Read Online Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy - Free Book Online

were plenty bad enough.
    Alice Foorgate and Helen Montgomery both gave him hugs. They’d been superb secretaries, and those were hard to find. Clark had been half tempted to try to find them jobs in the United States, but the Brits probably valued them as much as he had and would’ve put up a fight.
    And finally Alistair Stanley, the incoming boss, was standing at the end.
    “I’ll take good care of them, John,” he promised. They shook hands. There was not much else to be said. “Still no word on the next posting?”
    “I expect they’ll tell me before the next check comes.” The government was usually good about getting the paperwork done. Not much else, of course, but paperwork, surely.
    With nothing left to be said, Clark walked to the helicopter. Ding, Patsy, and J.C. were already strapped in, along with Sandy. J.C. especially loved flying, and he’d get a gut full in the next ten hours. On lifting off they turned southeast for Heathrow Terminal Four. Landing on their own pad, a van took them to the aircraft, and so they were absolved of passing through the magnetometers. It was a British Airways 777. The same type they’d flown over on four years earlier, then with the Basque terrorists aboard. They were in Spain, though in which prison and how the conditions were they’d never asked. Probably not the Waldorf Astoria.
     
     
     
    A re we fired, John?” Ding asked as the aircraft rotated off the Heathrow tarmac.
    “Probably not. Even if we are, they’re not going to call it that. They might make you a training officer down at The Farm. Me . . . ? Well, they can keep me on the payroll a year or two, maybe I can hold down a desk in the operations center until they take my parking sticker away. We’re too senior to fire. Not worth the paperwork. They’re afraid we might talk to the wrong reporter.”
    “Yeah, you still owe Bob Holtzman a lunch, don’t you?”
    John almost spilled his preflight champagne at that reminder. “Well, I did give my word, didn’t I?”
    They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Ding said, “So we make a courtesy call on Jack?”
    “We kinda sorta gotta, Domingo.”
    “I hear you. Hell, Jack Junior’s out of school now, isn’t he?”
    “Yeah. Not sure what he’s doing, though.”
    “Some rich-kid job, I bet. Stocks and bonds, money shit, I bet.”
    “Well, what were you doing at that age?”
    “Learning how to handle a dead drop from you, down at The Farm, and studying nights at George Mason University. Sleepwalking, mostly.”
    “But you got your master’s, as I recall. Lot more than I ever got.”
    “Yeah. I got a piece of paper that says I’m smart. You left dead bodies all over the world.” Fortunately, it was virtually impossible to bug an airliner’s cabin.
    “Call it foreign-policy laboratory work,” Clark suggested, checking the first-class menu. At least British Airways pretended to serve decent food, though why airlines didn’t just stock up on Big Macs and fries still mystified him. Or maybe a Domino’s pizza. All the money they’d save—but the McDonald’s in the UK just didn’t seem to have the right beef. In Italy it was even worse. But their national dish was veal Milanese, and that had a Big Mac beat. “You worried?”
    “About having a job? Not really. I can always make real money consulting. You know, the two of us could start up a company, executive security or like that, and really clean up. I’d do the planning, and you’d do the actual protection. You know, just stand there and stare at people in that special ‘don’t fuck with me’ way you do.”
    “Too old for that, Domingo.”
    “Ain’t nobody dumb enough to kick an old lion in the ass, John. I’m too short to scare bad guys away.”
    “Bullshit. I wouldn’t mess with you for the fun of it.”
    Chavez had rarely received that magnitude of compliment. He was overly sensitive about his diminutive height—his wife was an inch taller—but it had its tactical value.