“Just fine, thank you, ma’am.” He opened the car door.
“Have a productive day, Jack.” And the usual morning kiss.
Cathy settled in, buckled her seat belt, and started up the twelve-cylinder beast that lived under the hood. She waved and backed out. Jack watched her disappear down the driveway, out to where the lead and chase cars were waiting, then turned back to the kitchen door.
“Good morning, Mrs. O’Day,” he said in greeting.
“And to you, Mr. President,” said Special Agent Andrea Price-O’Day, Jack’s principal agent. She had a two-plus-year-old boy of her own, named Conor, and a handful he was, Jack knew. Conor’s dad was Patrick O’Day, Major Case Inspector for FBI Director Dan Murray, another of Jack’s government appointments that Kealty couldn’t mess with, because the FBI wasn’t allowed to be a political football—or least it wasn’t supposed to be.
“How’s the little one?”
“Just fine. Not quite sure about the potty yet, though. He cries when he sees it.”
Jack laughed. “Jack was the same way. Arnie is coming down Tuesday, about ten in the morning,” he told her. “Dinner, then overnight.”
“Well, we don’t have to check him out very thoroughly,” Andrea replied. But they’d still run his Social Security number through the National Crime Information Computer, just to be sure. The Secret Service trusted few—even in its own ranks, since Aref Raman had gone bad. That had caused a major bellyache for the Service. But her own husband had helped to settle that one down, and Raman would be in the Florence, Colorado, federal prison for a long, long time. The grimmest of all federal penitentiaries, Florence was as max as a maximum-security prison got, dug as it was into hard bedrock and entirely belowground. The guests of Florence mostly saw sunlight on black-and-white TV.
Ryan walked back into the kitchen. He could have asked more. The Service kept lots of secrets. He could have gotten an answer, however, because he, too, had been a sitting President, but that was something he just didn’t want to do.
And he still had work to do. So he poured another cup of coffee and headed off to his library to work on Chapter 48, mod 2. George Winston and the Tax System. It had worked well, until Kealty decided that some people weren’t paying “their fair share.” Kealty, of course, was the sole and final arbiter on what was “fair.”
11
THE XITS THIS MORNING contained an encrypted intercept for which The Campus had the key. The content could hardly have been more bland, so much so that encryption was superfluous. Somebody’s cousin had delivered a baby girl. Had to be plain text code. “The chair is against the wall” had been such a phrase used in World War Two to alert the French resistance to do something to the occupying German Army. “Jean has a long mustache” had told them that the D-day invasion was about to take place, as did “Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor.”
So what does this mean? Jack asked himself. Maybe somebody had just had a baby, and a girl, which was not an event of great moment to the Arab culture. Or maybe there had been a big (or small) money transfer, which was how they tried to keep track of the opposition’s activities. The Campus had eliminated those who made such money moves. One had been named Uda Bin Sali, and he’d died in London from the same pen that Jack had used in Rome to take down MoHa, who, he’d learned, had been a very bad boy.
Something caught Jack’s eye. Huh. The e-mail’s distribution contained an inordinate number of French addresses. Something brewing there? he wondered.
You grasping at straws again?” Rick Bell asked Jack ten minutes later. Like Jack, The Campus’s chief of analysis felt on its face the birth announcement too amorphous to get excited about.
“What else do you do in a hay field?” Jack replied. “Aside from the baby, there’re some bank transfers, but the guys downstairs are into those.”
“Big ones?”
Ryan shook his head. “No, the whole bunch doesn’t total up to half a million euros. Housekeeping money. They’ve set up a new collection of credit cards. So no airline tickets to track. The Bureau is into that anyway, insofar as they can without our cipher-key collection.”
“And that won’t last,” Bell opined. “Can’t be much longer before they change their encryption systems, and we’ll have to start over. The best we can hope for is they won’t do that