Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [24]
It had helped that he’d been among family. He and Dominic and Brian shared a grandfather, Jack Muller, his mom’s father. Their fraternal grandfather, now eighty-three, was first-generation Italian, having emigrated from Italy to Seattle, where for the past sixty years he’d lived and worked at the family-owned and -run restaurant.
Grandpa Muller, former Army veteran and Merrill Lynch VP, had a strained relationship with Jack Ryan Sr., having decided that his son-in-law’s abandonment of Wall Street for government service was sheer idiocy—idiocy that had eventually led to his daughter and granddaughter, Little Sally, nearly losing their lives in a car crash. But for his son-in-law’s ill-advised return to the CIA, the incident would have never happened. Of course, no one except Grandpa Muller believed that, including Mom and Sally.
It also helped, Jack Junior had decided, that Brian and Dominic were relatively new to this as well. Not new to the danger—Brian a Marine and Dominic an FBI agent—but to the “Wilderness of Mirrors,” as James Jesus Angleton had called it. They’d adapted well and quickly, having taken out three URC soldiers in short order—four at the Charlottesville Mall shooting and three in Europe with the Magic Pen. Still, Hendley hadn’t hired them because they were good triggers. “Smart shooters” was the phrase Mike Brennan, his USSS principal, had often used, and it sure as hell fit his cousins.
“Gimme your best guess,” Brian said now.
“Pakistan, but close enough that his people can hop across the border. Somewhere with plenty of evacuation routes. He’s in a place with electricity, but portable generators are easy to come by, so that doesn’t mean much. Maybe a phone line, too. They’ve gotten away from satellite phones. Learned that one the hard way—”
“Yeah, when they read about it in the Times,” Brian growled.
Journalists think they can print anything they want to; it was hard to see those kinds of consequences while sitting in front of a keyboard.
“Bottom line is we don’t know where His Highness is right now. Even my best guess is just a guess, but the truth be told, that’s usually all intelligence amounts to—a guess based on the available info. Sometimes it’s rock-solid, sometimes as thin as air. The good news is we’re reading a lot of mail.”
“How much?” Dominic asked.
“Maybe fifteen or twenty percent.” Still, the sheer volume was overwhelming, but with volume came opportunities. Kind of like Ryan Howard, Jack thought. Swing at a lot of pitches, strike out a lot, but hit a ton of home runs. Hopefully.
“So let’s go shake the trees and see what falls out.” Ever the Marine, Brian was always ready to charge a beachhead. “Snatch somebody up and sweat him.”
“Don’t want to tip our hand,” Jack said. “You save something like that for an op that’s worth blowing it all for.”
The one thing they both knew not to talk about was how cagily the intelligence community was playing with what data it had. A lot of it stayed in-house, not even forwarded to its own directors, who tended to be political appointees, loyal to the people who appointed them, if not always to the oath they’d taken on occupying their offices. The President—known in the community as NCA, for National Command Authority—had a staff that he trusted, though the trust must have been to leak things he wished to leak, and only those things, and only to reporters who could be trusted to accept the spin placed on a leak. The spook community was holding out on the President, a firing offense if anyone got caught. They withheld data from end-user field people, too, which was also something with a history behind it, and which also explained why special ops people rarely trusted the intelligence community. It was all about need-to-know. You could have the highest clearance level available, but if you didn’t need to know, you were still out of the loop. Same went for The Campus, which was officially out of all the loops, which was sort of the point. Still, they’d had a lot of success slipping themselves into