Read Jack Ryan 12 - The Teeth of the Tiger for Free Online Page A

Four-point-oh in nearly everything. Your language skills are particularly impressive.”
    “My dad is an American citizen—native-born, I mean—but his dad came off the boat from
    
    
     Italy
    
    
    , ran—still runs—a restaurant in
    
    
     Seattle
    
    
    . So, Pop actually grew up speaking mostly Italian, and a lot of that came down on me and my brother, too. Took Spanish in high school and college. I can't pass for a native, but I understand it pretty well.” 
    “Engineering major?”
    “That's from my dad, too. It's in there. He works for Boeing—aerodynamicist, mainly designs wings and control surfaces. You know about my mom—it's all in there. She's mainly a mom, does things with the local Catholic schools, too, now that Dominic and I are grown.”
    “And he's FBI?”
    Brian nodded. “That's right, got his law degree and signed up to be a G-man.”
    “Just made the papers,” Hardesty said, handing over a faxed page from the
    
    
     Birmingham
    
    
     papers. Brian scanned it.
    “Way to go, Dom,” Captain Caruso breathed when he got to the fourth paragraph, which further pleased his host.
     
     
    IT WAS
    
     scarcely a two-hour flight from
    
    
     Birmingham
    
    
     to Reagan National in
    
    
     Washington
    
    
    . Dominic Caruso walked to the Metro station and hopped a subway train for the
    
    
     Hoover
    
    
    
    
     Building
    
    
     at Tenth and
    
    
     Pennsylvania
    
    
    . His badge absolved him of the need to pass through the metal detector. FBI agents were supposed to carry heat, and his automatic had earned a notch in the grip—not literally, of course, but FBI agents occasionally joked about it.
    The office of Assistant Director Augustus Ernst Werner was on the top floor, overlooking
    
    
     Pennsylvania Avenue
    
    
    . The secretary waved him right in.
    Caruso had never met Gus Werner. He was a tall, slender, and very experienced street agent, an ex-Marine, and positively monkish in appearance and demeanor. He'd headed the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and two field divisions, and been at the point of retirement before being talked into his new job by his close friend, Director Daniel E. Murray. The Counter-Terrorism Division was a stepchild of the much larger Criminal and Foreign Counter-Intelligence divisions, but it was gaining in importance on a daily basis.
    “Grab yourself a seat,” Werner said, pointing, as he finished up a call. That just took another minute. Then Gus replaced the phone and hit the
    DO NOT DISTURB
    
    
    button.
    “Ben Harding faxed this up to me,” Werner said, holding the shooting report from the previous day. “How did it go?”
    “It's all in there, sir.” He'd spent three hours picking his own brain and putting it all down on paper in precise FBI bureaucratese. Strange that an act requiring less than sixty seconds to perform should require so much time to explain.
    “And what did you leave out, Dominic?” The question was accompanied by the most penetrating look the young agent had ever encountered.
    “Nothing, sir,” Caruso replied.
    “Dominic, we have some very good pistol shots in the Bureau. I'm one of them,” Gus Werner told his guest. “Three shots, all in the heart from a range of fifteen feet, is pretty good range shooting. For somebody who just tripped over an end table, it's downright miraculous. Ben Harding didn't find it remarkable, but Director Murray and I do—Dan's a pretty good marksman, too. He read this fax last night and asked me to render an opinion. Dan's never whacked a subject before. I have, three times, twice with HRT—those were cooperative ventures, as it were—and once in
    
    
     Des Moines
    
     ,
    
     Iowa
    
    
    . That one was a kidnapping, too. I'd seen what he'd done to two of his victims—little boys—and, you know, I really didn't want some psychiatrist telling the jury that he was the victim of an adverse childhood, and that it really wasn't his fault, and all that bullshit that you hear in a nice clean court of law, where