Tom Clancy - Locked On

He overtook Hardesty on South Washington Boulevard, just as he passed Towers Park on the right. The CIA man glanced back for an instant as he heard the jogger behind him, he moved to the edge of the curb to let the faster man pass, but instead the man spoke. “Jim, it’s John Clark. Keep running. Let’s go up in the trees here and have a quick chat.”

Without a word, both men ran up the little incline and stepped into an empty playground. There was just faint light in the sky, enough to see faces close. They stopped by a swing set.

“How’s it going, John?”

“I guess you could say I’ve been better.”

“You don’t need that gun on your hip.”

Clark didn’t know if the weapon was printing under his jacket or if Hardesty had just assumed. “I don’t need it for you, maybe. Whether or not I need it has yet to be determined.”

Neither man was out of breath; the jog had lasted less than a half-mile.

Hardesty said, “When I heard you were on the run, I thought you might come looking for me.”

Clark replied, “The FBI probably had the same suspicions.”

A nod. “Yep. A two-man SSG team a half-block up the street. They showed up before Brannigan went on the news.” The Special Surveillance Group was a unit of non-agent FBI employees who served as the Bureau’s army of watchers.

“Figured.”

“I doubt they’ll come looking for me for a half-hour or so. I’m all yours.”

“I won’t keep you. I’m just trying to get a handle on what’s going on.”

“DOJ has a hard-on for you, big-time. That’s pretty much all I know. But I want you to know this. Whatever they got on you, John, they didn’t get anything from me that wasn’t in your file.”

Clark did not even know that Hardesty had been questioned. “The FBI interviewed you?”

Hardesty nodded. “Two senior special agents grilled me at a hotel in McLean yesterday morning. I saw some younger special agents in another meeting room interviewing other guys from the building. Pretty much everyone who was around when you were in SAD was questioned about you. I guess I warranted the first-string agents because Alden told them you and I go way back.”

“What did they ask?”

“All kinds of stuff. They had your file already. Guess those pricks Kilborn and Alden saw something in there that they didn’t like, so they started some sort of DOJ investigation.”

Clark just shook his head. “No. What could be in my CIA record that would warrant CIA going out of shop like that? Even if they thought they had me on some bullshit treason charge, they’d bring me in themselves before they breathed a word of it to DOJ.”

Hardesty shook his head. “Not if they had something on you that wasn’t part of your CIA duties. Those fucks would sell you down the river because you are friends with Ryan.”

Shit, thought Clark. What if this wasn’t about The Campus? What if this was about the election? “What did they ask?”

Hardesty shook his head but stopped it in mid-shake. “Wait. I am the archivist. I know, or at least I have seen, virtually everything in the virtual record. But there was one thing they asked me about that threw me for a loop.”

“What’s that?”

“I know all your SAD exploits don’t make it into the files, but normally there is a grain of something in the files that can link up to what you were actually working on. Meaning I might not have a clue what a paramilitary operations officer did in Nigeria, but I can tell you if he was in Africa on a particular date. Malaria shots, commercial air travel, per diems that correspond to the location, that sort of thing.”

“Right.”

“But the two feds asked me about your activities in Berlin in March 1981. I went through the files… ” Hardesty shook his head. “Nothing. Nothing at all about you being anywhere near Germany at that time.”

John Clark did not have to think back. He remembered instantly. He gave away nothing, just asked, “Did they believe you?”

James shook his head. “Hell, no. Apparently Alden had told them to watch out for me because you and I have some history. So the feds pressed me. They asked me about a hit you did on a Stasi operative named Schuman. I told them the truth. I’ve never heard of any Schuman, and I didn’t know a damn thing about you in Berlin in ’eighty-one.”

Clark just nodded, his poker face remaining intact. The dawn filled out some of the features of Hardesty’s face. The question John wanted to ask hung in the air for a moment, then Hardesty answered it unbidden.

“I did not say one damn word about Hendley Associates.” Hardesty was one of the few at CIA who knew of the existence of The Campus. In fact, Jim Hardesty was the one who suggested Chavez and Clark go meet with Gerry Hendley in the first place.

Clark stared into the man’s eyes. It was too dark to get a read on him, but, Clark decided, Jim Hardesty wouldn’t lie to him. After a few seconds he said, “Thank you.”

James just shrugged. “I’ll take that to my grave. Look, John, whatever happened in Germany, this isn’t going to be about you. You’re just a pawn. Kealty wants to push Ryan into a corner on the issue of black ops. He’s using you, guilt by association or whatever you want to call it. But the way he’s having the FBI rummage through your past ops, pulling them out, and waving them around in the air, stuff that ought to just be left right the fuck where it is — I mean, he’s digging up old bones at Langley, and nobody needs that.”

John just looked at him.

“You know and I know they don’t have anything on you substantive. No sense in you making the situation any worse.”

“Say what you want to say, Jim.”

“I am not worried about your indictment. You are a tough guy.” He sighed. “I’m worried you are going to get killed.”

John said nothing.

“It makes no sense to run from this. When Ryan gets elected, this whole thing will dry up. Maybe, just maybe, you do a dozen months in a Club Fed somewhere. You can handle that.”

“You want me to turn myself in?”

Hardesty sighed. “You running like this isn’t good for you, it isn’t good for American black ops, and it isn’t good for 뀀t goodyour family.”

Clark nodded now, looked at his watch. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

“It’s best.”

“You’d better get on home now before SSG calls it in.”

The men shook hands. “Think about what I said.”

“I will.” Clark turned away from Hardesty, stepped into the trees lining the playground, and headed for the bus stop.

He had a plan now, a direction.

He wasn’t going to turn himself in.

No, he was going to Germany.

Clark sat in the back of a CVS pharmacy in the Sand-town neighborhood of West Baltimore. It was a blighted part of the city, rife with crime and decay, but it was also a good place for Clark to lie low.

Seated around him were locals, most old and sickly, waiting for their prescriptions to be filled. John himself kept his coat bunched up around his neck and his knit cap pulled down over his ears — it made him look like he was fighting a bad cold, but it also served to cover his facial features in case anyone around was looking for him.

Clark knew Baltimore; he’d walked these streets as a young man. Back then, he had been forced to disguise himself as a homeless person while he tracked the drug gang who had raped and then murdered his girlfriend, Pam. He’d killed a lot of people here in Baltimore, a lot of people who deserved to die.

That was around the time when he’d joined the Agency. Admiral Jim Greer had helped him cover up his exploits here in Baltimore so that he could work with the Special Activities Division. It was also the time when he’d met Sandy O’Toole, who later became Sandy Clark, his wife.