The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [19]
"You need merely tell me the time and the place," Mohammed replied. He handed over his business card. It had his e-mail address, the most useful tool for covert communications ever invented. And with the miracle of modern air travel, he could be anywhere on the globe in forty-eight hours.
CHAPTER 2-JOINING UP
He came in at a quarter to five. Anyone who passed him on the street would not have given him a second look, though he might have caught the eye of the odd unattached female. At six-one, a hundred eighty or so pounds-he worked out regularly-black hair and blue eyes, he wasn't exactly movie star material, but neither was he the sort of man that a pretty young female professional would have summarily kicked out of bed.
He also dressed well, Gerry Hendley saw. Blue suit with a red pinstripe-it looked English-made-vest, red-and-yellow-striped tie, nice gold tie bar. Fashionable shirt. Decent haircut. The confident look that came from having both money and a good education to go with a youth that would not be misspent. His car was parked in the visitors' lot in front of the building. A yellow Hummer 2 SUV, the sort of vehicle favored by people who herded cattle in Wyoming, or money in New York. And, probably, that was why
"So, what brings you here?" Gerry asked, waving his guest to a comfortable seat on the other side of his mahogany desk.
"I haven't decided what I want to do yet, just sort of bumping around, looking for a niche I might fit into."
Hendley smiled. "Yeah, I'm not so old that I can't remember how confusing it is when you get out of school. Which one did you go to?"
"Georgetown. Family tradition." The boy smiled gently. That was one good thing about him that Hendley saw and appreciated-he wasn't trying to impress anyone with his name and family background. He might even be a little uneasy with it, wanting to make his own way and his own name, as a lot of young men did. The smart ones, anyway. It was a pity that there was no place for him on The Campus.
"Your dad really likes Jesuit schools."
"Even Mom converted. Sally didn't go to Bennington. She got through her premed up at Fordham in New York. Hopkins Med now, of course. Wants to be a doc, like Mom. What the hell, it's an honorable profession."
"Unlike law?" Gerry asked.
"You know how Dad is about that," the boy pointed out with a grin. "What was your undergraduate degree in?" he asked Hendley, knowing the answer already, of course.
"Economics and mathematics. I took a double major." It had been very useful indeed for modeling trading patterns in commodities markets. "So, how's your family doing?"
"Oh, fine. Dad's back writing again-his memoirs. Mostly he bitches that he isn't old enough to do that sort of book, but he's working pretty hard to get it done right. He's not real keen on the new President."
"Yeah, Kealty has a real talent for bouncing back. When they finally bury the guy, they'd better park a truck on top of his headstone." That joke had even made the Washington Post.
"I've heard that one. Dad says it can only take one idiot to unmake the work of ten geniuses." That adage had not made the Washington Post. But it was the reason the young man's father had set up The Campus, though the young man himself didn't know it.
"That's overstating things. This new guy only happened by accident."
"Yeah, well, when it comes time to execute that klukker retard down in Mississippi, how much you want to bet he commutes the sentence?"
"Opposition to capital punishment is a matter of principle to him,"
Hendley pointed out. "Or so he says. Some people do feel that way, and it is an honorable opinion."
"Principle? To him that's the nice old lady who runs a grammar school."
"If you want to have a political discussion, there's a nice bar and grill a mile down Route 29," Gerry suggested.
"No, that's