Command Authority (20 page)

A
fter 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 over 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.

—

T
he 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.

As soon as his helicopter touched down from Andrews Air Force Base, he was told Ed Foley was waiting for him. Jack headed right over to the Oval Office and found Ed in the anteroom.

Foley had spent the past several days looking over raw data from the British secret service pertaining to the Zenith affair, a thirty-year-old set of murders in Europe. Ryan had tasked Foley with the research project without explaining much about its relevance.

Ryan leaned into the Roosevelt Room, where Ed was waiting for him. “Hey, Ed. Sorry to keep you waiting. Come on in.”

Foley followed Ryan into the Oval Office. He said, “No problem at all. How was Miami?”

“I wish I could tell you. I was there all of two and a half hours. Least I got a decent Cuban sandwich and a café con leche out of the trip.”

“Careful. That gets out and some folks will say you’ve gone commie.”

The President laughed, and the men sat down on the sofas in front of the desk. Ryan said, “I appreciate you digging in to all this old stuff.”

“My pleasure. It was fascinating.”

“What did you come up with?”

“More questions than answers, I’m afraid. I’ve spent five days reading everything sent to me about the events in question from the perspective of three nation’s intelligence agencies and police forces. From the British I have files from SIS, MI5, and Scotland Yard, and SIS also sent over reports they got from the Germans at the time—BfV intelligence reports, as well as relevant case files of the Swiss Federal Office of Police.”

Ed continued, “All the parties came to the same conclusion. There
was
no Russian assassin called Zenith operating in Europe. This was just a story cooked up by members of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction. These were politically motivated killings, but at that time the RAF was nearly dormant. Some of the terrorists wanted to keep it that way. The killings weren’t sanctioned within the organization, and those not involved were not happy to be tied to the killings, so they pushed the story that it was all a KGB plot.”

“And how did Roman Talanov’s name get tied to Zenith?”

“That came from British intelligence, but years after the fact. In the early nineties a source inside Russia, name redacted, claimed the Zenith assassin was real, and he was an ex-GRU Spetsnaz officer named Talanov who first served as a paratrooper during the invasion of Afghanistan.”

“The name of the source was redacted?”

“Yes, and that is very strange. It is the only redacted name in all of the SIS files sent to me. I showed it to Mary Pat, and she made a request through SIS. They claim the redaction is on the 1991 source document itself, and they don’t know who the source was.”

“That’s unusual.”

“Very. It was explained to Mary Pat that a determination was made that the information was false and their source not credible. They should have stricken the entire comment about Talanov, but someone screwed up and just redacted the name of the informant, and not the information itself.”

Ryan said, “So you are saying it is bad intel, from a bad source. And it is also a dead end, because we don’t even know where the intelligence came from.”

“I do have one clue, from the Swiss files, however. One of the Swiss reports was from their Zug Canton police; they detained a man at the scene of one of the killings. He was stopped as a witness, but he refused to comply with the cops. He was handcuffed and put in the back of a police cruiser, from which he promptly escaped.” Ed shuffled through his papers for a moment, then handed over a page. Ryan looked it over; it was a photocopied page of a document produced by an electric typewriter, and it was all in German.

Ryan did not see anything at first. He just said,
“Ich spreche kein Deutsch.”

Ed chuckled. “I don’t speak German, either. But look carefully in the right-hand margin.”

Jack lowered his glasses on his nose, and now he saw a faint marking. It appeared that something had been written in pencil and then erased.

He looked closer. “Does that say ‘Bedrock’?”

“Yes.”

“What’s Bedrock?”

Ed shook his head. “No clue. I’ve never heard of it before, it’s certainly not mentioned anywhere else in any of the Zenith case files. I checked with Mary Pat. The SIS has no record of Bedrock as a code name for either a person or an operation.”

“And it’s right next to the mention of the witness who escaped from police custody?”

Ed replied, “My German is atrocious, but that’s what the translator says.”

Ryan looked closely at the English word again. “Whose handwriting is that?”

Ed said, “There are other English notes made on the Swiss and German files. Must have been the Brits. My guess is the notes were made by Sir Basil Charleston himself.”

