Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [129]
“John, can you hang back for a moment?” Hendley asked.
“Sure. Ding, I’ll catch up.”
Once they were alone, Hendley said, “You’ve been around the block a few times, John. I wanted to get your take on a couple things.”
“Shoot.”
“We’re pretty new, this whole concept, in fact, so a lot of it is trial and error. I’m beginning to think our work flow’s a little convoluted.”
Clark chuckled. “No offense, Gerry, but using words like work flow for an outfit like this tells me you’re right. What’s the chain like?” Hendley described The Campus’s organizational structure, and Clark said, “Sounds like Langley. Listen, intelligence work is mostly organic, okay? Analysis is something you can’t do without, but trying to shove the process into some artificial structure is a cluster-fuck waiting to happen.”
“You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“Did you want me to?”
“No.”
“Too many good ideas get lost making their way up a chain. My advice: Get your principals in a room once a day and brainstorm. Might be a cliché, but it works. If you’ve got people who’re worried about whether their creative thinking will make the cut, you’re wasting talent.”
Hendley whistled softly, smiling. “Don’t take this the wrong way, John, but you sure as hell aren’t your average knuckle-dragger, are you?”
Clark shrugged but didn’t reply.
“Well,” Hendley continued, “you kind of hit it on the head. I’d been thinking the same thing. Nice to get a second opinion, though.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. Jack Ryan came to me the other day. He wants more fieldwork.”
Junior ain’t so junior anymore, Clark reminded himself.
“Tom told you about the MoHa thing?” Hendley asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I heard secondhand the Caruso brothers took Jack to Hogan’s Alley for a little stress relief. He did damned good, or so they say. Got a little banged up, made some rookie mistakes, but damned good all the same.”
So he’s got some talent, Clark thought. Genetics, maybe, if you buy into that sort of thing. He’d seen Jack’s dad at work, and he was a fair trigger, too. And cool under pressure. Both can be taught, but the latter was more about mind-set and temperament. It sounded like Jack had both, plus a steady hand.
“Where’s his head on it?” Clark asked.
“No illusions, I don’t think. Doesn’t strike me as a glory hound, anyway.”
“He isn’t. His parents raised him right.”
“He’s a damned good analyst, got a real knack for it, but he feels like he’s spinning his wheels. He wants to get in the weeds. Problem is, I don’t think his dad would—”
“If you’re going to make decisions about him based on what his dad would say or think, then …”
“Say it.”
“Then you need to be worrying about where your head is, not his. Jack’s an adult, and it’s his life. You need to make the decision based on whether he’d be good at it and whether it’d help The Campus. That’s it; that’s all.”
“Fair enough. Well, I need to mull it over some more. If I decide to send him out, he’d need a training officer.”
“You have one of those.”
“I could use another, or two. Pete Alexander is damned good, but I’d want you to take Jack under your wing.”
Clark considered this. Time to practice what you just preached to the boss, John. “Sure, I’ll do it.”
“Thanks. We’re always on the lookout for more like you and Chavez, too, if you’ve got any thoughts on that. We’ve got our own talent scouts, but it’s always better to have a surfeit of candidates.”
“True. Let me think about it. I may have a name or two.”
Hendley smiled. “Some recently retired operators, maybe?”
Clark smiled back. “Maybe.”
38
DEAD DROPS,” Mary Pat Foley announced, pushing her way through the NCTC conference room’s glass door. She walked to the corkboard to which they had tacked both the DMA chart and the Baedeker’s Peshawar map and tapped one of the dot clusters.
“Come again?” John Turnbull said.
“The legend on the back—up and down arrows combined with dot clusters—their dead-drop locations. The up arrow is the pickup signal, the down arrow the drop box location. The