The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [13]
"Cap'n, the reason you're here you've seen it in the papers, all the problems we've had dealing with this new spate of international terrorism. There have been a lot of turf wars between the Agency and the Bureau. At the operational level, there's usually no problem, and there isn't all that much trouble at the command level-the FBI director, Murray, is solid troop, and when he worked Legal Attaché in London he got along well with our people."
"But it's the mid-level staff pukes, right?" Caruso asked. He'd seen it in the Corps, too. Staff officers who spent a lot of their time snarling at other staff officers, saying that their daddy could beat up the other staff's daddy. The phenomenon probably dated back to the Romans or the Greeks. It had been stupid and counterproductive back then, too.
"Bingo," Hardesty confirmed. "And you know, God Himself might be able to fix it, but even He would have to have a really good day to bring it off. The bureaucracies are too entrenched. It's not so bad in the military. People there shuffle in and out of jobs, and they have this idea of 'mission,' and everybody generally works to accomplish it, especially if it helps them all hustle up the ladder individually. Generally speaking, the farther you are from the sharp end, the more likely you are to immerse yourself in the minutiae. So, we're looking for people who know about the sharp end."
"And the mission is-what?"
"To identify, locate, and deal with terrorist threats," the spook answered.
"'Deal with'?" Caruso asked.
"Neutralize-shit, okay, when necessary and convenient, kill the son of a bitches. Gather information on the nature and severity of the threat, and take whatever action is necessary, depending on the specific threat. The job is fundamentally intelligence-gathering. The Agency has too many restrictions on how it does business. This special sub-group doesn't."
"Really?" That was a considerable surprise.
Hardesty nodded soberly. "Really. You won't be working for CIA. You may use Agency assets as resources, but that's as far as it goes."
"So, who am I working for?"
"We have a little way to go before we can discuss that." Hardesty lifted what had to be the Marine's personnel folder. "You score in the top three percent among the Marine officers in terms of intelligence. Four-point-oh in nearly everything. Your language skills are particularly impressive."
"My dad is an American citizen-native-born, I mean-but his dad came off the boat from Italy, ran-still runs-a restaurant in Seattle. So, Pop actually grew up speaking mostly Italian, and a lot of that came down on me and my brother, too. Took Spanish in high school and college. I can't pass for a native, but I understand it pretty well."
"Engineering major?"
"That's from my dad, too. It's in there. He works for Boeing-aerodynamicist, mainly designs wings and control surfaces. You know about my mom-it's all in there. She's mainly a mom, does things with the local Catholic schools, too, now that Dominic and I are grown."
"And he's FBI?"
Brian nodded. "That's right, got his law degree and signed up to be a G-man."
"Just made the papers," Hardesty said, handing over a faxed page from the Birmingham papers. Brian scanned it.
"Way to go, Dom," Captain Caruso breathed when he got to the fourth paragraph, which further pleased his host.
It was scarcely a two-hour flight from Birmingham to Reagan National in Washington. Dominic Caruso walked to the Metro station and hopped a subway train for the Hoover Building at Tenth and Pennsylvania. His badge absolved him of the need to pass through the metal detector. FBI agents were supposed to carry heat, and his automatic had earned a notch in the grip-not literally, of course, but FBI agents occasionally joked about it.
The office of Assistant Director Augustus Ernst Werner was on the top floor, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. The secretary waved him right in.
Caruso had never met Gus Werner. He was a tall,