Clark chuckled at that. “Don’t see any security. Good sign.” Professionals knew when to play harmless.
He parked the rent-a-car in what seemed to be the visitors’ lot, and they got out and walked in the front door.
“Good morning, sir,” said a uniformed security guard. He was in a generic uniform, and his name tag said CHAMBERS. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see a Mr. Davis. John Clark and Domingo Chavez.”
Chambers lifted his phone and punched some numbers. “Mr. Davis? Chambers here in the lobby. Two gentlemen here to see you. Yes, sir, thank you.” The phone went back down. “He’s coming down to see you, gentlemen.”
Davis appeared in just over a minute. He was black, of average size, about fifty or so, Clark estimated. Well dressed, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened. The busy broker. “Thanks, Ernie,” he said to the security guard, then: “You must be John Clark.”
“Guilty,” John admitted. “And this is Domingo Chavez.” And handshakes were exchanged.
“Come on up.” Davis led them inside to the elevators.
“I’ve seen your face before. Other side of the river,” Chavez clarified.
“Oh?” Davis reacted guardedly.
“At the operations room. Watch officer?”
“Well, once I was an NIO. Here I’m a lowly bond trader. Mainly corporate stuff, but some government issues.”
They followed Davis to the top floor and then to his office—or most of the way. His office was right next to Rick Bell’s, and someone was heading in there.
“Hey,” Clark heard, and turned around to find Jack Ryan Jr. walking down the hall.
Clark took his hand, and for once his face showed surprise. “Jack . . . You work here, eh?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Doing what?”
“Currency arbitrage, mostly. Swapping money back and forth, stuff like that.”
“I thought the family business was stocks and bonds,” Clark observed mildly.
“Not into that . . . yet,” Jack responded. “Well, I’ve got to run. Catch you later, maybe?”
“Sure,” Clark said. His brain wasn’t exactly spinning, but he wasn’t entirely oriented to the day’s discoveries.
“Come on in,” Davis said next, waving him through the door.
The office was a comfortable one and wasn’t full of furniture made in a federal prison, such as they had at CIA headquarters. Davis waved them into seats. “So how long have you known Jimmy Hardesty?”
“For ten or fifteen years,” Clark replied. “Good man.”
“He is that. So: You want to retire?”
“I’ve never really thought about it.”
“What about you, Mr. Chavez?”
“I’m not ready for Social Security, either, and I guess I have a few marketable skills. Wife and kid, with another one on the way. Till now I haven’t had to give it much thought, but what you do here looks to be miles out of our skill set.”
“Well, everyone here has to know the language anyway,” Davis told them. “But beyond that ...” Davis shrugged. “How’re you fixed for clearance?”
“Top secret/special intelligence/poly—both of us,” Clark replied. “At least until Langley puts our paperwork through. Why?”
“Because what we do here is not for public dissemination. You will sign some pretty tight NDAs,” he said, referring to non-disclosure agreements. “Any problems with that?”
“Nope,” John said at once. His curiosity had been well and truly piqued in a way he hadn’t experienced in years. He noted that they hadn’t asked him to swear an oath. That was passé anyway, and the courts had voided them a long time ago—if you spoke to the newspapers.
The signing took less than two minutes. The forms weren’t anything they hadn’t seen before, though the setting certainly was.
Davis checked the forms over, then slid them into a drawer. “Okay, here’s the short of it: We get a lot of insider information through irregular channels. NSA keeps an eye on international trading for security reasons. Remember when Japan had that set-to with us? They clobbered Wall Street, and that made the Feds think they needed to keep an eye on such things. Economic warfare is real, and you can really mess up a country by clobbering its financial institutions. It works for us, especially for currency trading. That’s where we make most of our money.”
“Why is that important?” Chavez asked.
“We’re self-funding. We’re off the federal budget, Mr. Chavez, and therefore off the radar. No taxpayer money comes in the front door. We make what we spend, and what we don’t spend ourselves, we keep.”
Curiouser and curiouser, Clark thought.
You kept something secret by not having Congress fund it, and not having the Office of Management and Budget do the audits. If the government didn’t fund it, to Washington it existed