The Teeth of the Tiger

Random House Audio Publishing Group

Chapter One

THE TOWN of West Odenton, Maryland, isn't much of a town atall, just a post office for people who live in the general area, a few gasstations and a 7-Eleven, plus the usual fast-food places for people whoneed a fat-filled breakfast on the drive from Columbia, Maryland, totheir jobs in Washington, D.C. And half a mile from the modest post officebuilding was a mid-rise office building of government-undistinguishedarchitecture. It was nine stories high, and on the capacious frontlawn a low decorative monolith made of gray brick with silvery letteringsaid HENDLEY ASSOCIATES, without explaining what, exactly, HendleyAssociates was. There were few hints. The roof of the building wasflat, tar-and-gravel over reinforced concrete, with a small penthouse tohouse the elevator machinery and another rectangular structure that gaveno clue about its identity. In fact, it was made of fiberglass, white in color,and radio-transparent. The building itself was unusual only in one thing:except for a few old tobacco barns that barely exceeded twenty-five feetin height, it was the only building higher than two stories that sat on a directline of sight from the National Security Agency located at FortMeade, Maryland, and the headquarters of the Central IntelligenceAgency at Langley, Virginia. Some other entrepreneurs had wished tobuild on that sight line, but zoning approval had never been granted, formany reasons, all of them false.

Behind the building was a small antenna farm not unlike that foundnext to a local television station-a half-dozen six-meter parabolicdishes sat inside a twelve-foot-high, razor-wire-crowned Cyclone fenceenclosure and pointed at various commercial communications satellites.The entire complex, which wasn't terribly complex at all, comprised fifteenand a third acres in Maryland's Howard County, and was referred toas "The Campus" by the people who worked there. Nearby was theJohns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, a government-consultingestablishment of long standing and well-established sensitivityof function.

To the public, Hendley Associates was a trader in stocks, bonds, andinternational currencies, though, oddly, it did little in the way of publicbusiness. It was not known to have any clients, and while it was whisperedto be quietly active in local charities (the Johns Hopkins UniversitySchool of Medicine was rumored to be the main recipient ofHendley's corporate largesse), nothing had ever leaked to the local media.In fact, it had no public-relations department at all. Neither was itrumored to be doing anything untoward, though its chief executive officerwas known to have had a somewhat troubled past, as a result ofwhich he was shy of publicity, which, on a few rare occasions, he'ddodged quite adroitly and amiably, until, finally, the local media hadstopped asking. Hendley's employees were scattered about locally, mostlyin Columbia, lived an upper-middle-class lifestyle, and were generally asremarkable as Beaver's father, Ward Cleaver.

Gerald Paul Hendley, Jr., had had a stellar career in the commoditiesbusiness, during which he'd amassed a sizable personal fortune and thenturned to elected public service in his late thirties, soon becoming aUnited States senator from South Carolina. Very quickly, he'd acquireda reputation as a legislative maverick who eschewed special interests andtheir campaign money offers, and followed a rather ferociously independentpolitical track, leaning toward liberal on civil-rights issues, but decidedlyconservative on defense and foreign relations. He'd never shiedaway from speaking his mind, which had made him good and entertainingcopy for the press, and eventually there were whispered-about presidentialaspirations.

Toward the end of his second six-year term, however, he'd suffered agreat personal tragedy. He'd lost his wife and three children in an accidenton Interstate 185 just outside of Columbia, South Carolina, theirstation wagon crushed beneath the wheels of a Kenworth tractor-trailer.It had been a predictably crushing blow, and soon thereafter, atthe very beginning of the campaign for his third term, more misfortunehad struck him. It became known through a column in the New YorkTimes that his personal investment portfolio-he'd always kept it private,saying that since he took no money for his campaigning, he had no needto disclose his net worth except in the most general of terms-showedevidence of insider trading. This suspicion was confirmed with deeperdelving by the newspapers and TV, and despite Hendley's protest thatthe Securities and Exchange Commission had never actually publishedguidelines about what the law meant, it appeared to some that he'd usedhis inside knowledge on future government expenditures to benefit areal-estate investment enterprise which would profit him and his co-investorsover fifty million dollars. Worse still, when challenged on thequestion in a public debate by the Republican candidate-a self-described"Mr. Clean"-he'd responded with two mistakes. First, he'dlost his temper in front of rolling cameras. Second, he'd told the peopleof South Carolina that if they doubted his honesty, then they could votefor the fool with whom he shared the stage. For a man who'd never puta political foot wrong in his life, that surprise alone had cost him fivepercent of the state's voters. The remainder of his lackluster campaignhad only slid downhill, and despite the lingering sympathy vote fromthose who remembered the annihilation of his family, his seat hadended up an upset-loss for the Democrats, which had further been exacerbatedby a venomous concession statement. Then he'd left publiclife for good, not even returning to his antebellum plantation northwestof Charleston but rather moving to Maryland and leaving his life entirelybehind. One further flamethrower statement at the entire congressionalprocess had burned whatever bridges might have remainedopen to him.

