Jack Ryan (Reimagined)

Jack Ryan (full name John Patrick Ryan) is the son of Emmet William Ryan, a police homicide lieutenant and Vietnam War veteran. His mother, Catherine Burke Ryan, was a nurse.

After graduating from Loyola Blakefield High School in Towson, Maryland, Ryan attended Boston College, graduating with bachelor's degrees in both Economics and History and a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps (via NROTC). While waiting for the Corps to assign him somewhere, he passed the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination.

After The Basic School and the Infantry Officer Course at Quantico, Ryan was assigned to a battalion as a rifle platoon commander. Just a couple of months later, his battalion was deployed to Afghanistan. Seven months later Ryan's military career was cut short, when after a combat mission his platoon's helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade. Ryan's back was badly injured in the crash. Unfortunately, the Navy surgeons at Bethesda Naval Medical Center made inadequate repairs to his back. This led to a lengthy recovery process (during which he was nearly addicted to pain medications) after which, complete with a permanent disability and wearing a back brace, he left the Marine Corps, passed his stock broker's exam and took a position with the Baltimore office of the Wall Street investment firm Merrill Lynch.

His parents died in a plane crash at Chicago's Midway International Airport only nineteen months after his near death experience in Afghanistan. As a result, he developed an unease about flying that persist to this day.

While managing clients' portfolios, he began to invest his own money, banking on a tip he had received from an uncle about the workers' takeover of a civil engineering company, making approximately $600,000 off his $10,000 initial investment. He did so well that a senior VP of Merrill Lynch, Joe Muller, came to Baltimore to have dinner with him, with the objective of inviting him to the New York City headquarters. Also present was Muller's daughter Caroline, nicknamed Cathy, then a senior medical student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Ryan and Cathy immediately fell in love and got engaged. One night, while having dinner with his fiancée, Ryan threw out his back. Cathy took him directly to Doctor Stanley Rabinowitz, professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, to be evaluated. Rabinowitz later operated on Ryan's back and cured his chronic pain in relatively short order. Ryan subsequently persuaded the government to terminate his disability checks. Cathy later became an ophthalmic surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins.

While working at Merrill Lynch, Ryan attended night classes at Georgetown University to earn a master's degree in History. After earning his Master of Arts in History and accumulating nearly a million dollars on the stock market, Ryan left the firm and took a position as a history teacher at a high school in Annapolis, Maryland. Simultaneously he also began a part-time consultancy with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Following a recommendation of Father Tim O'Riley, S.J., (a Georgetown University professor) to a CIA contact, Ryan was asked to work as an outside consultant for the Agency, although officially employed by MITRE Corporation. He agreed and spent several months at Langley, where he wrote a paper called "Agents and Agencies", in which he maintained that state-sponsored terrorism is an act of war. He also invented the Canary trap, a method for exposing an information leak, which involves giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of a group of suspects and seeing which version gets leaked. By making sure that each copy of the document differs slightly in its wording, if any copy is leaked then it is possible to determine the identity of the informant.

Both of these accomplishments came to the attention of Admiral James Greer, the Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA. The expertness of Ryan's report, plus the adaptation, persuaded Admiral Greer to offer him a permanent job in the CIA, which he turned down.

While still teaching history, Ryan and his family (wife and daughter Sally) took a trip to London for research and vacationing. After spending the day sifting through British Navy archives doing research for a book on the British naval war in the Indian Ocean during World War II, Ryan walked to meet his family at a London park. As he joined them, members of the Ulster Liberation Army, an ultra-violent Maoist offshoot of the IRA, headed by a man named Kevin O'Donnell, attack a car containing a high-profile member of Parliament and his family right in front of Ryan and his wife and daughter. Ryan, while wounded, intervened in the attack and foiled their plan, killing one of the gunmen and capturing another.

Sean Miller, the man he captured, vowed revenge on Ryan and his family. But since he was going to Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight, the threat didn't seem serious. After being invested as a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order by the Queen, Ryan returned to the United States and his teaching job. When O'Donnell and the ULA rescued Miller on his way to Albany Prison, Ryan and his family became the target of their revenge.

Admiral Greer came to Ryan and asked him to to join the CIA full-time as an analyst to help track down the terrorists. He declined initially, only to accept it later after a failed attack on himself and his family by the ULA injured his wife and daughter. Later, while Ryan hosted his parents-in-law at his home in Maryland, the ULA made a second attack on the Ryans, which was foiled by Jack and his father-in-law.

Following the incident and arrest of the ULA members, Ryan was reassigned to London as a member of a liaison group to the British Secret Intelligence Service. After a little under a year into his assignment to London, he was reassigned to the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. He became Admiral Greer's assistant with the official title of Special Assistant to the Deputy Director for Intelligence. In this capacity, Jack Ryan serves as both an aide and policy advisor to Greer and he also occasionally travels abroad to serve as an intelligence consultant to CIA paramilitary teams during covert and clandestine operations.