by Mike Maden
“I don’t even want to know what that means. Just tell me you know another way to get in.”
“A project with this level of security is waiting for a guy like me to come snooping around. It’s gonna take some time if I don’t wanna get caught. They don’t serve Slim Jim Bacon Jerky in the supermax in Colorado, and you know how I love me some Slim Jims.”
“Find out what you can about RAPTURE, but don’t take any unnecessary risks. I wish I could tell you that this is all about a national security issue but I’d be lying. I’m just trying to do what’s right for a friend, and the thread just happens to be pulling on this RAPTURE thing. There’s no point in you getting into trouble over it.”
“Don’t worry about me. I love a challenge even more than I hate solitary confinement. I’ll get back to you when I find out more. Besides, if she was your friend, she was my friend, too.”
“I appreciate it. Hey, one more thing. Maybe we should pass along Runtso’s name and his death to someone over at the State Department. It’s only fair to his family.”
“I was thinking the same thing. But I’ll do it anonymously so I don’t have to face down a bunch of questions neither of us want to answer.”
“As always, you’re ahead of the curve, Mr. Biery.”
“That’s exactly what my mom always says.”
“Smart lady.”
“But a terrible cook.”
Gavin rang off and Jack pocketed his phone, the good news picking up his gait.
32
Jack finally reached his apartment building after a long and circuitous walk through the winding, narrow streets of the old city. He turned the skeleton key in the lock and pushed through the heavy wooden door.
He closed it behind him, his eyes automatically scanning the room for any signs of entry, as he was trained to do. He’d kept his head on a swivel the whole way down from Plaça de Catalunya, and despite the crowds, was fairly certain that no one had been following him.
Nothing seemed out of order as he tossed his keys onto the small kitchen table. He reached into the fridge and grabbed a clara, popping the frosty can open as he sat down at the table.
He took a long pull of the lemon beer to slake his thirst after the walk home, trying to clear his mind. Maybe Brossa was right. What good was he actually doing here? He did believe she would do everything in her power to solve the case, and besides, he had a life to get back to, and duties with The Campus to fulfill.
He flipped open the laptop, waking up the screen, and tapped in his security code to access the machine. By force of habit, he double-clicked an innocuous file folder titled “Travel Tips,” and inside that file folder tapped on another subfolder titled “Vaccinations.”
The Vaccinations folder opened up a surveillance program linked to the four miniature, motion-activated, wide-angle video cameras he had hidden around the apartment.
Jack nearly spit clara through his nose when he saw the flashing green dot in the corner of the menu bar.
According to the display, someone had been in his apartment just thirty-five minutes ago.
The split-screen window displayed all four camera images, each with its own player controls. Activating the first camera automatically activated the other three, and all four were programmed to run for sixty minutes and then shut off unless activated again.
Jack watched his front door open and a man in a white paper mask and a black Nike hat enter his place. One of the cameras on the first level was placed in a fern on the top of the kitchen cabinets for down-angle view. The other was wedged between the cushions on the couch in the living room for the up angle.
Something about the man seemed familiar. The build, certainly. A white guy, big and fit, like an operator. His movements were economical and deliberate.
But his features were mostly hidden by the mask and the ball cap. He waited for his face to turn fully toward either camera. When he did, Jack froze the image and zoomed in.
The man clearly had short hair because none was spilling out beneath his hat, but the mid-ear sideburns were blond, for sure. There were a lot of blond people in the world, so that didn’t exactly narrow things down, though not so many here in Barcelona.
Jack zoomed in farther on the eyes, just peeking over the mask.
Hazel eyes. Deep set in a square face.
Not so common.
He had a hard time remembering anyone that had them back home. The only pair of hazel eyes he’d seen in Spain that he could remember was from the other night, in the window reflection outside of L’avi, and they were also deep set in a square face.
Could this be Crooked Nose?
Had to be. There was no way to know for sure with that paper mask covering his nose and mouth but it was a fair bet, given his body type.
He wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t a hostile. Why steal information when you can ask for it? And why come here unless he was connected to the bombing?
That made him BC or, if Brossa was right, some other terror organization.
What does he want from me?
Only one way to find out.
Jack let the video run to see what his old friend was up to. It only took a few moments to see that the man wasn’t paying a social call. Within minutes he had gathered up enough genetic material and fingerprint fragments to satisfy a dozen crime labs. But all of the collected biological data was only as good as the database he had access to, and the records in it, specifically, Jack’s.
Chances were, Crooked Nose would come up way short. With all of the effort exerted by others to scrub Jack’s identity from public and private records, his anonymity was virtually guaranteed.
Reassuring himself of this, Jack was suddenly cold-slapped back into reality as Crooked Nose turned from DNA collection to planting listening devices in his apartment.
Holy shit.
