by Tom Clancy
Ryan forwarded that e-mail to Tony Wills, the analyst who worked in the cubicle next to Jack’s. Tony would work on ID’ing the subject. For now, Jack knew he needed to concentrate on the other team in the field, John Clark and Domingo Chavez.
Ding and John were in Europe at the moment, in Frankfurt, and they were mulling over their options. They’d spent the last two days preparing a surveillance operation to monitor an Al-Qaeda banker who would be heading into Luxembourg for some meetings, but the man canceled his trip from Islamabad at the last minute. The men were all dressed up with no place to go, so Jack decided he’d spend some time this morning digging deeper into the background of the European bankers the URC man planned on meeting with, in the hopes of getting a fresh lead for his colleagues in Europe to check out before they packed up and came home.
For this reason, Jack had rolled in to work much earlier than usual. He did not want them to return with nothing to show for their trip; it was his responsibility to feed them the intel they needed to find the bad guys, and he’d spend the next few hours trying to find them some bad guys.
He scanned through the XITS and a proprietary software program created by Gavin Biery, The Campus’s head of IT. Gavin’s catcher program searched data strings following the wishes of the analysts here at The Campus. It allowed them to filter out much of the intelligence that was not relevant to their current projects, and for Jack this software had been a godsend.
Ryan opened a series of files with clicks of his mouse. While he did this, he marveled at the number of tidbits of intelligence that were coming on a one-way street from U.S. allies these days.
It depressed him a little, not because he didn’t want America’s allies to share intel; rather, he was bothered because, these days, it was not a two-way street.
To most in the U.S. intelligence community, it was an outrageous scandal that President Edward Kealty and his political appointees in top intelligence posts had spent the past four years degrading the U.S.’s abilities to unilaterally spy on other countries. Kealty and his people had instead shifted the focus of intelligence gathering, relying not on America’s own robust spy services but instead relying on the intelligence services in foreign nations to provide information to the CIA. This was safer politically and diplomatically, Kealty correctly determined, although diminishing America’s spy services was unsafe in every other respect. The administration had all but precluded nonofficial cover operators from working in allied nations, and CIA clandestine-services people functioning in overseas embassies found themselves hamstrung with even more rules and regs, which made the already difficult dance of their work nearly impossible.
The Kealty administration had promised more “openness” and “transparency” in the clandestine CIA. Jack Junior’s father had written an op-ed in The Washington Post that suggested, in a manner that was still respectful to the office of the presidency, that Ed Kealty might want to look up the word clandestine in the dictionary.
Kealty’s intel appointees had eschewed human intelligence, instead stressing signals intelligence and electronic intelligence. Spy satellites and drones were far, far safer from a diplomatic standpoint, so these technologies were implemented more than ever. Needless to say, longtime CIA HUMINT specialists complained, quite rightly saying that although drones do a spectacular job showing us the top of an enemy’s head, they were inferior to human assets, who often could tell us what was inside the enemy’s head. But these HUMINT proponents were seen by many as dinosaurs, and their arguments were ignored.
Oh, well, Ryan thought. Dad will be in charge in a few months, he was sure of it, and he hoped most or all of the damage done could be undone during his father’s four-year term.
He pushed these thoughts out of his head so he could concentrate, and he took a long swig of quickly cooling coffee to help his still-sleepy mind focus. He kept clicking on the one-way overnight intelligence haul, paying special attention to Europe, as that was where Chavez and Clark were right now.
Wait. Here was something new. Ryan opened a file that sat in the inbox of an analyst at CIA’s OREA, the Office of Russian and European Analysis. Jack scanned it quickly, but something piqued his interest, so he went back and read it word for word. Apparently someone at DCRI, the French internal security arm, was letting a colleague at CIA know that they’d gotten a tip that a “person of interest” would be arriving at Charles de Gaulle that afternoon. Not a big deal in itself, and certainly not something that would have been pushed into one of Jack’s queries on its own, except for a name. The French intelligence source, not described in the message to CIA but likely some form of SIGINT or HUMINT, gave them reason to suspect the POI, a man only known to the French as Omar 8, was a recruiter for the Umayyad Revolutionary Council. DCRI heard he would touch down at Charles de Gaulle Airport at 1:10 that afternoon on an Air France flight from Tunis, and then he would be picked up by local associates and taken to an apartment in Seine-Saint-Denis, not far from the airport.
