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.