Dead or Alive

  “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 passé 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.”

  Curiouser and curiouser, Clark thought.

  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 Ryan signed a hundred blank pardons.”

  “Is that legal?” Chavez asked.

  “Pat Martin said so. He’s one of the people who knows that this place exists. Another is Dan Murray. So is Gus Werner. You know Jimmy Hardesty. Not the Foleys, however. We thought about getting them involved, but Jack decided against it. Even the ones I named only know to recruit people with special credentials, to go to a special place. They have no operational knowledge at all. They know a special place exists but not what we do here. Even President Ryan doesn’t have any operational information. That stays in this building.”

  “Takes a lot for a government type to trust people that much,” Clark observed.

  “You have to pick your people carefully,” Davis agreed. “Jimmy thinks you two can be trusted. I know your background. I think he’s right.”

  “Mr. Davis, this is a big thought,” Clark said, leaning back in his chair.

  For more than twenty years he’d daydreamed about how nice it would have been to have a place like this. He’d been dispatched by Langley to eyeball the head of Abu Nidal in Lebanon once, to determine if it might be possible to send him off to see God. That had been as dangerous as the actual mission itself, and the sheer insult of such a mission assignment had boiled his blood at the time, but he’d done it, and had come home with the photograph to show that, yes, it was possible to take the bastard down, but cooler heads or looser bowels in Washington had voided that mission, and so he’d put his life on the line for nothing, and so later the Israeli Army had killed him with a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache attack helicopter, which was altogether messier than a rifle from 180 meters and had also caused considerable collateral damage, which didn’t really trouble the Israelis all that much.

  “Okay,” Chavez said. “If and when we go out on a mission, we’re supposed to take down somebody who needs to be taken down. If we get caught, it’s tough luck for us. As a practical matter, chances are fifty-fifty we get killed on the spot, and that’s the ante, I get it. But it’s kinda nice to have a government blue blanket around us when we do that sort of thing.”

&
nbsp; “More than one way to serve your country.”

  “Maybe so,” Ding conceded.

  Clark said, “There’s a guy at Langley who’s doing a background check on me, guy named Alden, in the DO. Evidently Jim Greer left behind a dossier on me and the things I did before I joined up. I don’t know what’s in it exactly, but it could be problematic.”

  “How so?”

  “I took down some drug dealers. Never mind why, but I took down a whole drug ring. Jack Ryan Sr.’s father was a police detective, and he wanted to arrest me, but I talked him out of it and faked my own death. Ryan knows the story—at least part of it. Anyway, the Agency might have some of it in writing. You need to know that.”

  “Well, if any trouble develops from it, we have that presidential pardon to look after you. You think this Alden guy might want to use it against you?”

  “He’s a political animal.”

  “Understood. You two want some time to think it over?”

  “Sure,” Clark answered for both of them.

  “Sleep on it, then come back tomorrow. If this goes further, you can meet the boss. Just a reminder: What we discussed—”

  “Mr. Davis, I’ve been keeping secrets for a long time. Both of us. If you think we need a reminder, you’ve read us wrong.”

  “Point taken.” Davis stood up, concluding the meeting. “See you tomorrow.”

  They didn’t exchange words until they were outside, walking to the car. “Man, oh, man, Jack Junior whacked somebody?” Chavez asked the sky.

  “Sounds like it,” Clark replied, thinking it might be time to stop thinking of him as Junior. “Looks like he’s in the family business after all.”

  “His father would shit himself.”

  “Probably,” John agreed. And that’s nothing compared to how his mother would react.

  A few minutes later in the car, Chavez said, “Got a confession to make, John.”

  “Speak to me, my son.”

  “I fucked up—and royally.” Chavez leaned forward in his seat, withdrew an object from his back pocket, and laid it on the car’s center console.

  “What’s that?”

  “A USB drive. You know, for a computer—”

  “I know what it is, Ding. Why’re you showing it to me?”

  “Took it off one of the gomers in the Tripoli embassy. We did a quick shakedown, frisked ’em, all that. Found that on the lead guy—the one I dropped near the laptop.”

  Despite having a 9-millimeter round from Chavez’s MP5 buried in his side, one of the tangos had managed to stumble to a laptop and hit a key combo that had fried the hard drive and wireless card, both of which were now in the possession of the Swedes, for all the good they would do them.

  The consensus was that the bad guys had been using the laptop to communicate with someone on the outside. Such was the curse of the digital age, Clark knew. The state of wireless Internet technology was such that signals had not only greater reach but more robust encryption technology as well. Even if the Libyans had been fully cooperative, the chances Rainbow could have monitored and/or throttled every hot spot around the embassy were virtually nonexistent, so unless the Swedes were able to salvage either the drive or the card, they’d never know who the tangos in the embassy had been talking to.

  Or maybe not, Clark thought.

  “Christ, Ding, that’s a hell of an oversight.”

  “Put it in my pocket and didn’t think about it until we got back and unpacked. Sorry. So what d’you wanna do?” Ding asked, smiling evilly. “Hand it over to Alden?”

  “Let me give it some thought.”

  It was well into the afternoon before Jack found what he wanted. While by law aviation insurance carriers were required to make claims available to the public, there were no regulations regarding ease of access. Consequently, most carriers made sure digital claim searches were painstakingly convoluted.

