Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (25 page)

“W
HO IS IT
?” Ryan checked his clock. Damn, the extra forty minutes of sleep would have been nice.

“Mr. President, my name is Major Canon, Marine Corps,” the unknown voice announced.

“That's nice, Major, who are you?” Jack blinked his eyes and forgot to be polite, but probably the officer understood.

“Sir, I'm the watch officer in Signals. We have a report with high confidence that the President of Iraq was assassinated about ten minutes ago.”

“Source?” Jack asked at once.

“
Kuwait
and Saudi both, sir. It was on Iraqi TV live, some sort of event, and we have people over there to monitor their TV. We have a tape being uplinked to us right now. The initial word is a pistol right in the head, at close range.” The tone of the officer's voice wasn't exactly regretful. Well, they finally popped that fucker! Of course, you couldn't exactly say that to the President.

And you needed to figure who “they” was.

“Okay, Major, what's the drill?” The answer came quickly enough. Ryan replaced the phone.

“Now what?” Cathy asked. Jack swung his feet out of bed before answering.

“The President of Iraq was just killed.”

His wife almost said, Good, but stopped. The death of such a person was not as distant a concept as it had once been. How odd to feel that way about someone who could best serve the world by leaving it.

“Is that important?”

“In about twenty minutes, they'll tell me.” Ryan coughed before going on. “What the hell, I used to be competent in those areas. Yeah, it's potentially very important.” With that he did what every man in
America
did in the morning. He headed to the bathroom ahead of his wife. For her part, Cathy lifted the remote and performed the other ordinarily male function of clicking on the bedroom TV, surprised to find that CNN didn't have anything on but reports on which airports were operating behind schedule. Jack had told her a few times just how good the White House Signals Office was.

“Anything?” her husband asked, coming back out.

“Not yet.” Then it was her turn.

Jack had to think about where his clothes were, wondering how a President was supposed to dress. He found his robe—moved in from the Naval Observatory after having been moved there from Eighth and I, after having been removed from their home. . . damn—and opened the bedroom door. An agent in the hall handed him three morning papers. “Thanks.”

Cathy saw that and stopped cold in her tracks, belatedly realizing that there had been people just outside her bedroom door all night. Her face turned away, forming the sort of smile generated by finding an unexpected mess in the kitchen.

“Jack?”

“Yes, honey?”

“If I kill you in bed some night, will those people with guns get me right away, or will it wait until morning?”

T
HE REAL WORK
was being done at
Fort
Meade
. The video had traveled from one monitoring station on the Kuwait-Iraq border and another in
Saudi Arabia
, known as P
ALM
B
OWL
and S
TORM
T
RACK
, respectively, the latter set up to record all signals out of
Baghdad
, and the former watching the southeastern part of the country, around
Basra
. From both places the information traveled by fiberoptic cable to the National Security Agency's deceptively small building in King Khalid Military City (KKMC) and uplinked to a communications satellite, which then shot it back to NSA headquarters. There in the watch room, ten people summoned by one of the junior watch officers huddled around a TV monitor to catch the tape, while the more senior troops, in a separate glass-walled office, sipped their coffee soberly.

“Yes!” an Air Force sergeant observed on seeing the shot, “Nothin' but net!” Several high fives were exchanged. The senior watch officer, who'd already called White House Signals, nodded his more restrained approval and relayed the original signal along the way, and ordered a digital enhancement, which would take a few minutes—only a few frames were all that important, and they had a massive Cray supercomputer to handle that.

R
YAN REMARKED QUIETLY
that while Cathy was getting the kids ready for school, and herself ready to operate on people's eyes, here he was in Signals watching the instant replay of a murder. His designated national intelligence officer was still at CIA, finishing his morning intake of information, which he would then regurgitate to the President by way of the morning intelligence briefing. The post of National Security Advisor was currently vacant— one more thing to address today.

“Whoa!” Major Canon breathed.

The President nodded, then reverted to his former life as an intelligence officer. “Okay, tell me what we know.”

