Page 15 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
“I was never very good at that turning-the-other-cheek stuff.”
The priest-professor tugged at Jack’s elbow. “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be a virtue.” Costello’s eyes crinkled with his impish smile. “How about a pint of Guinness and we talk about old times? First one’s on me.”
9
Jack and Dr. Costello spent the next two hours catching up over pints of Guinness and the best shepherd’s pie Jack had ever eaten. Costello grilled him on his work with Hendley Associates, nodding approvingly as Jack explained the wide range of practical skills and fiduciary knowledge he’d acquired in the field after his stint in Costello’s economics course.
“You ever think about going back and getting your Ph.D. in finance?”
Jack shook his head. “No, not really.” For some reason he’d never considered it as a possibility. His dad had a doctorate, of course, and his mother was an M.D., but they were brainiacs. So was his older sister, also a doctor.
“You might consider it.”
“Maybe later. I’m having too much fun now,” Jack said. Between his duties for both The Campus and Hendley Associates, he just didn’t have the time, and the idea of spending more hours behind a desk instead of in a HALO parachutedidn’t appeal to him at the moment. But he had to admit it was an intriguing thought, at least for later. Why not?
They finished up and Jack paid the bill for both of them. Outside, they said their good-byes, promising to stay in touch. Jack hailed a cab for the airport as Costello headed for the Tube. Neither paid any attention to the CCTV cameras posted on the lamppost just outside the pub; they were ubiquitous throughout the city. Second only to communist Beijing, London had nearly half a million of the surveillance devices monitoring the activities of visitors and citizens alike, including Jack, who, for a split second—against his training and better judgment—cast his open face upward to catch a glimpse of a jetliner roaring low overhead before jumping into the taxi.
Big mistake.
—
In a city with so many government and private closed-circuit television cameras already in place, the addition of still more of them in crowded public spaces was hardly noticed, let alone regulated.
The Iron Syndicate had installed more than five hundred such cameras in London but also operated similar networks in Beijing, Frankfurt, New York, and a dozen other cities. Whatever cameras they didn’t own they were often able to hack through a variety of methods.
The first-level hack was commercial. The vast majority of CCTV cameras sold in the world were built in just three Chinese factories in Guangzhou, each of which was partly owned by a board member of the Iron Syndicate. That provided the organization a back door into every computer chip within thosecameras, including the ones deployed on NATO military installations and ships, as well as police and intelligence offices.
The second-level hack was human. The Iron Syndicate exploited dozens of compromised individuals within corporate divisions and government agencies around the world, who provided restricted CCTV and surveillance database access, either for a fee or under threat.
The third-level hack was the Iron Syndicate’s own world-class IT department, staffed with some of the most important private-sector and government scientists and technocrats who had originally designed these omnipresent surveillance systems. Whether through back doors they had left behind or simply through skill or brute force, there were few databases and live feeds that the Iron Syndicate couldn’t access around the globe as needed.
The recent bonus, though, was the advent of the smartphone. Whether through live camera chat programs like FaceTime or through the new facial-recognition software required to access phone use, the smartphone companies had provided billions of new real-time and securely identified faces for the Iron Syndicate to exploit.
But the coup de grace was the Iron Syndicate’s infiltration into the big social media platform databases—Instagram, Facebook, WeChat, Tencent. By posting billions of selfies every day, ordinary platform users were unwittingly contributing to the world’s most dangerous facial-recognition and surveillance program on the planet.
In all cases, the Iron Syndicate maintained a central processing center in Bucharest, Romania, where images were monitored and evaluated with Dragonfly Eye software, recently acquired through their Chinese affiliates. Dragonfly Eye was an AI-driven facial-recognition program deployed by theChinese government, capable of processing up to twobillionfaces in mereseconds.
At the moment, the Dragonfly Eye algorithms were tuned to find a match for Jack Ryan, Jr., for whom current photographs were strangely difficult to come by, even by open-source intelligence, or OSINT. It was as if somebody was going to the extraordinary length of constantly scrubbing any digital facial reference to the handsome young American throughout all private and social media. However, after enormous effort, the syndicate had acquired a few degraded images. These were sub-optimal, but adequate for the task at hand.
By the time Jack’s taxi pulled up to the departure gate at Heathrow, his image had been identified by the Iron Syndicate system, and the Code Red priority alarm triggered. The man on duty notified his shift supervisor by phone according to protocol, but he knew she would have already been alerted automatically. He’d seen only one other Code Red alarm in the last five years. Somebody wanted this guy badly.
The surveillance camera that had captured Jack’s image was immediately identified and its footage reviewed by hand by the shift supervisor. In short order she acquired the license plate number of Jack’s taxi.
As the Iron Syndicate reverted to its automated tracking system and tapped into its network of cameras positioned throughout London, as well as at the major airports and train stations, the taxi was quickly located and footage of Jack entering the airport secured.
It took only a few more AI-driven moments to track the American back with his carry-ons working his way through the security check and then toward his gate, where his flight information and destination—Ljubljana, Slovenia—weresecured and transmitted to Unit Black, the field operations “wet work” team. The supervisor put her best analyst on the Ljubljana airport cameras, though the algorithms would spot Ryan faster than a human eye.
The shift supervisor shuddered. She worked for a vast international criminal enterprise to be sure, but she was a trained software engineer, not a killer. Even within the merciless Iron Syndicate, Unit Black’s reputation was fearsome.
This Jack Ryan fellow didn’t have long to live, and the manner of his death wouldn’t be pleasant at all.
10
LJUBLJANA, SLOVENIA
A light rain streaked the small windows as the Embraer 170 jet gently touched the runway. Jack powered up his iPhone as the plane taxied to a stop, a hundred yards from the terminal. A text message pulled up on his screen. “Meet you in the lobby.”
Jack deplaned from the narrow-bodied Air France jet onto the tarmac, ignoring the spattering drops in the brief hop over to the wide bus that ferried them to the small terminal of the Ljubljana Jože Pucnik Airport. Heathrow International this was not, but it was perfectly serviceable—more like a regional American airport than an international hub.