“Interesting.”

“I thought maybe you could call Basil. It’s possible he won’t remember—it’s been thirty years, after all—but it might be worth a shot.”

Ryan thought it over. “I called him last year on his birthday. His mind is sharp as ever, but I’m afraid he’s deaf as a post.”

Ed said, “If you’d like, I could head over to the UK and talk to him about it.”

“I appreciate that, but there’s no need. I’ll call Jack Junior and ask him to run by Sir Basil’s place and ask him. I haven’t heard from my boy in a while, and this will give me an excuse to check in without looking too much like a mother hen.”

“How’s he doing over there?”

“I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. He talked to Cathy the other day. Says everything is just fine and dandy. Maybe I’ll get something more out of him.”

The two men stood. Ed said, “Sorry I couldn’t find anything more in the notes. I know you were hoping you could tie Talanov to the murders, but it really does look like these murders were the work of the RAF. The Germans busted a cell in Berlin and found intel that linked them to all the killings.”

Ryan patted Ed Foley on the shoulder. “Maybe so, Ed. Maybe so. But I do know there is more to the story than what is in the notes.”

Foley asked, “Why do you say that?”

Ryan gave a tired smile. “Because I lived through every damn bit of it.”

A
lthough they had hoped to operate below the radar in Kiev, John Clark and his Campus operators had changed their plan somewhat, and now they were, essentially, hiding in plain sight. Their run-in with the FSB a few nights earlier had shown them that Russian intelligence had the run of this town and any attempts at keeping a low profile around here were doomed to failure. With this in mind, Clark decided he and his team would, instead, just make it look like they were a somewhat blundering group of journalists who were blissfully unaware that they were operating in the middle of spooks and mafia, and clueless to the fact everything they did and said was under surveillance.

Gavin had tried the patience of the experienced operatives on the team more than once by straying into conversation that veered toward operational talk. Each time this occurred, whoever happened to be the closest man to Biery got in his face, gave him a dirty look, and then changed the subject of conversation quickly. Biery would wince in frustration at his lack of refinement as a real spy, he’d nod sheepishly, and he’d pick up the new conversation.

Even though they had to remain in character with their conversations because they knew they were being eavesdropped on, they were able to communicate by writing notes on their iPads and then erasing the file, and they wrote on paper that they immediately destroyed. They also texted one another because Biery had installed robust security software on all their electronic devices to keep out even the best attempts to decrypt them.

The Fairmont Grand Hotel Kiev is a massive building on the banks of the Dnieper River in the historic Podil district in central Kiev. From the windows and balconies, guests are treated to views of the river to the east and of hills and golden church domes to the west.

A massive construction project to build a flyover was in the works next door to the building, and the noise, dust, and traffic associated with the big project took much away from any charm the neighborhood might normally have, and petty criminals roamed Naberezhno-Khreshchatytska both day and night. At night, hotel guests were warned by bellmen to patronize only those taxis dispatched by the hotel’s transportation service, because of rogue cabdrivers’ common tactic of either robbing tourists themselves or driving them to a quiet place where they could be robbed by a confederate.

The Russian known as Gleb the Scar was staying in the Royal Suite on the ninth floor, but his entourage had taken over every other room on the eighth and ninth floors as well. In addition to the security the Scar would have around him at the top of the hotel, the ground floor was crawling with his men. Anyone with an eye for such things who looked around the opulent grounds could easily detect several men who were not hotel staff, but nevertheless seemed to be permanent fixtures in the lobby. Men were encamped at the tables, on the plush sofas, or else just milling about doing nothing.

The majority of these fixtures were Seven Strong Men security personnel, but FSB, Ukrainian intelligence, and interior security men, as well as agents for other intelligence agencies, also hung around. Clark had no doubt that CIA would have liked to keep someone here in the hotel 24/7, had they enough personnel to do so. Even if Bixby wasn’t so concerned about the Scar just yet to task his men with establishing a twenty-four-hour eye, Clark knew there would be enough POIs in the Fairmont that CIA would want to at least have paid informants on the staff here.

