by Tom Clancy
It stuck hard at Jack that his father was making plans for after his own death. His dad—dead? It was a lot to grasp except in a distant, intellectual sense. “Okay,” he managed to say. “Does Mom know this stuff?”
“Probably—no, almost certainly not. Some of it may not exist even at Langley. The government occasionally does things that are not committed to paper. Your father had a gift for stumbling into the middle of stuff like that.”
“And what about you?” Junior asked.
Hendley leaned back and took a philosophical tone. “The problem is that no matter what you do, there’s somebody who won’t like it much. Like a joke. No matter how funny it is, somebody will be offended by it. But at a high level, when somebody is offended, instead of calling you on it to your face, he goes off and cries his eyes out to a member of the press, and it goes public, usually with a great big disapproving tone attached to it. Most often that’s careerism raising its ugly head—getting ahead by back-stabbing somebody senior to you. But it’s also because people in senior positions like to make policy in accordance with their own version of right and wrong. That’s called ego. Problem is, everyone has a different version of right and wrong. Some of them can be downright crazy.
“Now, take our current President. In the Senate Cloakroom, once Ed told me he was so opposed to capital punishment that he couldn’t even have abided executing Adolf Hitler. That was after a few drinks—he tends to be verbose when he’s been drinking, and the sad fact is that he drinks a little too much on occasion. When he said that to me, I joked about it. I told him not to say it in a speech—the Jewish vote is big and powerful and they might see it less as a deeply held principle than as a high-order insult. In the abstract a lot of people oppose capital punishment. Okay, I can respect that, though I do not agree with it. But the drawback to that position is that you cannot then deal decisively with people who do harm to others—sometimes serious harm—without violating your principles, and to some people, their consciences or political sensibilities will not let them do it. Even though the sad fact of the matter is that due process of law is not always effective, frequently outside our borders, and, on rare occasions, inside them.
“Okay, how does this affect America? CIA doesn’t kill people—ever. At least not since the 1950s. Eisenhower was very skillful at using CIA. He was, in fact, so brilliant at exercising power that people never knew anything was happening and thought him a dullard because he didn’t do the old war dance in front of cameras. More to the point, it was a different world back then. World War Two was recent history, and the idea of killing a lot of people—even innocent civilians—was a familiar one, mainly from the bombing campaigns,” Hendley clarified. “It was just a cost of doing business.”
“And Castro?”
“That was President John Kennedy and his brother Robert. They had a hard-on for doing Castro. Most people think it was embarrassment over the Bay of Pigs fiasco. I personally think it might have come more from reading too many James Bond novels. There was a glamour in murdering people back then. Today we call it sociopathy,” Hendley noted sourly. “Problem was, first, that it’s a lot more fun to read about than actually to do it, and, second, it’s not an easy thing to accomplish without highly trained and highly motivated personnel. Well, I guess they found out. Then, when it became public, somehow the involvement of the Kennedy family was glossed over, and CIA paid the price for doing—badly—what the sitting President had told them to do. President Ford’s Executive Order put an end to it all. And so, CIA doesn’t deliberately kill people anymore.”
“What about John Clark?” Jack asked, remembering the look in that guy’s eyes.
“He’s an aberration of sorts. Yes, he has killed people more than once, but he was always careful enough to do it only when it was tactically necessary at the moment. Langley does allow people to defend themselves in the field, and he had a gift for making it tactically necessary. I’ve met Clark a couple of times. Mainly, I know him by reputation. But he’s an aberration. Now that he’s retired, maybe he’ll write a book. But even if he does, it’ll never have the full story in it. Clark plays by the rules, like your dad. Sometimes he bends those rules, but to my knowledge he’s never once broken them—well, not as a federal employee,” Hendley corrected himself. He and the elder Jack Ryan had once had a long talk about John Clark, and they were the only two people in all the world who knew the whole story.
“Once I told Dad that I wouldn’t want to be on Clark’s bad side.”
Hendley smiled. “That’s true enough, but you could also trust John Clark with the lives of your children. When we met last, you asked me a question about Clark. I can answer now: If he were younger, he’d be here,” Hendley said revealingly.
“You just told me something,” Jack said at once.
“I know. Can you live with it?”
“Killing people?”
“I didn’t say that, exactly, did I?”
Jack Jr. put his coffee cup down. “Now I know why Dad says you’re smart.”
