by Tom Clancy
Jack asked, “Are you there, President Wei?”
“I do not lead the military,” he responded.
“You lead the nation!”
“Nevertheless. My control is . . . It is not the same as in your country.”
“Your control over Su is the only chance to save your country from a war you cannot win.”
There was another long pause; this time, it was nearly a minute long. Ryan’s national security team sat on the sofas in front of him, but they were not listening in to the conversation. It was being recorded, and they could listen after. Jack looked at them and they back at him, clearly wondering what was going on.
Finally Wei responded: “Please understand, Mr. President. I will have to discuss your concerns directly with Chairman Su. I would prefer to do this in person, but I will not see him again until he comes to the Politburo meeting Thursday morning, traveling with his entourage from the PLA base in Baoding. He will speak to the Standing Committee, and I will talk to him afterward about this conversation and other matters.”
Ryan did not answer for several seconds. Finally he said, “I do understand, Mr. President. We will speak again.”
“Thank you.”
Ryan hung up the phone, then looked at the group in front of him. “Can I have a moment alone with Director Foley, Secretary Burgess, and Director Canfield?”
Everyone else filed out of the room. Ryan stood, but he did not step around his desk. There was an unmistakable look of astonishment on his face.
As soon as the door shut he said, “That was something I can’t say I expected.”
“What’s that?” Canfield asked.
Ryan shook his head. He was still in a state of shock. “I am reasonably certain that President Wei just purposefully fed me intelligence.”
“What kind of intelligence?”
“The kind that he wants me to use to assassinate Chairman Su.”
The two men and one woman standing in front of the President adopted the same bewildered expressions he wore.
President Jack Ryan sighed. “It’s a damn shame we don’t have any assets to exploit this opportunity.”
—
Gerry Hendley, Sam Granger, and Rick Bell sat in Gerry’s office on the ninth floor of Hendley Associates just after eleven o’clock in the evening. The three men had been here all evening, waiting for updates from Ding Chavez and the others in Beijing. Ding had checked in just a few minutes earlier to say his first impression of the rebels was that they were not ready for prime time, but he would reserve judgment for a couple of days while he, Dom, and Sam evaluated their capabilities.
The three senior executives were about to call it a night when Gerry Hendley’s mobile phone rang.
“Hendley.”
“Hi, Gerry. Mary Pat Foley here.”
“Hello, Mary Pat. Or should I say Mrs. Director?”
“You got it right the first time. I’m sorry to call you so late. Did I wake you?”
“No. Actually I’m at the office.”
“Good. There has been a new development I wanted to talk to you about.”
—
The home phone rang at the Emmitsburg, Maryland, home of John Clark. Clark and his wife, Sandy, were in bed, and Melanie Kraft was in a guest bedroom, sitting wide awake.
She had spent the day putting ice on her bruised eye and cheekbone and doing her best to pick the brain of John Clark about just what the hell Jack was doing. John was the wrong man to try to pull secrets out of, Melanie learned quickly enough, but he and his wife were nice enough, and they both seemed genuinely concerned about Melanie’s well-being, so she decided to wait on Jack to return before seeking answers to her many questions.
Within five minutes of the ringing phone, Clark tapped on her door.
“I’m awake,” she said.
John stepped in. “How are you feeling?”
“A little sore, but better than I would have been if you hadn’t made me keep the ice on my face, I’m sure.”
John said, “I have to go to Hendley Associates. Something critical has come up. I hate to do this to you, but Jack made me promise to stay with you at all times till he gets back.”
“You want me to go with you?”
“We’ve got a couple of beds there for data guys who work the night shift. It’s not the Ritz, but neither is this.”
Melanie slid out of the bed. “I finally get to see the mysterious Hendley Associates? Trust me, I don’t plan on sleeping.”
Clark smiled. “Not so fast, young lady. You’ll get to see the lobby, an elevator, and a hallway or two. You’ll have to wait for Jack to come back to get the VIP tour.”
Melanie sighed while putting on her shoes. “Yeah, like that will happen. Okay, Mr. Clark. If you promise to not treat me like a prisoner, I promise to not snoop around your office.”
Clark held the door open for her as she passed. “It’s a deal.”
SIXTY-EIGHT
Gavin sat in his office at one in the morning. On his desk in front of him was a technical manual from Microsoft that he’d been reading on and off for the entire day. It was not uncommon for him to work this late, and he imagined he’d be pulling a long string of all-nighters over the next few days while he rebuilt his system. He’d sent most of his staff home, but a couple of programmers were still somewhere on the floor; he’d heard them talking a few minutes earlier.
Since The Campus had men in the field he also knew there would be several guys up in Analysis, although there wasn’t a hell of a lot they could do but doodle on notepads without a computer network to assist them.
Biery felt like he’d let everyone down by allowing the virus onto his system. He worried about Ding, Sam, and Dom in Beijing, and even Ryan in Hong Kong, and he concentrated on getting back online as quickly as possible.