It looked to Jack like the Frenchies did not know much about this Omar 8. They suspected he was URC, but he wasn’t someone they were particularly interested in themselves. The CIA didn’t know much about him, either—so little that the analyst at OREA had not even replied yet or forwarded the message to Paris Station.
Neither the CIA nor the DCRI had much information on this POI, but Jack Ryan Jr. knew all about Omar 8. Ryan had gotten his intelligence straight from the horse’s mouth. Saif Rahman Yasin, aka the Emir, “gave up” Omar 8’s identity the previous spring, while under interrogation by The Campus.
Jack thought about that for a second. Interrogation? No … It was torture. No sense calling it anything else. Still, in this case anyway, it had been effective. Effective enough to know Omar 8’s real name was Hosni Iheb Rokki. Effective enough to know he was a thirty-three-year-old Tunisian, and effective enough to know he was not a recruiter for the URC. He was a lieutenant in their operational wing.
Jack immediately found it odd that this guy would be in France. Jack had read Rokki’s file many times, as he had read the files of all the known players in all the major terrorist organizations. The guy was not known to ever leave Yemen or Pakistan, except for rare trips home to Tunis. But here he was, flying into Paris under a known alias.
Weird.
Jack was excited by this nugget of intel. No, Hosni Rokki was no big fish in the world of international terror; these days, after the incredible degradation of the URC brought on by The Campus, there was only one URC operative who could be considered a serious player on an international level. That man’s name was Abdul bin Mohammed al Qahtani, and he was the operational wing commander of the organization.
Ryan would give anything for a shot at al Qahtani.
Rokki was no al Qahtani, but, wandering around France, so far from his normal area of operations, he was certainly interesting.
On a whim, Jack clicked open a folder on his desktop that contained a subfolder on each and every terrorist, suspected terrorist, cutout, etc. This was not the database used by the intelligence community at large. Virtually all federal agencies used the TIDE, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. Ryan had access to this massive file system, but he found it unwieldy and populated with way too many nobodies to be of any use to him. He referred to the TIDE when he was building his own folder, or Rogues Gallery, as he called it, but only for specific information on specific subjects. Most of the rest of the data for his Rogues Gallery was his own research, with odds and ends added on by his fellow analysts here at The Campus. It was a tremendous amount of work, but the effort itself had already paid dividends. As often as not, Jack found himself not needing to check his folder, because in the preparation of the files he had committed the vast majority of this information to memory, and he allowed himself to forget a tidbit of intel only once the man or woman had been confirmed dead by multiple reliable sources.
But since Rokki was not a rock star, Ryan did not remember all of the man’s specs, so he clicked
on Hosni Rokki’s folder, took a look at the pictures of his face, scrolled down the data sheet, and confirmed what he already knew. As far as any Western intelligence agency was aware, Rokki had never been to Europe.
Jack then opened the folder of Abdul bin Mohammed al Qahtani. There was only one picture on file; it was a few years old, but the resolution was good. Jack didn’t bother reading the data sheet on this guy, because Jack had written it himself. No Western intelligence agency had known anything about al Qahtani until after the capture and interrogation of the Emir. Once the man’s name and occupation passed the Emir’s lips, Ryan and the other analysts at The Campus went to work piecing together the history of the man. Jack himself took the lead on the project, and it was something he couldn’t take much pride in, since the information they’d managed to compile after a year of work was so goddamned thin.
Al Qahtani had always been camera- and media-shy, but he became incredibly elusive after the disappearance of the Emir. Once they knew who he was, he seemed to just drop off the map. He’d stayed in the dark for the past year, until last week, that is, when fellow Campus analyst Tony Wills uncovered a coded posting on a jihadist website claiming al Qahtani had called for reprisals against European nations—namely, France—for passing laws outlawing the wearing of burkas and head scarves.