Clark decided to keep his main base of operations at the rented flat, but he did take one room at the Fairmont so they could have someone close to Gleb the Scar. To effect this move and remain in cover at the same time, Clark concocted a ruse that began in the flat, where he started an argument with the other men about his OneWorld media assignment here in Kiev. For the benefit of the listening devices he knew recorded his every word, Clark, the senior reporter in the group, railed at the younger, less experienced journalists about everything from the equipment they had brought along for the job to production ideas for the project. He complained he wasn’t getting paid enough and that his per diem did not cover restaurants suitable for his needs, and he expressed outrage he was being forced to share a room with others.

And then, with a flair for the dramatic that had the other men in the room fighting to keep straight faces, Clark announced he would be moving into a hotel for the duration of their work here in Ukraine.

John Clark, a CIA officer since the Vietnam era, had never in his life been described, by anyone, as a diva, but his cover now had him adopting exactly that role.

An hour later, John Clark and Igor Kryvov arrived at the Fairmont; both of them pulled along large rolling suitcases full of items that any traveler might carry. Clark was careful to keep his luggage as innocuous as possible, because he was near certain the opposition would search his belongings here every chance they got. He checked into the hotel using his credentials showing him to be the senior reporter for OneWorld Productions in Vancouver, then he and Igor took their luggage to his third-floor room. They chatted along the way, Clark pestering the Ukrainian stringer with stories of other trips he’d supposedly taken with OneWorld and the better working conditions he’d experienced and the more professional crew of producers, photographers, audio men, and technical experts that he’d traveled with on assignments past.

Of course, Clark was certain he was being watched by cameras, mafia men, and enemy intelligence agencies, so this was all part of his cover.

After helping him with his diva-sized luggage, Igor Kryvov left the hotel and returned to the flat, and soon enough, John Clark moved down to the lobby, where he set himself up at a plush sofa by ordering coffee service, hooking a phone headset to his ear, and putting his iPad in his lap.

While Clark established his satellite op at the hotel, the rest of the team prepared their end of the operation. They split into two-man teams, with Igor and Sam taking one of their rented Toyota Highlanders and Dom and Ding taking the other, while Gavin remained back in the flat, working from there.

There was concern about leaving Gavin alone in an apartment the FSB had already raided once, so Igor arranged for two of his former colleagues in the federal police to stand outside the flat, telling them they were protecting a Canadian audio technician and his equipment.

At ten a.m. the two Highlanders arrived outside the Fairmont and parked in lots facing different directions within sight of the entrance to the massive hotel.

And then the men did that which they were very accustomed to doing in this line of work. They sat in their vehicles and waited.

—

I
t was no time at all before John Clark began attracting attention in the lobby of the Fairmont. Hard-faced men stared at him and even sat shoulder to shoulder with him on the sofa, but Clark did not blink, he just talked into his phone’s headset and worked on his tablet computer.

This was more of the “demonstration shadowing” FSB tactics that had been used against Clark and his men the other night.

But Clark was prepared for it now, and he wasn’t going anywhere. He ignored the men, regardless of their persistent attempts to get under his skin. Even when two of them sat on either side of him on the couch and carried on a conversation, the acrid smell of their bad breath filling his nostrils and their elbows jabbing him in the side as they gesticulated, Clark only continued reading his tablet as if he were alone.

When he talked on the phone, he acted as if he were in communication with someone overseas with his company, but in actuality he was on a secure conference call with his four men just outside the hotel.

In the vehicles outside, the men just listened to Clark drone on in their headsets about his dissatisfaction with his assignment here in Kiev and his refusal to start submitting his reports back to Vancouver until a new camera was sent in along with a new photographer to operate it.

By noon the FSB men had wandered off; perhaps they found the aged reporter as boorish as he found them. They remained in the lobby, mostly harassing other guests and giving the stink-eye to everyone who passed, but Clark could at least sip his coffee without having to keep his elbows pressed tight against his body.

Although Clark was forced to spend the vast majority of his efforts here in the lobby maintaining his cover, he was, in fact, here for a reason. With expert nonchalance, he was able to keep his head on a swivel and monitor the comings and goings to the elevators on the other side of the room, keeping a watchful eye out anytime someone went to the ninth floor.

