Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [127]
“Okay. So this Hendley guy—what do we know about him?”
“U.S. Senator from South Carolina, democrat, served on the Intelligence Committee. They liked him at Langley—smart, straight shooter. Ryan liked him, too. Hendley lost his family in a car accident. Wife and two boys, I think. He’s very rich. Like Ryan, he made a pile of money in the trading business. He’s good at seeing things other people don’t.”
Both men were properly dressed, in decent suits both had bought in London during their Rainbow tour, with Turnbull & Asser ties and nicely polished shoes. Actually, this was something Chavez still did every day, from his time in the U.S. Army, though Clark occasionally had to be reminded.
They parked in the visitors’ lot and walked inside. Ernie Chambers still had the desk duty. “Hi. We’re here to see Mr. Davis again.”
“Yes, sir. Please have a seat while I call upstairs.”
Clark and Chavez took a seat, and John picked up a current copy of Time magazine. He’d have to get used to reading the news four days late. Davis appeared in the lobby.
“Thanks for coming back. You want to follow me?”
Two minutes after that, all three were in Tom Davis’s office, looking out at some Maryland horse country.
“So are you interested?” Davis asked.
“Yes,” Clark replied for them both.
“Okay, good. Rules: First, what happens here stays here. This place does not exist, and neither does any activity that may or may not happen here.”
“Mr. Davis, we both know about secrecy. Neither one of us talks much, and we don’t tell tales out of school.”
“You’ll have to sign another round of NDAs on that. We can’t enforce anything with statutory law, but we can take all your money away.”
“Are we supposed to have our personal attorneys review them?”
“If you wish, you can. There’s nothing compromising in the agreements, but then you could tear it up. We can’t have any lawyers wondering what we do here. It’s not all, strictly speaking, legal.”
“How much travel?” John asked next.
“Less than you’re used to, I suspect. We’re still figuring that out. You’ll spend most of your time right here, looking over data and planning ops.”
“Source of the data?”
“Langley and Fort Meade, mostly, but skim a little from the FBI, Immigration and Customs, DHS … Those kinds of places. We’ve got a damned good technical team. You probably noticed the hedgehog on our roof.”
“We did.”
“We’re the only building on a direct line of sight from CIA to NSA. They swap data by microwave, and we download all their interagency transmissions. That’s how we do our financial trading. NSA keeps a close eye on domestic and foreign banks. They can also tap into the bank computer systems and internal communications.”
“What you said the other day about wet work … ?”
“We’ve only run one real operation to date—the four people I mentioned yesterday. Truth be told, we were halfway curious about what would happen. In fact, nothing much happened. Maybe we covered our tracks too well. All the killings looked like heart attacks, the victims were posted, and the autopsy reports all said ‘natural causes.’ We think the opposition bought that story and kept going. The fourth one—MoHa—netted us a laptop with encryption keys, so we’re reading some of their internal mail at the moment—or were, until recently. Looks like they might have switched up their communication protocols last week.”
“Out of the blue?” Clark asked.
“Yep. We intercepted a birth announcement. Big distribution list. Within hours, everyone went quiet.”
“Switching channels,” Chavez said.
“Yep. We’re working on a lead that may get us back in.”
“Who else will be operating like us?”
“You’ll meet them in due course,” Davis promised.
“And the pay?” Ding asked.
“We can start you both at two-fifty a year. You can participate in the office investment plan with as much or as little of your salary as you wish. I told you already about the rate of return. We also pay for reasonable