Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

  “Hey, Andrea,” Jack Junior said.

  “Mr. Ryan.”

  “Nice surprise,” said the former President.

  “Yeah, well, my date canceled on me, so…”

  Ryan laughed. “Man’s gotta have his priorities.”

  “Hell, I didn’t mean it like that-”

  “Forget it. Glad you came. You got a seat?”

  Jack Junior nodded. “Front row.”

  “Good. If I get into trouble you can throw me a softball.”

  Jack left his father, walked down the hall, took the stairs down one level, then headed toward the auditorium. Ahead, the hall was mostly dark, every other fluorescent ceiling fixture turned off. Like most educational institutions, Georgetown was trying to be more “green.” As he passed a conference room he heard a metallic scraping sound from within, like a chair being dragged across a floor. He stepped back and peeked through the slit window. Inside, a janitor in blue coveralls was kneeling down beside an upturned floor buffer, poking at the polishing pad with a screwdriver. On impulse, Jack pushed open the door and poked his head inside. The janitor looked up.

  “Hi,” Jack said.

  “Hello.” The man appeared to be Hispanic and spoke with a heavy accent. “Change pad,” he said.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Jack said, then shut the door behind him. He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Andrea’s number. She picked up on the first ring. Jack said, “Hey, I was on my way to the auditorium… There’s a janitor down here-”

  “Conference room two-b?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We cleared him, and we’ll sweep again. We’re taking the basement route anyway.”

  “Okay, just checking.”

  “You looking for a second job?” Price-O’Day asked.

  Jack chuckled. “How’s the pay?”

  “Lot less than you make. And the hours are hell. See you later.”

  Andrea disconnected. Jack headed toward the auditorium.

  Showtime, sir,” she told former President Ryan, who stood up and shot his cuffs; the gesture was uniquely Jack Ryan Sr., but Price-O’Day saw a bit of the son in the father, and SHORTSTOP’s call about the janitor had told her something more: The son hadn’t fallen far from the intellectual tree, either. Was there such a thing as a spook gene? she wondered. If so, Jack Junior probably had it. Like his father, he was intensely curious and took few things on face. Of course they’d swept the building, and of course Jack knew this. Even so, he’d spotted the janitor and immediately thought, Anomaly. It had been a false alarm, but the question had been valid-something Secret Service agents learned to ask through training and experience.

  Andrea now checked her watch and replayed their route in her mind, seeing the map in her head, timing the turns and distances. Satisfied, she knocked twice on the door, signaling to the agents there that SWORDSMAN was ready to move. She waited a moment for the cordon to form up, then opened the door, checked the hall, and stepped out, signaling for Ryan to follow.

  In his auditorium seat, Jack Junior absently flipped through the night’s program, his eyes taking in the words but his brain failing to register them. Something was itching at his subconscious, that nebulous feeling of something left undone… Something he’d meant to do before leaving The Campus, perhaps?

  The president of Georgetown appeared on the stage and walked to the podium, accompanied by polite applause. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. As we have only one item on tonight’s program, I’ll be brief with my introductions. Former President John Patrick Ryan has a long history of government service-”

  Janitor. The word popped, unbidden, into Jack’s mind. He’d been cleared, Andrea had said. Even so… He reached for his cell phone, then stopped. What would he say? That he had a feeling? From his seat, he could see the left side of the stage. Two black-suited Secret Service agents appeared; behind them, Andrea and his dad.

  Before he realized what he was doing, Jack was on his feet and headed for the side exit. He trotted up the stairs, turned left, headed down the hall, counting conference room doors as he went.

  Screwdriver, he thought, and suddenly the subconsious itch he’d felt two minutes earlier snapped into focus. The janitor had been using a screwdriver to remove a pad that had been secured to the buffer by a center locknut.

  Chest now pounding, Jack reached the correct conference room and stopped a few feet short. He saw light coming through the slit window but could hear no sounds from within. He took a break, walked to the door, and tried the knob. Locked. He peeked through the window. The buffer was still there. The janitor was gone. The flathead screwdriver lay on the floor.

