Full Force and Effect

9

Jack Ryan, Jr., awoke in the pitch dark, his eyes thick with sleep and his mind void of any clue of where the hell he was. He heard rain pounding on a window next to him, and he thought back, tried to remember the recent past.

This feels like jet lag. Where did you go this time, Jack?

It came to him slowly because he was so damn tired. Vietnam, Hazelton, the motorcycles, the plane ride home with the smell of death, halfway around the earth, the exhaustion after landing in Baltimore the previous evening.

Only then did it hit him. He realized where he was now.

He was home. His new place, a modern condominium overlooking the Potomac River in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. He barely knew his own home, he’d been traveling so much, so it took him a while to get his bearings. Finally, he rolled out of bed and walked toward the kitchen, hoping he could remember the way in the dark.

Jack had bought this place on Oronoco Street six weeks earlier, but it still felt brand-new to him. He’d been undergoing a battery of advanced tradecraft and operations training that took him all over the world — until last week, that is, when he and most other members of his unit rushed off to Asia on special assignment. Ryan realized he’d spent only six or seven nights at his Alexandria address since moving in, so it came as no real surprise that he’d been disoriented rising early on the morning after an exhausting flight around the world.

To combat the cobwebs in his head now he threw a pod into his coffee machine, filled the reservoir with water, flipped the device on, and stuck a cup under the spout. As he stood there with his eyes closed, the machine began to spew the hot black liquid into the cup. Jack had become a bit of a coffee snob, and he knew “pod” coffee couldn’t compete with “real” coffee in a taste contest, but in a speed race the pod won by a wide margin.

He stood in his dark kitchen and drank his coffee black and molten. It burned the back of his throat, but he needed the jolt because he could tell his brain was still somewhere back in Asia and he had to go to work today.

Thunder boomed on the street outside, and Ryan headed back upstairs to get in the shower.

Ryan had lived in Columbia, Maryland, for several years, but he moved here for the simple reason that his place of business had moved here. For years the offices of Hendley Associates had been north of D.C., in West Odenton, Maryland, but that building had been shuttered months back, after Chinese operatives learned of the existence of The Campus. A unit of Chinese Special Forces raided the property, killing several employees, and even though the threat had been repelled, both the “white side” Hendley Associates and the “dark side” Campus had closed up shop to prevent any further compromise.

Gerry Hendley had spent most of the intervening months looking for a new space, until finally deciding on a building here in Old Town Alexandria. The new Hendley Associates property was on North Fairfax Street, in a four-story brick Federalist office building with views of the Potomac River and the distant D.C. skyline. The building turned out to be perfect for Hendley’s needs. It had been built as the home of a government intelligence contractor run by a former U.S. Army general, before he’d left it behind to move his offices to an address inside the District.

Ryan dressed for work in a charcoal-gray pin-striped suit and a red silk tie. His formal attire contrasted a little with his thick, dark beard and his slightly longer than collar-length brown hair, but the beard and the hair were more important to him now than the suit. His father was President of the United States, so Jack had made it a focus of his attention to do whatever he could to avoid notice and attention. And in this task he had enjoyed near mission success; in the past few months only two or three times had anyone stepped up to him to inform him of the fact he was Jack Ryan, Jr., son of the President.

After he checked his suit in the mirror for lint, he stepped over to his nightstand and hefted a black pistol in a black leather holster from its nightly resting place by his clock. He slipped it into the waistband of his pants on his right side, then slid a small leather pouch containing an extra magazine for the weapon on his left side.

The operators of The Campus appreciated the relocation to Virginia for a few reasons, but one of the main perks was that they could easily and legally carry firearms here, unlike in nearby D.C. and in Maryland, which were both much more restrictive. Jack’s main carry weapon was the Austrian Glock 19, a squat, black, nearly featureless automatic pistol that carried sixteen rounds of nine-millimeter hollow-point ammunition. It was a simple and effective weapon, without a lot of bells and whistles such as a manual external safety. If one kept the gun loaded — which one should if one carried it for defensive purposes — anytime the trigger was pulled, a round would fire. There were no extra levers, switches, or buttons to slow down the process.

