by Tom Clancy
“No problem,” Ryan said. “I can keep it where she can’t reach it—we got a big closet, and I can keep them there, seven feet off the floor. Can I practice with a big-bore handgun in here?”
The Sergeant Major laughed. “That backstop we got used to be the armor plate on a heavy cruiser. Mainly we use .22’s in here, but my guards practice with .45’s all the time. Sounds to me like you know shotgunnin’ pretty good. Once you have that skill with pistol too, you’ll be able to do it with any gun you pick up. Trust me, sir, this is what I do for a living.”
“When do you want me here?”
“Say about four, every afternoon?”
Ryan nodded. “Okay.”
“About your wife—look. just bring her over some Saturday maybe. I’ll sit her down and talk to her about guns. Lots of women, they’re just afraid of the noise—and there’s all that crap on TV. If nothing else, we’ll get her used to shotgunning. You say she’s a doc, so she’s gotta be pretty smart. Hell, maybe she’ll like it. You’d be surprised how many of the gals I teach really get into it.”
Ryan shook his head. Cathy had never once touched his shotgun, and whenever he cleaned it, kept Sally out of the room. Jack hadn’t thought much about it, and hadn’t minded having Sally out of the way. Little kids and firearms were not a happy mixture. At home he usually had the Remington disassembled and the ammunition locked away in the basement. How would Cathy react to having a loaded gun in the house?
What if you start carrying a gun around? How will she react to that? What if the bad guys are interested in going after them, too ... ?
“I know what you’re thinkin’, Lieutenant,” Breckenridge said. “Hey, the Commander said the FBI didn’t think any of this crap was gonna happen, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So what you’re doin’ is buyin’ insurance, okay?”
“He said that, too,” Ryan replied.
“Look—we get intel reports here, sir. Yeah, that’s right. Ever since those bike bums broke in, we get stuff from the cops and the FBI, and from some other places—even the Coast Guard. Some of their guys come here for firearms training, ‘cause of the drug stuff they got ’em doing now. I’ll keep an ear out, too,” Breckenridge assured him.
Information—it’s all a battle for information. You have to know what’s happening if you’re going to do anything about it. Jack turned back to look at Jackson while he made a decision that he’d been trying to avoid ever since he got back from England. He still had the number in his office.
“And if they tell you those bike bums are coming back?” Ryan asked with a smile.
“They’ll wish they didn’t,” the Sergeant Major said seriously. “This is a U.S. Navy reservation, guarded by the United States Marine Corps.”
And that’s the name of that tune, Ryan thought. “Well, thanks, Gunny. I’ll get out of your way.”
Breckenridge saw them to the door. “Sixteen hundred tomorrow, Lieutenant. How about you, Commander Jackson?”
“I’ll stick to missiles and cannons, Gunny. Safer that way. G’night.”
“Good night, sir.”
Robby walked Jack back to his office. They had to pass on the daily drinks. Jackson had to do some shopping on the way home. After his friend left, Jack stared at his telephone for several minutes. Somehow he’d managed to avoid doing this for several weeks despite his wish to track down information on the ULA. But it wasn’t just curiosity anymore. Ryan flipped open his telephone book and turned to the “G” page. He was able to call the D.C. area direct, though his finger hesitated before it jabbed down on each button.
“This is Mrs. Cummings,” a voice answered after the first ring. Jack took a deep breath.
“Hello, Nancy, this is Doctor Ryan. Is the boss in?”
“Let me check. Can you hold for a second?”
“Yes. ”
They didn’t have one of the new musical hold buttons there, Ryan noted. There was just the muted chirp of electronic noise for him to listen to. Am I doing the right thing? he wondered. He admitted to himself that he didn’t know.
“Jack?” a familiar voice said.
“Hello, Admiral.”
“How’s the family?”
“Fine, thank you, sir.”
“They came through all the excitement all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I understand that your wife’s expecting another baby. Congratulations. ”
And how did you know that, Admiral? Ryan did not ask. He didn’t have to. The DDI was supposed to know everything, and there were at least a million ways he might have found out.
“Thank you, sir.”
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Admiral, I ...” Jack hesitated. “I want to look into this ULA bunch.”
“Yeah, I thought you might. I have here on my desk a report from the FBI’s terrorism unit about them, and we’ve been coordinating lately with the SIS. I’d like to see you back here, Jack. Maybe even on a more permanent basis. Have you thought our offer over any more since we last spoke?” Greer inquired innocently.
“Yes, sir, I have, but ... well, I am committed to the end of the school year.” Jack temporized. He didn’t want to have to face that particular question. If forced, he’d just say no, and that would kill his chance to get into Langley.
“I understand. Take your time. When do you want to come over?”
Why are you making it so easy? “Could I come over tomorrow morning? My first class isn’t until two in the afternoon.”
“No problem. Be at the main gate at eight in the morning. They’ll be waiting for you. See ya.”
“Goodbye, sir.” Jack hung up.
