Том Клэнси - The Teeth of the Tiger

“And the mission is – what?”

“To identify, locate, and deal with terrorist threats,” the spook answered.

“ ‘Deal with’?” Caruso asked.

“Neutralize – shit, okay, when necessary and convenient, kill the son of a bitches. Gather information on the nature and severity of the threat, and take whatever action is necessary, depending on the specific threat. The job is fundamentally intelligence-gathering. The Agency has too many restrictions on how it does business. This special sub-group doesn’t.”

“Really?” That was a considerable surprise.

Hardesty nodded soberly. “Really. You won’t be working for CIA. You may use Agency assets as resources, but that’s as far as it goes.”

“So, who am I working for?”

“We have a little way to go before we can discuss that.” Hardesty lifted what had to be the Marine’s personnel folder. “You score in the top three percent among the Marine officers in terms of intelligence. Four-point-oh in nearly everything. Your language skills are particularly impressive.”

“My dad is an American citizen – native-born, I mean – but his dad came off the boat from Italy, ran – still runs – a restaurant in Seattle. So, Pop actually grew up speaking mostly Italian, and a lot of that came down on me and my brother, too. Took Spanish in high school and college. I can’t pass for a native, but I understand it pretty well.”

“Engineering major?”

“That’s from my dad, too. It’s in there. He works for Boeing – aerodynamicist, mainly designs wings and control surfaces. You know about my mom – it’s all in there. She’s mainly a mom, does things with the local Catholic schools, too, now that Dominic and I are grown.”

“And he’s FBI?”

Brian nodded. “That’s right, got his law degree and signed up to be a G-man.”

“Just made the papers,” Hardesty said, handing over a faxed page from the Birmingham papers. Brian scanned it.

“Way to go, Dom,” Captain Caruso breathed when he got to the fourth paragraph, which further pleased his host.

IT WASscarcely a two-hour flight from Birmingham to Reagan National in Washington. Dominic Caruso walked to the Metro station and hopped a subway train for the Hoover Building at Tenth and Pennsylvania. His badge absolved him of the need to pass through the metal detector. FBI agents were supposed to carry heat, and his automatic had earned a notch in the grip – not literally, of course, but FBI agents occasionally joked about it.

The office of Assistant Director Augustus Ernst Werner was on the top floor, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. The secretary waved him right in.

Caruso had never met Gus Werner. He was a tall, slender, and very experienced street agent, an ex-Marine, and positively monkish in appearance and demeanor. He’d headed the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and two field divisions, and been at the point of retirement before being talked into his new job by his close friend, Director Daniel E. Murray. The Counter-Terrorism Division was a stepchild of the much larger Criminal and Foreign Counter Intelligence divisions, but it was gaining in importance on a daily basis.

“Grab yourself a seat,” Werner said, pointing, as he finished up a call. That just took another minute. Then Gus replaced the phone and hit the DO NOT DISTURB button.

“Ben Harding faxed this up to me,” Werner said, holding the shooting report from the previous day. “How did it go?”

“It’s all in there, sir.” He’d spent three hours picking his own brain and putting it all down on paper in precise FBI bureaucratese. Strange that an act requiring less than sixty seconds to perform should require so much time to explain.

“And what did you leave out, Dominic?” The question was accompanied by the most penetrating look the young agent had ever encountered.

“Nothing, sir,” Caruso replied.

“Dominic, we have some very good pistol shots in the Bureau. I’m one of them,” Gus Werner told his guest. “Three shots, all in the heart from a range of fifteen feet, is pretty good range shooting. For somebody who just tripped over an end table, it’s downright miraculous. Ben Harding didn’t find it remarkable, but Director Murray and I do – Dan’s a pretty good marksman, too. He read this fax last night and asked me to render an opinion. Dan’s never whacked a subject before. I have, three times, twice with HRT – those were cooperative ventures, as it were – and once in Des Moines, Iowa. That one was a kidnapping, too. I’d seen what he’d done to two of his victims – little boys – and, you know, I really didn’t want some psychiatrist telling the jury that he was the victim of an adverse childhood, and that it really wasn’t his fault, and all that bullshit that you hear in a nice clean court of law, where the only thing the jury sees are the pictures, and maybe not even them if the defense counsel can persuade the judge that they’re overly inflammatory. So, you know what happened? I got to be the law. Not to enforce the law, or write the law, or explain the law. That one day, twenty-two years ago, I got to be the law. God’s Own Avenging Sword. And you know, it felt good.”

“How did you know . . ?”

“How did I know for sure that he was our boy? He kept souvenirs. Heads. There were eight of them there in his house trailer. So, no, there wasn’t any doubt at all in my mind. There was a knife nearby, and I told him to pick it up, and he did, and I put four rounds in his chest from a range of ten feet, and I’ve never had a moment’s regret.” Werner paused. “Not many people know that story. Not even my wife. So, don’t tell me you tripped over a table, drew your Smith, and printed three rounds inside the subject’s ventricle standing on one foot, okay?”

“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.”