“Carter Gray will be going to the dedication in Brennan.”
“Damn, I’d say that was worth a face-to-face. How do you want to play it, then?”
“The exit strategy has always been problematic. No matter how we tried to tweak it, there was too much uncertainty. Now, with Gray coming, we have certainty.”
“How exactly do you figure that?”
Hemingway explained his plan and his colleague looked suitably impressed.
“Well, I think it’ll work. In fact, I think it’s brilliant. Brilliant and ballsy.”
“Depending on whether it succeeds or not,” Hemingway replied.
“Don’t be modest, Tom. Let’s call this what it is. A plan that will rock the entire world.” He paused and added, “But don’t underestimate the old man. Carter Gray’s forgotten more than you and I will ever know about the spy business.”
Hemingway opened his briefcase. Inside was a DVD. He tossed it to his companion. “I think you’ll find what’s on there helpful.”
Captain Jack fingered the DVD and watched Hemingway closely. “I did over twenty years with the Company, quite a few under Gray, and you did what?”
“Twelve, all in the field, with two years at NSA before that,” Hemingway answered. “I started at NIC a year after Gray became secretary.”
“I hear they’re grooming you for the top spot. Interested?”
Hemingway shook his head. “There’s little future there that I can see.”
“Back to the CIA, then?”
“It’s a useless anachronism.”
“Right! There’ll always be a CIA, even after the Iraqi WMDs that never were.”
“You think so?” Hemingway said curiously.
“Oh, when I was helping support a host of ‘acceptable alternatives’ to communism, mostly monster dictators, or feeding crack to black neighborhoods to help fund illegal operations overseas, or blowing up democracies in other countries because they wouldn’t support American business interests, I thought to myself, there’s got to be a better way of doing this. But I got over that thinking a long time ago.”
“We can’t win this particular fight with soldiers and spies,” Hemingway said. “It’s not that simple.”
“Then it can’t be won,” Captain Jack answered bluntly. “Because that’s the only way countries know to settle their differences.”
“Dostoyevsky wrote that ‘while nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him.’”
“You and I have both spent a lot of time there, but do you really think you’ll ever understand the ‘evildoer’ mentality of the Middle Eastern terrorist?”
“How do you know that’s the ‘evildoer’ I’m referring to? We certainly don’t have clean hands when it comes to events overseas. In fact, we created many of the problems we face today.”
“That’s why there’s only one sensible motivation these days: money. As I’ve told you before, I don’t care about anything else. I will go back to my beautiful little island, and I will not stir again. This is it for me.”
“That’s being brutally honest,” Hemingway remarked.
“Would you rather I tell you that my twitching ideology is screaming for me to help make the world better?”
“No, I’ll take the brutal honesty.”
“And why are you doing it?”
“For something better than what we have.”
“Idealism again? I’m telling you, Tom, you’ll live to regret it. Or die.”
This made him realize that in three short years he was going to have to make some pretty major decisions. Would he just retire? Or would he go to another agency, live mostly off his pension from the Service and stockpile the paychecks from the new job? This was known as double-dipping. It was completely legal, and many feds did it to pad their retirement funds. It was a way to even out things after they’d worked for below market-value in the p
ublic sector.
Much of Alex’s adult life had been a blur, learning the ropes at the Service, busting bad guys in eight different field offices, then on to protection detail, where he had spent every waking hour hopping planes and running from one city, one country to the next. He had been so busy worrying about everybody else that he had never spent much time worrying about himself. And now that it was time to think about his future, Alex suddenly felt totally incapable of doing so. Where did he start? What did he do? He felt a panic attack coming on, and not one that another martini would’ve cured.
He was standing paralyzed on a corner deciding what to do with the rest of his life when his cell phone rang. At first the name and number on the caller ID screen didn’t register, but then it clicked. It was Anne Jeffries, the late Patrick Johnson’s fiancée.
“Hello?”