“Naive,” Ryan said, criticizing the man, but his voice wasn’t as critical as his words. He felt for the man and his situation.
Murray said, “This guy wasn’t a spook. He’d never had anything like this happen to him. He reacted, and he reacted poorly.”
The President replied, “I guess we reacted poorly, too.”
Murray nodded. “When we couldn’t get the first team in without the compromise, maybe we should have spent more time worrying about the source and scope of the compromise, and less time worrying about busting Kincaid.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. These were North Koreans. They would have exploited the situation far beyond those first binders he was to pass over.”
Ryan said, “Will he be prosecuted?”
Murray replied, “I’ll talk to Adler. He’s done at State, that’s for sure, but turning this into a big federal prosecution doesn’t do anybody any good. Best bet is we all just move on.”
Canfield nodded. He was nearly despondent with the news of Jennifer Kinkaid’s death. “Stopping the pass was the right thing to do. Now we have to find out who the fuck is revealing the identities and locations of our covert personnel to the whole world.”
“To that end, what’s happening?” Ryan asked.
Canfield’s eyes cleared a little. “NSA is running with that ball right now. We are providing them everything they need.”
Murray nodded, said, “Ditto.”
Mary Pat said, “I’m getting daily progress reports. So far, they haven’t found commonalities between those exposed that look like they could be relevant. These weren’t people who knew each other, or even part of the same organization, other than the two CIA officers involved so far. They didn’t go through the same training programs, live in the same town, attend the same universities.”
Ryan said, “A database where all government employees’ records are kept?”
“Sure, that exists, but we’ve seen no hint of anything being hacked before, and even if it had been, the way the records are stored for certain covert occupations would mean a bad actor would have to go through, literally, millions of records. An officer working under nonofficial cover with the CIA isn’t in IRS records under that name, for example, and that wouldn’t explain how the fingerprints were obtained for the scanners in Iran and Indonesia, or how the hell Jen Kincaid was found in Belarus or Commander Hagen was found at a restaurant in New Jersey. No… Whatever the hell is going on doesn’t seem like some sort of computer hack.”
Ryan nodded distantly. He looked to Canfield. “I want to be there for the star ceremony.” He was speaking of the ceremony at CIA headquarters to honor a fallen officer.
Canfield said, “Mr. President, since she was a NOC, we can’t—”
“I know there won’t be an official release of her name. I’ll come quietly. No press, no fuss. And I want Ben Kincaid there.”
Murray cocked his head. “Jack… he’s still a prisoner.”
“Who will be treated gently. He’ll come to CIA, in your custody.”
“But—”
“Dan,” Ryan said, and Murray knew when to stop.
Soon everyone got up quietly to leave the room. The meeting had accomplished nothing other than the delivery of some very bad news, but as they headed for the door, Ryan asked a question out of curiosity.
“The team that pulled Kincaid out. Who were they?”
Mary Pat turned back to the President and blinked hard a few times. Finally she said, “Do you mind if I stick around for a moment?”
Ryan shook his head; Canfield, Burgess, and Murray left; and Mary Pat walked back over to the President’s desk.
Ryan didn’t even need her to say anything. From her actions he knew his son had been involved.
“Is he okay?”
“Jack’s fine, Mr. President. They all are. I’m sure they are taking the fallout from their successful operation hard, but it was a successful operation from the standpoint of what we sent them in to do. Nobody at The Campus did anything wrong.”
Ryan nodded distantly.
She added, “If we’d known who we were going over there to snatch, it would have been handled very differently, obviously.”
“Right,” he said. “Thanks, Mary Pat.” He looked at her. “Find this leak, and find Musa al-Matari. You do those two things, and America will be a lot safer.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Mary Pat left, and the President of the United States picked up the phone on his desk.
Jack Ryan, Jr., had been sound asleep, flat on his back in his condo in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. The flight around the world and back had come to an end just two hours earlier, the prisoner was delivered to a team of Dan Murray’s boys at dawn, and Jack said good-bye to his colleagues and took an Uber back to his place overlooking the Potomac.
He’d spent fifteen minutes in the shower, another fifteen minutes staring at ESPN, and then he hit the sack.
Now he woke to the sound of his mobile ringing next to his head. He found it, saw it was not even eight a.m., and realized he’d slept no more than an hour.
