by Tom Clancy
Ryan ran back into the warehouse with his pistol raised, but he holstered it when he saw his cousin and al Darkur looking into a large packing crate. Dom was talking on his phone with one hand, and shining a flashlight with his other.
Ryan got al Darkur’s attention. “Listen. There are about to be fifty cops pulling up in a minute. Can you and your man go out and talk to them, ask them to give us a minute?”
“Of course.” Mohammed and his captain left the warehouse.
Jack shouldered up to Dom. “What’s the word?” As he said this, he saw the red countdown clock on the detonator switch from 7:50 to 7:49.
“I took a picture of the device and sent it to Clark. He’s got experts with him that will take a look and then let me know if we’re about to glow in the dark.”
“Not funny.”
“Who’s joking?”
“Are you okay?” Ryan saw blood on the back of Caruso’s pants.
“I think I got shot in the ass. What about Rehan?”
“Dead.”
Both men nodded. Just then the Canadian Rainbow munitions expert came on the satellite phone and told Caruso how to reset the altimeter trigger, which would stop the manual countdown.
Dom finished with two minutes and four seconds remaining. The clock stopped, and the two men sighed in relief and shook hands.
Ryan helped Caruso down to the floor, Dom lay on his hip to keep his wound from getting any filthier than it already was, and Ryan sat down next to him.
Within another twenty minutes al Darkur’s unit of SSG had arrived along with PAEC engineers to render the weapon safe.
By then Ryan and Caruso were gone.
EPILOGUE
It was five p.m. in Baltimore and President-elect Jack Ryan flipped off the TV in his study. He had been watching the news reports from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and he’d had two conference calls with his aides, members of his cabinet-to-be, during which the matter was discussed at length.
Also discussed in the meeting was the worsening situation between Pakistan and India. Skirmishes had been reported along the border, but some reports suggested the shelling in Lahore and the areas around there were not by Indian forces, but rather PDF units allied with rogue ISI officers.
Ryan would take office in less than a month. Officially this was Ed Kealty’s problem, but Ryan was hearing grumblings from Kealty’s people — most of whom were reaching out to the Ryan camp in hopes of grabbing some sort of employment in the D.C. area — that the lame-duck President had already flipped the lights off in the Oval Office. Figuratively speaking, of course.
His phone rang, and he grabbed it without thinking. “Hello?”
“Hey, Dad.”
“Where are you?”
“In a plane, heading home.”
“Home from where?”
“That’s what I called to talk to you about. I’ve got a story to tell you. I need your help with the crisis in Pakistan.”
Ryan Sr. cocked his head. “How’s that?”
Junior spent the next twenty minutes telling his father about Rehan and the ISI and the theft of the nukes, about the Haqqani network and the Dagestani militants. It was a hell of a story, and the father interrupted the son only to ask him what kind of encryption his phone was using.
Jack Junior explained that he was on The Campus’s own aircraft, and Hendley had seen to it that the equipment was state of the art.
When he was finished, Ryan Sr. asked his son again: “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Dad. Cuts and bruises. Dom took a bullet in the ass, but he’ll be fine.”
“Oh my God.”
“Really, he was joking about it twenty minutes later.”
Jack Sr. rubbed his temples under the arms of his eyeglasses. “Okay.”
“Look, Dad. I know we have to keep The Campus away from you, but I thought you could talk to the players over there in India, persuade them to back off a bit. We do think the man in charge of this entire operation is dead, so it will fizzle out fast if no one does anything stupid.”
“I’m glad you called. I’m going to get on it right now.”
The call ended a few minutes later, but the phone immediately rang again. Ryan Sr. thought it was his son calling back. “Yeah, Jack?”
“Uh, I’m sorry, Mr. President. Bob Holtzman from the Post.”
Ryan fumed. “How the hell did you get this number, Holtzman? This is a private line.”
“John Clark gave it to me, sir. I just spoke with him after having an interesting meeting with a Russian intelligence officer.”
Ryan calmed down but remained on guard. “A meeting about what?”
“Mr. Clark did not want to speak with you directly. He thought that might put you in a compromised situation. Therefore, I am in the odd position, Mr. President, of having to explain some things to you. Mr. Clark told me you had no knowledge whatsoever about the Russian intelligence — Paul Laska plot against you.”
