Threat Vector jrj-4 Page 3

  THREE

  Jack Ryan, Jr., had been tasked with eliminating the target with the fewest question marks surrounding him. A lone man sitting at his desk in his apartment, or so said all their surveillance.

  It was supposed to be the easiest op of the night, and Jack understood this, just like he understood he was getting the mission for the simple fact that he was still the low man on the operational totem pole. He had worked high-risk clandestine ops all over the world, but still fewer than the four other operators in his unit.

  Initially he was going to be sent on the op at the Çiragan Palace to go after Target Two. It was decided that dousing a piece of meat with poison would be the easiest hit of the night. But Clark ended up getting that op because a sixty-five-year-old man dining alone would not be a queer occurrence in a five-star restaurant, where a young Westerner, just a couple of years out of college, eating such a meal in such a place all by himself would pique the interest of the restaurant staff to the degree that someone might remember the lone diner after the fact in the unlikely event authorities came with questions when another patron dropped dead a few tables over.

  So Jack Junior was tasked with taking down Target Five, a communications specialist for the ex — JSO cell, named Emad Kartal. Certainly not a walk in the park, but, the men of The Campus decided, Jack had it covered.

  Kartal spent virtually every evening on his computer, and it was ultimately this habit that brought about the eventual compromise of the JSO cell. Six weeks earlier he’d sent a message to a friend in Libya, and this message had been picked up and decoded, and Ryan and his fellow analysts back in the States had subsequently intercepted the intelligence.

  They’d further compromised both the man and his cell by hacking into his mobile phone’s voice mail; from this, they’d listened to correspondence among the cell members that indicated they were working together.

  At eleven p.m., Ryan found himself entering the apartment building of his target via a counterfeit keycard created by the technical gurus of his organization. The building was in the Taksim neighborhood and within sight of the five-hundred-year-old Cihangir Mosque. It was a slightly upscale property in an upscale neighborhood, but the flats themselves were tightly packed-together studio units, eight to a floor. Jack’s objective was on the third floor, smack in the middle of the five-story building.

  Ryan’s orders for the hit had been succinct. Make entry on Target Five’s flat, confirm the target visually, and then shoot him three times in the chest or head with subsonic rounds fired from his.22-caliber suppressed pistol.

  Ryan climbed the wooden staircase in his soft-soled shoes. While doing so, he pulled his black cotton ski mask down over his face. He was the only man operating with a mask tonight, simply because he was the one member of the team not working in public, where a masked man would draw more attention.

  He made his way to the third floor, and then entered the brightly lit hallway. His target was three doors down on the left, and as the young American passed the other units he heard people talking, the sounds of televisions and radios and phone conversations. The walls were thin, which was not good news, but at least the other residents of the floor were making some noise themselves. Jack hoped his silencer and his quieter-than-normal subsonic ammo would work as advertised.

  At his target’s door he heard the sounds of rap music coming from inside the flat. This was good news, as it would aid in masking Ryan’s approach.

  His target’s door was locked, but Ryan had instructions on how to get in. Clark had been in the building four times in the past week during his target reconnaissance before he’d switched ops with the youngest member of the team, and Clark had managed to pick several of the locks of unoccupied flats. The locks were old and not terribly difficult, so he bought a similar model at a local hardware store, then spent an evening tutoring Jack on how to quickly and quietly defeat the device.

  Clark’s instruction proved effective. With only the faint sounds of the soft scratching of metal on metal, Jack picked the door lock in less than twenty seconds. He drew his pistol and stood back up, then opened the door.

  In the studio flat he found what he expected. Across a small kitchen was a living area, and then, at the far 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.

  Shit, thought Jack. Could be drugs, forced prostitution, kidnapping. Ninety seconds’ work right now might well save lives.

  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 wor
ried 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 us. We’re burned, Ding.”

  “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 now, Jack! That’s a goddamned order!”

  “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.

  He started to reach for the USB drive in the computer, but it occurred to him this machine would retain all the pictures of his team on it, which could easily be seen by whoever came to investigate Target Five’s death.

  In a flurry of movement Jack dropped to the floor, unplugged the computer, and frantically ripped cables and cords out of the back of the machine. He hefted the entire thirty-pound device and carried it with him out the door of the flat, down the stairs, and out into the street. He ran through the rain, which was prudent as well as good tradecraft. It seemed a fitting thing for a man with a computer clutched in his arms to do in the rain. His car was a block away; he dumped the machine in the backseat and then drove out of Taksim toward the airport.

