But the good news was that he wasn’t dead yet. And he could look forward to honorable retirement, and maybe doing that autobiography, if Langley ever let him publish it. Not very likely. He knew a lot of things that ought not to be known, and he’d done one or two things that probably ought not to have been done, though at the time his life had ridden on that particular horse. Things like that didn’t always make sense to the people who sat at desks in the Old Headquarters Building, but for them the big part of the day was finding a good parking place and whether or not the cafeteria had spice cake on the dessert stack.
He could see Washington, D.C., out the window. The Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, and George’s marble obelisk, plus the surpassingly ugly buildings that housed various government departments.
To John Terrence Clark it was just a whole city composed of headquarters pukes for whom reality was a file folder in which the papers were supposed to be properly filled out, and if a man had to shed blood to make it that way, well, that was a matter of only distant interest. Hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them had wives-or husbands-and kids, but even so it was hard not to regard them with distaste-and, on occasion, with outright hatred. But they had their world, and he had his. They might overlap, but they never really met.
“Glad to be back, John?” Sandy asked.
“Yeah, sorta.” Change was hard but inevitable. As far as where his life would go from here… time would tell.
The next morning Clark turned right off the George Washington Parkway, looping to the left and through the gatehouse, whose armed guard had his tag number on his list of “okay to admit” strangers. John was allowed to park in the visitors’ area just in front and to the left of the big canopy.
“So how long before they tell us to find new employment, John?” Domingo asked.
“I give it maybe forty minutes. They’ll be polite about it, I’m sure.”
And with that assessment, they exited his rented Chevy and walked to the front door, there to be met by an SPO, or security and protective officer, whom they didn’t know.
“Mr. Clark, Mr. Chavez. I’m Pete Simmons. Welcome home.”
“Good to be back,” John responded. “You are…?”
“I’m an SPO, waiting for a field assignment. Got out of The Farm two months ago.”
“Who was your training officer?”
“Max DuPont.”
“Max hasn’t retired yet? Good man.”
“Good teacher. He told us a few stories about you two, and we saw the training film you did back in ’02.”
“I remember that,” Chavez observed. “Shaken, not stirred.” He had himself a brief laugh.
“I don’t drink martinis, Domingo, remember?”
“Not as good-looking as Sean Connery, either. What did you learn from the film, Simmons?”
“Keep your options open, and don’t walk in the middle of the street.” Those were, in fact, two good lessons for a field spook.
“So who’re we meeting?” Clark asked.
“Assistant Deputy Director Charles Sumner Alden, ADDO.”
“Political appointment?”
“Correct. Kennedy School, Harvard, yeah. He’s friendly enough, but sometimes I wonder if he really approves of what we do here.”
“I wonder what Ed and Mary Pat are doing now.”
“Ed’s retired,” Simmons told him. “Working on a book, I hear. Mary Pat’s over at NCTC. She’s a pistol.”
“Best instincts in a field spook I ever encountered,” Clark said. “What she says, you can take to the bank.”
“Makes you wonder why President Kealty didn’t keep her and Ed on the payroll,” Chavez observed.
Unclean, unclean, Clark thought. “How’s morale?” Clark asked on the way through the security card readers. Simmons handled that for them with a wave to the armed guard at the end of the gate line.
“Could be better. We have a lot of people running around in circles. They’re punching up the intelligence directorate, but mine was the last class through The Farm for a while, and none of us have field assignments yet.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Cop, Boston city police. I was hired under Plan Blue. My degree is from Boston University, not Harvard. Languages.”
“Which ones?”
“Serbian, some Arabic, and a little Pashtun. I was supposed to go out to Monterey to polish them up, but that got shelved.”
“You’re going to need the last two,” John advised. “And work on the jogging. Afghanistan-I spent some time there back in the mid-’80s, and it’ll wear out a mountain goat.”
“That bad?”
“The people there fight wars for fun, and there ain’t no good guys. I found myself feeling sorry for the Russians. The Afghans are tough people. I guess in that environment you have to be, but Islam is just an overlay on a tribal culture that goes back three-thousand-plus years.”
“Thanks for the tip. I’ll cross it off my list of preferences,” Simmons said as the elevator reached the seventh floor.
He dropped them off at the secretary’s desk. The plush carpet told them that the office was an important one-it looked fairly new. Clark took a magazine and paged through it while Domingo stared placidly at the wall. His former life as a soldier allowed him to tolerate boredom fairly well.
31
AFTER FORTY MINUTES, Charles Alden came to the anteroom, smiling like a used-car salesman. Tall and thin like a runner, old enough to seem important to himself, whatever he’d done to earn this post. Clark was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the doubts were piling up rapidly.
“So you’re the famous Mr. Clark,” Alden said in greeting-and without an apology for keeping them waiting, Clark noted.
“Not too famous,” Clark replied.
“Well, at least in this community.” Alden led his guest into his office, not inviting Chavez to join them. “I just read through your file.”
In fifteen minutes? Clark wondered. Maybe a speed-reader. “I hope it was illuminating.”
“Colorful. Getting the Gerasimov family out of Russia was quite a job. And the mission in Tokyo, with a Russian cover… impressive. Ex-SEAL… I see President Ryan got you your Medal of Honor. Twenty-nine years with the Agency. Quite a record,” Alden said, waving Clark to a chair; it was smaller than Alden’s own chair and designed to be uncomfortable. Power game, Clark thought.
“I just did the jobs they gave me, best I could, and I managed to survive them all.”