Commander-In-Chief (4 page)

T
hree days after the explosion of the liquefied natural gas facility in Lithuania, two well-dressed businessmen sat together at a café table in a little restaurant attached to the main hall of Warsaw’s Centralna station. The older of the two was nearing fifty, short but powerfully built, with curly dark hair flecked with a significant amount of gray. The younger was in his thirties and of average height, with short brown hair and a trimmed beard and mustache.

The men drank coffee and checked their watches from time to time; the older of the two perused an English-language newspaper and the younger kept his phone in his hand, but he mostly just sat with his legs crossed, his bored eyes drifting around the station. The appearance of the two was indistinguishable from twenty-five other pairs of businessmen in the central hall, and not markedly different from any of the three hundred or so standing or sitting here at the station.

When the men spoke, they did so in English, but even that wasn’t unusual at all in a cosmopolitan city such as Warsaw.

An announcement of the impending departure of the 9:55 Warszawa–Berlin express came over the PA in Polish, German, then English, and the men stood, hoisted shoulder bags and briefcases, and headed for the stairs down to the platforms.

As they walked through the middle of the crowded hall the younger man spoke softly. His business associate would not have been able to hear him if not for the earpiece transmitter the size of a hearing aid hidden in each man’s ear.

“If he’s a no-show, do we still board the train?”

The older man responded: “No sense sitting around Warsaw if we don’t have intel on his location. This is all we’ve got. We’ll take the train and check it out, maybe he boarded and we just missed him in the station.”

Dominic Caruso nodded without speaking, but the truth was he would have preferred to stick around Poland a little longer. They’d only just arrived the evening before, but already he could tell this was his kind of town; the history of the city was fascinating, the beer and the food were good and cheap, and the few people he’d encountered seemed laid-back and nice. He’d also noticed that the women were stunning, though this was nothing to keep him here. He was in a relationship at the moment, so he told himself it was probably just as well that he was about to climb on the next train out of town.

On the platform the two men took a moment to look around before boarding. A large crowd of travelers were moving in all directions, too many for either of the Americans to positively identify their target in the sea of faces. Still, they took their time, keeping an eye out for any countersurveillance operatives watching the platform to check the scene for the target.

Neither Domingo Chavez nor Dominic Caruso saw anything that concerned them, so they found their first-class carriage at the
back of the EuroCity express train to Berlin. Here they sat in a cabin with six seats and a sliding glass door to the narrow hallway, and they both positioned themselves near the window so they could continue to monitor the platform.

Chavez said, “Lots more cops than I’d expect to see.”

Caruso nodded as he scanned all the way to the stairs at the far side of the platform. “It’s that thing up north in Lithuania. A new terror actor over here with the skills to pull that off has all the European governments on edge.”

“Yeah, but for how long?”

“It’s hard to keep an edge,” Caruso acknowledged, and he also wondered if the increased police presence here in Europe, due to a completely unrelated situation, would have the unintended consequence of screwing with his surveillance mission.

He pushed away the doubt and kept scanning.

Their target here in Poland was named Yegor Morozov. He was thought to be a senior officer in the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, Russian intelligence. He was in his late forties, and to make the two Americans’ job over here more difficult, he was just about as plain-looking as most of the men in his chosen profession.

Chavez and Caruso worked for an American private intelligence outfit that called itself The Campus; through the research and analysis shops of their organization they had managed to uncover a Cyprus-based shell corporation associated with the Kremlin and Russian intelligence. The CIA had already ID’d Morozov as a spook, but The Campus tracked him here in Warsaw after he’d used a credit card linked to the Cyprus shell that was under one of his known aliases. By the time the two Americans made it to Poland, Morozov had checked out of his hotel, but his card had been used to book a pair of first-class tickets on this morning’s Warszawa–Berlin express.

The men had a picture of their target from his Polish visa application, but they didn’t know who he’d be traveling with, why he was going to Berlin, or any intel at all about what he was doing here in the West.

Still, they were here; their focus for the past few months had been on Russian money networks, after all, and Morozov was a name with a face tied to one company in one of the networks. He wasn’t much of a lead, but he was all they had, so they’d been sent to tail him.

And now it looked like he was going to be a no-show.

Dom Caruso said, “This could turn out to be a boring day.”

“Yeah, well, this whole investigation is more analysis than footwork. Jack Junior and the other analysts are the brains; you and I are just the feet and the eyeballs, so we pulled this thrilling gig.”

Caruso nodded while he scanned, then he blinked hard in surprise, as if doubting the image in front of him. “I’ll be damned. I got him.”

