Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (200 page)

O’Day relaxed his routine now. If you could do it with your first shot of the day—and he’d done it with all four—you still had it figured out. Two minutes and twenty shots later, the target’s head was an annulus. Murray, in the next lane, was busy in the standard Jeff Cooper technique, two rapid shots into the chest, followed by a slower aimed round into the head. When both were satisfied that their targets were dead, it was time to contemplate the day.

“Anything new?” the Director asked.

“No, sir. More follow-up interviews on the JAL case are coming in, but nothing startling.”

“What about Kealty?”

O’Day shrugged. He was not allowed to interfere with the OPR investigation, but he did get daily summaries. A case of this magnitude had to be reported to somebody, and though supervision of the case was entirely under the purview of OPR, the information developed also went to the Director’s office, filtered through his lead roving inspector. “Dan, enough people went in and out of Secretary Hanson’s office that anybody could have walked off with the letter, assuming there was one, which, our people think, there probably was. At least Hanson talked to enough people about it—or so those people tell us.”

“I think that one will just blow over,” Murray observed.

“GOOD MORNING, Mr. President.”

Another day in the routine. The kids were off. Cathy was off. Ryan emerged from his quarters suited and tied—his jacket was buttoned, which was unusual for him, or had been until moving in here—and his shoes shined by one of the valet staff. Except that Jack still couldn’t think of this place as a home. More like a hotel, or the VIP quarters he’d had while traveling on Agency business, albeit far more ornate and with much better service.

“You’re Raman?” the President asked.

“Yes, sir,” Special Agent Aref Raman replied. He was six feet and solidly built, more a weight lifter than a runner, Jack thought, though that might come from the body armor that many of the Detail members wore. Ryan judged his age at middle thirties. Good-looking in a Mediterranean sort of way, with a shy smile and eyes as blue as SURGEON’S. “SWORDSMAN is moving,” he said into his microphone. “To the office.”

“Raman, where’s that from?” Jack asked, on the way to the elevator.

“Mother Lebanese, father Iranian, came over in ’79, when the Shah had his problems. Dad was close to the regime.”

“So what do you think of the Iraq situation?” the President asked.

“Sir, I hardly even speak the language anymore.” The agent smiled. “Now, if you want to ask me about who’s lookin’ good in the NCAA finals, I’m your man.”

“Kentucky,” Ryan said decisively. The White House elevator was old, pre—Art Deco in the interior finishings, with worn black buttons, which the President wasn’t allowed to push. Raman did that for him.

“Oregon’s going all the way. I’m never wrong, sir. Ask the guys. I won the last three pools. Nobody’ll bet against me anymore. The finals will be Oregon and Duke—my school—and Oregon will win by six or eight. Well, maybe less if Maceo Rawlings has a good night,” Raman added.

“What did you study at Duke?”

“Pre-law, but I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Actually I decided that criminals shouldn’t have any rights, and so I figured I’d rather be a cop, and I joined the Service.”

“Married?” Ryan wanted to know the people around him. At one level, it was mere good manners. At another, these people were sworn to defend his life, and he couldn’t treat them like employees.

“Never found the right girl—at least not yet.”

“Muslim?”

“My parents were, but after I saw all the trouble religion caused them, well”—he grinned—“if you ask around, they’ll tell you my religion is ACC basketball. I never miss a Duke game on the TV. Damned shame Oregon’s so tough this year. But that’s one thing you can’t change.”

The President chuckled at the truth of that statement. “Aref, you said, your first name?”

“Actually, they call me Jeff. Easier to pronounce,” Raman explained as the door opened. The agent positioned himself in the center of the doors, blocking a direct line of sight to POTUS. A member of the Uniform Division was standing there, along with two more of the Detail, all of them known by sight to Raman. With a nod, he walked out, with Ryan in tow, and the group turned west, past the side corridor that led to the bowling alley and the carpenter shops.

“Okay, Jeff, an easy day planned,” Ryan told him unnecessarily. The Secret Service knew his daily schedule before he did.

“Easy for us, maybe.”

They were waiting for him in the Oval Office. The Foleys, Bert Vasco, Scott Adler, and one other person stood when the President walked in. They’d already been scanned for weapons and nuclear material.

“Ben!” Jack said. He paused to set his early morning papers on the desk, and joined his guests.