Just after twelve-thirty, two men whom Clark immediately ID’d as potential Spetsnaz types entered the big hotel lobby and walked over to the elevators. Here they spoke for a moment with two thick ruffians wearing ill-fitting suits. Clark had pegged the two for Seven Strong Men goons, probably down here controlling who got on and off the elevator. After a few moments of conversation, the hard-cut military-looking men stepped into one of the elevators and the doors shut.

Clark adjusted his reading glasses on his nose. They were built with special lenses that gave him distant magnification when he looked through the very top of the glass. Using these, he was able to read the elevator numbers from across the room, and saw that the car traveled up to the ninth floor.

Yep,
Clark said to himself,
these guys are here to talk to the boss.

Twenty minutes later, the two men appeared in the same elevator car and then walked to the front doors of the hotel.

Clark waited until the instant they pushed through the revolving doors, and then he spoke into his phone as if responding to the other party he’d been talking to all along. “I’m glad you said that, Bob.”

This was Clark’s code to the cars outside to let them know whoever was leaving the hotel was someone of interest. It was now the job of the two car teams to ID the subjects and their vehicle.

Ding was behind the wheel of a black Toyota Highlander a hundred yards up the street, across from the road construction area. Dom sat next to him. They saw the two men exit the hotel and climb into a waiting Land Rover, and the vehicle took off to the north, toward their position.

Dom spoke into his headset, over the voice of Clark, who chatted away in an imaginary conversation: “Vehicle coming this way. We’ll take it from here.”

Chavez pulled into traffic a few cars behind the SUV when it passed, and then followed it up Naberezhno-Khreshchatytska Street, along the left bank of the Dnieper, and then onto Naberezhno-Luhova.

While they drove along, Dominic Caruso opened an app on his iPad and prepared himself to input a quick but crucial set of commands as soon as the time was right.

There was a great deal of traffic in both directions, but Ding stayed three cars behind the target vehicle until they hit a red light. The instant both cars stopped moving, Caruso tapped an icon on his tablet.

Under his seat, attached to the underside of the Toyota, a radio-controlled car the size of a brick lost its magnetic connection with the metal oil pan and dropped to the street. On his screen Dom saw the camera view of the little vehicle, and he pushed forward the throttle icon to accelerate the RC car below him, driving it under a truck parked in traffic directly in front of his Highlander, and then under a four-door sedan.

When the RC car arrived below the target SUV, he tapped an icon on the tablet, changing the image to an upward-looking camera. A tiny light automatically turned on, and now Dom drove his little car slowly, moving it left and right by turning the tablet accordingly, looking for just the exact location on the bottom of the vehicle.

He stopped his tiny remote vehicle below the SUV’s oil pan, then tapped a few icons, locking the wheels of the device in place. Once this was done, he switched to his deployment screen on the app, and he tapped a graphic that said, simply, “pneumatic deployment.”

Below the SUV the slap-on GPS device attached to the top of the RC vehicle popped into the air under the power of a compressed air-powered launcher. The matchbox-sized transmitter hit the metallic surface below the SUV and stuck to it with its powerful magnet, and instantly the transmitter began sending the GPS location of the target vehicle.

On the conference call, Gavin Biery, who was sitting in front of his laptops back at the safe house, said, “Receiving signal.”

“Roger that,” Dom replied, and as the vehicles in front of him began rolling forward again, he hastily unlocked the RC car’s wheels, switched his camera back to the forward view, and turned the little car around and raced it back to his Toyota Highlander.

Chavez drove forward while the RC car rolled back to him. When the two vehicles met, Dom pressed an icon on his screen and the vehicle itself popped into the air on its spring-fired wheels. With a loud and satisfying
thunk
, Ding and Dom knew the electromagnets on the RC car had reattached themselves to the oil pan, and they made the next turn to their left so they could head back to the hotel.

They stopped along the way back, pulling into a gas station on Volos’ka Street, and here they retrieved the RC car and loaded it with another slap-on. It was early afternoon, after all—Gleb the Scar might well have other appointments that would need tracking.