Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  Jack took one last swig of coffee and rose to follow.

  It was going to be a good day.

  —

  At seven-thirty Melanie was showered, dressed, and standing in the doorway of Jack’s apartment with her purse on her shoulder. Her long hair was back in a ponytail, and her sunglasses were high on her head. She kissed Jack good-bye, a long kiss that let him know that she did not want to leave and she could not wait to see him again, and then she headed up the hall to the elevator. Melanie had a long morning commute to McLean, Virginia. She was an analyst for the CIA, but had recently moved from the National Counterterrorism Center, across the parking lot at Liberty Crossing, to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, following her boss Mary Pat Foley’s move from deputy director of NCTC to her new cabinet-level position as director of national intelligence.

  Jack was only half dressed, but he did not have to worry about a long commute. He worked much closer, just down the road in West Odenton, so he finished putting on his suit and tie, then lingered over another cup of coffee while he watched CNN on the sixty-inch plasma TV in the living room. A little after eight he headed downstairs to the parking lot of his building and successfully fought the urge to look for his huge canary-yellow truck. Instead he climbed into the black BMW 3 Series that he’d been driving for the past six months, and he headed out of the parking lot.

  The Hummer had been fun, his own way to show his individuality and spirit, but from a personal-security perspective, he might as well have been driving a three-ton homing beacon. Anyone attempting to follow him through beltway traffic could do so with ease from triple the distance normally needed for a vehicle follow.

  This allowance for his own security should have been made by Jack himself, as his profession necessitated watching his back 24/7, but in truth, losing the canary-yellow bull’s-eye was not his idea.

  It came in the form of a polite but strongly worded suggestion from the U.S. Secret Service.

  Although Jack had refused the Secret Service protection that came standard for an adult child of a current inhabitant of the Oval Office, Jack had been nearly compelled by his father’s protection detail to go to a series of private meetings with agents who gave him pointers on staying safe.

  Even though his mother and father did not like him going without protection, they both understood why he had to refuse. It would have been, to say the least, problematic to do what Jack Ryan, Jr., did for a living with a government agent shouldering up on either side of him. The Secret Service was not happy about his decision to go it alone—but they, of course, would have been exponentially more unhappy had they any idea how often he put himself in harm’s way.

  During the meetings they peppered him with tips and suggestions on how to maintain a low profile, and on the subject of maintaining a low profile, the first topic had been the Hummer.

  And the Hummer was the first to go.

  Jack understood the logic, of course. There were tens of thousands of black Beamers on the road, and his new car’s tinted windows made him even more invisible. Plus, Jack recognized, he could switch out his ride a lot easier than he could change his face. He still looked remarkably like the son of the President of the United States; there wasn’t much he could do about that, short of cosmetic surgery.

  He was known, there was no getting around that, but he was hardly a celebrity.

  His mom and dad had done their best to keep him and his brothers and sisters away from cameras since his father went into politics, and Jack himself had refrained from doing anything that would put him in the limelight other than the semi-official duties required of a child of a presidential candidate and president. Unlike seemingly tens of thousands of B-list celebrities and wannabe reality stars in America, even before Jack went into covert work at The Campus, he saw fame as nothing more than a pain in the ass.

  He had his friends, he had his family; why did he give a damn if a bunch of people he didn’t know knew who he was?

  Other than the night of his father’s win and his inauguration day some two months later, Jack had not been on television in years. And although the average American knew Jack Ryan had a son everybody called “Junior,” they would not necessarily be able to pick him out of a lineup of tall, dark-haired, good-looking American men in their middle to late twenties.

  Jack wanted to keep it that way, because it was convenient to do so, and it just might help him stay alive.

  EIGHT

  The sign outside the nine-story office building where Jack worked read Hendley Associates, which said nothing about what went on inside. The innocuous design of the signage fit the mild-mannered appearance of the structure itself. The building looked exactly like thousands of simple offices across America. Anyone driving by who gave it a passing glance might take it for a credit union bureau, an administrative center for a telecommunications firm, a human resources agency, or a PR company. There was a large array of satellite dishes on the roof, and a fenced-in antenna farm next to the building, but these were hardly noticeable from the street, and even if they were noticed, they would not strike the average commuter as something out of the ordinary.

  The one-in-a-million passerby who might do any further research into the company would see that it was an international finance concern, one of many around the greater D.C. metro area, and the one novel feature of the company was that it was owned and directed by a former U.S. senator.

  Of course, there were more unique features to the organization inside the brick-and-glass structure along the road. Though there was little physical security outside other than a low fence and a few closed-circuit cameras, inside, hidden behind the “white side” financial trading firm, was a “black side” intelligence operation unknown to all but an incredibly small minority in the U.S. intelligence community. The Campus, the unofficial name given to the off-the-books spy shop, had been envisioned years earlier by President Jack Ryan during his first administration. He’d set up the operation with a few close allies in the intelligence community, and helmed it with former senator Gerry Hendley.