He saw the target on the other side of the window, walking along the platform in a leather bomber jacket and jeans, and holding a large leather duffel bag in his hand. There was a female pulling a rolling duffel a few feet away from him, and they walked in step with each other. She was much younger than he was, with dark hair and fair skin. To Dom she didn’t look Polish, nor did she look Russian, but he told himself he had not been checking out the females over here all that much, so he wouldn’t admit to being an expert.

But Chavez was thinking the same thing. “I’d say the unsub is North African. Morocco. Algeria. Maybe Spanish, possibly Portuguese.”

Caruso nodded. Ding Chavez had been at this a lot longer than he had, and the older man was usually right with his first assumptions.

Caruso added, “She could do a lot better than a guy like Morozov.”

“Frankenstein’s bride could do a lot better than a guy like Morozov.”

The Russian and his fellow traveler climbed into the same car as Chavez and Caruso, which was not pure luck. Of the six carriages in the train, only one was first class.

Dom climbed out of his seat and moved to the sliding glass door to the hall, glanced down and saw the woman following Morozov into a compartment two down from the American operatives.

Moments later the conductor stepped onto the platform just ahead of where Caruso and Chavez were sitting and blew his whistle, then he climbed back aboard and the massive Siemens electric locomotive began pulling the six carriages out of the station.

Once they had been on the way for a few minutes, Chavez and Caruso decided they’d recon the entire train to look for any countersurveillance before they decided how to get a closer look at their target and the young woman with him. They left their compartment and passed Morozov’s compartment without glancing in, then they moved through the vestibule to the dining car. On the other side of the dining car, the vestibule was open to the first second-class carriage. Here a group of a dozen or so men, all in black tracksuits with red piping, sat together. Chavez and Caruso had seen them in the station a short while before boarding, and they assumed the men to be members of a soccer team. Most of them wore earbuds, but a few of them chatted. A couple of their number looked like they could be the team’s coaches, but the rest were the right general age and build of athletes.

Chavez and Caruso continued on to the next car, where they saw no one but tourists, a couple of men and women in business attire, and several senior citizens.

In the second-to-last car, both Americans took note of a trio of men in their thirties. Two were white and one was black; they sat together, wearing jeans and North Face jackets. In the lap of one of the white men was a high-end backpack with military-style webbing on the outside. The black man wore a tactical diving watch, and the other white male had a Panasonic Toughbook, a rugged-case laptop computer used commonly in the world of military and security contractors.

The final car was full of tourists, families with small children, and senior citizens.

Back in their compartment, the men talked about what they’d seen on their recon. Dom said, “The three dudes in car five were definitely in the biz.”

“Yeah,” said Chavez. “But our target is FSB. No way a follow team for Morozov would outfit themselves like that. Way too conspicuous.”

Caruso thought it over and agreed with a nod. “What about the soccer team? I can’t read Cyrillic like you can.”

“Yeah,” Chavez said. “Their logo said they were FC Luzhany. Not sure who or what that is.”

Dom looked them up on his phone. After a minute he said, “Here they are. A competitive amateur soccer team from Ukraine. Down south, near Odessa.”

“Can you find out what they’re doing here?”

A little work on his phone gave Dom more information. “There is an amateur tournament in Leipzig next week.”

“Okay,” Chavez said. He wasn’t really thinking there were a dozen bad guys on his train dressed as a soccer team, but he wanted to check them out anyway. He said, “Ruling out the team and the three G.I. Joes, I didn’t see anyone else on the train worth a second glance. Other than Morozov and his lady friend, that is.”

“Right,” Caruso said. “You want to get closer?”

Chavez nodded. “We can sit at a table in the dining car and have lunch. From there we can get eyes on their compartment through the windows in the vestibule doors. The angle isn’t perfect, but at least if anyone comes or goes we’ll get a look. If the girl makes a trip to the john, I’ll try to get a picture of her. That’s about all two of us can do.”

“I could plant a bug on her or Morozov.”

Chavez shook his head. “We can’t expose ourselves like that. Back when there were more of us, maybe that would have been an option, but with just two of us, we need to play this soft and smart.”

Caruso knew Chavez was right. The team was smaller now than it used to be, and every day in the field something reminded them of this fact.

J
ohn Clark felt the enormous impact of Arlington National Cemetery—he appreciated the majesty of the 624 acres, and the sacrifice of the 400,000 buried there. But the truth of the matter was . . . John Clark wasn’t much on visiting graves.

It was no sign of disrespect to the departed; on the contrary, he saw those who worshipped tombstones to be the ones who failed to remember the fallen as they wanted to be remembered. He’d lost many friends over the years, and it was important to him that he remembered them all, but he told himself he did not need to go to their final resting place in order to do it.

