Command Authority (22 page)
Authors: Tom Clancy,Mark Greaney
There was a brief pause. “Sorry, sir, but I’m afraid this qualifies.”
“I’ll be down in a second.”
Bixby flicked off the switch on the shredder and hurried downstairs.
—
I
n the lobby, Bixby found the Delta Force officer in charge of the small detachment. His call sign was Midas, but Bixby knew the man was a lieutenant colonel named Barry Jankowski who’d spent years as a highly decorated U.S. Army Ranger. He couldn’t help noticing that Midas had his H&K assault rifle hanging on his shoulder and a helmet on his head.
He hadn’t been wearing either the last time Keith had seen him, a half-hour earlier.
Not good.
With him was Rex, the security contractor in charge of the Lighthouse. He, too, was armed, but he always wore his M4 carbine when he was on the job.
“What’s going on?” Keith asked, as he left the stairwell.
Rex said, “We’ve got trouble. One of the Ukrainian security guys was on his way in for his shift, and he got a call from a buddy on the local police force. The cop told him he shouldn’t come in to work tonight.”
“Did he say why?”
“He said word was spreading this was a NATO facility, and a protest is being organized. The local cops had been told to stay out of it.”
“Shit,” Bixby said, then looked to Midas. “What do you think?”
Midas answered, “I think we should pack up what we can, demo the rest, and get the fuck out of here. But it’s not my call.”
Keith thought of all the classified equipment in the building. “We’ve got a hell of a lot of sensitive equipment left to break down. If we blow or burn the stuff while we’re here we’ll just draw attention to ourselves and we won’t get out of here. We’ve got antennas on the roof and more gear in the commo room. If we set charges, we can’t be sure we got it all, and you can be damn sure the Russians will pick this place apart when they get here.
“We’ll keep working on the double, through the night. We won’t have time to completely disassemble all the satellite equipment on the roof—we’ll have to just unhook everything and cram it in the trucks.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll need a couple more vehicles to make it all fit.”
Rex said, “I can call some locals for that.”
Bixby shook his head. “Not if the cops are already talking about us. I don’t want anyone in the neighborhood to know we’re about to make a run for it.”
Bixby mulled it over quickly. Who could he call to help? There were some nonofficial cover operators in the country, but they were all near the border, and they checked in only when it was secure to do so. He couldn’t see a way to ask them to come to the Lighthouse without burning more CIA assets.
There were a small number of U.S. forces here in Ukraine, based mostly on Ukrainian military bases. But none were in the Crimean peninsula, and more important, he couldn’t just have a few U.S. Army Humvees roll through the gates without attracting the kind of attention that would make driving out of here quietly an impossibility.
Then it came to him. John Clark and Domingo Chavez.
He turned to Midas. “I’ll make a call and have a couple more trucks here tomorrow morning.”
Midas said, “Good deal. We’ve got guys on the roof watching for any developments in the streets. The rest of us will keep packing up in the meantime.”
—
J
ohn Clark was just climbing into the plush bedding in his deluxe room in the Fairmont Grand Hotel when his sat phone rang.
“Clark.”
“Hey, buddy.”
Clark recognized Keith Bixby. He had to chuckle. It already sounded like the CIA man was going to ask for another favor. “Hey, pal,” he replied.
“I hate to push my luck with you, but I’ve got a problem and I could really use some quick help.”
“Name it.”
“It involves an eleven-hour drive through the night into a situation that is going from somewhat shaky to downright dangerous. You up for that?”
Clark replied, “I’ll notify my guys. I guess I better call room service and get some coffee up here.”
Bixby explained the situation in brief, and within minutes Clark was on the phone with Ding in the safe-house flat across town.
J
ack Ryan, Jr., had spent the entire day in his office at Castor and Boyle setting up a new IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook database. This file pertained to his new assignment, the theft of funds from a Norwegian freighter company that had purchased some ships from a Russian firm but, upon delivery, realized they had been sold rusty hulks. Not only was the case cut-and-dried and uninteresting, but the total value of the crime was several orders of magnitude less than the Galbraith–Gazprom affair. Jack had found himself bored by noon, and by two p.m. he was already sneaking peeks at a Gazprom affiliate mind map he’d made on Analyst’s Notebook the previous week.
His phone rang, and he reached for it automatically.
“Ryan.”
“Hey, Jack. Am I interrupting anything?”
Ryan was surprised to hear from his father. “Hey, Dad! Not at all. Just dealing with the Russians.”
“You and me both.”
Junior said, “Yeah, I heard. Has Dan figured out who poisoned Golovko yet?”