His current home was a farm dating back to the eighteenth century,where he raised Appaloosa horses-riding and mediocre golf were hisonly remaining hobbies-and lived the quiet life of a gentleman farmer.He also worked at The Campus seven or eight hours per day, commutingback and forth in a chauffeured stretch Cadillac.

Fifty-two now, tall, slender and silver-haired, he was well known withoutbeing known at all, perhaps the one lingering aspect of his politicalpast.

"YOU DID well in the mountains," Jim Hardesty said, waving theyoung Marine to a chair.

"Thank you, sir. You did okay, too, sir."

"Captain, anytime you walk back through your front door after it's allover, you've done well. I learned that from my training officer. Aboutsixteen years ago," he added.

Captain Caruso did the mental arithmetic and decided that Hardestywas a little older than he looked. Captain in the U.S. Army SpecialForces, then CIA, plus sixteen years made him closer to fifty than forty.He must have worked very hard indeed to keep in shape.

"So," the officer asked, "what can I do for you?"

"What did Terry tell you?" the spook asked.

"He told me I'd be talking with somebody named Pete Alexander."

"Pete got called out of town suddenly," Hardesty explained.

The officer accepted the explanation at face value. "Okay, anyway, thegeneral said you Agency guys are on some kind of talent hunt, butyou're not willing to grow your own," Caruso answered honestly.

"Terry is a good man, and a damned fine Marine, but he can be a littleparochial."

"Maybe so, Mr. Hardesty, but he's going to be my boss soon, when hetakes over Second Marine Division, and I'm trying to stay on his goodside. And you still haven't told me why I'm here."

"Like the Corps?" the spook asked. The young Marine nodded.

"Yes, sir. The pay ain't all that much, but it's all I need, and the peopleI work with are the best."

"Well, the ones we went up the mountain with are pretty good. How long did you have them?"

"Total? About fourteen months, sir."

"You trained them pretty well."

"It's what they pay me for, sir, and I had good material to start with."

"You also handled that little combat action well," Hardesty observed,taking note of the distant replies he was getting.

Captain Caruso was not quite modest enough to regard it as a "little"combat action. The bullets flying around had been real enough, whichmade the action big enough. But his training, he'd found, had workedjust about as well as his officers had told him it would in all the classesand field exercises. It had been an important and rather gratifying discovery.The Marine Corps actually did make sense. Damn.

"Yes, sir," was all he said in reply, however, adding, "And thank youfor your help, sir."

"I'm a little old for that sort of thing, but it's nice to see that I stillknow how." And it had been quite enough, Hardesty didn't add. Combatwas still a kid's game, and he was no longer a kid. "Any thoughtsabout it, Captain?" he asked next.

"Not really, sir. I did my after-action report."

Hardesty had read it. "Nightmares, anything like that?"

The question surprised Caruso. Nightmares? Why would he havethose? "No, sir," he responded with visible puzzlement.

"Any qualms of conscience?" Hardesty went on.

"Sir, those people were making war on my country. We made warback. You ought not to play the game if you can't handle the action.If they had wives and kids, I'm sorry about that, but when you screwwith people, you need to understand that they're going to come see youabout it."

"It's a tough world?"

"Sir, you'd better not kick a tiger in the ass unless you have a plan fordealing with his teeth."

No nightmares and no regrets, Hardesty thought. That was the way thingswere supposed to be, but the kinder, gentler United States of Americadidn't always turn out its people that way. Caruso was a warrior. Hardestyrocked back in his seat and gave his guest a careful look beforespeaking.

