SO WHAT’S COOKING?” Brian Caruso asked his cousin.
“Same stew, different day, I expect,” Jack Ryan Jr. replied.
“‘Stew’?” Dominic, the other Caruso, replied. “Don’t you mean shit?”
“Trying to be optimistic.”
All three armed with their first cups of coffee of the day, they walked down the corridor to Jack’s office. It was 8:10 a.m., about time for another day to start at The Campus.
“Any word on our friend the Emir?” Brian asked, taking a gulp of coffee.
“Nothing firsthand. He’s not stupid. He even has his e-mails relayed through a series of cutouts now, some of them through ISP accounts that open and close within hours, and even then the account financials turn out to be dead ends. The Pakistan badlands is the best current guess. Maybe next door. Maybe wherever he can buy a safe spot. Hell, at this point I’m tempted to look in our own broom closet.”
It was frustrating, Jack thought. His first adventure into field operations had been a slam dunk. Or beginner’s luck, maybe? Or fate. He’d gone to Rome as Brian and Dominic’s intel support, nothing more, and had by sheer chance spotted MoHa in the hotel. From there things had moved fast, too damned fast, and then it’d been him and MoHa in the bathroom…
He wouldn’t be as frightened the next time, Jack told himself with enormous-and false-confidence. He remembered the killing of MoHa as clearly as the first time he’d gotten laid. Most vivid of all was the look on the man’s face when the succinylcholine had taken hold. Jack might have felt regret for the killing except for the adrenaline rush of the moment, and for what Mohammed had been guilty of. He’d found no regret in his soul for that action. MoHa had been a murderer himself, someone who had taken it upon himself to deliver death to innocent civilians, and Jack hadn’t missed a wink of sleep over it.
It had helped that he’d been among family. He and Dominic and Brian shared a grandfather, Jack Muller, his mom’s father. Their fraternal grandfather, now eighty-three, was first-generation Italian, having emigrated from Italy to Seattle, where for the past sixty years he’d lived and worked at the family-owned and -run restaurant.
Grandpa Muller, former Army veteran and Merrill Lynch VP, had a strained relationship with Jack Ryan Sr., having decided that his son-in-law’s abandonment of Wall Street for government service was sheer idiocy-idiocy that had eventually led to his daughter and granddaughter, Little Sally, nearly losing their lives in a car crash. But for his son-in-law’s ill-advised return to the CIA, the incident would have never happened. Of course, no one except Grandpa Muller believed that, including Mom and Sally.
It also helped, Jack Junior had decided, that Brian and Dominic were relatively new to this as well. Not new to the danger-Brian a Marine and Dominic an FBI agent-but to the “Wilderness of Mirrors,” as James Jesus Angleton had called it. They’d adapted well and quickly, having taken out three URC soldiers in short order-four at the Charlottesville Mall shooting and three in Europe with the Magic Pen. Still, Hendley hadn’t hired them because they were good triggers. “Smart shooters” was the phrase Mike Brennan, his USSS principal, had often used, and it sure as hell fit his cousins.
“Gimme
“Pakistan, but close enough that his people can hop across the border. Somewhere with plenty of evacuation routes. He’s in a place with electricity, but portable generators are easy to come by, so that doesn’t mean much. Maybe a phone line, too. They’ve gotten away from satellite phones. Learned that one the hard way-”
“Yeah, when they read about it in the
Journalists think they can print anything they want to; it was hard to see those kinds of consequences while sitting in front of a keyboard.
“Bottom line is we don’t know where His Highness is right now. Even my best guess is just a guess, but the truth be told, that’s usually all intelligence amounts to-a guess based on the available info. Sometimes it’s rock- solid, sometimes as thin as air. The good news is we’re reading a lot of mail.”
“How much?” Dominic asked.
“Maybe fifteen or twenty percent.” Still, the sheer volume was overwhelming, but with volume came opportunities.
“So let’s go shake the trees and see what falls out.” Ever the Marine, Brian was always ready to charge a beachhead. “Snatch somebody up and sweat him.”
“Don’t want to tip our hand,” Jack said. “You save something like that for an op that’s worth blowing it all for.”
The one thing they both knew not to talk about was how cagily the intelligence community was playing with what data it had. A lot of it stayed in-house, not even forwarded to its own directors, who tended to be political appointees, loyal to the people who appointed them, if not always to the oath they’d taken on occupying their offices. The President-known in the community as NCA, for National Command Authority-had a staff that he trusted, though the trust must have been to leak things he wished to leak, and only those things, and only to reporters who could be trusted to accept the spin placed on a leak. The spook community was holding out on the President, a firing offense if anyone got caught. They withheld data from end-user field people, too, which was also something with a history behind it, and which also explained why special ops people rarely trusted the intelligence community. It was all about need-to-know. You could have the highest clearance level available, but if you didn’t need to know, you were still out of the loop. Same went for The Campus, which was officially out of all the loops, which was sort of the point. Still, they’d had a lot of success slipping themselves into the loop. Their hacker-in-chief, an ubergeek named Gavin Biery who ran their IT section, had yet to meet an encryption system into which he couldn’t poke a hole.
A former IBM employee, he’d lost two brothers in Vietnam, and thereafter had come to work for the federal government, then to be talent-scouted and cherry-picked to the Fort Meade headquarters of the National Security Agency, the government’s premier center for communications and electronic security. His government salary had long since topped him out as a Senior Executive Service genius, and indeed he still collected his reasonably generous government pension. But he loved the action and had snapped up the offer to join The Campus within seconds of its being made. He was, professionally, a mathematician, with a doctorate from Harvard, where he’d studied under Benoit Mandelbrot himself, and he occasionally lectured at MIT and Caltech as well in his area of expertise.
Biery was a geek through and through, right down to the heavy black-rimmed glasses and doughy complexion, but he kept The Campus’s electronic gears oiled and the machines purring.
“Compartmentalization?” Brian said. “Don’t gimme that cloak-and-dagger shit.”
Jack held up his hands and shrugged. “Sorry.” Like his dad, Jack Ryan Jr. wasn’t one to break the rules. Cousin or not, Brian didn’t have the need to know. Period.
“You ever wonder about the name?” Dominic asked. “The URC? You know how much these guys love double meanings.”
The Umayyad Revolutionary Council had been the Emir’s own invention, they’d always guessed. Was it what it seemed-just another oblique reference to the tried-and-true Islamic symbol of jihad; namely, Saladin-or something more?
Born Salah Ad-din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub in about 1138 in Tikrit-current-day Iraq-Saladin had quickly risen to figurehead status during the Crusades, first as the defender of Baalbek, then as the sultan of Egypt and Syria. The fact that Saladin’s battlefield record was by some accounts spotty at best was of little consequence in Muslim history, but as was the case with many historical figures, East and West alike, it was what Saladin came to represent that mattered. To Muslims he was the avenging sword of Allah standing against the flood of infidel crusaders.
If there was any insight to be gained from the URC’s name, it probably lay in the first word,
