Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [110]
“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 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