“Sir, we know that somebody got killed, probably the Iraqi President.”

“Double?”

Canon nodded, “Could be, but S
TORM
T
RACK
is now reporting a lot of VHP signals that started all of a sudden, police and military nets, and the activity is radiating out from Baghdad.” The Marine officer pointed to his computer monitor, which displayed real-time “take” from the NSA's many outposts. “Translations will take a little time, but I do traffic analysis for a living. It looks pretty real, sir. I suppose it could be faked, but I wouldn't—there!”

A translation was coming up, identified as emanating from a military command net. He's dead, he's dead, stsnd your regiment to and be prepared to move into the city imediately—recipient is Replican Gurds Special Operations regiment at Salmon Pak—reply is: Yes I will yes I will, who is giving the oders, what are my orders—

“Typos and all,” Ryan noted.

“Sir, it's hard for our people to translate and type it at the same time. Usually we clean it up before—”

“Relax, Major. I only use three fingers myself. Tell me what you think.”

“Sir, I'm only a junior officer here, that's why I draw the midwatch and—”

“If you were stupid, you wouldn't be here.”

Canon nodded. “He's deader 'n hell, sir.
Iraq
needs a new dictator. We have the imagery, we have unusual signal traffic that fits the pattern of an unusual event. That's my estimate.” He paused and went on to cover himself, like a good spook. “Unless it's a deliberate exercise to smoke out disloyal people inside his government. That's possible, but unlikely. Not in public like this.”

“Kamikaze play?”

“Yes, Mr. President. Something you can only do once, and dangerous the first time.”

“Agreed.” Ryan walked to the coffee urn—the White House Office of Signals was mainly a military operation, and they made their own. Jack got two cups and came back, handing one to Major Canon, rather to the horror of everyone else in the room. “Fast work. Send a 'thanks' to the guys working this, okay?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Who do I talk to to get things happening around here?”

“We got the phones right here, Mr. President.”

“I want Adler in here ASAP, the DCI . . . who else? State and CIA desks for
Iraq
. DIA estimate of the state of their military. Find out if Prince Ali is still in town. If he is, ask him to please stand by. I want to talk to him this morning if possible. I wonder what else . . . ?” Ryan's voice trailed off.

“C
ENT
C
OM
, sir. He'll have the best military-intelligence troops down at
Tampa
, most familiar with the area, I mean.”

“Get him up here—no, we'll do that by landline, and we give him time to get briefed in.”

“We'll get it all going for you, sir.” Ryan patted the officer on the shoulder and headed out of the room. The heavy door closed behind him before Major Charles Canon spoke again. “Hey, NCA knows his shit.”

“Is it what I heard?” Price asked, coming up the corridor.

“Do you ever sleep?” Then he thought about it. “I want you in on this.”

“Why me, sir, I'm not—”

“You're supposed to know about assassinations, right?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Then right now you're more valuable to me than a spook.”

T
HE TIMING COULD
have been better. Daryaei had been surprised by the information just delivered. Not in the least bit displeased by it—except maybe the timing. He paused for a moment, whispering a prayer first of thanks to Allah, then for the soul of the unknown assassin—assassin? he asked himself. Perhaps “judge” would be a better term for the man, one of many who'd been infiltrated into
Iraq
ages ago, while the war had still been going on. Most had merely disappeared, probably shot one way or another. The overall mission had been his idea, not nearly dramatic enough for the “professionals” working in his intelligence service. Largely leftovers from the Shah's Savak—trained by the Israelis in the 1960s and 1970s— they were effective, but they were mercenaries at heart however much they might protest their religious fervor and their loyalty to the new regime. They'd proceeded along “conventional” lines for the unconventional mission, trying bribes of various sorts or testing the waters for dissidents, only to fail at every turn, and for years Daryaei had wondered if the target of all that attention might have Allah's perverse blessings somehow or other—but that had been the counsel of despair, not of reason and faith, and even Daryaei was subject to human weakness. Surely the Americans had tried for him also, and probably in the same way, trying to identify military commanders who might like to try out the seat of power, trying to initiate a coup d'état such as they had done often enough in other parts of the world. But, no, this target was too skilled for that, and at every turn he'd become more skilled, and so the Americans had failed, and the Israelis, and all the others. All but me.

