Teeth of the Tiger

a long car ride.'

For the moment, Brian would tuck his into his belt. 'Where to today, Pete?'

'Back to the mall. More tracking drills.'

'Great,' Brian responded. 'Why don't you have invisibility pills?'

'H. G. Wells took the formula with him.'

CHAPTER 9 GOING WITH GOD

Jack's drive to The Campus took about thirty-five minutes, listening to NPR's Morning Edition all the way because, like his father, he didn't listen to contemporary music. The similarities with his dad had both vexed and fascinated John Patrick Ryan, Jr., throughout his life. Through most of his teenage years, he'd fought them off, trying to establish his own identity in contrast to his button-down father, but then in college he had somehow drifted back, hardly even noticing the process. He'd thought he was just doing the sensible thing, for instance, to date girls who might be good wife candidates, though he'd never quite found the perfect one. This he unconsciously judged by his mom. He'd been annoyed by teachers at Georgetown who said he was a chip off the old block, and at first taken some offense at it, then reminded himself that his father wasn't all that bad a guy. He could have done worse. He'd seen a lot of rebellion even at a university as conservative as G-Town, with its Jesuit traditions and rigorous scholarship. Some of his classmates had even made a show of rejecting their parents, but what asshole would do something like that? However staid and old-fashioned his father surely was, he'd been a pretty good dad, as dads went. He'd never been overbearing and let him go his own way and choose his own path… in confidence that he'd turn out okay? Jack wondered. But, no. If his father had been that conspiratorial, Jack would have noticed, surely.

He thought about conspiracy. There had been a lot of that in the newspapers and pulp-book media. His father had even joked more than once about having the Marine Corps paint his 'personal' helicopter black. That would have been a hoot, Jack thought. Instead, his surrogate father had been Mike Brennan, whom he'd regularly bombarded with questions, many of them about conspiracy. He'd been hugely disappointed to learn that the United States Secret Service was one hundred percent confident that Lee Harvey Oswald had assassinated Jack Kennedy, and all by himself. At their academy at Beltsville, outside Washington, Jack had held, and even shot, a replica of the 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that had taken the former President's life, and been fully briefed on the case — to his own satisfaction, if not that of the conspiracy industry that so fervently and commercially believed otherwise. The latter had even proposed that his father, as a former CIA official, had been the final beneficiary of a conspiracy that had gone on for at least fifty years for the express purpose of giving CIA the reins of government. Yeah, sure. Like the Trilateral Commission, and the World Order of Freemasons, and whoever else the fiction writers could make up. From both his father and Mike Brennan, he'd heard a lot of CIA stories, few of which bragged on the competence of that federal agency. It was pretty good, but nowhere near as competent as Hollywood proposed. But Hollywood probably believed that Roger Rabbit was real — after all, his picture had made money, right? No, the CIA had a couple of profound shortcomings…

… and was The Campus a means of correcting them…? That was a question. Damn, Junior thought, turning onto Route 29, maybe the conspiracy theorists might be right after all…? His own internal answer was a snort and a grimace.

No, The Campus wasn't like that at all, not like the SPECTRE of the old James Bond movies, or the THRUSH of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. reruns on Nick at Nite. Conspiracy theory depended on the ability of large numbers of people to keep their mouths shut, and as Mike had told him so many times, Bad Guys couldn't keep their mouths shut. There were no deaf-and-dumb people in federal prisons, Mike had told him many times, but criminals never quite figured that one out, the idiots.

Even the people he was tracking had that problem, and they were, supposedly, smart and highly motivated. Or so they thought. But, no, not even they were the Bad Guys of the movies. They needed to talk, and talking would be their downfall. He wondered which it was: Did people who did evil things need to brag, or did they need others to tell them they were doing good in some perverse way upon which they all agreed? The guys he was looking at were Muslims, but there were other Muslims. He and his father both knew Prince Ali of Saudi Arabia, and he was a good guy, the guy who'd given his dad the sword from which he'd gotten his Secret Service code name, and he still stopped by the house at least once a year, because the Saudis, once you made friends with them, were the most loyal people in the world. Of course, it helped if you were an ex-President. Or, in his case, the son of a former President, now making his own way in the 'black' world…

Damn, how will Dad react to this? Jack wondered. He's going to have a cow. And Mom? A real hissy fit. That was good for a laugh as he turned left. But Mom didn't need to find out. The cover story would work for her — and Grandpa — but not for Dad. Dad had helped set this place up. Maybe he needed one of those black helicopters after all. He slid into his own parking place, number 127. The Campus couldn't be all that big and powerful, could it? Not with less than a hundred fifty employees. He locked his car and headed in, remarking to himself that this every-morning-to-work thing sucked. But everybody had to start somewhere.

He walked in the back entrance, like most of the others. There was a reception/security desk. The guy there was Ernie Chambers, formerly a sergeant first class in the 1st Infantry Division. His blue uniform blazer had a miniature of the Combat Infantryman's Badge, just in case you didn't notice the shoulders and the hard black eyes. After the first Persian Gulf War, he'd changed jobs from grunt to MP. He'd probably enforced the law and directed traffic pretty well, Jack thought, waving good-morning at him.

'Hey, Mr. Ryan.'

''Morning, Ernie.'

'You have a good one, sir.' To the ex-soldier, everybody was named 'sir.'

* * *

It was two hours earlier outside Ciudad Juarez. There, the van pulled into a vehicle-service plaza and stopped by a cluster of four other vehicles. Behind them were the other minivans who'd followed them all the way to the American border. The men roused from their sleep and stumbled into the chill morning air to stretch.

'Here I leave you, senor,' the driver said to Mustafa. 'You will join the man by the tan Ford Explorer. Vaya con Dios, amigos,' he said in that most charming of dismissals: Go with God.

Mustafa walked over and found a tallish man wearing a cowboy-type hat. He didn't appear very clean, and his mustache needed trimming. 'Buenos dias, I am Pedro. I will be taking you the rest of the way. There are four of you for my vehicle, yes?'

Mustafa nodded. 'That is correct.'

'There are water bottles in the truck. You may wish to have something to eat. You can buy anything you like from the shop.' He waved to the building. Mustafa did, his colleagues did much the same, and after ten minutes they all boarded the vehicles and headed out.

They went west, mostly along Route 2. Immediately, the vehicles broke up, no longer 'flying formation,' as it were. There were four of them, all large American-made SUV-TYPE vehicles, all of them coated with a thick coating of dirt and grit so that they did not appear new. The sun had climbed above the horizon to their rear, casting its shadows onto the khaki-colored ground.

Pedro appeared to have spoken his piece back at the plaza. Now he said nothing, except an occasional belch, and chain-smoked his cigarettes. He had the radio on to an AM station, and hummed along with the Spanish music. The Arabs sat in silence.

* * *

'Hey, Tony,' Jack said in greeting. His workmate was already on his workstation.

'Howdy,' Wills responded.

'Anything hot this morning?'

'Not after yesterday, but Langley is talking about putting some coverage on our friend Fa'ad — again.'

'Will they really do it?'