Commander-In-Chief (6 page)

They had planned on taking a vacation to Tahiti together after
their last operation, but the Mikhail Grankin information had cropped up suddenly, and Jack realized he instead needed to go to Rome. He’d talked to his higher-ups, explained the situation, and reminded them what Ysabel had just pulled off in Dagestan. John Clark and Gerry Hendley allowed her to support Jack on his operation, and she had jumped at the chance to meet Jack in the Eternal City and help.

Ysabel’s part of the op was straightforward enough. She simply served as the face of Jack’s investigation; she went from one gallery in the city to another, places where Grankin’s front company was selling the art on commission. She posed as a representative for a buyer, and she used a hidden camera and a mike to look at the goods, to see what had sold already, and to try to get a feel for whether the prices asked and the prices paid indicated the whole scheme was indeed some sort of a payoff.

And Ysabel had one more role. It was her job to film enough of the computer systems in the establishments to work out what sort of technology the galleries used to store their account data.

Jack then did what he could to identify the buyer of the art. The director of information technology at The Campus was an MIT grad and a hacker of the first order; at most galleries, he had been able to simply break into their files to glean sales information. But at some of the galleries Ysabel herself had needed to plant RATs—Remote Administration Tools—on the systems, so that connections could be created between the network at the gallery and Gavin Biery’s own system.

Ysabel had been up for the work from the start. In fact, Jack realized, she loved this sort of thing. At first he worried she could be in some danger, but all the research he had done into the specific art galleries they were targeting indicated no relationship with organized crime or any real nefarious elements. These were just retail establishments that were unwittingly laundering money for the top goons in the Kremlin.

Ysabel’s only danger was being seen by a security guard poking around behind a counter while a gallery manager stepped into the kitchen to make her a cup of tea.

For these awkward moments Jack had always remained close by, outside the gallery in a vehicle, with eyes on Ysabel’s real-time camera feed—ready to swoop in and get her out of any jam, though she’d been so slick with her tradecraft he’d not once been called to sort out a problem.

As Campus operations went, this one had been a breeze.

And it had recently borne fruit. All three galleries Campus IT director Gavin Biery had hacked the sales info of showed the same thing. Pieces of art being sold on commission by the Russian front company were bought by a single entity. A trust based in Luxembourg.

Ryan’s digging into the trust had taken some time, but he’d successfully identified an attorney in Luxembourg who managed the trust’s finances. Although Jack didn’t know where the money came from that went into the trust to buy the paintings, he assumed this was nothing more than a way to take the Russian money that went into the art and launder it with the clean Luxembourg money. If the money purchasing the art at inflated prices was simply payoffs, then there would be other people and business entities involved. Many more. Ryan knew he had a long way to go to untie this Gordian knot, but he was happy he’d managed to swim downstream this far at least, from Grankin, to the art galleries, to the Luxembourg trust, to the individual lawyer.

His next step, he knew, was to dig into this lawyer in Luxembourg himself, identify what other companies he worked with, and identify who was helping Grankin in this deal.

If he was lucky he would be able to trace this scheme right back around to Grankin himself, but that was a long shot. He knew from his experience as a financial investigator that a well-resourced and well-backstopped money-laundering structure would involve dozens of companies, blind trusts, registering agents, banks, and even nations. By the time Grankin profited personally from the money expatriated from Russia, it would have moved around the world like a shell in a fifty-cup shell game.

But that didn’t matter to Jack. Even if Rome, Luxembourg, or the next five places Grankin’s money went didn’t give up the evidence he needed to disrupt the network, little by little he was removing layers of the onion, and someday he’d have the man at the top of the illegal enterprise.

Jack wanted to invite Ysabel to Luxembourg, but he’d need the approval of Hendley and Clark for that. He’d ask them tomorrow, and he was pretty sure they would say yes.