  Jack turned and started jogging back to the auditorium. He stopped at the door, collected himself, then gently pushed open the door and eased it shut. A few people looked up as he entered, as did one of Andrea’s agents standing in the center aisle. He gave Jack a nod of recognition, then returned to his scan of the auditorium.

  Jack started his own scan, looking first for any sign of blue coveralls but quickly abandoning this; the janitor wouldn’t have gotten into the auditorium. Backstage would be clear as well, locked down by Andrea’s team. Who else? he thought, picking through the sea of faces. Audience members, agents, campus security…

  Standing beside the east wall, his face partially in shadow and his hands clasped before him, was a rent-a-cop. Like the agents, he, too, was scanning the crowd. Like the agents… Jack kept scanning, counting campus security officers. Five in total. And none of them scanning the crowd. Untrained in personal protection, their attention was not focused on the audience- the most likely area of threat-but rather on the stage. Except for the guard on the east wall. The man turned his head, and his face passed briefly into the light.

  Jack pulled out his cell phone and texted Andrea: GUARD, EAST WALL = JANITOR.

  Onstage, Andrea was standing ten feet behind and to the left of the podium. Jack saw her pull out her cell phone, check the screen, then return it to her pocket. Her reaction was immediate. Her cuff mike came up to her mouth, then down again. The agent in the center aisle casually headed back up the aisle steps, then turned right at the carpeted intersection, heading toward the east wall. Now Jack saw Andrea sidestep behind his dad, moving into what he assumed was an intercept angle between his dad and the guard.

  The center-aisle agent had reached the east wall’s aisle. Thirty feet away, the guard rotated his head in that direction, paused ever so briefly on the agent, then rotated back to the stage, where Andrea had moved into blocking position. His dad, noticing this, cast a brief glance in her direction but kept talking. He would know, of course, what Andrea was doing, Jack reasoned, but not whether there was a specific threat.

  On the east wall, the guard also noticed Andrea’s movement. Casually, he took two steps down the aisle and bent over to whisper in an audience member’s ear. The woman looked up at the guard, surprise on her face, then stood up. Now smiling, the guard took her by the elbow and, stepping around to her right side, guided her down the aisle toward the exit by the stage. As they passed the fourth row, Andrea took another step forward, maintaining her blocking position.

  She unbuttoned her suit coat.

  The guard suddenly switched his left hand from the woman’s elbow to her collar, then sidestepped, moving sideways past the front row. The woman let out a yelp. Heads turned. The guard’s right hand slipped into the front waistband of his pants. He jerked the woman around, using her as a shield. Andrea’s gun came out and up.

  “Freeze, Secret Service!”

  Behind her, the other agents were already moving, swarming the former President, pushing him down and hurrying him toward the opposite side of the stage.

  The guard’s hand emerged from his waistband with a semiautomatic 9-millimeter. Seeing his target moving out of range, the guard made the mistake for which Andrea was waiting. Gun coming level with the stage, he took a step forward. And a half-foot beyond the protection of his human shield.

  An
drea fired once. At fifteen feet, the low-velocity hollow-point bullet struck home, punching into the guard’s head between his left eye and his ear. Designed for close-quarters, crowd-dense firing, the round worked as advertised, mushrooming inside the guard’s brain, expending all its energy in a thousandth of a second and stopping, as the autopsy would later show, three inches from the opposite side of the skull.

  The guard dropped straight down, dead before he reached the carpet.

  Andrea tells me you saved the day,” former President Ryan said twenty minutes later in the limousine.

  “Just sent up the flare,” Jack replied.

  The whole thing had been a surreal experience, Jack thought, but somehow less surreal than its aftermath. Though the series of events had been brief-five seconds from the time the guard had gotten the woman from her seat to when Andrea’s head shot had dropped him-the mental replay in Jack’s mind moved, predictably, he supposed, in slow motion. So shocked by the shooting was the audience that it had emitted only a few screams, all of those from the attendees before whom the assassin had fallen dead.

