The other rules were also different now. They didn’t move in single file. Too many people following a single path made for tracks. Though Chavez was at point, with Oso twenty meters behind, the rest of the squad was advancing in line abreast, with frequent changes of direction, shifting almost like a football backfield, but over a much larger area. Soon they’d start looping their path, waiting to see if someone might be following. If so, that someone was in for a surprise. For the moment, the mission was to move to a preselected location and evaluate the opposition. And wait for orders.
The police lieutenant didn’t often go to evening services at Grace Baptist Church, but he did this time. He was late, but the lieutenant had a reputation for being late, even though he customarily drove his unmarked radio car wherever he went. He parked on the periphery of the well-filled parking lot, walked in, and sat in the back, where he made sure his miserable singing would be noticed.
Fifteen minutes later, another plain-looking car stopped right next to his. A man got out with a tire iron, smashed the window on the right-side front door, and proceeded to remove the police radio, the shotgun clipped under the dash – and the locked, evidence-filled attaché case on the floor. In less than a minute he was back in his car and gone. The case would be found again only if the Patterson brothers didn’t keep their word. Cops are honest folk.
23. The Games Begin
THE MORNING ROUTINE was exactly the same despite the fact that Ryan had been away from it for a week. His driver awoke early and drove his own car to Langley, where he switched over to the official Buick and also picked up some papers for his passenger. These were in a metal case with a cipher lock and a self-destruct device. No one had ever tried to interfere with the car or its occupants, but that wasn’t to say that it would never happen. The driver, one of the official CIA security detail, carried his own 9mm Beretta 92-F pistol, and there was an Uzi submachine gun under the dash. He had trained with the Secret Service and was an expert on protecting his “principal,” as he thought of the acting DDI. He also wished that the guy lived closer to D.C., or that he was entitled to mileage pay for all the driving he did. He drove around the inner loop of the Capital Beltway, then took the cloverleaf east on Maryland Route 50.
Jack Ryan rose at 6:15, an hour that seemed increasingly early as he marched toward forty, and followed the same kind of morning routine as most other working people, though his being married to a physician guaranteed that his breakfast was composed of healthy foods, as opposed to those he liked. What was wrong with grease, sugar, and preservatives, anyway?
By 6:55 he was finished with breakfast, dressed, and about halfway through his paper. It was Cathy’s job to get the children off to school. Jack kissed his daughter on his way to the door, but Jack Jr. thought himself too old for that baby stuff. The Agency Buick was just arriving, as regular and reliable as airlines and railroads tried to be.
“Good morning, Dr. Ryan.”
“Good morning, Phil.” Jack preferred to open his own doors, and slid into the right-rear seat. First he would finish his Washington Post, ending, as always, with the comics, and saving Gary Larson for last. If there was anything an Agency person needed it was his daily dose of The Far Side, far and away the most popular cartoon at Langley. It wasn’t hard to understand why. By that time the car was back on Route 50, in the heavy Washington-bound traffic. Ryan worked the lock on the letter case. After opening it he used his Agency ID card to disarm the destruct device. The papers within were important, but anyone who attacked the car now would be more interested in him than in any written material, and no one at the Agency had illusions about Ryan’s – or any other person’s – ability to resist attempts to extract information. He now had forty minutes to catch up on developments that had taken place overnight – in this case over the weekend – so that he’d be able to ask intelligent questions of the section chiefs and night watch officers who’d brief him when he got in.
Reading the newspaper first always put a decent spin on the official CIA reports. Ryan had his doubts about journalists – their analysis was often faulty – but the fact of the matter was that they were in the same basic job as the Agency: information-gathering and -dissemination, and except for some very technical fields – which were, however, vitally important in matters like arms control – their performance was often as good as and sometimes better than the trained government employees who reported to Langley. Of course, a good foreign correspondent was generally paid better than a GS-12-equivalent case officer, and talent often went where the money was. Besides, reporters were allowed to write books, too, and that’s where you could make real money, as many Moscow correspondents had done over the years. All a security clearance really meant, Ryan had learned over the years, was sources. Even at his level in the Agency, he often had access to information little different in substance than any competent newspaper reported. The difference was that Jack knew the sources for that information, which was important in gauging its reliability. It was a subtle but often crucial difference.
