Command Authority (41 page)
Authors: Tom Clancy,Mark Greaney
Present day
J
ack Ryan, Jr., and Victor Oxley made it back to London just before five p.m. Of course, Ryan knew better than to return to his flat. Instead, he rented a room at a motor lodge on Wellesley Road in Croydon. Oxley had recommended it, explaining that he came to London from time to time and always stayed there, and he assured Ryan it was an out-of-the-way and suitable place for a “no questions asked” encounter, which was, Oxley pointed out, just what the situation called for now.
They had made one stop along the way. After growing tired of Oxley’s pestering, Jack pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket and fanned some bills out of his wallet, passing them over to the former spy. Oxley ducked into the market and returned ten minutes later with two shopping bags.
They pulled back onto the road, heading for the lodge, and this was when Jack learned Oxley had bought a fifth of Irish whiskey, a liter of cola, and two large bottles of beer. As for food, he’d picked up some snack cakes and a stick of sausage that looked to Jack as if it might have been as old as Oxley himself.
As Jack suspected when Oxley described the place, the motor lodge was a complete dump. There was peeling paint, and burns on the carpet and mold on the walls, but each room was over its own tiny one-car garage, clearly for the express purpose of hiding the vehicles of whoever was staying inside.
They pulled into their allotted garage and closed the door, then Jack and Victor heaved the Russian mob enforcer out of the trunk of the Mercedes. Victor yanked the man’s jacket up over his head so he couldn’t see. They then frog-walked him up a flight of stairs out of the garage and into the hotel room.
The bathroom was tiny and filthy, but it was a good place to stash a Russian gang member for a few minutes. There was exposed piping along the walls, and Oxley expertly tied the man in a fashion that kept his hands high behind his back so that he could not maneuver more than a couple inches without causing himself incredible pain in his shoulders. Oxley then took a pillow with a suspicious stain on it from the bed, removed the pillowcase, and hooded the man with it.
They shut the Russian in the bathroom, and then Jack turned up the television in the bedroom. He and the fifty-nine-year-old Brit stepped out onto a tiny balcony that overlooked a busy six-lane road.
Oxley was angry the lodge did not have a single piece of glassware for his use, but he made do by drinking a few long gulps out of the bottle of cola and then filling the bottle back up to the top of the neck with Irish whiskey. They sat on cheap aluminum chairs on the balcony while Jack watched the man drink and eat for a few minutes, using every last vestige of his patience, telling himself that the more satiated and sauced the ex–English spy was, the more he might talk.
Finally Jack said, “All right, Oxley. I want to question that asshole in the bathroom, but first I would like some answers from you. Do you feel like talking?”
The white-bearded Englishman seemed relaxed; Jack was sure it had something to do with all the whiskey in his cola. He shrugged, said, “First, start by calling me Ox. Second, know this. I’d rather not talk to you at all, but I don’t fancy armed Russian thugs chasing me till the end of my days, so I’m willing to work with you to get this all sorted. Still, there are things I can say, and there are things I’ll take with me to me grave.”
Jack opened a bottle of beer and took a sip. “Fair enough. Let’s start with something easy. When did you get back from Russia?”
After a moment, Oxley said, “I returned from the Motherland about twenty years ago.”
“What have you been doing the past twenty years? Can you talk about that?”
“I’ve been around. Here and there. Collecting government assistance, mostly.”
“Unemployed?”
“On and off the dole, lad. Do what I can.” He shrugged. “But not much more.”
Now Ox asked a question: “How is it that the son of the bleedin’ American President knows about me?”
Jack said, “My father wanted info on Bedrock, and he thought Sir Basil Charleston would know. I was over here anyway, so I went to ask him. Basil told me you were Bedrock. I tracked you from there, using SAS contacts.”
“Good ol’ Basil.”
“He thinks you want him dead.”
Oxley cocked his head. “Does he, now?” Oxley shook his head with a chuckle. “No. Charleston wasn’t part of the dirty tricks I was involved with. Old Basil didn’t do me any favors, but I can’t say he’s all bad.”
“He said you operated behind the Curtain. You fit in like a native.”
