Threat Vector

by Tom Clancy

  Clark heard his wife’s SUV pull up in the gravel drive. He sat down on a rocker on the back porch and waited for them to come in.

  A man in his mid-sixties sitting on the porch of a quiet farmhouse created a vision of peace and tranquility. But the image was deceptive. Inside the mind of John Clark, his prevailing thought was that he would like to get his good hand around the throat of that son of a bitch Valentin Kovalenko, the opportunistic Russian snake who did this to him, and then he’d like to test the strength and mobility of that hand on that bastard’s windpipe.

  But that would never happen.

  “John?” Sandy called from the kitchen.

  The girls came in through the kitchen door behind him. John wiped the last vestiges of his sweat from his forehead, and he called, “I’m out here.”

  —

  A moment later Patsy and Sandy sat outside on the porch with him, waiting for him to speak. They’d each spent a minute chastising him for not waiting on their return. But any frustration melted away quickly when they read his mood. He was somber. Mother and daughter leaned forward anxiously, worried looks on both their faces.

  “It moves. It grips . . . a bit. Maybe after some PT it will improve a little more.”

  Patsy said, “But?”

  Clark shook his head. “Not the outcome we’d hoped for.”

  Sandy moved to him, sat in his lap, and hugged him tightly.

  “It’s okay,” he said, comforting her. “Could have been a hell of a lot worse.” Clark thought for a moment. His torturers had been about a second away from driving a scalpel through his eye. He had not told Sandy or Patsy about this, of course, but it did pop into his head every now and then when he was dealing with his battered hand. He had a damn lot to be thankful for, and he knew it.

  He continued. “I’m going to concentrate on PT for a while. The docs have done their part to fix me up; time for me to do mine.”

  Sandy released the hug, sat up, and looked John in the eye.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying it’s time for me to pack it in. I’ll talk to Ding first, but I’m going to go in and see Gerry on Monday.” He hesitated a long time before saying, “I’m done.”

  “Done?”

  “I’m going to retire. Really retire.”

  Though she clearly tried to hide it, John saw a relief in Sandy’s face that he had not seen in years. In decades. It was virtually the same as joy.

  She had never complained about his work. She’d spent decades enduring his late-night dashes out of the house with no information as to where he was headed, his spending weeks away at a time, sometimes coming home bloodied and bruised and, more distressing to her, silent for days before he lightened up, his mind left the mission that he’d just returned from, and he could once again smile and relax and sleep through the night.

  Their years in the UK with NATO’s counterterror unit Rainbow had been some of the best times of her life. His hours were almost normal and their time together had been well spent. But still, even during their time in the UK, she knew that the fate of dozens of young men rested on his shoulders, and she knew this weighed heavily on him.

  With their return to the States and his employment at Hendley Associates, once again Sandy saw the stress and strain on his body and mind. He was an operator in the field again—she knew this without a doubt, though he rarely went into details about his activities away from home.

  The previous year her husband had been dubbed an international outlaw by the American press, he’d gone on the run, and she’d worried day and night while he was away. The matter had been put to bed in the press quickly and cleanly with a public apology by the outgoing U.S. President and John’s life had been given back to him, but when he’d come back from wherever he’d been off to, it was not to come home. It was, instead, to go into the hospital. He’d been beaten badly, to within an inch of his life, one of his surgeons had told Sandy quietly in a waiting room while John was under anesthesia, and though he’d come out of his ordeal with a damaged right hand, she thanked God every day that he’d come out of it at all.

  John talked it over with the two women in his life for a few minutes more, but any doubts he had about his decision were put to rest the instant he saw the relief in Sandy’s eyes.

  Sandy deserved this. Patsy deserved this, too. And his grandchild deserved a grandfather who would be around for a while. Long enough to cheer him on at baseball games, long enough to stand proudly at his graduation, long enough, just maybe, to watch him walk down the aisle.

  John knew that, considering the line of work he’d been in since Vietnam, he’d lived most of his life on borrowed time.

  That was over now. He was out.

  Clark was surprised to find himself at peace with his decision to retire, though he imagined he would harbor one regret—that he never got a chance to wrap his hand around the throat of Valentin Kovalenko.

  Oh, well, he thought as he gave a gentle hug to his daughter and headed into the kitchen to help with dinner. Wherever Kovalenko was right now, John was near certain he wasn’t exactly enjoying himself.

  SIX

  Matrosskaya Tishina is a street in northern Moscow, but it also serves as shorthand for a facility with a much longer name. Federal Budget Institution IZ-77/1 of the Office of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in the City of Moscow does not roll so trippingly off the tongue, so those referring to the massive detention facility on Matrosskaya Tishina normally just refer to the street itself.

  It is one of Russia’s largest and oldest pretrial lockups, built in the eighteenth century, and it shows its age. Though the seven-story façade that faces the street is well maintained and almost regal in appearance, the cells inside are small and decrepit, the beds and bedding are infested with lice, and the plumbing is unable to keep up with the building’s current population, which is more than three times the capacity for which it was built.