The briefing folders began with the Soviet Union. All sorts of interesting things were happening there, but still no one knew what it meant or where it was leading. Fine. Ryan and CIA had been reporting that analysis for longer than he cared to remember. People expected better. Like that Elliot woman, Jack thought, who hated the Agency for what it did – actually, for things it never did anymore – but conversely expected it to know everything. When would they wake up and realize that predicting the future was no easier for intelligence analysts than for a good sportswriter to determine who’d be playing in the Series? Even after the All-Star break, the American League East had three teams within a few percentage points of the lead. That was a question for bookmakers. It was a pity, Ryan grunted to himself, that Vegas didn’t set up a betting line on the Soviet Politburo membership, or glasnost, or how the “nationalities question” was going to turn out. It would have given him some guidance. By the time they got to the beltway, he was reading through reports from Latin and South America. Sure enough, some drug lord named Fuentes had gotten himself blown up by a bomb.
Well, isn’t that too bad? was Jack’s initial observation. He was thinking abstractly, but came down to earth. No, it wasn’t all that bad that he was dead. It was very worrisome that he’d been killed by an American aircraft bomb. That was the sort of thing that Beth Elliot hated CIA for, Jack reminded himself. All that judge-jury-and-executioner stuff. It had nothing to do with right or wrong. The question, to her, was political expediency and maybe aesthetics. Politicians are more concerned with “issues” than “principles,” but talked as though the two nouns had the same meaning.
Jesus, you’re really into Monday-morning cynicism, aren’t you?
How the hell did Robby Jackson tumble to this? Who set up the operation? What will happen if the word really does get out?
Better yet: Am I supposed to care about that? If yes, why? If not, why not?
It’s political, Jack. How do politics enter into your job? Are politics even supposed to enter into your job?
As with many things, this would have been a superb topic for a philosophical discussion, something for which Ryan’s Jesuit education had both prepared him and given him a taste. But the case at hand wasn’t an abstract examination of principles and hypotheticals. He was supposed to have answers. What if a member of the Select Committee asked him a question that he had to answer? That could happen at any time. He could defer such a question only for as long as it took to drive from Langley to The Hill.
And if Ryan lied, he’d go to jail. That was the downside of his promotion.
For that matter, if he honestly said that he didn’t know, he might not be believed, probably not by the committee members, maybe not by a jury. Even honesty might not be real protection. Wasn’t that a fun thought?
Jack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for. And that was what it all came down to, wasn’t it? Either you stand for something, or you don’t, Ryan told himself. Any jackass could be against things, like a petulant child claiming to hate an untasted vegetable. You could tell what these people stood for. The Mormons tithed their income, which allowed their church to construct this monument to faith, just as medieval peasants had taken from their need to build the cathedrals of their age, for precisely the same purpose. The peasants were forgotten by all but the God in Whom they believed. The cathedrals – testimony to those beliefs – remained in their glory, still used for their intended purpose. Who remembered the political issues of that age? The nobles and their castles had crumbled away, the royal bloodlines had mostly ended, and all that age had left behind were memorials to faith, belief in something more important than man’s corporeal existence, expressed in stonework crafted by the hands of men. What better proof could there be of what really mattered? Jack knew he wasn’t the first to wonder at the fact, not by a very long shot indeed, but it wasn’t often that anyone perceived Truth so clearly as Ryan did on this Monday morning. It made expediency seem a shallow, ephemeral, and ultimately useless commodity. He still had to figure out what he would do, and knew that his action would possibly be decided by others, but he knew what sort of guide, what sort of measure he would use to determine his action. That was enough for now, he told himself.