Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

Just before hitting Richmond, the female voice on his computer told him to take a right onto the Richmond Beltway, which presently delivered him to I-64 west toward the rolling, wooded hills. The countryside was pleasant, and green enough. Probably a lot of golf courses and horse farms. He’d heard that the CIA had its safe houses here from back when they had to debrief Soviet defectors. He wondered what the places were used for now. Chinese, maybe? Frenchmen, perhaps. Certainly they hadn’t been sold. The government didn’t like letting go of things, except maybe to close down military bases. The clowns from the Northeast and Far West loved to do that. They didn’t much like the Bureau either, though they were probably afraid of it. He didn’t know what it was about cops and soldiers that bothered some politicians, but he didn’t much worry about it. He had his rice bowl, and they had theirs.

After another hour and fifteen minutes or so, he started looking for his exit sign, but the computer didn’t need him.

“PREPARE TO TURN RIGHT AT THE NEXT EXIT,” the voice said, about two minutes ahead of time.

“Fine, honey,” Special Agent Caruso replied, without getting an acknowledgment. A minute later, he took the suggested exit – without so much as a VERY GOOD from the computer – and then took some ordinary city streets through the pleasant little town and up some gentle hills to the north wall of this valley, until finally:

“TAKE THE NEXT LEFT AND YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DESTINATION . . .”

“That’s nice, honey, thank you,” he observed.

“YOUR DESTINATION” was the end of an entirely ordinary-looking country road, maybe a driveway, since it had no lines painted on it. A few hundred yards farther and he saw two redbrick abutments and a white-rail gate that was conveniently swung open. There was a house another three hundred yards off, with six white pillars holding up the front part of the roof. The roof appeared to be slate – rather old slate, at that – and the walls were weathered brick that hadn’t been red in over a hundred years. This place had to be over a century old, maybe two. The driveway was recently raked pea-sized gravel. The grass – there was a lot of grass here – was a luscious golf-course green. Someone came out of a side door and waved him around to the left. He twisted the wheel to head behind the house, and got a surprise. The mansion – what did you call a house this big? – was larger than it first appeared, and had a fairsized parking lot, which at the moment held a Chevy Suburban, a Buick SUV, and – another Mercedes C-class just like his, with North Carolina tags. The likelihood of this coincidence was too remote even to enter his imagina–

“Enzo!”

Dominic snapped his head around. “Aldo!”

People often remarked on their resemblance, though it was even more apparent when they were apart. Both had dark hair and fair skin. Brian was the taller by twenty-four millimeters. Dominic was perhaps ten pounds heavier. Whatever differences in mannerisms they’d had as boys had stayed with them as they’d grown up together. Since both were partly Italian in ancestry, they hugged warmly – but they didn’t kiss. They weren’t that Italian.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Dominic was the first to ask.

“Me? What about you?” Brian shot back, heading to help with his brother’s bags. “I read about your shoot in Alabama. What’s the story?”

“Pedophile,” Dominic replied, pulling out his two-suiter. “Raped and killed a cute little girl. I got there about half an hour too late.”

“Hey, ain’t nobody perfect, Enzo. Papers said you put an end to his career.”

Dominic looked right into Brian’s eyes. “Yeah, I managed to accomplish that.”

“How, exactly?”

“Three in the chest.”

“Works every time,” Captain Brian Caruso observed. “And no lawyers to cry over his body.”

“No, not this time.” His words were not the least bit jolly, but his brother heard the cold satisfaction.

“With this, eh?” The Marine lifted his brother’s automatic from its holster. “Looks nice,” he said.

“It shoots pretty good. Loaded, bro, do be careful.”

Brian ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber. “Ten millimeter?”

“That’s right. FBI-issue. Makes nice holes. The Bureau went back to it after Inspector O’Day had that shoot-out with the bad guys – you know, Uncle Jack’s little girl.”

Brian remembered the story well: the attack on Katie Ryan at her school shortly after her dad had become President, the shoot-out, the kills.

“That dude had his shit wired pretty tight,” he said. “And you know, he’s not even an ex-Marine. He was a Navy puke before he turned cop. That’s what they said at Quantico, anyway.”

“They did a training tape of the job. I met him once, just shook his hand with twenty other guys. Son of a bitch can shoot. He talked about waiting for your chance and making the first shot count. He double-tapped both their heads.”

“How did he keep his cool?” The rescue of Katie Ryan had struck home for both Caruso boys. She was, after all, their first cousin, and a nice little girl, the image of her mother.

“Hey, you smelled the smoke over there. How did you keep yours?”

“Training. I had Marines to look after, bro.”

Together, they manhandled Dominic’s things inside. Brian showed the way upstairs. They had separate bedrooms, next to each other. Then they came back to the kitchen. Both got coffee and sat at the kitchen table.

“So, how’s life in the Marine Corps, Aldo?”

“Gonna make major soon, Enzo. Got myself a Silver Star for what I did over there – wasn’t that big a deal, really, I just did what they trained me to do. One of my men got shot up, but he’s okay now. We didn’t bag the guy we were after – he wasn’t in a mood to surrender, so Gunny Sullivan sent him off to see Allah – but we got two live ones and they talked some, gave us some good information, the Intel guys told me.”

“What did you get the pretty ribbon for?” Dominic asked pointedly.

“Mainly for staying alive. I shot three of the bad guys myself. Weren’t even hard shots, really. I just took ’em. Later they asked me if I had any nightmares about it. The Marine Corps just has too many doctors around – and they’re all squids.”

“Bureau’s the same way, but I blew it off. No bad dreams about that bastard. The poor little girl. I should’ve shot his dick off.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“ ’Cause that doesn’t kill your ass, Aldo. But three in the heart does.”

“You didn’t shoot him on the spur of the moment, did you?”

“Not exactly, but–”

“And that’s why you’re here, Special Agent Caruso,” a man said, entering the room. He was over six feet, a very fit fifty, both of the others thought.

“Who are you, sir?” Brian asked.

“Pete Alexander,” the man answered.

“I was supposed to meet you last–”

“No, actually you weren’t, but that’s what we told the general.” Alexander sat down with his own cup of coffee.

“So, who are you, then?” Dominic asked.

“I’m your training officer.”

“Just you?” Brian asked.

“Training for what?” Dominic asked at the same time.

“No, not just me, but I’m the one who’ll be here all the time. And the nature of the training will show you what you’re training for,” he answered. “Okay, you want to know about me. I graduated Yale thirty years ago, in political science. I was even a member of Skull and Bones. You know, the boys’ club that conspiracy theorists like to prattle about. Jesus, like people in their late teens can really accomplish anything beyond getting laid, on a good Friday night.” His brown eyes and the look in them hadn’t come from a college, however, even an Ivy League one. “Back in the old days, the Agency liked to recruit people from Yale and Harvard and Dartmouth. The kids there have gotten over it. They all want to be merchant bankers now and make money. I worked twenty-five years in the Clandestine Service, and then I got recruited by The Campus. Been with them ever since.”