Locked On Part 12

He didn't come right out and say it, but the inference was clear. Ed was a lost cause.

This provoked an immediate response from Kealty and his people. The next morning, Laska was on his jet from Santa Barbara with a private dinner invitation to the White House. He was ushered in to "the people's house" quietly, no record of his visit was recorded, and Kealty sat down for a private dinner with the venerable liberal kingmaker.

"Paul, things may look bleak right now," the President said between sips of pinot noir, "but I have the mother of all trump cards."

"Another a.s.sa.s.sination is in the works?"

Kealty knew Laska did not possess a sense of humor, so this was, in fact, a serious question. "Jesus, Paul!" Kealty shook his head violently. "No! I had nothing to do with . . . I mean . . . Don't even . . ." Kealty paused, sighed, and then let it go. "The Emir is in my custody, and when the time is right, I will pull him out and shut off Jack Ryan's asinine claim that I am weak on terrorism."

Laska's bushy eyebrows rose. "How did you get him?"

"It doesn't matter how I got him. What matters is that I have him."

Paul nodded slowly and thoughtfully. "What are you going to do with the Emir?"

"I just told you. Late in the election-my campaign manager, Benton Thayer, says I should do it at the second or third debate-I am going to announce to the country that I-"

"No, Ed. I am talking about his trial. How will you proceed with holding him accountable for his alleged actions?"

"Oh." Kealty waved an arm in the air as he slid another luscious morsel of prime rib onto his silver fork. "Brannigan at Justice wants to try him in New York; I'll probably let him do that."

Laska nodded. "I think you should do just that. And you should send a message to the world."

Kealty c.o.c.ked his head. "What message?"

"That America is, once again, the land of justice and peace. No kangaroo courts."

Kealty nodded slowly. "You want your foundation to defend him."

"It's the only way."

Kealty nodded, sipped his wine. He had something that Laska wanted. A high-profile case against the U.S. government. "I can make that happen, Paul. I'll get heat from the right, but who gives a d.a.m.n? Probably more ambivalence from the left than I would like, but n.o.body on our side of the aisle will squawk too much about it."

"Excellent," Laska said.

"Of course," Kealty said, his tone changed a little now that he was no longer sitting in front of Laska with his hat in hand, "you know what a Ryan victory would do to the trial. Your Progressive Const.i.tution Initiative would have no role in a military tribunal at Gitmo."

"I understand."

"I can only make this happen if I win. And even with this big reveal I plan at the presidential debate, I will only win with your continued support. Can I count on you, Paul?"

"You give my people the Emir case, and you will have my continued backing."

Kealty grinned like the Cheshire cat. "Wonderful."

Paul Laska lay in bed and thought back to that conversation at the White House. Laska's PCI legal team had ironed out all the complicated secret details with the Department of Justice in the intervening months, and now that the news was out about his capture, Laska's people would begin preparing their defense of the Emir the next morning.

As Paul listened to the grandfather clock tick in the corner of his dark bedroom, all he could think about was how Ryan would undo it all when he became President of the United States.

When, not if, Laska said to himself.

Hovno. f.u.c.king Ed Kealty. Kealty couldn't even win a debate where he had the best news the country has heard in a year.

Son of a b.i.t.c.h.

Paul Laska decided, at that very moment, that he would not spend one more G.o.dd.a.m.ned dime on that loser Ed Kealty.

No, he would divert his funds, his power, into one thing.

The destruction of John Patrick Ryan, either before he took his inevitable seat in the Oval Office or during his administration.

One full day after the Paris operation, all the Campus operators, John Clark included, sat in the conference room on the ninth floor of Hendley a.s.sociates in West Odenton, Maryland. All five men were still tired and sore from the op, but they'd each had a chance to go home and sleep for a few hours before heading into the office for the after-action debriefing.

Clark had slept more than the others, but that was only because of the meds. On the aircraft, Adara Sherman had administered painkillers that knocked him out until touchdown, and then he'd been picked up by Gerry Hendley and Sam Granger themselves and driven to the private office of a surgeon Hendley had retained in Baltimore for just such an eventuality. In the end, Clark hadn't needed surgery, and the doctor was effusive in his praise of the work of the person or persons who'd given the injury its initial cleaning and bandaging.

He had no way of knowing the person who had treated the wounded man had worked on more than her share of gunshot wounds in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most of those GSWs were much more serious than the hole left by the 9-millimeter round that pinged off of Clark's ulna. Other than administering an X-ray that revealed a hairline fracture of the bone, then handing over a removable cast, a sling, and a course of antibiotics, Hendley's surgeon had little to do other than to remember to keep quiet about the entire matter.

Hendley and Granger then drove Clark home. Both John's wife, Sandy, a retired nurse, and his daughter, Patsy, a doctor herself, were there waiting for him. They checked his wound over, yet again, ignoring his protests that he was fine and the complaints about the seemingly constant pulling and changing of the medical tape holding his dressing. Finally John managed to crash a few hours before driving himself back to work for the morning after-action briefing.

