There were a few nods in the room, but no one spoke.
Rick said, “Okay. Now let’s talk about what you guys helped prevent. According to intercepted communications from French security officials, al Qahtani and his men had over five hundred rounds of live ammo between them. There were no suppressors on their machine pistols. Those bastards were going to shoot their way in and then shoot their way out. You men saved six security officers, but you probably saved another twenty cops and civilians as well.”
“What about Rokki?” Chavez asked.
“He’s gone. One hundred sirens on the street saw to that.”
Granger said, “I am of the opinion that Hosni Rokki and his men were just MacGuffins. They were not there to commit any sort of terrorist act. They were not there because they were pissed off about the burka ban. Instead, I think Rokki just came to town under orders of al Qahtani to draw out French security officers, so that al Qahtani and the real terror squad, who were already in place, could ID them and murder them.”
“Damn it,” said Ryan. “I led us into a buzz saw by sending John and Ding after Rokki in the first place.”
Clark said, “I’m glad you did what you did. If we weren’t on the scene, it would have been bad. Short term, you saved some innocent lives. Long term … hell, those DCRI surveillance operatives might just save the world someday. I’m glad they’re still around to do it.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said with a shrug. That made sense.
Gerry Hendley turned back to Granger. “Conclusions, Sam?”
Sam Granger stood. “My conclusion is … you guys did well. But we can’t let anything like this happen again. A running gun battle on the streets of a European capital? Cameras, witnesses, police, civilians in the way? This isn’t what The Campus was set up to do. Jesus, this could have been a debacle.”
Jack Ryan Jr. had been riding high for the past twenty-four hours. Other than Clark’s injury, he felt like everything had gone perfectly, except for the fact Rokki and his men got away. Even John’s busted arm was determined by everyone to be not terribly serious early on. But somehow Sam Granger had just put it all into perspective, and now Jack wasn’t so sure how great he and his team were. Instead, he wondered how much of it could, in fact, be chalked up to luck. They’d raced along a razor’s edge on that op, and they hadn’t fallen. Luck exists, Jack realized. This time it was good. Next time, it might be bad.
The meeting broke for lunch, but Gerry Hendley asked Ryan to stay behind for a second. Chavez and Clark remained in the conference room, too.
Jack Junior thought he was about to be taken to the woodshed for arguing with Clark in the middle of the operation about leaving the impending fight and, instead, heading down to the lobby. He’d been expecting this ever since, and he was sure that if John hadn’t been injured and sedated during the flight home, he’d have given Jack a stern talking-to on the plane.
But instead of a lecture about following orders during an operation, Gerry went in a different direction. “Jack, we are all impressed as hell with you for all the training you’ve been putting yourself through these past several months. That said, we are a small shop, and with the uptick in OPTEMPO, I can’t risk having you miss a day of work right now. I’m going to pull you out of training for a bit.”
“Gerry, I know that—”
Gerry held a hand out so that he could stop Ryan’s argument, but Chavez jumped in.
“Gerry’s right. If we were a bigger operation, we could keep men rotating in and out of training all the time. We all respect what you’re doing, and I know it’s helped you out a lot, but in Paris you showed that you are absolutely one of the team now, and every one of us needs you out there with us.”
Chavez’s opinion meant everything to Jack Junior, but still, he felt he needed more experience and, at only twenty-six years old, he didn’t think it possible he could actually be injured during his training. “Guys, I appreciate it. I do. I just think—”
Now Clark spoke up: “You’re going to get the rest of your training on the job.”
Ryan stopped talking. Instead he nodded. “Okay.”
As the four men left the conference room for their break, Ryan caught up to Clark in the hall. “Hey, John. You got a second?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Mind if we go in your office?”
“Not if you get us some coffee first.”
“I’ll even stir in your sugar so you don’t spill it over your desk doing it one-handed.”
Five minutes later, both men sipped coffee in Clark’s office. The older man sat with his injured arm out of its sling and propped up on his desk by the elbow of the cast.
