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By Root 906 0

so far, Jack thought, but maybe, if he played his cards right, more in the field. He was already rehearsing his pitch to The Campus’s head, Gerry Hendley. The MoHa thing had to count for something, didn’t it? His cousins were smart shooters. Did the term fit him? Jack wondered. Could it fit him? In comparison, his life had been a sheltered one, the well-protected son of President John Patrick Ryan, but that had come with benefits, hadn’t it? He’d learned to shoot from Secret Service agents, had played chess against the Secretary of State, had lived and breathed, albeit obliquely, the inner worlds of the intelligence and military communities. Had he, by osmosis, picked up some of the traits for which Brian and Dominic had trained so hard? Maybe. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking. Either way, he had to get past Hendley first.

“But you ain’t your dad,” Dominic reminded him.

“True enough.” Jack turned in his chair and powered up his PC for the morning news dose, public and classified. Too often, the latter was only three days in advance of the former. The first thing Jack logged in to was the Executive Intercept Transcript Summary from the NSA. Called EITS or XITS—and bearing the unfortunate moniker “zits”—it went only to high-level officers at the NSA and the CIA, and the National Security Council at the White House.

Speaking of the devil … There he was, the Emir himself, in the XITS again. An intercept. The message had been strictly administrative. The Emir wanted to know what someone—just an anonymous code name—was doing, whether he had made contact with some unknown foreign national, for some unknown purpose. That was the standard with most of these intercepts—a lot of unknowns, sort of like fill-in-the-blank, which was, in truth, what intelligence analysis was all about. The biggest and most complex jigsaw puzzle in the world. This particular piece had prompted a brainstorming meeting at the CIA.

The proposed agenda was the topic of a full single-spaced report (almost all of it speculation) by some middle-level analyst who probably wanted a better office and liked to spitball his speculation in the hopes that someday something would stick to the wall and so hike him to a supergrade’s salary. And maybe someday he would, but that wouldn’t make him any smarter, except maybe in the eyes of a superior who’d clawed his way up in similar fashion and liked having his back scratched.

Something was nagging at Jack’s brain, something about this particular query… . He rolled his mouse’s pointer over the XITS folder on his hard drive, double-clicked it, and brought up the summary document he’d been keeping of XITS. And there it was, the same intercept reference number, this one attached to a trio of week-old e-mails, the first from an NSC staffer to the NSA. Seems somebody at the White House wanted to know how exactly the information had been obtained. The query was then forwarded to the DNSA—a billet for a three-star professional military intelligence officer, at the moment an Army officer named Lieutenant General Sam Ferren—who responded curtly: BACKPACK. DO NOT REPLY. WILL HANDLE AD-MINISTRATIVELY.

Jack had to smile at this. Currently “Backpack” was the NSA’s rotating, in-house code name for Echelon, the agency’s all-knowing, all-seeing electronic monitoring program. Ferren’s response was understandable. The NSC staffer was asking for “sources and methods,” the nuts and bolts of how the NSA worked its magic. Such secrets were simply not shared by intel consumers such as the White House, and for an NSC staffer to request them was idiotic.

Predictably, Ferren’s subsequent XITS summary for the NSC simply listed the intercept source as “overseas cooperative ELINT,” or electronic intelligence, essentially telling the White House that the NSA got the info from a friendly intelligence agency. In short, he lied.

There could be only one reason for this: Ferren suspected the White House was showing the XITS around. Jesus, Jack thought, must be quite a strain for a three-star to have to watch what he says to the sitting President.