Dead or Alive Read online

  He was right. The 9-millimeter Parabellum hollow-point bullet struck him just above the left eyebrow before mushrooming into a tangled lump of lead that turned a softball-sized chunk of his brain into so much jelly.

  10

  GODDAMN IT,” former President of the United States John Patrick Ryan muttered into his morning coffee.

  “What is it now, Jack?” Cathy asked, though fully aware of what “it” was. She dearly loved her husband, but when a topic attracted his attention, he was like the proverbial dog with a bone, a trait that had made him a good spook and an even better President but not always the easiest of souls to get along with.

  “This idiot Kealty doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. What’s worse, he doesn’t care. He killed twelve Marines yesterday in Baghdad. You know why?” Cathy Ryan didn’t answer; she knew the question was rhetorical. “Because somebody on his staff decided that Marines having loaded rifles might send the wrong message. Goddamn it, you don’t send messages to people pointing weapons at you. Then get this: Their company commander went after the bad guys and whacked about six of them before he was ordered to pull back.”

  “By whom?”

  “By his battalion commander, who probably got instructions from brigade, who got his from some lawyer Kealty’s goons slipped into the chain of command. The worst part is he doesn’t care. After all, the budget process is under way, and there’s that flap over those friggin’ trees in Oregon that has his undivided attention.”

  “Well, for better or worse, a lot of people get their panties in a twist over the environment, Jack,” Professor Ryan told her husband.

  Kealty, Jack seethed. He’d had it all figured out. Robby would have been a great President, but he hadn’t considered the twisted mind of that old Ku Klux Klan bastard who was still waiting to die on Mississippi’s Death Row. Jack had been in the Oval Office on that day—what had it been? Six days before the election, with Robby comfortably ahead in the polls. Not enough time to set things back in place, the election in chaos, Kealty the only major candidate left standing, and all the votes cast for Robby voided by circumstance. So many voters had simply stayed home in confusion. Kealty, President by default; election by forfeit.

  The transition period had been even worse, if that was possible. The funeral, held at Jackson’s father’s Baptist church in Mississippi, was one of Jack’s worst-ever memories. The media had sneered at his display of emotion. Presidents were supposed to be robots, after all, but Ryan had never been one of those.

  And with good damned reason, Ryan thought.

  Right here, right here in this very room, Robby had saved his life, and his wife’s, and his daughter’s, and his as yet unborn son’s. Jack had rarely known rage in his life, but this was one subject that caused it to erupt like Mount Vesuvius on a particularly bad day. Even Robby’s father had preached forgiveness on the subject, proof positive that the Reverend Hosiah Jackson was a better man than he would ever be. So what fate suited Robby’s killer? A pistol round in the liver, perhaps . . . might take five or ten minutes for the bastard to bleed out, screaming all the way to hell . . .

  Worse still, rumor had it the current President was contemplating a blanket commutation of every death sentence in America. His political allies were already lobbying for him in the media, planning a public mercy demonstration on the Washington Mall. Mercy for the victims of the killers and kidnappers was something they never quite addressed, of course, but for all that it was for them a deeply held principle, and Ryan actually respected it.

  The former President took a calming breath. He had his work to do. He was two years into his memoirs and in the home stretch. The work had gone quicker than he’d expected, so much so that he’d also written a confidential annex to his autobiography that would not see the light of day until twenty years after his death.

  “Where are you?” Cathy asked, thinking of her schedule for the day. She had four laser procedures scheduled. Her Secret Service detail had already checked out the patients, lest one come into the OR with a pistol or knife, an event so unlikely to happen that Cathy had long ago stopped thinking about it. Or maybe she had stopped thinking about it because she knew her detail was worrying about it.

  “Huh?”

  “In the book,” his wife clarified.

  “The last few months.” His tax and fiscal policy, which had actually worked until Kealty had applied a flamethrower to it.