  The Campus possessed some of the brightest analysts in the community, some of the best technological minds, and, thanks to the satellites on the roof and the code breakers in the IT department, a direct line of access into the computer networks of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

  The entire operation was also completely self-funded, as the cover firm, Hendley Associates, was a successful but low-profile financial management firm. The company’s success in picking stocks, bonds, and currencies was helped greatly by the gigabytes of raw intelligence data that streamed into the building each day.

  Ryan rolled past the sign, parked in the lot, and then entered the lobby with his leather messenger bag over his shoulder. Behind the security desk, a guard with a nameplate on his jacket that read Chambers stood with a smile.

  “Morning, Jack. How’s the wife?”

  “Morning, Ernie. I’m not married.”

  “I’ll check back tomorrow.”

  “Right.”

  It was a daily joke between the two, although Ryan didn’t really get it.

  Jack headed to the elevator.

  Jack Ryan, Jr., the eldest child of the President of the United States, had worked here at Hendley Associates for nearly four years. Though he was officially an associate financial manager, the vast majority of his work involved intelligence analysis. He had also expanded his responsibilities to become one of The Campus’s five operations officers.

  In his operational role he’d seen action—a lot of action— over the past three years, although since returning from Istanbul the only action he’d seen had been a few training evolutions with Domingo Chavez, Sam Driscoll, and Dominic Caruso.

  They’d spent time in dojos working on hand-to-hand skills, at indoor and outdoor firing ranges around Maryland and
Virginia keeping their perishable gunfighting skills as sharp as possible, and they’d practiced surveillance and countersurveillance measures by driving up to Baltimore or down to D.C., immersing themselves in the bustle of the crowded cities and then either tailing Campus trainers or attempting to shake trainers who’d been tasked with sticking on their tails.

  It was fascinating work, and extremely practical for men who, from time to time, had to put their life on the line in offensive operations around the globe. But it wasn’t real fieldwork, and Jack Junior did not join Hendley Associates’ black side in order to train at a shooting range or in a dojo or to chase or run from some guy who he’d be having a beer with later that afternoon.

  No, he wanted fieldwork, the adrenaline-pumping action that he had experienced numerous times over the past few years. It was addictive—to a man in his twenties, anyway—and Ryan was suffering from withdrawal.

  But now all the action was on hold, and The Campus’s future was in doubt, all because of something everyone now referred to as the Istanbul Drive.

  It was just a few gigabytes of digital images, e-mail traffic, software applications, and other electronic miscellany retrieved from Emad Kartal’s desktop computer the night Jack shot him dead in a flat in the Taksim neighborhood of Istanbul.

  The night of the hit Gerry Hendley, the head of The Campus, had ordered his men to cease all offensive operations until they dealt with whoever had them under surveillance. The five operators who had become well accustomed to globetrotting in the company Gulfstream now found themselves all but chained to their desks. Along with the analysts of the organization, they spent their days desperately trying to find out who had been so effectively monitoring their actions during the five assassinations in Turkey.

  Somebody had seen them and recorded them in flagrante delicto, any and all evidence relating to the surveillance had been preserved by Ryan’s taking of the drive, and for weeks The Campus had been scrambling to find out just how much trouble they were in.

  As Jack dropped down into his desk chair and lit up his computer, he thought back to the night of the hit. When he pulled the drive out of Emad’s desktop, he’d first planned on just returning to The Campus with the device so he could rush it to Gavin Biery, the shop’s director of technology and an expert hacker with a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard and work stints at IBM and NSA.

  But Biery nixed that idea immediately. Instead, Gavin met the airplane and the returning operatives at Baltimore Washington Airport, and then rushed them, and their drive, to a nearby hotel. In a two-and-a-half-star suite he disassembled the drive and inspected it for any physical tracking device while the five exhausted operators set up perimeter security, guarding the windows, doors, and parking lot in case a hidden beacon had already alerted an enemy to the drive’s location. After two hours’ work Biery was satisfied that the drive was clean, so he returned to Hendley Associates with the rest of the team and the one potential clue about who had been watching them in Istanbul.

  Even though the rest of The Campus was spooked by the compromisation of their actions in Turkey, most still thought Biery was operating with an unreasonable amount of caution, bordering on paranoia. This surprised no one, however, because Gavin’s network security measures around Hendley Associates were legendary. Behind his back he was called the Digital Nazi for demanding weekly security meetings and frequent password-changing schedules in order for employees to “earn” access to his network.

  Biery had promised his colleagues many times over the years that no computer virus would ever get into his network, and to keep his promise, he remained ever vigilant, if, at times, a thorn in the side of the rest of the employees in the building.

  The Campus’s computer network was his baby, he proclaimed proudly, and he protected it from any potential harm.

