Teeth of the Tiger

CHAPTER 4 BOOT CAMP

The drive back across the river to the Marriott allowed Dominic to collect his bags — with a twenty-dollar bill to the bellman — and then punch in his destination on the Mercedes's navigation computer. Soon he was south-bound on Interstate 95, leaving Washington behind. The skyline of the national capital actually looked pretty good in his rearview mirror. The car drove well, about what you'd expect of a Mercedes; the local talk radio was pleasingly conservative — cops tended to be that way — and traffic wasn't too bad, though he found himself pitying the poor bastards who had to drive into D.C. every day to push paper in the Hoover Building and all the other government-grotesque buildings surrounding The Mall. At least FBI Headquarters had its own pistol range for stress management. Probably well used, Dominic thought.

Just before hitting Richmond, the female voice on his computer told him to take a right onto the Richmond Beltway, which presently delivered him to I-64 west toward the rolling, wooded hills. The countryside was pleasant, and green enough. Probably a lot of golf courses and horse farms. He'd heard that the CIA had its safe houses here from back when they had to debrief Soviet defectors. He wondered what the places were used for now. Chinese, maybe? Frenchmen, perhaps. Certainly they hadn't been sold. The government didn't like letting go of things, except maybe to close down military bases. The clowns from the Northeast and Far West loved to do that. They didn't much like the Bureau either, though they were probably afraid of it. He didn't know what it was about cops and soldiers that bothered some politicians, but he didn't much worry about it. He had his rice bowl, and they had theirs.

After another hour and fifteen minutes or so, he started looking for his exit sign, but the computer didn't need him.

"PREPARE TO TURN RIGHT AT THE NEXT EXIT," the voice said, about two minutes ahead of time.

"Fine, honey," Special Agent Caruso replied, without getting an acknowledgment. A minute later, he took the suggested exit — without so much as a VERY GOOD from the computer — and then took some ordinary city streets through the pleasant little town and up some gentle hills to the north wall of this valley, until finally:

"TAKE THE NEXT LEFT AND YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DESTINATION…"

"That's nice, honey, thank you," he observed.

"YOUR DESTINATION" was the end of an entirely ordinary-looking country road, maybe a driveway, since it had no lines painted on it. A few hundred yards farther and he saw two redbrick abutments and a white-rail gate that was conveniently swung open. There was a house another three hundred yards off, with six white pillars holding up the front part of the roof. The roof appeared to be slate — rather old slate, at that — and the walls were weathered brick that hadn't been red in over a hundred years. This place had to be over a century old, maybe two. The driveway was recently raked pea-sized gravel. The grass — there was a lot of grass here — was a luscious golf-course green. Someone came out of a side door and waved him around to the left. He twisted the wheel to head behind the house, and got a surprise. The mansion — what did you call a house this big? — was larger than it first appeared, and had a fair-sized parking lot, which at the moment held a Chevy Suburban, a Buick SUV, and — another Mercedes C-class just like his, with North Carolina tags. The likelihood of this coincidence was too remote even to enter his imagina—

"Enzo!"

Dominic snapped his head around. "Aldo!"

People often remarked on their resemblance, though it was even more apparent when they were apart. Both had dark hair and fair skin. Brian was the taller by twenty-four millimeters. Dominic was perhaps ten pounds heavier. Whatever differences in mannerisms they'd had as boys had stayed with them as they'd grown up together. Since both were partly Italian in ancestry, they hugged warmly — but they didn't kiss. They weren't that Italian.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Dominic was the first to ask.

"Me? What about you?" Brian shot back, heading to help with his brother's bags. "I read about your shoot in Alabama. What's the story?"

"Pedophile," Dominic replied, pulling out his two-suiter. "Raped and killed a cute little girl. I got there about half an hour too late."

"Hey, ain't nobody perfect, Enzo. Papers said you put an end to his career."

Dominic looked right into Brian's eyes. "Yeah, I managed to accomplish that."

"How, exactly?"

"Three in the chest."

"Works every time," Captain Brian Caruso observed. "And no lawyers to cry over his body."

"No, not this time." His words were not the least bit jolly, but his brother heard the cold satisfaction.

"With this, eh?" The Marine lifted his brother's automatic from its holster. "Looks nice," he said.