Right now it looked like they would not be able to go live for at least another week.
The phone rang on Biery’s desk.
“Hey, Gav, it’s Granger. Gerry and I are up here in his office, waiting for word from Chavez. We figured you might be down there.”
“Yeah. Lots to do.”
“Understood. Listen, John Clark is coming into the office in just a few minutes. He is going to back up Chavez and the others on a new operation that is brewing in Beijing.”
“Good. Nice to know he’s back with us, even if it’s just temporary.”
“I was wondering if you could come up when he gets here and give him a ten-minute review of what happened in Hong Kong. It will help get him back in the loop.”
“I’d be glad to. I’ll be here all night, all day tomorrow. I can spare a little time.”
“Don’t burn yourself out, Gavin. Nothing that happened with that virus was your fault. I don’t need you to fall on your sword over this.”
Gavin snorted a little. “Should have caught it, Sam. Simple as that.”
Granger said, “Look. All we can tell you is that we support you. Gerry and I both think you’re doing a hell of a job.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
“Try and get some sleep tonight. You’re no good to anyone if you can’t function.”
“Okay. I’ll catch some z’s on my sofa as soon as I give Clark his briefing.”
“Good deal. I’ll call you when he gets here.”
Gavin hung up the phone, reached for his coffee, and then, without warning, all the power in his office went off.
Sitting in the black, he looked out into the hallway.
“Dammit!” he shouted. The lights seemed to be out over the entire building.
“Son of a bitch!”
—
In the lobby of Hendley Associates, night security manager Wayne Reese looked out the glass doorway to the parking lot and saw the Baltimore Ga
s and Electric truck pull up to the door.
Reese reached down to the Beretta pistol on his hip, and he thumbed the leather strap that secured it in the holster. This did not feel right.
One man walked up to the front door and held his ID badge up. Reese stepped up to the door, shone his flashlight on the badge, and determined that it looked legitimate. He turned the bolt lock and opened the door slightly.
“You guys sure are on the ball tonight. The power hasn’t been off three—”
Reese saw the black handgun appear from the man’s tool belt, and he knew he’d made a grave error. With all the speed he could muster he slammed the glass door, but a single round barked from the suppressed Five-seveN pistol, shot through the narrow opening, and hit him in the solar plexus, knocking him back onto the floor.
As Reese lay on his back, he tried to lift his head to see his murderer. The Asian man pushed through the unlocked door and stepped up to him. Behind him, several more men appeared out of the back of the van.
The shooter stood over Reese, raised his pistol to the wounded man’s forehead, and then Wayne Reese’s world went black.
—
Crane entered the building just as Quail shot the security officer a second time. Crane and five of his men shouldered their Steyr TMP machine pistols and took the stairs, leaving Grouse on the ground floor to watch the parking lot. One at the entrance was not optimal, but Grouse had a headset that kept him in constant touch with the rest of the operators, so he would serve more as a tripwire if there were any threats downstairs.
Crane knew tonight would be taxing on his small force. He had lost Wigeon this morning during the attempted assassination of Melanie Kraft on the Rock Creek Parkway. Additionally, Grouse had been shot in the left thigh. He should have been out of action with this injury, but Crane had ordered him to come on this operation tonight, principally because the Hendley Associates building was quite large, and therefore Crane needed all the men he could muster.
The building was nine stories tall, impossible to clear and search with this force, but Crane knew from Ryan’s phone intercepts and Center’s research on the Hendley Associates network before it went dark the previous day that the second floor was IT, the third floor was the intelligence analyst staff, and the ninth floor was the location of the executive offices.
At the second-floor exit, three men peeled off of the six-man tactical train. They would search here and then on the third floor, while Crane and two others rushed directly up to the top floor.
Quail, Snipe, and Stint moved up the darkened second-floor hallway with their silenced machine pistols at the high ready.
A security officer walking with a flashlight in his hand came out of a room backward, locking the door behind him, and then he turned to head back to the stairwell. Stint shot the man four times, killing him instantly.
In a large office toward the back of the IT department, the three Chinese operators found a heavyset white man in his fifties at his desk. His office door said he was Gavin Biery, the director of information technology.
The men had been ordered to take everyone who did not offer resistance alive and keep them alive until the network system could be rebooted and the drives reformatted. There were references to Center, Tong, Zha, and several of the operations that linked Center to the Chinese PLA and MSS, and these needed to be scrubbed from the hard drives of the servers before the company became front-page news after a mass murder there.
The data storage of Hendley Associates, it had been determined, was too large and well dispersed to simply blow up. Instead they needed to wipe the memory of the entire operation clean, and for that they would need employees of the company so they could find out passwords and the location of any offsite data storage.
After Biery was tied up they found two more IT men on the second floor, and then they headed up to the Analysis department on the third floor.
