Locked On jrj-3

by Tom Clancy

  “John? Holy shit! Are you okay?”

  “I’m holding together, but just. I could use your quick help.” “You got it.”

  “I need you to look into a Russian spook named Kovalenko.” “Russian? Okay. Is he FSB, SVR, or military intelligence?” Clark said, “Unknown. I remember a Kovalenko in the KGB, back in the eighties, but that guy woteluld be long out of the game by now. This Kovalenko could be a relative, or the name could just be a coincidence.” “All right. What do you need to know about him?” Ryan was scribbling furiously as he talked.

  “I need to know where he is. I mean physically where he is.” “Got it.” Ryan also thought, but did not say, that if Clark wanted to find this Kovalenko, it was probably because Clark wanted to put his hands around the man’s throat. This Russian dude is a dead man.

  John added, “And anything else you can get me on the guy. I’m flying blind at this point, so anything at all.” “I’ll assemble a team to go through CIA data, as well as open source, and we’ll pull out every last thing we can on him. Is he behind this smear on you?” “He’s got something to do with it — whether or not he’s the nucleus of it remains to be seen.” “You going to call me back?”

  “Three hours?”

  “Sounds good. Sit tight.”

  A minute and a half after Clark’s call, Ryan had a conference call going with a dozen employees around Hendley Associates, including Gerry Hendley, Rick Bell, Sam Granger, and others. Bell organized a team to dig into this Russian spook, and everyone immediately went to work.

  It did not take long for them to realize that Clark was right about the family connection; the Kovalenko he was looking for was the son of the Kovalenko Clark remembered from the KGB. Oleg, the father, was retired though still alive, and Valentin, the son, was now the SVR assistant rezident in London.

  At only thirty-five years old, assistant rezident in London was a pretty high-level job, all agreed, but no one could figure out how he could possibly be connected to any operation that the Russians could be running against John Clark.

  Next the analysts began searching through CIA traffic looking for information on Valentin Kovalenko. These analysts did not normally spend their days tracking Russian diplomats, and they found it rather refreshing. Kovalenko was not holed up in a Waziristan cave like many of The Campus’s targets. The CIA had information, the vast majority obtained through the United Kingdom’s Security Service, also known as MI5, about his London apartment, where he shopped, even where his daughter went to school.

  It soon became obvious to the analysts that MI5 did not follow Kovalenko on a day-to-day basis. They did show that he had traveled from Heathrow to Domodedovo Airport in Moscow for two weeks in October, but since then he had been back in London.

  Ryan began to wonder about Valentin’s father, Oleg Kovalenko. Clark had said that he knew of the man, though it didn’t sound like John harbored any suspicions that the old man himself might be involved in his current predicament. Still, Jack saw a lot of brilliant analysts all digging into Valentin. He decided there was no sense in his duplicating their efforts, so instead he figured, what the hell, he’d work the Oleg angle.

  For the next half-hour he read from the archives of the CIA about the KGB spy, specifically his exploits in Czechoslovakia, in East Germany, in Beirut, and in Denmark. Jack Junior had been in the game for only a few years, but to him the man did not seem to have a particularly remarkable career, at least as compared with some other personal historhe hies of Russian spies that he had read.

  After digging through the man’s past, Jack put his name into a Homeland Security database that would tell of any international travel he might have made to Western countries.

  A single trip popped up. The elder Kovalenko had flown on Virgin Atlantic to London in early October.

  “To see his son, perhaps?” Jack wondered.

  If it was a family reunion, it was a damn short one. Just thirty hours in country.

  The short trip was curious to Jack. He strummed his fingers on the desk for a moment, and then called Gavin Biery.

  “Hey, it’s Jack. If I give you the name of a foreign national, and I give you the dates he was in the UK, could you find his credit cards and get me a list of transactions he made while he was there so I can use that to try and track his movements?” Jack heard Biery whistle on the other end of the line. “Shit.” Biery said. “Maybe.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Couple of days, at least.”

  Ryan sighed. “Never mind.”

  Biery started to laugh. Ryan thought, What a fucking weirdo.