"It shoots pretty good. Loaded, bro, do be careful."

Brian ejected the magazine and cleared the chamber. "Ten millimeter?"

"That's right. FBI-issue. Makes nice holes. The Bureau went back to it after Inspector O'Day had that shoot-out with the bad guys — you know, Uncle Jack's little girl."

Brian remembered the story well: the attack on Katie Ryan at her school shortly after her dad had become President, the shoot-out, the kills.

"That dude had his shit wired pretty tight," he said. "And you know, he's not even an ex-Marine. He was a Navy puke before he turned cop. That's what they said at Quantico, anyway."

"They did a training tape of the job. I met him once, just shook his hand with twenty other guys. Son of a bitch can shoot. He talked about waiting for your chance and making the first shot count. He double-tapped both their heads."

"How did he keep his cool?" The rescue of Katie Ryan had struck home for both Caruso boys. She was, after all, their first cousin, and a nice little girl, the image of her mother.

"Hey, you smelled the smoke over there. How did you keep yours?"

"Training. I had Marines to look after, bro."

Together, they manhandled Dominic's things inside. Brian showed the way upstairs. They had separate bedrooms, next to each other. Then they came back to the kitchen. Both got coffee and sat at the kitchen table.

"So, how's life in the Marine Corps, Aldo?"

"Gonna make major soon, Enzo. Got myself a Silver Star for what I did over there — wasn't that big a deal, really, I just did what they trained me to do. One of my men got shot up, but he's okay now. We didn't bag the guy we were after — he wasn't in a mood to surrender, so Gunny Sullivan sent him off to see Allah — but we got two live ones and they talked some, gave us some good information, the Intel guys told me."

"What did you get the pretty ribbon for?" Dominic asked pointedly.

"Mainly for staying alive. I shot three of the bad guys myself. Weren't even hard shots, really. I just took 'em. Later they asked me if I had any nightmares about it. The Marine Corps just has too many doctors around — and they're all squids."

"Bureau's the same way, but I blew it off. No bad dreams about that bastard. The poor little girl. I should've shot his dick off."

"Why didn't you?"

"'Cause that doesn't kill your ass, Aldo. But three in the heart does."

"You didn't shoot him on the spur of the moment, did you?"

"Not exactly, but—"

"And that's why you're here, Special Agent Caruso," a man said, entering the room. He was over six feet, a very fit fifty, both of the others thought.

"Who are you, sir?" Brian asked.

"Pete Alexander," the man answered.

"I was supposed to meet you last—"

"No, actually you weren't, but that's what we told the general." Alexander sat down with his own cup of coffee.

"So, who are you, then?" Dominic asked.

"I'm your training officer."

"Just you?" Brian asked.

"Training for what?" Dominic asked at the same time.

"No, not just me, but I'm the one who'll be here all the time. And the nature of the training will show you what you're training for," he answered. "Okay, you want to know about me. I graduated Yale thirty years ago, in political science. I was even a member of Skull and Bones. You know, the boys' club that conspiracy theorists like to prattle about. Jesus, like people in their late teens can really accomplish anything beyond getting laid, on a good Friday night." His brown eyes and the look in them hadn't come from a college, however, even an Ivy League one. "Back in the old days, the Agency liked to recruit people from Yale and Harvard and Dartmouth. The kids there have gotten over it. They all want to be merchant bankers now and make money. I worked twenty-five years in the Clandestine Service, and then I got recruited by The Campus. Been with them ever since."

"The Campus? What's that?" the Marine asked. Alexander noticed that Dominic Caruso did not. He was listening and watching very closely. Brian would never stop being a Marine, and Dominic would never stop being FBI. They never did. It was both good and bad, in both cases.

"That is a privately funded intelligence service."

"Privately funded?" Brian asked. "How the hell—"

"You'll see how it works later, and when you do, you will be surprised how easily it's done. What concerns you right here and right now is what they do."

"They kill people," Dominic said immediately. The words came out seemingly of their own accord.

"Why do you think that?" Alexander asked innocently.

