Threat Vector Read online

  But one afternoon a security man who called himself Ernie unlocked the door, handed Kovalenko a thousand dollars in cash, and said, “I have a message from John Clark.”

  “Yes?”

  “Get lost.”

  “Okay.”

  Ernie turned and walked out of the room. Seconds later, Valentin heard a car start and pull out of the driveway.

  The bewildered Russian stepped out of the building a minute later to find himself in a condominium complex somewhere in suburban D.C. Slowly he walked toward the street, wondering if he would be able to hail a cab, and where exactly he should tell the cabbie to take him.

  —

  After returning from Hong Kong on the Hendley Associates Gulfstream, Jack Ryan, Jr., went straight to the Alexandria apartment of Melanie Kraft. He’d called ahead, giving her time to decide whether or not she would be there when he arrived, and to decide what she would tell him about her past.

  Over coffee at the bistro table in her tiny kitchen, he told her what she already knew. He was working for an intelligence organization running sub rosa, working in the interest of the United States, but free of the constraints of a government bureaucracy.

  She’d had several days to process this since the Chinese attack at Hendley Associates; she saw the benefit of such an organization, while simultaneously seeing the obvious dangers that went along with it.

  Then it was her turn in the confessional. She explained how her father had been compromised and how she’d learned of it, then decided she would not allow him to destroy her life with his mistake.

  He understood her difficult situation, but he was unable to make her believe that this FBI man, Darren Lipton, must have been an agent for Center and not actually working on a real investigation.

  “No, Jack. There was another guy with FBI. Lipton’s boss. Packard. I still have his card in my purse. He confirmed everything. Plus, they had the court order. They showed it to me.”

  Ryan shook his head. “Center was running you since he intercepted phone calls from Charles Alden discussing how you were working for him, providing information about me and Hendley Associates to discredit John Clark.”

  “Lipton is real. He knows about my father and—”

  “He knows because Center told him! Center could have got that information from hacking into Pakistani intelligence files. His operation could do that easily.”

  He saw that she did not believe him; she felt her entire life was about to fall down on her head when the FBI charged her for lying about her father’s espionage.

  Jack said, “One way we can clear this up right now.”

  “How?”

  “We go pay Lipton a visit.”

  —

  It took a day to find him. He’d taken a leave of absence from work, and both Jack and Melanie worried he’d fled the country. But Ryan got Biery to hack into the man’s bank records, and when he found out Lipton took out four hundred dollars from an ATM at a DoubleTree hotel in Crystal City just minutes earlier, Jack and Melanie headed over.

  By the time they got there Biery had the room number for them, and minutes later Jack used a master keycard Melanie pilfered from a maid.

  Ryan and Kraft came through the door and saw a half-naked Lipton and a fully nude hooker, and Jack told the girl to get her things, her four hundred bucks, and hit the road.

  Lipton seemed scared seeing Ryan and the girl here, but he seemed in no great hurry to dress. Jack threw a pair of khakis at him. “For the love of God, dude, put these on.”

  Lipton slipped into the pants, but did not put a shirt on over his wife-beater.

  “What do you want with me?” he asked.

  Jack said, “Center is dead, if you didn’t already know.”

  “Who?”

  “Center. Dr. K. K. Tong.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Look, asshole! I know you were working for Center. We’ve got all the transcripts of your conversations, and we’ve got Kovalenko, who can finger you.”

  Lipton sighed. “The Russian with the beard?”

  “Yep.”

  It was a lie, but Lipton fell for it.

  He gave up the ruse. “Center was my handler, but I don’t know K. K. Tong. I had no idea I was working for the Russians, otherwise I wouldn’t—”

  “You were working for the Chinese.”

  Darren Lipton winced. “Even worse.”

  “Who was Packard?” Melanie asked.

  Lipton shrugged. “He’s just some other poor schmuck that Center had by the balls. Just like me. He wasn’t FBI. I got the impression he was a detective. Maybe D.C., maybe Maryland or Virginia. Center sent him to me when the phony court order didn’t convince you to bug the phone. I dressed the guy up, gave him a fifteen-minute primer on the situation, and he did the good cop to my bad.”

  “But you asked me to go to the J. Edgar Hoover Building to meet him. What if I said yes?”

  Lipton shook his head. “I knew you wouldn’t walk through the front door of the Hoover Building.”

  Melanie was so furious she had been played by this son of a bitch that, in a moment of fury, she hit him in the mouth. Instantly blood appeared on his lower lip.

  Lipton licked at the blood, then winked at Kraft.

  Her face reddened even more, and she growled. “Jesus! I forgot. He gets off on that.”

  Ryan looked at Melanie, understood what she meant, then turned to Lipton.

  Jack said, “Get off on this,” and he threw the most vicious right jab of his life, connecting with the FBI man’s fleshy face. Lipton’s head snapped back, and the big man went down in a heap. His jaw was swollen and purple within seconds.

  Jack knelt down over him. “You have one week to resign from the FBI. Do it, or we come back for you. Do you understand?”