  And now the United States of America was muddling along under the presidency—or reign—of Edward Jonathan Kealty, a silver-spooned member of the aristocracy. In time it would be fixed one way or another, the people would see to that. But the difference between a mob and a herd was that a mob had a leader. The people didn’t really need that. The people could do without it—because a leader usually came along somehow or other. But who chose the leader? The people did. But the people chose a leader from a list of candidates, and they had to be self-selected.

  The phone rang. Jack got it.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Jack.” The voice was familiar enough. Ryan’s eyes lit up.

  “Hi, Arnie. How’s life in academia?”

  “As you might expect. See the news this morning?”

  “The Marines?”

  “What do you think?” Arnie van Damm asked.

  “Doesn’t look very good.”

  “I think it’s worse than it looks. The reporters aren’t telling the whole story.”

  “Do they ever?” Jack wondered sourly.

  “No, not when they don’t like it, but some of them have integrity. Bob Holtzman at the Post is having a conscience attack. He called me. Wants to talk to you about your views—off the record, of course.”

  Robert Holtzman of The Washington Post was one of the few reporters Ryan almost trusted, partially because he’d always been straight with Ryan and partially because he was a former naval officer—a 1630, the code the Navy used to designate an intelligence officer. While he was at odds with Ryan on most political issues, he was also a man of integrity. Holtzman knew things about Ryan’s background that he’d never published, despite the fact that they would have made juicy stories, perhaps even career-making stories. But then again, maybe he was just saving them for a book. Holtzman had written a few of those, one a bestseller, and had made decent money from the effort.

  “What did you tell him?” Jack asked Arnie.

  “I told him I’d ask, but you’d probably say not just no but hell, no.”

  “Arnie, I do like the guy, but a former President can’t trash his successor. ...”

  “Even if he’s a worthless piece of shit?”

  “Even then,” Jack confirmed sourly. “Maybe especially then. Hold on. I thought you liked him. What happened?”

  “Maybe I hung around you too much. Now I have this crazy notion that character counts for something. It’s not all political maneuvering.”

  “He’s damned good at that, Arnie. Even I have to grant him that. Arnie, you want to come down for a talk?” Ryan asked. Why else would he call on a Friday morning?

  “Yeah, okay, so I’m not exactly subtle.”

  “Fly on down. You’re always welcome in my house, you know that.”

  Cathy asked sotto voce, “What about Tuesday? Dinner.”

  “How about Tuesday for dinner?” Jack asked Arnie. “You can stay the night. I’ll tell Andrea to expect you.”

  “Do that. I’m always half worried that woman’s going to shoot me, and as good as she is, I doubt it’d be a flesh wound. See you around ten.”

  “Great, Arnie, see ya.” Jack set the phone back down and stood up to walk Cathy to the garage. Cathy had moved up in class. Now she drove a two-seat Mercedes, though she’d recently admitted she missed the helicopter into Hopkins. On the upside, now she got to play race-car driver, with her Secret Service agent, Roy Altman, former captain in the 82nd Airborne, holding on for dear life in the passenger seat. A serious guy. He was standing by the car, jacket unbuttoned, paddle holster
visible.

  “Morning, Dr. Ryan,” he greeted.

  “Hi, Roy. How are the kids?”

  “Just fine, thank you, ma’am.” He opened the car door.

  “Have a productive day, Jack.” And the usual morning kiss.

  Cathy settled in, buckled her seat belt, and started up the twelve-cylinder beast that lived under the hood. She waved and backed out. Jack watched her disappear down the driveway, out to where the lead and chase cars were waiting, then turned back to the kitchen door.

  “Good morning, Mrs. O’Day,” he said in greeting.

  “And to you, Mr. President,” said Special Agent Andrea Price-O’Day, Jack’s principal agent. She had a two-plus-year-old boy of her own, named Conor, and a handful he was, Jack knew. Conor’s dad was Patrick O’Day, Major Case Inspector for FBI Director Dan Murray, another of Jack’s government appointments that Kealty couldn’t mess with, because the FBI wasn’t allowed to be a political football—or least it wasn’t supposed to be.