Ryan considered himself much more of an intelligence analyst than a gunfighter, but he had entered into gun battles multiple times in his years with The Campus. It went with the job, so Ryan went armed as often as he could possibly get away with it.

Jack Junior popped open his umbrella on his covered back deck and he locked his back door, then he shouldered his backpack and exited his property through his rear garden gate. He walked past his black Mercedes E-Class in the driveway and continued down the street.

Ryan enjoyed walking to work; inside the Beltway it was the closest thing to paradise anyone had managed to find, and even in the rain it beat getting stuck in morning traffic.

Ten minutes later he shook out his umbrella at the entrance to Hendley Associates and stood in front of a bulletproof glass door until he was buzzed into the lobby by one of four guards inside.

A dozen armed men were employed as the security force of Hendley Associates. They were all ex-CIA paramilitary operations officers with top-secret security clearances who’d taken contracts as static security in the private sector. They knew the organization they protected was a sub rosa intelligence outfit, and they knew they weren’t supposed to know more than that, save for one extra item of interest that was quite relevant to their positions. The son of the President of the United States was an analyst for the company. Jack Junior arrived each morning at eight a.m., unless of course he was out of town. No one could imagine he had any operational capacity for the company, but then again, none of the static security was aware of the true scope of the work done by the men on the top floor. The security force here just assumed that on occasion POTUS’s kid had to go into the field to conduct some sort of financial analytics task for Gerry Hendley.

The director of security for Hendley Associates was a forty-seven-year-old ex — Army Ranger named Bryce Jennings. Jennings was no stranger to the world of clandestine security. After the Army he spent a decade in the CIA protecting secure facilities for the Agency. In his security career he’d been bombed in Baghdad, shot at in Kabul, he’d fought off an attempted overrun of a special mission compound in Sana’a and another outside Manila, and he’d once help save the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia from an insider attack when a local police captain tried to kidnap him at gunpoint.

Jennings had seen a lot in his career, but he was happy to leave that behind now so that he could spend more time with his wife and young daughter back in the United States. He’d jumped at the chance to come back stateside to take this new position, but he solemnly guaranteed Gerry Hendley he would treat his responsibilities here in the building in Alexandria, Virginia, as seriously as he would were they in Alexandria, Egypt.

Ryan was buzzed in after a moment and he entered the small lobby and then dropped off his umbrella in a rack.

Bryce was behind the desk by the elevator. “Morning, Jack.” He’d tried calling him Mr. Ryan the first half-dozen or so days he’d greeted him, but Ryan corrected him each time. Finally Jennings relented, so now it was just Jack.

“Hey, Bryce,” Ryan said. “Nats and Phillies tonight if the rain moves out.”

“Damn right, I’ll be there. Phillies have been hitting, but we’ve got Gonzalez on the mound. No problem.”

Ryan was an Orioles fan himself, but he knew Jennings lived and breathed the Washington Nationals, and took his six-year-old daughter to every game he could when he wasn’t working.

As Ryan made his way to the elevator he said, “Good luck tonight, but the Orioles will be down for a double-header Saturday. You’d better pray for rain then.”

Jennings’s eyes narrowed, feigning seriousness. “You really ought to root for the home team, you know. Your dad, too.”

Jack entered the elevator and turned around. “Oh, we do. D.C. isn’t home for either of us, Bryce.”

Jennings shook his head as the doors closed.

After the Chinese attack on The Campus the sub rosa intelligence organization had become a smaller, leaner outfit, and their offices reflected this. Fewer than seventy-five men and women worked in the building, and half of these worked exclusively in the white side. The first two floors of the building were devoted exclusively to the financial trading business. The third floor housed IT for both entities, as well as conference rooms and a small break room. The top floor was the location of Gerry Hendley’s large executive office suite, as well as the offices of The Campus. An equipment locker and the company’s mainframe computer, as well as an operations center for The Campus, were housed in the secure basement of the property.

Jack’s elevator stopped on the second floor, and Gavin Biery stepped in and pushed the third-floor button. Gavin Biery was the IT director of The Campus, and as much as the operational side of the house hated to admit it, The Campus would not exist without him.

“Morning, Gav.”

“Welcome home, Ryan. You boys have a nice little vacay?”

