That’s why I’m going to go to Langley tomorrow, Ryan answered himself.
They sent Sally to bed at 8:30, dressed in her bunny-rabbit sleeper, the flannel pajamas with feet that keep kids warm through the night. She was getting a little old for that, Jack thought, but his wife insisted on them, since their daughter had a habit of kicking the blankets en the floor in the middle of the night.
“How was work today?” his wife asked.
“The mids gave me a medal,” he said, and explained on for a few minutes. Finally he pulled the Order of the Purple Target out of his briefcase. Cathy found it amusing. The smiling stopped when he related the visit from Mr. Shaw of the FBI. Jack ran through the information, careful to include everything the agent had said.
“So, he doesn’t really think it’ll be a problem?” she asked hopefully.
“We can’t ignore it.”
Cathy turned away for a moment. She didn’t know what to make of this new information. Of course, her husband thought. Neither do I.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked finally.
“For one thing I’m going to call an alarm company and have the house wired. Next, I’ve already put my shotgun back together, and it’s loaded –”
“No, Jack, not in this house, not with Sally around,” Cathy said at once.
“It’s on the top shelf in my closet. It’s loaded, but it doesn’t have a round chambered. She can’t possibly get to it, not even with a stool to stand on. It stays loaded, Cathy. I’m also going to start practicing some with it, and maybe get a pistol, too. And” — he hesitated — “I want you to start shooting, too.”
“No! I’m a doctor, Jack. I don’t use guns.”
“They don’t bite,” Jack said patiently. “I just want you to meet a guy I know who teaches women to shoot. Just meet the guy.”
“No.” Cathy was adamant. Jack took a deep breath. It would take an hour to persuade her, that was the usual time required for her common sense to overcome her prejudices. The problem was, he didn’t want to spend an hour on the subject right now.
“So you’re going to call the alarm company tomorrow morning?” she asked.
“I have to go somewhere.”
“Where? You don’t have any classes until after lunch.”
Ryan took a deep breath. “I’m going over to Langley.”
“What’s at Langley?”
“The CIA,” Jack answered simply.
“What?”
“Remember last summer? I got that consulting money from Mitre Corporation?”
“Yeah.”
“All the work was at CIA headquarters.”
“But — you said over in England that you never –”
“That’s where the checks came from. That’s who I was working for. But CIA was where I was working at.”
“You lied?” Cathy was astounded. “You lied in a courtroom?”
“No. I said that I was never employed by CIA, and I wasn’t.”
“But you never told me.”
“You didn’t need to know,” Jack replied. I knew this wasn’t a good idea . . .
“I’m your wife, dammit! What were you doing there?”
“I was part of a team of academics. Every few years they bring in outsiders to look at some of their data, just as sort of a check on the regular people who work there. I’m not a spy or anything. I did all the work sitting at a little desk in a little room on the third floor. I wrote a report, and that was that.” There was no sense in explaining the rest to her.
“What was the report about?”
“I can’t say.”
“Jack!” She was really mad now.
“Look, babe, I signed an agreement that I would never discuss the work with anybody who wasn’t cleared — I gave my word, Cathy.” That calmed her down a bit. She knew that her husband was a real stickler for keeping his word. It was actually one of the things she loved about him. It annoyed her that he used this as a defense, but she knew that it was a wall she couldn’t breach. She tried another tack.
“So why are you going back?”
“I want to see some information they have. You ought to be able to figure out what that information is.”
“About these ULA people, then.”
“Well, let’s just say that I’m not worried about the Chinese right now.”
“You really are worried about them, aren’t you?” She was starting to worry, finally.
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
“But why? You said the FBI said they weren’t –”
“I don’t know — hell, yes, I do know. It’s that Miller bastard, the one at the trial. He wants to kill me.” Ryan looked down at the floor. It was the first time he’d said it aloud.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I saw his face, Cathy. I saw it, and I’m scared — not just for me.”
“But Sally and I –”
“Do you really think he cares about that?” Ryan snapped angrily. “These bastards kill people they don’t even know. They almost do it for fun. They want to change the world into something they like, and they don’t give a damn who’s in the way. They just don’t care.”
“So why go to the CIA? Can they protect you — us — I mean . . . ”
“I want a better feel for what these guys are all about.”
“But the FBI knows that, don’t they?”
“I want to see the information for myself. I did pretty good when I worked there,” Jack explained. “They even asked me to, well, to take a permanent position there. I turned them down.”
“You never told me any of this,” Cathy grumped.
“You know now.” Jack went on for a few minutes, explaining what Shaw had told him. Cathy would have to be careful driving to and from work. She finally started smiling again. She drove a six-cylinder bomb of a Porsche 911. Why she never got a speeding ticket was always a source of wonderment to her husband. Probably her looks didn’t hurt, and maybe she flashed her Hopkins ID card, with a story that she was heading to emergency surgery. However she did it, she was in a car with a top speed of over a hundred twenty miles per hour and the maneuverability of a jackrabbit. She’d been driving Porsches since her sixteenth birthday, and Jack admitted to himself that she knew how to make the little green sports car streak down a country road — enough to make him hold on pretty tight. This, Ryan told himself, was probably a better defense than carrying a gun.
“So, you think you can remember to do that?”
“Do I really have to?”
“I’m sorry I got us into this. I never — I never knew that anything like this would happen. Maybe I just should have stayed put.”
Cathy ran her hand across his neck. “You can’t change it now. Maybe they’re wrong. Like you said, probably they’re just acting paranoid.”
“Yeah.”
Chapter 12
Homecoming
Ryan left home well before seven. First he drove to U.S. Route 50 and headed west toward D.C. The road was crowded, as usual, with the early morning commuters heading to the federal agencies that had transformed the District of Columbia from a picturesque plot of real estate into a pseudo-city of transients. He got off onto I-495, the beltway that surrounds the town, heading north through even thicker traffic whose more congested spots were reported on by a radio station’s helicopter. It was nice to know why the traffic was moving at fifteen miles per hour on a road designed for seventy.
He wondered if Cathy was doing what she was supposed to do. The problem was that there weren’t that many roads for her to use to get to Baltimore. The nursery school that Sally attended was on Ritchie Highway, and that precluded use of the only direct alternate route. On the other hand, Ritchie Highway was always a crowded and fast-moving road, and intercepting her wouldn’t be easy there. In Baltimore itself, she had a wide choice of routes into Hopkins, and she promised to switch them around. Ryan looked out at the traffic in front of him and swore a silent curse. Despite what he’d told Cathy, he didn’t worry overly much about his family. He was the one who’d gotten in the way of the terrorists, and if their motivation was really personal, then he was the only target. Maybe. Finally he crossed the Potomac River and got on the George Washington Parkway. Fifteen minutes later he took the CIA exit.
He stopped his Rabbit at the guard post. A uniformed security officer came out and asked his name, though he’d already checked Ryan’s license plate against a computer-generated list on his clipboard. Ryan handed his driver’s license to the guard, who scrupulously checked the photograph against Jack’s face before giving him a pass.