But despite his reservations, he was here today at Arlington, in the cold rain, his umbrella forgotten in his car, and he stood over the grave of a friend.

The headstone said very little, and much of what it said was untrue.

S
AMUEL
R
EID
D
RISCOLL

1SG

U.S. A
RMY

J
UNE
26, 1976–M
AY
5, 2016

P
URPLE
H
EART

A
FGHANISTAN

The name was right, though he went by Sam. The rank and service were correct as well, but Sam had left the Army Rangers years before he died. The birth date was accurate, though his actual date of death was a few weeks off from the one hewn into the white marble. Clark was absolutely certain of this, because Clark had been just fifty feet away from Sam when he died.

And unless Afghanistan had been somehow picked up and moved south of the U.S. border, the location of his death was incorrect as well.

Sam Driscoll had been shot dead by a North Korean intelligence agent in a dark hallway of a luxury villa an hour outside Mexico City.

No, the marker didn’t mention any of that.

And while it was true that all the misinformation and errors of omission on Sam Driscoll’s tombstone bothered Clark a little, he knew they were for the best. The marker could not have said Sam was an operations officer for an off-the-books intelligence shop called The Campus, and it sure as hell couldn’t have stated the fact that Sam had been down in Mexico hunting the people behind the nearly successful assassination attempt on the President of the United States.

Sam had been good, no doubt he was a hell of a lot better than the North Korean who killed him—a man who, in the same instant, died at Sam’s hand. But Sam had been dealing with multiple
attackers, and while he got them,
both
of them . . . one of them got lucky in his last breath.

There are no promises in combat. When men are in fierce battle for their lives, fighting hand to hand and slinging hot lead at one another with a muzzle velocity of a thousand feet a second, bad shit is bound to happen, and to Sam, bad shit did.

John Clark stood there in the rain and thought about that night in Cuernavaca for another moment, but then he thought about his own life, his own mortality. It was hard not to do, standing here in a massive garden of stone, each white slab of rock representing another man or another woman, each with his or her own story about how the end came.

A hundred thousand ways to die; the only constant to these markers was that virtually everyone buried beneath them had, in some way, served the United States of America, and many of them, a great many, had lost their lives while in that service.

Just like Sam.

It wasn’t fair.

John Clark was sixty-seven years old. Sam Driscoll had been twenty-seven years younger than Clark, and many of the other men and women buried here at Arlington had been half Sam’s age when they’d met their maker.

Nope, not fair at all.

If he could, Clark would have taken the bullet to the heart that dropped Sam Driscoll, but Clark had been in harm’s way the vast majority of his lifetime, and if there was one thing he had learned, it was that there wasn’t one damn bit of sense involved in any of this, and even with all the skill in the world, there is a pervasive randomness to a gunfight.

John looked around at thousands of white tombstones.

Anything can happen; the good guys can die, too.

Slowly,
very
slowly, he remembered the flowers in his hand.

If Clark wasn’t one to stand at gravesites, he
really
wasn’t the sort to walk around carrying flowers. But this wasn’t his idea. No, it was the fulfillment of a promise.

At Sam’s funeral he met Edna Driscoll, the mother of the deceased. She knew nothing about how her son died; in fact, she knew only that her son had left the Army and had taken a job for a private contractor involved with homeland security. She understood his work was top-secret and he could not discuss it, but she did not know it would prove to be even more dangerous than his time in the 75th Ranger Regiment.

At the funeral, Clark expressed his condolences seriously and solemnly to the gaunt and drawn woman, but when she’d asked for details of her son’s death, all Clark could tell her was that he’d died for his country.

It was the God’s honest truth, and he hoped it would be enough, but he’d been through this before, and he knew.

It was
never
enough.

Clark’s wife, Sandy, had come to his rescue, as she had done at so many funerals in the past. She stepped into the conversation, introduced herself, and then directed Edna Driscoll away. She commiserated with her, and after the service, Sandy asked the woman if the two could stay in touch.

It was an act of kindness, a chance for a widow from Nebraska who lost her son to have some small connection to those he served with, although she did not understand who or what they were.

Sandy contacted Edna a few days later and told her an account representing her fallen son’s pension had been established as part of his compensation package with the private security contractor, and
it was all hers, and when Sandy told her the amount in the account, Edna Driscoll was even more confused about her son’s employer.

She found $3 million to be a shockingly large sum, but still, it was no replacement for her loss.

And then, a few weeks after Sam was buried and the account was settled, his mother e-mailed Sandy Clark with a request. She said she was overcome with sadness by the fact she was sure the flowers she’d left at her son’s grave had by now withered and died, and she wondered if Sandy wouldn’t mind placing a fresh bouquet on the headstone from time to time.

