Jack wanted to keep it that way, because it was convenient to do so, and it just might help him stay alive.
EIGHT
The sign outside the nine-story office building where Jack worked read Hendley Associates, which said nothing about what went on inside. The innocuous design of the signage fit the mild-mannered appearance of the structure itself. The building looked exactly like thousands of simple offices across America. Anyone driving by who gave it a passing glance might take it for a credit union bureau, an administrative center for a telecommunications firm, a human resources agency, or a PR company. There was a large array of satellite dishes on the roof, and a fenced-in antenna farm next to the building, but these were hardly noticeable from the street, and even if they were noticed, they would not strike the average commuter as something out of the ordinary.
The one-in-a-million passerby who might do any further research into the company would see that it was an international finance concern, one of many around the greater D.C. metro area, and the one novel feature of the company was that it was owned and directed by a former U.S. senator.
Of course, there were more unique features to the organization inside the brick-and-glass structure along the road. Though there was little physical security outside other than a low fence and a few closed-circuit cameras, inside, hidden behind the “white side” financial trading firm, was a “black side” intelligence operation unknown to all but an incredibly small minority in the U.S. intelligence community. The Campus, the unofficial name given to the off-the-books spy shop, had been envisioned years earlier by President Jack Ryan during his first administration. He’d set up the operation with a few close allies in the intelligence community, and helmed it with former senator Gerry Hendley.
The Campus possessed some of the brightest analysts in the community, some of the best technological minds, and, thanks to the satellites on the roof and the code breakers in the IT department, a direct line of access into the computer networks of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
The entire operation was also completely self-funded, as the cover firm, Hendley Associates, was a successful but low-profile financial management firm. The company’s success in picking stocks, bonds, and currencies was helped greatly by the gigabytes of raw intelligence data that streamed into the building each day.
Ryan rolled past the sign, parked in the lot, and then entered the lobby with his leather messenger bag over his shoulder. Behind the security desk, a guard with a nameplate on his jacket that read Chambers stood with a smile.
“Morning, Jack. How’s the wife?”
“Morning, Ernie. I’m not married.”
“I’ll check back tomorrow.”
“Right.”
It was a daily joke between the two, although Ryan didn’t really get it.
Jack headed to the elevator.
Jack Ryan, Jr., the eldest child of the President of the United States, had worked here at Hendley Associates for nearly four years. Though he was officially an associate financial manager, the vast majority of his work involved intelligence analysis. He had also expanded his responsibilities to become one of The Campus’s five operations officers.
In his operational role he’d seen action — a lot of action— over the past three years, although since returning from Istanbul the only action he’d seen had been a few training evolutions with Domingo Chavez, Sam Driscoll, and Dominic Caruso.
They’d spent time in dojos working on hand-to-hand skills, at indoor and outdoor firing ranges around Maryland and Virginia keeping their perishable gunfighting skills as sharp as possible, and they’d practiced surveillance and countersurveillance measures by driving up to Baltimore or down to D.C., immersing themselves in the bustle of the crowded cities and then either tailing Campus trainers or attempting to shake trainers who’d been tasked with sticking on their tails.
It was fascinating work, and extremely practical for men who, from time to time, had to put their life on the line in offensive operations around the globe. But it wasn’t real fieldwork, and Jack Junior did not join Hendley Associates’ black side in order to train at a shooting range or in a dojo or to chase or run from some guy who he’d be having a beer with later that afternoon.
No, he wanted fieldwork, the adrenaline-pumping action that he had experienced numerous times over the past few years. It was addictive — to a man in his twenties, anyway — and Ryan was suffering from withdrawal.
But now all the action was on hold, and The Campus’s future was in doubt, all because of something everyone now referred to as the Istanbul Drive.
It was just a few gigabytes of digital images, e-mail traffic, software applications, and other electronic miscellany retrieved from Emad Kartal’s desktop computer the night Jack shot him dead in a flat in the Taksim neighborhood of Istanbul.
The night of the hit Gerry Hendley, the head of The Campus, had ordered his men to cease all offensive operations until they dealt with whoever had them under surveillance. The five operators who had become well accustomed to globetrotting in the company Gulfstream now found themselves all but chained to their desks. Along with the analysts of the organization, they spent their days desperately trying to find out who had been so effectively monitoring their actions during the five assassinations in Turkey.
Somebody had seen them and recorded them in flagrante delicto, any and all evidence relating to the surveillance had been preserved by Ryan’s taking of the drive, and for weeks The Campus had been scrambling to find out just how much trouble they were in.
As Jack dropped down into his desk chair and lit up his computer, he thought back to the night of the hit. When he pulled the drive out of Emad’s desktop, he’d first planned on just returning to The Campus with the device so he could rush it to Gavin Biery, the shop’s director of technology and an expert hacker with a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard and work stints at IBM and NSA.
But Biery nixed that idea immediately. Instead, Gavin met the airplane and the returning operatives at Baltimore Washington Airport, and then rushed them, and their drive, to a nearby hotel. In a two-and-a-half-star suite he disassembled the drive and inspected it for any physical tracking device while the five exhausted operators set up perimeter security, guarding the windows, doors, and parking lot in case a hidden beacon had already alerted an enemy to the drive’s location. After two hours’ work Biery was satisfied that the drive was clean, so he returned to Hendley Associates with the rest of the team and the one potential clue about who had been watching them in Istanbul.
Even though the rest of The Campus was spooked by the compromisation of their actions in Turkey, most still thought Biery was operating with an unreasonable amount of caution, bordering on paranoia. This surprised no one, however, because Gavin’s network security measures around Hendley Associates were legendary. Behind his back he was called the Digital Nazi for demanding weekly security meetings and frequent password-changing schedules in order for employees to “earn” access to his network.
Biery had promised his colleagues many times over the years that no computer virus would ever get into his network, and to keep his promise, he remained ever vigilant, if, at times, a thorn in the side of the rest of the employees in the building.