Commander-In-Chief (44 page)

C
lark dreamt of the pain before he woke to feel it. In his dream he had been at home in bed; Sandy might have been next to him but he could not turn to look. A truck had driven into his bedroom, slowly and without seeming to care, and it had driven onto his bed, pinning him down. His legs were crossed, one on top of the other, so they hurt the worst, but his back was twisted by the big tires, and the heat from the exhaust pipe burned the side of his head, just behind his right ear.

This was an awful dream, to be sure, but he preferred it to how he felt when he woke. His mind took in the feeling, his body alive with the pain, and his arms and legs were just as slow to operate as they had been when he’d been dreaming.

He was looking up through the companionway, so he saw a bit of the faint glow from a mostly moonless night, but other than that he was still shrouded in darkness.

He had no idea how long he’d been lying here, and he also had no idea how badly he’d been hurt, but the worst of it was the side
of his head behind his right ear, so he forced his right hand up to touch it, praying the swelling would be on the outside of his skull, and not inside, where he ran the real risk of death, even hours after the injury occurred.

He touched his fingers to the center of the pain and he did, indeed, feel a massive knot there, which would have been good news, but Clark wasn’t feeling any better about it, because as he’d moved his hand to his head he’d managed to splash himself in the face with seawater.

If he hadn’t just suffered a concussion, if he hadn’t just woken up from an unconscious state brought on by a violent blow to the head, then Clark would have recognized much more quickly that he was lying in pain in the bowels of a sinking boat. As it happened, it took him several seconds to work this out; only the taste of the water on his lips and the sense his ears were now filling with the wetness and blocking out the noises around him impressed on him how bad his situation had become.

Now the pain in his head and his back and his legs was all of minor importance. No matter how bad he hurt, no matter what condition he found himself in when he began to move, he had only one objective.

John Clark was a Navy man, true, but he found himself under no obligation whatsoever to go down with his ship.

His legs were probably just bruised; his right shin and his left knee had caught the stairs in the companionway. Clark didn’t need a slow-mo replay of the event to know this. His back was killing him, it had seized in spasm, and he didn’t know how the hell he was going to swim when one of the largest chains of muscles in his body refused to cooperate with the orders sent from his brain, but that was a problem he’d have to sort out in a minute or two. For now it
was about getting out of the saloon, then out of the cockpit, and finally off the deck before this fifty-two-foot Irwin rolled over and took him down with it.

He pulled himself out of the water and up the companionway stairs in the darkness. To his right, circuits blew on his radio and weather center with pops and snaps and flashes of light as the seawater reached thigh-high.

John had watched boats sink before, and he knew the speed of the descent was unpredictable. A boat filling with a foot of water a minute could double or triple this rate instantly as the water found more non-waterproof openings, more ways to fill the air below the waterline. This very phenomenon was happening now, in fact. He’d been conscious no more than two minutes, and already the water had risen from a few inches over the deck of the saloon to three feet.

He made it up to the cockpit; here he put weight on both his legs and stood up for the first time. He felt weak and unsteady, his head was heavy like he’d been drugged, but he knew this was due to the blow to the head.

But not entirely. As he wobbled through the cockpit trying to find his gun and his mobile phone he realized the sailboat had begun a heavy list to port. He fought against it for a moment while he kept looking for the two items he did not want to leave the boat without, but quickly he came to his depleted senses and decided his luck of late had been far too bad for him to push it one second more.

Wearing only a pair of linen pants and boat shoes, he made his way out onto the main deck and leapt into the black water, fought against the agony in his back as he tried to swim away from the boat, at least far enough to avoid being slammed in the head by one of the masts as it came down.

He gave up on a breaststroke or a crawl, settled for a one-arm
sidestroke because of his back pain, and was glad to see his faculties hadn’t been damaged so much he could not still cover water rapidly and efficiently.

He took a break from his swim to shore, just long enough to watch a few more pops of electrical circuits blow on the deck, then the mast light flashed on and off in a shower of sparks.

Then the boat rolled over like a dying animal, revealing its keel in the low light of the moon.

