by Tom Clancy
“Ouch,” Clark said.
“It’s a crippling blow at the worst possible time. I’m pulling most of my people off assignments for their own safety, and I’m closing up some installations we have around the country.”
“I can understand why,” Clark admitted.
The train came to a stop, and the noise of the tracks disappeared. Both men stopped talking while people passed by and new passengers boarded. Bixby looked over faces and judged demeanors, and only when the train left the underground station and the noise of the tracks returned did he start speaking softly again.
“I’m heading down to Sevastopol tonight with a team. We’ve got a place there that’s been compromised.”
“A place?”
“Yep. SIGINT safe house we share with Ukrainian spooks. We have a technical team and a shitload of commo gear. There’s a small team of security contractors, and a team of CAG dudes there, too.”
Clark knew CAG meant Combat Applications Group, which meant Delta Force. It was no great surprise to him that Delta was in Sevastopol. It was the home port of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, after all. The United States would naturally do what it could to keep tabs on the area to see what the Russian Navy was up to.
Bixby said, “We’ve got a lot of equipment to break down and haul off, and a lot of files to shred and burn. I’ll be down there for thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”
“Sevastopol is a powder keg right now.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Clark said, “I’ve been fishing around. It looks like the Scar has been behind a lot of the riots and civil unrest here in Kiev.”
“I’ve been hearing the same rumors.”
“What can we do up here while you’re away?”
For the first time, Bixby broke cover, although just slightly. No one around noticed when he looked to the man on his right. “What can you do? Right now, Clark, I’ll take whatever I can get. You are my eyes and ears here in Kiev until Langley sends me fresh blood, and that won’t be for a week at least.”
Clark turned the page in his paperback. “Six guys. Including me, we are six guys. One Ukrainian speaker and three Russian speakers.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t ask you to come here in the first place. But since you’re here, why not keep an eye on Gleb? He is staying at the Fairmont Grand Hotel. The bastard has the entire top floor to himself. I’ve heard from a guy who works at the hotel that Gleb meets with a constant stream of characters all day long. Not FSB, at least not known faces.” Bixby shoved his hands deeper into his coat and leaned over a little closer. “A couple sets of trained eyeballs on him would give me a tiny bit of comfort knowing somebody was covering that part of the story here in Kiev.”
“Consider it done.”
“Sorry about being an asshole before.”
“You weren’t an asshole. You were just doing your best to keep your op buttoned up.”
Bixby smiled mirthlessly. “Yeah, well, look how well that worked out.”
The train arrived at its next stop. The station chief rose to his feet, and as he did so, he said, “See ya around.”
Clark replied, “I’ll be in touch.”
Bixby disappeared in the crowd leaving at the Tarasa Shevchenka stop. Without looking, Clark placed his left hand on the seat where Bixby had been sitting, and he scooped up a tiny folded scrap of paper. He slipped it into his pocket, having no doubt it would be the number to an encrypted phone where Bixby could be reached.
Clark sat back in the seat, already thinking about moving part of his operation to the Fairmont Grand Hotel.
31
It was near the end of the workday, and Jack Ryan, Jr., had not left his desk except for runs to the cafeteria for coffee and sandwiches and to the bathroom—he found himself unable to call it a “loo”—but he was looking forward to heading straight home and then opening up his computer there for a few hours’ more research before bed.
His phone rang and he did not look at the number before answering: “Ryan.”
“Sandy here, Jack. Wonder if you could come upstairs when you get a chance.”
“Upstairs?”
“Yes. I’m up here with Mr. Castor. No rush at all.”
Ryan had been here long enough to know the subtle understatement of British-speak. Lamont was telling him to get his ass up into the director’s office on the double.
“Be right there.”
“Lovely.”
* * *
Jack sat down at a coffee table in the ornate office of Hugh Castor, managing director of Castor and Boyle Risk Analytics, and he sipped coffee from a bone-china cup while Castor finished a phone call in French at his desk. Sandy Lamont sat across from him with his legs crossed.
Ryan whispered, “What’s going on?”
But Lamont just shrugged as if he had no idea.
The sixty-eight-year-old Englishman finished his call. He strode over to the sitting area and took the wingback chair at the end of the coffee table.
“You have done a remarkable job. We are all incredibly impressed.”
Jack liked an affirming compliment as much as anyone, but in this case he sensed a “but” coming.
He raised his eyebrows.
“But,” Hugh Castor said, “Jack, we are, quite frankly, nervous.”
“Nervous?”
“Locating the nexus between Russian business, Russian government, and Russian criminal enterprise is, frankly, part of our job here at Castor and Boyle. Having said that, your methods might be perceived by some as overly aggressive.”
Jack looked at Sandy. At first he thought this was about what had happened in the alley in Antigua. But Sandy’s almost imperceptible shake of his head told him this pertained to something else. “Perceived by whom?” Jack asked.
