Teeth of the Tiger

'For what it costs, you might as well pay attention — and, besides, it wasn't all that hard.' John Patrick Ryan, Jr., sipped at his coffee and wondered what would be coming next.

'We're prepared to discuss an entry-level job,' the former senator told him right away. He'd never been one for beating about the bush, which was one of the reasons he and his visitor's father had gotten along so well.

'Doing what, exactly?' Jack asked, with his eyes perked up.

'What do you know about Hendley Associates?'

'Only what I've already told you.'

'Okay, nothing of what I'm about to tell you can be repeated anywhere. Not anywhere. Are you clear on that?'

'Yes, sir.' And just that fast, everything was clear as hell. He'd guessed right, Jack told himself. Damn.

'Your father was one of my closest friends. I say 'was' because we can't see each other anymore, and we talk very rarely. Usually because he calls here. People like your dad never retire — never all the way, anyway. Your father was one of the best spooks who ever lived. He did some things that were never written down — at least not on government paper — and probably never will be written down. In this case, 'never' means fifty years or so. Your father is doing his memoirs. He's doing two versions, one for publication in a few years, and another that won't see the light of day for a couple of generations. It will not be published until after his death. That's his order.'

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.'