—
Crane, Gull, and Duck left the stairway on the ninth floor, and they too encountered a security officer in the hallway. This man recognized the threat immediately, however, and he moved laterally while drawing his Beretta pistol. Crane and Duck both got shots off but missed; then the guard fired two rounds up the hall, missing just high both times.
A second burst from Crane’s Steyr TMP caught the guard in the lower torso, sending him spinning to the ground dead.
Without a word between them, the three Chinese men began sprinting up the hall.
—
What in God’s name was that?” exclaimed Gerry Hendley. He and Sam Granger were in the conference room, trying to work under dim emergency lights and lighting from a sliver of moon through the large windows.
Granger leapt to his feet and rushed to a small broom closet in the corner. “Gunfire,” he said gravely. He opened the broom closet and retrieved a Colt M16 select fire rifle. It was loaded and kept here in case of emergency.
Granger had not fired a rifle in many years, but he deftly pulled back the charging handle, motioned for Hendley to stay right where he was, and then swung out into the hall with the gun raised in front of him.
Crane saw the man appear at the end of the hall some fifty feet away. The American saw Crane and his two operators at the same time, and he fired a short burst from his rifle. Crane dove for cover behind a planter by the elevator but then immediately rolled back out on the floor and fired an entire magazine from his machine pistol.
Sam Granger’s knees buckled as the rounds tore into his chest. An involuntary muscle spasm in his arm and hand caused him to squeeze off another three-round burst as he fell backward into the conference room.
Crane looked back over his shoulder; Duck had been shot through the forehead by the suited man’s M16 rifle. He now lay flat on his back, a pool of blood growing in the dark hall.
Gull and Crane rushed forward, leapt over the dead American, and entered the conference room. There, an older man in a tie and shirtsleeves stood near a table. Crane recognized him from a picture he’d been sent by Center. He was Gerry Hendley, director of Hendley Associates.
“Put your hands up,” Crane said, and Gull rushed in, knocked the old man onto his desk, and secured his hands behind his back.
SIXTY-NINE
Crane had his men bring everyone into the conference room on the second floor. There were nine individuals other than the three security officers and one executive they killed during the initial attack, and they were all bound at the wrists behind their backs and seated in chairs by the wall.
Crane called his controller and had the power restored to the building, and then he addressed the group in a monotone and heavily accented voice.
“We will bring your computer network back online. We need to do this quickly. I will require your passwords to the network and a description of each of your duties and access levels. There are many of you here; I do not need you all.” With the same monotone voice he said, “If you refuse to help, you will be shot.”
Gerry Hendley spoke up: “If you let everyone else go, I will give you whatever you want.”
Crane had been facing away, but he turned back to Hendley. “No talking.” He lifted his machine pistol, pointed it at Hendley’s forehead. He held it there for a moment.
His earpiece chirped. He put his hand to his ear and turned away. “Ni shuo shen me?” What did you say?
—
In the lobby, Grouse knelt down behind the reception desk and repeated himself softly: “I said an old man and a girl are coming to the front of the building.”
Crane replied, “Don’t let them in.”
“He has a key. I see it in his hand.”
“Okay. Let them in then, and take them. Hold them down there until we have what we need here, in case they have passwords we require.”
“Understood.”
“Do you need me to send some
one else down with you?”
Grouse winced with a fresh throb of pain in his wounded leg, but he quickly said, “Of course not. It’s an old man and a girl.”
John Clark and Melanie Kraft entered Hendley Associates’ lobby, and immediately Grouse stood up behind the reception desk and pointed his Steyr machine pistol at them. He had them put their hands on their heads and turn back to the wall; then he limped over to them and frisked them with one hand while keeping the weapon trained on their heads.
He found a SIG Sauer pistol on the old man, which was a surprise. He pulled it out of a shoulder holster and stuck it in his waistband. On the woman he found no weapons, but he relieved her of her purse. He then had them stand against the wall in the elevator lobby with their hands on their heads.
—
Melanie Kraft fought waves of panic as she stood there, her fingers laced together on top of her brunette hair. She looked over at Mr. Clark; he was doing the same, but his eyes were a flurry of activity.
She whispered, “What should we do?”
Clark looked over to her. Before he said anything, the Chinese man said, “No talking!”
Melanie leaned back against the wall, felt a quiver in her legs.
The armed man divided his attention between the two of them and the front of the building.
Melanie regarded the gunman now, and she saw no feeling, no emotion. He spoke into his headset once or twice, but other than that he looked and acted almost like a robot.
Except his limp. It was clear that he was having trouble with one of his legs.
Now Melanie’s terrified eyes darted back to John, hoping to see some sign that he had a plan. But she saw instead that he looked different; he had changed in the past few seconds, his face had reddened, and his eyes seemed to bulge in their sockets.
“John?”
“No talking!” the man said again, but Melanie was not paying attention to him. All her focus was on John Clark, because it was apparent that something was wrong.