  As he drove he called Chavez back.

  “Go for Ding.”

  “It’s Ryan. I’m clear, but… shit. None of us are clear. All five of us have been under surveillance tonight.”

  “By who?”

  “No idea, but somebody is watching us. They sent images of the entire team to Target Five. I took the hard drive with the pictures on it. I’ll be at the airport in twenty minutes, and we can—”

  “Negative. If somebody is playing us you don’t know that that box of wires in your car is not bugged or fitted with a beacon. Don’t bring that shit anywhere near our exfil.”

  Jack realized Ding was right. He thought it over for a second.

  “I’ve got a screwdriver on my utility knife. I’m going to pull over in a public place and remove the drive from the tower. I’ll inspect it and leave the rest right there. Dump the car, too, in case anyone planted something while I was in Five’s flat. I’ll find another way to the airport.”

  “Haul ass, kid.”

  “Yeah. Ryan out.”

  Jack drove through the rain, passing intersections with mounted traffic cameras high above, and he had the sick feeling that his every move was being watched by an unblinking eye.

  FOUR

  Wei Zhen Lin was an economist by trade, he had never served in his nation’s military, and consequently he had never even touched a firearm. This fact weighed heavily on him as he looked over the large black pistol on his desk blotter as if it was some rare artifact.

  He wondered if he would be able to fire the weapon accurately, though he suspected he would not need much skill to shoot himself in the head.

  He’d been given a thirty-second primer on the gun’s operation by Fung, his principal close protection agent, the same man who’d loaned him the weapon. Fung had chambered a round and flipped off the safety for his protectee’s benefit, and then, in a grave yet still somewhat patronizing tone, the ex — police officer had explained to Wei how to hold the weapon, and how to press the trigger.

  Wei had asked his bodyguard where, exactly, he should point the gun for maximum effect, and the response Wei received was not as precise as the former economist would have liked.

  Fung explained with a shrug that placing the muzzle against most any part of the skull around the brain should do the trick as long as medical attention was delayed, and then Fung promised that he would see to it that medical attention was, in fact, delayed.

  And then, with a curt nod, the bodyguard had left Wei Zhen Lin alone in his office, sitting behind his desk with the pistol in front of him.

  Wei snorted. “A fine bodyguard Fung turned out to be.”

  He hefted the pistol in his hands. It was heavier than he expected, but the weight was balanced. Its grip was surprisingly thick, it felt fatter in his hand than he’d imagined a gun would be, but that was not to say he’d spent much time at all thinking about firearms.

  And then, after looking the weapon over closely for a moment, reading the serial number and the manufacturing st
amp just out of curiosity, Wei Zhen Lin, the president of the People’s Republic of China and the general secretary of the Communist Party of China, placed the muzzle of the weapon against his right temple and pressed his fingertip against the trigger.

  * * *

  Wei was an unlikely man to lead his country, and that was, to a large degree, why he decided to kill himself.

  At the time of Wei Zhen Lin’s birth in 1958, Wei’s father, then already sixty years old, was one of thirteen members of the Seventh Politburo of the Communist Party of China. The older Wei had been a journalist by trade, a writer and newspaper editor, but in the 1930s he left his job and joined the Propaganda Department of the CPC. He was with Mao Zedong during the Long March, an eight-thousand-mile circling retreat that solidified Mao as a national hero and the leader of Communist China, and which also secured a comfortable future for many of the men around him.

  Men like Wei’s father, through the happenstance of history that put them alongside Mao during the revolution, were considered heroes themselves, and they filled leadership positions in Beijing for the next fifty years.

  Zhen Lin was born into this privilege, raised in Beijing, and then sent to an exclusive boarding school in Switzerland. At the Collège Alpin International Beau Soleil near Lake Geneva he developed friendships with other children of the party, sons of party officials and marshals and generals, and by the time he returned to Beijing University to study economics, it was all but preordained that he and many of his Chinese friends from boarding school would go into government service in one form or another.

  Wei was a member of a group that became known as the Princelings. They were the rising stars in politics, the military, or in business in China who were the sons or daughters of former top party officials, most of them high-ranking Maoists who fought in the revolution. In a society that denied the existence of an upper class, the Princelings were unquestionably the elites, and they alone were in possession of the money, power, and political connections that gave them the authority to rule the next generation.