Dead or Alive

“I’ll give it some thought,” Jack said. “Not a bad hunch, though.”

“It ain’t all sand up here, cuz,” Brian said, smiling, as he tapped his temple with his index finger. “So what’s your dad doing with all his spare time now?”

“Don’t know.” Jack didn’t spend much time at home. That would mean talking to his parents, and the more he talked about his “job,” the more likely his dad would be to get curious, and if his father found out what he was doing here, he might blow a gasket somewhere in his head. And how Mom would react didn’t bear contemplation. The thought grated on Jack. He wasn’t a mama’s boy, that was for sure, but did anyone ever really get past trying to impress their parents or seek their approval? What was that saying? A man isn’t truly a man until he kills his father-metaphorically, of course. He was an adult, on his own, doing some serious shit at The Campus. Time to step out from under Dad’s shadow, Jack reminded himself for the umpteenth time. And a damned big shadow it was.

Brian said, “Bet you he gets fed up and-”

“Runs?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“I’ve lived in the White House, remember? I had my fill. I’ll gladly take my cubicle here, hunting bad guys.”

Mostly on the computer so far, Jack thought, but maybe, if he played his cards right, more in the field. He was already rehearsing his pitch to The Campus’s head, Gerry Hendley. The MoHa thing had to count for something, didn’t it? His cousins were smart shooters. Did the term fit him? Jack wondered. Could it fit him? In comparison, his life had been a sheltered one, the well-protected son of President John Patrick Ryan, but that had come with benefits, hadn’t it? He’d learned to shoot from Secret Service agents, had played chess against the Secretary of State, had lived and breathed, albeit obliquely, the inner worlds of the intelligence and military communities. Had he, by osmosis, picked up some of the traits for which Brian and Dominic had trained so hard? Maybe. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. Either way, he had to get past Hendley first.

“But you ain’t your dad,” Dominic reminded him.

“True enough.” Jack turned in his chair and powered up his PC for the morning news dose, public and classified. Too often, the latter was only three days in advance of the former. The first thing Jack logged in to was the Executive Intercept Transcript Summary from the NSA. Called EITS or XITS-and bearing the unfortunate moniker “zits”-it went only to high-level officers at the NSA and the CIA, and the National Security Council at the White House.

Speaking of the devil… There he was, the Emir himself, in the XITS again. An intercept. The message had been strictly administrative. The Emir wanted to know what someone-just an anonymous code name-was doing, whether he had made contact with some unknown foreign national, for some unknown purpose. That was the standard with most of these intercepts-a lot of unknowns, sort of like fill-in-the-blank, which was, in truth, what intelligence analysis was all about. The biggest and most complex jigsaw puzzle in the world. This particular piece had prompted a brainstorming meeting at the CIA.

The proposed agenda was the topic of a full single-spaced report (almost all of it speculation) by some middle- level analyst who probably wanted a better office and liked to spitball his speculation in the hopes that someday something would stick to the wall and so hike him to a supergrade’s salary. And maybe someday he would, but that wouldn’t make him any smarter, except maybe in the eyes of a superior who’d clawed his way up in similar fashion and liked having his back scratched.

Something was nagging at Jack’s brain, something about this particular query… He rolled his mouse’s pointer over the XITS folder on his hard drive, double-clicked it, and brought up the summary document he’d been keeping of XITS. And there it was, the same intercept reference number, this one attached to a trio of week-old e-mails, the first from an NSC staffer to the NSA. Seems somebody at the White House wanted to know how exactly the information had been obtained. The query was then forwarded to the DNSA-a billet for a three-star professional military intelligence officer, at the moment an Army officer named Lieutenant General Sam Ferren-who responded curtly: BACKPACK. DO NOT REPLY. WILL HANDLE AD-MINISTRATIVELY.

Jack had to smile at this. Currently “Backpack” was the NSA’s rotating, in-house code name for Echelon, the agency’s all-knowing, all-seeing electronic monitoring program. Ferren’s response was understandable. The NSC staffer was asking for “sources and methods,” the nuts and bolts of how the NSA worked its magic. Such secrets were simply not shared by intel consumers such as the White House, and for an NSC staffer to request them was idiotic.

Predictably, Ferren’s subsequent XITS summary for the NSC simply listed the intercept source as “overseas cooperative ELINT,” or electronic intelligence, essentially telling the White House that the NSA got the info from a friendly intelligence agency. In short, he lied.

There could be only one reason for this: Ferren suspected the White House was showing the XITS around. Jesus, Jack thought, must be quite a strain for a three-star to have to watch what he says to the sitting President. But if the spook world didn’t trust the President, who, then, was looking after the country? And if the system broke down, Jack further thought, whom the hell did you go to? That was a question for a philosopher, or a priest.

Deep thoughts for an early morning, Jack told himself, but if he was reading the XITS-supposedly the sanctum sanctorum of government documents-what was he not reading? What wasn’t being disseminated? And who the hell got that info? Was there an insulated communications link at the director level only?

Okay, so the Emir was talking again. NSA didn’t have the key to his personal encryption system, but The Campus had it-something Jack had bagged himself, by borrowing the data off MoHa’s personal computer and handing it over to Biery and his geeks, who’d transferred the data to a FireWire hard drive. Inside of a day they’d picked it apart for all its secrets-including passwords, which had cracked open all manner of encrypted communications, some of which had been read at The Campus for five months before being changed routinely. The opposition had been fairly careful about that, and/or had been properly trained by somebody who’d worked for a real spook shop. But not that carefully. The passwords were not changed daily or even weekly. The Emir and his people were very confident in their security measures, and that failing had destroyed whole nation-states. Crypto spooks were always for hire on the open market, and most of them spoke Russian and were poor enough that any offer looked good. The CIA had even dangled a few at the bad guys as consultants to the Emir. At least one of them had been found under a trash heap in Islamabad with his throat slit from earlobe to earlobe. It was a rough game being played out there, even for professionals. Jack hoped that Langley took proper care of whatever family the man had left behind. That didn’t always happen with agents. CIA case officers got plenty of death benefits, and their families were never forgotten by Langley, but agents were a different thing altogether. Usually unappreciated, and often quickly forgotten when a better asset came along.

It appeared the Emir was still wondering about the people he’d lost on the streets of Europe-all at the hands of Brian and Dominic Caruso and Jack, though the Emir didn’t know that. Three heart attacks, the Emir speculated, seemed an inordinately large number for fit, young people. He’d had his agents delve carefully into the medical records, but those had been picked clean, overtly and covertly-the former by lawyers representing the estates of the deceased, and the latter by bribing petty bureaucrats for the original documents and further checking for evidence of a hidden addendum that might be filed separately, all to no avail. The Emir was writing to an operative evidently living in Vienna who’d been sent to look into an odd case, the man who’d apparently stumbled under a streetcar, because, the Emir said, he’d been such a spry boy as a youngster with horses-not the type to fall under a moving vehicle. But sure enough, the Emir’s man replied, fully nine people had seen the incident, and by all accounts he’d just slipped right in front of a tram, something that could have happened to anyone, however sure-footed he might have been at the age of eleven. The Austrian physicians had been thorough, and the official autopsy had been clear: Fa’ad Rahmin Yasin had been carved rather messily into half a dozen chunks by a streetcar. His blood had been checked for alcohol, but nothing was found but some residual traces from the previous night-so the pathologist assumed-certainly not enough to affect cognitive judgment. Nor were there any traces of narcotics of any sort in such blood as they’d managed to recover from the mangled body. Conclusion: He’d slipped and fallen and died of blunt-force trauma and exsanguination-a fancy way of saying he’d bled to death.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, Jack decided.