Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

“They’re real,” Brian said. “Out at Hereford in Wales. They’re not that secret. The senior guys from Force Recon have been out there to train with ’em. Never been there myself, but I know two guys who have. Them and the Brit SAS. They’re serious troops.”

“How far inside were you, Aldo?” his brother asked.

“Hey, the special-operations community is pretty tight. We cross-train, share new equipment and stuff. Most important part is when we sit down with beers and share war stories. Everybody has a different way of looking at problems, and, you know, sometimes the other guy has a better idea than you have. The Rainbow team – that’s the ‘men of black’ the newsies talk about – they’re very smart, but they’ve learned a thing or two from us over the years. Thing is, they’re smart enough to listen to new ideas. The boss man, this Clark guy, he’s supposed to be very smart.”

“He is. I’ve met him. Dad thinks he’s the cat’s ass.” He paused before going on. “Hendley knows him, too. Why he isn’t here, I don’t know. I asked the first day I came here. Maybe because he’s too old.”

“He’s a shooter?”

“I asked Dad once. Dad said he couldn’t say. That’s how he says yes. I guess I caught him at a weak moment. Funny thing about Dad, he can’t lie worth a damn.”

“I guess that’s why he loved being President so much.”

“Yeah, I think that’s the main reason he quit. He figured Uncle Robby could handle it better than he did.”

“Until that cracker bastard wasted his ass,” Dominic observed. The shooter, one Duane Farmer, was currently sitting on death row in Mississippi. “The last of the Klan,” the newspapers called him, and so he was, at age sixty-eight, just a damned-by-everybody bigot who could not abide the thought of a black President, and had used his grandfather’s World War One revolver to make it so.

“That was bad,” John Patrick Ryan, Jr., agreed. “You know, except for him, I wouldn’t have been born. It’s a big family story. Uncle Robby’s version of it was pretty good. He loved telling stories. Him and Dad were pretty tight. After Robby got wasted, the political pukes were running around in circles, some of them wanted Dad to pick up the flag again, like, but he didn’t do it, and so, I guess, he helped that Kealty guy get elected. Dad can’t stand him. That’s the other thing he never learned, how to be nice to people he hates. He just didn’t like living at the White House very much.”

He was good at it, being President, Dominic thought.

“You tell him that. Mom didn’t mind leaving, either. That First Lady stuff wrecked her doctor work, and she really hated what it did with Kyle and Katie. You know that old saying, the most dangerous place in the world is between a mom and her kids? It’s for real, guys. Only time I ever saw her lose her temper – Dad does that a lot more than Mom does – was when somebody told her that her official duties required her not to go to Kyle’s pageant at his day-care center. Jeez, she really came unglued. Anyway, the nannies helped – and the newspeople hammered her about that, how it wasn’t American and all that. You know, if anybody had ever taken a picture of Dad taking a piss, I bet someone would have said he wasn’t doing it right.”

“That’s what critics are for, to tell you how much smarter they are than the person they’re criticizing.”

“In the Bureau, Aldo, they’re called lawyers, or the Office of Professional Responsibility,” Dominic informed the table. “They have their sense of humor surgically removed before they join up.”

“The Marines have reporters, too – and I bet not one of them ever went through boot camp.” At least the guys who worked in the IG had been through the Basic School.

“I guess we should cheer up,” Dominic announced, holding up his wineglass. “Ain’t nobody going to criticize us.”

“And live,” Jack added with a chuckle. Damn, he thought, what the hell is Dad going to say when he finds out about me?

SUNDAY WASa day of rest for most people, and at The Campus it was much the same, except for the security people. Gerry Hendley believed that maybe God had had a point, that seven-day schedules accomplished a lot less than adding 16.67 percent to a man’s weekly productivity. It also dulled the brain by denying it free-form exercise, or just the luxury of doing nothing at all.

But today it was different, of course. Today they’d be planning real black operations for the first time. The Campus had been active just over nineteen months, and that time had mostly been spent in establishing their cover as a trading and arbitrage business. His department heads had taken the Acela trains back and forth to New York many times to meet their white-world counterparts, and though it had seemed slow at the time, in retrospect it had been very quickly indeed that they’d made their reputation in the money-management community. They’d hardly ever shown the world their real results, of course, from speculating on currencies and a few very carefully chosen stock issues, sometimes even insider trades on companies which themselves didn’t know the business that was coming their way. Staying covert had been the overall objective, but since The Campus had to be self-supporting, it also had to generate real income. In World War II, the Americans had peopled its black-operations establishments with lawyers, while the Brits had used bankers. Both had proven to be good for screwing people . . . and killing them. It had to be something about the way they looked at the world, Hendley thought over his coffee.

He gazed at the others: Jerry Rounds, his head of Strategic Planning; Sam Granger, his chief of Operations. Even before the building had been completed, the three of them had been thinking about the shape of the world, and how a few of the corners could best be rounded off. Rick Bell was here, too, his chief of Analysis, the one who spent his working days sorting through the “take” from NSA and CIA, and trying to find meaning in the flood of unrelated information – aided, of course, by the thirty-five thousand analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and other such places. Like all senior analysts, he also liked to frolic in the operations playground, and here that was actually possible, since The Campus was too small to have been overtaken by its own bureaucracy. He and Hendley worried that it might not always be so, and both made sure that no empires were being built.

To the best of their knowledge, theirs was the only institution in all the world like this. And it had been set up in such a way that it could be erased from the landscape in a matter of two or three months. Since Hendley Associates did not invite outside investors, their public profile was low enough that the radar never spotted their machinations, and, in any case, the community they were in did not advertise. It was easy to hide in a field in which everyone did the same, and nobody ratted on anyone else, unless very badly stung. And The Campus didn’t sting. At least not with money.

“So,” Hendley began, “are we ready?”

“Yes,” Rounds said for Granger. Sam nodded soberly and smiled.

“We’re ready,” Granger announced officially. “Our two boys have earned their spurs in a way we never anticipated.”

“They earned ’em, all right,” Bell agreed. “And the Ryan boy has identified a good first target, this Sali fellow. The events of Friday have generated a lot of message traffic. They turn out a lot of cheerleaders. A lot of them are stringers and wannabes, but even if we pop one of them by mistake it’s no great loss. I have the first four all lined up. So, Sam, do you have a plan for dealing with them?”