"The outfit is small. We're the only people here, judging by the parking pad outside. I'm not experienced enough to be an expert agent. All I did was whack somebody who needed it, and next day I'm up in Headquarters talking to an assistant director, and a couple of days after that I drive to D.C. and get sent down here. This place is very, very special, very, very small, and it has top-level approval for whatever it does. You're not selling U.S. Savings Bonds here, are you?"

"The book on you is that you have good analytical ability," Alexander said. "Can you learn to keep your mouth shut?"

"It's not needed in this particular place, I should think. But, yeah, I know how, when the situation calls for it," Dominic said.

"Okay, here's the first speech. You guys know what 'black' means, right? It means a program or project that is not acknowledged by the government. People pretend it doesn't exist. The Campus takes that one step further: We really do not exist. There is not a single written document in the possession of any government employee that has a single word about us. From this moment on, you two young gentlemen do not exist. Oh, sure, you, Captain — or is it Major already? — Caruso, you get a paycheck that's going to be direct-deposited into whatever bank account you set up this week, but you are no longer a Marine. You are on detached duty, whose nature is unknown. And you, Special Agent Dominic Caruso—"

"I know. Gus Werner told me. They dug a hole and pulled it in after them."

Alexander nodded. "You will both leave your official identification documents, dog tags, everything, here before you leave. You can keep your names, maybe, but a name is just a couple of words, and nobody believes a name in this business anyway. That's the funny part about my time in the field with the Agency. Once on a job, I changed names without thinking about it. Damned embarrassing when I realized it. Like an actor: All of a sudden I'm Macbeth when I'm supposed to be Hamlet. No harm came of it, though, and I didn't croak at the end of the play."

"What, exactly, will we be doing?" This was Brian.

"Mostly, you'll be doing investigative work. Tracking money. The Campus is particularly good at that. You'll find out how and why later. You will probably deploy together. You, Dominic, will do most of the heavy lifting on the investigative side. You, Brian, will back him up on the muscle side, and along the way you'll learn to do what — what was it you called him a little while ago?"

"Oh, you mean Enzo? I call him that because he had a heavy foot when he got his driver's license. You know, like Enzo Ferrari."

Dominic pointed to his brother and laughed. "He's Aldo because he dresses like a dweeb. Like in that wine commercial, Aldo Cella: 'He's not a slave to fashion'? It's a family joke."

"Okay, go to Brooks Brothers and dress better," Pete Alexander told Brian. "Your cover mainly will be as a businessman or a tourist. So, you'll have to dress neatly, but not like the Prince of Wales. You'll both let your hair grow out, especially you, Aldo."

Brian rubbed a hand over his head stubble. It marked him anywhere in the civilized world as a United States Marine. It could have been worse. Army Rangers were even more radical in the hair department. Brian would look like a fairly normal human being in a month or so. "Damn, I'll have to buy a comb."

"What's the plan?"

"For today, just relax and settle in. Tomorrow we wake up early and make sure you two are in decent physical shape. Then there's weapons proficiency — and the sit-down classwork. You're both computer-literate, I presume."

"Why do you ask?" This was Brian.

"The Campus mainly works like a virtual office. You'll be issued computers with built-in modems, and that's how you'll communicate with the home office."

"What about security?" Dominic asked.

"The machines have pretty good security built in. If there's a way to crack them, nobody's found it yet."

"That's good to know," Enzo observed, dubiously. "They use computers in the Corps, Aldo?"

"Yeah, we have all the modern conveniences, even toilet paper."

"And your name is Mohammed?" Ernesto asked.

"That is correct, but for now, call me Miguel." Unlike with Nigel, it was a name he'd be able to remember. He had not begun by invoking Allah's blessing on this meeting. These unbelievers would not have understood.

"Your English is — well, you sound English."

"I was educated there," Mohammed explained. "My mother was English. My father was Saudi."

"Was?"

"Both are dead."

"My sympathies," Ernesto offered with questionable sincerity. "So, what can we do for each other?"

"I told Pablo here about the idea. Has he filled you in?"

"Si, he has, but I wish to hear it directly from you. You understand that I represent six others who share my business interests."

"I see. Do you have the power to negotiate for all of them?"

"Not entirely, but I will present what you say to them — you need not meet with them all — and they have never rejected my suggestions. If we come to an agreement here, it can be fully ratified by the end of the week."

