Mall shooting and three in Europe with the Magic Pen. Still, Hendley hadn’t hired them because they were good triggers. “Smart shooters” was the phrase Mike Brennan, his USSS principal, had often used, and it sure as hell fit his cousins.
“Gimme your best guess,” Brian said now.
“Pakistan, but close enough that his people can hop across the border. Somewhere with plenty of evacuation routes. He’s in a place with electricity, but portable generators are easy to come by, so that doesn’t mean much. Maybe a phone line, too. They’ve gotten away from satellite phones. Learned that one the hard way—”
“Yeah, when they read about it in the Times,” Brian growled.
Journalists think they can print anything they want to; it was hard to see those kinds of consequences while sitting in front of a keyboard.
“Bottom line is we don’t know where His Highness is right now. Even my best guess is just a guess, but the truth be told, that’s usually all intelligence amounts to—a guess based on the available info. Sometimes it’s rock-solid, sometimes as thin as air. The good news is we’re reading a lot of mail.”
“How much?” Dominic asked.
“Maybe fifteen or twenty percent.” Still, the sheer volume was overwhelming, but with volume came opportunities. Kind of like Ryan Howard, Jack thought. Swing at a lot of pitches, strike out a lot, but hit a ton of home runs. Hopefully.
“So let’s go shake the trees and see what falls out.” Ever the Marine, Brian was always ready to charge a beachhead. “Snatch somebody up and sweat him.”
“Don’t want to tip our hand,” Jack said. “You save something like that for an op that’s worth blowing it all for.”
The one thing they both knew not to talk about was how cagily the intelligence community was playing with what data it had. A lot of it stayed in-house, not even forwarded to its own directors, who tended to be political appointees, loyal to the people who appointed them, if not always to the oath they’d taken on occupying their offices. The President—known in the community as NCA, for National Command Authority—had a staff that he trusted, though the trust must have been to leak things he wished to leak, and only those things, and only to reporters who could be trusted to accept the spin placed on a leak. The spook community was holding out on the President, a firing offense if anyone got caught. They withheld data from end-user field people, too, which was also something with a history behind it, and which also explained why special ops people rarely trusted the intelligence community. It was all about need-to-know. You could have the highest clearance level available, but if you didn’t need to know, you were still out of the loop. Same went for The Campus, which was officially out of all the loops, which was sort of the point. Still, they’d had a lot of success slipping themselves into the loop. Their hacker-in-chief, an übergeek named Gavin Biery who ran their IT section, had yet to meet an encryption system into which he couldn’t poke a hole.
A former IBM employee, he’d lost two brothers in Vietnam, and thereafter had come to work for the federal government, then to be talent-scouted and cherry-picked to the Fort Meade headquarters of the National Security Agency, the government’s premier center for communications and electronic security. His government salary had long since topped him out as a Senior Executive Service genius, and indeed he still collected his reasonably generous government pension. But he loved the action and had snapped up the offer to join The Campus within seconds of its being made. He was, professionally, a mathematician, with a doctorate from Harvard, where he’d studied under Benoit Mandelbrot himself, and he occasionally lectured at MIT and Caltech as well in his area of expertise.
Biery was a geek through and through, right down to the heavy black-rimmed glasses and doughy complexion, but he kept The Campus’s electronic gears oiled and the machines purring.
“Compartmentalization?” Brian said. “Don’t gimme that cloak-and-dagger shit.”
Jack held up his hands and shrugged. “Sorry.” Like his dad, Jack Ryan Jr. wasn’t one to break the rules. Cousin or not, Brian didn’t have the need to know. Period.
“You ever wonder about the name?” Dominic asked. “The URC? You know how much these guys love double meanings.”
Interesting idea, Jack thought.
The Umayyad Revolutionary Council had been the Emir’s own invention, they’d always guessed. Was it what it seemed—just another oblique reference to the tried-and-true Islamic