“Yes, but it’s one of those things that creates more questions than answers.”
Jack Junior looked up at his mind map; it looked like multicolored spaghetti noodles in a bowl. “I hear you.”
“Mom said you called the other night. Sorry I didn’t get to talk to you.”
“That’s okay. I know you have been running around dealing with Sergey and Ukraine. I hope you guys are doing okay.”
“We’re fine. We’re back in the residence, and it’s the same as ever. They tore the john out of the living room bathroom. Can you believe that?”
“Unreal. Look, Dad. I’m sorry I haven’t checked in. Just real busy at work.”
“It’s okay, sport. Been pretty busy at work myself.”
The younger Ryan chuckled.
“So how’s life?”
“It’s fine.”
“Living in London is great, right?” Jack Junior could hear the excitement in his dad’s voice, almost as if he was enjoying himself vicariously through his son’s experience, reliving his own time here so long ago.
Junior just muttered out an unenergetic “Yeah.”
There was a pause. Jack Senior said, “It
is
great, right?”
“I guess I’m still settling in a little.”
“Is something wrong? Is there a problem?”
“No, Dad. Everything is fine.”
Jack Senior paused again. “You know you can talk about anything, right?”
“Of course. And I will. It’s all good. Work is just frustrating.”
“Okay.” The father left it alone, though he could hear tension in his son’s voice. He asked, “I was wondering if you had time to do me a favor.”
Now Jack Junior lightened up. “Name it. It would be good to think about something else for a bit.”
“You remember Basil Charleston, don’t you?”
“Of course. It’s been a long time. He must be well into his eighties by now.”
“And that’s the problem. I have a couple of questions for him, and I would love to talk to him in person, but I have a funny feeling he’s not going to be able to hear me over the phone. The last time I called him it was hit-and-miss.”
“Does he still have his place in Belgravia?”
“He does.”
“I can swing by, it’s not far at all. What do you want me to ask him?”
“About thirty years ago, there was a string of murders in Europe. At the time, some people thought it was a KGB agent called Zenith who was responsible. We’ve discovered some uncorroborated intelligence tucked away in an old file that suggests Zenith and Roman Talanov were one and the same.”
“Holy shit,” the younger Ryan said.
“That’s basically my thought, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I need to know more about this. To that end, the code word ‘Bedrock’ came up in the Zenith murders. We don’t know if that relates to a person, a place, or maybe an operation. We’d like to know just what Bedrock is. And if anyone will remember, it would be Sir Basil.”
The elder Ryan explained that it looked like Charleston had handwritten a reference to Bedrock in the file, and he said he’d have his secretary e-mail the file to Jack Junior immediately.
“Surely that’s going to be classified intelligence. Why would he talk to me?”
Jack Senior said, “Basil won’t have a problem talking to you. He knows you used to work for Gerry.”
Jack Junior knew the phone conversation between him and his father was secure, and he knew his father was aware of this fact as well. Nevertheless, his dad was speaking to him with a little code. The fact Charleston knew the younger Ryan had “worked for Gerry” clearly meant he knew about The Campus. This surprised the younger Ryan.
“Really?”
“Absolutely. He knows you were an analyst there, and he knows the sort of work Gerry was involved with.”
“Okay. Next question. Did this take place back around the time we were living in the UK?”
“Yes, exactly that time. I remember this episode well, as a matter of fact. You were in diapers.”
“No offense, Dad, but that was a long time ago. Do you think there’s any chance Basil is going to remember the case, especially since there is no other record of Bedrock at SIS?”
“Jack, you know better than most, not every important operation gets written down for posterity. If Bedrock was important enough to stay off-book, then I think it’s likely Basil will know all about it.”
“You’ve got a point. I’ll ask him. Do you really think there is any chance this Talanov character was involved?”
“No way of knowing. I’ve learned not to rely too much on one single tidbit of intelligence. It takes more to convince me.”
“But you are curious enough to have me track down Bedrock.”
“Right,” Jack Senior said, then caught himself. “Track down? Wait. I just said talk to Basil. I don’t need you to do anything else.”
“Right,” the younger Ryan said.
“So tell me, what’s going on at work?”
“I am up to my neck in shady Russians over here. They are swindling clients out of fortunes and businesses and intellectual property. They are lying with a straight face and using the court system to steal and intimidate.”
“It’s that bad?”
“You wouldn’t believe.” Jack Junior caught himself. “What am I saying? You used to go toe-to-toe with the KGB.”
President Ryan said, “Very true. Do you enjoy the work, at least?”