  Lipton nodded weakly, looked up at Ryan, and nodded again.

  —

  The funerals for the Hendley Associates employees killed by the Divine Sword commandos took place all over Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. All of the Campus operators attended, as did Gerry Hendley.

  Jack went to the funerals alone. He and Melanie had achieved some sort of détente in their relationship; they both understood why they had lied to each other, but trust was a precious commodity in a love affair, and trust had been thoroughly breached by both of them.

  For whatever justifications, their relationship was tarnished, and they found they had little to say to each other.

  —

  Jack was not surprised to see Mary Pat Foley and her husband, Ed, at Sam Granger’s funeral in Baltimore. When the Saturday-afternoon services were completed, Jack asked for a moment alone with the director of national intelligence. Ed excused himself to go chat with Gerry Hendley, and Mary Pat’s security officer lagged far behind his boss and the President’s son as the two walked alone through the cemetery.

  They found a wooden bench and sat down. Mary Pat looked behind her to her security officer, gave him a nod that said “Give us some space,” and he stepped back twenty yards and turned in the other direction.

  “You okay, Jack?”

  “I need to talk to you about Melanie.”

  “Okay.”

  “She’s been informing on me, first for Charles Alden, last year during the Kealty affair, and then, after Alden was arrested, she was approached by a guy at FBI, National Security Branch. He wanted intel on me and Hendley Associates.”

  Mary Pat’s eyebrows rose. “NSB?”

  Jack shook his head. “It’s not as bad as it sounds for us. This guy was actually a Center proxy agent.”

  “Christ. What’s his name?”

  “Darren Lipton.”

  She nodded. “Well, he’ll be out of a job by lunch on Monday, that’s for damn sur
e.”

  Jack cracked a strained smile. “You won’t find him in his office Monday. I think I broke his jaw.”

  “I’m sure the Bureau of Prisons will be able to accommodate his liquid diet.” Mary Pat then looked off in the distance for a long time. “Why did Melanie agree to inform on you? I mean, other than the fact she was working on orders from her superior and federal law enforcement.”

  “A secret in her past. Something Center found out about her dad, something the FBI guy held over her.”

  Mary Pat Foley waited for Ryan to explain. When he did not speak, she said, “I’m going to need to know, Jack.”

  Ryan nodded. Then he told her about her father, about her lie.

  Mary Pat did not seem as surprised as Ryan had expected. She said, “I’ve been doing this a long time. The drive and determination I saw in that young lady was something unique. I understand now, she was compensating, trying to outdo everyone else because she felt like she had to.”

  Ryan said, “If it helps at all, Clark says she saved lives at Hendley. Without her, we’d be going to a few more funerals.”

  Mary Pat nodded, seemingly half lost in thought.

  “What are you going to do?” Jack asked.

  “She knows about The Campus. She’s finished at CIA for lying on her background investigation, but I sure as hell am not going to rake her over the coals. I’ll head down to talk to her right now.”

  “If you tell her to resign, she’s going to know you are aware of The Campus. This could be a problem for you.”

  DNI Foley waved her hand in the air. “I’m not worried about me. It may sound hokey, but it’s more important to me to preserve the integrity of American intelligence, and to preserve the security of the organization your father set up with the best of intentions. I’ve got to try to do that.”

  Jack nodded. He felt like shit.

  Mary Pat saw this and said, “Jack. I’ll go easy on her. She did what she thought was right. She’s a good kid.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said after a moment of reflection. “She is.”

  —

  Mary Pat Foley’s black Suburban pulled up in front of Melanie Kraft’s Alexandria carriage-house apartment just after four in the afternoon. The temperature had dropped below freezing, and the low gray skies spit a light mix of snow and freezing rain.

  The DNI’s driver waited in the car, but her security officer walked with her to the front door holding an umbrella over her with his left hand. He stood beside her as she knocked on the door, with his free hand slipping inside his coat to his right hip.

  Melanie answered quickly; there was nowhere in her flat more than ten steps to the front door.

  She did not smile when she saw Mary Pat, who had become her friend as well as her boss. Instead she backed away from the door and said, meekly, “Won’t you come in?”

  On the drive down from Baltimore, Mary Pat had asked her bodyguard if he had a problem with her spending a few minutes alone with one of her employees in her apartment. This was just a tiny sliver of the truth, but it served its purpose. The burly security officer did a quick walk around the tiny apartment and then went back outside to stand underneath the umbrella.

  While he did this, Mary Pat stood in the living room and looked around. It did not take the head of the American intelligence community long to derive the situation. It was easily discernible that the occupant of this apartment was moving out. Two suitcases were open against the wall. They were half filled with clothes. Several cardboard boxes were already sealed with tape, and several more were still unfolded, lying flat against the wall.

  “Have a seat,” Melanie said, and Mary Pat sat on the tiny love seat. Melanie herself sat on a metal bistro chair.

  “I wasn’t going to just leave,” Melanie said by way of explanation. “I was going to call you tonight and ask if I could come by.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I am resigning.”

