Jack Ryan Jr. pulled his Hummer into his designated parking space in the lot of Hendley Associates at 5:10 a.m.  He struggled to climb out of the big vehicle.  His muscles ached; cuts and bruises covered his arms and legs.

He limped through the back door of the building.  He did not like coming in so early, especially considering how beat-up he was this morning.  But he had important work that could not wait.  At this moment there were four operatives in the field, and although he truly wished he were out there with them, Ryan knew it was his responsibility to provide them the best real-time intelligence he could in order to make their tough work, if not easier, at least not any harder than it needed to be.

He passed a security man at the reception desk in the lobby.  As far as Jack was concerned, the guard was freakishly awake and alert at this rude hour.

"Morning, Mr. Ryan."

"Hey, Bill."  Normally Ryan didn't come in until eight, and by then Bill, a retired Air Force Security Force master sergeant, had handed off his post to Ernie.  Ryan had met Bill only a couple of times, but he seemed like he was born to do his job.

Jack Junior took the elevator up, shuffled through the dark hallway, dropped his leather messenger bag off in his cubicle, and headed for the kitchen.  There he started a pot of coffee and then reached into the freezer and pulled out an ice pack that had been getting a lot of use of late.

Back at his desk while the coffee brewed, he lit up his computer and flipped on the lamp.  Other than Jack, some IT guys who worked twenty-four/seven, a third-shift analytical/ translation unit, and the security men on the first floor, the building would be dead for at least another hour.  Jack sat, held the ice to his jaw, and put his head down on his desk.

"####," he mumbled.

Five minutes later, the coffeemaker dripped its last drop into the pot just as Ryan grabbed a mug from the cabinet; he poured steaming black liquid into it and hobbled back to his desk.

He wanted to go back home and lie down, but that was not an option.  The after-hours training Ryan had been going through was kicking his ass, but he knew he wasn't in any real danger.  His colleagues out in the field were the ones in peril, and it was his job to help them out.

And his tool to help them was his computer.  More specifically, it was the data that the parabolic dishes on the roof and the antenna farm of Hendley Associates pulled out of the ether, the data the code breakers and a mainframe supercomputer decoded from the near constant haul of encrypted information.  Jack's daily morning fishing expedition derived its fish from data traffic from CIA in Langley, from the National Security Agency at Fort Mead, from the National Counter-terrorism Center at Liberty Crossing in McLean, from the FBI in D.C., and from a host of other agencies.  Today he saw he had a particularly large pull to go through even this early in the morning.  Much of it was traffic that came to Langley from friendly nations overseas, and this is what he'd arrived early to peruse.