  Just before four in the morning, a narrow gurney with squeaky wheels rolled down a green-and-white painted hallway inside the old main building of Matrosskaya Tishina. Four guards pushed and pulled it along while the prisoner on the bed fought against his bindings.

  His shouts echoed off the poured concrete floors and the cinder-block walls, a sound just louder and no less shrill than the squeaky wheels.

  “Answer me, damn you! What’s going on? I am not ill! Who ordered me transported?”

  The guards did not answer; obeying the profane commands of prisoners in their charge was precisely the opposite of their job description. They just kept rolling the gurney down the hall. They stopped at a partition of iron grating and waited for the gate in the center to be unlocked. With a loud click the gate opened, and they pushed their prisoner through and rolled him on.

  The man on the gurney had not told the truth. He was ill. Everyone who had spent any time behind bars in this hellhole was ill, and this man suffered from bronchitis as well as ringworm.

  Though his physical condition would be appalling to a citizen on the outside, the prisoner was no worse than most of his cellmates, and he was correct in his fear that he had not been hauled from his cell in the middle of the night in order to receive treatment for maladies shared by virtually every other prisoner in the building.

  He yelled again at the four men, and again they took no notice of him.

  After more than eight months here at Matrosskaya Tishina, thirty-six-year-old Valentin Kovalenko still had not gotten used to being ignored. As a former assistant rezident of Russia’s foreign intelligence arm, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, he had grown accustomed to having his questions answered and his orders obeyed. He’d been a rising star in the SVR from his early twenties until his mid-thirties, achieving the plum assignment of number-two man in their London Station. Then, some months ago, a personal and professional gamble had failed,
and he’d gone from meteoric rise to freefall drop.

  Since his arrest by internal security officers in a warehouse in Moscow’s Mitino district in January he’d been held at the pretrial facility under an executive order of the office of the president, and he’d been told by those few prison officials that he’d met that his case would be delayed and delayed again, and he should mentally prepare himself to spend years in his cell. Then, if he was lucky, all would be forgotten and he’d be sent home. On the other hand, they warned, he could be shipped east and ordered to serve time in Russia’s gulag system.

  This, Kovalenko knew, would be a virtual death sentence.

  For now he spent his days fighting for a corner of a cell shared by one hundred prisoners and his nights sleeping in shifts on a bug-ridden cot. Disease and disputes and despair encompassed every hour of every day.

  From other inmates he learned that the average wait to see a judge for someone whose case had not been sped up by bribes or political corruption was between two and four years. Valentin Kovalenko knew he did not have two to four years. When the other inmates in his cell learned who he was, a former high-ranking member of Russian intelligence, he would likely be beaten to death within two to four minutes.

  Most residents of Matrosskaya Tishina were no great fans of the government.

  This threat of exposure and then reprisal had been used effectively by Kovalenko’s enemies outside the prison, mostly at the Federal’naya Sluzhba Besopasnosti, Russian internal security, because it ensured that their inconvenient prisoner would keep his mouth shut while on the inside.

  In the first month or two of incarceration Kovalenko had had sporadic contact with his frantic and confused wife, and in their brief phone conversations he’d only assured her that everything would be straightened out and that she had nothing to worry about.

  But his wife stopped coming to the prison, and then she stopped calling. And then, he had been told by the assistant warden, his wife had filed for dissolution of the marriage and full custody of his children.

  But this was not the worst news. Rumors began filtering down to Kovalenko that no one was working on his case. It was frustrating no one was on his defense, but the fact no one was working on his prosecution was even more ominous. He was just sitting here, in a cage, rotting away.

  He worried he would be dead of disease inside of six months.

  As the gurney turned to the right and rolled under a recessed light in the ceiling, Kovalenko looked at the guards. He did not recognize any of them, but to him they appeared to be just as robotic as the rest of the staff here. He knew he would get no useful information from them, but out of growing panic he shouted again as they took him through another gate that led out of his cell block and into an administrative portion of the facility.

  In another moment he was wheeled into the prison infirmary.

  Valentin Kovalenko knew what was happening. He’d imagined this. He expected this. He could have penned the script for this event himself. The late-night rousing. The leather bindings on the gurney with the squeaky wheels. The silent guards and the trip into the bowels of the prison.

  He was about to be executed. In secret and in defiance of the law, his enemies were going to remove him from their list of worries.

  The massive infirmary was empty of doctors, nurses, or any prison employees except for the men who rolled his gurney, and this reconfirmed Kovalenko’s fears. He’d been taken here once before, when a guard’s rubber club had opened a wound on his face that needed stitches, and even though that had happened late at night, the medical facility had been well staffed.

  Tonight, however, it appeared as though someone had cleared out any witnesses.

  Valentin fought against his wrist and ankle straps in vain.

  The four guards rolled him into an exam room that appeared to be empty, and then they backed out of the doorway, shutting the door behind them and leaving him in the dark, bound and helpless. Kovalenko shouted as they left, but when the door closed, he looked around in the low light. To his right was a rolling curtain partition, and behind this he could hear movement.