“Mr. President,” Dr. Ben Goodley replied with a smile.

“Ben’s prepared the morning brief,” Ed Foley explained.

Since not all of the morning visitors were part of the inner circle, Raman would stay in the room, lest somebody leap across the coffee table and try to strangle the President. A person didn’t need a firearm to be lethal. A few weeks of study and practice could turn any reasonably fit person into enough of a martial-arts expert to kill an unwary victim. For that reason, members of the Detail carried not only pistols, but also Asps, police batons made of telescoping steel segments. Raman watched as this Goodley—a carded national intelligence officer—handed out the briefing sheets. Like many members of the Secret Service, he got to hear nearly everything. The “EYES-ONLY PRESIDENT” sticker on a particularly sensitive folder didn’t really mean that. There was almost always someone else in the room, and while the Detail members professed even among themselves not to pay any attention to such things, what that really meant was that they didn’t discuss them very much. Not hearing and not remembering were something else. Cops were not trained or paid to forget things, much less to ignore them.

In that sense, Raman thought, he was the perfect spy. Trained by the United States of America to be a law enforcement officer, he had performed brilliantly in the field, mainly in counterfeiting cases. He was a proficient marksman, and a very organized thinker—a trait revealed all the way back in his schooling; he’d graduated from Duke summa cum laude, with nothing less than an A grade on his transcript, plus he’d been a varsity wrestler. It was useful for an investigator to have a good memory, and he did. Photographic, in fact, a talent which had attracted the Detail leadership to him early on, because the agents protecting the President needed to be able to recognize a particular face instantly from the scores of photographs which they carried when the Boss was out pressing flesh. During the Fowler administration, as a junior agent gazetted to the Detail from the St. Louis field office to cover a fund-raising dinner, he’d ID’d and detained a suspected presidential stalker who’d turned out to have a .22 automatic in his pocket. Raman had pulled the man from the crowd so quietly and skillfully that the subject’s processing into the Missouri state mental-health system had never made the papers, which was just what they tried to achieve. The young agent had “Detail” written all over him, the then-Director of the United States Secret Service had decided on reviewing the case, and so Raman had been transferred over soon after Roger Durling’s ascension to the Presidency. As a junior member of the Detail he’d stood boring hours on post, run alongside the Presidential limousine, and gradually worked his way up rather rapidly for a young man. He’d worked the punishing hours without complaints, only commenting from time to time that, as an immigrant, he knew how important America was, and as his distant ancestors might have served Darius the Great as one of the “Immortals,” so he relished doing the same for his new country. It was so easy, really, much easier than the task his brother—ethnic, not biological—had performed in Baghdad a short time earlier. Americans, whatever they might say to pollsters, truly loved immigrants in their large and foolish hearts. They knew much, and they were always learning, but one thing they had yet to learn was that you could never look into
another
human heart.

“No assets we can use on the ground,” Mary Pat was saying.

“Good intercepts, though,” Goodley went on. “NSA is really coming through for us. The whole Ba’ath leadership is in the jug, and I don’t think they’re going to be coming out, at least not standing up.”

“So Iraq is fully decapitated?”

“A military ruling council, colonels and junior generals. Afternoon TV showed them with an Iranian mullah. No accident,” Bert Vasco said positively. “The least that comes out of this is a rapprochement with Iran. At most, the two countries merge. We’ll know that in a couple of days—two weeks at the outside.”

“The Saudis?” Ryan asked.

“They’re having kittens, Jack,” Ed Foley replied at once. “I talked with Prince Ali less than an hour ago. They cobbled together an aid package that would just about have paid off our national debt in an effort to buy the new Iraqi regime—did it overnight, biggest goddamned letter of credit ever drafted—but nobody’s answering the phone. That has ’em shook in Riyadh. Iraq’s always been willing to talk business. Not now.”