The younger Ryan sighed. “It’s frustrating. I’ve spent the last few years thinking about justice. Chasing down bad guys and stopping them. But here I am chasing down the bad guys, but the most I can hope for is that some court that has no real jurisdiction over the bad guys will order that some assets are seized, and that probably will never happen.”
“Justice moves slowly.”
“In this case, it doesn’t move at all. My boss, Hugh Castor, is apparently afraid to pin any corruption directly on the
siloviki
in the Kremlin. I understand he doesn’t want to get bogged down in court over there, or have his people harassed by the authorities, but we are letting the real criminals off too lightly.
“I can’t help but think about what I could do to some of these worthless bastards to make them change their ways. If Ding and John and Sam and Dom were here, I wouldn’t be reading old ownership transfer agreements, that’s for damn sure.”
“I understand. There were a couple of times in my analytical career where I felt like I had connected the dots that needed to be connected, but there was not enough follow-through from those above me to make a difference. There is very little more frustrating than that.”
Jack Senior said, “I’ll e-mail you the document I’d like you to show Basil. That, and what I’ve already told you, might be enough for you to prod his memory. I won’t go into the rest of it, because it’s a long story, and I don’t even remember all the details myself.”
“No problem. I’ll talk to Basil and let you know what he says. Sounds like fun.”
Jack Senior laughed a little. “I can’t promise you any more excitement than spending a few minutes chatting with an octogenarian in his study, but I guess it’s something.”
“It
is
something, Dad. You know I love stories about the old days.”
The President’s voice darkened. “Not this one, son. This story did not have a happy ending at all.”
Thirty years earlier
J
ack Ryan woke to the patter of light rain, although he barely noticed it. This was England, after all; the absence of rain this time of year would have been unique. He reached out with a long, slow stretch and found his wife’s warm shoulder in the dark. Cathy was sound asleep still, which, at twenty minutes before six in the morning, seemed to Jack to be perfectly reasonable.
Their alarm was set for a quarter till the hour, so Jack took his time waking up. Finally he reached over and turned off the alarm before rolling out of bed. He shuffled into the kitchen to start the coffee and headed out to the front porch to get the paper.
The street was perfectly quiet. The Ryans lived in Chatham, in North Kent, some thirty miles from London. He and Cathy were the only couple on Grizedale Close who had to commute all the way to the capital, so theirs was more often than not the first house on the street with its lights on and movement inside each morning.
The neighbors all knew Cathy was a surgeon at Hammersmith Hospital, and they thought Jack had some boring job at the U.S. embassy. And while that was officially true, the truth would have inspired much more gossip over the hedges on Grizedale Close.
The young American was, in fact, an analyst in the CIA.
Jack noticed the milkman had delivered his usual half-gallon of whole milk. His daughter, Sally, would drink every drop of it before the next delivery. He picked the milk off the porch, and then searched for a moment before finding the newspaper in the bushes near the door. The copy of the
International Herald Tribune
was wrapped in a plastic bag to protect it from the weather, indicating the paperboy had better sense than he had aim.
Ryan went back inside and woke Cathy, then made his way to the kitchen. After pouring himself a cup of coffee, Jack snapped open the paper and took his first sip of the morning.
Below the fold on the front page, a picture grabbed his attention. A body covered in a tarp lay in a street. From the look of the buildings, he guessed it was Italy or perhaps Switzerland.
He read the headline below the photo.
“Swiss Banker Shot Dead, Four Others Wounded.”
Jack scanned the details of the article. It seemed the banker’s name was Tobias Gabler, and he worked at Ritzmann Privatbankiers, a venerable family-owned bank based in the Swiss canton of Zug. Gabler was killed, and several others were injured, when someone opened fire from the window of a building into a street full of pedestrians.
So far, the police had no one in custody.
Ryan looked up from the paper when Cathy strolled into the kitchen in her pink housecoat. She kissed Jack on the top of the head, and then she shuffled on to the coffeemaker.
“No surgery?” Jack asked. She never drank coffee when she had any surgery planned for the day.
“Nope,” she said, as she poured herself a cup. “Just some follow-up appointments. A jittery hand while I’m fitting someone for glasses won’t be the end of the world.”
Jack had no idea how his wife could go to work most mornings and slice into eyeballs.
Better her than me,
he told himself.
—
O
n the way to the shower, Jack peeked in on his five-year-old daughter, Sally. She was sleeping, but he knew she would be up and wide awake by the time he got out of the bathroom. He liked to get at least one nice, peaceful look at his little girl while she wasn’t darting around like a moving target, and first thing in the morning was his only opportunity.
