at work, and he was a fair trigger, too. And cool under pressure. Both can be taught, but the latter was more about mind-set and temperament. It sounded like Jack had both, plus a steady hand.
“Where’s his head on it?” Clark asked.
“No illusions, I don’t think. Doesn’t strike me as a glory hound, anyway.”
“He isn’t. His parents raised him right.”
“He’s a damned good analyst, got a real knack for it, but he feels like he’s spinning his wheels. He wants to get in the weeds. Problem is, I don’t think his dad would—”
“If you’re going to make decisions about him based on what his dad would say or think, then ...”
“Say it.”
“Then you need to be worrying about where your head is, not his. Jack’s an adult, and it’s his life. You need to make the decision based on whether he’d be good at it and whether it’d help The Campus. That’s it; that’s all.”
“Fair enough. Well, I need to mull it over some more. If I decide to send him out, he’d need a training officer.”
“You have one of those.”
“I could use another, or two. Pete Alexander is damned good, but I’d want you to take Jack under your wing.”
Clark considered this. Time to practice what you just preached to the boss, John. “Sure, I’ll do it.”
“Thanks. We’re always on the lookout for more like you and Chavez, too, if you’ve got any thoughts on that. We’ve got our own talent scouts, but it’s always better to have a surfeit of candidates.”
“True. Let me think about it. I may have a name or two.”
Hendley smiled. “Some recently retired operators, maybe?”
Clark smiled back. “Maybe.”
38
DEAD DROPS,” Mary Pat Foley announced, pushing her way through the NCTC conference room’s glass door. She walked to the corkboard to which they had tacked both the DMA chart and the Baedeker’s Peshawar map and tapped one of the dot clusters.
“Come again?” John Turnbull said.
“The legend on the back—up and down arrows combined with dot clusters—their dead-drop locations. The up arrow is the pickup signal, the down arrow the drop box location. The location of the first tells you which box to check for the package. A three-dot cluster for the pickup signal location, a four-dot cluster for the box location.
“That’s some nitty-gritty Cold War shit right there,” Janet Cummings said.
“It’s tried and true—goes back to ancient Rome.”
The fact that her colleagues seemed surprised by this turn of events told her that they—and perhaps the CIA at large—were still working with a perceptual deficit when it came to the URC’s intelligence capability. Providing the agents working the dead drops were careful, the system was an effective way to make secondhand exchanges.
“No way to know if they’re still active, though,” she said. “Not without boots on the ground.”
The phone at Ben Margolin’s elbow trilled. He picked up the handset, listened for thirty seconds, then hung up. “Nothing so far, but the computers are chewing away at it. The good news is, we’ve eliminated a sixty-mile radius around the cave.”
“Too many variables,” John Turnbull, head of Acre Station, said.
“Yep,” Janet Cummings, the NCTC’s Chief of Operations, replied.
Mary Pat Foley’s idea for solving the “Where in the world is this?” riddle surrounding the sand table Driscoll and his team had recovered from the Hindu Kush cave involved a CIA project code-named Collage.
The brainchild of some mathematician in the Langley science and technology directorate, Collage had been out of Acre Station’s frustration in answering a question to Mary Pat’s, in their case, “Where in the world is he?” The Emir and his lieutenants had long been fond of releasing photos and videos of themselves traipsing about the wilds of Pakistan and Afghanistan, giving the U.S. intelligence community plenty of hints about the weather and terrain of their locations but never enough to be of any help to UAVs or Special Forces teams in the area. Without larger context, points of reference, and reliable scale, a rock was a rock was a rock.
Collage hoped to solve that by collating every available piece of raw topographical data, from commercial and military Landsat images to radar imaging satellites such as Lacrosse and Onyx, to family photo albums on Facebook and travelogues on Flickr—as long as the image’s location could be solidly fixed and scaled to some point on earth, Collage put it into the hopper for digestion and spit it out as an overlay of the earth’s surface. Also into this mix went a dizzying array of variables: geological characteristics, current and past