Beyond the sad display a hundred yards away from him, he saw something that excited him for a moment. The lights of a boat in the distance. It was moving, but with no other reference points it was hard to tell if it was coming or going.

Quickly he told himself to curb his enthusiasm. The lights in the distance weren’t going to be his salvation. He recognized the configuration of the masts from the masthead lights, and he realized he was watching the
Spinnaker II
round the northern tip of West Seal Dog Island. From the fact he could only make out the white light on the stern, he felt sure it was departing, motoring away to the northeast, perhaps for Anegada Island.

Not a sound made its way across the water to Clark’s position as the catamaran left his view.

The lights disappearing in the dark took with them a mother and a child held against their will, their lives the key to unlocking a puzzle with global ramifications.

Clark started up his sidestroke again, telling himself to keep his mind on his personal situation. It occurred to him that he had no way to prove anything untoward had happened here. His wounds would just make him look like some aging boat renter who slipped on his companionway as he rushed down to see about a leak. The fact that his bilge alarm had not gone off, screaming at 140 decibels, would mean nothing to most investigators, because for all they
knew, the old renter of the Irwin probably hadn’t tested it before setting out.

Well before first light, the battered and bruised body of a man—alive but too exhausted and broken to swim—floated the last two hundred yards through the gentle surf, washing ashore like trash in the water.

Clark crawled up the sand, through the morning coral and shell deposits, catching seaweed on his arms and knees as he did so.

He was exhausted and he was injured, and at the moment he was bereft of a plan. But as he sat there spitting sand out of his mouth, he told himself he’d get back in the fight. He didn’t need a hospital. He just needed the three most important things he’d lost tonight—his phone, his target, and his motherfucking gun.

•   •   •

J
ack Ryan, Jr., sat quietly, his body as still as a statue, his eyes locked on Salvatore as he sat at the lobby bar in the Stanhope Hotel. The Italian paparazzo had a drink on the bar in front of him and his mobile in his hand.

Jack stared intently at the man’s face and did his best to gauge his mood, his intentions. Was he bored, intense, excited, scared? Was this just another day at the office for him, or was he being sent on some mission?

Jack leaned in, getting as close to the man’s face as he could while still focusing.

Nothing. It was too hard to tell anything, looking at a man on a computer monitor.

Jack was sitting at his cubicle, and the security camera feed from the hotel was running on his center monitor in real time, pulled in by Gavin Biery’s IT team.

This wasn’t surveillance, what Jack was doing. In fact, he thought it was a joke. Unless and until Salvatore got up and did something obvious, Jack knew he’d have no idea what the hell was going on.

Jack had spent most of the workday looking into Salvatore in one form or another. He started with the man’s history. In his career Salvatore had gone many places, taken and sold thousands of photographs all over Europe, almost all of them of famous people who were just trying to go about their day. It was typical celebrity smash-mouth paparazzo work. But in all these travels, Jack had not found one example of Salvatore working in Brussels.

Jack had also looked into the current status of dozens of other European-based paparazzi, using social media to determine their locations. Of the fifty or so he’d been able to pin down, not one of them had gone to Brussels, and this gave him the strong suspicion there was nothing going on there at the moment that would interest the paparazzi.

The Italian seemed to be on the world’s most boring vacation, mostly just sitting around in the lobby bar at night and venturing out during the day, but not in some specific pattern like he was here for a nine-to-five job. No, he’d leave for an hour or two in the afternoon, then return to his hotel.

Jack had no idea what was going on, but he felt strongly that Salvatore wouldn’t be here at all if he wasn’t working in some capacity for the Russians, as he’d obviously been doing in Rome.

He had taken this information back to Gerry, framing it just as an FYI, an update on his progress about the Salvatore case. When Gerry didn’t react to Jack’s hints that perhaps it would be worthwhile for Jack to go over to Belgium after all, Jack went for broke, and point-blank requested approval again.

And as before, Gerry denied the request.