* * *
—
DNA and wireless listening devices?
This dude was pretty serious about getting intel on him. Even small, wireless civilian LDs were easy enough to come by—Alibaba and Amazon had plenty to choose from. These were smaller. Probably mil-spec.
What was this guy hoping to hear? Conversations with Brossa, most likely, but also any information about his identity or any organization he might be working with.
The DNA snatch was an interesting twist. On the one hand, it meant Brigada Catalan either had their own serious hacking skills, a government agency plant, or a relationship with an organization that had either of those assets.
But then again, personal information was digital gold, especially of government personnel, and millions of hackers were mining for it every day.
Some hackers worked for other governments, like the one-hundred-thousand-plus digital thieves inside China’s cyberespionage programs. They were believed responsible for the recent theft of nearly twenty-two million records from the U.S. government’s personnel database, including digital images and fingerprints.
Worse, the medical records of at least one hundred and fifty million Americans had been stolen by still other entities. That was a lot of data that could be used to uncover people wanting to hide their identities.
People like Jack.
Private criminal organizations like the Russian Bratva or the Iron Syndicate needed that kind of information, as well. One of the ways they protected themselves was by identifying local and national police and security personnel in order to guard against them, bribe them, or kill them. And selling those identities to other interested parties was a highly profitable business.
In fact, it was becoming increasingly difficult to hide anyone’s identity these days, a subject that Jack Ryan, Jr., had struggled with for several years. Because of his unique status, anonymity was required for him to be able to operate. But the proliferation of everybody’s digital footprints, including people like Jack who consciously avo
ided making them, was growing exponentially.
Where things had gotten really crazy was the genetic stuff. Besides the general collection of DNA materials by governments, private DNA ancestry companies had been compromised, either through voluntary cooperation or by hacking.
In Gavin’s latest security briefing, he pointed out it didn’t matter if Jack had never submitted his spit tube to one of those companies. If close relatives had done so, their genetic connections could still lead to him, or at the very least, blow his cover by their actions or online activities.
The only good news was that it was also possible for the good guys to break into these DNA databases and either delete or alter the genetic records to protect their people or create whole new cover identities.
Things had become so complex on both offense and defense that Gavin created a separate digital identity unit within his division. While Jack’s unique identity situation had top priority, every member of The Campus needed the service. Gavin’s unit spent as much time wiping out the new digital footprints that crept up nearly every day as building credible digital “legends” for their people for future use on operations as needed.
As Jack watched the last of his surveillance images play out, his DEFCON alert jumped a couple of pegs.
Brigada Catalan, or whoever this guy worked for, had a serious hard-on for him. Why? Was Gavin right?
Was he the bombing target all along?
* * *
—
Jack once read a story about the B-17 “Flying Fortress,” America’s first four-engine bomber, and the U.S. Army Air Corps’ workhorse throughout World War Two. It was one of the most sophisticated airframes of its time, comprised of advanced, multi-featured engine, flight, and navigational systems. Early in its development it suffered a catastrophic crash and investigators determined that the pilots forgot to release a simple locking mechanism on the flight control system. This led to the conclusion that the B-17 was simply too difficult and complicated for humans to handle.
But the surviving test pilots felt the airplane was too important to abandon. They came up with a revolutionary solution to the B-17’s complexity challenge: the preflight checklist. The checklist saved the B-17, which helped win the war against fascism in Europe and the Pacific.
And a checklist might have just saved Jack’s life.
Checklists and routines—doing the same things the same way every time—were drilled into him during his formative training at The Campus by John Clark.
Though not a scholar by any means, Clark was highly intelligent—genius IQ, according to his service records—and well read. His checklist lecture included Aristotle’s famous dictum We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Not that he needed Aristotle to prove his point. Clark credited his own iron disciplines of habit and hard work as the primary reasons he not only survived but prevailed in countless undercover missions against overwhelming odds behind enemy lines in Vietnam and the Iron Curtain.
So when Jack came through the door, the first thing he did was check his surveillance system.
Thank you, Mr. C, Jack said to himself as he took mental note of the locations of the planted bugs.
Jack faked a yawn and ambled over to the sink for a glass of water, letting the faucet run while he came up with a plan. He popped on the television set in the front room just ten feet away from the open kitchen and flipped channels until he found an English-language movie station and turned up the volume.
He then carefully removed the laptop from the kitchen table and sat down on the couch with it, and texted Gavin quietly. According to his surveillance cameras, the intruder hadn’t planted any software or other surveillance devices on his computer so it was safe to communicate this way.
Thankfully, Gavin was almost always connected, even when he was asleep. He happened to be in a Fortnite competition but Gavin’s high sense of duty and fierce loyalty to his friends overrode all other concerns, even when he was technically off the clock.