  “How’s the little one?”

  “Just fine. Not quite sure about the potty yet, though. He cries when he sees it.”

  Jack laughed. “Jack was the same way. Arnie is coming down Tuesday, about ten in the morning,” he told her. “Dinner, then overnight.”

  “Well, we don’t have to check him out very thoroughly,” Andrea replied. But they’d still run his Social Security number through the National Crime Information Computer, just to be sure. The Secret Service trusted few—even in its own ranks, since Aref Raman had gone bad. That had caused a major bellyache for the Service. But her own husband had helped to settle that one down, and Raman would be in the Florence, Colorado, federal prison for a long, long time. The grimmest of all federal penitentiaries, Florence was as max as a maximum-security prison got, dug as it was into hard bedrock and entirely belowground. The guests of Florence mostly saw sunlight on black-and-white TV.

  Ryan walked back into the kitchen. He could have asked more. The Service kept lots of secrets. He could have gotten an answer, however, because he, too, had been a sitting President, but that was something he just didn’t want to do.

  And he still had work to do. So he poured another cup of coffee and headed off to his library to work on Chapter 48, mod 2. George Winston and the Tax System. It had worked well, until Kealty decided that some people weren’t paying “their fair share.” Kealty, of course, was the sole and final arbiter on what was “fair.”

  11

  THE XITS THIS MORNING contained an encrypted intercept for which The Campus had the key. The content could hardly have been more bland, so much so that encryption was superfluous. Somebody’s cousin had delivered a baby girl. Had to be plain text code. “The chair is against the wall” had been such a phrase used in World War Two to alert the French resistance to do something to the occupying German Army. “Jean has a long mustache” had told them that the D-day invasion was about to take place, as did “Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor.”

  So what does this mean? Jack asked himself. Maybe somebody had just had a baby, and a girl, which was not an event of great moment to the Arab culture. Or maybe there had been a big (or small) money transfer, which was how they tried to keep track of the opposition’s activities. The Campus had eliminated those who made such money moves. One had been named Uda Bin Sali, and he’d died in London from the same pen that Jack had used in Rome to take down MoHa, who, he’d learned, had been a very bad boy.

  Something caught Jack’s eye. Huh. The e-mail’s distribution contained an inordinate number of French addresses. Something brewing there? he wondered.

  You grasping at straws again?” Rick Bell asked Jack ten minutes later. Like Jack, The Campus’s chief of analysis felt on its face the birth announcement too amorphous to get excited about.

  “What else do you do in a hay field?” Jack replied. “Aside from the baby, there’re some bank transfers, but the guys downstairs are into those.”

  “Big ones?”

  Ryan shook his head. “No, the whole bunch doesn’t total up to half a million euros. Housekeeping money. They’ve set up a new collection of credit cards. So no airline tickets to track. The Bureau is into that anyway, insofar as they can without our cipher-key collection.”

  “And that won’t last,” Bell opined. “Can’t be much longer before they change their encryption systems, and we’ll have to start over. The best we can hope for is they won’t do that before we break something worthwhile. Nothing else?”

  “Only questions, like where is Big Bird hiding? Not a whiff on that one.”

  “NSA has been watching every phone system in the world. To the point that it’s taxing their computers. They want to buy two new mainframes from Sun Microsystems. The appropriation is going through this week. The weenies out in California are already assembling the boxes.”

  “Does NSA ever get shot down or underfunded?” Ryan wondered.

  “Not in my lifetime,” Bell reported. “Just so they fill out the forms right and grovel properly in front of the congressional committees.”