She’d done a great job so far; she and Jack had worked hard every day and into the evenings, but they did not miss this opportunity altogether. The young couple was getting to know the restaurants and amorous corners of the city as they got to know each other better in the process.

Jack smiled a little as he checked his six again. John Clark’s commanding voice was always there in his mind, telling him to watch his back.

He was clean.

Luxembourg, even with Ysabel, would not be as much fun as Rome. Jack would need to move on from the beautiful art galleries and into static surveillance operations on office buildings and conference rooms to identify the associates of the lawyer.

Not quite the same thing he’d done in the past couple weeks, but at least he and Ysabel would be together.

With that pleasant thought on his mind, Jack Ryan stepped off a curb, looking in all directions as he did so.

Suddenly his face morphed into a mask of terror.

A small blue Citroën ran a stop sign and barreled down on him as he walked in the middle of the street.

J
ack launched forward in a broad jump, avoiding the front bumper of the speeding car by less than two feet. He spun around to look at the vehicle, which was now in the process of making a screeching left turn at the intersection.

The blue Citroën almost slammed into a middle-aged couple walking on the crosswalk on the other street. The woman gestured and screamed at the driver, a heavyset man in his fifties, who seemed oblivious to the fact that his bad driving had nearly caused a bloodbath.

If this had been anywhere else Jack would have thought someone had just tried to kill him, but this was Rome, the most dangerous city in Europe for pedestrians. This wasn’t an assassination attempt; it was just some asshole who didn’t know how to drive.

And this town was full of them.

“Son of a bitch,” Jack muttered under his breath, but he didn’t yell. OPSEC demanded he not reveal himself as American in the field unless it was necessary to do so.

He started walking again, and he thought about something he
read when he was doing research for his work trip. A writer talking about the poor drivers in the Italian capital had remarked that Romans park their cars the way he would park his car if he had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on his lap.

Jack thought that line was as true as anything he’d ever read, and he wondered if Gerry would give him hazardous-duty pay for living here in central Rome for the month.

He smiled at his own joke—working for The Campus meant
every
day involved hazardous duty, and nobody got a bonus for danger.

He crossed over the Ponte Regina Margherita and ducked into a butcher shop he had noticed earlier in the week. He used his pidgin Italian to pick up a pair of fat rib eyes, cut to order by the owner himself. His mouth watered while the steaks were wrapped in paper, and after leaving the little shop he began to pick up the pace so he could hurry home, careful to keep a close eye on the motorists around him. It was nearly four p.m. and he imagined they wouldn’t eat for another three hours or so, but like all good things, he knew these steaks would be worth the wait.

Jack’s eyes roamed constantly while he thought. It was on probably the fiftieth such quick scan of the day, just before reaching the corner of Ferdinando di Savoia and Maria Adelaide, when he glanced at the reflection in a passing bus and noticed a man behind him in a leather jacket with his long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. The man wasn’t looking right at Jack, but something seemed familiar about him. Jack wasn’t certain he’d seen this person before—central Rome was full of men, many had long hair, and this guy didn’t look or act different from the norm—but something inside Jack triggered when he noticed the man.

Jack had long ago learned that the moment you think there is any chance whatsoever that someone might be following you,
suddenly
everyone
looks suspicious. He had been living with this phenomenon for years, and over time he had trained himself to keep a cool head and a dispassionate, analytic eye scanning the world around him. He saw no one else in the area who piqued his senses, so he simply filed the man’s appearance in his mental database and kept walking.

But by the time he reached the large, open Piazza del Popolo, he was convinced something was wrong. He’d slowed down significantly a block before so he could window-shop. This wasn’t a countersurveillance ruse—a magnificent Breitling watch really did catch his eye in a shop window, and although he wouldn’t let himself go in and inquire as to the price, neither could he tear his eyes away from the big chronograph for nearly a minute.

When he made his way into the piazza a few moments later he glanced into the glass of another passing car and realized Mr. Ponytail was still behind him, at the exact same distance he was before.