"Very well. You know the interests I myself represent. I am empowered to make an agreement, as well. Like you, we have a major enemy nation to the north. They are putting ever-greater pressure on my friends. We wish to retaliate, and to deflect their pressure in other directions."

"It is much the same with us," Ernesto observed.

"Therefore, it is in our mutual interests to cause unrest and chaos within America. The new American president is a weak man. But for that reason he can be a dangerous one. The weak are quicker to use force than the strong. Even though they use it inefficiently, it can be an annoyance."

"Their methods of intelligence-gathering concern us. You also?"

"We have learned caution," Mohammed replied. "What we do not have is a good infrastructure in America. For this we need assistance."

"You don't? That's surprising. Their news media is full of reports about the FBI and other agencies busily tracking your people within their borders."

"At the moment, they are chasing shadows — and sowing discord in their own land by doing so. It complicates the task of building a proper network so that we can conduct offensive operations."

"The nature of those operations does not concern us?" Pablo asked.

"That is correct. It is nothing you have not done yourselves, of course." But not in America, he did not add. Here in Colombia the gloves were all the way off, but they'd been careful to limit themselves in the U.S., their "customer" nation. So much the better. It would be entirely out of character with anything they'd done. Operational security was a concept both sides fully understood.

"I see," the senior Cartel man noted. He was no fool. Mohammed could see that in his eyes. The Arab was not going to underestimate these men or their capabilities…

Nor would he mistake them for friends. They could be as ruthless as his own men, he knew that. Those who denied God could be every bit as dangerous as those who worked in His Name.

"So what can you offer us?"

"We have conducted operations in Europe for a long time," said Mohammed. "You wish to expand your marketing efforts there. We've had a highly secure network in place for over twenty years. The changes in European commerce — the diminution of the importance of borders, and so forth — works in your favor, as it has worked in ours. We have a cell in the port city of Piraeus that can easily accommodate your needs, and contacts within the transnational trucking companies. If they can transport weapons and people for us, they can surely transport your products easily enough."

"We will need a list of names, the people with whom we can discuss the technical aspects of this business," Ernesto told his guest.

"I have it with me." Mohammed held up his personal laptop computer. "They are accustomed to doing business in return for monetary considerations." He saw his hosts nod without asking about how much money. Clearly, this was not a matter of great concern for them.

Ernesto and Pablo were thinking: There were over three hundred million people in Europe, and many of them would doubtless enjoy the Colombians' cocaine. Some European countries even allowed the use of drugs in discreet, controlled — and taxed — settings. The money involved was insufficient to make a decent profit, but it did have the advantage of setting the proper atmosphere. And nothing, not even medicinal-quality heroin, was as good as Andean coca. For that they would pay their Euros, and this time it would be enough to make this venture profitable. The danger, of course, was in the distribution side. Some careless street dealers would undoubtedly be arrested, and some of them would talk. So, there had to be ample insulation between the wholesale distribution and retail sides, but that was something they knew how to do — no matter how professional the European policemen were, they could not be all that different from the Americans. Some of them would even happily take the Cartel's Euros, and grease the skids. Business was business. And if this Arab could help with that — for free, which was truly remarkable — so much the better. Ernesto and Pablo did not react physically to the business offer on the table. An outsider might have taken their demeanor for boredom. It was anything but that, of course. This offer was heaven-sent. A whole new market was going to open up, and with the new revenue stream it brought, maybe they could buy their country entirely. They'd have to learn a new way of doing business, but they'd have the money to experiment, and they were adaptable creatures: fish, as it were, swimming in a sea of peasants and capitalists.

"How do we contact these people?" Pablo inquired.

"My people will make the necessary introductions."

Better and better, Ernesto thought.

"And what services will you require of us?" he finally asked.

"We will need your help to transport people into America. How would we go about this?"

"If you mean physically moving people from your part of the world into America, the best thing is to fly them into Colombia — right here to Cartagena, in fact. Then we will arrange for them to be flown into other Spanish-speaking countries to the north. Costa Rica, for example. From there, if they have reliable travel documents, they can fly there directly, via an American airline, or through Mexico. If they appear Latin and speak Spanish, they can be smuggled across the Mexican-American border — it is a physical challenge, and some of them might be apprehended, but if so, they'd simply be returned to Mexico, for another attempt. Or, again with proper documents, they could just walk across the border into San Diego, California. Once in America, it's a question of maintaining your cover. If money is not an issue—"

"It isn't," Mohammed assured him.