“My mum was from Omsk, in Siberia. She defected with her parents through Berlin, back before the wall. She met an English Army officer and they moved to the UK. Settled in Portsmouth. Dad became a fisherman, he wasn’t home much. My mum became part of the local Russian émigré community, so I grew up speaking more Russian at home than I did English.”
Oxley gulped from his bottle. “And why on earth was your father interested in an old story like Bedrock?”
Jack had brought along the photocopied page from the Swiss police report. He pulled it out of his jacket and handed it over to Oxley.
Oxley looked at the page, then reached into his pocket and scrounged around for a moment for a pair of reading glasses. He put them on and looked at the page again.
“It’s bloody German.”
“Yes. But your code name is on there in pencil that someone erased. Next to a story from the Swiss police of a man who was detained after the bombing of a restaurant in Rotkreuz, Switzerland.”
Oxley nodded very slowly, almost imperceptibly.
“So you remember.”
Oxley looked off into space, as if recalling a moment in the distant past. “I was ordered to track down a rumor in the East about a killer the KGB called Zenith.”
Jack wondered if Basil had been untruthful about Bedrock’s lack of involvement with Zenith, or if he’d just forgotten. Ryan said, “Zenith was in Western Europe. Why did you go to the East?”
“The first rumors about Zenith came from the Czechoslovakians. Two of their investigators working on a case in Prague were found floating facedown in the Vltava River. A Russian staying at a hotel in the area disappeared in a hurry without paying his bill. A search of the man’s room turned up some luggage. In it was a KGB cipher book with some writing on the inside flap. The Czechs managed to break enough of the code to decipher the word ‘Zenith.’ Whether or not that was the code name of the owner of the book with the Russians, no one knew, but ‘Zenith’ stuck nonetheless.
“The Czechoslovakians went to the KGB, but the Russians said they knew nothing about anyone named Zenith, nor did they admit to having any operatives in Prague.”
Jack said, “Yeah, well, the KGB lied a lot.”
“True,” Oxley said, “and I’m sure the Prague police were thinking the same thing, but suddenly the back alleys off Wenceslas Square started to look like a KGB convention. Russian spies rained down on the city, and all of them were hunting for this Zenith character.”
“And the UK learned this from a source in Prague?”
“MI5 got wind. Don’t ask me how. Before it was all over, he killed twice more in Czechoslovakia, and four men in Hungary.”
“All cops?”
“No. In Budapest he killed employees with the State Bank of Hungary, as well as a smuggler.”
“A smuggler?” Jack asked.
“Human smuggler. He was a bloke that helped defectors over the border. It was common in Hungary back then,” Oxley said. “Anyway, from our intelligence we got the impression Zenith was not KGB. He was some sort of a rogue. The KGB thought he was an ex–GRU man, who was now being run by a Western power. We were worried we would be implicated in his actions.”
“Why would the UK be implicated in his actions?”
Oxley’s chuckle was low and raspy. “Because we had an asset operating behind the Iron Curtain ourselves, doing a similar type of work.”
Jack’s eyebrows rose. Things were starting to make sense. “You?”
“Maybe you aren’t quite as daft as I took you for.” Oxley played with his reading glasses, moving them through his fingers slowly. He said, “Yeah. I was in Prague when Zenith was active there. I was in cover as a Russian, I was there alone, so naturally I was interviewed by the Czechs. I talked my way out of it, but when the killings continued in Hungary, some dim bulb in London thought I might get tied to the crimes. Zenith might hurt relations, right when we were hoping for a thaw. This was at the height of the arms race, but we liked the way things were heading. Poland was well on its way to democracy, Reagan and Thatcher had the Soviet Union by the knackers. There were still many battles to fight, but a new age was dawning. Zenith was upsetting the apple cart.”
“So you were sent to kill Zenith so that the KGB couldn’t blame the West for a rogue assassin running around whacking everybody?”
“That’s it.”
“Then what happened?”
“I couldn’t bloody find him. Neither could KGB.”
“But why did you go to Switzerland?”