Half asleep still, he coughed and said, “Ryan?”
“Hey, sport.” It was his dad.
Jack rolled to a sitting position on his bed, rubbed his eyes, and wondered what had happened. His dad called on rare occasions, but never first thing in the morning. He was President, after all. Presidents usually had stuff to do as soon as they got to work.
“Something wrong?” Jack said.
“Not on my end. How are you?”
Jack knew better than to talk about his operations at The Campus with his dad. “Just fine. I’m… I’ve got the day off today, so I was just sleeping in.”
“Sorry to wake you.” There was a pause. “Long-haul flights like that can be a real pain.”
So… his dad knew. Mary Pat had told him, obviously, which meant she’d been asked directly, because she knew better than to introduce that stress into Jack’s father’s life.
Jack said, “Yeah. We’re all sick about what happened.”
“Son, sometimes things fall apart, despite all our best intentions.”
Jack said, “Dad, I find it’s probably better for both of us if I don’t talk about—”
Jack Senior said, “I don’t care about any of that. I care about you. I care about the effect this can have on you, because you somehow hold yourself responsible.”
“I am responsible. It’s not about denying. It’s about accepting it, figuring out how I can do better next time.”
“You were let down by the intelligence you received. An incomplete picture.”
“Everyone keeps saying that. I know that’s true, but I also know that I got into this to be a damn analyst in the first place. The guy that would go out and get the best intel product possible, to avoid disasters like this. Somewhere along the way I turned into something else. Maybe I got sucked into the world of operations. I started to see myself as another team guy, when I should be doing what I do best. But right now I blame myself, not because of what I did in Jakarta, but because of what I didn’t do back home. Maybe if I’d been analyzing this situation instead of shooting at North Koreans, I might have—”
Ryan Senior interrupted. “You shot at North Koreans?”
Oh, shit, Jack thought. “I assumed you knew. We had to. It was nothing.”
“That’s not nothing, son.”
“My point is maybe I should go back to just being an analyst. Maybe I could play a bigger role that way.”
The father would like nothing more in the world than for the son to leave ops behind and go back to being an analyst behind a desk in a D.C.-area office. But he also knew he was exactly the wrong person to push that on Jack Junior. He himself had been a teacher who turned into an analyst who turned into… what? A reluctant operative? But had he really been so reluctant? The elder Ryan understood the lure of direct involvement, too. The adrenaline, the single-minded sense of purpose with life-and-death actions.
Yeah, he’d love Jack Junior to turn away from that before something horrible happened to him, but that was a decision for Jack Junior.
He said, “Your mom and I, Sally, Katie, and Kyle… we love you and support you, whatever you do. You know I want you safe, but I also want you happy. Feeling like you are fulfilling your life’s mission, whatever you determine that to be. Your mom and I trust you to do the right thing, and what happened yesterday was a terrible outcome. I am just calling to tell you I know how you feel, and you have to put it past you.”
Jack asked, “Who the hell blew his cover to the DPRK?”
Ryan Senior sighed. “We don’t know, but we do know it goes much bigger than the DPRK, the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, and the State Department. This is something we are seeing across the government in the past few weeks. Getting to the bottom of it is everyone’s top priority.” Ryan caught himself. “Well… I hope it is. There is something else in extremis brewing, something unrelated, but something that can easily divert resources.”
Jack Junior knew better than to ask his dad too many questions, or to circumvent his own boss by making any promises about what The Campus would or could do to help. Instead, he said, “Well… You are doing a damn good job, Dad. Just hang in there. A couple years from now we’ll be out on a boat fishing and talking about how cool and important we used to be.”
Jack Senior laughed. It was nice to hear his son joke around a little. “I look forward to that day.”
“Me, too.”
“Come see us as soon as you can.”
“I will.”
It was a promise Jack made more often than he fulfilled, but he told himself he’d try to do better.
He hung up the phone and lay there, and within a few seconds he told himself he was going to talk to John, talk to Gerry, and see if he could be of some help in finding out who the fuck was at fault for the leak.
He’d find the son of a bitch responsible for Jen Kincaid’s death by working as an analyst, and then, if he could, he’d revert to direct-action operator, and he’d kill that son of a bitch himself.