Dead or Alive Read online

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Ding said, “So we make a courtesy call on Jack?”

  “We kinda sorta gotta, Domingo.”

  “I hear you. Hell, Jack Junior’s out of school now, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah. Not sure what he’s doing, though.”

  “Some rich-kid job, I bet. Stocks and bonds, money shit, I bet.”

  “Well, what were you doing at that age?”

  “Learning how to handle a dead drop from you, down at The Farm, and studying nights at George Mason University. Sleepwalking, mostly.”

  “But you got your master’s, as I recall. Lot more than I ever got.”

  “Yeah. I got a piece of paper that says I’m smart. You left dead bodies all over the world.” Fortunately, it was virtually impossible to bug an airliner’s cabin.

  “Call it foreign-policy laboratory work,” Clark suggested, checking the first-class menu. At least British Airways pretended to serve decent food, though why airlines didn’t just stock up on Big Macs and fries still mystified him. Or maybe a Domino’s pizza. All the money they’d save—but the McDonald’s in the UK just didn’t seem to have the right beef. In Italy it was even worse. But their national dish was veal Milanese, and that had a Big Mac beat. “You worried?”

  “About having a job? Not really. I can always make real money consulting. You know, the two of us could start up a company, executive security or like that, and really clean up. I’d do the planning, and you’d do the actual protection. You know, just stand there and stare at people in that special ‘don’t fuck with me’ way you do.”

  “Too old for that, Domingo.”

  “Ain’t nobody dumb enough to kick an old lion in the ass, John. I’m too short to scare bad guys away.”

  “Bullshit. I wouldn’t mess with you for the fun of it.”

  Chavez had rarely received that magnitude of compliment. He was overly sensitive about his diminutive height—his wife was an inch taller—but it had its tactical value. Over the years, several people had underestimated him and then come within his reach. Not professionals. Those could read his eyes and see the danger that lay behind them. When he bothered to turn the lights on. It rarely came to that, though one street tough in east London had gotten impolite outside a pub. He’d been awakened later with a pint of beer and a playing card tucked in his pocket. It was the queen of clubs, but the back of the card had been a glossy black. Such instances were rare. England remained a civilized country for the most part, and Chavez never went looking for trouble. He’d learned that lesson over the years. The black deck of cards was an unauthorized souvenir for the Men of Black. The newspapers had picked up on it, and Clark had come down hard on the men who carried the cards. But not that hard. There was security, and there was panache. The boys he’d left behind in Wales had both, and that, really, was okay, as long as the troops knew where the line was.

  “What do you think our best job was?”

  “Gotta be the amusement park. Malloy did a great job of setting your team down on the castle, and the takedown you did was damned near perfect, especially since we couldn’t rehearse it.”

  “Damn, those were good troops,” Domingo agreed with a smile. “My old Ninjas didn’t even come close, and I thought they were as good as soldiers got.”

  “They were, but experience counts for a lot.” Every one of the Rainbow team was at least an E-6 or equivalent, which took some years in uniform to achieve. “A lot of smarts comes along with time, and it’s not the sort of thing you get out of a book. Then we trained the hell out of them.”

  “Tell me about it. If I run any more, I’ll need two new legs.”

  Clark snorted. “You’re still a pup. But I’ll tell ya this: I’ve never seen a better bunch of triggers, and I’ve seen a fair share. Christ, it’s like they were born with H-and-P’s in their hands. How about it, Ding, got a personal champ?”

  “Have to measure it with an O-scope and calipers. I’d take Eddie Price for brains. Weber or Johnston on a rifle, hell, there ain’t nothing to choose from. For short guns, that little Frenchie, Loiselle . . . He could have scared Doc Holliday out of Tombstone. But you know, all you can really do is put a bullet in the X-ring. Dead is dead. We could all do it, close or far, day or night, awake or asleep, drunk or sober.”

  “Which is why we’re paid the big money.”

  “Shame they’re pulling back on the reins.”

  “A damned shame.”

  “Why, goddamn it? I just don’t get it.”

