“I’ve seen your face before. Other side of the river,” Chavez clarified.
“Oh?” Davis reacted guardedly.
“At the operations room. Watch officer?”
“Well, once I was an NIO. Here I’m a lowly bond trader. Mainly corporate stuff, but some government issues.”
They followed Davis to the top floor and then to his office-or most of the way. His office was right next to Rick Bell’s, and someone was heading in there.
“Hey,” Clark heard, and turned around to find Jack Ryan Jr. walking down the hall.
Clark took his hand, and for once his face showed surprise. “Jack… You work here, eh?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Doing what?”
“Currency arbitrage, mostly. Swapping money back and forth, stuff like that.”
“I thought the family business was stocks and bonds,” Clark observed mildly.
“Not into that… yet,” Jack responded. “Well, I’ve got to run. Catch you later, maybe?”
“Sure,” Clark said. His brain wasn’t exactly spinning, but he wasn’t entirely oriented to the day’s discoveries.
“Come on in,” Davis said next, waving him through the door.
The office was a comfortable one and wasn’t full of furniture made in a federal prison, such as they had at CIA headquarters. Davis waved them into seats. “So how long have you known Jimmy Hardesty?”
“For ten or fifteen years,” Clark replied. “Good man.”
“He is that. So: You want to retire?”
“I’ve never really thought about it.”
“What about you, Mr. Chavez?”
“I’m not ready for Social Security, either, and I guess I have a few marketable skills. Wife and kid, with another one on the way. Till now I haven’t had to give it much thought, but what you do here looks to be miles out of our skill set.”
“Well, everyone here has to know the language anyway,” Davis told them. “But beyond that…” Davis shrugged. “How’re you fixed for clearance?”
“Top secret/special intelligence/poly-both of us,” Clark replied. “At least until Langley puts our paperwork through. Why?”
“Because what we do here is not for public dissemination. You will sign some pretty tight NDAs,” he said, referring to non-disclosure agreements. “Any problems with that?”
“Nope,” John said at once. His curiosity had been well and truly piqued in a way he hadn’t experienced in years. He noted that they hadn’t asked him to swear an oath. That was passe anyway, and the courts had voided them a long time ago-if you spoke to the newspapers.
The signing took less than two minutes. The forms weren’t anything they hadn’t seen before, though the setting certainly was.
Davis checked the forms over, then slid them into a drawer. “Okay, here’s the short of it: We get a lot of insider information through irregular channels. NSA keeps an eye on international trading for security reasons. Remember when Japan had that set-to with us? They clobbered Wall Street, and that made the Feds think they needed to keep an eye on such things. Economic warfare is real, and you can really mess up a country by clobbering its financial institutions. It works for us, especially for currency trading. That’s where we make most of our money.”
“Why is that important?” Chavez asked.
“We’re self-funding. We’re off the federal budget, Mr. Chavez, and therefore off the radar. No taxpayer money comes in the front door. We make what we spend, and what we don’t spend ourselves, we keep.”
You kept something secret by not having Congress fund it, and not having the Office of Management and Budget do the audits. If the government didn’t fund it, to Washington it existed only as a source of taxes, and a good accounting firm could ensure that Hendley Associates-The Campus’s official cover-kept a low profile: Just pay everything in full and on time. And if anyone knew how to hide money, it would have been these guys. Surely Gerry Hendley had enough contacts in Washington to keep the heat off his business. You mainly did that by being honest. There were enough high-priced crooks in America to keep the IRS and SEC interested, and like most government agencies, they didn’t go freelance looking for new crooks without a solid lead. As long as you didn’t get a reputation for being too good at what you did, or sailing too close to the wind, you didn’t appear on the radarscopes.
“How many real clients do you have?” Chavez asked.
“Essentially, the only private accounts we manage belong to our employees, and they do pretty good. Last three years we’ve averaged a return of twenty-three percent, over and above salaries that are pretty decent. We’ve got some good benefits, too-especially educational perks for our employees who have kids.”
“Impressive. What exactly do you have to do?” Ding asked. “Kill people?” He’d thought he’d added that as a minor-league joke.
“Occasionally,” Davis told him. “Kinda depends on the day.”
The room got very quiet for a moment.
“You’re not kidding,” Clark stated.
“No,” Davis said.
“Who authorizes it?”
“We do.” Davis paused to let that sink in. “We employ some very skillful people-people who think first and handle it carefully. But yes, we do that when the circumstances call for it. We did four in the last couple of months, all in Europe, all terrorist affiliates. No blowback on any of them yet.”
“Who does it?”
Davis managed a smile. “You just met one of them.”
“You have to be shitting us,” Chavez said. “Jack Junior? SHORTSTOP?”
“Yeah, he bagged one in Rome just six weeks ago. Operational glitch; he kind of fell ass-backward into it but did a decent job. The target’s name was Mohammed Hassan Al-din, senior ops officer for the terrorist group that’s been giving us a headache. Remember those mall shootings?”
“Yeah.”
“His handiwork. We got a line on him and took him down.”
“Never made the papers,” Clark objected.
“He died of a heart attack, so said the forensic pathologist of the Rome city police force,” Davis concluded.
“Jack’s dad doesn’t know?”
“Not hardly. As I said, his role had been planned differently, but shit happens, and he handled it. Had we known, we would probably have done something else, but it didn’t work out that way.”
“I’m not going to ask how Jack gave your subject a heart attack,” Clark said.
“Good, because I’m not going to tell you-not now anyway.”
“What’s our cover?” Clark asked.
“As long as you’re in the United States, you’re covered completely. Overseas is something else. We’ll take proper care of your families, of course, but if you’re bagged overseas, well, we’ll hire you the best lawyer we can find. Other than that, you’re private citizens who got caught doing something naughty.”
“I’m used to that idea,” Clark said. “Just so my wife and kids are protected. So I’m just a private citizen abroad, right?”
“That’s correct,” Davis confirmed.
“Doing what?”
“Making bad people go away. Can you handle that?”
“I’ve been doing that for a long time, and not always on Uncle Sam’s nickel. I’ve gotten into trouble at Langley for it sometimes, but it was always tactically necessary, and so I-we-have always gotten clear. But if something happens over here, you know, like conspiracy to commit murder-”
“You have a presidential pardon waiting for you.”
“Say again?” John asked.
“Jack Ryan is the guy who persuaded Gerry Hendley to set this place up. That was Gerry’s price. So President