  When Biery returned with the drive to the technology shop at The Campus, he took the paperback book–size device and placed it in a safe with a combination lock. Ryan and Operations Director Sam Granger, who happened to be standing close by at the time, looked on in bewilderment at this, but Biery explained that he would be the only person in the building with access to the drive. Even though he’d established to his satisfaction that there was no locator on the device, Biery had no idea if there was a virus or other corrupt malware hidden on the drive. He’d rather not have the untested piece of equipment anywhere on the physical property, but barring that, he would personally maintain security of the drive and control all access to it.

  Gavin then set up a desktop computer in a second-floor conference room with keycard access. This computer was not part of any network in the building, and it had neither wired nor wireless modem nor Bluetooth capability. It was completely isolated in both the real world and the cyberworld.

  Jack Ryan sarcastically asked Biery if he was worried that the drive might grow legs and try to break out of the room. Biery had replied at the time, “No, Jack, but I am worried that one of you guys might be working late one night and try to slip a USB thumb drive into the room or a laptop with a sync cable because you are too rushed or lazy to do things my way.”

  At first Biery demanded that he be the only person in the room with the computer while the computer was on, but Rick Bell, director of analysis for The Campus, had immediately protested on the quite reasonable grounds that Biery was not an analyst, and he did not know what to look for or even how to recognize and interpret much in the way of intelligence data.

  It was finally agreed to by all that for the first session with the drive, only one analyst, Jack Junior, should be with Biery in the conference room, and Jack would be armed with nothing more than a legal pad and a pen, and a wired phone connection to his coworkers at their desks in case network computing power was needed for research during the investigation.

  Before entering the room, Gavin hesitated. He turned to Jack. “Any chance you would voluntarily submit to a patdown?”

  “No problem.”

  Biery was pleasantly surprised. “Really?”

  Jack looked at him. “Of course. And just to be doubly sure, how ’bout I undergo a body-cavity search? You want me to assume the position against the wall here?”

  “Okay, Jack. No need to be a smart ass. I need to know that you don’t have a USB drive, a smart phone, anything that might get infected by whatever we find on this drive.”

  “I don’t, Gav. I told you that I don’t. Why can’t you just allow for the possibility that there are other people around here who don’t want to screw up our network? You don’t have the corner on the market on operational security. We’ve done everything you requested, but I’m not about to let you pat me down.”

  Biery thought it over for a second. “If the network is compromised at all . . .”

  “I get it,” Jack assured him.

  Biery and Ryan entered the conference room. Biery removed the Istanbul Drive from its strongbox, then wired it to the PC. He turned the machine back on and waited for it to boot up.

  Their first sweep of the drive’s contents showed them that the operating system was the latest version of Windows, and there were quite a few programs, e-mails, documents, and spreadsheets that they would need to go through.

  The e-mail program and the documents were password-protected, but Gavin Biery knew this particular encryption program backward and forward, and he finessed his way through in minutes via a back door that he and his team knew about.

  Together Biery and Ryan looked through the e-mails first. They were prepared to pull in Arabic- and Turkish-speaking analysts from Rick Bell’s team on the third floor, and they did find dozens of documents in both languages on the drive, but it quickly became apparent that much of the data, and likely the data most relevant to the investigation, was in English.

  They found nearly three dozen English e-mails going back about six months from the same address. As they read through the
m in chronological order, Jack spoke into the phone to the other analysts. “From his e-mails, it looks like our man in Istanbul was working directly with an English speaker. This guy communicated under the code name of Center. Doesn’t ring a bell from any data mining we’ve done on known personality aliases, but that’s no surprise. We’ve been focusing on terrorists, and this is looking like it’s a different animal.”

  Jack read through e-mails and relayed what he found. “The Libyan negotiated payment for a retainer-like relationship with Center, was told that he and his cell would be needed for odd jobs around town . . .” Jack paused while he dug into the next e-mail. “Here they were sent out to rent some warehouse space”—another e-mail opened—“here they were ordered to pick up a package and deliver it to a man on a freighter docked at Istanbul Port. Another e-mail has them picking up a case from a guy at Cengiz Topel Airport. No mention of the contents, but that’s not surprising. They also did some reconnaissance work at the offices of Turkcell, the mobile phone provider.”

  Jack summarized after looking through a few more e-mails: “Just low-rent gofer stuff. Nothing too interesting.”

  Except, Jack thought to himself, all the pictures of himself and his colleagues.

  Further digging into the e-mails revealed another secret. Just eleven days before the Campus hit, Center had stopped all e-mail communications with the Libyan. The last e-mail from Center said, simply, “Switch communication protocol immediately and delete all existing correspondence.”

  Jack thought this was interesting. “I wonder what the new communication protocol was.”

  Biery answered after looking through the system for a few seconds. “I can answer that. He installed Cryptogram the same day that e-mail came.”

  “What’s Cryptogram?”

  “It’s like instant messaging for spies and crooks. Center and Kartal could chat back and forth over the Internet and even send each other files, all on an encrypted forum, knowing that no one was looking in at the conversation and all traces of the conversation would be immediately and permanently scrubbed from both machines, and not hosted on any server in between.”