Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [111]
“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