Jack went back to his desk and spent the rest of the day watching camera feeds at Salvatore’s hotel, and that’s where he finally found him, in the lobby, at ten p.m. Brussels time. The Italian was alone, he drank vodka on ice, and he played with his phone, either waiting for a message or just goofing off—Jack couldn’t tell which through the security camera.

Jack couldn’t tell much of
anything
through the security camera.

He realized then and there that he had to know what the man was up to, and there was just one way to find out. He couldn’t wait for Ding and Dom to finish their work in Lithuania, or for Clark to finish his work in the BVIs. Whatever Salvatore was doing in Brussels was time-sensitive.

Jack decided he would defy Gerry Hendley’s direct order to stand down, to wait for support from his fellow operators.

He would lose his job for his decision; he had no doubt in his mind. Gerry had allowed some indiscretions from Jack in the past. The younger Ryan had called audibles on missions that weren’t exactly in the spirit of Gerry’s orders, but he’d always done them in the heat of the moment, for the undeniable greater good of the mission.

But this was very different. He’d been expressly ordered out of the European theater and back to Campus HQ, he’d then requested to travel back to Europe to run a solo surveillance package on Salvatore, and Gerry Hendley, director of The Campus, had unequivocally denied this request.

There’d be no getting around it: When Jack climbed aboard a plane to Belgium, he would be AWOL from The Campus and insubordinate.

He’d be gone.

But Jack knew he was going to do it anyway.

J
ohn Clark sat in the saloon of a small sailboat, smiling at the middle-aged German couple who’d collected him from the shore of West Seal Dog Island an hour before. The husband was dressed only in a Speedo; he was as pink as a rose and as round as a beach ball, and although she was much more modestly dressed, his wife was no more svelte.

They smiled back at Clark, which told him they didn’t get the hint that he wanted some privacy.

They’d rescued him from the rocky deserted island after he had sat there six hours in the sun, feeling the muscle spasms and the bruising and the swelling, and brooding over how nice it was going to feel to get the Walkers’ kidnappers at gunpoint.

And then when the German couple brought him on board their thirty-five-foot Catalina, the
Frau
tended to his wounds with the boat’s med kit and the
Herr
brought him a cold bottle of pilsner in an actual stein.

For a minute Clark thought his head injury was so bad his brain was playing bizarre and cruel tricks on him.

Almost immediately the couple asked to get a picture with the American, their catch of the day; they were so proud of their rescue Clark thought this would make the papers in whatever tiny hamlet they lived in back in Bavaria. He obliged reluctantly and then asked if he could use their phone to call his wife.

And here they were, Clark with the phone in his hand and Gerry Hendley’s number already keyed into it, and the Germans smiling and grinning and beaming with pride, staring at him like they wanted to take him to a taxidermist and mount him and put him over their mantel.

Clark smiled even broader. “I’m sorry. I wonder if I could have a little privacy. I might get emotional talking to my wife, since I almost died last night. It would be embarrassing to me for you to see me cry.”

“Ach so!”
said the husband, and the wife quickly checked the icepack and the bandage on the side of his head, and then the husband shooed her up the tiny companionway and then followed her, even closing the companionway door.

Clark blew out a long sigh while he dialed the phone, then deleted his picture while it rang.

Gerry answered his mobile after a few rings. “Hendley.”

“Hey, Gerry, John here.”

“Jesus, John, I’ve been calling you all morning.”

“Yeah, well my phone is probably getting humped by a lobster right now.”

“I’m sorry . . . what do you mean by that?”

“It’s at the bottom of the ocean.” John told Gerry everything condensed into a minute of time, because he didn’t know when the German couple was going to peek down on him and he really didn’t feel like pretending to cry.

When he finished Gerry said, “Christ, John. We’ve got to get you out of there.”

“I’m fine. I just need to be reequipped, and I need a new lead on the
Spinnaker II
.”

“I’ll pull the boys out of Lithuania to come help you.”

“Please don’t! What they are doing is important. This is important down here, but rescuing the Walkers isn’t in the same ballpark as far as significance. I can handle this myself.”

