The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [140]
"Like getting the head of the KGB to defect. That's gotta be some story. That guy's been on TV. I guess he's still pissed at your dad for keeping him from taking the Soviet Union over. Probably thinks he could have saved it."
"Maybe so. Dad has a lot of secrets, all right. So do some of his pals from the Agency. One guy in particular, named Clark. Scary guy, but him and Dad are pretty tight. I think he's in England now, boss of that new secret counter-terrorism bunch that the press talks about every year or so, the 'men of black,' they call 'em."
"They're real," Brian said. "Out at Hereford in Wales. They're not that secret. The senior guys from Force Recon have been out there to train with 'em. Never been there myself, but I know two guys who have. Them and the Brit SAS. They're serious troops."
"How far inside were you, Aldo?" his brother asked.
"Hey, the special-operations community is pretty tight. We cross-train, share new equipment and stuff. Most important part is when we sit down with beers and share war stories. Everybody has a different way of looking at problems, and, you know, sometimes the other guy has a better idea than you have. The Rainbow team-that's the 'men of black' the newsies talk about-they're very smart, but they've learned a thing or two from us over the years. Thing is, they're smart enough to listen to new ideas. The boss man, this Clark guy, he's supposed to be very smart."
"He is. I've met him. Dad thinks he's the cat's ass." He paused before going on. "Hendley knows him, too. Why he isn't here, I don't know. I asked the first day I came here. Maybe because he's too old."
"He's a shooter?"
"I asked Dad once. Dad said he couldn't say. That's how he says yes. I guess I caught him at a weak moment. Funny thing about Dad, he can't lie worth a damn."
"I guess that's why he loved being President so much."
"Yeah, I think that's the main reason he quit. He figured Uncle Robby could handle it better than he did."
"Until that cracker bastard wasted his ass," Dominic observed. The shooter, one Duane Farmer, was currently sitting on death row in Mississippi. "The last of the Klan," the newspapers called him, and so he was, at age sixty-eight, just a damned-by-everybody bigot who could not abide the thought of a black President, and had used his grandfather's World War One revolver to make it so.
"That was bad," John Patrick Ryan, Jr., agreed. "You know, except for him, I wouldn't have been born. It's a big family story. Uncle Robby's version of it was pretty good. He loved telling stories. Him and Dad were pretty tight. After Robby got wasted, the political pukes were running around in circles, some of them wanted Dad to pick up the flag again, like, but he didn't do it, and so, I guess, he helped that Kealty guy get elected. Dad can't stand him. That's the other thing he never learned, how to be nice to people he hates. He just didn't like living at the White House very much."
"He was good at it, being President," Dominic thought.
"You tell him that. Mom didn't mind leaving, either. That First Lady stuff wrecked her doctor work, and she really hated what it did with Kyle and Katie. You know that old saying, the most dangerous place in the world is between a mom and her kids? It's for real, guys. Only time I ever saw her lose her temper-Dad does that a lot more than Mom does-was when somebody told her that her official duties required her not to go to Kyle's pageant at his day care center. Jeez, she really came unglued. Anyway, the nannies helped-and the newspeople hammered her about that, how it wasn't American and all that. You know, if anybody had ever taken a picture of Dad taking a piss, I bet someone would have said he wasn't doing it right."
"That's what critics are for, to tell you how much smarter they are than the person they're criticizing."
"In the Bureau, Aldo, they're called lawyers, or the Office of Professional Responsibility," Dominic informed the table. "They have