Well, that was easy. Too easy, Jack thought. What’s he up to? Ryan dismissed the thought. He wanted to look at what CIA had. They might have stuff the FBI didn’t; at the least he’d get a look at more data than he had now, and Jack wanted to do that.
Nevertheless the drive home was a troubled one. Jack watched his rearview mirror after remembering that he’d left the Academy the same way he always did. The hell of it was, he did see familiar cars. That was a problem with making your commute about the same time every day. There were at least twenty cars that he had learned to recognize. There was someone’s secretary driving her Camaro Z-28. She had to be a secretary. She was dressed too well to be anything else. Then there was the young lawyer in his BMW—the car made him a lawyer, Ryan thought, wondering how he had ever assigned tags to his fellow commuters. What if a new one shows up? he wondered. Will you be able to tell which one is a terrorist? Fat chance, he knew. Miller, for all the danger that lay on his face, would look ordinary enough with a jacket and tie, just another state employee fighting his way up Route 2 into Annapolis....
“Paranoid, all this is paranoid,” Ryan murmured to himself. Pretty soon he’d check the rear seat in his car before he got in, to see if someone might be lurking back there like on TV, with a pistol or garrote! He wondered if the whole thing might be a stupid, paranoid waste of time. What if Dan Murray just had a bug up his ass or was simply being cautious? The Bureau probably taught its men to be cautious on these things, he was sure. Do I scare Cathy over this? What if that’s all there is to it?
What if it’s not?
That’s why I’m going to go to Langley tomorrow, Ryan answered himself.
They sent Sally to bed at 8:30, dressed in her bunny-rabbit sleeper, the flannel pajamas with feet that keep kids warm through the night. She was getting a little old for that, Jack thought, but his wife insisted on them, since their daughter had a habit of kicking the blankets on the floor in the middle of the night.
“How was work today?” his wife asked.
“The mids gave me a medal,” he said, and explained on for a few minutes. Finally he pulled the Order of the Purple Target out of his briefcase. Cathy found it amusing. The smiling stopped when he related the visit from Mr. Shaw of the FBI. Jack ran through the information, careful to include everything the agent ha
d said.
“So, he doesn’t really think it’ll be a problem?” she asked hopefully.
“We can’t ignore it.”
Cathy turned away for a moment. She didn’t know what to make of this new information. Of course, her husband thought. Neither do I.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked finally.
“For one thing I’m going to call an alarm company and have the house wired. Next, I’ve already put my shotgun back together, and it’s loaded—”
“No, Jack, not in this house, not with Sally around,” Cathy said at once.
“It’s on the top shelf in my closet. It’s loaded, but it doesn’t have a round chambered. She can’t possibly get to it, not even with a stool to stand on. It stays loaded, Cathy. I’m also going to start practicing some with it, and maybe get a pistol, too. And”—he hesitated—“I want you to start shooting, too.”
“No! I’m a doctor, Jack. I don’t use guns.”
“They don’t bite,” Jack said patiently. “I just want you to meet a guy I know who teaches women to shoot. Just meet the guy. ”
“No.” Cathy was adamant. Jack took a deep breath. It would take an hour to persuade her, that was the usual time required for her common sense to overcome her prejudices. The problem was, he didn’t want to spend an hour on the subject right now.
“So you’re going to call the alarm company tomorrow morning?” she asked.
“I have to go somewhere.”
“Where? You don’t have any classes until after lunch.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “I’m going over to Langley.”
“What’s at Langley?”
“The CIA,” Jack answered simply.
“What?”
“Remember last summer? I got that consulting money from Mitre Corporation?”
“Yeah.”
“All the work was at CIA headquarters.”
“But—you said over in England that you never—”
“That’s where the checks came from. That’s who I was working for. But CIA was where I was working at.”
“You lied?” Cathy was astounded. “You lied in a courtroom?”
“No. I said that I was never employed by CIA, and I wasn’t.”
“But you never told me.”
“You didn’t need to know,” Jack replied. I knew this wasn’t a good idea....
“I’m your wife, dammit! What were you doing there?”
“I was part of a team of academics. Every few years they bring in outsiders to look at some of their data, just as sort of a check on the regular people who work there. I’m not a spy or anything. I did all the work sitting at a little desk in a little room on the third floor. I wrote a report, and that was that.” There was no sense in explaining the rest to her.
“What was the report about?”
“I can’t say.”
“Jack!” She was really mad now.
“Look, babe, I signed an agreement that I would never discuss the work with anybody who wasn’t cleared—I gave my word, Cathy.” That calmed her down a bit. She knew that her husband was a real stickler for keeping his word. It was actually one of the things she loved about him. It annoyed her that he used this as a defense, but she knew that it was a wall she couldn’t breach. She tried another tack.
“So why are you going back?”
“I want to see some information they have. You ought to be able to figure out what that information is.”
“About these ULA people, then.”
“Well, let’s just say that I’m not worried about the Chinese right now.”
“You really are worried about them, aren’t you?” She was starting to worry, finally.