“I was following some KGB geezers in Budapest who were themselves hunting Zenith. I was hoping they might lead me to him. I was quite surprised when they traveled to the West, to Zug, to visit a bank.”
“And then people started getting killed there, too.”
“Yes.”
“Zenith killed them?”
Oxley shrugged, a slow, tired gesture on his big frame; a long stream of air escaped through his nose. He watched the cars roll by on the road below the balcony. “Depends on who you believe.”
Ryan looked at Oxley. “Call me crazy, but right now, I believe you.”
Victor Oxley smiled a little. “Then, yes. Zenith killed the lot of them.”
The Englishman looked up from his drink now. “Now it’s your time to talk. Why is your father interested in this story now? This was thirty years ago. Hasn’t he created enough problems in the world to where this one could be left where it was?”
“I take it you disagree with my dad’s politics?”
“Politics? I’ve got no patience for politics. Don’t give a toss about it.”
“Then why do you hate my father?”
“It’s personal.”
“
Personal?
You know my dad?”
“No, and I don’t care to.” Ox waved his hand away, dismissing the topic. “I asked you the question, lad. Why now? What does your dear old daddy want with me?”
Ryan shrugged. “Your code name was found in the files relating to the Zenith case. Nobody had looked at them in a long time, I guess, but another old note in a dusty old file turned up suggesting that Roman Talanov was Zenith.”
Oxley looked at Ryan. “Talanov? Right. That’s the name. So? Again, that was ages ago. What the hell does it matter now?”
Jack was surprised. “Wait. You
know
Talanov is Zenith?”
“I suspect I am the one who put that old dusty note in that file. Back in ninety-two, I think it was. After I got out of the gulag. But you haven’t explained why anyone cares about the name of a rogue KGB assassin from a quarter-century ago.”
Jack thought for a moment. “I didn’t see a television in your flat.”
“No use for them. No radio, either. Occasionally, there will be a football match on at the pub, but I have no interest in the news.”
“That explains it, then.”
Ox was confused. “What are you on about, Ryan?”
“This isn’t about what happened a quarter-century ago. It’s about what’s happening now. You have no idea that Roman Talanov is the head of the FSB, do you?”
Oxley stared ahead, watching the traffic race by on Wellesley Road. After a long time he said, “No. I didn’t know that.” He took a thoughtful pull on his drink and stared off over the city. “Bloody fuckin’ hell.”
Thirty years earlier
C
IA analyst Jack Ryan spent the first few hours after the raid on the RAF Sprengelstrasse flat in a musty vacant office at the British consulate in West Berlin.
As soon as he was given the chance to use a secure phone, Ryan called the CIA director of intelligence, Admiral James Greer. He reached Greer at home—it was nine p.m. on the East Coast—and he filled him in on the events of the past few hours. The admiral was astonished by the news of the shootout, especially his own man’s part in it.
Ryan stressed to Greer he was skeptical that the RAF had operated alone, and he was certain there were other shadowy forces involved in this entire operation.
Greer doubted Ryan’s theory of Russian involvement. “But Jack. What about Rabbit? You know as well as I do we have an asset who was well informed on KGB operations. We’ve spent months debriefing Rabbit. I find it hard to believe he’s going to just scratch his chin and then say, ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention there is an assassin operating in Europe.’”
Jack said, “We need to check with him on this. Maybe he’ll remember something relevant.”
Greer said, “Look, Jack, we’ll talk to him again, but you and I both know he wasn’t holding out on us. If there were any active measures that in any way fit the description of what you are describing, he would have told us.”
“Zaitsev has been out of the KGB communication room for months. This could be something that started after he left.”
“Possible, but unlikely, and you know why. These operations take time to field. Assassinating Western European bankers. Co-opting and—I guess you are saying—framing West German terrorists. That doesn’t sound like an op that was just thrown together in the past few months, does it?”
“No,” Ryan conceded. He paused. “I know what this sounds like.”
“It sounds like you are grasping at straws. If it were anyone else, I’d dismiss this out of hand. But you aren’t anyone else. You are one hell of an analyst, and I owe it to you to tell you to follow your instincts.”
“Thanks.”