He next peeked in on Jack Junior. His toddler was sound asleep, facedown in his crib on the top of his covers, his diapered butt sticking up in the air. Jack smiled. His little boy would be walking soon, and that little crib wouldn’t keep him for much longer.
Jack started the shower and then took a moment to look at himself in the mirror. Ryan was six-one, in fair shape, although he’d let both his diet and his exercise slip in the past few months here in the UK. Two small kids in the house meant keeping a flexible schedule, which got in the way of his workouts, and it also meant there was an abundance of snacks and cereals and treats in the pantry, one or two of which seemed to call to Ryan every day.
As he did most mornings, Ryan poked at the pronounced white scar on his shoulder. A year earlier he had saved the Prince of Wales and his family from an assassination attempt by an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army. Jack earned himself honorary knighthood from the queen for his quick-thinking actions, but he’d also earned himself a gunshot wound from the terrorists for not being quite quick enough.
Ryan had had other run-ins with danger, both with the Irish and in Vatican City, during the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. He’d done his best to prevent the attack, but he’d narrowly missed the Bulgarian agent working under orders from Moscow.
Ryan left the mirror and stepped into the shower, and the hot water instantly relieved tight muscles in his back, another remembrance of his past. As a twenty-three-year-old second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, he’d been stationed on an amphibious assault ship during a NATO exercise in Crete. He’d been in the back of a CH-46 when the aft rotor failed, and the chopper full of Marines crashed into the rocks. Ryan broke his back, lost his commission, and endured years of pain after the fact before a successful surgery gave him his life back.
Ryan started his post-military life at Merrill Lynch, where he made a small fortune in the markets. After a few years of this, he decided to go back to school; he earned his doctorate in history, and then, after teaching for a while at the Naval Academy, he’d gone to work for the CIA.
In just thirty-two years Jack Ryan had experienced more than the average man does in a lifetime. As he stood under the hot water he smiled, taking comfort in the certainty that his next thirty-two years wouldn’t be nearly as eventful. As far as he was concerned, watching his kids grow up was all the excitement he’d ever need.
By the time Jack and Cathy were ready to leave for work, the nanny had arrived. She was a young South African redhead named Margaret, and she immediately began her workday by wiping jam from Sally’s face with one hand while holding Junior in her other.
The taxi honked out on the street, so Jack and Cathy gave the kids one last hug and kiss, and then they headed out the door into what now had devolved into a heavy mist.
Ten minutes later they were in the train station in Chatham. They climbed aboard the train to London, sat in a first-class cabin, and read most of the way.
They parted in Victoria Station with a good-bye kiss, and by ten till nine Jack was walking along under his umbrella on Westminster Bridge Road.
Although Jack was officially an employee of the U.S. embassy, in truth he almost never set foot in the embassy. Instead, he worked at Century House, 100 Westminster Bridge Road, the offices of the Secret Intelligence Service.
Ryan had been sent over by his boss at the CIA, Director of Intelligence Admiral James Greer, to serve as a liaison between the two friendly services. He was assigned to Simon Harding and his Russian Working Group, and here Ryan pored through any and all intelligence MI6 wanted shared with the CIA relating to the USSR.
Although he knew they had every right to protect their sources and methods, even from the United States, Jack considered the Brits to be somewhat stingy with their information. More than once he found himself wondering if his counterpart SIS analyst working at Langley came across some of the same roadblocks when trying to get information out of the CIA. He had come to the conclusion that his own service was probably even more tightfisted. Still, the arrangement seemed to work well enough for both nations.
—
J
ust before ten a.m., the phone on Ryan’s desk rang. He was engrossed in a report on Russia’s Kilo-class submarines stationed in Paldiski, Estonia, so he reached for the handset distractedly.
“This is Ryan.”
“Good morning, Jack.” It was Sir Basil Charleston himself, director general of the Secret Intelligence Service.
Ryan sat up straighter and put the dot-matrix printout he’d been reading down on the blotter in front of him. “Morning, Basil.”
“I was wondering if I could borrow you away from Simon for a few minutes. Would you be so good as to pop round?”
“Now? Sure. I’ll be right up.”
“Splendid.”
Ryan took the executive elevator to Sir Basil’s corner office on the top floor. When he walked in, he saw the director of the Secret Intelligence Service standing by a window that overlooked the Thames. He was talking to a blond man about Jack’s age who wore an expensive-looking charcoal-gray pin-striped suit.
“Oh, hello, Jack. There you are,” said Basil. “I’d like to introduce you to David Penright.”
The two men shook hands. Penright’s blond hair was slicked back, and his sharp blue eyes stood out on his clean-shaven face.
