Jack Ryan 2 - Patriot Games (25 page)

“That reminds me. There's a little outfit outside Boston that's gonna hit it big.”

“Oh?” Jack's ears perked up.

“It's called Holoware, Ltd., I think. They came up with new software for the computers on fighter planes -- really good stuff, cuts a third off the processing time, generates intercept solutions like magic. It's set up on the simulator down at Pax, and the Navy's going to buy it real soon.”

“Who knows?”

Jackson laughed as he got his things. “The company doesn't know yet. Captain Stevens down at Pax just got the word from the guys out at Topgun. Bill May out there -- I used to fly with Bill -- ran the stuff for the first time a month ago, and he liked it so much that he almost got the Pentagon boys to cut through all the bullshit and just buy the stuff. It got hung up, but DCNO-Air is on it now, and they say Admiral Rendall is really hot for it. Thirty more days, and that little company is going to get a Christmas present. A little late,” Robby said, “but it'll fill one big stocking. Just for the hell of it, I checked the paper this morning, and sure enough, they're listed on the American Exchange. You might want to check it out.”

“What about you?”

The pilot shook his head. “I don't play the market, but you still fool around there, right?”

“A little. Is this classified or anything?” Jack asked.

“Not that I know of. The classified part is how the software is written, and they got a real good classification system on that -- nobody understands it. Maybe Skip Tyler could figure it out, but I never will. You have to be a nuc to think in ones and zeros. Pilots don't think digital. We're analog.” Jackson chuckled. “Gotta run. Sissy's got a recital tonight.”

“ 'Night, Rob.”

“Low and slow, Jack.” Robby closed the door behind him. Jack leaned back in his chair for a moment. He smiled to himself, then rose and packed some papers into his briefcase.

“Yeah,” he said to himself. “Just to show him that I still know how.”

Ryan got his coat on and left the building, walking downhill past the Preble Memorial. His car was parked on Decatur Road. Jack drove a five-year-old VW Rabbit. It was a very practical car for the narrow streets of Annapolis, and he refused to have a Porsche like his wife used for commuting back and forth to Baltimore. It was dumb, he'd told Cathy about a thousand times, for two people to have three cars. A Rabbit for him, a 911 for her, and a station wagon for the family. Dumb. Cathy's suggestion that he should sell the Rabbit and drive the wagon was, of course, unacceptable. The little gas engine fired up at once. It sounded too noisy. He'd have to check the muffler. Jack pulled out, turning right, as always, onto Maryland Avenue through Gate Three in the grimly undecorous perimeter wall that surrounded the Academy. A Marine guard saluted him on the way out. Ryan was surprised by that -- they'd never done it before.

Driving wasn't easy. When he shifted, Ryan twisted his left hand inside the sling to grab the wheel while his right hand worked the gearshift. The rush-hour traffic didn't help. Several thousand state workers were disgorging themselves from various government buildings, and the crowded streets gave Ryan plenty of opportunity to stop and restart from first gear. His Rabbit had five, plus reverse, and by the time he got to the Central Avenue light he was asking himself why he hadn't gotten the Rabbit with an automatic. Fuel efficiency was the answer -- is this worth an extra two miles per gallon". Ryan laughed at himself as he headed east toward the Chesapeake Bay, then right onto Falcon's Nest Road.

There was rarely any traffic back here. Falcon's Nest Road came to a dead end not too far down from Ryan's place, and on the other side of the road were several farms, also dormant at the beginning of winter. The stubby remains of cornstalks lay in rows on the brown, hard fields. He turned left into his driveway. Ryan had thirty acres on Peregrine Cliff. His nearest neighbor, an engineer named Art Palmer, was half a mile away through heavily wooded slopes and across a murky stream. The cliffs on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay were nearly fifty feet high where Jack lived -- those farther south got a little higher, but not much -- and made of crumbly sandstone. They were a paleontologist's delight. Every so often a team from a local college or museum would scour at the base and find fossilized shark teeth that had once belonged to a creature as large as a midget submarine, along with the bones of even more unlikely creatures that had lived here a hundred million years earlier.