  The NSA always got what it wanted, Jack knew. But not so the CIA. But the NSA was more trusted and kept a lower profile. Except for Trailblazer, that was. Not long after 9/11, the NSA realized its SIGINT intercept technology was woefully inadequate to handle the volume of traffic it was trying to not only digest but disseminate, so a company out in San Diego, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), was hired to upgrade Fort Meade’s systems. The twenty-six-month, $280 million project called Trailblazer went nowhere. SAIC was then awarded a $360 million contract for Trailblazer’s successor. The waste of money and time had sent heads rolling at the NSA and damaged its otherwise untarnished image on Capitol Hill. Execute Locus, though still on track, was not yet out of the beta stage, so the NSA was supplementing its intercept computers with Sun mainframes, which, though powerful in their own right, were tantamount to sandbags holding back a tsunami. Worse still, by the time Execute Locus comes online it will have already started down the hill toward obsolescence, thanks mainly to IBM’s übercomputer, Sequoia.

  As tech-saavy as Jack liked to think himself, Sequoia’s capacity was mind-boggling. Faster than the world’s top five hundred supercomputers combined, Sequoia could perform twenty quadrillion mathematical processes per second, a statistic that could be grasped only by reductive comparison: If each of the 6.7 billion people on earth was armed with a calculator and worked together on a calculation twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, it would take more than three centuries to do what Sequoia will do in one hour. On the downside, Sequoia wasn’t quite ready for prime time; at last report it was being housed in ninety-six refrigerators covering more than three thousand square feet.

  As big as a good-sized two-story house, Jack thought. Then: Wonder if they’re giving tours?

  Bell now asked, “So what tells you this is important?”

  “Why encrypt a birth announcement?” Ryan replied. “And we cracked it on their in-house key. Okay, maybe bad guys have kids in their families, but no name on the mother, the father, or the kid. It’s too clinical.”

  “True,” Bell replied.

  “One more thing: There’s a new addressee on the distribution list, and he’s using a different ISP. Might be worth a look. Maybe he’s not as careful with his backstops and financials as the others.”

  So far all of their “French Connection” e-mails had come from cloaked Internet service providers or fire-and-forget e-mail accounts with nothing but a ghost at the other end, and since all originated from overseas providers, The Campus had little way of prying back the floorboard. If the French were in the loop, they’d simply walk into the Internet service provider and pull up his account information. They’d at least get his credit card number, and from that they’d get the address the credit card bill goes to every month, unless it was a falsely backstopped card, but even then they’d be able to launch a tracking operation and try to start gathering pieces. Back to the jigsaw theory:
A lot of little pieces end up painting a big picture. With luck.

  “Might take some hacking, but we might be able to grab enough to start a line on this guy.”

  “Worth a try,” Bell agreed. “Run with it.”

  For his part, the birth announcement had come as a happy surprise to Ibrahim. Hidden within the seemingly innocuous language were three messages: His part of Lotus was moving to the next phase, communication protocols were changing, and a courier was en route.

  It was late afternoon in Paris, and the city bustled with rush-hour traffic. The weather was pleasant. Tourists were coming back—from America, to the commercial pleasure and philosophical discontent of Parisians, to taste the food and wine, and see what sights there were. So many came by train from London now, but you couldn’t tell from their clothing. The taxi drivers hustled their fares around, giving informal lessons on pronunciation along the way and grumbling at the size of their tips—at least Americans understood about tipping, while most Europeans did not.

  Ibrahim Salih al-Adel was fully acclimated. His French was sufficiently perfect that Parisians had trouble fixing his accent, and he walked about like any other local, not gawping about like a monkey in the zoo. It was, oddly, the women who most offended him. So proudly they pranced about in their fashionable clothes, often with lovely and expensive leather bags dangling from their hands but usually with comfortable walking shoes, because people walked here more often than they rode. The better to parade their pride, he thought.

  He’d had a routine day at work, mostly selling movie videos and DVDs, mainly of American films dubbed in French or with subtitles—which allowed his business clients to try out the English skills they’d learned in school. (Much as the French disdained America, a movie was a movie, and the French loved the cinema more than most nationalities.)