by Tom Clancy
Ryan mumbled, “I was afraid of that. He’s going to chew me out, isn’t he?”
Gavin Biery said, “Think of it as tough love, kid.”
Clark got on the phone with Ryan, who proceeded to tell him everything about the events of the past day. Clark listened intently, he did not interrupt at all, but once Ryan was finished with his story, the pause on the line told the younger man that the older man was not pleased.
Clark said, “Kid, I swear to God, you manage to get yourself into the shit, don’t you?”
“Well… this kind of blew up on me.”
“The second you had even just that twitchy feeling that you were being tailed you should have picked up the damn phone and called me.”
“Well, John, from what Gav just told me, you’ve been a little tied up yourself.”
“That doesn’t get you off the hook on this one. You know I could have had guys and guns around you within a couple of hours. Hell, I know enough old SAS guys there in London I could have had security on you in twenty minutes. You can’t just run solo like that, for crying out loud. You are the President’s son.”
“I know. I thought I was just being paranoid. I didn’t recognize the threat level until it was too late.”
“This Gleb the Scar you mentioned is a personality we are very familiar with over here.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He’s Seven Strong Men, from Saint Petersburg. We think he might be the number-two guy in their organization.”
“Who’s number one?”
“No one knows. But Gleb is over here running proxy ops for FSB.”
Ryan said, “Interesting. The guys who attacked me work for him, and in my work at Castor and Boyle, I uncovered an illegal scheme to defraud one of our clients, and traced it as a payoff by Gazprom, which is the Russian government, to a man with FSB ties named Dmitri Nesterov.”
Clark told Ryan to hold the line while he checked to see if that was a name they had come across in Ukraine. They had not. He then asked his local expert, Igor Kryvov, if he had ever heard the name, but it was new to him as well.
Clark spoke quickly and with complete self-assuredness. “All right, you are obviously in the center of a shit storm over there, so here’s what’s going to happen: I’m sending Ding, Dom, and Sam to you right now, tonight, on the Gulfstream. They will escort you back to the States. If your new friend there has a passport, they can take him as well. If he doesn’t have a passport, we might be able to swing something.”
Ryan hesitated for a moment.
Clark sensed the reticence and said, “Jack, you realize you can’t stay there. Right?”
“John, I know it looks like I’m running a hell of a risk staying over here, but I am in the middle of something I can’t drop. The stakes are too high. I’d appreciate a little muscle to watch my back, only if you can spare it.”
“I’ll have them moving in a half-hour. Are you at least in a secure location now?”
“I am mobile. I left my car at a mall and we took a taxi to a car rental agency, where I picked up a new ride. It’s in my name, so I could be traced, theoretically, but the Seven Strong Men guys on me haven’t shown that they are using much high-tech surveillance just yet. Just to be sure, I’ve done an SDR, and there is no tail.”
Clark replied, “I’d feel better if you’d go back to the States, but for now, I’ll get the plane and the guys to London. In the meantime, we will call you back when Gavin runs the names on the phone data you sent him.”
“Thanks, John.”
* * *
Ryan and Oxley drove through the countryside north of London while they waited for Gavin to call back. There was no conversation between the two of them. Ox seemed lost in thought, and Ryan was thinking over his next move.
He wanted to talk to Sandy Lamont, but he was not sure he could trust him. It was very possible Lamont had tipped off someone that Ryan was going to Corby. It was possible that Lamont knew about the connection between Castor and Oxley, although why anyone would need to die over it remained a mystery to Ryan.
The more Jack thought about Lamont, the more suspicious he became. He recognized his affable boss had twice warned him against digging deeper into the Gazprom deal, before finally pulling him off the case altogether. Could there have been reasons for this more nefarious than those he’d stated?
Jack knew the only way to find out for sure was to confront him and gauge his reaction.
They stopped at a fast-food restaurant and grabbed takeout, and then parked in the lot behind a busy motor lodge to eat. They had just finished their meal when Jack’s phone chirped.
“Hey, Gavin.”
It was John Clark who spoke first. “Actually, it’s John and Gavin. We’ve got you on speakerphone.”
Gavin spoke next. “Ryan, you’ve got yourself a situation there.”
“Explain.”
“There were twenty-four contacts on the phone that were of possible interest, but I whittled it down to six that needed the full track run on them. Two of the six are personalities we’ve run into over here in Kiev.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope,” said Clark. “We’ve spent most of the past week tagging men who’ve met with Gleb the Scar at the Fairmont Grand. These two guys on your hit man’s phone are obviously mob characters. I put them as lieutenants. They’ve been in regular contact with your man Oleg for at least the past month, and spoke to him within the past twenty-four hours while he was there in the UK.”
Gavin picked up from there. “Two more are apparently in the group you put on ice. Their phones stopped moving just after noon today in the town of Corby, and now they are beaming signals in a police station. I backtracked the GPS bread crumbs to several locations, both in the UK and in Ukraine. They aren’t so terribly interesting in and of themselves, but their phones were in the same low-rent hotel the day before yesterday as another phone on the list, and that phone is the most fascinating of all.”
“And why is that?”
