Threat Vector

ELEVEN

Jack Ryan, Jr., got the senior staff meeting scheduled for eleven a.m., and now he was back at his desk, looking over some more analysis that he would present today. His coworkers were focusing on material they had intercepted from CIA discussing the death of the five Libyans in Turkey two months ago. It was no surprise that CIA was more than a little curious about who the killers were, and Jack found it at once creepy and exciting to read the Langley spooks’ theories about the well-orchestrated hit.

The smart ones knew good and well the new Libyan government’s spies had not orchestrated this as a revenge operation against the Turkish cell, but beyond that there was little consensus.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence had worked the equation for a few days, and even Jack’s girlfriend, Melanie Kraft, had been tasked with going over the evidence about the assassinations. Five different killings in the same night, all in different manners and all against a cell with a decent level of communication between its members. Melanie was impressed, and in the report she had written for her boss, Mary Pat Foley, director of national intelligence, she had raved about the skill of the perpetrators.

Jack would love to tell her some night over a bottle of wine that he was one of the hit men.

No. Never. Jack pushed that out of his mind immediately.

Melanie had concluded that whoever the actors were in the assassinations, there was nothing to indicate they were any threat to the United States. The targets were enemies of the United States, after a fashion, and the perpetrators were talented killers who took some serious chances but managed to pull it off with skill and guile, so the ODNI did not linger over the event for long.

Even though the U.S. government’s understanding of the events of the night in question was limited, its knowledge of the Libyan cell itself was interesting to Jack. NSA had managed to pull text messages off the five men’s mobile devices. Jack read the translated transcripts from NSA — short, cryptic dialogue that made it clear that these men did not know any more about the identity or overall mission of this Center character than did Ryan himself.

Odd, Jack thought. Who works for someone so shadowy they do not have a clue who they are working for?

Either the Libyans were utter fools or their new employer was incredibly competent at his own security.

Jack did not think the Libyans were fools. Lazy in their PERSEC, perhaps, but that was a result of the fact that they felt the only group after them was the new Libyan intelligence agency, and the JSO men did not think much of their successors’ capabilities.

Jack almost smiled at this as he scanned files on his monitor, looking for anything else from CIA with which to update the senior staff in his meeting.

Just then Jack felt a presence behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see his cousin, Dom Caruso, sitting down on the edge of Jack’s wraparound desk. Standing behind Dom were Sam Driscoll and Domingo Chavez.

“Hey guys,” he said. “I’ll be ready to head up in about five minutes.”

They all had serious looks on their faces.

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

Chavez answered, “Clark quit.”

“Quit what?”

“He turned his resignation in to Gerry and Sam. He’ll spend a day or two getting his stuff cleaned up, but he’ll be out of here by midweek.”

“Oh, shit.” Ryan felt an immediate sense of foreboding. They needed Clark. “Why?”

Dom said, “His hand is still messed up. And he’s worried all his shine time on TV last year might compromise The Campus. He’s made his mind up. He’s done.”

“Can he really stay away?”

Chavez nodded. “John doesn’t do things in half-measures. He’s going to work on being a granddad and a husband.”

“And a country gentleman.” Dom said it with a smile.

Ding chuckled. “Something like that, I guess. Jeez, who’d’a thunk it?”

The meeting started a few minutes late. John was not in attendance. He had an appointment with his orthopedic surgeon in Baltimore, and he was not one for dramatic good-byes, so he slipped out quietly as everyone was heading up to the ninth-floor conference room.

The early conversation was about John and John’s decision to leave, but Hendley very quickly brought everyone’s attention back to the problem at hand.

“Okay. We’ve spent a lot of time scratching our heads and looking over our shoulders. Jack warns me he doesn’t have much in the way of answers for us today, but we’re going to get an update from him and Gavin about the forensic investigation of the drive.”

Both Ryan and Gavin spoke to the others for fifteen minutes about everything they had learned from the hard drive as well as from CIA sources. They discussed the hacking of Emad Kartal’s computer by Center, the work Center gave the Libyans in Istanbul, and the fact that Center seemed to be setting the Libyans up to penetrate a network in the future, though he apparently changed his mind.