Normally Biery supported Campus operations from his banks of computers here in Virginia, but the Vietnam op had come up quickly and Gavin hadn’t been involved. Even so, Gavin Biery was cleared for anything that happened to the Campus operators, so Ryan knew he didn’t need to keep quiet about the operation.

Jack said, “Oh, it was a blast. Our subject got murdered right in front of me. Ding and Sam got shot at, and Clark flattened a dude with a rental car. How was your weekend?”

The elevator dinged as it stopped, and the doors opened on Gavin’s floor. He stood there with his mouth half open, not sure if Ryan was serious.

Finally he said, “Sure am sorry I missed that op.”

Gavin had gone out with the team a few times in his career to provide computer support to their operations, and due to these limited forays into the field he considered himself something of a full-fledged spook. The rest of the team found this to be comical, although the computer geek had done an admirable job in the field.

“It’s your floor, Gav,” Jack said.

“Right,” Gavin replied as he stepped out into the third-floor hall, still not sure if Ryan was pulling his leg about what had happened overseas or not.

Jack headed to his fourth-floor office to drop his bag on his way to the kitchen, but as he walked up the hall he saw someone sitting on the edge of his desk. As he got closer he realized it was his cousin, Dominic Caruso. Jack hadn’t seen Dom in nearly three months. Dom was an operations officer here at The Campus, same as Jack, but the operators had all been off in different directions in specialized individual training, each on their own rotation around the world. Dom had stayed out on an evolution longer than the other men, and he and Jack hadn’t spoken or e-mailed each other in weeks.

The two men embraced. “Good to see you, cuz!” Caruso said.

After a post-embrace chest bump, a silly move they’d started doing as a joke, Ryan said, “You, too. Damn, Dom. You’ve been training a long time. Me and the other guys have actually been out working while you’ve been rolling around on a cushy judo mat somewhere.”

Caruso cocked his head. “Really? Gerry didn’t tell you?”

Now Ryan cocked his own head. “Tell me what?”

Caruso hesitated. Finally he said, “Never mind. If Gerry didn’t tell you, then you must not need to know.”

The truth was, Dom Caruso had been fighting his own battle in the past few weeks. A battle that had taken him from the Indian subcontinent to Central America and then to Europe, as he tried to stop a potentially devastating intelligence leak from falling into the hands of the Iranians. The rest of the team had been kept away from the situation, but Dom didn’t know until now that the others had not even been informed he’d been in harm’s way.

Hendley knew what Dom had been involved in, but apparently he’d kept the others in the dark. Operational security. He could already hear Hendley saying it as an explanation, and it did make sense, although it made Dom feel even more like he’d been swinging in the wind alone on his last operation.

Ryan said, “Tell me about it. You get into anything interesting?”

“Later,” Dom replied, not sure if he would say anything about it at all now. “I heard you guys were out on a job. Anything cool happen?”

Jack shrugged, then put his arm around Caruso’s shoulders. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee and I’ll fill you in.”

John Clark arrived in his fourth-floor office just after eight, and as soon as he put his briefcase down he picked up his phone and called Jack Ryan, Jr.’s office down the hall.

Jack answered on the second ring. “Hey, John.”

“I’m guessing Dom is in there shooting the shit with you.”

Jack chuckled. “We have a little catching up to do.”

“Right. Before you do that, send him down to me.”

“You got it.”

A minute later Caruso entered Clark’s office and shut the door behind him. The two men shook hands.

Clark said, “I meant to call you before you came in, but we had an in extremis situation come up last week.”

“Yeah, I heard. No details yet, but Jack was getting around to it. He doesn’t seem to be aware of what I’ve been up to.”

“Gerry and I have decided to keep some of the work we do here compartmentalized. You were working your last job as a singleton. When an operator is in the field as a singleton, there is no need to know among the other operators.”

Dom said, “I understand that.”

“Good.” The matter was settled, Caruso wouldn’t talk about his operation to the rest of the team. “How do you feel? Ready to get back to work?”

“Absolutely. I’m good to go.”

Clark said, “I need to fill you in on what went down in Vietnam. We have a nine a.m. meeting where we might get further marching orders on the subject.”

Dom pulled up a chair. “Let’s hear it.”