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.
Chavez and Clark’s Acela Express beat the Northeast Regional train to Penn Station in Manhattan by twenty minutes. The rabbits stopped to eat some cheesecake at Junior’s off Times Square, then led the team on a merry walk around Central Park, then back to Midtown before boarding the N train to Canal Street.
“Are you running countersurveillance?” Clark asked.
“Nope,” Chavez said.
Chavez was no slouch when it came to his tactical background. He had eons of experience in the Army, as a protective officer in the CIA, and a team leader of the multinational Rainbow counterterrorism unit. He’d been there and done that all over the world. He had the T-shirt and the scars to prove it. But Clark was a legend in the intelligence community, which was saying something in a business where anonymity was the rule of the day. A former Navy SEAL and longtime operator for the CIA, the details of Clark’s past were fuzzy, if not altogether redacted. Few in the business knew exactly what he’d done, but they knew he’d done it. A lot of it. And knowing that was enough.
Since Clark also happened to be Ding’s father-in-law, this added a nuanced layer of stress—and trust—to every operation. They’d worked together long before Ding had met Patsy. John must have approved of the union, because Chavez was still standing upright. He and his father-in-law had gone on to spill blood and have plenty of their own blood spilt.
Clark glanced at his watch—a Victorinox analog, plain but hell for stout. Chavez took another drink of bubble tea. Funny how the boss looking at his watch could make even the most even-keeled person squirm. As assistant director of ops, Chavez was running point on more and more missions, allowing Clark to stand back and quietly observe—while he drank coffee and looked at his watch.
“Something bothering you, Mr. C?” Chavez asked.
It wasn’t like Clark to fidget. They’d been together all morning and Clark had just now suffered a tiny crack in his stony composure.
“I’m good,” he said, giving the slightest of shrugs as he aimed his thousand-yard stare down East Broadway. Chavez was surprised one of the passersby didn’t catch fire. “Just thinking.”