Gerry Hendley finally asked the question that everyone in the room wanted answered. “But why? Why did this Center guy just sit there and watch you guys kill his entire cell of assets in Istanbul? What possible reason did he have?”

Ryan looked around the conference room for a moment. He drummed his fingers on the table. “I don’t know for sure.”

“But you have a suspicion?” asked Hendley.

Jack nodded. “I suspect Center knew for some time that we were on our way to kill the Libyan cell.”

Hendley was gobsmacked. “They knew about us before that night? How?”

“I have no idea. And I could be wrong.”

Chavez asked, “If you are right, if he knew we were coming to Turkey to kill the Libyans who were working for him, why the hell didn’t he warn the Libyans?”

Jack said, “Again, just speculation. But… maybe they were bait. Maybe he wanted to watch us in action. Maybe he wanted to see if we could do it.”

Rick Bell, Jack’s boss on the analytical side, leaned in to the table. “You are taking some massive subjective leaps in your analysis, Jack.”

Ryan’s hands came up in surrender. “Yes. You are one hundred percent right about that. Maybe it’s just a feeling I have at this point.”

“Go where the data leads. Not where your heart leads. No offense, but you might just be freaked out by finding yourself on candid camera,” Bell cautioned.

Jack agreed, but he wasn’t crazy about the comment from the head of analysis. Ryan had an ego, and did not like admitting that he was letting his own personal prejudices into the equation. But deep inside he knew Rick was right. “Understood. We’re still trying to put this puzzle together. I’ll keep at it.”

Chavez said, “There is something I don’t get, Gavin.”

“What’s that?”

“Center… this guy who obviously had control of the machine. He wanted Ryan to know he was watching.”

“Yeah, obviously.”

“If he was able to delete all but the faintest trace of his malware, why did he not delete every e-mail related to him and his operation?”

Gavin said, “I’ve spent weeks racking my brain on that one, Domingo, and I think I’ve got it figured out. Center would have deleted the delivery malware as soon as he made a successful penetration on the computer, but he didn’t scrub the rest of the drive, the e-mails and stuff, because he did not want to tip off Kartal that he had hacked his machine. Then, when Ryan got there and whacked Kartal, Center pushed those photos of the rest of the team to the computer so that Ryan would see them and e-mail them to his own address or grab a thumb drive or a DVD off the desk and load them on there.”

Jack interrupted, “And then take them back here to The Campus and put them on my machine.”

“Exactly. His idea was cunning, but he messed up. He thought of every way Jack could have moved that data back to The Campus except for one.”

Hendley said, “Stealing the whole damned computer.”

“That’s right. Center sure as hell did not plan on Jack running out the front door with the computer under his arm. That was so dumb it was brilliant.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe it was just brilliant.”

“Whatever. The important thing is you didn’t just bring a disk back home to check it out.”

Ryan explained for the benefit of anyone in the room who wasn’t following. “He was trying to use me to plant a virus on our system.”

Biery said, “Damn right. He dangled those e-mails so you would bite, which you did, but he figured you’d leave with the digital data but not the entire device. I’m sure his plan was to completely sanitize the computer before the cops arrived.”

Hendley asked Biery, “Could Center have infected our network that way?”

“If his malware was good enough, yes. My network has anti-intrusion measures that are better than any government network. Still… all it takes is one asshole with a thumb drive or a USB cable to bring all this down.”

Gerry Hendley looked off into space for a moment before saying, “Guys… everything you have told us today makes me more certain that someone knows a lot more about us than we want them to. I don’t know who this potential bad actor is, but until we get more information, our operational stand-down will continue. Rick, Jack, and the rest of the analytical team will keep up the hard work of finding out Center’s identity through all the traffic we have access to from Fort Meade and Langley.”

Hendley turned to Gavin Biery. “Gavin? Who is Center? Who does he work for? Why did he focus so hard on compromising us?”

“Beats me. I’m not an analyst.”

Gerry Hendley shook his head, unsatisfied with the nonanswer. “I’m asking for your best guess.”

Gavin Biery took off his glasses and rubbed them with his handkerchief. “If I had to guess? I’d say it was the best, most organized, and most ruthless cyberespionage and cyberwarfare folks on the planet.

“I’d say it was the Chinese.”

The conference room erupted in low groans.