Ryan said, “John. When you told me to go down to the lobby, I shouldn’t have questioned that. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”
Clark nodded. “I’ve been around the block a few times, Jack. I know what I’m doing.”
“Of course you do. I just thought—”
The older man interrupted. “Thinking is good. It was your thinking that put us in a position to help by sending us after Rokki, and your thinking when you saw the van with the suspicious guys sent us to the right location. Your thinking saved a lot of people’s lives. I’m never going to tell you to stop thinking. But I will tell you when it is time to shut up and listen to orders. If everybody does what they think is right when the bullets are about to start flying, then we won’t operate as a cohesive unit. Sometimes you may not like the order you are given, sometimes it might not make sense to you, but you have to do as you’re told. If you had spent some time in the military, this would be automatic to you. But you haven’t, so you’re just going to have to trust me.”
Ryan just nodded. “You are right. I just let my emotions get in the way. It won’t happen again.”
Clark just nodded. Smiled.
“What?” Jack asked.
“You and your dad.”
“What about my dad?”
“The similarities. Stories I could tell you.”
“Go ahead.”
But the older man just shook his head. “‘Need to know,’ kid. ‘Need to know.’”
Jack himself smiled now. “Somehow, someday. I’m going to get all those stories out of either you or my dad.”
“Your best chance was on the Gulfstream coming back over the Atlantic. Miss Sherman had me pretty well loopy on pain meds.”
Ryan smiled. “I missed my chance. Hope I get another chance that doesn’t involve you getting shot.”
“Me too, kid.” Clark shook his head and chuckled. “I’ve been shot worse than this, but this is the first time I took a round from some cop just trying to do his job. It’s hard to get good and mad at anybody but myself.”
Clark’s phone chirped on his desk. He picked it up. “Yeah? Sure, I’ll send him down. Me too? Okay, be right there.” Clark looked up at Ryan as he hung up the phone. “Tony Wills needs us at your desk.”
22
Jack found Tony Wills sitting in his cube, which was next to Ryan’s. With Tony sat Gavin Biery, the company IT chief. In Ryan’s chair, his cousin Dom Caruso sat waiting for him. Sam Driscoll leaned against the partition of the cubicle. Sam Granger and Rick Bell, chiefs of ops and analysis, respectively, were also there and standing around.
“Is this a surprise party?” Ryan asked. Dom and Sam both shrugged. They didn’t know why Tony had called them down, either.
But Wills had a pleased grin on his face. He called everyone over to his monitor. “So it took a while, mostly because the Paris op got in the way, but also because of the quality of the photos, but the facial-recog software finally came back with some hits on the guy that Sam and Dom saw meeting with Mustafa el Daboussi in Cairo the other day.”
“Cool,” said Dom. “Who is he?”
“Gavin,” said Wills. “You have the con.”
“Well”—Gavin Biery made his way through the scrum of men in the cubicle and sat down at Wills’s chair—“the software has narrowed Cairo man down to two
probables.” He worked the keyboard for a moment and one of the pictures taken by Dom’s covert camera in the caravanserai in Cairo appeared on one half of the twenty-two-inch monitor.
Gavin said, “Facial recog says there is a ninety-three percent chance that this guy is …” He clicked his mouse. “This dude.” A picture appeared next to Dom’s photo of the man. It was a shot of a Pakistani passport for a man named Khalid Mir. The man wore glasses with round frames and had a trim beard, and he appeared to be several years younger than he looked in the Cairo photo.
Immediately Caruso said, “He’s changed a lot, but I think that’s the same guy.”
“Yeah?” said Wills. “Well then, your boy is a Khalid Mir, aka Abu Kashmiri, a known operative for Lashkar-e-Taiba over in Pakistan. They are nasty, and Khalid Mir used to be one of their big shots.”
“Used to be?”
