The Teeth of the Tiger Page 4

  Toward the end of his second six-year term, however, he’d suffered a great personal tragedy. He’d lost his wife and three children in an accident on Interstate 185 just outside of Columbia, South Carolina, their station wagon crushed beneath the wheels of a Kenworth tractor-trailer. It had been a predictably crushing blow, and soon thereafter, at the very beginning of the campaign for his third term, more misfortune had struck him. It became known through a column in the New York Times that his personal investment portfolio—he’d always kept it private, saying that since he took no money for his campaigning, he had no need to disclose his net worth except in the most general of terms—showed evidence of insider trading. This suspicion was confirmed with deeper delving by the newspapers and TV, and despite Hendley’s protest that the Securities and Exchange Commission had never actually published guidelines about what the law meant, it appeared to some that he’d used his inside knowledge on future government expenditures to benefit a real-estate investment enterprise which would profit him and his co-investors over fifty million dollars. Worse still, when challenged on the question in a public debate by the Republican candidate—a self-described “Mr. Clean”—he’d responded with two mistakes. First, he’d lost his temper in front of rolling cameras. Second, he’d told the people of South Carolina that if they doubted his honesty, then they could vote for the fool with whom he shared the stage. For a man who’d never put a political foot wrong in his life, that surprise alone had cost him five percent of the state’s voters. The remainder of his lackluster campaign had only slid downhill, and despite the lingering sympathy vote from those who remembered the annihilation of his family, his seat had ended up an upset-loss for the Democrats, which had further been exacerbated by a venomous concession statement. Then he’d left public life for good, not even returning to his antebellum plantation northwest of Charleston but rather moving to Maryland and leaving his life entirely behind. One further flamethrower statement at the entire congressional process had burned whatever bridges might have remained open to him.

  His current home was a farm dating back to the eighteenth century, where he raised Appaloosa horses—riding and mediocre golf were his only remaining hobbies—and lived the quiet life of a gentleman farmer. He also worked at The Campus seven or eight hours per day, commuting back and forth in a chauffeured stretch Cadillac.

  Fifty-two now, tall, slender and silver-haired, he was well known without being known at all, perhaps the one lingering aspect of his political past.

  “YOU DID well in the mountains,” Jim Hardesty said, waving the young Marine to a chair.

  “Thank you, sir. You did okay, too, sir.”

  “Captain, anytime you walk back through your front door after it’s all over, you’ve done well. I learned that from my training officer. About sixteen years ago,” he added.

  Captain Caruso did the mental arithmetic and decided that Hardesty was a little older than he looked. Captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces, then CIA, plus sixteen years made him closer to fifty than forty. He must have worked very hard indeed to keep in shape.

  “So,” the officer asked, “what can I do for you?”

  “What did Terry tell you?” the spook asked.

  “He told me I’d be talking with somebody named Pete Alexander.”

  “Pete got called out of town suddenly,” Hardesty explained.

  The officer accepted the explanation at face value. “Okay, anyway, the general said you Agency guys are on some kind of talent hunt, but you’re not willing to grow your own,” Caruso answered honestly.

  “Terry is a good man, and a damned fine Marine, but he can be a little parochial.”

  “Maybe so, Mr. Hardesty, but he’s going to be my boss soon, when he takes over Second Marine Division, and I’m trying to stay on his good side. And you still haven’t told me why I’m here.”

  “Like the Corps?” the spook asked. The young Marine nodded.

  “Yes, sir. The pay ain’t all that much, but it’s all I need, and the people I work with are the best.”

  “Well, the ones we went up the mountain with are pretty good. How long did you have them?”

  “Total? About fourteen months, sir.”

  “You trained them pretty well.”

  “It’s what they pay me for, sir, and I had good material to start with.”

  “You also handled that little combat action well,” Hardesty observed, taking note of the distant replies he was getting.

  Captain Caruso was not quite modest enough to regard it as a “little” combat action. The bullets flying around had been real enough, which made the action big enough. But his training, he’d found, had worked just about as well as his officers had told him it would in all the classes and field exercises. It had been an important and rather gratifying discovery. The Marine Corps actually did make sense. Damn.

  “Yes, sir,” was all he said in reply, however, adding, “And thank you for your help, sir.”

  “I’m a little old for that sort of thing, but it’s nice to see that I still know how.” And it had been quite enough, Hardesty didn’t add. Combat was still a kid’s game, and he was no longer a kid. “Any thoughts about it, Captain?” he asked next.

  “Not really, sir. I did my after-action report.”

  Hardesty had read it. “Nightmares, anything like that?”