Either this guy had managed to stumble across a distraction that lasted exactly as long as Jack had been looking at the watch, or else the man slowed down or stopped so that he did not overtake Ryan on the sidewalk.

Suddenly Jack knew he was being tailed. He had noticed during his last reflection check that the man had a small backpack over one shoulder, and he wondered what was inside.

Jack crossed the street and entered the piazza. A stage was being erected in the center—he assumed there would be some sort of open-air concert here this evening—but for now it was easy to walk across the cobblestones among the small crowd milling about.

Now everyone
did
look suspicious. A man sweeping the piazza, a young woman sitting on a scooter and talking on her cell phone, an ice cream vendor standing behind his cart and gazing Jack’s way.

Jack picked up the pace for a moment, then turned suddenly at
another vendor’s cart and purchased a bottle of water. While he fished a few euro coins out of his pocket he glanced back to his left and saw Ponytail tying his shoe, his foot propped up on an iron bench.

Yep, he was most definitely a follower, and not much of one at that. It looked to Ryan as if this guy had trained in surveillance by watching shitty made-for-television movies.

Ryan thought if this guy was part of a crew, he was either the weakest link or else they would all be as obvious as he was. As he began to walk away from the vendor cart, sipping his bottled water, Jack scanned the crowd more intently, all the way south across the Piazza del Popolo.

It was a three-minute walk, his wrapped steaks in hand, and through it all Jack ID’d no one else who appeared to be interested in him.

He chanced a quick look behind him as he tossed the empty water bottle into the trash. Ponytail was still there, seventy-five feet or so back, and he looked away as Jack turned in his direction.

Jack’s body tensed, and his mind began working on the situation. He’d been compromised, and that was bad, but he was too in-the-moment to think of the ramifications this surveillance had on his operation at this point. Now it was just about slipping this character and getting back to the apartment.

He’d work out his next move after that.

It occurred to Jack that the best way to shake this incompetent flunky, if he was in fact alone, was to simply climb into a cab. Ponytail probably didn’t have wheels close by, he would have no way of knowing that Jack would be heading to the Popolo, so the likelihood that he’d staged a vehicle right here was next to none.

Ryan walked to the curb of the street ringing the piazza, watched the cavalcade of small Italian cars whip around, each driver
seeming to have his own idea about both the speed limit and the location of the lane markers, and he picked out a taxi approaching in the closest lane. He waited until it was a reasonable distance away at the speed it was traveling, then he held out his hand.

The cab driver whipped his little Fiat over to the curb and came to a stop. Behind him scooters and cars slammed on their brakes.

Jack jumped into the back and the cab lurched forward again.

•   •   •

C
havez and Caruso had finished a meal of schnitzel, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes, washing it all down with a couple of beers. There was no rule about drinking on the job at The Campus; the operatives were supposed to maintain their cover for status and cover for action at all times, and sometimes that meant downing a drink or two while working surveillance. It was part of adapting to the surroundings, and while the men knew better than to overindulge, they also knew better than to draw attention to themselves.

While they sat, Dom kept an eye out through the doors to the compartment containing Morozov and the young brunette female he seemed to be chaperoning into Germany. She’d made one run to the bathroom and Caruso had taken a picture of her. He’d sent it to The Campus so the analysts could run it through facial recognition, but she didn’t turn up in any of the criminal databases.

Caruso and Chavez were talking over their surveillance options for when they arrived in Berlin when the train passed out of Poland and into Germany at the town of Frankfurt an der Oder. There was no scheduled stop here at the border; both Germany and Poland were in Europe’s Schengen Area, a collection of twenty-six nations with common visa requirements and no passport controls between the nations.

So the two Americans looked out the window in surprise when the train began to slow.

Ding went to the counter to order a coffee while a voice over the train’s PA system, broadcast in several languages, announced that German customs police would be making a quick pass through the train with dogs.

