Tom Clancy - Locked On

“Damn it,” said Ryan. “I led us into a buzz saw by sending John and Ding after Rokki in the first place.”

Clark said, “I’m glad you did what you did. If we weren’t on the scene, it would have been bad. Short term, you saved some innocent lives. Long term… hell, those DCRI surveillance operatives might just save the world someday. I’m glad they’re still around to do it.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said with a shrug. That made sense.

Gerry Hendley turned back to Granger. “Conclusions, Sam?”

Sam Granger stood. “My conclusion is… you guys did well. But we can’t let anything like this happen again. A running gun battle on the streets of a European capital? Cameras, witnesses, police, civilians in the way? This isn’t what The Campus was set up to do. Jesus, this could have been a debacle.”

Jack Ryan Jr. had been riding high for the past twenty-four hours. Other than Clark’s injury, he felt like everything had gone perfectly, except for the fact Rokki and his men got away. Even John’s busted arm was determined by everyone to be not terribly serious early on. But somehow Sam Granger had just put it all into perspective, and now Jack wasn’t so sure how great he and his team were. Instead, he wondered how much of it could, in fact, be chalked up to luck. They’d raced along a razor’s edge on that op, and they hadn’t fallen. Luck exists, Jack realized. This time it was good. Next time, it might be bad.

The meeting broke for lunch, but Gerry Hendley asked Ryan to stay behind for a second. Chavez and Clark remained in the conference room, too.

Jack Junior thought he was about to be taken to the woodshed for arguing with Clark in the middle of the operation about leaving the impending fight and, instead, heading down to the lobby. He’d been expecting this ever since, and he was sure that if John hadn’t been injured and sedated during the flight home, he’d have given Jack a stern talking-to on the plane.

But instead of a lecture about following orders during an operation, Gerry went in a different direction. “Jire/foack, we are all impressed as hell with you for all the training you’ve been putting yourself through these past several months. That said, we are a small shop, and with the uptick in OPTEMPO, I can’t risk having you miss a day of work right now. I’m going to pull you out of training for a bit.”

“Gerry, I know that—”

Gerry held a hand out so that he could stop Ryan’s argument, but Chavez jumped in.

“Gerry’s right. If we were a bigger operation, we could keep men rotating in and out of training all the time. We all respect what you’re doing, and I know it’s helped you out a lot, but in Paris you showed that you are absolutely one of the team now, and every one of us needs you out there with us.”

Chavez’s opinion meant everything to Jack Junior, but still, he felt he needed more experience and, at only twenty-six years old, he didn’t think it possible he could actually be injured during his training. “Guys, I appreciate it. I do. I just think—”

Now Clark spoke up: “You’re going to get the rest of your training on the job.”

Ryan stopped talking. Instead he nodded. “Okay.”

As the four men left the conference room for their break, Ryan caught up to Clark in the hall. “Hey, John. You got a second?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Mind if we go in your office?”

“Not if you get us some coffee first.”

“I’ll even stir in your sugar so you don’t spill it over your desk doing it one-handed.”

Five minutes later, both men sipped coffee in Clark’s office. The older man sat with his injured arm out of its sling and propped up on his desk by the elbow of the cast.

Ryan said, “John. When you told me to go down to the lobby, I shouldn’t have questioned that. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

Clark nodded. “I’ve been around the block a few times, Jack. I know what I’m doing.”

“Of course you do. I just thought—”

The older man interrupted. “Thinking is good. It was your thinking that put us in a position to help by sending us after Rokki, and your thinking when you saw the van with the suspicious guys sent us to the right location. Your thinking saved a lot of people’s lives. I’m never going to tell you to stop thinking. But I will tell you when it is time to shut up and listen to orders. If everybody does what they think is right when the bullets are about to start flying, then we won’t operate as a cohesive unit. Sometimes you may not like the order you are given, sometimes it might not make sense to you, but you have to do as you’re told. If you had spent some time in the military, this would be automatic to you. But you haven’t, so you’re just going to have to trust me.”

Ryan just nodded. “You are right. I just let my emotions get in the way. It won’t happen again.”

Clark just nodded. Smiled.

“What?” Jack asked.

“You and your dad.”

“What about my dad?”

“The similarities. Stories I could tell you.”

“Go ahead.”

But the older man just shook his head. ookl y“‘Need to know,’ kid. ‘Need to know.’”

Jack himself smiled now. “Somehow, someday. I’m going to get all those stories out of either you or my dad.”

“Your best chance was on the Gulfstream coming back over the Atlantic. Miss Sherman had me pretty well loopy on pain meds.”

Ryan smiled. “I missed my chance. Hope I get another chance that doesn’t involve you getting shot.”

“Me too, kid.” Clark shook his head and chuckled. “I’ve been shot worse than this, but this is the first time I took a round from some cop just trying to do his job. It’s hard to get good and mad at anybody but myself.”

Clark’s phone chirped on his desk. He picked it up. “Yeah? Sure, I’ll send him down. Me too? Okay, be right there.” Clark looked up at Ryan as he hung up the phone. “Tony Wills needs us at your desk.”

Jack found Tony Wills sitting in his cube, which was next to Ryan’s. With Tony sat Gavin Biery, the company IT chief. In Ryan’s chair, his cousin Dom Caruso sat waiting for him. Sam Driscoll leaned against the partition of the cubicle. Sam Granger and Rick Bell, chiefs of ops and analysis, respectively, were also there and standing around.

“Is this a surprise party?” Ryan asked. Dom and Sam both shrugged. They didn’t know why Tony had called them down, either.

But Wills had a pleased grin on his face. He called everyone over to his monitor. “So it took a while, mostly because the Paris op got in the way, but also because of the quality of the photos, but the facial-recog software finally came back with some hits on the guy that Sam and Dom saw meeting with Mustafa el Daboussi in Cairo the other day.”

“Cool,” said Dom. “Who is he?”

“Gavin,” said Wills. “You have the con.”

“Well”—Gavin Biery made his way through the scrum of men in the cubicle and sat down at Wills’s chair—“the software has narrowed Cairo man down to two probables.” He worked the keyboard for a moment and one of the pictures taken by Dom’s covert camera in the caravanserai in Cairo appeared on one half of the twenty-two-inch monitor.

Gavin said, “Facial recog says there is a ninety-three percent chance that this guy is…” He clicked his mouse. “This dude.” A picture appeared next to Dom’s photo of the man. It was a shot of a Pakistani passport for a man named Khalid Mir. The man wore glasses with round frames and had a trim beard, and he appeared to be several years younger than he looked in the Cairo photo.

Immediately Caruso said, “He’s changed a lot, but I think that’s the same guy.”