“Can you live with the fact that your father has taken a few lives in his time?”
“I know about that. Happened the night I was born. It’s practically a family legend. The newsies made a lot of it while Dad was President. They kept bringing it up like it was leprosy or something. Except there’s a cure for leprosy.”
“I know. In a movie it’s downright cool, but in real life people get the heebie-jeebies about it. The problem with the real world is that sometimes—not often, but sometimes—it’s necessary to do that sort of thing, as your father discovered . . . on more than one occasion, Jack. He never flinched. I think he even had bad dreams about it. But when he had to do it, he did it. That’s why you’re alive. That’s why a lot of other people are alive.”
“I know about the submarine thing. That’s pretty much in the open, but—”
“More than just that. Your father never went out looking for trouble, but when it found him—as I said, he did what was necessary.”
“I sorta remember when the people who attacked Mom and Dad—the night I was born, that is—were executed. I asked Mom about it. She’s not real big on executing people, you see. In that case, she didn’t mind very much. She was uncomfortable with it, but I suppose you’d say she saw the logic of the situation. Dad—you know, he didn’t really like it either, but he didn’t cry any tears over it.”
“Your father had a gun to that guy’s—the leader, I mean—his head, but he didn’t squeeze off the round. It wasn’t necessary, and so he held back. Had I been in his position, well, I don’t know. It was a hard call, but your father made the right choice when he had ample reason not to.”
“That’s what Mr. Clark said. I asked him about it once. He said the cops were right there, so why bother? But I never really believed him. That’s one hardcase mother. I asked Mike Brennan, too. He said it was impressive for a civilian to hold off. But he would not have killed the guy. Training, I guess.”
“I’m not sure about Clark. He’s not really a murderer. He doesn’t kill people for fun or for money. Maybe he would have spared the guy’s life. But no, a trained cop is not supposed to do anything like that. What do you think you would have done?”
“You can’t know until you’re there,” Jack answered. “I thought it through once or twice. I decided Dad handled it okay.”
Hendley nodded. “You’re right. He handled the other part right, too. The guy in the boat he drilled in the head, he had to do it to survive, and when you have that choice, there’s only one way to go.”
“So, Hendley Associates does what, exactly?”
“We gather and act upon intelligence information.”
“But you’re not part of the government,” Jack objected.
“Technically, no, we’re not. We do things that have to be done, when the agencies of the government are unable to handle them.”
“How often does that happen?”
“Not very,” Hendley replied offhandedly. �
�But that may change—or it might not. Hard to tell right now.”
“How many times—”
“You do not need to know,” Hendley replied, with raised eyebrows.
“Okay. What does Dad know about this place?”
“He’s the guy who persuaded me to set it up.”
“Oh . . .” And just that fast it was all clear. Hendley had kissed off his political career in order to serve his country in a way that would never be recognized, never be rewarded. Damn. Did his own father have the stones to try this one? “And if you get into trouble somehow . . . ?”
“In a safety-deposit box belonging to my personal attorney are a hundred presidential pardons, covering any and all illegal acts that might have been committed between the dates that my secretary will fill in when she types up the blanks, and signed by your father, a week before he left office.”
“Is that legal?”
“It’s legal enough,” Hendley replied. “Your dad’s Attorney General, Pat Martin, said it would pass muster, though it would be pure dynamite if it ever became public.”
“Dynamite, hell, it would be a nuke on Capitol Hill,” Jack thought aloud. It was, in fact, something of an understatement.
“That’s why we’re careful here. I cannot encourage my people to do things that might end them up in prison.”
“Just lose their credit rating forever.”
“You have your father’s sense of humor, I see.”
“Well, sir, he is my dad, you know? Comes along with the blue eyes and black hair.”
The academic records said that he had the brains. Hendley could see that he had the same inquisitive nature, and the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff. Did he have his father’s guts . . . ? Better never to have to find out. But even his best people couldn’t predict the future, except in currency fluctuations—and on that they cheated. That was the one illegal thing he could get prosecuted for, but, no, that would never happen, would it?
“Okay, time for you to meet Rick Bell. He and Jerry Rounds do the analysis here.”
“Have I met them before?”
“Nope. Neither has your father. That’s one of the problems with the intelligence community. It’s gotten too damned big. Too many people—the organizations are always tripping over themselves. If you have the best hundred people in pro football on the same team, the team will self-destruct from internal dissension. Every man was born with an ego, and they’re like the proverbial long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Nobody objects too much because the government isn’t supposed to function too efficiently. It would scare people if it did. That’s why we’re here. Come on. Jerry’s office is right down the hall.”