When he sat back down with his coffee, Dom said, “Must be because of the Lithuania thing.”

“Right,” agreed Chavez. “They don’t know how much C-4 those ecoterrorists used to blow up that ship. Might be enough left over to take down the Reichstag or something.”

Here in the dining car, Caruso was seated facing the first-class area, and back over Chavez’s left shoulder he had a clear view of the door to Morozov’s compartment, plus their own compartment farther on. He saw no activity from Morozov or the girl. Over Dom’s right shoulder Ding could see into the open second-class cabin. There, many members of the Ukrainian soccer team had gotten up to look out the window, and once the train came to a full stop, six officers in the Bundespolizei, the German Federal Police, entered with two Belgian Malinois on leashes. One of the dog handlers and two officers made a right, deeper into the train, and the other three turned toward the forward three cars. Quickly Chavez realized these were not customs officers, as the train conductor said; nor were they just making a simple pass down the length of the train. Instead, they were taking their time, asking to see everyone’s passport.

Chavez said, “They are doing a full immigration check.”

The train began to roll again.

Caruso chuckled. “I hope Morozov has his papers in order. It would be a shame to see him frog-marched out of here.”

Chavez smiled, too, but not for long. “Hey, are these Ukrainians starting to look a little squirrelly to you?”

Caruso turned to look back over his shoulder, and he saw what Chavez noticed. Several members of the soccer team, including one of the coaches, were constantly looking back over their shoulders at the three approaching officers. “Yeah,” he said. “These guys have something to hide.”

But when the police arrived at them, one of the coaches pulled a stack of passports out of a vinyl messenger bag and handed them over to the officers. One man looked them over quickly while the dogs sniffed around the young men. Both Dom and Ding saw continued evidence of nervousness in the players, but after matching each passport with a face, the Bundespolizei officer handed the documents back to the coach of the team, and the three moved on toward the dining car.

Caruso said, “Wonder if they have performance enhancers in their luggage in the racks above them. They were scared they’d get searched.”

Chavez said, “They are amateurs. It’s probably weed.”

The two Campus operatives produced their documents when the trio of armed officers arrived at their table. Dom noticed one of the men carried an HK MP5 submachine gun on his chest, and all three, including the female dog handler, wore big Glock 17 pistols on their belts in retention holsters.

“Gibt es ein Problem?”
Chavez asked the officers. Is there a problem?

“Not at all,” the female officer replied in English, after their documents were returned to them.

Chavez had hoped for a little more information, but he wasn’t surprised the German police weren’t terribly forthcoming with an explanation about what was going on.

The three cops and their dog moved through the vestibule and into first class, and now Caruso focused on Morozov’s compartment, visible through the glass window in the vestibule doors. When the police arrived they opened the door and stood in the hall outside the compartment. The dog sniffed around inside for a moment, then returned; he seemed utterly uninterested in his work and ready to move on. Caruso could see the passports the two inside the compartment handed over to the police. They were both burgundy in color, which meant they could have been Russian, but there were also lots of other countries, even here in Europe, that used the same color.

One of the passports was returned quickly, but the other was checked for a long time. Caruso slowly got the impression that something wasn’t right. Dom could tell one of the three officers was asking a series of questions to one of the people in the compartment, presumably the Russian spy.

Chavez was facing the opposite direction, so Caruso kept him informed. “Looks like Morozov is getting the third degree.”

Chavez did not look back. “That’s weird. You’d think the FSB could at least send their man out into the field with clean papers.”

“Dumbasses,” Dom muttered with a little grin.

“Don’t get too excited, ’
mano
. If they take him off the train, we just wasted a trip.”

“We can follow the girl.”

Chavez shrugged. For all he knew this was Morozov’s daughter and they were on their way for a vacation in the art galleries of Berlin.

A minute later the other three police and their dog passed through the dining car, went through the vestibule to first class, and joined the others, all standing in the hall.