The bad news was that the cliffs were prone to erosion. His house was built a hundred feet back from the edge, and his daughter was under strict orders -- twice enforced with a spanking -- not to go anywhere near the edge. In an attempt to protect the cliff face, the state environmental-protection people had persuaded Ryan and his neighbors to plant kudzu, a prolific weed from the American South. The weed had thoroughly stabilized the cliff face, but it was now attacking the trees near the cliff, and Jack periodically had to go after them with a weed-eater to save the trees from being smothered. But that wasn't a problem this time of year.

Ryan's lot was half open and half wooded. The part near the road had once been fanned, though not easily, as the ground was not flat enough to drive a tractor across it safely. As he approached his house, the trees began, some gnarled old oaks, and other deciduous trees whose leaves were gone now, leaving skeletal branches to reach out into the thin, cold air. As he approached the carport, he saw that Cathy was already home, her Porsche and the family wagon parked in the carport. He had to leave his Rabbit in the open.

“Daddy!” Sally yanked open the door and ran out without her jacket to meet her father.

“It's too cold out here,” Jack told his daughter.

“No, isn't,” Sally replied. She grabbed his briefcase and carried it with two hands, puffing as she climbed up the three steps into the house.

Ryan got out of his coat and hung it in the entry closet. As with everything else, it was hard to do with one hand. He was cheating a little now. As with steering the car, he was starting to use his left hand, careful to avoid putting any strain on his shoulder. The pain was completely gone now, but Ryan was sure that he could bring it back quickly enough if he did something dumb. Besides which, Cathy would yell at him. He found his wife in the kitchen. She was looking at the pantry and frowning.

“Hi, honey.”

“Hi, Jack. You're late.”

“So are you.” Ryan kissed his wife. Cathy smelled his breath. Her nose crinkled.

“How's Robby?”

“Fine -- and I just had two very light ones.”

“Uh-huh.” She turned back to the pantry. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Surprise me,” Jack suggested.

“You're a big help! I ought to let you fix it.”

“It's not my turn, remember?”

“I knew I should have stopped at the Giant,” Cathy groused.

“How was work?”

“Only one procedure. I assisted Bernie on a cornea transplant, then I had to take the residents around for rounds. Dull day. Tomorrow'll be better. Bernie says hi, by the way. How does franks and beans grab you?”

"Jack laughed. Ever since they came back, their diet had consisted mainly of basic American staples, and it was a little late for something fancy.

“Okay. I'm going to change and punch up something on the computer for a few minutes.”

“Careful with the arm. Jack.”

Five times a day she warns me. Jack sighed. Never marry a doctor. The Ryan home was a deckhouse design. The living/dining room had a cathedral ceiling that peaked sixteen feet over the carpeted floor with an enormous wood beam. A wall of triple-paned windows faced the bay, with a large deck beyond the sliding glass doors. Opposite the glass was a massive brick fireplace that reached through the roof. The master bedroom was half a level above the living room, with a window that enabled one to look down into it. Ryan trotted up the steps. The house design accommodated large closets. Ryan selected casual clothes, and went through the annoying ritual of changing himself one-handed. He was still experimenting, trying to find an efficient way to do it.

Finished, he went back down, and curved around the stairs to the next level down, his library. It was a large one. Jack read a lot, and also purchased books he didn't have time to read, banking against the time when he would. He had a large desk up against the windows on the bay side of the house. Here was his personal computer, an Apple, and all of its peripheral equipment. Ryan flipped it on and started typing in instructions. Next he put his modem on line and placed a call into CompuServe. The time of day guaranteed easy access, and he selected MicroQuote II from the entry menu.

A moment later he was looking at Holoware, Ltd.'s stock performance over the past three years. The stock was agreeably unimpressive, fluctuating from two dollars to as much as six, but that was two years back -- it was a company which had once held great promise, but somewhere along the way investors had lost confidence. Jack made a note, then exited the program and got into another, Disclosure II, to look at the company's SEC filings and last annual report. Okay, Ryan told himself. The company was making money, but not very much. One problem with hi-tech issues was that so many investors wanted big returns very quickly, or they'd move on to something else, forgetting that things didn't necessarily happen that way. This company had found a small though somewhat precarious niche, and was ready to try something bold. Ryan made a mental estimate of what the Navy contract would be worth and compared it with the company's total revenues . . .

“Okay!” he told himself before exiting the system completely and shutting his computer down. Next he called his broker. Ryan worked through a discount brokerage firm that had people on duty around the clock. Jack always dealt with the same man.