“CHARLOTTESVILLE?” Dominic asked. “I thought—”
“Since the time of Director Hoover, the Bureau has had a safe house facility down there. Technically, it doesn’t belong to the FBI. It’s where we keep the Gray Files.”
“Oh.” He’d heard about that from a senior instructor at the Academy. The Gray Files—outsiders never even knew the term—were supposed to be Hoover’s files on political figures, all manner of personal irregularities, which politicians collected as other men collected stamps and coins. Supposedly destroyed at Hoover’s death in 1972, in fact they’d been sequestered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in a large safe house on a hilltop across the gentle valley from Tom Jefferson’s Monticello and overlooking the University of Virginia. The old plantation house had been built with a capacious wine cellar, which for more than fifty years had held rather more precious contents. It was the blackest of Bureau secrets, known only to a handful of people, which did not necessarily include the sitting FBI Director, but rather controlled by only the most trusted of career agents. The files were never opened, at least not the political ones. That junior senator during the Truman administration, for example, did not need to have his penchant for underage females revealed to the public. He was long dead in any case, as was the abortionist. But the fear of these records, whose continuation was widely believed to be carried on, explained why Congress rarely attacked the FBI on matters of appropriations. A really good archivist with a computerized memory might have inferred their existence from subtle holes in the Bureau’s voluminous records, but that would have been a task worthy of Heracles. Besides, there were much juicier secrets than that to be found in the White Files squirreled off in a former West Virginia coal mine—or so an historian might think.
“We’re going to detach you from the Bureau,” Werner said next.
“What?” Dominic Caruso asked. “Why?” The shock of that pronouncement nearly ejected him from his chair.
“Dominic, there’s a special unit that wants to talk to you. Your employment will continue there. They will fill you in. I said ‘detach,’ not ‘terminate,’ remember. Your pay will continue. You’ll be kept on the books as a Special Agent on special assignment to counterterrorism investigations directly under my office. You’ll continue to get normal promotions and pay raises. This information is secret, Agent Caruso,” Werner went on. “You cannot discuss it with anyone but me. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir, but I cannot say I understand.”
“You will in due course. You will continue to investigate criminal activity, and probably to act upon it. If your new assignment turns out to be not to your liking, you can tell me, and we’ll reassign you to a new field division for more conventional duties. But, I repeat, you cannot discuss your new assignment with anyone but me. If anyone asks, you’re still a Special Agent of the FBI, but you are unable to discuss your work with anyone. You will not be vulnerable to any adverse action of any kind as long as you do your job properly. You will find that the oversight is looser than you’re used to. But you will be accountable to someone at all times.”
“Sir, this is still not very clear,” Special Agent Caruso observed.
“You will be doing work of the highest national importance, mainly counterterrorism. There will be danger attached to it. The terrorist community is not a civilized one.”
“This is an undercover assignment, then?”
Werner nodded. “Correct.”
“And it’s run out of this office?”
“More or less,” Werner dodged with a nod.
“And I can bail out whenever I want?”
“Correct.”
“Okay, sir, I’ll give it a look. What do I do now?”
Werner wrote on a small pad of paper and handed it across. “Go to that address. Tell them you want to see Gerry.”
“Right now, sir?”
“Unless you have something else to do.”
“Yes, sir.” Caruso stood, shook hands, and took his leave. At least it would be a pleasant drive into the Virginia horse country.
CHAPTER 4
BOOT CAMP
THE DRIVE back across the river to the Marriott allowed Dominic to collect his bags—with a twenty-dollar bill to the bellman—and then punch in his destination on the Mercedes’s navigation computer. Soon he was south-bound on Interstate 95, leaving Washington behind. The skyline of the national capital actually looked pretty good in his rearview mirror. The car drove well, about what you’d expect of a Mercedes; the local talk radio was pleasingly conservative—cops tended to be that way—and traffic wasn’t too bad, though he found himself pitying the poor bastards who had to drive into D.C. every day to push paper in the Hoover Building and all the other government-grotesque buildings surrounding The Mall. At least FBI Headquarters had its own pistol range for stress management. Probably well used, Dominic thought.
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. C
ertainly 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 fair-sized 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—