Jack filled Gavin in on what had happened and a plan he’d come up with to deal with the asshole who’d planted the listening devices. Gavin liked it because it let him get involved in field operations without actually having to be in the field. Gavin was a computer genius but also smart enough to recognize his considerable limitations. The inability to engage in lethal violence was one of those limitations. Surviving such lethal encounters was another. Going into the field with Jack Junior would challenge both because when he got his war on, someone was going to die.
33
Jack climbed the stairs to the upper level of his loft apartment and headed for the bathroom.
One of the planted audio devices was located behind the toilet. He took a leak—it wasn’t an exercise in tradecraft, he just really needed to bleed the lizard after the beer.
He flushed the toilet, then turned on the shower. There also happened to be a radio attached to the wall above the toilet with small speakers located high in two corners of the closet-size bathroom. Jack found a Euro Pop station and turned up the sound, then headed back downstairs as quietly as he could. He also moved the laptop to the floor beneath the kitchen table, where another listening device was located. He then exited the apartment with every bit of stealth he could muster. Neither time nor noise was his friend right now. He had to move fast and silently for his plan to work.
* * *
—
Jack climbed the shoulder-wide staircase up to his private rooftop terrace.
His building was attached to two other apartment buildings—one a story higher, the other a story lower—on the north and south side of his building. Several more apartment buildings of varying heights ran together, forming the rest of the city block.
His building was bounded by narrow streets on both sides. His front door faced the eastbound street. There was no door to the westbound street.
At the ends of the city block, streets ran north and south.
Jack was careful to stay away from the walls that bordered his terrace. He was uncertain where the hazel-eyed intruder might be, or any other operatives he might have deployed to keep the block under surveillance.
Jack had a chance to look at one of the listening devices without disturbing it. Thankfully, it wasn’t a recording device, but rather, a live feed. That meant Crooked Nose or one of his minions had ears on, and given the size of the miniature transmitter, that meant the listener was close—a hundred meters away, at most.
He crouched low and inched close to the east side of the building facing the Mediterranean Sea, just a few blocks away. He pulled out his pocket-size Nikon monocular, one of those small, innocuous checklist items Clark insisted they carry when traveling. The most likely location of whoever was listening would be in one of the many cars parked on the streets below.
Jack raised himself up just high enough to sight the Nikon down the north side of the street that ended just a block up. The buildings fronting the street were tall enough to cast shadows against the sun, so the car windows weren’t blinded by glare.
Near as he could tell, there wasn’t anybody sitting in any of the cars in that direction. Nor in the other.
Jack then scooted low across the terrace to the west side of the building and repeated the exercise. He spotted a woman walking a small terrier on one side of the street, and a South Asian man emptying the garbage from the back door of a restaurant. Neither appeared to be the tango in question.
Jack then turned his monocular to the southbound direction.
Bingo.
Across the intersection, approximately seventy-five yards away, an Audi sedan was parked in the lead position, and a man in a black Nike hat sat in the driver’s seat, his window down and his elbow resting on the door. An audio headset was perched on his head. The face was square and the eyes were deep set, and most important, the long nose looked like it had once been broken.
Crooked Nose.
Had to be.
There was one way to test his assumption.
Jack put in his AirPods and pulled out his smartphone. “Gav, I’m on the roof. You ready?”
“Yeah, I think I’ve got something that’ll do the trick.”
“Fire away.”
Jack put his monocular on the man. A moment later, walrus and seal noises exploded in Jack’s ears—a cacophony of roars, chuffs, screams, squeals, and bellows. It sounded like a pride of angry, flatulent lions fornicating inside a small public restroom. The noise was simultaneously hilarious, weird, and perfect to elicit the response Jack was hoping for.
Crooked Nose shook his head and tapped his headphones, his face twisted in a frown of utter confusion.
Bingo times two.
Gavin was running a crazy soundtrack through Jack’s laptop speakers directly beneath one of the planted listening devices. It was so strange and unexpected it caught the guy off guard.
“Love the soundtrack, Gav. But you should see a doctor for that intestinal issue you obviously have.”
“Funny, Jack.”
“Good job. I’ll take it from here.”
* * *
—
Since the dude in the car was on the same side of the street as the building’s only exit, Jack had to find another way down to the street if he didn’t want to be seen.
Jack pocketed his AirPods and phone as he ducked back over to the west side of his building and scanned up and down the row of adjacent buildings looking for a way down. There weren’t any fire escapes. But there was an option.
The only problem was, how to get to it?
The sturdy aluminum awning frame on his terrace was bolted to his stairwell wall and, luckily for him, to the wall of the taller south-facing building. Jack stepped onto one of the wood-slatted chairs, up onto the outdoor table, then pulled himself up onto one of the aluminum awning struts where it was bolted into the taller wall.