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“But why? You said the FBI said they weren’t—”
“I don’t know—hell, yes, I do know. It’s that Miller bastard, the one at the trial. He wants to kill me.” Ryan looked down at the floor. It was the first time he’d said it aloud.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I saw his face, Cathy. I saw it, and I’m scared—not just for me.”
“But Sally and I—”
“Do you really think he cares about that?” Ryan snapped angrily. “These bastards kill people they don’t even know. They almost do it for fun. They want to change the world into something they like, and they don’t give a damn who’s in the way. They just don’t care.”
“So why go to the CIA? Can they protect you—us—I mean....”
“I want a better feel for what these guys are all about.”
“But the FBI knows that, don’t they?”
“I want to see the information for myself. I did pretty good when I worked there,” Jack explained. “They even asked me to, well, to take a permanent position there. I turned them down.”
“You never told me any of this,” Cathy grumped.
“You know now.” Jack went on for a few minutes, explaining what Shaw had told him. Cathy would have to be careful driving to and from work. She finally started smiling again. She drove a six-cylinder bomb of a Porsche 911. Why she never got a speeding ticket was always a source of wonderment to her husband. Probably her looks didn’t hurt, and maybe she flashed her Hopkins ID card, with a story that she was heading to emergency surgery. However she did it, she was in a car with a top speed of over a hundred twenty miles per hour and the maneuverability of a jackrabbit. She’d been driving Porsches since her sixteenth birthday, and Jack admitted to himself that she knew how to make the little green sports car streak down a country road—enough to make him hold on pretty tight. This, Ryan told himself, was probably a better defense than carrying a gun.
“So, you think you can remember to do that?”
“Do I really have to?”
“I’m sorry I got us into this. I never—I never knew that anything like this would happen. Maybe I just should have stayed put.”
Cathy ran her hand across his neck. “You can’t change it now. Maybe they’re wrong. Like you said, probably they’re just acting paranoid. ”
“Yeah.”
12
Homecoming
Ryan left home well before seven. First he drove to U.S. Route 50 and headed west toward D.C. The road was crowded, as usual, with the early morning commuters heading to the federal agencies that had transformed the District of Columbia from a picturesque plot of real estate into a pseudo-city of transients. He got off onto I-495, the beltway that surrounds the town, heading north through even thicker traffic whose more congested spots were reported on by a radio station’s helicopter. It was nice to know why the traffic was moving at fifteen miles per hour on a road designed for seventy.
He wondered if Cathy was doing what she was supposed to do. The problem was that there weren’t that many roads for her to use to get to Baltimore. The nursery school that Sally attended was on Ritchie Highway, and that precluded use of the only direct alternate route. On the other hand, Ritchie Highway was always a crowded and fast-moving road, and intercepting her wouldn’t be easy there. In Baltimore itself, she had a wide choice of routes into Hopkins, and she promised to switch them around. Ryan looked out at the traffic in front of him and swore a silent curse. Despite what he’d told Cathy, he didn’t worry overly much about his family. He was the one who’d gotten in the way of the terrorists, and if their motivation was really personal, then he was the only target. Maybe. Finally he crossed the Potomac River and got on the George Washington Parkway. Fifteen minutes later he took the CIA exit.
He stopped his Rabbit at the guard post. A uniformed security officer came out and asked his name, though he’d already checked Ryan’s license plate against a computer-generated list on his clipboard. Ryan handed his driver’s license to the guard, who scrupulously checked the photograph against Jack’s face before giving him a pass.
“Sir, the visitors’ parking lot is to the left, then the second right—”
“Thanks, I’ve been here before.”
“Very well,
sir.” The guard waved him on.
The trees were bare. CIA headquarters was built behind the first rank of hills overlooking the Potomac Valley, in what had once been a lush forest. Most of the trees remained, to keep people from seeing the building. Jack took the first left and drove uphill on a curving road. The visitor parking lot was also attended by a guard—this one was a woman—who waved him to an open slot and made another check of Ryan before directing him toward the canopied main entrance. To his right was “the Bubble,” an igloo-shaped theater that was connected to the building by a tunnel. He’d once delivered a talk there, a paper on naval strategy. Before him, the CIA building was a seven-story structure of white stone, or maybe prestressed concrete. He’d never checked that closely. As soon as he got inside, the ambience of spook-central hit him like a club. He saw eight security officers, all in civilian clothes now, their jackets unbuttoned to suggest the presence of sidearms. What they really carried was radios, but Jack was sure that men with guns were only a few feet away. The walls had cameras that fed into some central monitoring room—Ryan didn’t know where that was; in fact, the only parts of the building he actually knew were the path to his erstwhile cubbyhole of an office, from there to the men’s room, and the route to the cafeteria. He’d been to the top floor several times, but each time he’d been escorted since his security pass didn’t clear him for that level.
“Doctor Ryan.” A man approached. He looked vaguely familiar, but Jack couldn’t put a name on the face. “I’m Marty Cantor—I work upstairs.”