“But whatever you do, I want you to remember this. The Brits are pretty good at this sort of thing. If they say they are done with the investigation, you’ll be on your own over there. You can tap into whatever local agency facility you need to help you, of course, but be careful. You’ve come too close to danger already. I don’t want you taking any unnecessary risks.”
“That makes two of us.”
—
T
wenty minutes later, Ryan met with Eastling and his men in a second-floor office, and here they all went over the material found in the RAF safe house again. The German BfV retained custody of the briefcase and the contents inside, so two BfV investigators loomed over Eastling’s and Ryan’s shoulders while the Englishman and the American conducted their own review of the items.
Eastling and his men went first. This had begun as an SIS operation, after all. One of Eastling’s men had a fingerprint kit, and he dusted the case and the items inside, then Eastling himself took each piece of evidence and read it over, examining watermarks on paper, the techniques used to print the photographs of the bankers, the typewriter characteristics of the letters on the bomb-making guide and the communiqué.
The case itself was examined for a false bottom or any other hidden compartments, but none were found.
Jack was fascinated by Eastling’s handling of the evidence for the simple fact that Jack himself had no training in these types of investigative techniques. He wasn’t a cop or a detective. His dad had been a detective on the Baltimore PD, and he’d always been interested in police work, but he’d never seen it as his calling.
He was an analyst, however, so when he finally got his chance to look over the material, he went for the documents first. He wore rubber gloves, of course, and had one of the BfV officers standing with him to translate.
Jack tried to get the BfV men to admit they didn’t think it was possible the RAF members at the apartment could have possibly put up such a professional fight against GSG 9, but the Germans weren’t as certain as Ryan. There were nine dead civilians in the flat on Sprengelstrasse, and so far only five of the bodies had been identified. The BfV officers said they couldn’t pass judgment on the skill of the RAF fighters until they figured out the identity of all those lying on slabs in the morgue.
Ryan learned very little from his examination of the documents. He wasn’t a specialist on the RAF by any means, but the communiqué looked like a standard pronouncement from a left-wing terrorist group, and all the material involving the attacks on Gabler and Wetzel—the photos, the maps, and the bomb-making instructions—seemed legitimate.
The only thing doubtful about the entire scene was that in order to take the briefcase and its contents at face value, one had to believe Marta Scheuring possessed some of the absolute worst operational tradecraft in the history of left-wing terror. Even though the RAF routinely took credit for their operations, like most terror groups, the fact the young German woman had brought her ID along with her on her op strained credulity.
Ryan didn’t know what to make of it. Scheuring had a couple of arrests under her belt, but she’d certainly never been implicated in a murder. That said, two of the inhabitants of the flat had been wanted for a rocket attack on a NATO installation several years earlier, and while no one had been killed or even seriously injured in the attack, certainly the intention had been to cause loss of life.
Eastling, as usual, was leaning toward wrapping up this investigation. Ryan, on the other hand, thought the spoon-fed nature of this evidence created more suspicions than the evidence itself cleared up.
As the Germans were anxious to leave with their evidence, Ryan and the Brits finished their review of the material in under an hour.
Jack had been up for more than twenty-four hours, so around nine a.m. he was offered a couch in an unused office to catch a couple hours’ sleep.
—
A
t eleven-thirty a.m. Eastling leaned into the room. Ryan sat up, rubbing his eyes and pushing a wool blanket off his legs.
Eastling sat down in the chair in front of him. His eyes were bloodshot, and his clothes were wrinkled. Jack wondered if he looked as tired and worn-out as the Englishman did.
“What’s going on?” Jack asked.
“We’ve been through everything multiple times. The documents we found in Marta Scheuring’s room at the RAF safe house look legitimate. The Germans have finally identified the other bodies in the flat. They were three girlfriends and one boyfriend of the occupants. None of them are known RAF members, but of course this will be looked into further.
“They also checked into the sniper location across the street. The one-room flat had been rented by Marta Scheuring three nights ago.”
Jack was confused. “Marta rented a room two blocks away from where she lived? Why would she do that?”