  “XLIS—XL Insurance Switzerland,” Jack told Rounds. “Does a lot of aviation stuff over there. Three weeks ago a claim was filed on a Dassault Falcon 9000. It’s a small executive jet. Built by the same people who do the Mirage fighter. The claimant is a woman named Margarite Hlasek, co-owner of Hlasek Air with her husband, Lars—who also happens to be a pilot. It’s based out of Zurich. Here’s the kicker: I cross-referenced our intercepts, mixed and matched some keywords, and got a hit: Two days ago the FBI contacted its legal attachés in Stockholm and Zurich. Somebody’s looking for info on Hlasek Air.”

  “Why Stockholm?”

  “Just a guess, but they’d want to look into Hlasek’s home base, and maybe the last airport the Falcon visited.”

  “What else do we know about Hlasek?”

  “They’re dicey. I found four separate complaints forwarded to either the Swedish Civil Aviation Administration or the Swedish Civil Aviation Authority—”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “One handles state-owned airports and air traffic control; the other deals with commercial aviation and safety. Four complaints in the last two years—three about irregularities in customs forms and one about a misfiled flight plan.”

  “Fly the friendly terrorist skies,” Rounds murmured.

  “Could be. If so, that kind of service doesn’t come cheap.”

  “Let’s go talk to Gerry.”

  Hendley was in with Granger. The boss waved them in. “Jack may have something,” Rounds said, and Jack laid it out.

  “Long shot,” Granger observed.

  “Missing plane, ATF involvement, the FBI putting out feelers on the ground in Sweden, and a shady charter company,” Rounds countered. “We’ve seen this before, okay? Hlasek Air’s moving people who either don’t want to fly commercial or they can’t fly commercial. This probably won’t lead us to who we’re looking for, but maybe it’s a thread we can pull. Or a trigger on some miscellaneous mutts.”

  Hendley considered this, then looked to Granger, who shrugged and nodded. Hendley said, “Jack?”

  “Doesn’t hurt to get out and shake some trees once in a while, boss.”

  “True enough. What’re the Caruso boys up to?”

  33

  HAVING TO deal with an intermediary wasn’t common, but it wasn’t so uncommon that it gave Melinda cause for concern. Usually it meant the customer was married and/or a luminary in a prominent position, which in turn usually translated into more money, which was the case here. The intermediary—a Mediterranean type named Paolo with burn scars on his hands—had given her half of the $3,000 fee up front, along with the address of the corner on which she should be waiting for pickup—again, not her usual modus operandi, but money was money, and this money was far beyond her usual fee.

  The most likely danger she faced was that the john was into something kinky she didn’t want to do. Then the problem became how to misdirect him without losing the date. Most men were easy that way, but once in a while you’d come across one with his sights stubbornly set on something perverse. In those cases—it had happened twice to her—discretion, she’d found, was the better part of business. Say thanks but no thanks, and get the hell out of there.

  Statistically, there weren’t that many serial killers around, but about half of them killed hookers—all the way back to Jack the Ripper in London’s Whitechapel district. Ladies of the evening, in the elegant phrase of nineteenth-century England, took their johns to secluded places for a “knee trembler,” where a murder was easier than it was in the middle of a busy street, and so she and some of her colleagues had evolved a simple system of mutual security, sharing with one another the details of their dates.

  In this case the car was a Lincoln Town Car with tinted windows. It pulled up to the curb, and Melinda heard the rear door unlock. The windows did not roll down. After a moment’s indecision, she climbed in.

  “Why the tinted windows?” she asked the driver, trying to sound casual.

  “To protect against the sun,” he replied.

  Reasonable enough, Melinda had thought, keeping her h
and near her purse, where she had a very old .25-caliber Colt pocket model automatic, nearly weightless at thirteen ounces. She’d hardly ever fired it, but it was fully loaded with seven rounds, with the safety on. Not exactly a .44 Magnum, but not a kiss on the cheek, either.

  She checked her watch. They were thirty minutes out of town, she figured. Good news and bad news. A really private place was a good place to kill a whore and dump the body. But she wasn’t going to worry about everything, and her purse was only an inch from her right hand, and Little Mr. Colt was right in there. . . .

  The car took a hard left turn into an alley, and then another left into a condominium parking garage. A private garage rather than a communal one, which meant a private entrance to the condo. At least it wasn’t a trailer park. The people who lived in those frightened her, though they did not constitute her normal clientele. Melinda charged a thousand or two a pop, and $4,500 for overnight. The remarkable part was that so many were willing to pay it, which was a fine supplement to her regular job, receptionist at the headquarters of the Las Vegas public school system. The man got out of the car, opened her door, and offered her his hand as she climbed out.

  Welcome,” called an adult voice. She walked toward it and saw a tallish man in the living room. He smiled pleasantly enough. She was used to that. “What is your name?” he asked. He had a nice voice. Melodic.

  “Melinda,” she replied, walking toward him, putting a little extra sway into her hips.

  “Would you like a glass of wine, Melinda?”

  “Thank you,” she responded, and a nice crystal glass was provided. Paolo had disappeared—where to, she had no idea—but the atmosphere had disengaged her alarm systems. Whoever this was, he was rich, and she had ample experience with those. She could relax a little now. Melinda was excellent at reading men—what else did she do for a living?—and this guy was not threatening in any way. He just wanted to get his rocks off, and that was her business. She charged so much because she was good at it, and men didn’t mind paying because she was worth the money. It was a perfectly laissez-faire economic system well known in this area, though Melinda had never voted Republican in her life.