  “Because the European terrorists have gone to ground. We shut them down, Ding, and in the process worked ourselves out of a full-time job. At least they didn’t pull the plug altogether. Given the nature of politics, we’ll call that a success and ride into the sunset.”

  “With a pat on the back and an attaboy.”

  “You expect gratitude from democratic governments?” John asked with a slight grimace. “You poor, naive boy.”

  The European Union bureaucrats had been the main reason. No European countries tolerated capital punishment anymore—what the common folk might have wanted was not considered, of course—and one such representative of the people had said aloud and repeatedly that the Rainbow team had been too ruthless. Whether or not he insisted on humane capture and medical treatment for rabid dogs had never quite been asked. The people had never disapproved of team actions in any country, but their kind and gentle bureaucrats had gotten their panties in a wad, and those faceless people had the real political power. Like every place else in the civilized world.

  “You know, in Sweden it’s illegal to raise calves the efficient way. You have to give them social contact with other critters. Next you won’t be able to cut their balls off until they get laid at least once,” Chavez grumped.

  “Seems reasonable to me. That way they’ll know what they’re missing.” Clark chuckled. “One less thing for the cowboys to have to do. Probably not a fun job for a man to do that to somebody else.”

  “Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth, and that’s fine with me, but it’s still nice to have cops around.”

  “You hear me arguing with you? Rock your seat back and have a glass of wine and get some sleep, Domingo.”

  And if some asshole tries to hijack this airplane, we’ll deal with him, Clark didn’t add.

  One could always hope. One last jolt of action before going out to pasture.

  7

  SO WHAT’S COOKING?” Brian Caruso asked his cousin.

  “Same stew, different day, I expect,” Jack Ryan Jr. replied.

  “‘Stew’?” Dominic, the other Caruso, replied. “Don’t you mean shit?”

  “Trying to be optimistic.”

  All three armed with their first cups of coffee of the day, they walked down the corridor to Jack’s office. It was 8:10 a.m., about time for another day to start at The Campus.

  “Any word on our friend the Emir?” Brian asked, taking a gulp of coffee.

  “Nothing firsthand. He’s not stupid. He even has his e-mails relayed through a series of cutouts now, some of them through ISP accounts that open and close within hours, and even then the account financials turn out to be dead ends. The Pakistan badlands is the best current guess. Maybe next door. Maybe wherever he can buy a safe spot. Hell, at this point I’m tempted to look in our own broom closet.”

  It was frustrating, Jack thought. His first adventure into field operations had been a slam dunk. Or beginner’s luck, maybe? Or fate. He’d gone to Rome as Brian and Dominic’s intel support, nothing more, and had by sheer chance spotted MoHa in the hotel. From there things had moved fast, too damned fast, and then it’d been him and MoHa in the bathroom . . .

  He wouldn’t be as frightened the next time, Jack told himself with enormous—and false—confidence. He remembered the killing of MoHa as clearly as the first time he’d gotten laid. Most vivid of all was the look on the man’s face when the succinylcholine had taken hold. Jack might have felt regret for the killing except for the ad
renaline rush of the moment, and for what Mohammed had been guilty of. He’d found no regret in his soul for that action. MoHa had been a murderer himself, someone who had taken it upon himself to deliver death to innocent civilians, and Jack hadn’t missed a wink of sleep over it.

  It had helped that he’d been among family. He and Dominic and Brian shared a grandfather, Jack Muller, his mom’s father. Their fraternal grandfather, now eighty-three, was first-generation Italian, having emigrated from Italy to Seattle, where for the past sixty years he’d lived and worked at the family-owned and -run restaurant.

  Grandpa Muller, former Army veteran and Merrill Lynch VP, had a strained relationship with Jack Ryan Sr., having decided that his son-in-law’s abandonment of Wall Street for government service was sheer idiocy—idiocy that had eventually led to his daughter and granddaughter, Little Sally, nearly losing their lives in a car crash. But for his son-in-law’s ill-advised return to the CIA, the incident would have never happened. Of course, no one except Grandpa Muller believed that, including Mom and Sally.

