wall, a desk facing away from the entrance. At the desk a man sat with his back to Ryan in front of a bank of three large flat-screen computer monitors as well as various peripherals, books, magazines, and other items within reach. Foam containers of half-eaten Chinese takeout sat in a plastic bag. Next to this, Ryan confirmed the presence of a weapon. Jack knew handguns, but he could not immediately identify the semiautomatic pistol just a foot from Emad Kartal’s right hand.
Jack stepped into the kitchen and quietly pulled the door closed behind him.
The kitchen was bathed in light, but the living area where his target sat was dark, other than the light coming from the computer monitors. Ryan checked the windows to his left to make sure no one could see in from the apartments across the street. Confident his act would go undetected, he took a few steps forward, closer to his target, so that the gunfire would be centered in the room and no closer to the hallway than necessary.
The rap music thumped throughout the room.
Perhaps Jack made a noise. Maybe he threw a shadow across the shiny surfaces in front of his victim, or cast his reflection on the glass of the monitors. For whatever reason, the JSO man suddenly kicked back his chair and spun around, reaching desperately for his Turkish-made Zigana 9-millimeter semiautomatic. He took the weapon in his fingertips and raised it at the intruder while he was still in the process of obtaining a firing grip on the gun.
Jack identified the target from his surveillance photos and then he fired once, sending a tiny.22-caliber bullet into the man’s stomach, right where the back of his head would have been had the man not startled. The Libyan dropped his pistol and lurched back onto his desk, not from the force of the impact but rather from the natural urge to escape the searing pain of the bullet wound.
Jack fired again, hitting the man in the chest this time, and then again, this bullet striking dead-center mass, between the pectoral muscles. The middle of the man’s white undershirt bloomed dark red.
The Libyan clutched his chest, grunted as he spun around, and then slumped over on his desk. His legs gave out totally and gravity took over. The ex — JSO operative slid down onto the floor and rolled onto his back.
Quickly Ryan walked up to the man and raised his weapon for a final shot to the head. But then he thought better of it; he knew the report of the gun, though quiet, was in no way silent, and he also knew this apartment was surrounded by other units that were occupied. Instead of creating another noise that could be heard by a dozen or so potential witnesses, he knelt down, felt for the man’s carotid artery, and determined him to be dead.
Ryan stood to leave, but his eyes flicked up to the desktop computer and the three monitors on the desk. The hard drive of the machine would contain a treasure trove of intelligence, Jack knew, and as an analyst, he found nothing on this earth more enticing than an intel dump at his fingertips.
Too bad his orders were to leave everything behind and bolt the instant he neutralized his target.
Jack stood quietly for a few seconds, listening to the ambient noises around him.
No screams, no shouts, no sirens.
He felt confident no one heard the gunfire. Maybe he could find out what the Libyans were working on. They’d picked up only bits and pieces during their surveillance, just enough to know the JSO men were operational, likely doing work for some syndicate based outside of Istanbul. Jack wondered if he could find enough pieces here on Emad Kartal’s computer to put the puzzle together.
Jack Ryan quickly dropped to his knees in front of the desk, pulled the keyboard closer, and grabbed the mouse.
Though he was not wearing gloves, he wasn’t worried at all about leaving prints. He’d painted New-Skin onto the tips of his fingers; it was a clear, tacky substance that dried clean and clear and was used as a liquid bandage. All the operators were using it in situations where gloves were either not practical or would look out of place.
Jack pulled up a list of files on the machine and slid the folders over to the monitor closest to him. There was a splatter of blood from Kartal’s chest wound diagonally across the monitor, so Jack grabbed a dirty napkin out of the bag of half-eaten Chinese take-out food and wiped the screen clean.
Many of the files were encrypted, and Ryan knew he did not have the time to try and decrypt them here. Instead he looked around the desk and found a plastic baggie with a dozen or so portable flash drives in it. He pulled out one of the drives and slid it into a USB port on the front side of the computer, then copied the files to the drive.
He saw Target Five’s e-mail client open, and he began pulling up e-mails. Many were in Arabic, one looked like it might have been in Turkish, and a few were just files without any subject headings or text. One after another he opened these e-mails and clicked on attachments.
His earpiece chirped. Jack tapped it with his fingertip. “Go for Jack.”
“Ryan?” It was Chavez. “You’re late reporting in. What’s your status?”
“Sorry. Just a slight delay. Target Five is down.”
“There a problem?”
“Negative.”
“You clear?”
“Not yet. Getting a sweet intel dump off the subject’s PC. Another thirty seconds and I’m done.”
“Negative, Ryan. Leave whatever you find. Get out of there. You’ve got no support.”
“Roger that.”
Ryan stopped clicking through the e-mails, but a new message appeared in Kartal’s inbox. Instinctively he double-clicked on the attached folder and JPEG photos opened in a grid across one of the monitors in front of him. “What if we can use this stuff?” he asked, distraction in his voice as he expanded the first photo in the grid.
“Quick and clean, kid.”
But Jack was not listening to Chavez now. He scrolled through the images hurriedly at first, but then he slowed and looked at them carefully.
And then he stopped.
“Ryan? You there?”
“Oh my God,” he said, softly.
“What is it?”
“It’s… it’s
“What are you talking about?”
The images on the screen in front of Jack seemed to be taken from security cameras, and the quality of the shots varied, but they were all good enough for Jack to ID his team. John Clark standing in the doorway of a luxurious restaurant. Sam Driscoll driving a scooter up a rainswept street. Dom Caruso walking through a turnstile in a cavernous passage, like that of a sports stadium. Domingo Chavez talking into his mobile phone on a bench inside a ferryboat.
Jack came to the realization quickly that these pictures had been taken this evening. All within the last hour or so.
As Ryan rose from his knees, his legs weak from the near panic of knowing his team’s actions tonight in Istanbul were under surveillance, another message popped up at the top of the inbox. Jack all but dove at the mouse to open it.
The e-mail contained one image; he double-clicked to open it.
Jack saw a masked man kneeling at a keyboard, his intense eyes peering at a point just below the camera that captured the image. Behind the masked man, on the floor, Ryan could just make out the foot and leg of a man lying on his back.
Ryan turned his head away from the monitor, looked back over his left shoulder, and saw Target Five’s foot sticking up.
Jack looked on the top of the center monitor and saw the small camera built into the display’s bezel.
This image had been taken sometime in the last sixty seconds, while Ryan downloaded data off the hard drive.
He was being watched this very second.
Before Jack could say anything else, Chavez’s voice blasted his right ear. “Fucking split
“I’m gone,” he said, his voice a whisper. His eyes locked onto the lens of the tiny webcam, and his thoughts on whoever was behind it, looking at him right now.
