Commander-In-Chief (12 page)

O
ud-Zuid is the most desirable quarter in Amsterdam. It’s centrally located, expensive, cosmopolitan, and beautiful.

Sibling assassins Braam and Martina Jaeger lived here in the neighborhood, residing together in a comfortable and ultramodern condo that took up the top two floors of a brownstone on leafy Frans van Mierisstraat.

They’d been home from Venezuela for just days; they’d spent them relaxing mostly, enjoying the neighborhood cafés along with late nights in clubs. Last night brother and sister had gone to a trendy nightclub and while Braam had sat on a VIP sofa lording over the scene, his sister had danced in the hot, thick space till four in the morning.

It was just ten a.m. now, and Braam had made breakfast for them both. Martina had just finished picking through her omelet, and now she took her coffee to the table in the middle of the living room and she opened her laptop. She logged on to Tor, software that enabled “onion routing.” Tor was an acronym for The Onion
Router—and it offered the user anonymous communication by directing Internet traffic through some six thousand relays around the world, hiding both the sender and the receiver of a message.

She opened an e-mail sent late the night before, and reading through it saw she and her brother had been given their next assignment. The uniqueness of the situation was not lost on her, that here, sitting in a bathrobe and holding a mug of steaming coffee, her mind heavy from the booze and the noise and the pills she’d taken the night before, she could receive and accept a contract to kill a human being somewhere in the world, on the other side of the planet, even.

Braam sat across the room, himself in a robe, with a copy of
De Telegraaf
open on his lap.

She called out to him. “Braam.
Kom hier.
”

He climbed from the sofa and stepped behind her at a desk in the middle of the large open living area, nestled his chin on her shoulder, and they read their instructions together silently.

When he finished, Braam said,
“Amerika. Mooi.”
Nice.

She smiled herself. “Beverly Hills.” And then, in a fake American accent, she added, “Darling, this will be so much fun.”

They both stood up and went to start packing, because the timeline on this operation was short.

•   •   •

T
he conversion of the Jaegers from normal middle-class kids from Utrecht to international contract killers employed by Russian intelligence began quite innocently when their father, a colonel in the Royal Netherlands Army, convinced his video game–loving ten-year-old son to come with him on a hunting trip. Braam took to the shooting and the stalking naturally and with ease, but it would have been no great love of his had he not seen the pride in his father’s eyes.

When he did see it, he realized, quite simply, that his father’s love was conditional on his ability to hunt game.

Soon enough Braam began to enjoy the competition of shooting, so much so that he became a well-known teenage biathlete. After school he joined the Dutch military instead of going to college, for the simple reason that the military had a program that would allow soldiers to compete in national and international sporting competitions. He soon became an infantry sergeant, with plans to leave the military after four years to go on the professional biathlon circuit.

Then came Holland’s entrance into the Afghanistan war.

Braam found himself engaging in, and riveted by, the combat. By the end of his first day in a “real” war he had no further interest in wearing Lycra with a number on his back and shooting paper targets. No, the only
real
competition in a man’s life, as he saw it, was the two-way gunfire of battle.

He left the Dutch military after four years to take a job as a civilian military security contractor in Iraq. He found himself under fire with regularity, and life was good.

Martina was beautiful and intelligent, and she worshipped her brother and had followed in his footsteps since she was old enough to walk. She hunted and shot with her father, and she competed in the biathlon and other shooting sports. At eighteen she became world ranked in the ten-meter air rifle and ten-meter air pistol categories, and she missed out going to the Olympics at age twenty only because of a neck injury she picked up while training for a European championship judo competition.

In her early twenties she took up mountain climbing with all the gusto she put into everything she enjoyed, and by age twenty-six she had summited seven of the fourteen 8,000-plus-meter mountains of the world.

Her try for an eighth ended in disaster, however, when an avalanche on K2 killed four in her party and left her with broken bones.

While Braam was engaging insurgents in Iraq, Martina convalesced at home, bitter that all her competitive endeavors had ended in failure.

Eight years earlier, when they were still in their late twenties, Martina was working in a sporting-goods store in Amsterdam when Braam called and asked her to drop everything and meet him in Mali, Africa. She was surprised to learn he was no longer in the Middle East, but he explained he’d taken a job doing security investigations in the Third World.

As soon as she arrived she realized her brother had not asked her to Africa for a family reunion. Instead, he was working on a low-profile assignment and he needed a cover story—more specifically, he needed someone to play the role of his wife.

The cover worked, the operation was a success, and Martina Jaeger knew she would never work in some mundane profession again.