"Cap'n, the reason you're here ... you've seen it in the papers, all theproblems we've had dealing with this new spate of international terrorism.There have been a lot of turf wars between the Agency and the Bureau.At the operational level, there's usually no problem, and there isn'tall that much trouble at the command level-the FBI director, Murray,is solid troop, and when he worked Legal Attachi in London he gotalong well with our people."

"But it's the midlevel staff pukes, right?" Caruso asked. He'd seen itin the Corps, too. Staff officers who spent a lot of their time snarling atother staff officers, saying that their daddy could beat up the otherstaff's daddy. The phenomenon probably dated back to the Romans orthe Greeks. It had been stupid and counterproductive back then, too.

"Bingo," Hardesty confirmed. "And you know, God Himself mightbe able to fix it, but even He would have to have a really good day tobring it off. The bureaucracies are too entrenched. It's not so bad in themilitary. People there shuffle in and out of jobs, and they have this ideaof 'mission,' and everybody generally works to accomplish it, especiallyif it helps them all hustle up the ladder individually. Generally speaking,the farther you are from the sharp end, the more likely you are to immerseyourself in the minutiae. So, we're looking for people who knowabout the sharp end."

"And the mission is-what?"

"To identify, locate, and deal with terrorist threats," the spook answered.

"'Deal with'?" Caruso asked.

"Neutralize-shit, okay, when necessary and convenient, kill the sonof a bitches. Gather information on the nature and severity of thethreat, and take whatever action is necessary, depending on the specificthreat. The job is fundamentally intelligence-gathering. The Agency hastoo many restrictions on how it does business. This special sub-groupdoesn't."

"Really?" That was a considerable surprise.

Hardesty nodded soberly. "Really. You won't be working for CIA.You may use Agency assets as resources, but that's as far as it goes."

"So, who am I working for?"

"We have a little way to go before we can discuss that." Hardestylifted what had to be the Marine's personnel folder. "You score in thetop three percent among the Marine officers in terms of intelligence.Four-point-oh in nearly everything. Your language skills are particularlyimpressive."

"My dad is an American citizen-native-born, I mean-but his dadcame off the boat from Italy, ran-still runs-a restaurant in Seattle. So,Pop actually grew up speaking mostly Italian, and a lot of that camedown on me and my brother, too. Took Spanish in high school and college.I can't pass for a native, but I understand it pretty well."

"Engineering major?"

"That's from my dad, too. It's in there. He works for Boeing-aerodynamicist,mainly designs wings and control surfaces. You know aboutmy mom-it's all in there. She's mainly a mom, does things with the localCatholic schools, too, now that Dominic and I are grown."

"And he's FBI?"

Brian nodded. "That's right, got his law degree and signed up to be aG-man."

"Just made the papers," Hardesty said, handing over a faxed pagefrom the Birmingham papers. Brian scanned it.

"Way to go, Dom," Captain Caruso breathed when he got to thefourth paragraph, which further pleased his host.

IT WAS scarcely a two-hour flight from Birmingham to Reagan Nationalin Washington. Dominic Caruso walked to the Metro station andhopped a subway train for the Hoover Building at Tenth and Pennsylvania.His badge absolved him of the need to pass through the metaldetector. FBI agents were supposed to carry heat, and his automatic hadearned a notch in the grip-not literally, of course, but FBI agents occasionallyjoked about it.

The office of Assistant Director Augustus Ernst Werner was on thetop floor, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. The secretary waved himright in.

Caruso had never met Gus Werner. He was a tall, slender, and veryexperienced street agent, an ex-Marine, and positively monkish in appearanceand demeanor. He'd headed the FBI Hostage Rescue Teamand two field divisions, and been at the point of retirement before beingtalked into his new job by his close friend, Director Daniel E. Murray.The Counter-Terrorism Division was a stepchild of the much largerCriminal and Foreign Counter-Intelligence divisions, but it was gainingin importance on a daily basis.

"Grab yourself a seat," Werner said, pointing, as he finished up a call.That just took another minute. Then Gus replaced the phone and hitthe DO NOT DISTURB button.

"Ben Harding faxed this up to me," Werner said, holding the shootingreport from the previous day.



Continues...
Excerpted from The Teeth of the Tigerby Tom Clancy Copyright © 2003 by Tom Clancy. Excerpted by permission.
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