Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy Read Free Book Online

get the morning's Early Bird as well, the clipping service that went to senior government officials. This he scanned to see if he'd missed anything in his morning read of the big-time papers. Not much, except for an interesting piece in the Virginia Pilot about the annual Fletcher Conference, a circle-think held by the Navy and Marine Corps every year at the Norfolk Navy Base. They talked about terrorism, and fairly intelligently, Hendley thought. People in uniform often did. As opposed to elected officials.
    We kill
    
    
     off the
    
    
    
     Soviet Union
    
    
    
     ,
    
    Hendley thought, and we expected everything in the world to settle down. But what we didn't see coming was all these lunatics with leftover AK-47s and education in kitchen chemistry, or simply a willingness to trade their own lives for those of their perceived enemies.
    And the other thing they hadn't done was prepare the intelligence community to deal with it. Even a president experienced in the black world and the best DCI in American history hadn't managed to get all that much done. They'd added a lot more people—an extra five hundred personnel in an agency of twenty thousand didn't sound like a lot, but it had doubled the operations directorate. That had given the CIA a force only half as horribly inadequate as it had been before, but that wasn't the same as adequate. And in return for it, the Congress had further tightened oversight and restrictions, thus further crippling the new people hired to flesh out the governmental skeleton crew. They never learned. He himself had talked at infinite length to his colleagues in the World's Most Exclusive Men's Club, but while some listened, others did not, and almost all of the remainder vacillated. They paid too much attention to the editorial pages, often of newspapers not even native to their home states, because that, they foolishly figured, was what the American People thought. Maybe it was this simple: any newly elected official was seduced into the game the same way Cleopatra had snookered Gaius Julius Caesar. It was the staffs, he knew, the “professional” political helpers who “guided” their employers into the right way to be reelected, which had become the Holy Grail of public service.
    
    
     America
    
    
     did not have a hereditary ruling class, but it did have plenty of people happy to lead their employers onto the righteous path of government divinity.
    And working inside the system just didn't work.
    So, to accomplish anything, you just had to be outside the system.
    Way the hell outside the system.
    And if anybody noticed, well, he was already disgraced anyway, wasn't he?
    He spent his first hour discussing financial matters with some of his staff, because that was how Hendley Associates made its money. As a commodities trader, and as a currency arbitrageur, he'd been ahead of the curve almost from the beginning, sensing the momentary valuation differences—he always called them “Deltas”—which were generated by psychological factors, by perceptions that might or might not turn out to be real.
    He did all his business anonymously through foreign banks, all of which liked having large cash accounts, and none of which were overly fastidious about where the money came from, so long as it was not overtly dirty, which his certainly was not. It was just another way of keeping outside the system.
    Not that every one of his dealings was strictly legal. Having
    
    
     Fort
    
    
    
    
     Meade
    
    
    's intercepts on his side made the game a lot easier. In fact, it was illegal as hell, and not the least bit ethical. But in truth Hendley Associates did little in the way of damage on the world stage. It could have been otherwise, but Hendley Associates operated on the principle that pigs got fed and hogs got slaughtered, and so they ate only a little out of the international trough. And, besides, there was no real governing authority for crimes of this type and this magnitude. And tucked away in a