Braam began to use his sister on several more jobs, he found himself working deeper in the shadowy world of private security, and much of his work involved deep-cover operations.

It was Martina Jaeger who first suggested they offer their services as contract killers. They found work immediately, and they killed their first target together in Namibia. He was a white South African reporter who’d run afoul of local organized crime. Their white skin and their cover as urbane tourists allowed them to slip into bars and restaurants where black gangsters would have brought security officers running, and their skill and calm under fire helped them see the difficult assignment through.

After a few more hits in Africa, Martina decided they would
branch out, so she contacted a Saint Petersburg
bratva
, a Mafia-like criminal organization.

Neither Martina nor Braam cared for politics. They worked for money and the thrill of it all, and the Saint Petersburg syndicate gave them two years’ worth of work around Europe. After this, they found themselves coopted into FSB operations, because of the close nexus between Russian business and Russian government interests.

They didn’t care. They were paid well and on schedule, and the FSB had all the work Braam and Martina could handle.

The Jaegers absolutely loved their work.

Killing, they agreed, was the best adventure sport on earth.

J
ohn Clark woke early on Sunday morning, long before his wife, and he dressed for warmth. He slipped a weathered gun belt through the loops of his jeans, holstered his large SIG Sauer P227 .45-caliber pistol, and pulled on a thick flannel lumberjack shirt.

After a pit stop in the bathroom and a drop into the kitchen to fill a thermos with coffee from the automatic pot, Clark headed out the back door of his Emmitsburg, Maryland, farmhouse. He pulled on a pair of muddy and weathered boots and made a beeline to his garage. Here, in a locked storeroom, he filled an old canvas pack with several hundred rounds of .45-caliber ammunition, several extra magazines, hearing and eye protection, and a gun-cleaning kit. A small medic pouch and his thermos also went into the pack; then he slung it over his shoulder and headed back outside.

Clark walked nearly ten minutes to his own private shooting range, down deep in a dry gully that ran to the creek on his farm. Here, several steel plates of different shapes were set up in front of
a hay-bale backstop, and behind that the wall of the gully kept any examples of poor marksmanship from straying too far, although Clark was certain he’d never once placed a single bullet in the mud.

An old wooden workbench on wagon wheels sat in the middle of the gravel-covered ground, and here John Clark took his time disassembling and cleaning his handgun, and sipping his coffee, while the sun rose.

Even this early, John heard the occasional crackle of gunfire in the distance. There were hunters on land nearby, and instead of being annoyed by the noise, Clark welcomed it, because as far as he was concerned it gave him carte blanche to conduct target practice on his own property whenever the hell he pleased.

Sandy had made John promise to never open fire before seven a.m. unless he was using a weapon with a silencer. John, who was a loving and dutiful husband, always added a half-hour to his wife’s moratorium, so he never started before seven-thirty.

As his watch beeped the half-hour, Clark loaded his gun. His everyday sidearm was the New Hampshire–manufactured SIG Sauer P227 .45-caliber Enhanced Elite model. It carried ten rounds in the magazine, along with an additional round in the chamber.

Clark was the only member of The Campus who carried a .45 and the only one who carried a SIG. All the others carried Glocks or Smith & Wessons in nine-millimeter, but Clark had been a fan of the big and fat .45-caliber round since Vietnam.

Ryan and Caruso teased him a bit for being old-school with his pistol, and even Chavez liked to joke that Clark could run a little faster and jump a little higher if he didn’t wear a howitzer on his belt, but Clark didn’t find the eleven-round SIG to be as heavy as the eight-round Colt 1911 he’d carried for decades, so he felt secure in his choice of weapon.

He let the others chide him; it was his opinion that reasonable
people could disagree on caliber, but the most reasonable people agreed with him that the .45 was the way to go.

Clark brought this and other weapons out to his homemade gun range regularly, but today he’d decided he would make a major shift in his daily training.

Clark’s eyesight was fair for a normal sixty-seven-year-old man, but Clark was not a normal sixty-seven-year-old. Few men his age ever found themselves needing to shoot at anyone shooting back at them. And Clark was fast for his age, but few men his age ever called on their speed to engage a threat with a firearm.

In both cases, John Clark was one of those few.

He knew he was getting slower and less sure with his weapon; it was a fact of life that his skills would deteriorate with age. Sure, he was still a hell of a lot better, at all handgun distances, than the vast majority of those who carried a weapon for a living, but to Clark that wasn’t good enough.

It was about carrying out his missions, but it was more than that.