  But only until Gavin said, “Just messing with you, Jack. I can have that for you inside of ten minutes. E-mail me the guy’s name and anything else you have on him and I’ll jump on it.” “Umm. Okay.”

  Ten minutes later, Ryan’s phone rang. He answered with, “What did you find out?” Gavin Biery, mercifully, recognized the urgency in Ryan’s voice. “Here’s the deal. He was in London, no question. But he didn’t pay for a hotel or a car or anything like that. Just a few gifts, and an incidental or two.” Ryan sighed in frustration. “So it sounds like someone else paid for his trip.” “He bought his own plane ticket, put it on a card. But once he was in London he was on someone else’s dime.” “Okay… Guess that won’t do me any good.” “What were you hoping to find?”

  “I don’t know. Just fishing. I hoped this trip had something to do with the Clark situation. I guess I thought if I could track him for the thirty hours he was in town I could get an idea—” “I know where he stayed.”

  “You do?”

  “He bought a box of cigars in the gift shop of the Mandarin Oriental at seven fifty-six in the evening, then he bought a box of Cadbury chocolates in the gift shop there at eight twenty-two the next morning. Unless he was just really in love with that gift shop, it sounds like he bedded down there for the night.” Jack thought this over. “Can you get a look at all the rooms that night?” “Yeah, I checked. No Valentin Kovalenko.” “Oleg Kovalenko?”

  “Nope.”

  “So someone else, not his son, paid his way. Can we get a list of every credit card that held a room for that night?” “Sure. I can pull e, notthat out. Call you back in five?” Ryan said, “I’ll be at your desk in three.”

  Ryan showed up at Biery’s desk with his own laptop, which he opened as he plopped into a chair next to the computer guru. Biery handed Ryan a printout, so Ryan and Gavin both could scan through the list of names of those registered at the hotel. Ryan didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly, which made delegating half of the search to Gavin practically impossible. Other than the name “Kovalenko,” which Biery had already said was not here, or the highly unlikely discovery of the name “Edward Kealty,” he didn’t really know what would pique his interest.

  He wished like hell he could be sitting with Melanie right now. She would find a name, a pattern, something.

  And then, from out of the blue, Jack got an idea in his head. “Vodka!” he shouted.

  Gavin smiled. “Dude it’s ten-fifteen in the morning. Unless you’ve got some Bloody Mary mix—” Ryan wasn’t listening. “Russian diplomats who visit the UN in New York are always getting in trouble for drinking all the vodka in their minibars.” “Says who?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve heard it before. Might be an urban legend, but look at this guy.” He pulled up a photo of Valentin Kovalenko on his laptop. “You can’t tell me he wasn’t tipping back the Stoli.” “He’s got that big red nose, but what does that have to do with his trip to London?” “Check for a room with minibar charges, or a bar tab charged to the room.” Biery ran another report on his computer, and as he was doing so he said, “Or room service. Specifically, a liquor tab.” “Exactly,” agreed Ryan.

  Gavin began going through the itemized credit card charges of the subset of rooms that had ordered room service or charged bar items to their room. He found a few possibles, then a few more. Finally he settled on one charge i
n particular. “Okay, here we go. Here is a room paid for by an American Express Centurion card under the name of Carmela Zimmern.” “Okay. So?”

  “So it looks like Ms. Zimmern, in her one evening at the Mandarin Oriental, enjoyed two servings of beluga caviar, four bottles of Finlandia vodka, and three porno movies.” Ryan looked at the digital receipt on Gavin’s laptop. When he saw the three “in-room entertainment” charges, he was confused.

  “How do you know they were pornos?”

  “Look, they all ran at the same time. I guess Oleg wanted to channel-flip through the chatty parts.” “Oh,” Ryan said, still putting this together. He started scrolling through the names on his sheet again. “Wait a second. Carmela Zimmern also booked the Royal Suite the same night. That’s nearly six grand. So Kovalenko was in the other room? He was there to see her, maybe?” “Sounds plausible.”

  Shit, thought Jack. Who is this Carmela Zimmern?

