fraternals. Their mom must have punched out two eggs instead of one that month. Both of them impressed the right people. Brains, mental agility, fitness, and between them a good mix of talents, plus language skills. Spanish, especially.”
“This one speaks Pashtu?” Hendley looked up in surprise.
“Just enough to find the bathroom. He was in country eight weeks or so, took the time to learn the local patois. Acquitted himself pretty well, the report says.”
“Think they’re our kind of people?” Hendley asked. Such people did not walk in the front door, which was why Hendley had a small number of very discreet recruiters sprinkled throughout the government.
“We need to check them out a little more,” Davis conceded, “but they do
have the talents we like. On the surface, both appear to be reliable, stable, and smart enough to understand why we’re here. So, yeah, I think they’re worth a serious look.”
“What’s next for them?”
“Dominic is going to transfer to Washington. Gus Werner wants him to join the counterterror office. He’ll probably be a desk man to start with. He’s a little young for HRT, and he hasn’t proven his analytical abilities yet. I think Werner wants to see how smart he is first. Brian will fly to Camp Lejeune, back to working with his company. I’m surprised the Corps hasn’t seconded him to intelligence. He’s an obvious candidate, but they do like their shooters, and he did pretty well over in camel-land. He’ll be fast-tracked to major’s rank, if my sources are correct. So, first, I think I’ll fly down and have lunch with him, feel him out some, then come back to D.C. And do the same with Dominic. Werner was impressed with him.”
“And Gus is a good judge of men,” the former senator noted.
“That he is, Gerry,” Davis agreed. “So—anything new shaking?”
“Fort Meade is buried under a mountain, as usual.” The NSA’s biggest problem was that they intercepted so much raw material it would take an army to sort through it all. Computer programs helped by homing in on key words and such, but nearly all of it was innocent chatter. Programmers were always trying to improve the catcher program, but it had proven to be virtually impossible to give a computer human instincts, though they were still trying. Unfortunately, the really talented programmers worked for game companies. That was where the money was, and talent usually followed the money path. Hendley couldn’t complain about that. After all, he’d spent his twenties and half of his thirties doing the same. So, he often went looking for rich and very successful programmers for whom the money chase had become not so much boring as redundant. It was usually a waste of time. Nerds were often greedy bastards. Just like lawyers, but not quite as cynical. “I’ve seen half a dozen interesting intercepts today, though . . .”
“Such as?” Davis asked. The company’s chief recruiter, he was also a skilled analyst.
“This.” Hendley handed the folder across. Davis opened it and scanned down the page.
“Hmm,” was all he said.
“Could be scary, if it turns into anything,” Hendley thought aloud.
“True. But we need more.” That was not earthshaking. They always needed more.
“Who do we have down there right now?” He ought to have known, but Hendley suffered from the usual bureaucratic disease: He had trouble keeping all the information current in his head.
“Right now? Ed Castilanno is in Bogotá, looking into the Cartel, but he’s in deep cover. Real deep,” Davis reminded his boss.
“You know, Tom, this intelligence business sometimes sucks the big one.”
“Cheer up, Gerry. The pay’s a hell of a lot better—at least for us underlings,” he added with a tiny grin. His bronze skin contrasted starkly with the ivory teeth.
“Yeah, must be terrible to be a peasant.”
“At least da massa let me get educated, learn my letters and such. Could have been worse, don’ have to chop cotton no more, Mas Gerry.” Hendley rolled his eyes. Davis had, in fact, gotten his degree from Dartmouth, where he took a lot less grief for his dark skin than for his home state. His father grew corn in Nebraska, and voted Republican.
“What’s one of those harvesters cost now?” the boss asked.
“You kidding? Far side of two hundred thousand. Dad got a new one last year and he’s still bitching about it. ’Course, this one’ll last until his grandchildren die rich. Cuts through an acre of corn like a battalion of Rangers going through some bad guys.” Davis had made a good career in CIA as a field spook, becoming a specialist in tracking money across international borders. At Hendley Associates he’d discovered that his talents were also quite useful in a business sense, but, of course, he’d never lost his nose for the real action. “You know, this FBI guy, Dominic, he did some interesting work in financial crimes in his first field assignment in Newark. One of his cases is developing into a major investigation into an international banking house. He knows how to sniff things out pretty well for a rookie.”
“All that, and he can kill people on his own hook,” Hendley agreed.
“That’s why I like his looks, Gerry. He can make decisions in the saddle, like a guy ten years older.”
