Command Authority (45 page)

A
fter 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.”

—

A
n 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 down 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.

But he did discover something interesting. In a meeting three days before the death of Tobias Gabler, Penright had pressured Marcus Wetzel to try to get more information about the account holder of the two hundred million. To do this, it appeared from the documentation, Morningstar had spoken directly to Tobias Gabler at a meeting between the two of them in a park near Lake Zug.

Jack wondered if that conversation set in motion the death of all three men. It seemed possible that once Gabler knew Wetzel was fishing around for information about the account, he might have gone to the Russians directly to warn them a bank executive was asking questions.

Then, it was conceivable to Ryan, the Russians might have decided to move their money to safety and to kill both Wetzel, the man asking the questions, and Gabler, the man in possession of the answers. And then, it was a stretch, but it was possible, the Russians killed the British agent managing the operation against them.

Ryan rubbed exhaustion from his eyes.

Just after nine p.m., Jack called Sir Basil at his home in Belgravia, London. “I don’t know what I found, but at least I have a place for us to start.”

“Where?”

“First things first. Thank you for letting me take a look at the files.”

“Of course.”

Jack explained that he’d worked through the in-house transfers, and he was near certain that the money Morningstar had flagged as suspicious had all been moved into another account.

Jack said, “We need to dig into the new numbered account. If we can find out who owns this, we can continue to monitor these funds.”

Charleston said, “As usual, Jack, you have done impressive work. But I am afraid what you are asking for cannot just be ordered up. Getting information on the new account would involve finding a new inside man at this particular bank. A bloody rare thing, indeed. I’m afraid Morningstar was a one-off.”

“We have to go to the bank. Either SIS or Langley. We can pressure them.”

“Pressuring a Swiss bank will not succeed without going through the Swiss legal system, and even if we did receive permission to get information on the account it would take months. Whoever controls that account can move the money out in days, if not hours.

“I’m sorry, Jack. We
had
an inside man, we lost him, and now we have lost the access he provided us.”

Jack knew Basil was correct. Morningstar had worked as an asset only because he had come willingly to the British. Any attempts to pressure RPB for information on the accounts would take a lot longer to bear fruit than it would take the Russians to move their money from the bank.

Ryan’s work of the past several hours had been, if not a waste of time, certainly nothing that would create actionable intelligence anytime in the near future.

Dejected, Ryan told Charleston he would fly back to the UK the next day, and he wished him a good evening. Then he gathered up all the files and left the little office.

The SIS courier named Mr. Miles had been waiting in the cafeteria the entire time Jack had worked, and now he went through every page of every document, checking the physical files with a printout he had with him. Then he put them back in his case, handcuffed it to his wrist, bid Jack good evening, and headed out to his car.

The CIA staff still in the building offered Jack a bed in a portion of the Army barracks used for CIA personnel, but they warned him there would be no hot shower tonight and that the cafeteria had closed for the evening.

Jack wasn’t a Marine any longer; he had no interest in austerity and he wanted to clear his head with a meal and a hot shower. He grabbed his suitcase and walked out the front gate of Clay Headquarters, and flagged down a taxi. The driver did not speak much English, but he understood when Jack said he wanted to go to a hotel.

“What hotel?” the driver asked.

It was certainly a reasonable question, but Ryan didn’t have an answer. He didn’t know Berlin well at all. He thought back to the area he had been in the evening before. He said, “Wedding? Is there a hotel in Wedding?”