succinylcholine. That’s a sedative used in surgical procedures. In stops the breathing and voluntary muscle movement. But not the heart. You can’t move, can’t speak, and you can’t breathe. The heart keeps beating for a minute or so, but it’s starved of oxygen, and so death happens from what appears on postmortem examination to be a heart attack. It evidently feels like it, too.”
“Reversible?” Clark wondered.
“Yeah, if you get the victim on a respirator immediately. The drug wears off—metabolizes—in about five minutes. It leaves nothing in the way of traces unless the victim is posted by a really expert ME that knows what they’re looking for. Damned near perfect.”
“I’m surprised the Russians didn’t come up with something like this.”
“They surely tried,” Davis responded. “But succinylcholine didn’t make it to their hospitals, I guess. We got it from a doc friend up at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons who had a personal score to settle. His brother—a senior broker with Cantor Fitzgerald—died on Nine-Eleven.”
“Impressive,” Clark said, eyeballing the pen. “Might be a good interrogation tool, too. It would be a rare customer who’d want to go through that experience twice.”
Davis handed it over. “It’s not loaded. You twist the tip to swap out the point. It writes perfectly well.”
“Slick. Well, that answers one question. We’re free to use more conventional tools?”
“If and as the job calls for doing so,” Davis confirmed with a nod. “But we’re all about not being there, so always keep that in the back of your mind.”
“Understood.”
“And you, Mr. Chavez?” Hendley asked.
“Sir, I just try to listen and learn,” Ding told the boss.
“Is he that smart, John?” the former Senator asked.
“More so, actually. We work well together.”
“That’s what we need. Well, welcome aboard, gentlemen.”
“One thing,” Clark said. He withdrew Ding’s flash drive from his pocket and laid it on the desk. “We took that off one of the bad guys in Tripoli.”
“I see. And why is it sitting on my desk?”
“An oversight,” Clark replied. “Call it a ‘senior moment.’ I figure we can give it to the Swedes or to Langley, but I suspect we’d put it to better use here.”
“Have you looked at it?”
Chavez answered, “JPEG image files—a dozen or so. Looked like vacation shots to me, but who knows.”
Hendley considered this, then nodded. “Okay, we’ll take a look. Tom, do we have an office for them?”
“Right down with the Caruso boys.”
“Good. Have a look around, guys, then we’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning.”
Hendley stood, encouraging the others to do the same. Davis headed toward the door, followed by Chavez and Clark.
“John, can you hang back for a moment?” Hendley asked.
“Sure. Ding, I’ll catch up.”
Once they were alone, Hendley said, “You’ve been around the block a few times, John. I wanted to get your take on a couple things.”
“Shoot.”
“We’re pretty new, this whole concept, in fact, so a lot of it is trial and error. I’m beginning to think our work flow’s a little convoluted.”
Clark chuckled. “No offense, Gerry, but using words like work flow for an outfit like this tells me you’re right. What’s the chain like?” Hendley described The Campus’s organizational structure, and Clark said, “Sounds like Langley. Listen, intelligence work is mostly organic, okay? Analysis is something you can’t do without, but trying to shove the process into some artificial structure is a cluster-fuck waiting to happen.”
“You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
“Did you want me to?”
“No.”
“Too many good ideas get lost making their way up a chain. My advice: Get your principals in a room once a day and brainstorm. Might be a cliché, but it works. If you’ve got people who’re worried about whether their creative thinking will make the cut, you’re wasting talent.”
Hendley whistled softly, smiling. “Don’t take this the wrong way, John, but you sure as hell aren’t your average knuckle-dragger, are you?”
Clark shrugged but didn’t reply.
“Well,” Hendley continued, “you kind of hit it on the head. I’d been thinking the same thing. Nice to get a second opinion, though.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. Jack Ryan came to me the other day. He wants more fieldwork.”
Junior ain’t so junior anymore, Clark reminded himself.
“Tom told you about the MoHa thing?” Hendley asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I heard secondhand the Caruso brothers took Jack to Hogan’s Alley for a little stress relief. He did damned good, or so they say. Got a little banged up, made some rookie mistakes, but damned good all the same.”
So he’s got some talent, Clark thought. Genetics, maybe, if you buy into that sort of thing. He’d seen Jack’s dad