“Sir John, it’s a pleasure.”
“Please, call me Jack.”
Basil said, “Jack is a little self-conscious about his knighthood.”
“
Honorary
knighthood,” Ryan hastened to add.
Penright said with a smile, “I see what you mean. Very well. Jack it is.”
The three men sat in chairs around a coffee table, and a tea service was brought in.
Charleston said, “David is an operational officer, based in Zurich, mostly, aren’t you, David?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tough post,” Ryan joked with a smile. Neither of the two men smiled back.
Oops,
Jack thought.
On the coffee table next to the service was that morning’s copy of
The Times
of London. Penright picked it up. “Have you had a chance to look over the paper?”
“I get the
International Tribune
. I glanced at it.”
“Did you see the article about the dreadful affair in Switzerland yesterday afternoon?”
“In Zug, you mean? Pretty awful. A man was killed, some others were wounded. The paper says it didn’t look like robbery, since nothing was taken.”
Penright said, “The man’s name was Tobias Gabler. He was killed not in Zug, but in a nearby burg called Rotkreuz.”
“Right. He was a banker?”
Penright replied, “He was indeed. Are you familiar with his bank, Ritzmann Privatbankiers?”
Ryan said, “No. There are dozens of small, family-owned banks in Switzerland. They’ve been around forever, so they must be successful, but like most Swiss banks, knowing just how successful they are is difficult.”
“And why is that?” Charleston asked.
“The Swiss Banking Act of 1934 essentially codified their bank secrecy procedures. Swiss banks don’t have to share any information with any third party, including foreign governments, unless so ordered by a Swiss court.”
Penright said, “And good luck with that.”
“Exactly,” agreed Ryan. “The Swiss are tight when it comes to giving up information. They use numbered accounts, which draws dirty money to them like a bee to honey.”
Ryan added, “The numbered accounts aren’t really as anonymous as many make them out to be, because the bank itself has to fully verify the identity of the person opening the account. That said, they do not have to fix the name to the account itself. And this makes transactions anonymous, because anyone with the correct code can deposit to or withdraw from the account.”
The two Englishmen looked at each other, as if deciding whether the conversation was to continue.
After a moment, Sir Basil nodded to David Penright.
The younger man said, “We have reason to believe a certain nefarious enterprise maintains accounts at RPB.”
This didn’t surprise Ryan in the slightest. “Cartel? Mafia?”
“We think there is a strong possibility that the man who was killed, Tobias Gabler, was managing numbered accounts for the KGB.”
This
did
surprise Ryan. “Interesting.”
“Is it?” Penright asked. “We were wondering if, perhaps, CIA had come to the same conclusion about the bank.”
“I can tell you with some degree of confidence that Langley doesn’t know of specific numbered accounts in Switzerland. I mean, sure, we know they exist. Russian intelligence has to stash black funds in the West so their operatives on this side of the Iron Curtain can have a steady stream of cash, but we don’t have their accounts pinned down.”
“You’re quite sure?” Penright asked. He seemed disappointed.
“I am pretty sure, but I can cable Jim Greer, just to double-check. I’d hope that if we had that kind of information, we’d either find a way to shut down the KGB’s access to the account or, better yet—”
Penright finished the thought. “Or, better yet, monitor the account, to see who makes withdrawals.”
“Right,” Jack said. “That could prove to be a treasure trove of intel about KGB ops.”
Charleston spoke up. “That was our idea. The interesting thing here, however, is there is one particular account in question that we are curious about, because it is quite large, and it’s just sitting there.”
“Maybe they are setting it up for some future operation,” Ryan suggested.
Sir Basil Charleston said, “I quite hope that is
not
the case.”
“Why do you say that?”
Basil leaned toward Ryan. “Because the account we are talking about has a balance in excess of two hundred million dollars. With regular high-dollar deposits coming in monthly.”
Jack’s eyes went wide. “Two hundred
million
?”
Penright said, “Yes. Two hundred four million, as a matter of fact. And if the money keeps coming in at the same pace, in another year there will be twice that.”
“All in
one
account? That’s unbelievable.”
“Quite,” said Charleston.
Ryan said, “Obviously, this isn’t being set up for an intelligence operation in the West. That’s
way
too much money. I . . . are you
sure
it’s KGB money?”
“We are not sure, but we believe so.”
That didn’t tell Jack much, but he assumed the Brits were holding back to protect their source. He thought for a moment. “I understand if you aren’t going to give me information about your source for this intelligence, but I can’t think of any possibility other than the fact you have someone in the inside of that bank.”