The Campus distributed that intel—covertly, of course—back out to the intelligence community at large.
Ryan connected the dots, such as they were. The head of URC ops wants to strike out at France, and within a week a junior achiever in the organization shows up in country, apparently to meet with others.
Tenuous. Tenuous at best. Certainly not something that would normally make Ryan move operators to the area. Under normal circumstances, after this sighting he and his coworkers would just make a point of monitoring French intelligence feeds and CIA Paris Station traffic to see if anything else developed during Hosni Rokki’s European vacation.
But Ryan knew Clark and Chavez were in Frankfurt, just a quick hop away. Further, they were geared up and ready to go for a surveillance op.
Should he send them to Paris to try and learn something from Rokki’s movements or contacts? Yes. Hell, it was a no-brainer. A URC goon, out in the open? The Campus might as well find out what he was up to.
Jack grabbed his phone and pushed a two-digit code. It would be just after noon in Frankfurt.
While he waited for the connection to be made, Jack picked up his melting ice pack and held it to the back of his sore neck.
John Clark answered on the first ring. “Hey, John, it’s Jack. Something popped up. It’s not going to knock your socks off, but it looks semi-promising. How do you feel about taking a side trip to Paris?”
6
One hundred miles south of Denver, Colorado, on Highway 67, a 640-acre complex of buildings, towers, and fences sprawls across the flatlands in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains.
Its official name is the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, and its designation in the nomenclature of the Bureau of Prisons is United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, ADX Florence.
The Bureau of Prisons classifies its 114 prisons into five levels of security, and ADX Florence is alone at the top of this list. It is also in the Guinness World Records as the most secure prison in the world. It is America’s tightest “supermax” prison, where the most dangerous, the most deadly, and the hardest-to-hold prisoners are locked away.
Among the security measures are laser trip wires, motion detectors, night-vision-capable cameras, automatic doors and fences, guard dogs, and armed guards. No one has ever escaped from ADX Florence. It is unlikely anyone has even escaped a cell at ADX Florence.
But as difficult as it is to get out of “the Alcatraz of the Rockies,” it is perhaps equally hard to get in. There are fewer than 500 inmates at Florence, out of a total U.S. federal prison population of more than 210,000. Most regular federal prisoners could more easily find acceptance to Harvard than Florence.
Ninety percent of ADX Florence’s convicts are men who have been taken out of the population of other prisons because they pose a danger to others. The other ten percent are high-profile or special-risk inmates. They are housed, predominately, in general-population units that keep the inmates in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day but allow a level of nonphysical contact among the inmates and—via visits, mail, and phone calls—the outside world.
Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, is in the general-population D Unit, along with Oklahoma City conspirator Terry Nichols, and Olympic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph.
Mexican drug lord Francisco “El Titi” Arellano is housed at Florence in the general population as well, as is Lucchese mob family underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, and Robert Philip Hanssen, the FBI traitor who sold American secrets to the Soviet Union and then Russia for two decades.
The H Unit is more restrictive, more solitary, and here inmates face SAMs, Special Administrative Measures—Bureau of Prisons parlance for the rules for housing the especially difficult cases. In all of the federal prison system, there are fewer than sixty inmates under SAMs, and more than forty of them are terrorists. Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber, spent many years in H until moving into D after good behavior and high-profile lawsuits. Omar Abdel-Rahman, “the Blind Sheikh,” is in H Unit, as is Zacarias Moussaoui, “the twentieth hijacker.” Ramzi Yousef, the leader of the cell that detonated the bomb in the World Trade Center in 1993, splits his time between H and even more restrictive quarters, depending on his shifting moods and behavior.
The men here are allowed just a one-hour visit to a one-man concrete recreation yard that looks like an empty swimming pool, and then only after undergoing a strip search and a walk in cuffs and leg irons while escorted by two guards.