Ryan answered before Wills, “One of Kealty’s drone attacks supposedly took him out in Pakistan, about three years ago. That was about the same time LeT started branching out and sending its operatives against Western targets. Before that they had been almost exclusively a Kashmir-based terror group who struck India and only India.”
Dom Caruso spun around and looked at Ryan. “No offense, Junior, but aren’t you supposed to know all these guys on sight?”
Jack shrugged. “If this guy was LeT fighting against India, and he died three years ago, he wasn’t exactly on my threat matrix for dangerous Western terrorists.”
“Makes sense. Sorry.”
“Not at all.”
Granger looked at Driscoll now. “Sam? You aren’t saying anything. Dom thinks this is the guy you saw in Cairo.”
Dom answered for his partner: “Sam pegged the guy at the time as a military officer.”
Driscoll nodded. “I was sure of it, but this photo does look like it could be the same guy.”
Gavin Biery smiled. “You thought he was a military officer, huh? Well the recog software says there is a ninety-six percent chance you are right.” He made a few more clicks of his mouse. The photo of Khalid Mir’s passport disappeared and was replaced by a grainy photo of a man in an olive green uniform crossing a street, carrying a briefcase and papers under his arm. This man looked older and fuller in the face than the passport photo of Khalid Mir.
Driscoll nodded forcefully. “That is the guy from Cairo.”
“I’ll be damned,” muttered Sam Granger. “Who is he, Tony?”
“He is Brigadier General Riaz Rehan.”
“General of what?”
“He’s in the Pakistani Defense Force. He is also the current director of Joint Intelligence Miscellaneous of the ISI. A shadowy figure, even though he’s a department head and a general. There are no known photos of the man other than this one.”
“But wait,” Clark said. “If this is Cairo guy, can Khalid Mir be Cairo guy, too?”
“Could be,” said Biery, but he didn’t clarify.
Tony Wills admonished him. “Gavin, we talked about this. No dramatics, please.”
Biery shrugged. “Damn. We IT guys never get to have any fun. Okay, here’s the thing: Both of these pictures, the ISI guy and the LeT guy, have been in the database the CIA uses for facial recognition for a long time, but they were never matched with one another.”
“Why not?” asked Clark.
Gavin seemed glad to be asked this question. “Because facial-recognition algorithms aren’t perfect. They do better when the faces being compared are photographed from the same angle with the same light values. By using facial metrics, that is to say the distance between key landmarks, like eyes and ears and such, the software determines a statistical probability that it is looking at the same face. If there are too many anomalies, either because the faces don’t match very well or because the photographs are taken at different resolutions or one of the pictures is registering some movement of the subject, then the match probability goes down precipitously. We can solve for these external discrepancies somewhat by using something called the active appearance model, which removes the shape of the face and only uses the texture as a comparison.”
Dom Caruso said, “Sorry, Gavin, but we have to be back upstairs in ten minutes. Can you cut to the chase?”
“Dom, let’s indulge him for another minute, okay?” asked John.
Dom nodded, and Biery addressed Clark directly now, as though the other men were not in the room. “Anyway, the picture of Khalid Mir on his passport and the picture of Riaz Rehan crossing the street in Peshawar are just too different for current facial-recognition software to connect, because there are too many variances in angle, lighting, type of equipment used for the photograph, and of course Rehan is wearing sunglasses, which is not as much of a problem as it used to be before a newer software design began being used, but it sure doesn’t help. So these two pictures”—he drew his cursor back and forth between the two older pictures on the monitor—“do not match.” Then he took the cursor over to the Cairo picture taken three days earlier. “But both of these two pictures do match this picture, because it retains just enough of the characteristics of the other two. It’s in the middle, so to speak.”
Chavez asked, “So all three shots are definitely the same guy?”
Biery shrugged. “Definitely? No. We don’t like to use that term when discussing mathematical probabilities.”
“Okay, what is the probability?”
“It’s about a ninety-one percent chance Cairo dude, general dude, and dead dude are all the same dude.”