John Clark spoke now: “Because the owner of that phone has spent part of the past month in a house in a Moscow suburb. That house is owned by a man named Pavel Lechkov, and although we know he’s Russian, we don’t have anything on him. We tried to find a picture of Lechkov but came up blank, which makes me suspect he might be an intelligence agent.” Clark added, “There’s more, Jack.”
“I’m listening.”
Gavin said, “I bread-crumbed his phone number and tracked it to a couple of hotels in London. But Friday evening he went to a private residence in Islington.”
Jack asked the next question with trepidation. “Friday evening is after I went to Corby to see Ox. Whose place did Lechkov go to in Islington?”
Clark said, “He spent twenty-five minutes at the home of Hugh Castor.”
“Is that right?” Jack mumbled.
Clark said, “Yes. Whether or not he met with Castor, of course, we can’t say. Nevertheless, I’m afraid your employer in London is starting to look like he might be involved—indirectly, at least—in the attack on you.”
Ryan said, “That’s two strikes against him. He’s involved with the Seven Strong Men, and he knew Oxley from a long time back. It seems like this Lechkov paid Castor a visit after I went and met with Oxley, and then Lechkov met with Oleg and the other Seven Strong Men goons and gave them orders to kill Ox.”
Clark said, “Jack, I hope you will agree, this seems like a fine time for you to head back to the U.S.”
Ryan did not agree. “I have someone here in London that I need to talk to. After that, I want to meet with Malcolm Galbraith. He might be able to connect some more dots.”
Clark went silent.
To bolster his argument, Jack said, “John, I’ll be at Stansted when the plane lands, and we’ll fly to Edinburgh. It’s Edinburgh. It’s not Kiev or Moscow. Plus I’ll have Ding, Sam, and Dom at my side the whole time. Adara will keep watch on the aircraft and Oxley. All I want to do is go have tea with a bi
llionaire and pick his brain—how much trouble can I get into with that?”
Clark sighed. “I guess we’re about to find out.”
71
Thirty years earlier
After his altercation with MI6 counterintelligence investigator Nick Eastling, CIA analyst Jack Ryan left the British consulate and took a cab to the West Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. Here, on Clayallee, a large compound of buildings known as Clay Headquarters lay sprawled over several fenced-in blocks. This was the home of Berlin’s United States military command, known as the Berlin Brigade, as well as the Office of the United States Commander, and U.S. Mission Berlin.
Mission Berlin was essentially the State Department’s toehold in the city, because there was no U.S. embassy here.
The CIA, not surprisingly, had many secret locations in West Berlin, but their facility here behind the offices of Mission Berlin was among the most secure and well equipped.
Ryan had chosen this location so that he could communicate with Langley.
He was searched by the U.S. Army guards at the Clayallee main gate, and some calls were made to establish his identity. Soon he walked alone up a tree-lined street and entered the side entrance to Mission Berlin. He gave his name to a man behind a desk, and he was searched again, and then escorted to a freestanding building behind the State Department’s facility.
This was the local CIA station, and it did not take long for Ryan to establish his credentials and obtain his own small office to work from, along with a secure phone.
It took a few minutes to get the phone working, and as soon as he got a dial tone he called Cathy at Hammersmith Hospital. He was disappointed to reach a receptionist who told him his wife was in surgery at the moment, so he left a message saying all was well and he’d try to call that evening.
He then put in a call to Sir Basil Charleston at Century House, but again, he could not reach his intended party. Charleston’s secretary told Jack that Sir Basil was on a call to the United States and that he would get back with him at the soonest possible opportunity.
Jack spent an hour of the afternoon sitting in the office waiting. Finally, at four p.m., Sir Basil Charleston called back.
“I’ve heard it all from Nick,” Basil said.
“Eastling and I don’t see eye to eye on this. Or on anything, for that matter.”
“I gathered as much. You have to understand one thing, Jack. The nature of the work of our counterintelligence staff makes them a tad different than us. I am going to use a football analogy. I do hope you can follow along.”
Jack replied, “I assume you mean soccer.”
“Yes, you call it soccer over there, don’t you? Anyway, we, as intelligence officers, are offensive players. We see the world as our opponent’s goal, and we attack it, leaving the role of protecting our goal to others. Counterintelligence, on the other hand, are the defenders, they are trained to protect the goal. They take issue with us running up the field and leaving them to suss out the opposing side on their own. They look at us as a risk.
“A team needs both types, but sometimes we attackers don’t appreciate the tactics of the defenders.”
Ryan said, “I hope you will let me play some offense. Morningstar may be dead, but there is more to learn about the accounts at Ritzmann Privatbankiers.”
“I spoke with Judge Moore and Admiral Greer this afternoon. I have agreed to give you access to the Morningstar dossier and the preliminary files of the Penright investigation on the condition that you share all your findings with us immediately.”
A wave of relief washed over Ryan. “Of course I will.”
“Will you be coming back to London?”
“I’d like to stay over here in case I turn up anything.”
“I thought you might say that. I’m having everything driven over to you from our consulate in Berlin. A courier will stand by while you look it over. He’ll explain the protocol to you.”