  They Googled the name and found nothing. Well, not nothing, there were several Carmela Zimmerns. One was a fourteen-year-old girl in Kentucky who played lacrosse and another was a thirtnd y-five-year-old mother of four in Vancouver who loved to crochet. They looked them over, one at a time, but there was certainly no one that looked like they’d be spending lavishly on five-star hotels or entertaining Russian spies in the UK.

  “I’ll find the address on her card,” Biery said, and he began clicking his keyboard.

  While he did this, Jack Ryan Jr. hunched over his laptop, reading through anything he could find on Carmela Zimmerns in social media, on random websites, anywhere in open source. Within a minute of beginning his search, he said, “Holy shit.” “What?”

  “This one works for Paul Laska.”

  “The Paul Laska?” “Yep. Carmela Zimmern, forty-six years old, lives in Newport, Rhode Island, works for the Progressive Nations Institute.” Gavin finished his check of the AmEx card. “That’s our girl. Address in Newport.” “Interesting. Laska’s PNI is based in New York.” “Right, but Laska himself is in Newport.” “So she works directly with the old bastard.” “Looks that way.”

  When Clark phoned back the call came through the speakerphone in the ninth-floor conference room. All the principals were there, some still poring over the information Ryan and Biery had just dug up.

  “John, it’s Ryan. I’ve got everyone here with me.” “Hey guys.” Everyone in the room quickly called out to Clark one at a time.

  Clark hesitated before speaking. “Where’s Driscoll?” Hendley took this. “He’s in Pakistan.” “Still?”

  “He’s a POW. Haqqani has him.”

  “Fuck. God damn it.”

  Gerry interjected, “Look, we have a viable lead on getting him out of there. There is hope.” “Embling? Is he your lead?”

  “Nigel Embling is dead, John. Killed by Riaz Rehan.” Hendley said it softly.

  “What the hell is going on?” Clark asked.

  “It’s complicated,” Gerry said, putting it extremely mildly. “But we’re working on that end. Let’s concentrate on your situation for now. How are you?” Clark sounded tired and angry and frustrated, all at the same time. “I’ll be better when this gets worked out. Any word on Kovalenko?” Hendley looked at Jack Junior and nodded.

  “Yes. Valentin Kovalenko, age thirty-five. He is SVR’s assistant rezident in London.” “And he’s in Moscow?”

  “No. He was there, in October, but only for a couple of weeks.” “Shit,” said Clark, and Ryan got the impression from this reaction that Clark was in Moscow.

  “There’s more, John.”

  “Go.”

  “Kovalenko’s father, Oleg. Like you said, he was KGB.” “Yesterday’s news, Jack. He’s got to be eighty.” “He’s nearly that, but listen for a second. This guy never goes anywhere outside of Russia. I mean not as far back as Homeland Security’s records go. But in October he flies to London.” “To see his kid?”

  “To see Paul Laska, apparently.”

  There was a long pause. “The Paul Laska?” “Yep,” said Ryan. “This is preliminary, but we think it is possible that they knew each other in Czechoslovakia.” “Okay,” Clark said it with a confused tone. “Go on.” “Right after Oleg’s visit to London, Valentin races over to Moscow for two weeks. He gets back to London, and a few days later, the indictment on you drops out of the sky.” Clark filled in what he knew. “When he was in Moscow, Valentin sent a crew of thugs out to get intel on me from sources in my file with the KGB.” “Weird,” said Caruso, who’d been silent until now. “If he is SVR, why didn’t he send his own people?” Clark answered this quickly. “He wanted to use cutouts to insulate him and his service from this.” “So Valentin knows about you through Laska?” asked Ryan.

  “Looks like it.”

  Ryan was confused. “And Laska knows about you… how?” Sam Granger answered this. “Paul Laska runs the Progressive Constitution Initiative, the group that is defending the Emir. Somehow the Emir fingered Clark, and Laska is orchestrating this all with Russia because he can’t let on that the Emir is passing intel to him.” Hendley ran his fingers through his gray hair. “The Emir may have described Clark to his lawyers. They, somehow, got a picture of you from CIA.” “So Paul Laska and his people are using the Russians, running their version of a false-flag operation,” said Clark.

  “But why would the Russians go along with this?” asked Chavez.

