Locked On

Now Clark spoke up: “You’re going to get the rest of your training on the job.”

Ryan stopped talking. Instead he nodded. “Okay.”

As the four men left the conference room for their break, Ryan caught up to Clark in the hall. “Hey, John. You got a second?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Mind if we go in your office?”

“Not if you get us some coffee first.”

“I’ll even stir in your sugar so you don’t spill it over your desk doing it one-handed.”

Five minutes later, both men sipped coffee in Clark’s office. The older man sat with his injured arm out of its sling and propped up on his desk by the elbow of the cast.

Ryan said, “John. When you told me to go down to the lobby, I shouldn’t have questioned that. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

Clark nodded. “I’ve been around the block a few times, Jack. I know what I’m doing.”

“Of course you do. I just thought—”

The older man interrupted. “Thinking is good. It was your thinking that put us in a position to help by sending us after Rokki, and your thinking when you saw the van with the suspicious guys sent us to the right location. Your thinking saved a lot of people’s lives. I’m never going to tell you to stop thinking. But I will tell you when it is time to shut up and listen to orders. If everybody does what they think is right when the bullets are about to start flying, then we won’t operate as a cohesive unit. Sometimes you may not like the order you are given, sometimes it might not make sense to you, but you have to do as you’re told. If you had spent some time in the military, this would be automatic to you. But you haven’t, so you’re just going to have to trust me.”

Ryan just nodded. “You are right. I just let my emotions get in the way. It won’t happen again.”

Clark just nodded. Smiled.

“What?” Jack asked.

“You and your dad.”

“What about my dad?”

“The similarities. Stories I could tell you.”

“Go ahead.”

But the older man just shook his head. ookl y“‘Need to know,’ kid. ‘Need to know.’”

Jack himself smiled now. “Somehow, someday. I’m going to get all those stories out of either you or my dad.”

“Your best chance was on the Gulfstream coming back over the Atlantic. Miss Sherman had me pretty well loopy on pain meds.”

Ryan smiled. “I missed my chance. Hope I get another chance that doesn’t involve you getting shot.”

“Me too, kid.” Clark shook his head and chuckled. “I’ve been shot worse than this, but this is the first time I took a round from some cop just trying to do his job. It’s hard to get good and mad at anybody but myself.”

Clark’s phone chirped on his desk. He picked it up. “Yeah? Sure, I’ll send him down. Me too? Okay, be right there.” Clark looked up at Ryan as he hung up the phone. “Tony Wills needs us at your desk.”

22

Jack found Tony Wills sitting in his cube, which was next to Ryan’s. With Tony sat Gavin Biery, the company IT chief. In Ryan’s chair, his cousin Dom Caruso sat waiting for him. Sam Driscoll leaned against the partition of the cubicle. Sam Granger and Rick Bell, chiefs of ops and analysis, respectively, were also there and standing around.

“Is this a surprise party?” Ryan asked. Dom and Sam both shrugged. They didn’t know why Tony had called them down, either.

But Wills had a pleased grin on his face. He called everyone over to his monitor. “So it took a while, mostly because the Paris op got in the way, but also because of the quality of the photos, but the facial-recog software finally came back with some hits on the guy that Sam and Dom saw meeting with Mustafa el Daboussi in Cairo the other day.”

“Cool,” said Dom. “Who is he?”

“Gavin,” said Wills. “You have the con.”

“Well”—Gavin Biery made his way through the scrum of men in the cubicle and sat down at Wills’s chair —“the software has narrowed Cairo man down to two probables.” He worked the keyboard for a moment and one of the pictures taken by Dom’s covert camera in the caravanserai in Cairo appeared on one half of the twenty-two-inch monitor.

Gavin said, “Facial recog says there is a ninety-three percent chance that this guy is…” He clicked his mouse. “This dude.” A picture appeared next to Dom’s photo of the man. It was a shot of a Pakistani passport for a man named Khalid Mir. The man wore glasses with round frames and had a trim beard, and he appeared to be several years younger than he looked in the Cairo photo.

Immediately Caruso said, “He’s changed a lot, but I think that’s the same guy.”

“Yeah?” said Wills. “Well then, your boy is a Khalid Mir, aka Abu Kashmiri, a known operative for Lashkar-e- Taiba over in Pakistan. They are nasty, and Khalid Mir used to be one of their big shots.”

“Used to be?”

Ryan answered before Wills, “One of Kealty’s drone attacks supposedly took him out in Pakistan, about three years ago. That was about the same time LeT started branching out and sending its operatives against Western targets. Before that they had been almost exclusively a Kashmir-based terror group who struck India and only India.”

Dom Caruso spun around and looked at Rvelyan. “No offense, Junior, but aren’t you supposed to know all these guys on sight?”

Jack shrugged. “If this guy was LeT fighting against India, and he died three years ago, he wasn’t exactly on my threat matrix for dangerous Western terrorists.”

“Makes sense. Sorry.”

“Not at all.”

Granger looked at Driscoll now. “Sam? You aren’t saying anything. Dom thinks this is the guy you saw in Cairo.”

Dom answered for his partner: “Sam pegged the guy at the time as a military officer.”

Driscoll nodded. “I was sure of it, but this photo does look like it could be the same guy.”

Gavin Biery smiled. “You thought he was a military officer, huh? Well the recog software says there is a ninety-six percent chance you are right.” He made a few more clicks of his mouse. The photo of Khalid Mir’s passport disappeared and was replaced by a grainy photo of a man in an olive green uniform crossing a street, carrying a briefcase and papers under his arm. This man looked older and fuller in the face than the passport photo of Khalid Mir.

Driscoll nodded forcefully. “That is the guy from Cairo.”

“I’ll be damned,” muttered Sam Granger. “Who is he, Tony?”

“He is Brigadier General Riaz Rehan.”

“General of what?”

“He’s in the Pakistani Defense Force. He is also the current director of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous of the ISI. A shadowy figure, even though he’s a department head and a general. There are no known photos of the man other than this one.”

“But wait,” Clark said. “If this is Cairo guy, can Khalid Mir be Cairo guy, too?”

“Could be,” said Biery, but he didn’t clarify.

Tony Wills admonished him. “Gavin, we talked about this. No dramatics, please.”