Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

  Tariq muted the television.

  “Strange bedfellows,” the Emir murmured.

  “Pardon?”

  While Tehran had been generally unsupportive of the URC’s cause, neither had it been a hindrance, knowing well that one never knew where interests might intersect. In this case, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security, or VEVAK, had in recent years turned its attention to how a postoccupation Iraq might look. Though well represented by several militias and bolstered by both Hezbollah and Pasdaran aid, the Iraqi Shia population was still a minority, and therefore vulnerable to Sunni persecution, an imbalance of power that Tehran despised and the URC was only too happy to exploit. Even as the United States had begun banging the drum for war in 2002, the Emir had conducted his own cost-benefit analysis and developed a strategy to further the URC’s aim. The fact that the strategy was obliquely based on the American economic model was something that would likely never occur to Washington.

  The United States would eventually leave, or at least decrease its presence to a nominal level, at which time Iran would begin its play for domination in Iraq, a feat it couldn’t hope to accomplish without an advantage over the Sunni majority. In this, Iran had a need. It was a customer-in-the-making.

  The URC’s involvement in Iraq had begun in August of 2003 with an influx of men, matériel, and expertise, all of which were freely offered to Sunni extremist groups. Based on a mutual hatred of the U.S. occupiers, resources were shared and goals intertwined, and by 2006 the URC held sway over great portions of Baghdad and most of the Sunni Triangle. This was the good or service for which Tehran was willing to pay.

  As Mary Pat Foley and the NCTC well knew and Jack Ryan Jr. had recently realized, information availability in the digital age could be as much a hindrance to intelligence work as it could be a blessing. Computers can categorize, collate, and disseminate massive amounts of information, but the human mind can absorb and use only so much of it. The application of information is the pivot on which decisions-good, bad, and neutral-are made, a fact that engineers, game wardens, casinos, and hundreds of other seemingly unrelated disciplines had long ago recognized. Who does what, and where and when do they do it? To a city planner, a list of intersections prone to traffic gridlock was virtually useless; a dynamic map on which he or she could see hot spots and trends, invaluable. Sadly, as was too often the case, the U.S. government was playing catch-up in the fields of Data Visualization and information architecture, having to outsource such services to private cyber-savvy firms while the federal bureaucracy threw millions of dollars and lost time at the issue.

  For Jack and Gavin Biery, the project they eventually dubbed PLOWSHARE began as a technical challenge: how to take the flood of open-source information on the Internet and beat it into something useful-a sword with which they could pare down the overload. The slightly overwrought metaphor notwithstanding, they made rapid progress, starting with a software program designed to gather obituaries from the eastern seaboard and map them according to various groupings: age, location, cause of death, vocation, etc. Many of the patterns that emerged were predictable-such as elderly deaths clustered around retirement homes-but some were not, such as the recent raising of the drinking age in one state preceding more young-adult deaths on highways leading to a nearby state with a lower drinking age. This, too, was somewhat predictable, they admitted, but seeing the clusters on the map was the proverbial picture that paints a thousand words.

  The other surprise was the depth and scope of open-source information. The truly useful data, while not inaccessible, were tucked away deep within local, state, and federal government websites, available to anyone with enough patience and technological literacy to find it. Second and Third World countries, the ones in which most terrorist incidents took place, were the easiest prey, often failing to close the gap between online record-keeping and online database security. Otherwise confidential information such as arrest reports and investigatory case files were stored in unsecured servers without so much as a firewall or password between them and government website portals.

  And such was the case with Libya. Within four hours of getting the go-ahead from Hendley, Jack and Gavin had PLOWSHARE chewing on gigabytes of data from both open-source and government databases. Two hours after that, PLOWSHARE regurgitated the information onto Gavin’s hacked copy of Google Earth Pro. Jack called Hendley, Granger, Rounds, and the Caruso brothers into the dimmed conference room. The PLOWSHARE-ENHANCED satellite view of tripoli was overlaid with crisscrossing multicolored lines, clusters, and squares. Jack stood by the LCD screen with remote in hand; Biery sat in the back against the wall, his laptop open on his legs.

  “Looks like a Jackson Pollock painting,” Brian observed. “You trying to give us a seizure, Jack?”

  “Bear with me,” Jack replied, then touched a button on the remote. The “data tracery,” as he and Gavin had come to call it, disappeared. Jack gave the group a five-minute primer on PLOWSHARE, then touched the remote again. The image zoomed in on the Tripoli airport, which was now overlaid with what looked like the head of a flower, its center a stigma divided into colored pie slices, its petals squared off and of various lengths.

  “The stigma represents average arrival volume per day. Mornings are busiest; afternoons the slowest. The petals represent average number of special searches conducted at airport checkpoints. As you can see, there’s a spike in the mornings, from seven to ten, and a drop-off the closer you move toward noon. Translation: Thursdays between ten-thirty and noon are the best times to try to sneak something through the screeners.”

  “Why?” asked Granger.

  “The checkpoints are fully manned in the morning, but personnel are rotated through lunch breaks in late morning; less staff plus more transitions equals less security. Plus, almost two-thirds of the screeners and security guards work Sundays through Thursdays.”