Castor sighed. “A name came up in your investigation the other day.”
Jack nodded. “Dmitri Nesterov. What about him?”
Castor examined his fingernails for a moment. In an offhand way, he said, “As it turns out, he happens to be a large shareholder in Gazprom, as well as a high-ranking official in the FSB.”
Lamont said, “Double trouble, you might say.”
“Quite,” agreed Castor.
Jack said nothing for several seconds.
Castor responded to Jack’s silence: “You are trying to decide just how to ask me how it is I know this about Nesterov.”
Ryan said, “I looked into him. He is a restaurateur in Saint Petersburg. I didn’t discover any connection to FSB or even to Gazprom. You must have other means at your disposal.”
“In light of your father’s profession before he went into politics, I’m sure you know something about the work of the intelligence services.”
You might say that, Ryan thought. He just nodded.
“It is mutually beneficial that we here at Castor and Boyle and the good men and women in British secret service communicate from time to time. We might come across a name, as you did, and want to ask them about it. Or they might like to learn something about what we have discovered in our work.”
I knew it, thought Jack. C&B had ties to SIS. But again, he didn’t say it.
“Makes sense.”
“So I inquired about Nesterov, and they came right back to me and said, in their unique way of doing things, that we should be careful with him.”
“Okay,” Jack said. And then he added, “I’m careful.”
Castor paused. “Flying down to Antigua and Barbuda, going through rubbish bins on private property. This is not careful. I can’t imagine the negative press Castor and Boyle would have received if our employee, the American President’s child, no less, was seriously injured or killed while on some sort of a secret mission on a Third World island in the Caribbean. It’s a right dangerous world out there, lad, and you aren’t trained to deal with some of the unsavory characters who operate on the fringes of our industry.”
Sandy Lamont cleared his throat slightly, but he said nothing.
Jack asked, “Is this about the FSB, or is this about the fact I’m the President’s son?”
“Frankly, it’s both. It is our job to fulfill the wishes of our clients. In this case, you have done a bang-up job, but we are not going to recommend to Galbraith that he pursue his case any further.
“The problem, lad, is that if Nesterov is an owner of IFC, there is zero chance Galbraith will ever see a shilling of his money. We can’t pull them into court, not in Russia, and not in any European country, because Russia controls the flow of energy into Europe.”
Jack said, “If we reveal the fact that Gazprom colluded with the tax office to raid Galbraith’s company, and that this FSB guy earned a one-point-two-billion-dollar payday, then we can put a stop to this sort of thing continuing.”
“We are not a police force. We are not an army. Your father might be the leader of the free world, but that carries no weight in this situation. The FSB can make things difficult for us if we hit too close to home in our investigation.”
Ryan gritted his teeth. “If you are telling me the fact I am employed here makes seeking justice more difficult for you, then I will resign.”
Castor said, “That’s just it, lad. What we do here is not about justice.”
Lamont leaned in helpfully. “It’s about money, mate. We want to help our client retrieve lost assets. That is possible if we find tangible assets in the West, but if you start naming high-ranking FSB geezers, Galbraith will not receive any recompense, I can assure you of that.”
Castor said, “Jack. You, quite simply, have aimed too high on this one.”
After a moment of silence, Jack said, “I understand.”
He did not, in fact, understand, but he felt like if he sat here for one minute more he was going to put his fist through the wall.
Castor said, “We’re going to put you on something else. Something less incendiary. You do very fine work, we just need to direct your efforts to a new task.”
“Sure,” Ryan said. “Whatever you think is best.”
* * *
Jack left Castor and Boyle at six-thirty p.m. Sandy invited him out for drinks and dinner in an attempt to make up for the tough meeting with the director, but Jack didn’t feel like he would be much company tonight. Instead, he went to a pub on his own, picked at a shepherd’s pie, and drank down four pints before leaving for the Tube.
Ryan’s foul mood intensified as he walked up Cannon Street in the rain. He’d forgotten his damn umbrella again, and he punished himself by not allowing himself to buy another. No, he would just let himself get soaked; he thought that might help him remember to grab it next time.
He was thinking about stopping off at one more pub on the way home. He would pass by the Hatchet on his way to the Tube; he’d been there before, and he’d liked the place well enough. Another beer would hit the spot, but, he decided, it would only make him more pissed off and sullen.
No. He’d go home and get some sleep instead.
He crossed the street, glancing back quickly over his right shoulder as he did so. Force of habit, nothing more, and as always, there was no one there who looked in any way out of the ordinary. He chastised himself; it was as if he was having a very difficult time switching into this life. He was overzealous in his work, treating shady businessmen as though they were an international terrorist syndicate, because that’s what he’d been dealing with in his old life. And he ran mini-SDRs and stayed on the lookout for surveillance, because that’s also what he’d been trained to do in his last job.
