Commander-In-Chief (5 page)

J
ack Ryan, Jr., slipped his phone back into his blazer and downed the last few drops of his double espresso. He checked his watch, then picked up the newspaper folded in front of him and glanced at it absentmindedly.

Jack was in his early thirties, just over six feet tall, with short dark hair and a trimmed beard. He wore sensible eyeglasses that, along with his tailored blue blazer, made him look older than his years, but his jeans and easy smile lessened any sense of stuffiness about him. He weighed two hundred five pounds, much of it muscle, but his clothing choices went a long way toward hiding his athletic physique.

He dropped the paper down on the table and looked across the nearly empty café, his eyes searching intently.

He just realized his date had been in the bathroom for a long time. He felt stress growing inside, a sudden feeling of foreboding.

Ysabel reappeared from the women’s restroom as if on cue, looking boyish but beautiful in jeans and a fitted leather jacket, her black hair up in a tight bun.

Jack stifled a sigh of relief, chastised himself for freaking out because a girl just spent a few minutes in the little girls’ room, and reminded himself they weren’t in the middle of a damn war zone.

Not anymore.

Jack stood from the table and pulled her chair out for her, and he called for the check as they both sat back down.

Ysabel said, “Sorry. I know you think I was just preening at the mirror for the last ten minutes.”

“Were you gone long? I hadn’t noticed.”

She smiled. A look that said she didn’t believe him. Shaking her head, she said, “I was touching up my makeup and another woman at the mirror knocked my purse on the floor. Everything fell out.” She giggled. “A girl keeps a lot in her purse, you know.”

“I’ve lifted your purse. Did she at least help you pick everything up?”

“Yes. She was very apologetic and helpful. Just a klutz. What about you? Is everything all right? I thought you said you’d be on the phone awhile.”

“Everything is fine. My boss is out of the office, so I’ll have to make my report tomorrow.”

In a hopeful tone, Ysabel asked, “You’re going to ask for more time here in Rome before you have to go?”

Jack nodded. “Told him we’ll need another week. We’re not quite finished here; plus, I have a lot of analytical prep work to do before I need to be on the ground in Luxembourg. Might as well do it here, since the apartment is paid up until the end of the month.” He affected an air of nonchalance, picking up the folded newspaper again and looking it over as he crossed his legs.

Ysabel frowned, but for only an instant, because Jack slowly looked up at her and grinned. “Kidding. All that’s true, but I’m going to stay another week so you and I can spend some more time
together. This working-vacation thing has been awesome. You think we could license it?”

She stood up and came around to his side of the table, sat in his lap and kissed him, but only after punching him on the arm first. He’d gotten used to her playful attitude, to the point he was slowly starting to adopt his own version of it.

Ysabel’s eyes widened suddenly. “I’ve got an idea! To celebrate, I am going to make you a fantastic dinner tonight.”

Ryan did not adopt her same sense of excitement. With an air of suspicion, he asked, “What’s on the menu?”

“A dish my grandmother taught me.
Kookoo sabzi.
”

“I really hope that’s not Farsi for ‘Grandma’s vegetarian mush.’”

She punched him playfully on the arm again. “Of course not! It’s an herb-and-vegetable quiche.”

“Oh, boy.”

Ysabel sighed and climbed off Jack’s lap. “It’s delicious, you’re gonna love it. I’ll go by the Persian market on the way home and get everything I need.”

Jack looked up at her without speaking, but he faked a look of enthusiasm.

Clearly, she saw right through it. “Why don’t you pick up some steaks at the butcher? Get a cut you would eat at home. You can grill while I make stew. We will have the
kookoo sabzi
as a side dish. An Iranian-and-American meal.”

Jack almost leapt up from his chair, his enthusiasm real this time. “The world in harmony, right there on our plates. I like it. I’ll meet you back at the apartment in a half-hour.”

They kissed again and Ysabel left the café, turning south. Jack headed east, a spring in his step because he was already thinking about dining on juicy steaks and drinking great wine on the balcony of his apartment, all with such a beautiful and amazing woman.

As he walked through central Rome’s late-afternoon swarm of pedestrians, cars, trucks, and scooters, he thought about his situation, and some of the spring left his step because he was reminded how temporary this all was. He and Iranian national Ysabel Kashani had spent the past two weeks here in one of the most romantic cities in the world, and he’d loved every minute of it, but it wasn’t going to last much longer.

He didn’t know what kind of a future he had with Ysabel, it was too early to say, because they had known each other for just over a month. They met on an operation in Asia and a relationship had developed quickly, and despite his reticence about getting into anything serious at this stage of his life, Jack had to admit he found himself falling for this girl.

And he knew this could be problematic for a few reasons, not the least of which was that they lived in different hemispheres.

Jack quickly scanned his six o’clock as he reached the left bank of the Tiber River and began walking south toward the nearest bridge to the east. He didn’t see anyone tailing him. Even though he wasn’t expecting anyone to be following him on this op, he didn’t need Clark reminding him to keep his personal and operational security at the forefront of his thoughts; OPSEC and PERSEC came naturally to him now. His countersurveillance tactics had become ingrained in his past several years working with The Campus. Everywhere he went, even back in the States, he used varying routes to and from his apartment; he didn’t go to the same coffee shops, restaurants, or markets every day; and he made subtle checks of the people around him, both in front and behind, at irregular intervals.

He completed his scan, and then he allowed his fertile brain to go back to work. His thoughts drifted off Ysabel—for the time being, anyway—and he started thinking about finances.