  “So Thursdays are their Fridays,” Dominic said. “Already thinking about the weekend.”

  Jack nodded. “That’s what we thought. We’ve also got a corresponding departures graph. Might be of more use to you.”

  Jack cycled through a series of colored overlays depicting traffic patterns, acts of violence, kidnappings, raids conducted by both police and military units, anti-Western demonstrations… all categorized by dates and times, demographics, neighborhoods, ethnicity, foreign involvement, religious and political affiliations, until finally summarizing the data into a “do’s and don’ts” for Brian and Dominic: areas to avoid, and at what times of the day, neighborhoods in which they were likely to find strong URC support, streets on which military checkpoints and police raids were most common.

  “Jack, this is great stuff,” Brian commented. “Kind of our own bizarro Frommer’s guidebook.”

  “How much does the data vary?” This from Dominic.

  “Not by much. There’s some fluctuation on and around major Islamic observances, but unless you stay more than ten days or so, you won’t encounter any of it.”

  Granger asked, “Can they access this in the field?”

  “Gavin’s hacked a couple of Sony Vaio VGNs-eight-inch screen with Ubuntu OS and a one-point-three-”

  “English, Jack,” said Rounds.

  “Tiny laptop. It’ll have all the data on it in Flash format. You can change and review the PLOWSHARE overlays on the fly. We’ll give you a walk-through when we’re done here.”

  Hendley said, “Nicely done, Jack… Gavin. Any questions, guys?”

  Brian and Dominic shook their heads.

  “Okay, safe travels.”

  61

  JACK RYAN SENIOR knotted his tie and looked in the mirror. He decided he looked good enough. His lucky suit, a plain white button-down shirt, a red tie. He got a haircut the previous day, and his hair showed enough gray to make certain he wasn’t exactly a kid anymore, but he looked youthful enough for a man in his early fifties. A test smile showed that he’d brushed his teeth properly. Game time.

&nbs
p; It would start in an hour, in front of twenty or so TV cameras and the hundreds of reporter/commentators behind them, few of whom had any real affection for him. But they didn’t have to. Their job was to report the facts as they saw them, fairly and honestly. Most, or at least some, of them would, God willing. But Ryan had to deliver his lines properly, not throw up or fall down in front of the cameras, however entertaining that would be to Jay Leno later this day.

  There was a knock on the door. Ryan walked to answer it. He didn’t have to be overly careful. His Secret Service detail had this whole floor guarded like an Air Force nuke locker.

  “Hey, Arnie, Callie,” he said in greeting.

  Arnie van Damm looked him over. “Well, Mr. President, good to see you still know how to dress.”

  “Got a different tie?” Callie Weston asked.

  “What’s wrong with red?” Ryan asked in reply.

  “Too in-your-face.”

  “What would you prefer?”

  “Sky-blue is better.”

  “Callie, I love your work, but, please, let me dress myself, okay?”

  Callie Weston growled but let it slide.

  “All ready?” Arnie asked.

  “Too late to run away,” Ryan answered. And it was. From now on he was a willing, fire-in-the-belly candidate. Blood in his eyes and steel in his spine.

  Van Damm said, “Sure I can’t talk you into-”

  “No.” He and Arnie and Callie had batted around Georgetown-whether or not to include the assassination attempt in his announcement speech. Predictably, they’d argued for inclusion, but Ryan would have none of it. The incident would be raised during the campaign, but not by him. Nor would he avoid it.

  “How’s the audience?” Ryan asked, closing the subject.

  “All wired up,” Arnie replied. “It is otherwise a slow news day out there, and so they’ll be glad to see you. It gives them almost five minutes of airtime to fill. You will sell a lot of toothpaste for them, Jack. Hell, some of them actually like you.”

  “Really? Since when?” Ryan asked.

  “They’re not the enemy. They’re the press. They’re neutral observers. You ought to hang out with them, off-the-record talks. Have a beer with them. Let them come to like you. You’re a likable guy. Let it work for you.”

  “I’ll think about it. Coffee?”

  “They do it good here?”

  “No complaints from me,” Jack told them. He wandered over to the room-service tray and sat down to pour another cup. His third. That would be his limit, lest the caffeine make him jumpy. At the White House, presidential coffee was all Jamaican Blue Mountain, from the former British colony, widely regarded as the best in all the world. That was a cup of coffee. Maybe it was the bauxite in the beans, Jack thought.

  Again Ryan’s mind came back to the central question: If he won, how to put the country back on course? Governing so complex a country as the United States of America was an effective impossibility. Too many interests, each of them matters of life and death to somebody, and that somebody would be on TV or in the papers to make sure that his/her views got their proper-preferably loud-attention. The President might or might not pay attention. He/she had a staff to make sure that only the important stuff made it to his/her desk. But that made the President a hostage to the staff, and even a good man could be misdirected by the people that he or she had chosen for the job-and as a practical matter, selection of the staff was delegated to more senior staffers, all of whom had a sense of self-importance about them, as though a desk in the White House West Wing or the Old Executive Office Building was a personal gift from God’s Own Hand. Such people could and did shape the ideas of their President just by selecting the things he saw. And you’re going to fight for four more years of this? Ryan asked himself. You fucking idiot.