One to hold the chains, the other to hold a baton.
Still, H Unit is not the highest-security wing. That is Z Unit, the “ultramax” disciplinary unit, where the bad boys go to think about their transgressions, should they violate any of their SAMs. Here there is no recreation and no visitors, and minimal contact with even the guards.
Remarkably, even Z Unit has a special section, where only the worst of the worst are sent. It is called Range 13, and at this moment only three prisoners are housed there.
Ramzi Yousef was put here for violations of his SAMs while in Z Unit, where he was staying due to violations of his SAMs in H Unit.
Tommy Silverstein, a sixty-year-old career inmate who was convicted of armed robbery in 1977, was put here long ago for killing two inmates and a prison guard at another maximum-security prison.
And a third prisoner, a male inmate who was brought here by masked FBI agents some months prior only after an existing Range 13 cell was specially sealed off from the rest of the ultramax subunit, making it even more restrictive. The new cell is known only to Range 13 personnel, and only two have seen the new resident’s face. He is guarded not by BOP officers but by a special ad hoc unit from the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, fully armed and armored paramilitary officers who observe their one prisoner through a glass partition twenty-four hours a day.
The HRT men know the inmate’s true identity, but they do not speak it. They, and the few Range 13 personnel who are aware of this odd arrangement at all, refer to the man behind the glass only as Register Number 09341-000.
Prisoner 09341-000 does not have the twelve-inch black-and-white television allowed most other inmates. He is not allowed out of the room to go to the concrete rec yard.
Ever.
Most inmates are allowed one fifteen-minute phone call a week, provided they pay for it out of their own trust fund account, a prison banking system.
Prisoner 09341-000 has neither telephone privileges nor a trust fund account.
He has neither visitor nor mail privileges, either, nor access to the psychological or educational services afforded the other prisoners.
His room, his entire world, is eighty-four square feet, seven feet by twelve feet. The be
d, the desk, and the immovable stool in front of the desk are poured concrete, and other than the toilet-sink combo designed to shut off automatically if intentionally plugged, there are no other furnishings in the cell.
A four-inch-wide window on the back wall of the cell has been bricked over so that the inmate inside has neither a view to the outside nor any natural light.
Prisoner 09341-000 is the most solitary prisoner in America, perhaps the world.
He is Saif Rahman Yasin, the Emir. The leader of the Umayyad Revolutionary Council, and the terrorist mastermind responsible for the deaths of hundreds in a series of attacks on America and other Western nations, and also the perpetrator of an attack on the West that easily could have killed one hundred times that number.
The Emir climbed up from his prayer rug after his morning salat and sat back on the thin mattress on his concrete bed. He checked the plain white calendar on his desk by his left elbow, and saw that today was Tuesday. The calendar had been given to him so that he could hand his laundry out through the electric-operated steel hatch for cleaning at the proper times. Tuesday, Yasin knew, was the day his wool blanket needed to go through the hatch to be cleaned. Dutifully he rolled it into a tight ball, walked past his steel one-piece toilet-and-sink unit, took another step that moved him past a shower that worked on a timer so that he would not be able to cover the drain and flood his cell.
One more step brought him to the window with the hatch. There, two men in black uniforms, black body armor, and black ski masks stared blankly through the Plexiglas back at him. On their chests, MP5 sub-guns hung at the ready.
They wore no badges or insignia at all.
Only their eyes were visible.
The Emir held their gazes, one after the other, for a long moment, his face not more than two feet from theirs, though both men were several inches taller. All three sets of eyes broadcast hatred and malevolence. One of the masked men must have said something on the other side of the soundproof glass, because two other masked and armed men sitting at a desk in the back of the viewing room turned their heads toward their prisoner, and one flipped a switch on a console. A loud beep rang out in the Emir’s cell, and then the small access hatch opened below the window. The Emir ignored it, continued the staring contest with his guards. After a few seconds he heard another beep, and then the amplified voice of the man at the desk came from a speaker recessed in the ceiling above the Emir’s bed.