Code of Honor полностью

“Okay.” Chadwick sighed. “But it’s a long shot that the President will still even be in town tomorrow. If something is going down, the Jack Ryan I know won’t sit on his ass behind his desk and twiddle his thumbs.”

“Perhaps,” Huang said. “But that is exactly why we need you inside. We need to know for sure.”

Ryan had felt the text vibrate in his pocket while he was in the middle of a deep conversation with, of all people, Senator Michelle Chadwick. Now, there was one for the record books. Their talk had turned odd, bordering on friendly — so far out of character for Chadwick that Ryan had felt the need for a moment’s distance. He apologized and took the phone from his pocket, using the “I’m expecting an important call” white lie that busy people the world over used when they needed to step away.

Seconds later, he’d told Chadwick he really did need to step away. He called Arnie back in, and the senator had been ushered out immediately with a curt apology.

Ryan had taken a screenshot of the text as soon as it appeared, knowing Pat West’s penchant for self-erasing messages. Once a spy, always a spy.

Van Damm, Mary Pat Foley, and Secretary of State Scott Adler were in his office in a matter of minutes. The attorney general and the secretaries of homeland security and defense were on their way.

“Thoughts?” Ryan said, his mind in overdrive.

Pat West was his longtime friend, but the message had larger connotations than a buddy in trouble. Obviously sent under duress, the text was beyond cryptic, full of typos and vague references. An artificial-intelligence game? What did that even mean?

Mary Pat held up a sheet of paper with the printed contents of Patrick West’s message.

“So much for autocorrect,” Adler said, perusing his copy of the text. “This thing is littered with mistakes.”

Ryan nodded.

Mary Pat said, “Cell phones were the stuff of science fiction in the days when Pat West was active. But any officer nowadays knows to disable the autocorrect function as soon as they unbox a new phone. Purposely misspelled words here, uppercase letters there, often send messages of their own. See how the S in West is capitalized, while the rest of the word is typed lowercase? A capital in the middle of the word, like the S in West, means he was in danger, but not writing the message in view of anyone. All lower means okay. A regular signoff with a capitalized first letter means we should view the message as being coerced.”

“In other words,” Ryan said, “we should be able to trust the body of the message, even if we don’t yet understand it.”

“What about these?” van Damm asked, pointing to the other uppercase letters that occurred randomly throughout the body of the message. “What do they mean?”

Foley shook her head. “Those are just noise,” she said. “They keep the one in the signature from standing out. It’s the signoff that matters.”

“PFC honey trap…” Ryan mused.

“PRC?” van Damm offered. “Sex traps are kind of their modus operandi.”

“That would be my guess,” Foley said. “F is immediately below R on the QWERTY keyboard.”

“China…” Ryan mused. “They’re using AI — facial recognition and the like — to track and jail a significant portion of their Uighur population. The PRC would be keen to get their hands on anything new.” He shook his head at his own line of reasoning. “But Father West says it’s dangerous. That’s more than just getting their hands on some new AI. For him to text me while he’s about to be arrested means he thinks this is something unusual.”

“We have two separate issues here, Mr. President,” the secretary of state said. “The possible national security risk that Mr. West proposes, whatever that may be, and the fact that your friend may have been arrested. Where was he the last time you spoke?”

“It’s Father West,” Ryan corrected. “We don’t talk often, but the last I heard from him, he was heading up Catholic relief efforts in West Java.”

“Okay,” Adler said. “I’ll have my people in Jakarta do some discreet digging with their counterparts in the local police.”

“What about this… Calliope?” Ryan said. “Does that ring a bell with anybody?”

“I have some people running it down now,” Foley said, pen poised over a ubiquitous green government notebook. “So far we know Parnassus Games is a software company in Boston. They specialize in first-person shooter video games. Two Bureau agents from the Boston office are there now. All the bosses are out of the office, on a team-building boondoggle to Australia after attending a computer technology conference in Jakarta.”