All eyebrows in the room raised high. Ryan spoke for the group: “Holy shit!”
“Holy shit indeed,” said Wills. “We have just learned that a known terrorist for LeT is not only not dead but is now a department chief for Pakistani intelligence.”
And Granger said, “And this department head for the ISI, who is, or was, an LeT operative, is now meeting with a known bad guy in Cairo.”
“I hate to state the obvious,” Dominic said, “but we need to learn more about this Rehan guy.”
Granger looked at his watch. “Well, that was the most productive lunch break we’ve had in a while. Let’s head back up to the conference room.”
Back upstairs, Granger filled Hendley in on the developments. Immediately the discovery made by Tony Wills and Gavin Biery superseded the Paris operation as the main focus of the meeting.
“This is big,” said Hendley, “but it’s also all very preliminary. I don’t want to jump the gun on this and leak intelligence to CIA or MI6 or anyone else that isn’t one hundred percent solid. We need to know more about this general in the ISI.”
Everyone agreed.
Hendley said, “How can we check this out?”
Ryan spoke first. “Mary Pat Foley. The National Counterterrorism Center knows as much about Lashkar as anyone. If we can find out more about Khalid Mir, before he became Riaz Rehan, maybe we can use that to link the two guys together.”
Hendley nodded. “We haven’t paid a visit on Mary Pat in a while. Jack, why don’t you give her a call and take her to lunch? You can run on down to Liberty Crossing and show her the Mir-Rehan connection. I bet she’ll find that very interesting.”
“I’ll give her a call today.”
“Okay. Keep our sources and methods under your hat, though.”
“Understood.”
“And Jack? Whatever you do, don’t mention that you just got back from Paris.”
The conference room erupted in tired laughter.
23
Sixty-one-year-old Judith Cochrane’s rental car came with in-dash GPS, but she did not set it for the forty-mile drive down from Colorado Springs. She knew the way to 5880 State Highway 67, as she had been here many times to visit her clients.
Her rented Chrysler pulled off South Robinson Avenue, and she stopped at the first gate of ADX Florence. The guards knew her by sight but still they looked over her documents and identification carefully before letting her pass.
It wasn’t easy for an attorne
y to see a client at Florence; it was harder still for an attorney to see a client housed in H Unit, and a Range 13 client was nigh on impossible to meet with face-to-face. Cochrane and the Progressive Constitution Initiative were in the later stages of drafting a lawsuit to address this issue, but for now she had to play by the rules of supermax.
As one of the most regular visitors to ADX Florence, Judith had come prepared. She would carry a purse with nothing of value in it because she would have to leave it in a locker, and she would not bother entering with her laptop or cell phone, because these would be taken from her immediately if they were on her person. She knew to wear comfortable shoes because she would be walking from the administration unit to her prisoner’s cell, a journey of hundreds of yards of hallways and covered outdoor walkways, and she made sure to dress in an especially conservative pantsuit so that the warden would not refuse her entry due to the preposterous accusation of provocative attire.
She also knew she’d be going through X-ray machines and full-body scanners, so she followed prison rules for visitors and wore a bra that was free of underwire.
She drove on past the guard shack, past a long, high wall. She looped around to the south and went through more remote gates, and as she drove slowly she encountered more guard towers, shotguns, assault rifles, German shepherds, and security cameras than she could possibly count. Finally she pulled into a large, half-empty parking lot outside the administration wing. Behind her, at the entrance to the lot, a row of bright yellow hydraulically operated spikes rose from slats in the concrete. She would not be leaving until the guard force here was ready for her to leave.
Judith Cochrane was met at her car door by a female guard, and together they walked through a series of secure doors and hallways in the administrative wing of the prison. There was no conversation between the two, and the guard did not offer to help the much older woman carry her briefcase or pull her laptop bag.
“Lovely morning,” Judith Cochrane said as they marched down a clean white passageway.