Jack Ryan 2 - Patriot Games (34 page)

“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.”

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.”

The name came back as they shook hands. Cantor was Admiral Greer's executive assistant, a preppy type from Yale. He gave Jack a security pass.

“I don't have to go through the visitor room?” Jack waved to his left.

“All taken care of. You can follow me.”

Cantor led him to the first security checkpoint. He took the pass from the chain around his neck and slid it into a slot. A small gate with orange and yellow stripes, like those used for parking garages, snapped up, then down again as Ryan stuck his card in the slot. A computer in a basement room checked the electronic code on the pass and decided that it could safely admit Ryan to the building. The gate went back up. Already Jack was uncomfortable here. Just like before, he thought, like being in a prison -- no, security in a prison is nothing compared to this. There was something about this place that made Jack instantly paranoid.

Jack slung the pass around his neck. He gave it a quick look. It had a color photograph, taken the previous year, and a number, but no name. None of the CIA passes had names on them. Cantor led off at a brisk walk to the right, then left toward the elevators. Ryan noticed the kiosk where you could buy a Coke and a Snickers bar. It was staffed by blind workers, yet another of the oddly sinister things about the CIA. Blind people were less likely to be security risks, he supposed, though he wondered how they drove in to work every day. The building was surprisingly shabby, the floor tile never quite shiny, the walls a drab shade of yellow-beige; even the murals were second-rate. It surprised a lot of people that the Agency spent little on the outward trappings of importance. The previous summer Jack had learned that the people here took a perverse pride in the place's seediness.

Everywhere people walked about with anonymous haste. They walked so fast in the building that most corners had hubcap-shaped mirrors to warn you of possible collision with a fellow spook . . . or to alert you that someone might be lurking and listening around the corner.

Why did you come here?

Jack shook the thought off as he entered the elevator. Cantor pushed the button for the seventh floor. The door opened a minute later to expose yet another drab corridor. Ryan vaguely remembered the way now. Cantor turned left, then right, as Ryan watched people walking about with a speed that would impress a recruiter for the Olympic Team's heel-and-toe crew. He had to smile at it until he realized that none of them were smiling. A serious place, the Central Intelligence Agency.

The executive row of CIA had its own private corridor -- this one had a rug -- that paralleled the main one and led to offices facing the east. As always, there were people just standing about and watching. They inspected Ryan and his pass, but showed no reaction, which was good enough news for Jack. Cantor took his charge to the proper door and opened it.

Admiral James Greer was in civilian clothes, as usual, leaning back in a high-backed swivel chair, reading an inevitable folder and sipping at inevitable coffee. Ryan had never seen him otherwise. He was in his middle sixties, a tall, patrician-looking man whose voice could be as courtly or harsh as he wished. His accent was that of Maine, and for all his sophistication, Ryan knew him to be a farmer's son who'd earned his way into the Naval Academy, then spent forty years in uniform, first as a submarine officer, then as a full-time intelligence specialist. Greer was one of the brightest people Ryan had ever met. And one of the trickiest. Jack was convinced that this gray-haired old gentleman could read minds. Surely that was part of the job description for the Deputy Director, Intelligence, of the Central Intelligence Agency. All the data gathered by spies and satellites, and God only knew what else, came across his desk. If Greer didn't know it, it wasn't worth knowing. He looked up after a moment.

“Hello, Doctor Ryan.” The Admiral rose and came over. “I see you're right on time.”

“Yes, sir. I remembered what a pain the commute was last summer.” Without being asked, Marty Cantor got everyone coffee as they sat on chairs around a low table. One nice thing about Greer was that he always had good coffee. Jack remembered.

“How's the arm, son?” the Admiral asked.

“Almost normal, sir. I can tell you when it's going to rain, though. They say that may go away eventually, but it's like arthritis.”

“And how's your family?”

The man doesn't miss a trick. Jack thought. But Jack had one of his own. “A little tense at the moment, sir. I broke the news to Cathy last night. She's not real happy about it, but then neither am I.” Let's get down to business, Admiral.

“So what exactly can we do for you?” Greer's demeanor changed from pleasant old gentleman to professional intelligence officer.

“Sir, I know this is asking a lot, but I'd like to see what the Agency has on these ULA characters.”

“Not a hell of a lot.” Cantor snorted. “These boys cover their tracks like real pros. They're being bankrolled in a pretty big way -- that's inferred, of course, but it has to be true.”

“Where does your data come from?”

Cantor looked over to Greer and got a nod. “Doctor, before we go any further, we have to talk about classification.”

Resignedly: “Yeah. What do I have to sign?”

“We'll take care of that before you leave. We'll show you just about everything we've got. What you have to know now is that this stuff is classified SI-codeword.”

“Well, that's no surprise.” Ryan sighed. Special-Intelligence-Codeword was a level of classification higher than top secret. People had to be individually cleared for the data, which was identified by a special codeword. Even the codeword itself was secret. Ryan had only twice before seen data of this sensitivity. But now they're going to lay it all out in front of me, he thought as he looked at Cantor. Greer must really want me back to open a door like this. “So, like I said, where does it come from?”

“Some from the Brits -- actually from the PIRA via the Brits. Some new stuff from the Italians --”

“Italians?” Ryan was surprised for a moment, then realized what the implications of that were. “Oh. Okay, yeah, they have a lot of people down in sand-dune country, don't they?”

“One of them ID'd your friend Sean Miller last week. He was getting off a certain ship that was, miraculously enough, in the English Channel on Christmas Day,” Greer said.

“But we don't know where he is?”

“He and an unknown number of associates headed south.” Cantor smiled. “Of course the whole country is south of the Med, so that's not much of a help.”

“The FBI has everything we have, and so do the Brits,” Greer said. “It's not much to go on, but we do have a team sifting through it.”

“Thanks for letting me take a look. Admiral.”

“We're not doing this out of charity, Doctor Ryan,” the Admiral pointed out. “I'm hoping that you might find something useful. And this thing has a price for you, too. If you want in, you will be an Agency employee by the end of the day. We can even arrange for you to have a federal pistol permit.”

“How did you know --”

“It's my job to know, sonny.” The old man grinned at him. Ryan didn't think this situation was the least bit funny, but he granted the Admiral his points.

“When can I start?”

“How does your schedule look?”

“I can work on that,” Jack said cautiously. “I can be here Tuesday morning, and maybe work one full day per week, plus two half-days. In the mornings. Most of my classes are in the afternoon. Semester break is coming up, and then I can give you a full week.”

“Very well. You can work out the details with Marty. Go take care of the paperwork. Nice to see you again, Jack.”

Jack shook his hand once more. “Thank you, sir.”

Greer watched the door close before he went back to the desk. He waited a few seconds for Ryan and Cantor to clear the corridor, then walked out to the corner office that belonged to the Director of Central Intelligence.

“Well?” Judge Arthur Moore asked.

“We got him,” Greer reported.

“How's the clearance procedure going?”

“Clean. He was a little too sharp doing his stock deals a few years back, but, hell, he was supposed to be sharp.”

“Nothing illegal?” Judge Moore asked. The Agency didn't need someone who might be investigated by the SEC. Greer shook his head.

“Nah, just very smart.”

“Fine. But he doesn't see anything but this terrorist stuff until the clearance procedures are complete.”

“Okay, Arthur!”

“And I don't have Deputy Directors to do our recruiting,” the DCI pointed out.