Clark realized he was beginning to sound like Jack Junior. He had something to prove that, one could argue, transcended logic and sense. Jack had to live up to the legend of his father. Clark had to live up to the legend of himself. Both he and Jack, Clark realized, were dealing with self-inflicted forces.

But that didn’t make them any less real.

It simultaneously annoyed him and allowed him to lighten his criticisms of his younger operator.

Gerry said, “Look, when you didn’t check in first thing this morning I got worried. I sent Adara down, she’ll be landing around one-thirty.”

“Gerry, I don’t need—”

“Wait, just listen. It’s done. Adara will support you. No arguments. You know what she’s done in other ops. She is more than capable of providing operational support.”

Gerry asked for no arguments, and Clark gave him none.

•   •   •

C
lark’s morning with the German couple ended when Adara Sherman picked him up in a rented helicopter in Spanish Town, Virgin Gorda. Clark had explained the attractive young woman in the red Robinson helicopter was an employee of the company he
worked for, but he didn’t explain how she happened to be down here.

As they flew back toward Tortola, Adara explained she had rented a small two-room house near the airport and she was taking Clark there now so she could check out his injuries.

Clark protested out of habit, but his entire body hurt like hell, and he was exhausted nearly to the point of nausea.

When they got into the house, a businesslike Adara Sherman opened her rolling backpack med kit in the kitchen and ordered John Clark to take off his shirt.

Adara looked at his bruises and scrapes. “Good Lord! Did you fall down the stairs?”

“As a matter of fact, I did.” He winced when she rubbed an alcohol compress on his back. “Is this where you and the other kids start talking about putting me in assisted living?”

It was a joke, and Adara had an easy laugh, even in tough situations, but she wasn’t laughing now. She saw the knot behind his ear. “Oh . . . I get it. It looks like someone encouraged you to fall.”

“That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

“Was this a leather sap?”

“It felt like a hammer, but I’m not sure. I guess everything to the skull feels like a hammer.”

Adara put ice behind his ear after tending to his other wounds. When she was finished Clark said, “We need to find that boat. I feel like they are still in the area, but it could take days to find it.”

“John . . . we have an aircraft. We can fly across this entire chain in minutes.”

“The Gulfstream can’t make low passes over the BVIs looking for a boat. It will draw too much attention.”

“Then I’ll rent that Robinson we were just on. On the way to
pick you up, the pilot said he moves people all over the BVIs all day long.”

“What’s he going to say to flying a recon mission?”

Adara just smiled. “Trust me, Mr. Clark. I’ll make up a good story. He told me he only had two short charters tomorrow, so I’ll call him now, and first thing in the morning he and I will go out hunting for that catamaran.”

Clark winced again as she cinched an ACE bandage holding an icepack around his head. “What about me?”

Adara said, “The only way this happens is if you take a couple days to recuperate. I see the pain you are in. You are lucky you aren’t in traction in the hospital, or worse.”

“But—”

“I can do the recon on my own. I know what I’m looking for. I can see better than you. No offense, but it’s true. I’ll find the boat if it’s out there, and I’ll report back to you. You lie around here for forty-eight hours, keep your ice on, and you will thank me when you get back in action.”

“Ms. Sherman, I am really fine.”

“Everybody says that the day after an injury. It’s two days after, when the bruising circulates through the soft tissue, that the pain gets the worst.”

John had learned this very fact from a lifetime of hard living. In retrospect, he wished he’d learned it from a book instead.

Adara added, “Let’s let them think you are dead. If you go back out to the marinas and ports asking more questions, it won’t take them any time to realize you are still alive and still hunting for them.”

Clark realized Sherman was right. Still, he said, “What am I going to do for two days?”

“First, you’re going to call your wife and daughter and tell them you love them.”

Clark looked down at the floor, a little embarrassed. “Of course.”

“Good. And you don’t need me to tell you to do the other thing you have to do.”

“What other thing?”

Adara Sherman gave John Clark a hard look. “You are going to plan your next meeting with the men who did this to you.”

Clark nodded. No, he didn’t need anyone to tell him this.