  “I see,” Foley said. Then, “Why?”

  “Because I lied on my background investigation. I lied so damn well I beat the polygraph. I thought it did not matter, the thing I was lying about, but I see now that any lie can be used to compromise someone, someone who knows America’s most closely kept secrets.

  “I was vulnerable, and I was duped. I was used. All because of a stupid lie that I never thought would come back to haunt me.”

  “I see,” said Mary Pat.

  “Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. I am not sure what you know, but don’t tell me. I don’t want to do anything to compromise you.”

  “So you just fall on your sword?”

  Melanie chuckled a little. She reached down to one of several stacks of books on the floor along the wall and, while she talked, began packing them in a plastic milk crate. “I didn’t think of it like that. I’ll be fine. I’ll go back to school, find something else that interests me.” She smiled a little more broadly now. “And be damn good at it.”

  Mary Pat said, “I feel sure that you will.”

  “I’ll miss the job. I’ll miss working for you.” She sighed a little. “And I’ll miss Jack.” After a pause she added, “But I won’t miss this fucking town.”

  “Where will you go?”

  She slid the full milk crate to the side, and then pulled over a cardboard box. This she began filling with more books. “I am going home. To Texas. To my dad.”

  “Your dad?”

  She said, “Yes. I turned my back on him a long time ago for a mistake he made. Now I see that what I did was not so very different, and I don’t think I’m a bad person. I’ve got to get home to him and let him know that despite everything that happened, we’re still a family.”

  Mary Pat Foley could tell Melanie was resolute but still pained by her decision.

  She said, “Whatever may have happened in the past, you are doing the right thing now.”

  “Thanks, Mary Pat.”

  “And I want you to know that your time in this town was worth it. The work you did made a difference. Don’t ever forget that.”

  Melanie smiled, finished filling the box of books, slid it to the side, and then reached for another.

  —

  After the funeral, Jack returned to the Ryan family home in Baltimore.

  President Jack Ryan and his wife, Cathy, were there for the weekend, as well as the children. Jack made his way through his dad’s Secret Service detail to see his father in his study. Ryan Senior embraced his son, fought off the tears of relief to see him in the flesh and in one piece, and then held him tightly by the shoulders, just looking him over, up and down.

  Jack smiled. “I’m fine, Dad. I promise.”

  The elder Ryan said, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Had to be done. I was the only one available, so I went and did it.”

  Senior’s jaw flexed as though he wanted to argue with this, but instead he said nothing at all.

  Junior was the next to speak. “I need to talk to you about something else.”

  “Is this just a way to change the subject?”

  Jack Junior half smiled and said, “Not this time.”

  The two men sat on a sofa. “What’s up?”

  “It’s Melanie.”

  Ryan Senior’s eyes seemed to sparkle. He’d not hidden the fact he was smitten with the young intelligence analyst. But the President quickly picked up on the dark tone from his son. “What is it?”

  Jack told him almost everything. How Charles Alden had her looking into Ryan’s relationship with Clark, and then how Darren Lipton, working for the Chinese, duped her to bug his phone.

  He did not tell his father about the Russians in Miami, or any of the details of Istanbul or Hong Kong or Guangzhou, or about the shoot-out with Divine Sword commandos in Georgetown. The y
ounger Ryan had reached the level of maturity that he no longer felt the need to tell war stories that would only upset those who worried about him and his safety.

  For his part, President Jack Ryan did not ask for details. It was not that he did not want to know. He was a man finely tuned to seek out information. It was, rather, that he did not want to put his son in the position of feeling like he had to tell him.

  Ryan Senior realized he was dealing with Jack’s dangerous exploits much in the same way Cathy had with his own. He knew there was more to the story that he wasn’t getting, a hell of a lot more, as a matter of fact. But if Jack Junior wasn’t going to offer it, Jack Senior was not going to ask.

  When he’d listened to everything, Senior’s first response was, “Have you told anyone about this guy Lipton?”

  Jack said, “He’s being dealt with. Mary Pat will eat him for lunch.”

  “I suspect you’re right about that.”

  The President thought for a moment more and said, “Miss Kraft was in the West Sitting Hall and the dining room at the White House. Do I need to have the detail concentrate their next sweep for listening devices on those areas?”

  “I believe she told me everything. I was Lipton’s target, not you, nor the White House. Also, I’m sure they would have already found anything if she’d planted something—but go ahead, you can’t be too careful.”

  Senior then took a moment to compose his thoughts. Finally he said, “Jack, each and every day I thank God that your mother has stuck with me. It’s a million-to-one shot that I found someone willing to put up with the life of an intelligence operative. The secrets we have to keep, the associations we are forced to have, the lies we have to tell as a matter of course. It’s not conducive to a good relationship.”

  Jack had been thinking the same thing.

  “You made the decision to work at The Campus. That decision might bring you some fulfillment and excitement, but along with that comes a lot of sacrifice.”

  “I understand.”

  “Melanie Kraft won’t be the only time your job interferes with your personal life. If you can walk away, right now, while you’re young, you should do just that.”