“You’re half right,” Clark said. “People are just strange. Period.” He took a deep breath, blowing it out hard the way every older man Chavez had ever met did when remembering a particular story. “I once watched two Vietcong for five full minutes while they took a smoke break less than five feet in front of my hide. I could have reached out and touched their Ho Chi Minh sandals.” Clark breathed out hard again, settling the memory. “I’d been in country long enough I could understand a little of what they were saying. It took me a minute, but I realized these two guys were telling jokes. Funny, but I never thought of them joking with each other, laughing about the same sort of dirty stuff we laughed at…”
“What happened?” Chavez asked, regretting the words as soon as they left his lips. He was a soldier. He knew better.
“War happened,” Clark said simply. “And that’s no laughing matter.”
Even after two decades of working with John Clark, and being married to his daughter, the dude could still send a chill up Chavez’s spine. At the same time, though he was pushing fifty years old, Ding couldn’t help but think he wanted to be John Clark when he grew up.
Ryan’s voice broke squelch on the radio again.
“They’re giving you the stink eye,” he said. “Countersurveillance team, maybe.”
Jack Ryan, Jr., was the boss’s boss’s boss’s son. Athletic and smart as anyone Chavez had ever seen, he could think on his feet and read a given situation with near lightning speed. Yeah, he’d been a bit of a rogue, known to chase tail when he should have been focusing on, well, just about anything else. Hell, he’d been all but fired twice — grounded for sure, stuck behind a desk — and that was as good as being fired once you’d tasted fieldwork. Ding and Clark had both vouched for him — and he’d stepped up. All signs indicated he’d finally matured to match his intellect.
And now he was seeing bogeymen.
There wasn’t any countersurveillance team. Chavez knew it. He’d set up the operation.
Ding enjoyed putting together training, but he missed pounding the pavement, acting several different parts, masking his hunter/killer persona so he could blend in on the street and not look too aggressive. There were few joys in life better than bringing justice to the bad guys — putting warheads on foreheads, they called it. As much fun as it was standing around drinking bubble tea with his father-in-law, he missed being out there with his team.
“Okay,” Adara said. Her dot on Chavez’s phone showed her moving west on Canal, approaching Elizabeth. “Dom’s staying on the rabbits. I’m going to slow at this shop window and give them a chance to pass.”
A former Navy corpsman, Adara Sherman had seen action in most of the Stans, where most of the killing was being done these days. A CrossFit fanatic, she was an extremely competent operator, and, more important, dead calm under pressure. She was also romantically involved with Dominic Caruso, the only actual federal officer on the team — seconded to The Campus. Ryan’s cousin, Caruso was a Feeb — still on the FBI rolls. Chavez imagined that the tight-ass middle managers in the Bureau — every agency had them — surely wondered what the hell kind of special duty their agent had disappeared to do for such a long period. The director knew. That was enough.
“Running some countersurveillance, eh, Ding…” Adara said.
Chavez looked at Clark again, more than a little embarrassed that his guys were seeing ghosts. Clark’s face remained as passive as one of those stone dudes on Easter Island. Completely unreadable.
As the director of operations for the off-the-books intelligence agency known as The Campus, John Clark was grading Chavez, just as Chavez was grading his team.
This training op had been in motion for the past five hours, with Dave and Lanny playing the role of rabbits. Both former Marines, they were handpicked force-protection specialists for the company — the guys who handled physical security at the building, the Gulfstream, and countersurveillance when the need arose. They’d started early, leading the four members of the operational team on a series of winding surveillance-detection routes that began in Alexandria, Virginia, not far from the financial arbitrage firm Hendley Associates — the name that was on all their paychecks.
Everyone on the team was pro — experienced, tried by fire. But even pros needed periodic training. Tradecraft, like any skill, grew stale when it wasn’t used. Clark’s motto to practice “not until they got it right, but until they didn’t get it wrong” was ingrained in each of them by now. All were naturals, endowed with innate talent that lent itself to surveillance, surveillance-detection runs, surreptitious entry, and, more important, the social engineering that intelligence work required. The life’s blood of intelligence work. They practiced defensive tactics as well — and some offensive ones — and firearms. Everyone enjoyed that the most, though no one was carrying today except Clark, Chavez, and Caruso. All of them were highly proficient with firearms — but they also trained extensively for the countless times when they would not have access to one of Samuel Colt’s equalizers. Still, situational awareness trumped a gun only until it didn’t. They’d arm up when able. Hence the leather BOG — bag o’ guns — hanging over Ding’s shoulder.
The securities and forensic accounting side of Hendley Associates was a working front, the “white side” that paid for the hidden raison d’être of the firm. Highly sensitive, and generally autonomous from the other intelligence agencies of the United States government, The Campus was conceived and organized in concert between former senator Gerry Hendley and President Jack Ryan.
Ryan Senior took a hands-off approach to their actual assignments. Hendley was an avuncular boss, friendly, strict when he needed to be, in on the planning while at the same time staying out of the way. He left the actual mission execution to the pros, John Clark in particular.
Clark’s leadership style had surely developed from the way he liked to operate. He believed strongly in setting parameters and then allowing his team to rattle around inside those boundaries, making their own decisions with the knowledge that could be gained only by someone with boots on the ground. He continued to play an active role, but was stepping back a little, playing elder statesman, and turning more and more of his duties over to Chavez.
The object of this mission was straightforward if not simple — just like the real world. The team was to surveil their rabbits to their hide. Once they learned that location, the team would create a diversion, defeat any security systems, break in, and steal Ding Chavez’s prized RAF Credenhill — otherwise known as Hereford — coffee mug. Easy peasy — so long as Dave and Lanny didn’t identify them.
The countersurveillance Jack Junior had seen was a nonissue, because it didn’t exist. The kid must have dreamed it up.
Midas Jankowski broke squelch next. A retired Delta Force colonel, his voice was calm and resonant, like he’d been born to speak on the radio. “Adara, no kidding, I got two Asians, one male, one female, just coming off Mott onto Canal, about fifty feet behind you, moving your direction.”
Chavez looked at the dots on his phone, all of them heading east on Canal now.
Ding decided to let it play out. It would be good training — embarrassing as hell for Ryan and Midas, but good. To professionals like these, failure in front of peers was more horrifying than getting shot by an actual enemy.
Time plus distance plus boredom equaled mission fatigue, making the training more realistic — so Chavez made sure the scenario contained large doses of all three.
The rabbits had transferred to the Red Line on the D.C. Metro system, arriving at Union Station with tickets already in hand, just in time to jump on the 8:40 a.m. Northeast Regional Amtrak train going toward Boston. Ding had been proud of the way the team scrambled to make it on board just before the train pulled away. He and Clark had taken the Acela Express ten minutes later, carrying the bag o’ guns. As a credentialed FBI agent, Caruso could travel armed virtually anywhere he went in the United States, but the rest of the team needed to go slick in the event they had to follow a rabbit into a museum or onto a commercial airplane. Clark rarely went anywhere without his 1911, and though intelligence work often called for operatives to be unarmed, he knew all too well the dangers of their job. He believed strongly in overwatch that had the ability to provide deadly force quickly when needed. If at all feasible, someone on the team carried the BOG. Caruso carried his Glock as well as Adara’s M&P Shield in holsters inside his waistband. This was a drill, but there were additional Shields in the leather BOG, including one for Adara, in case Dom couldn’t link up with her.