The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [113]
"It'll make us easier to spot," Dominic objected.
"So, disguise it somehow. Be creative," the training officer suggested a little testily.
"When do we find out what all of this is for, exactly?" Brian asked.
"Soon."
"You keep saying that, man."
"Look, you can drive back to North Carolina whenever you want."
"I've thought about it," Brian told him.
"Tomorrow's Friday. Think about it over this weekend, okay?"
"Fair enough." Brian backed off. The tone of the interplay had gotten a little uglier than he'd actually wanted. It was time to back down. He didn't dislike Pete at all. It was the not knowing, and his distaste for what it looked like. Especially with a woman as the target. Hurting women was not part of his creed. Or children, which was what had set his brother off-not that Brian disapproved. He wondered briefly if he might have done the same thing, and told himself, sure, for a kid, but without being quite sure. When dinner was finished, the twins handled the cleanup, then settled in front of the downstairs TV for some drinks and the History Channel.
It was much the same the next state up, with Jack Ryan, Jr., drinking a rum and Coke and flipping back and forth between History and History International, with an occasional sojourn to Biography, which was showing a two-hour look at Joseph Stalin. That guy, Junior thought, was one seriously cold motherfucker. Forcing one of his own confidants to sign the imprisonment order for his own wife. Damn. But how did that physically unprepossessing man exercise such control over people who were his own peers? What was the power he'd wielded over others? Where had it come from? How had he maintained it? Jack's own father had been a man of considerable power, but he had never dominated people in anything like that way. Probably never even thought about it, much less killing people for what amounted to the fun of it. Who were these people? Did they still exist?
Well, they had to. The one thing that never changed in the world was human nature. The cruel and the brutal still existed. Perhaps society no longer encouraged them as they had in, say, the Roman Empire. The gladiatorial games had trained people to accept and even to be entertained by violent death. And the dark truth of the matter was that if Jack had been given access to a time machine, he might-he would-have journeyed back to the Flavian Amphitheater to see it, just once. But that was human curiosity, not blood lust. Just a chance to gain historical knowledge, to see and read a culture connected to, yet different from, his own. He might even toss his cookies watching or maybe not. Maybe his curiosity was that strong. But for damned sure, if he ever went back, he'd take a friend along for the ride. Like the Beretta.45 he'd learned to shoot with Mike Brennan. He wondered how many others might have taken the trip. Probably quite a few. Men. Not women. Women would have needed a lot of societal conditioning to want to look at that. But men? Men grew up on movies like Silverado and Saving Private Ryan. Men wanted to know how well they might have handled such things. So, no, human nature didn't really change. Society tended to stomp on the cruel ones, and since man was a creature of reason, most people shied away from behavior that could put them in prison or the death chamber. So, man could learn over time, but the basic drives probably did not, and so you fed the nasty little beast with fantasies, books and movies, and dreams, thoughts that walked through your consciousness while waiting for sleep to come. Maybe cops had a better time. They could exercise the little critter by handling those who stepped over the line. There was probably satisfaction in that, because you got both to feed the critter and to protect the society.
But if the beast still lived in the hearts of men, somewhere there would be men who would use whatever talents they had to-not so much control it as harness it to their own will, to use it as a tool in their personal quest for power. Such men were called Bad Guys. The unsuccessful