“Correct. He was a nasty son of a bitch, but he was a stickler for civil rights. We at The Campus are not.”
“Keep talking,” Brian suggested.
“Our job is to act upon intelligence information. To take decisive action.”
“Isn’t the term for that ‘executive action’?”
“Only in the movies,” Alexander replied.
“Why us?” Dominic asked.
“Look, the fact of the matter is that CIA is a government organization. A whole lot of chiefs and not enough Indians. How many government agencies encourage people to put their necks on the line?” he asked. “Even if you do it successfully, the lawyers and accountants nibble you to death like ducks. So, if somebody needs to depart this mortal coil, the authorization has to come from up the line, up the chain of command. Gradually—well, not all that gradually—the decisions went to the Big Boss in the West Wing. And not many presidents want that sheet of paper to turn up in their personal archives, where some historian might find it and do an expose. So, we got away from that sort of thing.”
“And there are not many problems that can’t be solved by a single .45 bullet at the right time and place,” Brian said like a good Marine.
Pete nodded again. “Correct.”
“So, we are talking political assassination? That could be dangerous,” Dominic observed.
“No, that has too many political ramifications. That sort of thing hasn’t happened in centuries, and not very often even then. However, there are people out there who rather urgently need to meet God. And sometimes, it’s up to us to arrange the rendezvous.”
“Damn.” This was Dominic.
“Wait a minute. Who authorizes this?” Major Caruso asked.
“We do.”
“Not the President?”
A shake of the head. “No. As I said before, there aren’t too many Presidents with the stones to say yes to something like that. They worry too much about the newspapers.”
“But what about the law?” Special Agent Caruso asked, predictably.
“The law is, as I’ve heard one of you once say, so memorably, if you want to kick a tiger in his ass, you’d better have a plan for dealing with his teeth. You guys will be the teeth.”
“Just us?” Brian wondered.
“No, not just you, but what others there might or might not be, you do not need to know.”
“Shit . . .” Brian sat back in his chair.
“Who set this place—The Campus—up?”
“Somebody important. It’s got deniable authorization. The Campus has no ties to the government at all. None,” Alexander emphasized.
“So, we’ll be shooting people technically on our own?”
“Not much shooting. We have other methods. You will probably not be using firearms much. They’re too hard to move around, with airports and all.”
“In the field naked?” Dominic asked. “No cover at all?”
“You will have a good cover legend, but no diplomatic protection of any kind. You will live by your, wits. No foreign intelligence service will have any way of finding you. The Campus does not exist. It’s not on the federal budget, even the black part. So, nobody can trace any money to us. That’s how it’s done, of course. That’s one of the ways we have of tracking people. Your cover will be as international businessmen, bankers and investment stuff. You’ll be educated in all the, terminology so that you can carry on a conversation on an airplane, for example. Such people don’t talk much about what they’re up to, to keep their business secrets close. So, if you’re not overly talkative, it will not be seen as unusual.”
“Secret Agent Man . . .” Brian said quietly.
“We pick people who can think on their feet, who are self-starters, and who don’t faint at the sight of blood. Both of you have killed people out in the real world. In both of your cases, you were faced with the unexpected, and both of you handled the situation efficiently. Neither of you had any regrets. That will be your job.”
“What about protection for us?” The FBI agent again.
“There’s a get-out-of-jail-free card for both of you.”
“My ass,” Dominic said again. “There isn’t any such thing.”
“A signed presidential pardon,” Alexander clarified.
“Fuck . . .” Brian thought for a second. “It was Uncle Jack, wasn’t it?”
“I can’t answer that, but if you wish you can see your pardons before you go into the field.” Alexander set down his coffee cup. “Okay, gentlemen. You’ll have a few days to think this one over, but you’ll have to make your decisions. This is not a small thing I’m asking of you. It’s not going to be a fun job, nor will it be easy or pleasant, but it will be a job which will serve the interests of your country. It’s a dangerous world out there. Some people need to be dealt with directly.”
“And if we whack the wrong guy?”
“Dominic, there is that possibility, but, no matter who it is, I can promise you that you will not be asked to kill Mother Teresa’s little brother. We’re pretty careful about who we target. You’ll know who it is, plus how and why we need to deal with him or her before we send you out.”
“Kill women?” Brian asked. That was not part of the Marine ethos.
“It’s never happened, as far as I know, but it’s a theoretical possibility. So, if that’s enough for breakfast, you guys need to think it over.”
“Jesus,” Brian said after Alexander left the room. “What’s lunch going to be like?”
“Surprised?”
“Not completely, Enzo, but the way he just said it like that . . . ”
“Hey, bro, how many times have you wondered why we couldn’t simply take care of business ourselves?”
“You’re the cop, Enzo. You’re the guy who’s supposed to say Oh, shit, remember?”
“Yeah, but that shoot of mine in Alabama—well, I kinda stepped little over the line some, y’know? All the way driving to D.C., I thought over how I’d explain it to Gus Werner. But he didn’t blink even a little.”
“So, what do you think?”
“Aldo, I’m willing to listen some more. There’s a saying in Texas that there’s more men need killin’ than horses need stealin’.”
The reversal of roles struck Brian as more than a little surprising. After all, he was the gong ho Marine. Enzo was the guy who was trained to give people their constitutional rights before he slapped the cuffs on.
That they were both able to take a life without having bad dreams later was obvious to the brothers, but this went a little farther than that. This was premeditated murder. Brian usually went into the field with an exquisitely trained sniper under his command, and he knew what they did wasn’t far removed from murder, either. But being in uniform made it different. It put some sort of blessing on it. The target was an enemy and on the battlefield it was everyone’s job to look after his own life, and if he failed to do it, well, that was his failing, not that of the man who killed him. But this would be more than that. They’d be hunting individual people down with the deliberate intent of killing them, and that wasn’t what he’d been brought up and trained to do. He’d be dressed in civilian clothes—and killing people under those circumstances made him a spy, not an officer of the United States Marine Corps. There was honor in the latter, but damned little in the former, or so he’d be trained to think. The world no longer had a Field of Honor, and real life wasn’t a duel in which men had identical weapons and an open field on which to make use of them. No, he’d been trained to plan his operation in a way that gave his enemy no chance at all, because he had men under his command whose lives he was sworn to preserve. Combat had rules. Harsh rules, to be sure, but rules even so. Now he was being asked to set those rules aside and become—what? A paid assassin? The teeth of some notional wild beast? The masked avenger from some old movie on Nick at Nite? This didn’t fit into his tidy picture of the real world.
When he’d been sent to Afghanistan, he hadn’t—hadn’t what? He hadn’t disguised himself as a fishmonger on a city street. There’d been no city street in those goddamned mountains. It had been more like a big-game hunt, one in which the game had weapons of its own. And there was honor in such a hunt, and for his efforts he’d gotten the approval of his country: a combat decoration for bravery that he might or might not display.
All in all, it was a lot to consider over his second cup of morning coffee.
“Jesus, Enzo,” he breathed.
“Brian, you know what the dream of every cop is?” Dominic asked.