If Jack Ryan Sr. had learned one thing in his many years working with Arnie van Damm, it was this: When dealing with a journalist, never ever admit that you don’t know what he is talking about.
But Arnie was not here right now, and Jack dropped his veil of self-assuredness.
“What the fuck are you talking about, Holtzman?”
“If you have a minute, I think I can enlighten you, sir.” Jack Ryan Sr. grabbed a notepad and a pen, and he leaned back in his chair. “I always have time for a respected member of the press, Bob.”
One week later, Charles Alden slammed the phone down in the office of his Georgetown row house just after eight a.m. This would be his first of several calls to Rhode Island, he had resigned himself to that fact. He’d been trying to get in touch with Laska for the past three fucking days, and the old bastard would not answer or return his calls.
Alden decided to pester the man. As far as he was concerned, Laska owed him for the risks he had taken in the past few months.
The DD/CIA fumed as he left his office and headed downstairs to his kitchen for another cup of coffee. He had not bothered to put on a suit this morning, a rarity for a Tuesday. Instead he would sit in his warm-ups and drink coffee and call Paul goddamned Laska until the son of a bitch answered his phone.
A knock at the front door diverted Alden from his route to the kitchen.
He looked through the peephole. A couple of suits in trench coats stood on his stoop. Behind them, a government Chrysler was double-parked on the snowy street.
He pegged the men for CIA security officers. He could not imagine what these guys wanted.
Charles opened the door.
The men entered quickly without waiting for an invitation. “Mr. Alden, I am Special Agent Caruthers, and this is Special Agent Delacort with the FBI. I’m going to have to ask you to turn around and face the wall, please.”
“Wha… What the hell is going on?”
“I’ll explain everything shortly. For your and my safety, please face the wall, sir.”
Alden turned slowly on legs that suddenly felt weak and slack. Handcuffs were placed on his wrists and then the pockets of his warm-up pants were professionally gone through by Delacort. Caruthers stood back in the doorway, watching the street.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?”
Alden was turned toward his front door and walked back out into the cold. “You are under arrest, Mr. Alden,” said Caruthers as they headed down the icy steps to the street.
“What the fuck? What is the charge?”
“Four counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and four counts of unauthorized retention of national defense information.”
Alden added it up in his head quickly. He was facing more than thirty years behind bars.
“Bullshit! This is bullshit!”
“Yes, sir,” said Caruthers as he put his hand on Alden’s head and guided him into the back of the Chrysler. Delacort had already slid behind the wheel.
Charles Alden said, “Ryan
! This is Ryan’s doing! I get it. The witch hunt has begun, right?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir,” said Caruthers, and the Chrysler drove off toward downtown.
The same day, Judith Cochrane left her Pueblo, Colorado, hotel at nine-thirty in the morning, and she began her familiar drive to ADX Florence.
Her client would finally be removed from the Special Administrative Measures and transferred to a better facility on the East Coast; they had not told her where yet for security reasons, but she knew it would be somewhere in the D.C. area, so it would be close to her home.
Without the SAMs, Saif Rahman Yasin would be able to sit in a room with her while they worked together on his case, close over a table. Sometimes there would be other attorneys present, and the guards would be ever present, but there would be a modicum of privacy, and Judith Cochrane had thought of little else for some time.
Too bad that conjugal visits would not be allowed. Judy smiled as that thought came to her.
Well, a girl can dream, can’t she?
The rental car began making an odd noise that she hadn’t heard before. “Damn it,” she said, as it got louder and louder. It was a thumping, and she did not know cars at all, other than where to put the gas.
As it grew even louder, she slowed her vehicle. She had the entire road to herself, and there was nothing but flat country around her and huge mountains far to the west. She decided to pull over to the side of the road, but just as she started to do so, she was startled by a huge shadow passing over her car.
Then she saw it, a big black helicopter streaked just overhead, flew up the road another hundred yards, and then turned sideways, blocking her path.
She stopped the rental car in the middle of the road.
The helicopter landed, and men with guns jumped out, ran up to her with their guns pointed at her, and when they got close she could hear their screaming.
She was pulled out of her car, turned around, and pushed up on the hood. Her legs were kicked open, and she was frisked.
“What do you want?”
“Judith Cochrane. You are under arrest.”
“On what goddamned charge?”