"Then you retain a local attorney — few of them have much in the way of scruples — and arrange the purchase of a suitable safe house to serve as a base of operations. Forgive me — I know we agreed that such operations need not concern us — but if you gave me some idea of what you have in mind, I could advise you."

Mohammed thought for a few moments, and then explained.

"I see. Your people must be properly motivated to do such things," Ernesto observed.

"They are." Could this man have any doubt of that? Mohammed wondered.

"And with good planning and nerve, they can even survive. But you must never underestimate the American police agencies. In our business we can make financial arrangements with some of them, but that is very unlikely in your case."

"We understand that. Ideally, we would want our people to survive, but sadly we know that some will be lost. They understand the risk." He didn't talk about Paradise. These people would not understand. The God they worshipped folded into their wallets.

What sort of fanatic throws his people away like that? Pablo asked himself. His men freely took their risks, measuring the money to be gained against the consequences of failure, and made decisions out of their own free will. Not these people. Well, one couldn't always choose one's business associates.

"Very well. We have a number of blank American passports. It is your job to be certain that the people you send us can speak proper English or Spanish, and can present themselves properly. I trust none of them will partake in flying lessons?" Ernesto meant it as a joke.

Mohammed did not take it as one.

"The time for that is past. Success rarely succeeds twice in my field of endeavor."

"Fortunately, we have a different field," Ernesto responded. And it was true. He could send shipments in cargo container boxes via commercial vessels and trucks all over America. If one of them was lost, and the programmed destination discovered, America had many legal protections for his downstream employees. Only the foolish ones went to prison. Over the years, they'd learned to defeat sniffer dogs and all the other means of discovery. The most important thing was that they used people who were willing to take risks, and most of them survived to retire back to Colombia and join the upper middle class, their prosperity the result of something in the distant, fading past, never to be repeated or spoken of.

"So," Mohammed said. "When can we commence operations?"

This man is anxious, Ernesto noted. But he would accommodate him. Whatever he managed to accomplish would draw manpower away from America's counter-smuggling operations, and that was good. The relatively minor cross-border losses he had learned to endure would shrink to even more trivial levels. The street price of cocaine would drop, but demand would increase somewhat, and so there would be no net loss in sales revenue. That would be the tactical profit. More to the point, America would become less interested in Colombia, and shift her focus of intelligence operations elsewhere. That would be his strategic advantage from this endeavor…

… and he always had the option of sending information to the CIA. Terrorists had appeared unexpectedly in his backyard, he could say, and their operations would be understood to be beyond the pale even for the Cartel. While that would not gain him the affection of America, it would not hurt him, either. And any of his own people who'd provided assistance to the terrorists could be dealt with internally, as it were. The Americans would actually respect that.

So, there was a real upside, and a controllable downside. On the whole, he decided, this had the makings of a valuable and profitable operation.

"Senor Miguel, I will propose this alliance to my colleagues, with my recommendation that we undertake it. You can expect a final decision by the end of this week. Will you remain in Cartagena, or will you be traveling?"

"I prefer not to remain in one place too long. I fly out tomorrow. Pablo can reach me via the Internet with your decision. For the moment, I thank you for a cordial business meeting."

Ernesto stood and took his guest's hand. He decided then and there to consider Miguel as a businessman in a similar but not competitive field of endeavor. Not a friend, certainly, but an ally of convenience.

"How the hell did you manage this?" Jack asked.

"Ever hear of a company called INFOSEC?" Rick Bell asked in return.

"Encryption stuff, right?"

"Correct. Information Systems Security Company. The company's domiciled outside of Seattle. They have the best information-security program there is. Headed by a former deputy head of the Z-Division over at Fort Meade. He and three colleagues set the company up about nine years ago. I'm not sure NSA can crack it, short of brute-forcing it with their new Sun Workstations. Just about every bank in the world uses it, especially the ones in Liechtenstein and the rest of Europe. But there's a trapdoor in the program."

