“I remember that,” Chavez observed. “Shaken, not stirred.” He had himself a brief laugh.
“I don’t drink martinis, Domingo, remember?”
“Not as good-looking as Sean Connery, either. What did you learn from the film, Simmons?”
“Keep your options open, and don’t walk in the middle of the street.” Those were, in fact, two good lessons for a field spook.
“So who’re we meeting?” Clark asked.
“Assistant Deputy Director Charles Sumner Alden, ADDO.”
“Political appointment?”
“Correct. Kennedy School, Harvard, yeah. He’s friendly enough, but sometimes I wonder if he really approves of what we do here.”
“I wonder what Ed and Mary Pat are doing now.”
“Ed’s retired,” Simmons told him. “Working on a book, I hear. Mary Pat’s over at NCTC. She’s a pistol.”
“Best instincts in a field spook I ever encountered,” Clark said. “What she says, you can take to the bank.”
“Makes you wonder why President Kealty didn’t keep her and Ed on the payroll,” Chavez observed.
“Could be better. We have a lot of people running around in circles. They’re punching up the intelligence directorate, but mine was the last class through The Farm for a while, and none of us have field assignments yet.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Cop, Boston city police. I was hired under Plan Blue. My degree is from Boston University, not Harvard. Languages.”
“Which ones?”
“Serbian, some Arabic, and a little Pashtun. I was supposed to go out to Monterey to polish them up, but that got shelved.”
“You’re going to need the last two,” John advised. “And work on the jogging. Afghanistan-I spent some time there back in the mid-’80s, and it’ll wear out a mountain goat.”
“That bad?”
“The people there fight wars for fun, and there ain’t no good guys. I found myself feeling sorry for the Russians. The Afghans are tough people. I guess in that environment you have to be, but Islam is just an overlay on a tribal culture that goes back three-thousand-plus years.”
“Thanks for the tip. I’ll cross it off my list of preferences,” Simmons said as the elevator reached the seventh floor.
He dropped them off at the secretary’s desk. The plush carpet told them that the office was an important one-it looked fairly new. Clark took a magazine and paged through it while Domingo stared placidly at the wall. His former life as a soldier allowed him to tolerate boredom fairly well.
31
AFTER FORTY MINUTES, Charles Alden came to the anteroom, smiling like a used-car salesman. Tall and thin like a runner, old enough to seem important to himself, whatever he’d done to earn this post. Clark was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the doubts were piling up rapidly.
“So you’re the famous Mr. Clark,” Alden said in greeting-and without an apology for keeping them waiting, Clark noted.
“Not too famous,” Clark replied.
“Well, at least in this community.” Alden led his guest into his office, not inviting Chavez to join them. “I just read through your file.”
“Colorful. Getting the Gerasimov family out of Russia was quite a job. And the mission in Tokyo, with a Russian cover… impressive. Ex-SEAL… I see President Ryan got you your Medal of Honor. Twenty-nine years with the Agency. Quite a record,” Alden said, waving Clark to a chair; it was smaller than Alden’s own chair and designed to be uncomfortable.
“I just did the jobs they gave me, best I could, and I managed to survive them all.”
“Your missions tended to get somewhat physical.”
Clark shrugged this off.
“We try to avoid that now,” Alden observed.
“I tried to avoid it back then. Best-laid plans.”
“You know, Jim Greer left behind a lengthy document about how you came to the Agency’s attention.”
“Admiral Greer was a particularly fine and honorable gentleman,” John observed, instantly on guard for what that file might say. James Greer had liked his written records. Even he’d had his weaknesses. Well, everybody did.
“He discovered Jack Ryan, too, correct?”
“And a lot of others.”
“So I have learned.”
“Excuse me, sir, doing research, are we?”
“Not really, but I like to know who I’m talking to. You’ve done some recruiting, too. Chavez, for example.”
“He’s a good officer. Even if you discount the stuff we did in England, Ding has been there when our country needed him. Got himself educated, too.”
“Oh, yeah, he did get that master’s degree at George Mason, didn’t he?”
“Right.”
“A little physical, though, like you. Not really a field officer, as most people understand the term.”
“We can’t all be Ed Foley or Mary Pat.”
“They also have colorful files, but we’re trying to get away from that as the world evolves.”
“Is that so?”
“Well, it is today. The world’s changed. The Romania job you and Chavez pulled off-that must have been exciting.”
“That’s one way to put it. Not often you find yourself in a foreign country in the middle of a revolution, but we got the job done before we skipped the country.”
“You killed your subject,” Alden said, somewhat distastefully.
“He needed killing,” Clark said in reply, eyes locked on to Alden’s face.
“It was against the law.”
“I’m not an attorney, sir.” And an executive order, even a presidential one, wasn’t exactly statutory or constitutional law. This guy was a quintessential desk-sitter, John realized. If it wasn’t written down, it wasn’t real, and if it wasn’t authorized in writing, then it was wrong. “When someone points a loaded firearm at you,” Clark said, “it’s a little late to start formal negotiations.”
“You try to avoid such contingencies?”
“I do.”
“Your relations with law enforcement have not always been friendly,” Alden said, flipping through pages of the classified file.
“Excuse me, does that file have my driving record in it?”
“Your friendship with senior people has been helpful to your career.”