  It also helped, Jack Junior had decided, that Brian and Dominic were relatively new to this as well. Not new to the danger—Brian a Marine and Dominic an FBI agent—but to the “Wilderness of Mirrors,” as James Jesus Angleton had called it. They’d adapted well and quickly, having taken out three URC soldiers in short order—four at the Charlottesville Mall shooting and three in Europe with the Magic Pen. Still, Hendley hadn’t hired them because they were good triggers. “Smart shooters” was the phrase Mike Brennan, his USSS principal, had often used, and it sure as hell fit his cousins.

  “Gimme your best guess,” Brian said now.

  “Pakistan, but close enough that his people can hop across the border. Somewhere with plenty of evacuation routes. He’s in a place with electricity, but portable generators are easy to come by, so that doesn’t mean much. Maybe a phone line, too. They’ve gotten away from satellite phones. Learned that one the hard way—”

  “Yeah, when they read about it in the Times,” Brian growled.

  Journalists think they can print anything they want to; it was hard to see those kinds of consequences while sitting in front of a keyboard.

  “Bottom line is we don’t know where His Highness is right now. Even my best guess is just a guess, but the truth be told, that’s usually all intelligence amounts to—a guess based on the available info. Sometimes it’s rock-solid, sometimes as thin as air. The good news is we’re reading a lot of mail.”

  “How much?” Dominic asked.

  “Maybe fifteen or twenty percent.” Still, the sheer volume was overwhelming, but with volume came opportunities. Kind of like Ryan Howard, Jack thought. Swing at a lot of pitches, strike out a lot, but hit a ton of home runs. Hopefully.

  “So let’s go shake the trees and see what falls out.” Ever the Marine, Brian was always ready to charge a beachhead. “Snatch somebody up and sweat him.”

  “Don’t want to tip our hand,” Jack said. “You save something like that for an op that’s worth blowing it all for.”

  The one thing they both knew not to talk about was how cagily the intelligence community was playing with what data it had. A lot of it stayed in-house, not even forwarded to its own directors, who tended to be political appointees, loyal to the people who appointed them, if not always to the oath they’d taken on occupying their offices. The President—known in the community as NCA, for National Command Authority—had a staff that he trusted, though the trust must have been to leak things he wished to leak, and only those things, and only to reporters who could be trusted to accept the spin placed on a leak. The spook community was holding out on the President, a firing offense if anyone got caught. They withheld data from end-user field people, too, which was also something with a history behind it, and which also explained why special ops people rarely trusted the intelligence community. It was all about need-to-know. You could have the highest clearance level available, but if you didn’t need to know, you were still out of the loop. Same went for The Campus, which was officially out of all the loops, which was sort of the point. Still, they’d had a lot of success slipping themselves into the loop. Their hacker-in-chief, an übergeek named Gavin Biery who ran their IT section, had yet to meet an encryption system into which he couldn’t poke a hole.

  A former IBM employee, he’d lost two brothers in Vietnam, and thereafter had come to work for the federal government, then to be talent-scouted and cherry-picked to the Fort Meade headquarters of the National Security Agency, the government’s premier center for communications and electronic security. His government salary had long since topped him out as a Senior Executive Service genius, and indeed he still collected his reasonably generous government pension. But he loved the action and had snapped up the offer to join The Campus within seconds of its being made. He was, professionally, a mathematician, with a doctorate from Harvard, where he’d studied under Benoit Mandelbrot himself, and he occasionally lectured at MIT and Caltech as well in his area of expertise.

  Biery was a geek through and through, right down to the heavy black-rimmed glasses and doughy complexion, but he kept The Campus’s electronic gears oiled and the machines purring.

  “Compartmentalization?” Brian said. “Don’t gimme that cloak-and-dagger shit.”

  Jack held up his hands and shrugged. “Sorry.” Like his dad, Jack Ryan Jr. wasn’t one to break the rules. Cousin or not, Brian didn’t have the need to know. Period.

  “You ever wonder about the name?” Dominic asked. “The URC? You know how much these guys love double meanings.”

