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.
21
Although he could not know it yet, the man Jack Ryan, Jr., very much wanted to kill was a twenty-nine-year-old Romanian named Alexandru Dalca.
People had described Dalca as a con man since long before he was even a man. When he was a very young boy he’d been a thief, a swindler, like a character out of Oliver Twist, and now, still in his twenties, he drove a Porsche and lived in a million-dollar condo in Bucharest’s posh Sector 1 neighborhood.
A year earlier, Dalca stepped out through the gates of Jilava Prison and into the rain, a free yet completely soulless man. He’d entered the prison’s walls six years before that, and though he’d gone in with deep psychological issues and significant abilities that he used for the benefit of himself and the detriment of others, the person who departed prison that wet morning last year was incalculably more dangerous than the one who went in, because prison had given him the last of the tools he needed to become a true criminal mastermind.
At the prison’s gates a car had waited for him, as had been promised, and he shook off the rain and climbed into the back, not even taking time to breathe in the fresh air or look at the green fields to the east.
No, his mind was on his future, his plan.
His retribution. Retribution in the form of personal gain earned via injury to America.
Dalca was born in the city of Râmnicu Vâlcea in 1989, the same year Romanian strongman President Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife and deputy prime minister, Elena, were ousted from power, then seconds later pushed in front of a brick wall and eviscerated with 120 bullets.
Alexandru grew up in the years after the revolution, and it would be a mischaracterization to describe anything that happened to him in his formative years as a real childhood. His father was unknown to him — his mother never even acknowledged the man’s existence, and she herself died in a factory fire when Alex was just five. He was put into a horrific orphanage with little food and zero nurturing, so soon enough he found his way onto the streets of his town. Fortunately for him, Râmnicu Vâlcea had a decent amount of tourism, because it was just a few hours from Bucharest by train and in the foothills of the beautiful Southern Carpathian Mountains. Dirt-cheap Westerners looking for a dirt-cheap vacation flocked to Romania in the nineties, and young Alexandru learned a smattering of English begging from Western tourists, offering to shine shoes for a few coins, or selling items he and his street-urchin friends stole from market stalls and gift shops.
A group of British girls all but adopted the handsome boy during their week in his town, and they brought him back to their youth hostel to give him food and his own bed to sleep in.
He was seven years old, and when the girls went back home to England, Alexandru stayed behind at the hostel. The building had a popular Internet café, the only one in Romania outside Bucharest in those early days of the World Wide Web, and young Alexandru had never before seen a computer. He spent hours every day peering over people’s shoulders, sat next to them and talked in his bad English, watched them playing games and communicating with loved ones around the world, asking them a million questions about the amazing device. Often he would swipe bills out of their purses and backpacks while he did all this, but just a few, because he did not want to be banished from the establishment.
Dalca became a fixture of the place, working odd jobs at the hostel and café, but while doing so he became adept at conning travelers of their excess food and change. He improved his English talking to the travelers, as well as by watching the movies that played all day long on a VCR in the great room.
After a few years Dalca expanded on his crimes. In his off time he formed up with some older Romanian teens who had started a scam using the new website eBay to post ads for items that Americans would pay for in advance. The Romanian guys would never ship the items; they would pocket the money and then simply open up new accounts and do it again as soon as their old eBay ID took a hit for the rip-offs.
Good English was the most important skill for these types of scammers, and Dalca’s was good enough. As soon as Alexandru’s voice changed with puberty, he became the telephone man on dozens and dozens of scams at a time. He spent twelve hours a day in a phone room set up next door to the café making deals, then responding to questions from ever more frantic and angry customers wondering why they hadn’t yet received their purchases.
He could adopt a chill, relaxed demeanor to convince his marks that everything was all right, because, in fact, everything was all right.
For Alexandru and the boys he worked with, everything was great. They just got paid to do nothing more than make empty promises.