And that would be what frightened all the states on the Arabian Peninsula, Ryan knew. It wasn’t well appreciated in the West that the Arabs were businessmen. Not ideologues, not fanatics, not lunatics, but businessmen. Theirs was a maritime trading culture that predated Islam, a fact remembered in America only in remakes of Sinbad the Sailor movies. In that sense they were very like Americans, despite the difference in language, clothing, and religion, and just like Americans they had trouble understanding people who were not willing to do business, to reach an accommodation, to make some sort of exchange. Iran was such a country, changed from the previous state of affairs under the Shah by the Ayatollah Khomeini into a theocracy.
They’re not like us
was the universal point of concern for any culture.
They’re not like us ANYMORE
would be a very frightening development for Gulf States who’d always known that, despite political differences, there had always been an avenue of commonality and communication.

“Tehran?” Jack asked next. Ben Goodley took the question unto himself.

“Official news broadcasts welcome the development—the routine offers of peace and renewed friendship, but nothing beyond that at this point,” Goodley said. “Officially, that is. Unofficially, we’re getting all sorts of intercept traffic. People in Baghdad are asking for instructions, and people in Tehran are giving them. For the moment they’re saying to let the situation develop apace. The revolutionary courts come next. We’re seeing a lot of Islamic clergy on TV, preaching love and freedom and all that nice stuff. When the trials start, and people start backing into walls to pose for rifle-fire, then there’s going to be a total vacuum.”

“Then Iran takes over, probably, or maybe runs Iraq like a puppet on a string,” Vasco said, flipping through the latest set of intercepts. “Goodley may be right. I’m reading this SIGINT stuff for the first time. Excuse me, Mr. President, but I’ve been concentrating on the political side. This stuff is more revealing than I expected it to be.”

“You’re saying it means
more
than I think it does?” the NIO asked.

Vasco nodded without looking up. “I think it might. This is not good,” the desk officer opined darkly.

“Later today, the Saudis are going to ask us to hold their hand,” Secretary Adler pointed out. “What do I tell them?”

Ryan’s reply was so automatic that it startled him. “Our commitment to the Kingdom is unchanged. If they need us, we’re there, now and forever.” And with two sentences, Jack thought a second later, he had committed the full power and credibility of the United States of America to a non-democratic country seven thousand miles away. Fortunately, Adler made it easier for him.

“I fully agree, Mr. President. We can’t do anything else.” Everyone else nodded agreement, even Ben Goodley. “We can do that quietly. Prince Ali understands, and he can make the King understand that we’re not kidding.”

“Next stop,” Ed Foley said, “we have to brief Tony Bretano in. He’s pretty good, by the way. Knows how to listen,” the DCI-designate informed the President. “You plan to do a cabinet meeting about this?”

Ryan shook his head. “No. I think we should play this one cool. America is observing regional developments with interest, but there’s nothing for us to get excited about. Scott, you handle the press briefing through your people.”

“Right,” SecState replied.

“Ben, what do they have you doing at Langley now?”

“Mr. President, they went and made me a senior watch officer for the Operations Center.”

“Good briefing,” Ryan told the younger man, then turned to the DCI. “Ed, he works for me now. I need an NIO who speaks my language.”

“Gee, do I at least get a decent relief pitcher back?” Foley replied with a laugh. “This kid’s a good prospect, and I expect to be in the pennant race this fall.”

“Nice try, Ed. Ben, your hours just got worse. For now, you can have my old office around the corner. The food’s a lot better here,” the President promised.

Throughout it all, Aref Raman stood still, leaning against the white-painted walls while his eyes flickered automatically from one visitor to another. He was trained not to trust anyone, with the possible exceptions of the President’s wife and kids. No one else. Of course, they all trusted him, including the ones who had trained him not to trust anyone, because everybody had to trust somebody.

It was just a matter of timing, really, and one of the things his American education and professional training had conferred upon him was the patience to wait for the chance to make the proper move. But other events on the other side of the globe were bringing that moment closer. Behind expressionless eyes Raman thought that maybe he needed guidance. His mission was no longer the random event he’d promised to fulfill twenty years earlier. That he could do almost any time, but he was
here
now, and while anyone could kill, and while a dedicated person could kill almost anyone, only a truly skilled assassin could kill the proper person at the proper moment in pursuit of a larger goal. So deliciously ironic, he thought, that while his mission came from God, every factor in its accomplishment had come directly from the Great Satan himself, embodied in the life of one man who could best serve Allah by departing this life at just the proper moment. Picking the moment would be the hard part, and so after twenty years, Raman decided that he might just have to break cover after all. There was a danger in that, but, he judged, a slight one.