Commander-In-Chief (7 page)

“Damn,” Caruso said now. “They
are
taking him off.” He could
see the police motion for someone to come out of the compartment, and he assumed it was the Russian spy. But to his surprise he saw the brunette female escorted out of the little room.

For a moment Caruso caught a glimpse of Morozov as he leaned out of the compartment, trying to talk to the police, but they weren’t listening to him. Instead, they began walking the girl toward the exit of the first-class cabin. One of the cops pulled out his radio, presumably to order the conductor to stop at the next station.

Morozov turned and walked toward Dom and Ding, passing them in the dining car without a glance. Dom could see an intensity on the man’s face that worried him.

“Where’s he going?” Chavez asked.

He got his answer quickly. The Russian FSB man rushed into the second-class cabin, walked right up to the coach of the soccer team, and leaned in close to his ear.

Chavez said, “Oh shit. What does
this
mean?”

Caruso turned and his eyes went wide. “I guess it means the amateur soccer team is a professional security team, and Morozov has himself a dozen goons.”

The soccer team stood as one and began to reach for their luggage, which was all positioned on the racks high above their heads. Morozov moved back through the dining car, passed Dom and Ding again without looking at them, and continued into his compartment, where he closed the door. The six police farther down the car, standing around the woman by the exit, didn’t even notice he’d left his compartment.

Dom saw all this, but Ding wasn’t looking. Instead, he had his eyes on the Ukrainians. They’d all slung bags over their shoulders, placed their hands inside the unzipped bags, and they were flooding toward the dining car.

Chavez said, “These dudes are packing. They are going to try to get the girl back.”

Caruso said, “And we’re unarmed.”

Chavez lifted a dirty steak knife off the table and hid it under the cuff of his suit coat.

Caruso gave Chavez a look. “You’re going to engage a dozen armed dudes with a steak knife?”

“No. I’m going to engage
one
armed dude with a steak knife, and then I’m going to engage eleven armed dudes with a gun.”

Dom grabbed his own knife, wiped some sauce from it with his napkin, and hid it in the cuff of his jacket.

D
omingo Chavez knew he wasn’t breaching his cover by staring at the men in black storming up through the dining car toward the police. It would have looked completely inauthentic to continue drinking his coffee with his eyes on his empty lunch plate while a dozen men with intense faces marched by in single file, every one of them holding something hidden inside a gym bag. So he stared, tried to ID who they were and how far they were willing to go with this. Quick eye contact with Dom, then an almost imperceptible nod, passed on the message that these men were the real deal; they looked willing to kill some police to keep this mystery woman out of the hands of German authorities, and Dom and Ding had to keep this from happening.

After the first ten men passed the table, then went through the vestibule door, the last two turned around in the dining car by the door, drew black automatic pistols from their bags, and covered the dining car and second-class car beyond. This put their eyes right on Dom and Ding, a dozen feet ahead of them on their right. They held their guns low in front of their bodies.

Chavez instantly realized these men were well trained, otherwise all dozen would have just attacked the known threat, and they wouldn’t have set up a rear guard for any other potential threats.

Still, both Caruso and Chavez saw that they were within a dozen feet of the pair of armed men, close enough to engage. They just needed to act with speed, surprise, and violence of action, and they could even the odds of this one-sided contest.

As the door to the vestibule between the dining car and the first-class car closed, Dom raised his hands and began to stand in the aisle, drawing the attention of both men.

“Don’t shoot! Just tell us what is going—”

Ding Chavez spun low out of the chair with his coffee cup in his hand and flicked the steaming liquid out and up toward the faces of the men. He took one step to square his body with the gunmen standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the door, and he launched himself forward. Both pistols rose toward the motion, but the hot coffee in their eyes caused them to flinch and recoil before they could aim. Chavez slammed into the midsections of both men, sending them back hard onto the floor. One man banged his head against the door and dropped his pistol, and the other man’s gun hand was pushed high to his right by Chavez’s left shoulder. A shot rang out in his first-class cabin just as Caruso arrived, leaping through the air over Chavez’s prostrate form, then landing, his knees slamming onto the chests of both men. One man drew a folding knife from the pocket of his tracksuit and clicked it open, but Ding stabbed him through the heart with his steak knife, ending him instantly. The second man still had his pistol in his hand, but a hailstorm of punches from Dom onto the man’s nose and jaw rendered him senseless quickly.

By then, sustained gunfire from first class shattered the glass window of the vestibule door just over both Americans’ heads.

Chavez and Caruso both scooped up the weapons of the two gunmen. They were GSh-18s, Russian military-issue nine-millimeter pistols. They entered the vestibule, crawling low, listening to the booming gunfire just past the next door. The gunfire grew heavier by the second, but Chavez chanced a look through the broken window. He saw the female dog handler lying still in the hallway of first class, the big Belgian Malinois tearing into the arm of a flailing man in a black tracksuit, and more police taking cover in the first compartment and down at the end of the hall near the exits to the train. More men in black leaned out of Morozov’s compartment and two more closer to the dining car, all firing pistols.