Sandy and John lived in Emmitsburg, Maryland, which wasn’t exactly next door to Arlington National Cemetery, but this was lost on the woman from a little town outside Omaha, so Sandy agreed, promising Edna she’d take care of it.

John Clark would have loved for his wife to do just that, to take care of it—cemeteries were not his thing, after all—but Arlington was on the way to his office in Alexandria, so it made no sense for Sandy to make the drive when he could do it so much more easily.

And now he was back again for a third delivery of flowers. John placed them on Sam’s headstone, feeling the weight of the deaths of Sam and all the others around him, but soon he shook out of it. He wasn’t too sentimental about all this. He missed Sam and felt the same amount of responsibility for the man’s death as he had for others who had died under his leadership, but Sam wasn’t here, lying under this headstone, under this dirt.

This was just an earthly memorial.

And it occurred to Clark that Edna Driscoll’s realization of this just might help her heal in some small way.

His phone rang in his jacket, and he welcomed the distraction, even though it was a struggle to answer in the rain.

“Clark.”

“Hey, John. It’s Jack.”

Jack Ryan, Jr., was in Italy, this Clark knew because he’d sent him there two weeks earlier. Clark looked at his watch and saw it was afternoon there.

“How’s the girl, kid?”

There was a slight pause. “You mean Ysabel?”

“How many girls do you have over there?”

Jack laughed uncomfortably. “She’s fine, thanks. You
do
know I’m working, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. Just giving you a little grief.” He looked down at Sam’s grave. “Nobody wants to deprive you of your personal life. There’s little enough of that as it is.”

Jack paused before speaking again. Then, “You okay, John?”

“Absolutely.” The connection was silent until Clark said, “You called
me
, remember?”

“Yeah. Wanted to see if you could get the guys in the conference room for a ten-minute talk. Nothing earthshaking, just wanted to give everyone a progress report on what I’ve found over here.”

“You learn anything interesting?”

“Yeah. I learned Russian financial shenanigans are complicated.”

Clark turned from Sam’s headstone and began to walk back to his car. “We paid for a first-class seat on Alitalia and a month lease on a furnished apartment in Rome for you to figure that out? Hell, I knew that sitting on my back porch.”

Jack laughed again, more naturally this time. “Well, yeah, I’ve managed to piece together a bit more than that. You guys have time for a briefing?”

Clark said, “Not at present. I sent Dom and Ding on a quick trip to Poland yesterday.”

“Lucky guys.”

Clark snorted. “Says the lucky guy shacking up with his girlfriend in Rome.”

Ryan chuckled awkwardly again, then said, “Okay, how about I just brief you and Gerry?”

Clark replied, “Actually, I’m out of the office at the moment.”

“Really? It’s nine-fifteen in Virginia. Not like you to sleep in.”

“Do you
really
think I slept in?”

“No, I was just trying to get you to tell me where you are.”

Silence on both ends of the line, until Jack Ryan, Jr., said, “And, apparently, I failed.” Still nothing. “Okay, we can do the call tomorrow.”

“Let’s, but give me the five-second version,” Clark said.

“I’ve identified a lawyer in Luxembourg who is definitely involved in this scheme. When I’m done here, I’d like to go to Luxembourg City to look into him a little more closely.”

“Do you need me to send you some help?”

The answer came quickly. “No, I’m good. This is straight analytical work, nothing dicey. Ysabel and I have it covered here in Rome, and I don’t think I’ll need any more resources in Luxembourg than I do here. I will need another week or so here to finish the job before moving on.”

“Right,” Clark said. John Clark was no fool, he knew what was going on. Jack’s girlfriend was an Iranian national named Ysabel Kashani. She was assisting him there in Rome, and Rome was closer to Tehran than Luxembourg City.

It was also several orders of magnitude more romantic.

Clark almost admonished his young operative. He considered telling him to get his head in the game, but he stopped himself. He’d go easy on Ryan, for a day or two. This operation was important, but this wasn’t a matter of life or death.

The kid could enjoy himself a little bit more. It wouldn’t hurt anybody.

“Okay, kid. I’ll get a conference call set up for this time tomorrow and you can fill us in on what you know.” His voice turned louder and more commanding. “And don’t get complacent over there. I want you practicing your proper OPSEC twenty-four/seven. No excuses, no compromises. Got it?”

“Roger that. Hey, you sure you’re okay, John?”

“I’m outstanding, kid. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Clark hung up the phone, gave one last look to the hillside full of identical white stones, then he bent his head into the rain and climbed into his car.

Jack was right; Clark was late for work.