  He was not alone.

  Kovalenko asked, “Who’s there?”

  “Who are you? What is this place?” replied a gruff male voice. The man sounded like he was just on the other side of the partition, also on a gurney, perhaps.

  “Look around, fool! This is the infirmary. I asked who you are?”

  Before the man behind the curtain answered, the door opened again, and two men entered. Both wore lab coats, and both were older than Kovalenko. He put them in their fifties. Valentin had never seen them before but assumed them to be doctors.

  Both men looked nervous.

  Neither doctor regarded Kovalenko on his gurney by the door as they passed by. They then removed the curtain partition, rolling it out of the way up against the wall, giving Kovalenko a view of the rest of the space. In the faint light he saw another man on a gurney; the second prisoner’s body below the shoulders was covered by a sheet, but he was clearly bound by his hands and feet much the same as was Kovalenko.

  The other prisoner looked at the doctors now. “What is this? Who are you?”

  Valentin wondered what was wrong with the man. Who are you? Was it not clear where he was and who they were? The better question would have been “What the hell is going on?”

  “What the hell is going on?” Kovalenko shouted at the two older men, but they ignored him and walked now to the foot of the other prisoner’s bed.

  One of the doctors had a black canvas bag on his shoulder, and he reached into the bag and took out a syringe. With a quiver in his hands and a tightness in his jaw that Valentin could register even in the dim, the man popped the cap off the syringe, and then he lifted the sheet off the bare feet of the other prisoner.

  “What the fuck are you doing? Don’t touch me with—”

  The doctor took hold of the man’s big toe while Kovalenko watched in horror and utter confusion. Valentin quickly looked up at the prisoner and saw similar bewilderment on the man’s face.

  It took the doctor with the syringe a moment to separate the skin from the nail at the tip of the man’s toe, but as soon as he accomplished this he jabbed the needle deep under the nail and pressed the plunger.

  The man screamed in terror and pain as Kovalenko looked on.

  “What is that?” Valentin demanded. “What are you doing to this man?”

  The needle came out of the toe, and the doctor tossed the syringe into the bag. He wiped the site with an alcohol prep pad, and then he and his colleague just stood at the foot of both gurneys, their eyes fixed on the man to Valentin’s right.

  Kovalenko realized the other man had fallen silent. He looked over at his face again and saw confusion, but before Valentin’s eyes the face contorted in sudden and sharp pain.

  Through clenched teeth the prisoner growled, “What did you do to me?”

  The two doctors just stood there, watching, tension in their own faces.

  After a moment more the man on the gurney began thrashing against his bindings; his hips rose high in the air and his head jerked from side to side.

  Valentin Kovalenko shouted for help at the top of his lungs.

  Foam and spit came out of the agonized man’s mouth, followed by a guttural moan. He kept convulsing at the limit of his straps, as if he was trying in vain to expel whatever toxin had been injected into him.

  It took the prisoner a slow, torturous minute to die. When he stilled, when his body came to rest contorted but restrained by the straps, the man’s wide eyes seemed to stare right at Kovalenko.

  The ex–SVR assistant rezident looked toward the doctors. His voice was hoarse from his shouting. “What did you do?”

  The man with the bag on his shoulder stepped over to the foot of Kovalenko’s gurney and
reached inside his bag.

  As he did this, the other man pulled the bedsheet off Kovalenko’s legs and feet.

  Valentin screamed again, his voice cracking and faltering. “Listen to me! Just listen! Don’t touch me! I have associates who will pay you . . . pay you or kill you if you—”

  Valentin Kovalenko shut up when he saw the pistol.

  From out of the bag the doctor had retrieved not a syringe, but instead a small stainless-steel automatic, and he leveled it at Kovalenko. The other man stepped up to the gurney and began unfastening the bindings around the younger Russian’s arms and legs. Kovalenko lay there quietly, sweat alternately stinging his eyes and chilling him where it had dampened the sheets.

  He blinked out the sweat and kept his eyes fixed on the pistol.

  When the unarmed doctor finished releasing Valentin from the leather straps, he stepped back to his colleague. Valentin sat up slowly on the gurney, keeping his hands slightly raised and his eyes locked onto the pistol in the quivering hand of the man who had just murdered the other patient.

  “What do you want?” Valentin asked.

  Neither of the two men spoke, but the one with the pistol—Kovalenko identified it now as a Walther PPK/S—used the barrel of his tiny weapon as a pointer. He twitched it toward a canvas duffel on the floor.

  The Russian prisoner slid off the gurney and knelt down to the bag. He had a hard time taking his eyes off the gun, but when he finally did he found a full change of clothes and a pair of tennis shoes. He looked up to the two older men, and they just nodded at him.

  Valentin changed out of his prison garb and into worn blue jeans and a brown pullover that smelled like body odor. The two men just watched him. “What’s happening?” he asked while he dressed, but they did not speak. “Okay. Never mind,” he said. He’d given up getting answers, and it certainly did not look as though they were about to kill him, so he allowed them their silence.