“Hi, Mort, it's Jack. How's the family?”

“Hello again, Doctor Ryan. Everything's fine with us. What can we do for you tonight?”

“An outfit called Holoware, one of the hi-tech bunch on Highway 128 outside Boston. It's on the AMEX.”

“Okay.” Ryan heard tapping on a keyboard. Everyone used computers. “Here it is. Going at four and seven-eighths, not a very active issue . . . until lately. There has been some modest activity over the past month.”

“What kind?” Ryan asked. This was another sign to look for.

“Oh, I see. The company is buying itself back a little. No big deal, but they're buying their own stock out.”

Bingo! Ryan smiled to himself. Thank you, Robby. You gave me a tip on a real live one. Jack asked himself if this constituted trading on inside information. His initial tip might be called that, but his decision to buy was based on confirmation made legally, on the basis of his experience as a stock trader. Okay, it's legal. He could do whatever he wanted.

“How much do you think you can get for me?”

“It's not a very impressive stock.”

“How often am I wrong, Mort?”

“How much do you want?”

“At least twenty-K, and if there's more, I want all of it you can find.” There was no way he'd get hold of more than fifty thousand shares, but Ryan made a snap decision to grab all he could. If he lost, it was only money, and it had been over a year since he'd last had a hunch like this one. If they got the Navy contract, that stock would increase in value tenfold. The company must have had a tip, too. Buying back their own stock on the slim resources they had would, if Ryan was guessing right, dramatically increase the firm's capital, enabling a rapid expansion of operations. Holoware was betting on the future, and betting big.

There was five seconds of silence on the phone.

“What do you know, Jack?” the broker asked finally.

“I'm playing a hunch.”

“Okay . . . twenty-K plus . . . I'll call you at ten tomorrow. You think I should . . .?”

“It's a toss of the dice, but I think it's a good toss.”

“Thanks. Anything else?”

“No. I have to go eat dinner. Good night, Mort.”

“See ya.” Both men hung up. At the far end of the phone, the broker decided that he'd go in for a thousand shares, too. Ryan was occasionally wrong, but when he was right, he tended to be very right.

“Christmas Day,” O'Donnell said quietly. “Perfect.”

“Is that the day they're moving Sean?” McKenney asked.

“He leaves London by van at four in the morning. That's bloody good news. I was afraid they'd use a helicopter. No word on the route they'll use . . .” He read on. “But they're going to take him across on the Lymington ferry at eight-thirty Christmas morning. Excellent timing, when you think about it. Too early for heavy traffic. Everyone'll be opening his presents and getting dressed for church. The van might even have the ferry to itself -- who'd expect a prisoner transfer on Christmas Day?”

“So, we are going to break Sean out, then?”

“Michael, our men do us little good when they're inside, don't they? You and I are flying over tomorrow morning. I think we'll drive down to Lymington and look at the ferry.”

“God, it'll be nice to have two arms again,” Ryan observed.

“Two more weeks, maybe three,” Cathy reminded him. “And keep your hand still inside the damned sling!”

“Yes, dear.”

It was about two in the morning, and things were going badly -- and well. Part of the Ryan family tradition -- a tradition barely three years old, but a tradition nevertheless -- was that after Sally was in bed and asleep, her parents would creep down to the basement storage area -- a room with a padlocked door -- and bring the toys upstairs for assembly. The previous two years, this ceremony had been accompanied by a couple of bottles of champagne. Assembling toys was a wholly different sort of exercise when the assemblers were half blasted. It was their method of relaxing into the Christmas spirit.

So far things had gone well. Jack had taken his daughter to the seven o'clock children's mass at St. Mary's, and gotten her to bed a little after nine. His daughter had slid her head around the fireplace wall only twice before a loud command from her father had banished her to her bedroom for good, her arm clasping an overly talkative AG Bear to her chest. By midnight it was decided that she was asleep enough for her parents to make a little noise. This had begun the toy trek, as Cathy called it. Both parents removed their shoes to minimize noise on the hardwood steps and went downstairs. Of course, Jack forgot the key to the padlock, and had to climb back upstairs to the master bedroom to search for it. Five minutes later the door was opened and the two of them made four trips each, setting up a lavish pile of multicolored boxes near the tree, next to Jack's tool kit.