It was tradition, after all, all the way back to antiquity. One man, operating alone, one faithful man who would do whatever was necessary to accomplish his mission. Eleven such men had been dispatched into Iraq for this specific purpose, told to go deep under cover, trained to forget everything they had ever been, entirely without contact or control officers, and all records of their existence destroyed so that even an Iraqi spy in his own agencies could not discover the mission without a name. Within an hour, some of his own cronies would come into this office, praising God and lauding their leader for his wisdom. Perhaps so, but even they didn't know all the things he had done, or all the people he'd dispatched.

T
HE DIGITIZED RENDITION
of the event didn't change much, though now he had a more professional opinion of the options:

“Mr. President, a guy with a Silicon Graphics workstation could fake this,” the NIO told him. “You've seen movies, and movie film has much higher resolution than a TV set. You can fake almost anything now.”

“Fine, but your job is to tell me what did happen,” Ryan pointed out. He'd seen the same few seconds of tape eight times now, and was growing tired of instant replay.

“We can't say with absolute certainty.”

Maybe it was the week's sleep deprivation. Maybe it was the stress of the job. Maybe it was the stress of having to face his second crisis. Maybe it was the fact that Ryan was himself still a carded national intelligence officer. “Look, I'm going to say this once: Your job isn't to cover your ass. Your job is to cover mine!”

“I know that, Mr. President. That's why I'm giving you all the information I have. . . .” Ryan didn't have to listen to the rest of the speech. He'd heard it all before, a couple of hundred times. There had even been cases when he'd said similar things himself, but in Jack's case, he'd always hung his hat on one of the options.

“Scott?” Jack asked the acting SecState.

“The son of a bitch is dead as yesterday's fish,” Adler replied.

“Disagreement?” President Ryan asked the others in the room. Nobody contradicted the assessment, giving it a sort of blessing. Even the NIO would not disagree with the collective opinion. He'd delivered his assessments, after all. Any mistakes now were the Secretary of State's problem. Perfect.

“Who was the shooter?” Andrea Price asked. The answer came from CIA's Iraq-desk officer.

“Unknown. I have people running tapes of previous appearances just to make sure that he's been around before. Look, from all appearances it was a senior member of his protection detail, with the rank of an army colonel, and—”

“And I damned well know everybody on my detail,” Price concluded the statement. “So, whoever it was, he belonged there, and that means whoever pulled this off managed to get somebody all the way inside, close enough to make the hit, and committed enough to pay the price for it. It must have taken years.” The continuation of the tape—they'd watched that only five times—showed the man crumble after a cavalcade of pistol shots at point-blank range. That struck Agent Price as odd. You damned well wanted to bag such people alive. Dead men still didn't tell any tales, and executions could always be arranged. Unless he'd been killed by other members of a conspiracy. But how likely was it that more than one assassin had made it that far? Price reflected that she could ask Indira Gandhi that someday. Her whole detail had turned on her one afternoon in a garden. For Price that was the final infamy, killing the person you were sworn to defend. But, then, she hadn't sworn to defend such people as that. One other thing on the tape got her attention: “Did you notice the body language?”

“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“The way the gun came up, the way he took the shot, the way he just stood there and watched. Like a golfer, it's called follow-through. He must have waited a long time for the chance. He damned sure thought about it for a long, long time. He must have dreamed about it. He wanted the moment to be perfect. He wanted to see it and enjoy it before he went down.” She shook her head slowly. “That was one focused, dedicated killer.” Price was actually enjoying herself, chilling though the subject of the meeting was. More than one President had treated the Secret Service agents as if they were furniture, or at best nice pets. It wasn't often that big shots asked their opinion of much more than narrow professional areas, like where a bad guy might be in a particular crowd.