“I’ll get right to work on it here, and I’ll call you if I find anything.”
* * *
An hour later, Ryan met the courier from the local MI6 office in the lobby of Mission Berlin. The man called himself Mr. Miles, and after Jack gave him one look he decided the man had been out of the military and working for SIS for all of about ten minutes. He was middle-aged but square-jawed and muscular and he stood with his shoulders ramrod straight. He carried a briefcase in which, Jack assumed, the files were stored. Jack reached out to take it, and Mr. Miles pulled the arm of his coat up a few inches to reveal the case discreetly handcuffed to his wrist.
“Let’s you and me have a wee chat before I hand this off to you. Is that all right, sir?”
“Sure,” Jack said. It dawned on the American analyst then that being passed secret documents in the field was a different process from having them sent over to one’s desk at Century House.
Together, Jack and Miles walked to the cafeteria, and as soon as they sat at a table, the Englishman had Jack sign several sheets of paper saying he wouldn’t steal any of the documents he was about to see, nor would he copy anything, destroy anything, or otherwise do anything that would give the British SIS courier a reason to hit him over the head with a chair.
Ryan thought this fellow to be one of the most serious Englishmen he’d met in his time over here in Europe, but, he had to admit, sending Mr. Miles over with the files did have the desired effect. Ryan told himself he’d better not get so much as a smudge on the paperwork, because he did not want this man annoyed with him.
Soon the courier sat at a table in the cafeteria to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, and Jack went back to his tiny borrowed office so he could dig into the files relating to the Morningstar case.
He saw immediately that much of it was in the form of notes in David Penright’s own handwriting, and other documents—these all related to Penright’s death—were in the handwriting of Nick Eastling and members of his team.
Of all the documents present, the dot-matrix printout of internal bank account transfers at Ritzmann Privatbankiers was the most curious to Jack. At first blush it wasn’t much to look at. Just columns of numbered accounts next to other columns of numbered accounts alongside a column that showed, as far as Jack could determine, values represented in Swiss francs.
Paper-clipped to the file was an English translation of the few words on the pages.
There was nothing about the printout that seemed obviously crucial to the case. If the KGB or other Russians were using RPB to hold money, the transfers into the bank to the suspected Russian account would be damn important, as would any transfers out of the bank to other banks around the world. These sorts of transactions could help SIS and CIA follow the money trail.
But internal account transfers did not seem terribly useful to Ryan. He knew enough about banking to know that many account holders had multiple accounts and routinely moved their money around within the bank. Some accounts might be tied to an investment portfolio or another account might be used for payables at the account holder’s place of business.
This sheaf of papers seemed to Ryan to be more clerical in nature.
Another problem with the printout was that it was indecipherable to him, because although Penright had given him the list of clients of the banks, the client list was not tied to the numbered accounts themselves.
No, there was no reason to find this printout interesting in the least, except for the fact that, as far as anyone could determine, a bank executive had hand-delivered these internal documents to a British spy on the night the British spy was killed, and the bank executive himself was killed two days later.
That alone made this long, folded dot-matrix printout worthy of further investigation.
Ryan began looking at the dates for the transactions listed. The printout was 122 pages long, and from what Ryan could tell, it seemed to contain all in-house transfers for the past thirty days.
Now he thought back. Tobias Gabler had been killed five days earlier. Ryan ran a finger quickly d
own the date column, flipped through page after page, and finally found the date of Gabler’s death.
He started looking at the numbered accounts, and the in-house transfers, and he searched for multiple transfers leaving the same account. There were dozens of cases of this, so soon he began looking at high-value transfers, or cases where the same account had made many transfers into a single second account.
He used a legal pad to calculate how much had been moved out of each account. It was slow, laborious, and boring, but after an hour and a half he began to focus on two particular numbered accounts. Beginning on the day before the death of Tobias Gabler and continuing for three days, there had been several large transfers out of account number 62775.001 and into account number 48235.003.
It took two more hours to finish his work. All in all, since the day before the death of Tobias Gabler, there had been 704 in-house transfers of funds. Twelve of them came from 62775.001, and the total of all twelve transfers was 461 million Swiss francs. Jack checked the exchange rate in a financial newspaper he found on the desk; then he pulled his calculator closer, and keyed in some numbers.
The amount of the transfer was $204 million. Penright had told him the account being investigated by the suspected KGB men contained exactly that amount. Looking over the 704 transactions, Jack saw that no other account had moved a tenth of the money around as had account 62775.001.
Jack felt certain this was the account in question and all its money had been moved out of it and into another account in the same bank. Jack had no way of knowing if this was simply a poor attempt to hide the funds from the first account, or if it represented some sort of payment to another entity who had an account at RPB.
But whatever was going on here, Jack knew it was important, and knew he needed to find out who owned numbered account 48235.003, the receiver of the $204 million.
Jack put the dot-matrix printout to the side and spent the next hour reading everything else available about Morningstar and the Penright death investigation. There was lots and lots of mundane data: meeting places and times for Marcus Wetzel and David Penright, protocols established for setting up a dead drop, makes and models of vehicles seen in the area. Jack did not learn much from any of this.
