Dead or Alive

Ryan signed a hundred blank pardons.”

“Is that legal?” Chavez asked.

“Pat Martin said so. He’s one of the people who knows that this place exists. Another is Dan Murray. So is Gus Werner. You know Jimmy Hardesty. Not the Foleys, however. We thought about getting them involved, but Jack decided against it. Even the ones I named only know to recruit people with special credentials, to go to a special place. They have no operational knowledge at all. They know a special place exists but not what we do here. Even President Ryan doesn’t have any operational information. That stays in this building.”

“Takes a lot for a government type to trust people that much,” Clark observed.

“You have to pick your people carefully,” Davis agreed. “Jimmy thinks you two can be trusted. I know your background. I think he’s right.”

“Mr. Davis, this is a big thought,” Clark said, leaning back in his chair.

For more than twenty years he’d daydreamed about how nice it would have been to have a place like this. He’d been dispatched by Langley to eyeball the head of Abu Nidal in Lebanon once, to determine if it might be possible to send him off to see God. That had been as dangerous as the actual mission itself, and the sheer insult of such a mission assignment had boiled his blood at the time, but he’d done it, and had come home with the photograph to show that, yes, it was possible to take the bastard down, but cooler heads or looser bowels in Washington had voided that mission, and so he’d put his life on the line for nothing, and so later the Israeli Army had killed him with a Hellfire missile fired from an Apache attack helicopter, which was altogether messier than a rifle from 180 meters and had also caused considerable collateral damage, which didn’t really trouble the Israelis all that much.

“Okay,” Chavez said. “If and when we go out on a mission, we’re supposed to take down somebody who needs to be taken down. If we get caught, it’s tough luck for us. As a practical matter, chances are fifty-fifty we get killed on the spot, and that’s the ante, I get it. But it’s kinda nice to have a government blue blanket around us when we do that sort of thing.”

“More than one way to serve your country.”

“Maybe so,” Ding conceded.

Clark said, “There’s a guy at Langley who’s doing a background check on me, guy named Alden, in the DO. Evidently Jim Greer left behind a dossier on me and the things I did before I joined up. I don’t know what’s in it exactly, but it could be problematic.”

“How so?”

“I took down some drug dealers. Never mind why, but I took down a whole drug ring. Jack Ryan Sr.’s father was a police detective, and he wanted to arrest me, but I talked him out of it and faked my own death. Ryan knows the story-at least part of it. Anyway, the Agency might have some of it in writing. You need to know that.”

“Well, if any trouble develops from it, we have that presidential pardon to look after you. You think this Alden guy might want to use it against you?”

“He’s a political animal.”

“Understood. You two want some time to think it over?”

“Sure,” Clark answered for both of them.

“Sleep on it, then come back tomorrow. If this goes further, you can meet the boss. Just a reminder: What we discussed-”

“Mr. Davis, I’ve been keeping secrets for a long time. Both of us. If you think we need a reminder, you’ve read us wrong.”

“Point taken.” Davis stood up, concluding the meeting. “See you tomorrow.”

They didn’t exchange words until they were outside, walking to the car. “Man, oh, man, Jack Junior whacked somebody?” Chavez asked the sky.

“Sounds like it,” Clark replied, thinking it might be time to stop thinking of him as Junior. “Looks like he’s in the family business after all.”

“His father would shit himself.”

“Probably,” John agreed. And that’s nothing compared to how his mother would react.

A few minutes later in the car, Chavez said, “Got a confession to make, John.”

“Speak to me, my son.”

“I fucked up-and royally.” Chavez leaned forward in his seat, withdrew an object from his back pocket, and laid it on the car’s center console.

“What’s that?”

“A USB drive. You know, for a computer-”

“I know what it is, Ding. Why’re you showing it to me?”

“Took it off one of the gomers in the Tripoli embassy. We did a quick shakedown, frisked ’em, all that. Found that on the lead guy-the one I dropped near the laptop.”

Despite having a 9-millimeter round from Chavez’s MP5 buried in his side, one of the tangos had managed to stumble to a laptop and hit a key combo that had fried the hard drive and wireless card, both of which were now in the possession of the Swedes, for all the good they would do them.

The consensus was that the bad guys had been using the laptop to communicate with someone on the outside. Such was the curse of the digital age, Clark knew. The state of wireless Internet technology was such that signals had not only greater reach but more robust encryption technology as well. Even if the Libyans had been fully cooperative, the chances Rainbow could have monitored and/or throttled every hot spot around the embassy were virtually nonexistent, so unless the Swedes were able to salvage either the drive or the card, they’d never know who the tangos in the embassy had been talking to.

Or maybe not, Clark thought.

“Christ, Ding, that’s a hell of an oversight.”

“Put it in my pocket and didn’t think about it until we got back and unpacked. Sorry. So what d’you wanna do?” Ding asked, smiling evilly. “Hand it over to Alden?”

“Let me give it some thought.”

It was well into the afternoon before Jack found what he wanted. While by law aviation insurance carriers were required to make claims available to the public, there were no regulations regarding ease of access. Consequently, most carriers made sure digital claim searches were painstakingly convoluted.

“XLIS-XL Insurance Switzerland,” Jack told Rounds. “Does a lot of aviation stuff over there. Three weeks ago a claim was filed on a Dassault Falcon 9000. It’s a small executive jet. Built by the same people who do the Mirage fighter. The claimant is a woman named Margarite Hlasek, co-owner of Hlasek Air with her husband, Lars-who also happens to be a pilot. It’s based out of Zurich. Here’s the kicker: I cross-referenced our intercepts, mixed and matched some keywords, and got a hit: Two days ago the FBI contacted its legal attaches in Stockholm and Zurich. Somebody’s looking for info on Hlasek Air.”

“Why Stockholm?”

“Just a guess, but they’d want to look into Hlasek’s home base, and maybe the last airport the Falcon visited.”

“What else do we know about Hlasek?”

“They’re dicey. I found four separate complaints forwarded to either the Swedish Civil Aviation Administration or the Swedish Civil Aviation Authority-”

“What’s the difference?”

“One handles state-owned airports and air traffic control; the other deals with commercial aviation and safety. Four complaints in the last two years-three about irregularities in customs forms and one about a misfiled flight plan.”

“Fly the friendly terrorist skies,” Rounds murmured.

“Could be. If so, that kind of service doesn’t come cheap.”

“Let’s go talk to Gerry.”

Hendley was in with Granger. The boss waved them in. “Jack may have something,”