Gerry started the briefing by entering the room, pulling off his coat and draping it over the chair at the head of the table. He blew out a long sigh and said, "Gentlemen, I, for one, miss the days of poison pens."

The first several "wet" missions The Campus had undertaken, the operators had employed succinylcholine injector pens that were an efficient means for taking a life. A quick turn of the nub of the pen to reveal the syringe tip, then a stroll past the target, and finally a quick jab in the target's a.s.s. The a.s.sa.s.sin had, in all but a couple of cases, just walked on unnoticed while the target himself continued on down the street, wondering what had just bit or stung him.

Until moments later, when the target succ.u.mbed to a sudden heart attack, and died there, his colleagues standing over him with no idea what was wrong, and no idea the man gasping for air had just been murdered before their eyes.

It was quick and it was clean, and that was Gerry's point. No one fought back against a heart attack. No one even pulled their guns or their knives, because no one realized they were under attack.

"Would that it always worked like that," Gerry said to the room.

Next each of the operators talked about what they did, what they saw, what they thought about what they did and saw. They went around the room like this for most of the morning, and other than some self-criticisms over small things, the general consensus was that they had all done extremely well to react and respond to the drastic change in the operation at, literally, the last minute.

And they also all agreed that they had been d.a.m.n lucky, John Clark's forearm not withstanding.

Campus head of operations Sam Granger had kept quiet through most of the discussion. He had not been on the scene, after all. After the five operators had finished, he stood up and addressed the table. "We've gone over what happened, but now it's time to talk about fallout. Comebacks. Because even though you guys saved the DCRI officers and took down a known terrorist leader and five of his confederates, that does not mean the FBI won't be fast-roping down on Hendley a.s.sociates if the word gets out that we were involved."

A smile from Dom and Sam Driscoll, the two most "go with the flow" operators in the unit. The other men were a little more serious about the implications. Granger said, "I've been monitoring the media reports of the incident, and there is speculation already that this is some sort of terrorist catfight that French security found themselves in the middle of. It is not being reported that DCRI was rescued from a.s.sa.s.sination by unknown armed individuals. As s.h.i.tty as it was for you guys at the time that this was such a complicated takedown, it was even more confused from the side of the DCRI. They just saw men crashing into their room and shooting at each other. I can't imagine what they were thinking."

Sam motioned to Rick Bell, the chief of a.n.a.lysis at The Campus. "Fortunately, I don't have to. Rick has tasked his a.n.a.lysts downstairs to look into what French authorities know, or think they know, about what's going on."

Rick stood and addressed the boardroom. "DCRI and judicial police are both investigating this, but DCRI has not granted interviews of its people on the scene to the police investigators, so the judicial police aren't getting anywhere with their inquiry. DCRI does recognize there were two different sets of actors here, not a single cell that went berserk and shot it out with each other. They haven't gotten much further than that yet, but they are going to dig a lot deeper.

"That they will continue to investigate is the bad news, but it's nothing that we didn't expect. The good news is, as far as video evidence, you guys seem to be in the clear. There are a couple of distant grainy shots from street cameras. Jack crossing the Avenue George V on his way around the corner to the Hotel de Sers, and one of John going in the front of the Four Seasons and then coming back out. Also Ding and Dom turning the corner with the gear under their jackets. But the best facial-recog software in the world doesn't have algorithms that can solve for the distortion masks and the sungla.s.ses all you guys are wearing during the ops."

Rick sat back down, and Sam Granger again addressed the room: "That isn't to say some tourist with a cell phone cam didn't get a close-up shot of one of you. But if that happened, so far, it has not come out."

There were a few nods in the room, but no one spoke.

Rick said, "Okay. Now let's talk about what you guys helped prevent. According to intercepted communications from French security officials, al Qahtani and his men had over five hundred rounds of live ammo between them. There were no suppressors on their machine pistols. Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were going to shoot their way in and then shoot their way out. You men saved six security officers, but you probably saved another twenty cops and civilians as well."

"What about Rokki?" Chavez asked.

"He's gone. One hundred sirens on the street saw to that."

Granger said, "I am of the opinion that Hosni Rokki and his men were just MacGuffins. They were not there to commit any sort of terrorist act. They were not there because they were p.i.s.sed off about the burka ban. Instead, I think Rokki just came to town under orders of al Qahtani to draw out French security officers, so that al Qahtani and the real terror squad, who were already in place, could ID them and murder them."

"d.a.m.n it," said Ryan. "I led us into a buzz saw by sending John and Ding after Rokki in the first place."

Clark said, "I'm glad you did what you did. If we weren't on the scene, it would have been bad. Short term, you saved some innocent lives. Long term . . . h.e.l.l, those DCRI surveillance operatives might just save the world someday. I'm glad they're still around to do it."

"Yeah," Ryan said with a shrug. That made sense.

Gerry Hendley turned back to Granger. "Conclusions, Sam?"

Sam Granger stood. "My conclusion is . . . you guys did well. But we can't let anything like this happen again. A running gun battle on the streets of a European capital? Cameras, witnesses, police, civilians in the way? This isn't what The Campus was set up to do. Jesus, this could have been a debacle."

