any significant damage to the storage levels wouldn’t fit into a moving truck.”
“And nonconventional explosives?” asked the Idaho delegate.
Then, Steve thought, we’d have a problem.
43
OKAY, PEOPLE, time to change up the game,” Gerry
Hendley announced as he filed into the conference room and found a seat.
It was another morning at The Campus, and the conference table was laid out with carafes of steaming coffee and platters of pastries and doughnuts and bagels. Jack poured himself a cup of coffee, grabbed a whole-wheat bagel—no cream cheese—and found an empty spot at the table. Also present were Jerry Rounds, chief of analysis/intelligence; Sam Granger, chief of operations; Clark and Chavez; and the Caruso brothers.
“It’s time we start taking a focused approach. From this point on, every person in this room is going to have nothing else on his plate except for the Emir and the Umayyad Revolutionary Council—except for myself, Sam, and Jerry, of course. We’ll also be keeping the lights on and the doughnuts fresh, but the rest of you start shifting your workload. We’re going to live, breathe, and eat Emir twenty-four-seven until he’s caught or dead.”
“Hoo-yah,” Brian Caruso said, getting a round of laughter.
“To that end, we’ve given the group a fitting name: Kingfisher. The Emir thinks he’s a king of sorts, fine. We’re going to fish him out. From now on, this is your workspace, and everyone’s door is always open—that means me, it means Sam, and it means Jerry.”
Holy crap, Jack thought. Where’s this coming from?
“First things first. Dom and Brian were tracking down leads in Sweden,” Hendley said, then recounted Jack’s discovery of the DHS/FBI intercept about Hlasek Air. “We’re going to keep pulling at that thread, but nothing jumped out. Mechanic’s turned himself into the Swedish national police, but he’s got nothing to give. Cash transaction for a little work on a transponder and a charter full of maybe Middle Easterners.”
“Kingfisher,” Hendley continued. “If you’ve got an idea, tell someone. If you want to try something new, ask. If you just want to brainstorm or play what-if, get together and do. The only dumb questions or ideas are the ones we don’t ask or put out there. We’re going organic, people. Forget the way we were doing things and start thinking outside the box. You can bet your ass the Emir is. So: Questions?”
“Yeah,” Dominic Caruso said. “Why the change?”
“Got a piece of good advice recently.”
Jack saw Hendley give John Clark a barely perceptible glance, and then it made sense.
“We’re too small a shop to be running it like a bureaucracy,” Jerry Rounds added. “The three of us will be rotating through here regularly to make sure we’re still on the rails, but the bottom line is this: The Emir is an extraordinary character, and we have to change our tactics accordingly.”
“What does this mean for the operational side of things?” Chavez asked.
Sam Granger answered, “More business, we hope. A lot of the new stuff we’ll be generating won’t be verifiable in the hypothetical. That means beating the bushes and running down leads. A lot of it might be scut work, but it adds up. Don’t get me wrong, we’d all love a home run, but you don’t stumble ass-backward into them. You’ve got to work for them.”
“When do we start?” Jack asked.
“Right now,” Hendley replied. “First order of business is making sure we’re all on the same page. Let’s lay out what we know, what we suspect, and what we still have to find out.” He checked his watch. “We’ll break for lunch, then meet back here.”
Jack popped his head into Clark’s office. “Whatever you did, John, you sure as hell got Hendley’s attention.”
Clark shook his head. “I didn’t do anything but nudge him where he was already headed. He’s sharp. He would’ve gotten there eventually. Come on in. Got a minute to sit?”
“Sure.” Jack took a seat across the desk.
“Heard you want to get your hands dirty.”
“What? Oh, yeah. He told you, huh?”
“Asked me to train you.”
“Well, that’d be fine with me. More than fine, really.”
“Why do you want to do this, Jack?”
“Didn’t Hendley tell—”
“I want to hear it from you.”
Jack shifted in his chair. “John, I sit here every day, reading traffic, trying to make sense of information that could be something, or nothing, and sure, I know it’s important and it’s got to be done, but I want to do something, y’know?”
Clark nodded. “Like MoHa.”
“Yeah, like that.”
“It’s not always clean like that.”
“I know.”
“Do you? I’ve done it, Jack—face-to-face and hand to hand.