No, he wanted fieldwork, the adrenaline-pumping action that he had experienced numerous times over the past few years. It was addictive — to a man in his twenties, anyway — and Ryan was suffering from withdrawal.
But now all the action was on hold, and The Campus’s future was in doubt, all because of something everyone now referred to as the Istanbul Drive.
It was just a few gigabytes of digital images, e-mail traffic, software applications, and other electronic miscellany retrieved from Emad Kartal’s desktop computer the night Jack shot him dead in a flat in the Taksim neighborhood of Istanbul.
The night of the hit Gerry Hendley, the head of The Campus, had ordered his men to cease all offensive operations until they dealt with whoever had them under surveillance. The five operators who had become well accustomed to globetrotting in the company Gulfstream now found themselves all but chained to their desks. Along with the analysts of the organization, they spent their days desperately trying to find out who had been so effectively monitoring their actions during the five assassinations in Turkey.
Somebody had seen them and recorded them in flagrante delicto, any and all evidence relating to the surveillance had been preserved by Ryan’s taking of the drive, and for weeks The Campus had been scrambling to find out just how much trouble they were in.
As Jack dropped down into his desk chair and lit up his computer, he thought back to the night of the hit. When he pulled the drive out of Emad’s desktop, he’d first planned on just returning to The Campus with the device so he could rush it to Gavin Biery, the shop’s director of technology and an expert hacker with a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard and work stints at IBM and NSA.
But Biery nixed that idea immediately. Instead, Gavin met the airplane and the returning operatives at Baltimore Washington Airport, and then rushed them, and their drive, to a nearby hotel. In a two-and-a-half-star suite he disassembled the drive and inspected it for any physical tracking device while the five exhausted operators set up perimeter security, guarding the windows, doors, and parking lot in case a hidden beacon had already alerted an enemy to the drive’s location. After two hours’ work Biery was satisfied that the drive was clean, so he returned to Hendley Associates with the rest of the team and the one potential clue about who had been watching them in Istanbul.
Even though the rest of The Campus was spooked by the compromisation of their actions in Turkey, most still thought Biery was operating with an unreasonable amount of caution, bordering on paranoia. This surprised no one, however, because Gavin’s network security measures around Hendley Associates were legendary. Behind his back he was called the Digital Nazi for demanding weekly security meetings and frequent password-changing schedules in order for employees to “earn” access to his network.
Biery had promised his colleagues many times over the years that no computer virus would ever get into his network, and to keep his promise, he remained ever vigilant, if, at times, a thorn in the side of the rest of the employees in the building.
The Campus’s computer network was his baby, he proclaimed proudly, and he protected it from any potential harm.
When Biery returned with the drive to the technology shop at The Campus, he took the paperback book — size device and placed it in a safe with a combination lock. Ryan and Operations Director Sam Granger, who happened to be standing close by at the time, looked on in bewilderment at this, but Biery explained that he would be the only person in the building with access to the drive. Even though he’d established to his satisfaction that there was no locator on the device, Biery had no idea if there was a virus or other corrupt malware hidden on the drive. He’d rather not have the untested piece of equipment anywhere on the physical property, but barring that, he would personally maintain security of the drive and control all access to it.
Gavin then set up a desktop computer in a second-floor conference room with keycard access. This computer was not part of any network in the building, and it had neither wired nor wireless modem nor Bluetooth capability. It was completely isolated in both the real world and the cyberworld.
Jack Ryan sarcastically asked Biery if he was worried that the drive might grow legs and try to break out of the room. Biery had replied at the time, “No, Jack, but I
At first Biery demanded that he be the only person in the room with the computer while the computer was on, but Rick Bell, director of analysis for The Campus, had immediately protested on the quite reasonable grounds that Biery was not an analyst, and he did not know what to look for or even how to recognize and interpret much in the way of intelligence data.
It was finally agreed to by all that for the first session with the drive, only one analyst, Jack Junior, should be with Biery in the conference room, and Jack would be armed with nothing more than a legal pad and a pen, and a wired phone connection to his coworkers at their desks in case network computing power was needed for research during the investigation.
Before entering the room, Gavin hesitated. He turned to Jack. “Any chance you would voluntarily submit to a patdown?”
“No problem.”
Biery was pleasantly surprised. “Really?”
Jack looked at him. “Of course. And just to be doubly sure, how ’bout I undergo a body-cavity search? You want me to assume the position against the wall here?”
“Okay, Jack. No need to be a smart ass. I need to know that you don’t have a USB drive, a smart phone, anything that might get infected by whatever we find on this drive.”
“I don’t, Gav. I
Biery thought it over for a second. “If the network is compromised at all…”
“I get it,” Jack assured him.
Biery and Ryan entered the conference room. Biery removed the Istanbul Drive from its strongbox, then wired it to the PC. He turned the machine back on and waited for it to boot up.
Their first sweep of the drive’s contents showed them that the operating system was the latest version of Windows, and there were quite a few programs, e-mails, documents, and spreadsheets that they would need to go through.
The e-mail program and the documents were password-protected, but Gavin Biery knew this particular encryption program backward and forward, and he finessed his way through in minutes via a back door that he and his team knew about.
Together Biery and Ryan looked through the e-mails first. They were prepared to pull in Arabic- and Turkish- speaking analysts from Rick Bell’s team on the third floor, and they did find dozens of documents in both languages on the drive, but it quickly became apparent that much of the data, and likely the data most relevant to the investigation, was in English.
They found nearly three dozen English e-mails going back about six months from the same address. As they read through them in chronological order, Jack spoke into the phone to the other analysts. “From his e-mails, it looks like our man in Istanbul was working directly with an English speaker. This guy communicated under the code name of Center. Doesn’t ring a bell from any data mining we’ve done on known personality aliases, but that’s no surprise. We’ve been focusing on terrorists, and this is looking like it’s a different animal.”
Jack read through e-mails and relayed what he found. “The Libyan negotiated payment for a retainer-like relationship with Center, was told that he and his cell would be needed for odd jobs around town…” Jack paused while he dug into the next e-mail. “Here they were sent out to rent some warehouse space”—another e-mail opened—“here they were ordered to pick up a package and deliver it to a man on a freighter docked at Istanbul Port. Another e-mail has them picking up a case from a guy at Cengiz Topel Airport. No mention of the contents, but that’s not surprising. They also did some reconnaissance work at the offices of Turkcell, the mobile phone provider.”
Jack summarized after looking through a few more e-mails: “Just low-rent gofer stuff. Nothing too interesting.”