  For his part, Jack had known better than to move, so he remained standing against the west wall as campus security and Andrea’s agents cleared the auditorium. His dad, at the center of the Secret Service scrum, had been offstage before Andrea had fired the killing shot.

  “Even so,” Ryan said. “Thanks.”

  It was an awkward moment that drifted into an even more uncomfortable silence. Jack Junior broke it. “Scary shit, huh?”

  Former President Ryan nodded at this. “What made you go back there-to check on the janitor, I mean?”

  “When I saw him, he was trying to take off the buffer pad with a screwdriver. He needed a crescent wrench.”

  “Impressive, Jack.”

  “Because of the screwdriver-”

  “Partially that. Partially because you didn’t panic. And you let the professionals do their job. Eight outta ten people wouldn’t have noticed the buffer thing. Most of those would have panicked, frozen up. The others would’ve tried to move on the guy themselves. You did it right, from soup to nuts.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ryan Senior smiled. “Now let’s talk about how to break this to your mother…”

  15

  THEY DIDN’T get far before the plane returned to the gate, the front wheels having never even begun their rotation onto the tarmac proper. There was no explanation offered, only a fixed smile and a curt “Will you come with me, please?” to himself and Chavez, followed by the fixed and firm smile that only a professional flight attendant can mount-and one that told Clark the request wasn’t open to discussion.

  “You forget to pay a parking ticket, Ding?” Clark asked his son-in-law.

  “Not me, mano. I’m a straight arrow.”

  Each of them gave his wife a quick kiss and a “Don’t worry,” then followed the flight attendant up the aisle to the already open door. Waiting for them in the jet bridge was a London Metropolitan Police Service officer. The black-and-white checkerboard pattern on the man’s cap told Clark he wasn’t your run-of-the-mill bobby, and the patch on his sweater told him he belonged to SCD11-intelligence-part of the Specialist Crime Directorate.

  “Sorry to interrupt your jaunt home, gentlemen,” the cop said, “but your presence has been requested. If you’ll follow me, please.”

  British manners-along with driving on the wrong side of the road and french fries being called “chips”-was one of the things Clark had never quite gotten used to-especially among the upper echelons of the Army. Polite was always better than rude, mind you, but there was something unnerving about being talked to oh, so civilly by a guy who had probably killed more bad guys than most people would ever see in their lifetime. Clark had met some folks here who could explain in detail how they planned to kill you with a fork, drink your blood, then skin you, all the while making it sound like an invitation to afternoon tea.

  Clark and Chavez followed the cop down the jetway, through several checkpoints, then through a card reader-controlled door into Heathrow’s security center. They were led to a small conference room where they found Alistair Stanley, still officially second-in-command of Rainbow Six, standing at the diamond-shaped table under the cold glare of fluorescent lights. Stanley was SAS, or Special Air Service, Britain’s premier special warfare unit.

  Though Clark was reluctant to admit it in mixed company, as far as he was concerned, when it came to efficacy and longevity, the SAS was without peer. Certainly there were outfits out there that were as good as the SAS-his alma mater, the Navy SEALs, came to mind-but the Brits had long ago set the gold standard for modern-era special ops troops, going back as far as 1941 when a Scots Guards officer named Stirling-later of Stir-ling submachine-gun fame-and his L Detachment of sixty-five men harried the German Wehrmacht across North Africa. From their early behind-the-lines sabotage missions in North Africa to Scud hunting in the Iraqi desert, the SAS had done it all, seen it all, and written the book on special ops along the way. And like all his brethren before him, Alistair Stanley was a top-notch troop. In fact, Clark had rarely thought of Stanley as his second but rather his co-commander, so great was his respect for the man.

  Along with driving lanes and french fries, SAS organization had been another adjustment for Clark. In characteristically British fashion, the SAS’s organization was unique, divided into regiments-the 21st, the 22nd, and the 23rd-and squadrons-ranging from A through G, with a few alphabetical gaps thrown in for good measure. Still, Clark had to further admit, the Brits did everything with flair.

