The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [15]
"I don't, sir," Caruso assured him. "That little girl, Penelope-I couldn't save her, but at least that bastard won't ever do it again." He looked Werner right in the eye. "You know what it feels like."
"Yeah." He looked closely at Caruso. "And you're sure you have no regrets?"
"I caught an hour's nap on the flight up, sir." He delivered the statement without a visible smile.
But it generated one on Werner's face. He nodded. "Well, you'll be getting an official atta-boy from the office of the Director. No OPR."
OPR was the FBI's own "Internal Affairs" office, and while respected by rank-and-file FBI agents, was not beloved of them. There was a saying,"If he tortures small animals and wets his bed, he's either a serial killer or he works for the Office of Professional Responsibility." Werner lifted Caruso's folder. "Says here you're pretty smart good language skills, too Interested in coming to Washington? I'm looking for people who know how to think on their feet, to work in my shop."
Another move, was what Special Agent Dominic Caruso heard.
Gerry Hendley was not an overly formal man. He wore jacket and tie to work, but the jacket ended up on a clothes tree in his office within fifteen seconds of arrival. He had a fine executive secretary-like himself, a native of South Carolina-named Helen Connolly, and after running through his day's schedule with her, he picked up his Wall Street Journal and checked the front page. He'd already devoured the day's New York Times and Washington Post to get his political fix for the day, grumbling as always how they never quite got it right. The digital clock on his desk told him that he had twenty minutes before his first meeting, and he lit up his computer to get the morning's Early Bird as well, the clipping service that went to senior government officials. This he scanned to see if he'd missed anything in his morning read of the big-time papers. Not much, except for an interesting piece in the Virginia Pilot about the annual Fletcher Conference, a circle-think held by the Navy and Marine Corps every year at the Norfolk Navy Base. They talked about terrorism, and fairly intelligently, Hendley thought. People in uniform often did. As opposed to elected officials.
We kill the Soviet Union, Hendley thought, and we expected everything in the world to settle down. But what we didn't see coming was all these lunatics with leftover AK-47s and education in kitchen chemistry, or simply a willingness to trade their own lives for those of their perceived enemies.
And the other thing they hadn't done was prepare the intelligence community to deal with it. Even a president experienced in the black world and the best DCI in American history hadn't managed to get all that much done. They'd added a lot more people-an extra five hundred personnel in an agency of twenty thousand didn't sound like a lot, but it had doubled the operations directorate. That had given the CIA a force only half as horribly inadequate as it had been before, but that wasn't the same as adequate. And in return for it, the Congress had further tightened oversight and restrictions, thus further crippling the new people hired to flesh out the governmental skeleton crew. They never learned. He himself had talked at infinite length to his colleagues in the World's Most Exclusive Men's Club, but while some listened, others did not, and almost all of the remainder vacillated. They paid too much attention to the editorial pages, often of newspapers not even native to their home states, because that, they foolishly figured, was what the American People thought. Maybe it was this simple: any newly elected official was seduced into the game the same way Cleopatra had snookered Gaius Julius Caesar. It was the staffs, he knew, the "professional" political helpers who "guided" their employers into the right way to be reelected, which had become the Holy Grail of public service. America did not have a hereditary ruling class, but it did have plenty of people happy to lead their employers