Jack Ryan Jr. had been riding high for the past twenty-four hours. Other than Clark's injury, he felt like everything had gone perfectly, except for the fact Rokki and his men got away. Even John's busted arm was determined by everyone to be not terribly serious early on. But somehow Sam Granger had just put it all into perspective, and now Jack wasn't so sure how great he and his team were. Instead, he wondered how much of it could, in fact, be chalked up to luck. They'd raced along a razor's edge on that op, and they hadn't fallen. Luck exists, Jack realized. This time it was good. Next time, it might be bad.

The meeting broke for lunch, but Gerry Hendley asked Ryan to stay behind for a second. Chavez and Clark remained in the conference room, too.

Jack Junior thought he was about to be taken to the woodshed for arguing with Clark in the middle of the operation about leaving the impending fight and, instead, heading down to the lobby. He'd been expecting this ever since, and he was sure that if John hadn't been injured and sedated during the flight home, he'd have given Jack a stern talking-to on the plane.

But instead of a lecture about following orders during an operation, Gerry went in a different direction. "Jack, we are all impressed as h.e.l.l with you for all the training you've been putting yourself through these past several months. That said, we are a small shop, and with the uptick in OPTEMPO, I can't risk having you miss a day of work right now. I'm going to pull you out of training for a bit."

"Gerry, I know that-"

Gerry held a hand out so that he could stop Ryan's argument, but Chavez jumped in.

"Gerry's right. If we were a bigger operation, we could keep men rotating in and out of training all the time. We all respect what you're doing, and I know it's helped you out a lot, but in Paris you showed that you are absolutely one of the team now, and every one of us needs you out there with us."

Chavez's opinion meant everything to Jack Junior, but still, he felt he needed more experience and, at only twenty-six years old, he didn't think it possible he could actually be injured during his training. "Guys, I appreciate it. I do. I just think-"

Now Clark spoke up: "You're going to get the rest of your training on the job."

Ryan stopped talking. Instead he nodded. "Okay."

As the four men left the conference room for their break, Ryan caught up to Clark in the hall. "Hey, John. You got a second?"

"Sure. What's up?"

"Mind if we go in your office?"

"Not if you get us some coffee first."

"I'll even stir in your sugar so you don't spill it over your desk doing it one-handed."

Five minutes later, both men sipped coffee in Clark's office. The older man sat with his injured arm out of its sling and propped up on his desk by the elbow of the cast.

Ryan said, "John. When you told me to go down to the lobby, I shouldn't have questioned that. I was wrong, and I'm sorry."

Clark nodded. "I've been around the block a few times, Jack. I know what I'm doing."

"Of course you do. I just thought-"

The older man interrupted. "Thinking is good. It was your thinking that put us in a position to help by sending us after Rokki, and your thinking when you saw the van with the suspicious guys sent us to the right location. Your thinking saved a lot of people's lives. I'm never going to tell you to stop thinking. But I will tell you when it is time to shut up and listen to orders. If everybody does what they think is right when the bullets are about to start flying, then we won't operate as a cohesive unit. Sometimes you may not like the order you are given, sometimes it might not make sense to you, but you have to do as you're told. If you had spent some time in the military, this would be automatic to you. But you haven't, so you're just going to have to trust me."

Ryan just nodded. "You are right. I just let my emotions get in the way. It won't happen again."

Clark just nodded. Smiled.

"What?" Jack asked.

"You and your dad."

"What about my dad?"

"The similarities. Stories I could tell you."

"Go ahead."

But the older man just shook his head. "'Need to know,' kid. 'Need to know.'"

Jack himself smiled now. "Somehow, someday. I'm going to get all those stories out of either you or my dad."

"Your best chance was on the Gulfstream coming back over the Atlantic. Miss Sherman had me pretty well loopy on pain meds."

Ryan smiled. "I missed my chance. Hope I get another chance that doesn't involve you getting shot."

"Me too, kid." Clark shook his head and chuckled. "I've been shot worse than this, but this is the first time I took a round from some cop just trying to do his job. It's hard to get good and mad at anybody but myself."

Clark's phone chirped on his desk. He picked it up. "Yeah? Sure, I'll send him down. Me too? Okay, be right there." Clark looked up at Ryan as he hung up the phone. "Tony Wills needs us at your desk."

Jack found Tony Wills sitting in his cube, which was next to Ryan's. With Tony sat Gavin Biery, the company IT chief. In Ryan's chair, his cousin Dom Caruso sat waiting for him. Sam Driscoll leaned against the part.i.tion of the cubicle. Sam Granger and Rick Bell, chiefs of ops and a.n.a.lysis, respectively, were also there and standing around.

"Is this a surprise party?" Ryan asked. Dom and Sam both shrugged. They didn't know why Tony had called them down, either.

But Wills had a pleased grin on his face. He called everyone over to his monitor. "So it took a while, mostly because the Paris op got in the way, but also because of the quality of the photos, but the facial-recog software finally came back with some hits on the guy that Sam and Dom saw meeting with Mustafa el Daboussi in Cairo the other day."