love and get engaged. One night, while having dinner with his fiancée, Ryan throws out his back. Cathy takes him directly to Dr. Stanley Rabinowitz, professor of neurosurgery at famed Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, to be evaluated. Rabinowitz later operates on Ryan's back and cures his chronic pain in relatively short order. (In a later novel, the surgeon is credited as Sam Rosen, a doctor introduced in Without Remorse.) Ryan subsequently persuades the government to terminate his disability checks. Cathy later becomes an ophthalmic surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins. After creating a net worth of $8 million, Ryan left the firm after four years and enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. for six doctoral courses in history. He does a brief stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then accepts a position at the U.S. Naval Academy as a civilian professor of history. In addition, he has also written books on naval history: Options and Decisions, Doomed Eagles, and Fighting Sailor, a biography of World War II Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, in which he justifies Halsey's actions during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. First CIA work and career Following a recommendation from Father Tim O'Riley, a Jesuit priest and professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to a Central Intelligence Agency contact, Ryan was asked to work as a consultant for the agency, although officially employed by the MITRE Corporation. He agreed and spent several months at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he wrote a paper entitled "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 is leaked. By ensuring that each copy of the document differs slightly in its wording, if any copy is leaked, then it is possible to determine the informant's identity. These accomplishments come to the attention of U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James Greer, the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence. The expertise of Ryan's report, plus the application, persuaded Greer to offer him a permanent job in the CIA, but Ryan declined. Patriot Games (1987) While in London with his family, Ryan (portrayed by Harrison