"And nobody's found it?" Buyers of computer programs had learned over the years to have outside experts go over such programs line by line, as a defense against playful software engineers, of which there were far too many.

"Those NSA guys do good code," Bell responded. "I have no idea what's in there, but these guys still have their old NSA school ties hanging in the closet, y'know?"

"And Fort Meade listens in, and we get what they dig up when they fax it to Langley," Jack said. "Anybody at CIA good at tracking money?"

"Not as good as our people."

"Takes a thief to catch a thief, eh?"

"Helps to know the mind-set of the adversary," Bell confirmed. "It's not a large community we're dealing with here. Hell, we know most of them — we're in the same business, right?"

"And that makes me an additional asset?" Jack asked. He was not a prince under American law, but Europeans still thought in such terms. They'd bow and scrape just to shake his hand, regard him as a promising young man however thick his head might turn out to be, and seek his favor, first because of the possibility he might speak a kind word into the right ear. It was called corruption, of course, or at least the atmosphere for it.

"What did you learn in the White House?" Bell asked.

"A little, I suppose," Jack responded. Mostly, he'd learned things from Mike Brennan, who'd cordially detested all the diplomatic folderol, to say nothing of the political stuff that happened there every day. Brennan had talked it over with his foreign colleagues often enough, who saw the same things in their own capitals, and who thought much the same of it, from behind the same blank faces when they stood post. It was probably a better way to learn all this stuff than his father had, Jack thought. He hadn't been forced to learn to swim while struggling not to drown. It was something his father had never spoken about, except when angry at the whole corrupting process.

"Be careful talking to Gerry about it," said Bell. "He likes to say how clean and upright the trading business is by comparison."

"Dad really likes the guy. I guess maybe they're a little alike."

"No," Bell corrected, "they're a lot alike."

"Hendley got out of politics because of the accident, right?"

Bell nodded. "That's it. Wait until you have a wife and kids. It's about the biggest hit a man can take. Even worse than you might think. He had to go and identify the bodies. It wasn't pretty. Some people would eat a gun after that. But he didn't. He'd been thinking about a run for the White House himself, thought maybe Wendy would make a good First Lady. Maybe so, but his lust for that job died along with his wife and kids." He didn't go further. The senior people at The Campus protected the boss, in reputation at least. They thought him a man who deserved loyalty. There was no considered line of succession at The Campus. Nobody had thought that far forward, and the subject never came up in board meetings. Those were mainly concerned with non-business matters anyway. He wondered if John Patrick Ryan, Jr., would take note of that one blank spot in the makeup of The Campus. "So," Bell went on, "what do you think so far?"

"I read the transcripts they gave me of what the central bank heads say back and forth to each other. It's surprising how venal some of that stuff is." Jack paused. "Oh, yeah, shouldn't be surprised, should I?"

"Any time you give people control of that much money or power, some corruption is bound to happen. What surprises me is the way their friendships cross national lines. A lot of these guys profit personally when their own currencies are hurt, even if it means a little inconvenience for their fellow citizens. Back in the old-old days, the nobility frequently felt more at ease with foreign nobility than with the people on their own estates who bowed down to the same king. That characteristic hasn't died yet — at least not over there. Here the big industrialists might work together to lobby Congress, but they don't often hand freebies to them, and they don't trade secrets. Conspiracy at that level isn't impossible, but concealing it for a long time is pretty tough. Too many people, and every one has a mouth. Europe's getting the same way. There's nothing the media likes better than a scandal, here or there, and they'd rather clobber a rich crook than a cabinet minister. The latter is often a good source, after all. The former is just a crook."

"So, how do you keep your people honest?"

It was a good question, Bell thought, and one they worried about all the time, though it wasn't spoken about much.

"We pay our people pretty well, and everyone here is part of a group investment plan that makes them feel comfortable. The annualized return is about nineteen percent over the last few years."

"That's not bad," Junior understated. "All within the law?"

"That depends on the lawyer you talk to, but no U.S. Attorney is going to make a big deal about it, and we're very careful how we manage it. We don't like greed here. We could turn this place into the biggest thing since Ponzi, but then people would notice. So, we don't flaunt anything. We make enough to cover our operations and to make sure the troops are well provided for." They also kept track of the employees' money, and the trades they made, if any. Most didn't, though some worked accounts through the office, which, again, was profitable but not greedy. "You'll give us account numbers and codes to all of your personal finances, and the computers will keep track of them."