Eastling shrugged. “Can’t answer that one. Her name is on the ledger, but no one could ID her picture. It’s a tenement-type lodging, so nobody pays attention to who comes and goes. Guest workers from Turkey, Ireland, and North Africa, mostly. A couple of people on her floor say they saw a man enter the room last night, late evening.”
“What did they say about the man?”
“Twenties or thirties. White. Might have been German, might have been something else. No one heard him talk. No one heard any shooting coming from the room, either.”
“How the hell is that possible?”
“Sniper rifle with a suppressor. It still makes a bloody loud racket, but considering the fact two blocks away a small-scale war was going on with more than two dozen people blasting each other and tossing bloody grenades, the
pop-pop
of a silenced weapon could quite easily go missed.”
Jack sighed, then he had a new thought. “We’ve got to go back to Zug, show the pictures of Marta Scheuring to the bartenders at the place where Penright met the German woman the night he died.”
Eastling was already shaking his head. “It’s done, mate. Swiss did it yesterday, used a copy of her license.”
“And?”
“Everyone working that night was in agreement. The woman who Eastling tried to pick up in the bar was not Marta Scheuring.”
Jack had been so certain. Now he did not know what to say. He just muttered, “What’s the next step?”
“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about. I know you have concerns of KGB involvement, and I’m certainly not prepared to rule anything out at this moment, but I do believe this RAF cell committed the attack that killed the two Swiss bankers.”
“What about Penright?”
Eastling answered with understated sarcasm: “I am sticking with my assertion that the bus that ran him down was not driven by the RAF, nor was it driven by the KGB. Seriously, Ryan, he wasn’t pushed. Remember, there were witnesses saying he was drunk. And we do not think he was drugged. His body did not show indications of known poisons, though toxicology results won’t be available for a while. If the Reds have some new poison we don’t know about, well, Lord help us all. But that’s not within the scope of my inquiry.”
“So what are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you we are going home. This afternoon.”
Jack rubbed his eyes. He found himself wanting to go home himself, to return to his house on Grizedale Close. Sitting on the sofa with Cathy, Sally on the floor coloring, and Jack Junior in his lap—it sounded like heaven right now.
But he pushed the fantasy out of his mind.
Not yet.
Jack said, “Have a nice trip. I’m staying.”
Eastling seemed to expect this. He said, “Am I going to have to force the issue?”
Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t have to do anything. I don’t work for you.”
“Bloody hell, Ryan, we are on the same side here.”
“Not as far as I’m concerned. You are on the side of clearing up the Penright death, and I am on the side of finding out what the hell actually happened. There are other forces at work in this operation. Is it possible that David fell in front of a city bus? I suppose so, but I think we are getting played by the other side.”
“How can I convince you?”
“You can give me everything you have on Morningstar. All the files leading up to Penright’s trip to Switzerland, as well as the paperwork found in the safe at the safe house in Zug. Give me that, let me look it all over, and I’ll draw my own conclusions as to what happened.”
“I can’t—”
“Basil brought me into this investigation because he thought I could help. I have expertise in this world—in a roundabout way, anyhow. If I was read in on what Penright knew, I could talk to Langley and try to get more relevant information on Ritzmann Privatbankiers. Maybe I can help connect whatever dots Penright was working on when he died.”
Eastling said, “You’re like some sort of a foxhound, aren’t you? You think you’ve found a scent and now you won’t stop, no matter what.”
Ryan replied, “I
am
on a scent. I
know
I am.”
Eastling did not respond to this, so Ryan prompted him.
“What do you think?”
Eastling said, “What do
I
think? I think you are a sanctimonious Yank who does not know how to behave. You shot up some Ulstermen last year and you got your knighthood, and you shot up some RAF sniper this morning and the Krauts will probably make you a bloody Kaiser or something equally as ridiculous, but your good fortune has advanced you further than your ability to work on a team ever will. If I was the one to make the decision, you would be dumped on your arse outside the U.S. consulate and shipped back to America, where you belong, in a steamer trunk.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “But this isn’t a call for me to make.”
He sighed again. “I’ll talk to Basil, and he will make the determination what, if anything, you can see from the Morningstar files.”
“That’s all I ask.”