  Interesting idea, Jack thought.

  The Umayyad Revolutionary Council had been the Emir’s own invention, they’d always guessed. Was it what it seemed—just another oblique reference to the tried-and-true Islamic symbol of jihad; namely, Saladin—or something more?

  Born Salah Ad-din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub in about 1138 in Tikrit—current-day Iraq—Saladin had quickly risen to figurehead status during the Crusades, first as the defender of Baalbek, then as the sultan of Egypt and Syria. The fact that Saladin’s battlefield record was by some accounts spotty at best was of little consequence in Muslim history, but as was the case with many historical figures, East and West alike, it was what Saladin came to represent that mattered. To Muslims he was the avenging sword of Allah standing against the flood of infidel crusaders.

  If there was any insight to be gained from the URC’s name, it probably lay in the first word, Umayyad, after the Damascus mosque that housed Saladin’s final resting place, a mausoleum containing both a marble sarcophagus donated by Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany and a plain wooden coffin, in which Saladin’s body still remained. The fact that the Emir had chosen Umayyad as his organization’s operational word suggested to Jack that the Emir saw his jihad as a turning point, just as Saladin’s death had been a transition from this life of struggle and suffering to everlasting paradise.

  “I’ll give it some thought,” Jack said. “Not a bad hunch, though.”

  “It ain’t all sand up here, cuz,” Brian said, smiling, as he tapped his temple with his index finger. “So what’s your dad doing with all his spare time now?”

  “Don’t know.” Jack didn’t spend much time at home. That would mean talking to his parents, and the more he talked about his “job,” the more likely his dad would be to get curious, and if his father found out what he was doing here, he might blow a gasket somewhere in his head. And how Mom would react didn’t bear contemplation. The thought grated on Jack. He wasn’t a mama’s boy, that was for sure, but did anyone ever really get past trying to impress their parents or seek their approval? What was that saying? A man isn’t truly a man until he kills his father—metaphorically, of course. He was an adult, on his own, doing some serious shit at The Campus. Time to step out from under Dad’s shadow, Jack reminded himself for the umpteenth time. And a damned big shadow it was.

  Brian said, “Bet you he gets fed up and—”

  “Runs?”

&
nbsp; “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I’ve lived in the White House, remember? I had my fill. I’ll gladly take my cubicle here, hunting bad guys.”

  Mostly on the computer so far, Jack thought, but maybe, if he played his cards right, more in the field. He was already rehearsing his pitch to The Campus’s head, Gerry Hendley. The MoHa thing had to count for something, didn’t it? His cousins were smart shooters. Did the term fit him? Jack wondered. Could it fit him? In comparison, his life had been a sheltered one, the well-protected son of President John Patrick Ryan, but that had come with benefits, hadn’t it? He’d learned to shoot from Secret Service agents, had played chess against the Secretary of State, had lived and breathed, albeit obliquely, the inner worlds of the intelligence and military communities. Had he, by osmosis, picked up some of the traits for which Brian and Dominic had trained so hard? Maybe. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. Either way, he had to get past Hendley first.

  “But you ain’t your dad,” Dominic reminded him.

  “True enough.” Jack turned in his chair and powered up his PC for the morning news dose, public and classified. Too often, the latter was only three days in advance of the former. The first thing Jack logged in to was the Executive Intercept Transcript Summary from the NSA. Called EITS or XITS—and bearing the unfortunate moniker “zits”—it went only to high-level officers at the NSA and the CIA, and the National Security Council at the White House.

  Speaking of the devil ... There he was, the Emir himself, in the XITS again. An intercept. The message had been strictly administrative. The Emir wanted to know what someone—just an anonymous code name—was doing, whether he had made contact with some unknown foreign national, for some unknown purpose. That was the standard with most of these intercepts—a lot of unknowns, sort of like fill-in-the-blank, which was, in truth, what intelligence analysis was all about. The biggest and most complex jigsaw puzzle in the world. This particular piece had prompted a brainstorming meeting at the CIA.