"I have a trust account through Dad, but it's managed through an accounting firm in New York. I get a nice allowance, but no access to the principal. What I make on my own is mine alone, however, unless I send it into the CPAs. Then they build it up and send me a statement every quarter. When I turn thirty, I'm allowed to play with it on my own." Turning thirty was a little distant for young Jack to concern himself about at the moment, however.

"We know," Bell assured him, "it's not a question of lack of trust. It's just that we want to make sure nobody's developed a gambling habit."

Probably the best mathematicians of all time were the ones who'd made up the rules for gambling games, Bell thought. They'd provided just enough illusion that you had a chance to sucker you in. Born inside the human mind was the most dangerous of drugs. That was called "ego," too.

"So, I start out on the 'white' side of the house? Watching currency fluctuations and stuff?" said Jack.

Bell nodded. "Correct. You need to learn the language first."

"Fair enough." His father had started off a lot more humbly than this, as a junior accounting manager at Merrill Lynch who'd had to cold-call people. Paying one's dues was probably bad for the ego but good for the soul. His father had often lectured him on the Virtue of Patience. He'd said that it was a pain in the ass to acquire, even after acquiring it. But the game had rules, even in this place. Especially in this place, Jack realized on reflection. He wondered what happened to people on The Campus who crossed over the line. Probably nothing good.

"Buon vino. " Dominic observed. "For a government installation, the wine cellar isn't half bad." The year on the bottle read 1962, long before he and his brother had been born… for that matter, so long ago their mom had just been thinking about Mercy High School, a few blocks from their grandparents' place on Loch Raven Boulevard in Baltimore… toward the end of the last Ice Age, probably. But Baltimore was a hell of a long way from the Seattle they'd grown up in. "How old is this place?" he asked Alexander.

"The property? It goes back to before the Civil War. The house was started in seventeen-something. Burned down and rebuilt in 1882. Government got hold of it just before Nixon was elected. The owner was an old OSS guy, J. Donald Hamilton, worked with Donovan and his crowd. He got a fair price when he sold it, moved out to New Mexico and died there in 1986, I think, aged ninety-four. They say he was a mover and shaker in his day, stuck it out pretty far in World War One, and helped Wild Bill work against the Nazis. There's a painting of him in the library. Looks like a guy to step aside for. And, yeah, he did know his wines. This one's from Tuscany."

"Goes nicely with veal," Brian said. He'd done the cooking.

"This veal goes well with anything. You didn't learn that in the Marine Corps," Alexander observed.

"From Pop. He is a better cook than Mom," Dominic explained. "You know, it's an old-country thing. And Grandpop, that son of a bitch, can still do it, too. He's what, Aldo, eighty-two?"

"Last month," Brian confirmed. "Funny old guy, travels the whole world to get to Seattle, and then he never leaves the city for sixty years."

"Same house for the last forty," Dominic added, "a block from the restaurant."

"This his recipe for the veal?"

"Bet your bippy, Pete. The family goes back to Florence. Went up there two years when the Med FMF was making a port call in Naples. His cousin has a restaurant just upriver from the Ponte Vecchio. When they found out who I was, they went nuts feeding me. You know, Italians love the Marines."

"Must be the green suit, Aldo," Dominic said.

"Maybe I just cut a manly figure, Enzo. Ever think of that?" Captain Caruso demanded.

"Oh, sure," Special Agent Caruso replied, taking another bite of the Veal Francese. "The next Rocky sits before us."

"You boys always like this?" Alexander asked.

"Just when we drink," Dominic replied, and his brother laughed.

"Enzo can't hold his liquor worth a damn. Now, we Marines, we can do anything."

"I have to take this from somebody who thinks Miller Lite is really beer?" the FBI Caruso asked the air.

"You know," Alexander said, "twins are supposed to be alike."

"Only identical twins. Mom punched out two eggs that month. It had Mom and Dad fooled until we were a year old or so. We're not at all alike, Pete." Dominic delivered this pronouncement with a smile shared by his brother.

But Alexander knew better. They only dressed differently — and that would soon be changing.