“Espionage, Ms. Cochrane.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous! I’ll drag every last one of you before a judge tomorrow morning and your shitty careers will be over!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Judith screamed at the officers and demanded their badge numbers, but they ignored her. They handcuffed her, and she called them fascists and robots and vermin, and she called them sons of bitches as they led her to the helicopter and helped her on board.
She was still screaming when the helicopter took off, turned to the east, and flew away.
She would not know it for some time, but she had been sold out by Paul Laska in an attempt to save himself.
The Emir sucked fresh air into his lungs for the first time in months. It was dark when he was led out of ADX Florence and into the back of a Bureau of Prisons van, and the heavy snow further obstructed his view.
He had been looking forward to this day for months, since Judy Cochrane had promised him she would get him out of his tiny cell and into a federal prison near Washington. A prison where he could exercise and watch television and have more books and access to other members of his defense who would help him fight the Ryan administration.
As the van rolled through the entrance of a small airport, the Emir fought a smile. The next stage in his captivity would be the next stage in his quest to damage the infidels. He would get time in court, Judy had told him, and he would have a chance to say whatever he wanted to say. At first he had been instructed not to say a word about his capture, but now Judy encouraged him to talk as loudly and as often as possible about the circumstances of his kidnapping at the hands of Americans. Although he had been captured in the United States, he intended to continue his story — he’d told it so many times to Judy that he himself almost believed it now — that he had been yanked off a street in Riyadh.
Judy believed it; that fat fool would believe anything.
The van lurched to a stop, and the FBI men helped him out and into a blinding snowstorm. They led him forward, and in seconds Yasin could smell jet fuel as he approached a large aircraft. He’d expected some sort of corporate jet, but instead it was a large cargo craft.
He began walking up the ramp with the men on either side of him. At the top of the ramp there was no snow, only several men who stood at attention.
They were wearing camouflage uniforms.
They were soldiers. American military.
The FBI man tapped Yasin on the shoulder. “Have fun at Gitmo, asshole.”
What? Yasin tried to back up, but men held him. “No! I will not go. I am to go to Washington for my trial. This is incorrect. Where is Judith?”
The FBI man smiled. “Right now she’s in custody in Denver.”
They gave him one more try to walk forward, but when he refused, four muscular young men grabbed his arms and legs. He was lifted into the air and carried inside the aircraft. Seconds later the ramp lifted, and it closed on the Colorado snowstorm, stifling his screams of protest.
Jack and Melanie enjoyed their dinner, their wine, and their conversation. They had not seen each other in weeks, and although their last parting had been awkward, the chemistry between them seemed undamaged.
Ryan was glad Melanie had not asked too many questions about the cuts on his face. He told her he was back into his MMA classes and a new student had gotten a little overzealous in training. She seemed to believe him, and the conversation had drifted off his face and onto all the news about his dad’s upcoming inauguration and the near disaster in Russia and the averted war between India and Pakistan.
Melanie told Jack about Rehan. He had been on the news to some degree, and the CIA/NCTC analyst was careful to keep her detail in the realm of open-source information. Ryan pled ignorance and showed his fascination in her work, but he was, himself, careful to avoid conveying anything that might make her suspicious that he knew more than he was saying.
But then she said something that made him lose his polite but only mildly interested gaze.
“Too bad they let his number-two guy slip away.”
“What’s that?” Jack said.
“I think it’s been on the news, in Pakistan, at least. Yes, I’m sure I read it in Dawn today, their paper. A colonel who worked for him, Saddiq Khan. He survived and is missing. You never really know in these situations if that is significant or not.”
Jack nodded, then said, “How about some dessert?”
They ordered dessert, and Jack excused himself to go to the bathroom. When he was out of view, Melanie stood quickly and stepped outside the restaurant; her mobile phone was already to her ear when the door shut behind her.
She waited for a moment for an answer on the other end, her eyes fixed on the lobby of the restaurant, careful for any signs that Jack was on his way back to the table.
“It’s me. He was there, in Pakistan…. Yes. There is no doubt in my mind. When I told him Khan was still alive he looked like he’d been poleaxed. No, of course it’s not true, but right now he’s in a bathroom stall, no doubt calling someone in a panic, trying to get confirmation.”
The young woman listened to her instructions, acknowledged them, then ended the call and rushed back inside tyo wait for her date to return to the table.
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