Tom Clancy Under Fire

Tehran, Iran

BE CAREFUL how you spend your time. You never get it back.

Of all the lessons he'd learned from his father, this one truly resonated with Jack Ryan, Jr.-no small feat, as he'd received the advice as a teenager with little more on his mind than girls and football games. Go figure, Jack thought.

In this case, with his lunch appointment predictably late, Jack was playing a round of "watch the watchers," a game introduced to him by John Clark. His location, Chaibar, an outdoor café on a quiet Tehran side street, made the game more challenging. Nestled in the courtyard garden of a renovated villa, Chaibar was full of couples and small groups seated at wrought-iron tables. Jack caught glimpses of muted flowered murals behind potted plants and hanging vines. Overhead, boughs cast the courtyard in dappled sunlight. While most of the murmured voices were speaking in Arabic or Persian, Jack also caught snippets of French and Italian.

The premise of "watch the watchers" was a simple one: He's in the field for Hendley Associates, aka The Campus. He's under surveillance. But by whom? If you're largely unfamiliar with the nuances of casual Iranian interaction, how do you spot that one pair of eyes paying too much attention to you, or someone whose mannerisms are out of sync with the surroundings? With this checklist in mind, Jack studied faces, body language, banter between this couple, or forced banter among that group.

Nothing, Jack thought. None of Chaibar's patrons set off alarms for him. In real life, a good thing; for the purposes of this game, not so much.

If Hendley Associates, aka The Campus, were in fact what it seemed, a privately held arbitrage firm, Jack's game would have been one of fantasy, but The Campus's true purpose went much deeper, as it sat squarely in the grayest of areas in the espionage/counterterrorism world-an off-the-books intelligence group answerable only to the President of the United States. Where the CIA was a