  “To hobble the Ryan Presidency, or maybe even kill it outright.” “We have to go after Laska,” said Caruso.

  “Hell, no,” Hendley said. “We don’t operate inside America against Americans, even misguided sons of bitches like him.” A mild argument broke out in the room, with Caruso and Ryan on one side, and the rest of the men on the other. Chavez stayed out of it for the most part.

  Clark stopped the argument. “Listen, I understand and respect that. I will try to get more information on my end that we can use, and then I will report back.” “Thank you,” said Gerry Hendley.

  “There is another situation.” “What’s that?”

  “A crew coming after me. Not Russians. Not Americans. French. One of them died in Cologne. I didn’t kill him, exactly, but he’s just as dead. Don’t guess his buddies are going to listen to my side of it.” The men in the conference room looked at one another for a moment. They had all heard the news about the death of tdley ran hhe Frenchman, supposedly at the hands of John Clark. But if Luc Patin was part of a team after Clark, that meant there was another force involved in all this. Finally Rick Bell said, “We’ll try to find out who they are. Maybe we can look into the dead guy a lot closer than the international media has, try and find out who he was working for.” Clark said, “I appreciate it. It wouldn’t hurt to know what I’m dealing with on that front. Okay. Got to go. You guys focus on getting Sam back.” “Will do,” said Chavez. “Watch yourself, John.” When Clark hung up, Dominic turned to Domingo. “Ding, you’ve known Mr. C the longest. He sounded tired, didn’t he?” Chavez just nodded.

  “How much longer can he go on? The guy’s what? Sixty-three, sixty-four? Shit. He’s more than twice my age and I’m feeling the effects of everything I’ve been through the past few weeks.” Chavez just shook his head as he looked off into the distance. “No point in speculating how long his body can hold up to the day-to-day wear and tear.” “Why not?”

  “Because if you do what John does, sooner or later, you’re going to go out quick. One of the bullets that have been whizzing past his head for damn near a half-century is going to have his name on it. And I’m not talking about that little scratch he got in Paris.” Caruso nodded. “I guess we all have an expiration date on us, doing what we do.” “Yep. We roll the dice every time we go out.”

  The meeting was breaking up, but the conference room was still full when a call light on the phone console in the center of the table blinked again. Hendley himself picked it up. “Yeah? Good, put him through.” Hendley looked to the men standing around. “It’s al Darkur.” He punched the conference
button to put the call through the speakers. “Hello, Mohammed. You are speaking to Gerry, and the others are listening in.” “Good.”

  “Tell me you have good news.”

  “Yes. We have found your man. He is still in North Waziristan, in a walled compound in the town of Aziz Khel.” Chavez leaned over the desk. “What are you going to do about it?” “I have planned a raid on the compound. At this point I have not asked for approval because I do not want the information to leak out to the men holding him. But I expect the rescue attempt will launch within three days’ time.” Chavez asked, “How did you happen to find out about this compound?” “The ISI has known about the compound — it is used as a prison for kidnap victims of Siraj Haqqani. But the ISI did not have anyone of value held there, so there was no reason to risk tipping our hand about the existence of our intelligence asset that provided the information. I persuaded someone to tell me.” Chavez nodded. “How many gomers you think are there?” Al Darkur paused on the other end. “How many what?” “Sorry. How many of Haqqani’s people? How much opposition at the compound.” A longer pause. “Maybe you would prefer to ny not know the answer to that question.” Chavez shook his head. “I’d rather have bad news than no news. Something I learned from a friend of mine.” “I think your friend is very wise. I am sorry that the news is bad. We expect there will be no less than fifty Haqqani fighters billeted within one hundred meters of where Sam is being held.” Ding looked at Jack and Dom. Both men just nodded to him. “Mohammed. We’d like to come over as soon as possible.” “Excellent. You men proved your talents in Dubai. I could use you again.” After the phone conversation with the ISI major, the three Campus operators sat back down at the table. They were joined, again, by Hendley and Granger.

  It was clear that Jack, Dom, and Ding wanted to go to Pakistan, and they wanted to be involved in the raid on the compound where, according to the ISI, Sam Driscoll was being held captive by the Haqqani network.