Not
his
finances—he was making good money, and he came from a well-to-do family. Hell, his dad was President of the United States and his mom was chief of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins.

But the finances on his mind at present were those of the upper echelon in the Kremlin.

He’d come here to Italy on a mission that was one part operational fieldwork and two parts analysis, and Jack considered himself perfectly suited to the job, as he was both an operations officer and an analyst, specializing of late in the financial analytics helpful in tracking money laundering.

The U.S. intelligence community knew that the key to dealing with the criminal regime at the Kremlin was to understand both where their money came from and, perhaps more important, where it was going. Russia was a kleptocracy, all the power in the hands of a corrupt few. The term thrown around these days was “elite capture”; the privileged of the nation had taken over the democratic process, wresting the power from the masses through bribery, election rigging, and other underhanded tactics.

Around the time Russia’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies merged with each other, the CIA began tasking a lot of analytical manpower to identifying the personal assets of the small cabal of Kremlin and FSB policy makers at the center of influence, many of whom were themselves ex–intelligence officials. Jack’s father, the President, had managed to convince several other nations to join him in imposing sanctions on many in this group of Russian elite as a way to press back against that nation’s aggression against its neighbors. This wasn’t a perfect foil to the Kremlin’s actions by any means, but it hit several of Russia’s top power players where it hurt, and it had increased pressure on President Valeri Volodin from within.

But while some of the oligarchs’ accounts were seized and their travel privileges in the West curtailed, The Campus had begun focusing not on the oligarchs aligned with the Kremlin themselves, but on the economists, mathematicians, bankers, money managers, offshore business experts, and accountants who worked under them. Jack knew Volodin’s top men weren’t themselves hunched over computers setting up foreign trusts and buying and selling holdings, property, and other assets. No, it was the men and possibly women—though so far The Campus had identified only men—below these powerful Kremlin players who possessed both the financial talent and the political reliability.

These Russian money movers had been a project of the analysts at The Campus for some time, though Ryan himself had been away, involved in operations around the world, so he had only recently gotten involved.

Together Jack and the other analysts had identified roughly three dozen men who seemed to be in the trenches controlling the two-way spigot of money that propelled the Russian government kleptocracy. There were undoubtedly many more than those they knew of, but the deeper Jack got into the weeds while looking into the known players, a question in Ryan’s mind grew and grew: Which of these men, if any, did Valeri Volodin
himself
entrust to handle his own finances?

It was rumored Volodin had untold wealth—before the recent huge drop in oil prices it had been suggested he had north of $40 billion. Presumably, it was held in a combination of stakes in state-owned businesses, offshore banks, and other property. Most in the U.S. government suspected Volodin’s own money traveled through the same secret financial-haven networks as that of the other members of Russia’s powerful elite, so it was just a matter of peeling
apart the layers of the network and looking for the masterminds who build it, and then perhaps The Campus would find the men in control of Volodin’s hidden riches.

The U.S. government, of which Jack’s father was the chief executive, had expressly precluded the Department of Justice from targeting Volodin’s personal wealth. There were international treaties and accords set up to prevent one nation from dredging up world leaders’ personal finances, set in place to keep bickering countries from simply filing charges against one another’s heads of state as a means of diplomatic pressure.

But The Campus had no such restrictions.

The director of The Campus, Gerry Hendley, had given his analytical shop the green light to seek out the players involved with Volodin’s personal amassed billions. That had led them to a lot of sleepless nights of work, but finally it had led one of them—Jack Ryan, Jr., to be exact—here to Europe.

Mikhail “Misha” Grankin was a key player in Volodin’s inner circle, and currently under sanction by the West. As the new director of the Kremlin’s Security Council, Grankin had in the past year become Volodin’s principal go-to adviser on all matters diplomatic, military, and intelligence. But in addition to his duties for the government, like a lot of Volodin’s cronies, he was also part owner of several large private companies with government contracts. By tracing funds paid by the government for these contracts tied to Grankin, The Campus identified a shell company in Rome as a money-laundering vehicle for several works of art at galleries across the Italian capital. The company had used Russian government money to purchase several dozen paintings, and the art was still physically here in Rome, still displayed in the galleries from which it was purchased. If and when the artwork sold, the gallery would
get a hefty commission, and then payments would go to a private trust to be deposited into some offshore bank somewhere.

The entire scheme seemed plain enough to Jack and his fellow analysts at The Campus: Mikhail Grankin’s people had purchased the paintings with the sole intention of expatriating millions of dollars of his nation’s wealth by laundering the money through the sale.

The opacity of the art world meant a person could walk into a gallery or an auction house, purchase a painting for a million dollars in cash, and walk out with it without even giving a name. It was an excellent way to launder money, and a terrific way to hide the portfolio of a man who was on America’s list of sanctioned members of the Kremlin.

Jack had come to Rome to dig into the transactions and to try to identify the facilitators of the purchase. Whoever offered up the money for the paintings, Jack knew, would be deeply involved in the scheme, and Jack didn’t think for a second this would be a one-off crime. His working theory was that whoever was involved in the operation was part of the intricate network the Kremlin used, and it stood to reason that Valeri Volodin himself might use such a conduit to hide his money.

His goal had been to identify the next link in the chain, and then to pass his intelligence about Grankin’s money on to the U.S. Justice Department, so they could lock down these funds, same as they had all the other accounts of Mikhail Grankin that they had found outside Russia.

There was another reason Jack had come to Rome, though he tried to deny it, even to himself. Rome was pretty damn romantic, and Ysabel had been helping him in his investigation.