And, as another nod to his personal security, he treated every female who got within ten yards of him as a potential enemy plant.
Because that’s what happened to him in his last job.
* * *
Ryan entered the Mansion House Tube station, cold and soaking wet. On the escalator down to the tracks an attractive woman in front of him turned around and looked up at him. She gave him a sympathetic half-smile. Like he was a puppy who’d come in from the rain. Then she turned back, away from the wet guy in the nice suit.
Twenty minutes later he walked out of the Earl’s Court station, hands in his pockets and his collar up. He’d dried off a little in the Tube, but even though the rain had stopped, the evening mist was so incredibly thick he was soaked again within minutes.
After he passed a few people standing under umbrellas in front of an Indian restaurant on Hogarth Road he was all alone, walking along the sidewalk in front of a long set of row houses. He crossed the street over to Kenway, and his mind was lost back in his work. He’d just been kicked off the Galbraith case, but he couldn’t help himself; he was still trying to get his head around the mazelike structure of the companies, trusts, foundations involved.
He crossed the little street to cut through a footpath between buildings that would take him to Cromwell Road, and he automatically used the opportunity to look over his shoulder, as if checking for any traffic.
A long shadow under the lamplight around the corner behind him was moving when he turned, but whoever was casting the shadow stopped suddenly and then, slowly, began backing away, causing the shadow to slide back along the street.
Jack stopped in the middle of the road, watching the receding shadow for a moment, and then he started walking in that direction. The shadow disappeared quickly. Jack heard hurried footfalls, and then running.
Ryan began running himself, his leather messenger bag bouncing off his hip as he shot toward the corner. He spun around, hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever was running away.
There was no one. Just two-story white townhomes on both sides of the two-lane road, and cars parked along the street. The heavy mist seemed to hang around the streetlamps, adding a particular eeriness to the scene.
Ryan stood in the middle of the little street, his heart pounding.
He turned back in the direction of his flat and started walking again. For a fraction of a second he wondered if it could have been a potential mugger. But Jack had learned enough in the past few years to know there was no such thing as coincidence. And in this case, there was no other explanation. Someone was following him.
His heart thumped even harder now.
His mind filled with an assortment of government agencies, foreign governments, criminal enterprises, and terrorist groups, trying to come to some sort of conclusion about the entity that had him under surveillance, but until he actually spotted something more solid than a shadow, this was unknowable.
As he made his way home, he felt the palpable sense of potential danger, but he could not deny to himself that with this came an unmistakable exhilaration.
32
After a week and a half of cleaning and repairs, the Ryan family returned to the residence of the White House with little fanfare. The President wanted to keep the event low-key, so without notifying the press in advance, Cathy and the kids were helicoptered from their home in Maryland to the South Lawn, and Jack met them at the south entrance. Katie and Kyle immediately ran up to their rooms and found them exactly as they had left them, though one member of the cleaning crew had picked up Kyle’s toys so that the carpets could be steamed and shampooed.
That afternoon, Cathy herself had the idea to host a pool reporter from the White House press office through a tour of the residence. As it turned out, it was a senior White House correspondent from ABC, and Cathy took her, along with her cameraman, all over the common areas of the second-floor residence to show America that the People’s House bore no physical scars from the unfortunate event.
The correspondent tried to back the First Lady into a corner by asking if, in retrospect, having a known enemy of the government in power in Russia o
ver for lunch might have been a bad idea.
Cathy replied with grace, saying Sergey was a friend of the family’s, a friend of America’s, and a friend of Russia’s.
Jack Ryan was angry to learn that ten days after the incident, Golovko’s body was still in the United States and, effectively, stuck in customs. He personally called the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to see what the holdup was. The director of ICE found himself in the delicate position of having to explain to the President of the United States that his friend’s body had been, in compliance with U.S. law, classified as contaminated waste, and even though he was in a lead-lined coffin, there was an incredible amount of red tape involved in getting him transported to the United Kingdom for burial.
Ryan was both angered and saddened by this news, but he had the empathy to recognize the situation in which he’d just put the head of ICE. He apologized, thanked the man for his hard work and diligence, and let him get back to work.
The family spent their first evening back in the White House together in the theater room, watching a children’s movie. Cathy’s idea was to get the kids back into a comfortable routine at home, and to a large degree it was successful. At one point, Kyle made a remark about the “man who made the mess” in the bathroom, but otherwise the kids, like most kids, seemed virtually unaffected by the event they did not really understand. Jack realized it wouldn’t be long before Katie would piece together more about what happened that strange night when she was ten years old and had to sleep in her father’s office before taking a surprise vacation home for spring break.
* * *
The next morning, Ryan flew to Miami on Air Force One for a lunchtime speech to Cuban American leaders. He had planned on staying the evening to meet with local GOP fund-raisers, but he cut his trip short to deal with the situation in Ukraine and returned to Washington just after lunch.