  “Alistair,” Clark said with a solemn nod. The look on Stanley’s face told him something serious had already happened or was in the process of happening.

  “Miss us already, Stan?” Ding said, shaking his hand.

  “I wish that were it, mate. Feel bloody awful interrupting your trip and all. Thought you boys might like to have one more go before you go soft. Got something interesting in the works.”

  “From?” Clark asked.

  “The Swedes, in a roundabout fashion. Seems they’ve gone and lost their consulate in Tripoli. Bloody embarrassing for them.”

  Chavez said, “By ‘lost,’ I assume you don’t mean misplaced?”

  “Right, sorry. Typical British understatement. Charming but not always practical. The intelligence is still filtering in, but given the location, it doesn’t take much of a leap to venture a guess as to the culprit’s general identity.”

  Clark and Chavez pulled out chairs and sat down at the table. Stanley did the same. He opened a leather portfolio containing a legal pad covered in handwritten notes.

  “Let’s hear it,” Clark said, switching mental gears.

  Ten minutes earlier he’d been in civilian mode-or at least as much of a civilian mode as he allowed himself-sitting with his family and getting ready to head home, but that was then and this was now. Now he was the commander of Rainbow Six again. It felt good, he had to admit.

  “Best as we can tell, there are eight men in all,” Stanley said. “Bypassed the local cops quick as you please with nary a casualty. Satellite images show four Swedes-probably Fallskarmsjagares-down and out within the compound’s grounds.”

  The Fallskarmsjagares were essentially Sweden’s version of airborne rangers, culled from the best of the Army. Probably members of the Särskilda Skyddsgruppen-Special Protection Group-that had been seconded to SÄPO, the Swedish Security Service, for embassy duty.

  “Those are some tough boys,” Chavez said. “Somebody did their homework-and some good shooting. Anything from inside the consulate?”

  Stanley shook his head. “Radio-silent.”

  Which made sense, Clark decided. Anyone good enough to get into the grounds that quickly and take down four Fallskarmsjagares would also be smart enough to go straight for the communications room.

  “Nobody taking credit?” Chavez asked.

  “None so far, but that won’t last long, I suspect. So far the Libyans
have a lid on the press, but it’s only a matter of time, I’m afraid.”

  The hodgepodge of terrorist groups in the Middle East tended to take overlapping credit for any act of significant violence, and it wasn’t always about prestige, either, but rather a deliberate attempt to muddy the intelligence waters. It was a lot like what a police homicide unit went through during big murder cases. Quick confessions and nutjob suspects were a dime a dozen, and each one had to be taken seriously, lest you miss a real tango. The same applied to terrorism.

  “And no demands, I assume?” Clark added.

  “Right.”

  As often as not there were no demands. In the Middle East most hostage takers just wanted to grow an international audience before they started executing people, only belatedly explaining the whys and wherefores. Not that that made any difference to Clark and his team, but until some government functionary somewhere said “Go,” Rainbow was, like every other special ops outfit, at the mercy of politics. Only once the pols had satisfied themselves that unleashing the dogs of war was appropriate did Rainbow get to do what it did best.

  “Now here’s the tricky part,” Stanley said.

  “Politics,” Clark guessed.

  “Right again. As you might imagine, our friend the Colonel wants to send in his Jamahiriyyah-he already has them staged, in fact-but the Swedish Consul General isn’t so keen on the idea, what with the Jamahiriyyah’s rules of engagement being what they are.”

  The Jamahiriyyah Guard were essentially Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s own personal Special Forces unit, composed of two thousand or so men drawn from his own backyard, the Surt region of Libya. The Jamahiriyyah were good, Clark knew, and well supported with their own in-house logistics and intelligence units, but the Jamahiriyyah were not known for their discretion, nor for any deep concern for collateral damage, inanimate and animate alike. With the Jamahiriyyah making the assault, the Swedes were likely to lose a fair number of staff.