Clark thought about the death of Sam Driscoll, and he knew objectively that Sam’s death had had absolutely nothing to do with any mistake Clark made. But with the news that Chavez and Caruso had found themselves outgunned in Germany two days earlier, Clark realized he could possibly find himself back out in the field, and his ability to handle his share of the duty and protect his team from harm was paramount to him.

And he wanted to be ready, despite the negative effects of his age on his skill sets, so he told himself he needed to work his ass off to maintain and even increase his own abilities in the field.

Point shooting was a technique that involved focusing on the target, not the weapon’s sights, in order to quickly and accurately engage a threat. Clark had been trained in point shooting; all
operators who spend time in close quarters battle training need the ability to bring a rifle or a pistol up for a snap shot when there was no time to engage through the sights. But Clark knew his advancing years meant it would be greatly beneficial for him to adapt point shooting to engaging targets farther out than the very close distances he’d been accustomed to. If he could teach himself to draw his pistol and hit chest-sized targets at twenty, thirty, even forty feet, he could greatly decrease his engagement times with a firearm.

So much of point shooting involved orienting the body and using the body to aim the weapon. Without the benefit of the sights, proper body alignment to the target helped get the barrel of the gun pointed in the right direction. From there it was just a matter of refining fundamentals. Proper grip on the gun, perfect trigger control, a good understanding of how to manage recoil and get the gun back on target.

Clark exhaled a long, full breath that turned into vapor in the cold, and he reached over to the table and tapped a button on the top of his automatic shot timer. Once the button was pressed, it would wait a random amount of time—somewhere between three and ten seconds—and then it would beep loudly. This served as his starting gun, his indication that the steel target forty feet away was a threat.

Clark lowered his hands to his sides, and he eyed the target, waiting to explode with action. He always started his training rounds cold, meaning he did not warm up at all. He knew if he ever needed to employ his weapon in the field, he wouldn’t have a chance to tell all the bad guys to take a smoke break while he shot some paper targets off to the side, just to make sure his synapses were firing and he was ready to go.

The shot timer beeped. Clark dropped his hand to the pistol
and drew it from his belt. As he did so he turned his body toward the target, so when the gun cleared leather and he began to raise it, he was already oriented in the right direction.

Clark fired one round in nearly half the time it would have taken him to bring the weapon up to his sightline and focus on it.

He saw a massive splatter of mud in the wall of the gully, behind and a foot to the left of the steel target.

Clark sighed and reholstered his weapon.

He didn’t let it get to him. This was why he trained. If he had succeeded his first time out, he would have known he wasn’t making the training challenging enough.

Clark ran the drill again, and again he got the same results. On the fourth try he was slower, but at least he dinged the edge of the steel target, just where the “right elbow” of the “man” jutted out from his body.

He spent an hour dumping more than two hundred rounds at the steel man-sized target forty feet away. One draw at a time. It was hard to keep himself from bringing the weapon up to eye level for each shot, but it got easier as he retrained his muscles to respond to the new technique.

At the end of his training, he was speckled with mud from splatter that came back at him, and his clothing and hair smelled like gun smoke. On top of this, he wasn’t where he wanted to be with this skill, not even close. But he was a hell of a lot better than he’d been when he woke up.

He cleaned his gun at the table, then reloaded it, and he was just slipping his hot pistol back into his holster for the last time of the morning when his cell phone rang in his pocket. He didn’t even look at the caller ID on the screen, so sure he was it was Sandy letting him know that she had breakfast almost ready and the table set on the back porch. She’d dutifully listened to an hour of
gunfire on a Sunday morning, and as he brought the phone to his ear he decided he was going to make it up to her. “I’m on the way back, honey. How about we go to that antiques place up in Gettysburg after breakfast?”

There was a delay, then Clark heard the Kentucky drawl of Gerry Hendley, director of The Campus. “Uh . . . John?”

“Oops. Sorry about that, Gerry. Thought you were Sandy.”

“I’m not, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like antiques.”

Clark laughed. “What’s up?”

“I hate to do this to you, but Mary Pat asked if she could come to the office today for a meeting.”

Clark said, “Does this involve the shootout in Germany?”

Gerry said, “Not sure. Dom and Domingo just got back in town last night, but she asked that everyone come, so I’ll call them next.”

Clark did not hesitate in his response. Mary Pat rarely came to the office. After all, she was the head of all U.S. intelligence, a cabinet-level official. “Just tell me when and I’ll be there.” He looked down at himself. “I’ll be honest, though. I could stand a shower first.”