“Chavez will call you on the way and have you go through some equipment that he’s ordered that will be on board.”
“Got it.” Paris, Jack thought. How great is that?
“And Jack?”
“Yeah, Gerry?”
“This one could get rough. You will not be going to provide analysis. Clark will use you as he sees fit.”
Jack quickly admonished himself for thinking about beautiful girls and outdoor cafés. Get your head in the game.
“I understand,” he said. He handed the phone to Buck. The Brit took it and listened. Jack thought the older man looked like a lion watching a gazelle escape.
“I’ll be back,” Ryan said as he turned toward the locker room.
“And I’ll be waiting, laddie. Might want to get that dodgy knee sorted whilst you’re on holiday, because my boot will be hunting for that weak spot upon your return.”
“Great,” Jack mumbled as he disappeared through the door.
Dom Caruso and Sam Driscoll sat on a pair of cots they’d stationed by the window of their studio apartment in Cairo’s Zamalek neighborhood. They sipped Turkish coffee that Sam had made in a metal pot on the stove, and watched the property on an adjacent hillside a few blocks away.
Throughout the evening, el Daboussi had received only one visitor. Caruso had taken a few pictures of the car, an S-class Mercedes, and he’d caught the tag. He’d e-mailed the images to the analysts at The Campus, and they’d reported back in minutes that the vehicle was registered to a high-level Egyptian parliamentarian who, until just nine months ago, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood living in exile in Saudi Arabia. Now he was back home and helping to run the country. This was all well and good, Dom thought, unless and until he began cavorting with a known former URC trainer with experience in the Al-Qaeda camps of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
Shit, Caruso said to himself, and then, aloud, “Hey, Sam. I watch American TV. They say the Muslim Brotherhood only want democracy and equal rights for women. What gives with their midnight meetings with jihadists?” He was being facetious, of course.
“Yeah,” said Sam, picking up on the false naiveté. “I thought the Mo-Bros were the good guys.”
“Right,” said Dom. “I saw some nutjob on MSNBC say that the Muslim Brotherhood used to be terrorists, but now they are as benign as the Salvation Army in the U.S. Just another religious-based organization that only wants to do good.”
Sam didn’t say anything.
“No opinion?”
“I tuned you out when you said MSNBC.”
Dom laughed.
Caruso’s Thuraya Hughes satellite phone chirped, and he checked his watch as he answered it. “Yeah?”
“Dom, it’s Gerry. We’re going to have to pull you out. Clark and Chavez need some help in Paris right away.”
Caruso was surprised. He knew Clark and Chavez were working an op in Europe, but last he’d heard, their target had jetted back to Islamabad.
“What about Sam?” Dom asked. Driscoll eyed him from the cot on the other side of the tiny darkened room.
“Sam, too. The situation in Paris is the kind that is going to need the type of help you and Driscoll can provide. Ryan is on the way there in the jet. He’s got everything you will need.”
Caruso hated to leave this op, the guy they’d seen in the market meeting with MED, the one Driscoll pegged for a Pakistani general, had not yet been ID’d. He’d love to hang around until the intel nerds at The Campus got a hit on the man’s face. But despite his high hopes for this mission, he said nothing. If John Clark and Ding Chavez needed help, then, Dom knew, there was definitely something serious brewing over in Europe.
“We’re on the way.”
11
Jack Ryan Jr. sat in the principal’s seat of a business jet that streaked at 547 nautical miles per hour through the thin air 47,000 feet above and 41 miles southeast of Gander, Newfoundland.
He was the only passenger of the aircraft. The three crew members — pilot, first officer, and flight attendant — had mostly kept to themselves in order to let Ryan read a thick binder that had been left for him on one of the leather cabin chairs.
While he read, he sipped a glass of California cabernet and picked absentmindedly at a sausage plate.
His laptop was open in front of him, as well, and he’d virtually held the handset of his seat’s phone to his neck for most of the past hour, talking to Clark in Paris, and to various operations and intelligence men at The Campus in Maryland. He also spoke briefly with Driscoll, who, along with Caruso, was at that moment boarding a flight from Cairo to Paris.
Ryan would be finished with this part of his evening’s work within a couple of hours, but he already knew he wouldn’t be getting any sleep on this transatlantic flight. There was a large amount of gear on board that he’d have to go through while getting directions from Clark and Chavez on the phone in order to make sure everything was ready to go as soon as he touched down in France.
And once he got all that done, if it wasn’t too late, he needed to call his mom and dad. He’d been so busy lately, he’d canceled a lunch with his mom and his brother and sister, Kyle and Katie, when Mom was home from the campaign.
Actually, he thought as he took a sip of cabernet, that day he had not really been too busy to get away for lunch. No, it was a big red cut on the bridge of his nose, courtesy of James Buck, that had caused him to call off the get-together at the last minute. Since then, though, it had been ten-hour days at the office and then three to four hours in the dojo before staggering home, into a bath filled with Epsom salts, chugging a few gulps of Budweiser, before crashing on the sofa in his Columbia, Maryland, apartment.
As the jet raced over the eastern shores of Newfoundland now, flying on a heading that would take it across the Atlantic and to the continent before dawn there, Ryan finished a twenty-minute cram session over a map of the Eighth Arrondissement neighborhood where the Four Seasons George V was located. The one-way alleyways and the large, wide boulevards and avenues would take days to memorize properly, but he had to do his best, to become as familiar as possible with the area before the team went to work there. He had been informed by Clark that he would be the “wheel man,” the driver, though Clark also warned him that they were such a small force he would undoubtedly be called on for other things.
Perhaps even things that required the use of the Glock 23 .40-caliber pistol that had been left on the aircraft for him.
Jack reached for a printed layout of the Four Seasons hotel itself to study the floor plan of the building, but he turned away, took a moment to look up at the high-definition moving map monitor on the cabin wall to check his time of arrival. He saw he’d land in Paris at 5:22 a.m.
Jack sipped his wine and took a moment more to appreciate the beautifully appointed cabin. This jet was still new, and he had not yet gotten accustomed to sitting in it.
This was The Campus’s newest toy, a Gulfstream G550 ultra-long-range corporate jet, and it filled a couple of extremely important needs for the fledgling off-the-books intelligence organization. Since the capture and interrogation of the Emir, the operational tempo of their work had gone through the roof as they’d turned into more of an intelligence gathering force and less of an assassination squad. The five operators, as well as the top brass and some of the analytical team, found themselves with increasing regularity heading all over the world to conduct surveillance on targets or to track leads or to perform other necessary tasks.