  The question surprised Caruso. Nightmares? Why would he have those? “No, sir,” he responded with visible puzzlement.

  “Any qualms of conscience?” Hardesty went on.

  “Sir, those people were making war on my country. We made war back. You ought not to play the game if you can’t handle the action. If they had wives and kids, I’m sorry about that, but when you screw with people, you need to understand that they’re going to come see you about it.”

  “It’s a tough world?”

  “Sir, you’d better not kick a tiger in the ass unless you have a plan for dealing with his teeth.”

  No nightmares and no regrets, Hardesty thought. That was the way things were supposed to be, but the kinder, gentler United States of America didn’t always turn out its people that way. Caruso was a warrior. Hardesty rocked back in his seat and gave his guest a careful look before speaking.

  “Cap’n, the reason you’re here . . . you’ve seen it in the papers, all the problems we’ve had dealing with this new spate of international terrorism. There have been a lot of turf wars between the Agency and the Bureau. At the operational level, there’s usually no problem, and there isn’t all that much trouble at the command level—the FBI director, Murray, is solid troop, and when he worked Legal Attaché in London he got along well with our people.”

  “But it’s the midlevel staff pukes, right?” Caruso asked. He’d seen it in the Corps, too. Staff officers who spent a lot of their time snarling at other staff officers, saying that their daddy could beat up the other staff’s daddy. The phenomenon probably dated back to the Romans or the Greeks. It had been stupid and counterproductive back then, too.

  “Bingo,” Hardesty confirmed. “And you know, God Himself might be able to fix it, but even He would have to have a really good day to bring it off. The bureaucracies are too entrenched. It’s not so bad in the military. People there shuffle in and out of jobs, and they have this idea of ‘mission,’ and everybody generally works to accomplish it, especially if it helps them all hustle up the ladder individually. Generally speaking, the farther you are from the sharp end, the more likely you are to immerse yourself in the minutiae. So, we’re looking for people who know about the sharp end.”

  “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-gathe
ring. 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 WAS scarcely 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 CounterIntelligence 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.”

  Werner lifted Caruso’s folder. “Says here you’re pretty smart... good language skills, too . . . Interested in coming to Washington? I’m looking for people who know how to think on their feet, to work in my shop.”

  Another move, was what Special Agent Dominic Caruso heard.

  GERRY HENDLEY was not an overly formal man. He wore a jacket and tie to work, but the jacket ended up on a clothes tree in his office within fifteen seconds of arrival. He had a fine executive secretary—like himself, a native of South Carolina—named Helen Connolly, and after running through his day’s schedule with her, he picked up his Wall Street Journal and checked the front page. He’d already devoured the day’s New York Times and Washington Post to get his political fix for the day, grumbling as always how they never quite got it right. The digital clock on his desk told him that he had twenty minutes before his first meeting, and he
lit up his computer to get the morning’s Early Bird as well, the clipping service that went to senior government officials. This he scanned to see if he’d missed anything in his morning read of the big-time papers. Not much, except for an interesting piece in the Virginia Pilot about the annual Fletcher Conference, a circle-think held by the Navy and Marine Corps every year at the Norfolk Navy Base. They talked about terrorism, and fairly intelligently, Hendley thought. People in uniform often did. As opposed to elected officials.

  We kill off the Soviet Union, Hendley thought, and we expected everything in the world to settle down. But what we didn’t see coming was all these lunatics with leftover AK-47s and education in kitchen chemistry, or simply a willingness to trade their own lives for those of their perceived enemies.

  And the other thing they hadn’t done was prepare the intelligence community to deal with it. Even a president experienced in the black world and the best DCI in American history hadn’t managed to get all that much done. They’d added a lot more people—an extra five hundred personnel in an agency of twenty thousand didn’t sound like a lot, but it had doubled the operations directorate. That had given the CIA a force only half as horribly inadequate as it had been before, but that wasn’t the same as adequate. And in return for it, the Congress had further tightened oversight and restrictions, thus further crippling the new people hired to flesh out the governmental skeleton crew. They never learned. He himself had talked at infinite length to his colleagues in the World’s Most Exclusive Men’s Club, but while some listened, others did not, and almost all of the remainder vacillated. They paid too much attention to the editorial pages, often of newspapers not even native to their home states, because that, they foolishly figured, was what the American People thought. Maybe it was this simple: Any newly elected official was seduced into the game the same way Cleopatra had snookered Gaius Julius Caesar. It was the staffs, he knew, the “professional” political helpers who “guided” their employers into the right way to be reelected, which had become the Holy Grail of public service. America did not have a hereditary ruling class, but it did have plenty of people happy to lead their employers onto the righteous path of government divinity.