“Brother act. Interesting,” Hendley observed, eyes on the folders again.
“Maybe breeding tells. Grandfather was a homicide cop, after all.”
“And before that in the 101st Airborne. I see your point, Tom. Okay. Sound them both out soon. We’re going to be busy soon.”
“Think so?”
“It’s not getting any better out there.” Hendley waved at the window.
THEY WERE at a sidewalk café in Vienna. The nights were turning less cold, and the patrons of the establishment were enduring the chill to enjoy a meal on the wide sidewalk.
“So, what is your interest with us?” Pablo asked.
“There is a confluence of interests between us,” Mohammed answered, then clarified: “We share enemies.”
He gazed off. The women passing by were dressed in the formal, almost severe local fashion, and the traffic noise, especially the electric trams, made it impossible for anyone to listen in on their conversation. To the casual, or even the professional, observer, these were simply two men from other countries—and there were a lot of them in this imperial city—talking business in a quiet and amiable fashion. They were speaking in English, which was also not unusual.
“Yes, that is the truth,” Pablo had to agree. “The enemies part, that is. What of the interests?”
“You have assets for which we have use. We have assets for which you have use,” the Muslim explained patiently.
“I see.” Pablo added cream to his coffee and stirred. To his surprise, the coffee here was as good as in his own country.
He’d be slow to reach an agreement, Mohammed expected. His guest was not as senior as he would have preferred. But the enemy they shared had enjoyed greater success against Pablo’s organization than his own. It continued to surprise him. They had ample reason to employ effective security measures, but as with all monetarily motivated people they lacked the purity of purpose that his own colleagues exercised. And from that fact came their higher vulnerability. But Mohammed was not so foolish as to assume that made them his inferiors. Killing one Israeli spy didn’t make him Superman, after all. Clearly they had ample expertise. It just had limits. As his own people had limits. As everyone but Allah Himself had limits. In that knowledge came more realistic expectations, and gentler disappointments when things went badly. One could not allow emotions to get in the way of “business,” as his guest would have misidentified his Holy Cause. But he was dealing with an unbeliever, and allowances had to be made.
“What can you offer us?” Pablo asked, displaying his greed, much as Mohammed had expected.
“You need to establish a reliable network in Europe, correct?”
“Yes, we do.” They’d had a little trouble of late. European police agencies were not as restrained as the American sort.
“We have such a network.” And since Muslims were not thought to be active in the drug trade—drug dealers often lost their heads in Saudi Arabia, for example—so much the better.
“In return for what?”
“You have a highly successful network in America, and you have reason to dislike America, do you not?”
“That is so,” Pablo agreed. Colombia was starting to make progress with the Cartel’s uneasy ideological allies in the mountains of Pablo’s home country. Sooner or later, the FARC would cave in to the pressure and then, doubtless, turn on their “friends”—really “associates” was a loose enough word—as their price of admission to the democratic process. At that time, the security of the Cartel might be seriously threatened. Political instability was their best friend in South America, but tha
t might not last forever. The same was true of his host, Pablo considered, and that did make them allies of convenience. “Precisely what services would you require of us?”
Mohammed told him. He didn’t add that no money would be exchanged for the Cartel’s service. The first shipment that Mohammed’s people shepherded into—Greece? Yes, that would probably be the easiest—would be sufficient to seal the venture, wouldn’t it?
“That is all?”
“My friend, more than anything else we trade in ideas, not physical objects. The few material items we need are quite compact, and can be obtained locally if necessary. And I have no doubt that you can help with travel documents.”
Pablo nearly choked on his coffee. “Yes, that is easily done.”
“So, is there any reason why this alliance cannot be struck?”
“I must discuss it with my superiors,” Pablo cautioned, “but on the surface I see no reason why our interests should be in conflict.”
“Excellent. How may we communicate further?”
“My boss prefers to meet those with whom he does business.”
Mohammed thought that over. Travel made him and his associates nervous, but there was no avoiding it. And he did have enough passports to see him through the airports of the world. And he also had the necessary language skills. His education at Cambridge had not been wasted. He could thank his parents for that. And he blessed his English mother for her gift of complexion and blue eyes. Truly he could pass for a native of any country outside of China and Africa. The remains of a Cambridge accent didn’t hurt, either.
“You need merely tell me the time and the place,” Mohammed replied. He handed over his business card. It had his e-mail address, the most useful tool for covert communications ever invented. And with the miracle of modern air travel, he could be anywhere on the globe in forty-eight hours.