  “I know that look,” Arnie said. “I know what you’re thinking. What can I say, Jack, except that I think you really are the best man for the job, and it’s necessary. I believe that down to my bones. How about you?”

  “I’m getting there,” Ryan said.

  “You see the business about Iran?” Arnie asked.

  “Which part? Their nuclear program or the border exercise?”

  “Both.”

  “Same houses, different paint,” Jack said. “Tehran knows all it has to do is rattle a little saber and Kealty will react-or overreact. What’s he got Netters sending over there, a whole battle group?”

  “Yep. Stennis. Pulled it back from a rotation home.”

  “Idiot. They’ve got the President of the United States dancing on a string.” He checked his watch. “How much more time do I have?”

  “Ten minutes,” Callie replied. “Can I talk you into some TV makeup?”

  “No way in hell!” Ryan thundered in reply. “I’m not a ten-dollar hooker on Sixteenth Street.”

  “They cost more than that now, Jack. Inflation, remember?”

  Ryan stood and made his way to the bathroom. Losing bladder control was something else to be avoided, and not something he could do in front of cameras. As Ryan grew older, he found himself liking less to wait in line to take a leak. Part of the aging process, he figured. Well, he took his leak, zipped up, and walked back out to don his jacket.

  “Off we go, guys?”

  “Into the lion’s den, Mr. President.” Arnie called him Jack only in private. Callie Weston had the same privilege, which made her uncomfortable. On walking out of the room, Andrea Price-O’Day was there, along with other members of Jack’s detail, guns securely holstered.

  “SWORDSMAN is moving,” Andrea told the rest of her team over her lapel microphone.

  Jack walked to the elevator, which was, as usual, held for him, with yet another armed agent inside.

  “Okay, Eddie,” Andrea said, and Eddie released the key he’d been holding, and the elevator went down to the second floor, which had the meeting room reserved for today’s announcement.

  Forty seconds and the doors slid open, and the Secret Service team went out to lead the parade. There was a funnel of spectators, some of them ordinary citizens, remarkably enough, but the majority of them reporters of various flavors, and their TV cameras. Jack smiled at them-candidates had to smile all the time-waving to a few he knew by name from four years earlier. The smile threatened to make his face crack, Jack thought.

  “Mr. President, please follow me,” the hotel manager said, shepherding the party to the back of the room. There was the lectern. Ryan went to it at once. Gripping the wood panel hard enough to make his hands hurt a little. It was his normal practice, and helped synchronize him with the task at hand.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jack began. “Thank you for coming. I am here to announce my candidacy to run for the Presidency of the United States in this coming year.

  “Since I left the Presidency three years ago, I’ve watched the current President’s term of office with disappointment. President Kealty has not responded well to the challenges our country has faced. In Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers have died needlessly, victims of a rudderless policy of withdrawal. Even when a war is ill conceived, when you have a war, you are stuck with it, and you must play it out. Running away from a conflict is not a policy. President Kealty, as a United States Senator, was not a friend of our military services, and he has compounded his earlier errors to utilize those forces inefficiently, micromanaging their field activities from the Oval Office in such a way as to get our people killed instead of listening to the commanders on the ground.

  “Moreover, President Kealty has also mismanaged our national economy. When I left office, America had a growing and healthy economy. In his first two years, President Kealty’s misguided tax policy has stopped that cold. In this last year, the economy bounced off the bottom and is now starting to grow again, but that is in spite of government policy, not because of it. Under my administration, we simplified tax policy. That put a lot of lawyers and accountants out of business-by the way, you might remember that I am still a CPA, and th
e new tax codes are to the point that I can’t comprehend them anymore. Maybe President Kealty is happy that, in his words, everybody pays his fair share of taxes, but revenues to the federal government have gone down, not up, and the resulting deficit is harming America every day.

  “I can only regard Kealty’s first three years in the White House as a mistake for our country, and for that reason, I am here to try to get back there myself to correct the mistakes.

  “On the issue of national security, our country needs a new and efficient look at where we are in the world. Who our enemies are, and how we need to deal with them. For starters, we need a better intelligence service. Fixing it will be a task of years, but the work must begin soon. You can’t deal with your enemies unless you know who they are, and where they are. You fight against enemies by supporting and then using your military assets efficiently. President Kealty has manifestly not done that well. National security is the first task of the federal government. Life, as Thomas Jefferson put it, comes before liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Protecting the nation’s life is the job of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps. To that end, they must be properly supported, trained to perfection, and then allowed to do their job in accordance with the wishes and expertise of their professional officers, under strategic direction from the sitting President. President Kealty doesn’t seem to recognize that simple fact.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am here because someone has to replace the President, and that person, I think, is John Patrick Ryan. I call on your support, and the support of our citizens. America deserves better than what he’s done, and I offer myself, and my vision, to fix the problems that have been created in the last three years. My mission is to return America to the old truths that have stood us in good stead for two hundred years. Our people deserve better. I am here to give the people the things they need. And what is that?” he asked rhetorically.