The Teeth of the Tiger Read online

  “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 ther
e. 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. Certainly 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—

  “Enzo!”

  Dominic snapped his head around. “Aldo!”

  People often remarked on their resemblance, though it was even more apparent when they were apart. Both had dark hair and fair skin. Brian was the taller by twenty-four millimeters. Dominic was perhaps ten pounds heavier. Whatever differences in mannerisms they’d had as boys had stayed with them as they’d grown up together. Since both were partly Italian in ancestry, they hugged warmly—but they didn’t kiss. They weren’t that Italian.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Dominic was the first to ask.

  “Me? What about you?” Brian shot back, heading to help with his brother’s bags. “I read about your shoot in Alabama. What’s the story?”

  “Pedophile,” Dominic replied, pulling out his two-suiter. “Raped and killed a cute little girl. I got there about half an hour too late.”

  “Hey, ain’t nobody perfect, Enzo. Papers said you put an end to his career.”

  Dominic looked right into Brian’s eyes. “Yeah, I managed to accomplish that.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “Three in the chest.”

  “Works every time,” Captain Brian Caruso observed. “And no lawyers to cry over his body.”

  “No, not this time.” His words were not the least bit jolly, but his brother heard the cold satisfaction.

  “With this, eh?” The Marine lifted his brother’s automatic from its holster. “Looks nice,” he said.

  “It shoots pretty good. Loaded, bro, do be careful.”

  Brian ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber. “Ten millimeter?”

  “That’s right. FBI-issue. Makes nice holes. The Bureau went back to it after Inspector O’Day had that shoot-out with the bad guys—you know, Uncle Jack’s little girl.”

  Brian remembered the story well: the attack on Katie Ryan at her school shortly after her dad had become President, the shoot-out, the kills.

  “That dude had his shit wired pretty tight,” he said. “And you know, he’s not even an ex-Marine. He was a Navy puke before he turned cop. That’s what they said at Quantico, anyway.”

  “They did a training tape of the job. I met him once, just shook his hand with twenty other guys. Son of a bitch can shoot. He talked about waiting for your chance and making the first shot count. He double-tapped both their heads.”

  “How did he keep his cool?” The rescue of Katie Ryan had struck home for both Caruso boys. She was, after all, their first cousin, and a nice little girl, the image of her mother.

  “Hey, you smelled the smoke over there. How did you keep yours?”

  “Tra
ining. I had Marines to look after, bro.”

  Together, they manhandled Dominic’s things inside. Brian showed the way upstairs. They had separate bedrooms, next to each other. Then they came back to the kitchen. Both got coffee and sat at the kitchen table.

  “So, how’s life in the Marine Corps, Aldo?”

  “Gonna make major soon, Enzo. Got myself a Silver Star for what I did over there—wasn’t that big a deal, really, I just did what they trained me to do. One of my men got shot up, but he’s okay now. We didn’t bag the guy we were after—he wasn’t in a mood to surrender, so Gunny Sullivan sent him off to see Allah—but we got two live ones and they talked some, gave us some good information, the Intel guys told me.”

  “What did you get the pretty ribbon for?” Dominic asked pointedly.

  “Mainly for staying alive. I shot three of the bad guys myself. Weren’t even hard shots, really. I just took ’em. Later they asked me if I had any nightmares about it. The Marine Corps just has too many doctors around—and they’re all squids.”

  “Bureau’s the same way, but I blew it off. No bad dreams about that bastard. The poor little girl. I should’ve shot his dick off.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “’Cause that doesn’t kill your ass, Aldo. But three in the heart does.”

  “You didn’t shoot him on the spur of the moment, did you?”

  “Not exactly, but—”

  “And that’s why you’re here, Special Agent Caruso,” a man said, entering the room. He was over six feet, a very fit fifty, both of the others thought.

  “Who are you, sir?” Brian asked.

  “Pete Alexander,” the man answered.

  “I was supposed to meet you last—”

  “No, actually you weren’t, but that’s what we told the general.” Alexander sat down with his own cup of coffee.

  “So, who are you, then?” Dominic asked.

  “I’m your training officer.”

  “Just you?” Brian asked.