Teeth of the Tiger

grandfather's World War One revolver to make it so.

'That was bad,' John Patrick Ryan, Jr., agreed. 'You know, except for him, I wouldn't have been born. It's a big family story. Uncle Robby's version of it was pretty good. He loved telling stories. Him and Dad were pretty tight. After Robby got wasted, the political pukes were running around in circles, some of them wanted Dad to pick up the flag again, like, but he didn't do it, and so, I guess, he helped that Kealty guy get elected. Dad can't stand him. That's the other thing he never learned, how to be nice to people he hates. He just didn't like living at the White House very much.'

He was good at it, being President, Dominic thought.

'You tell him that. Mom didn't mind leaving, either. That First Lady stuff wrecked her doctor work, and she really hated what it did with Kyle and Katie. You know that old saying, the most dangerous place in the world is between a mom and her kids? It's for real, guys. Only time I ever saw her lose her temper — Dad does that a lot more than Mom does — was when somebody told her that her official duties required her not to go to Kyle's pageant at his day-care center. Jeez, she really came unglued. Anyway, the nannies helped — and the newspeople hammered her about that, how it wasn't American and all that. You know, if anybody had ever taken a picture of Dad taking a piss, I bet someone would have said he wasn't doing it right.'

'That's what critics are for, to tell you how much smarter they are than the person they're criticizing.'

'In the Bureau, Aldo, they're called lawyers, or the Office of Professional Responsibility,' Dominic informed the table. 'They have their sense of humor surgically removed before they join up.'

'The Marines have reporters, too — and I bet not one of them ever went through boot camp.' At least the guys who worked in the IG had been through the Basic School.

'I guess we should cheer up,' Dominic announced, holding up his wineglass. 'Ain't nobody going to criticize us.'

'And live,' Jack added with a chuckle. Damn, he thought, what the hell is Dad going to say when he finds out about me?

CHAPTER 16 AND THE PURSUING HORSES

Sunday was a day of rest for most people, and at The Campus it was much the same, except for the security people. Gerry Hendley believed that maybe God had had a point, that seven-day schedules accomplished a lot less than adding 16.67 percent to a man's weekly productivity. It also dulled the brain by denying it free-form exercise, or just the luxury of doing nothing at all.

But today it was different, of course. Today they'd be planning real black operations for the first time. The Campus had been active just over nineteen months, and that time had mostly been spent in establishing their cover as a trading and arbitrage business. His department heads had taken the Acela trains back and forth to New York many times to meet their white-world counterparts, and though it had seemed slow at the time, in retrospect it had been very quickly indeed that they'd made their reputation in the money-management community. They'd hardly ever shown the world their real results, of course, from speculating on currencies and a few very carefully chosen stock issues, sometimes even insider trades on companies which themselves didn't know the business that was coming their way. Staying covert had been the overall objective, but since The Campus had to be self-supporting, it also had to generate real income. In World War II, the Americans had peopled its black-operations establishments with lawyers, while the Brits had used bankers. Both had proven to be good for screwing people… and killing them. It had to be something about the way they looked at the world, Hendley thought over his coffee.

He gazed at the others: Jerry Rounds, his head of Strategic Planning; Sam Granger, his chief of Operations. Even before the building had been completed, the three of them had been thinking about the shape of the world, and how a few of the corners could best be rounded off. Rick Bell was here, too, his chief of Analysis, the one who spent his working days sorting through the 'take' from NSA and CIA, and trying to find meaning in the flood of unrelated information — aided, of course, by the thirty-five thousand analysts at Langley, Fort Meade, and other such places. Like all senior analysts, he also liked to frolic in the operations playground, and here that was actually possible, since The Campus was too small to have been overtaken by its own bureaucracy. He and Hendley worried that it might not always be so, and both made sure that no empires were being built.

To the best of their knowledge, theirs was the only institution in all the world like this. And it had been set up in such a way that it could be erased from the landscape in a matter of two or three months. Since Hendley Associates did not invite outside investors, their public profile was low enough that the radar never spotted their machinations, and, in any case, the community they were in did not advertise. It was easy to hide in a field in which everyone did the same, and nobody ratted on anyone else, unless very badly stung. And The Campus didn't sting. At least not with money.

'So,' Hendley began, 'are we ready?'

'Yes,' Rounds said for Granger. Sam nodded soberly and smiled.

'We're ready,' Granger announced officially. 'Our two boys have earned their spurs in a way we never anticipated.'

'They earned 'em, all right,' Bell agreed. 'And the Ryan boy has identified a good first target, this Sali fellow. The events of Friday have generated a lot of message traffic. They turn out a lot of cheerleaders. A lot of them are stringers and wanna-bes, but even if we pop one of them by mistake it's no great loss. I have the first four all lined up. So, Sam, do you have a plan for dealing with them?'

That was Davis's cue. 'We're going to do reconnaissance by fire. After we whack one or two, we'll see what reaction, if any, results, and we will take our guidance from there. I agree that Mr. Sali looks like a profitable first target. Question is, is his elimination going to be overt or covert?'

'Explain,' Hendley ordered.

'Well, if he's found dead on the street, that's one thing. If he disappears with his daddy's money and leaves behind a note saying that he wants to stop what he's doing and just retire, that's something else,' Sam explained.

'Kidnapping? It's dangerous.' The Metropolitan Police in London had a closure rate on kidnappings that nibbled at one hundred percent. That was a dangerous game to play, especially on their first move.

'Well, we can hire an actor, dress him up right, fly him to New York Kennedy, and then just have him disappear. In fact, we dispose of the body and keep the money. How much does he have access to, Rick?'

'Direct access? Hell, it's over three hundred million bucks.'

'Might look good in the corporate exchequer,' Sam speculated. 'And it wouldn't hurt his dad much, would it?'

'His father's money — all of it? Try the sunny side of three billion,' Bell answered. 'He'll miss it, but it wouldn't break him. And given his opinion of his son, it might even develop as good cover for our operation,' he hypothesized.

'I am not recommending this as a course of action, but it is an alternative,' Granger concluded.

It had been talked about before, of course. It was too obvious a play to escape notice. And three hundred million dollars would have looked just fine in a Campus account, say in the Bahamas or Liechtenstein. You could hide money anywhere that had telephone lines. It was just electrons anyway, not gold bricks.

Hendley was surprised that Sam had brought this up so soon. Maybe he wanted to get a read on his colleagues. They were clearly not overcome with emotion at the thought of ending this Sali's life, but to steal from him in the process pushed some very different buttons. A man's conscience could be a funny thing, Gerry concluded.

'Let's set that aside for the moment. How hard will the hit be?' Hendley asked.

'With what Rick Pasternak gave us? It's child's play, so long as our people don't make a complete hash of it. Even then the worst thing that can happen is that it'll look like a mugging that went wrong,' Granger told them.

'What if our guy drops the pen?' Rounds worried.

'It's a pen. You can write with it. It'll pass inspection with any cop in the world,' Granger replied confidently. He reached in his pocket and passed his sample around the table. 'This one's cold,' he assured them.