Chavez aimed quickly at the back of a gunman’s head and fired, dropping the man to the hallway floor, but immediately the German police began firing at Chavez, thinking him to be just one more attacker shooting at them. He hit the floor, turned to Dom, and said, “The shooters are in the nearest three compartments in first class.”

Dom said, “I’ll go outside, engage through the windows.”

Chavez said, “The hell you will. This isn’t
Mission Impossible
. They don’t put handrails on the outside of trains.”

Just then, the train began to slow again. Its brakes wailed and squealed. Dom and Ding were thrown to the ground in the vestibule.

Dom looked outside. “Shit, we’re in a forest.”

The conductor was just stopping the train so people could get off, but Caruso and Chavez knew this would help Morozov and his team escape.

Even before the locomotive came to a complete stop, the Americans could hear glass shattering in the first-class compartments. Dom opened the door to the outside, leapt to the ground, and saw men dropping to the tracks, weapons in hand. He started to aim at
the closest gunman, but the cracks of a pistol from one of the windows sent him back inside the train.

He found Chavez involved in a firefight through the vestibule window. “They are escaping out the windows!” Dom shouted over the gunfire.

“Good! Let them go, just don’t let them flank us!”

Dom aimed back through the door just as a gunman spun around, trying to get a shot off on the unknown shooters behind the gunmen in first class. Dom fired twice, hitting the man in the left clavicle and spinning him to the train tracks.

A second shooter had made it to a row of trees beyond the train tracks, and with his pistol he took careful aim at the men in gray suits in the vestibule between the dining car and first class. His first shot went high over Ding’s head, but his second grazed Dom in the back, sending him diving into the bathroom.

The door to first class slid open without warning, and Chavez spun his gun toward the movement. A man dressed in black slammed into him, knocking him to the floor.

The German police continued firing up the length of their carriage, and bullet holes tore through the metal door as it closed again, the rounds going just a few feet over Chavez’s head.

Dom aimed at the man on top of Chavez from his position on the floor of the bathroom, and he pressed his trigger, but the attacker lowered his head quickly and the round went high. The slide of Dom’s GSh-18 locked open, letting him know he was out of ammo.

The man on top of Chavez delivered a powerful right cross into the American’s face.

Dom leapt from the bathroom and onto the man, ripping him off Chavez and throwing him against the wall of the vestibule. The man launched himself back toward Dom, eyes red with fury.

The attacker in the black tracksuit landed on top of Caruso now, but not before Dom got his steak knife out and up. It buried into the man’s throat, sent him rolling off, grabbing at his mortal wound.

More gunfire from the outside of the train forced the Americans to crawl out of the vestibule and back into the dining car, where they took cover with a terrified porter behind the counter. They weren’t sure what had happened to the German police, Morozov, or the woman, but they’d done what they could to minimize the slaughter, and now it was all about survival.

The entire gunfight, from when Chavez and Caruso took down the two rear sentries to the last sound of men running off into the trees, lasted only three minutes.

Chavez’s mouth was bleeding and his lip swollen from the punch to the face, but he was most concerned about the wound to Dom’s back. Dom pulled his jacket off, and when he did so Chavez saw blood on his white shirt.

“How bad?” Dom asked. It was in the small of his back on his left side, but too far behind for Dom to be able to see the wound.

Chavez looked at it quickly. “You’re fine. Wrap it with a tablecloth and put your coat back on. I’m going to go check on the cops.”

Ding Chavez found three police officers and one dog still alive in the first-class carriage, though one of the men had been shot twice in the legs. Chavez stabilized him while he talked to the other police. He denied knowing anything about any other shooters on the train other than the cops, and asked the three police what happened to the woman they were trying to detain.

“She got away,” one said, his voice cracking with emotion as he looked at his dead comrades. Chavez thought the man might go into shock within minutes.

More civilians appeared in first class now, as well as the train conductor and a cashier from the dining car. Ding used the influx
of new faces to slip back to the dining car, where he found Caruso going through the pockets of the unconscious men. He looked up at Chavez and shook his head. “More ammo. Their bags have clothes, a few toiletries, small wads of cash.”

“Where are their passports?”

“Remember, the guy dressed up as a coach had them. I guess he’s in the forest somewhere.”

Chavez sighed. “It’s time for us to do the same. How do you feel?”

“My back stings like I just got a tattoo. My pride is hurt that I took a bullet. Do the cops suspect us of anything?”

“I doubt it, but it will just take one witness to put us with a gun in our hands to get us stuck here at the German border till things get straightened out. I think we need to get off this train.”

Dom nodded. “I’ll get our bags.”

Chavez said, “These guys were good.
Very
good.”

Caruso nodded. “Could be a Spetsnaz unit of some sort. If that’s the case, if Russian special operations boys
are
running around in the West carrying guns and shooting cops, you can bet none of those bodies will have any IDs.”

Chavez said, “We get out of here and call it in. That’s all we can do.”

“Roger that.”

J
ack Ryan, Jr., was sure he’d lost the man who had been following him, so he climbed out of the taxi two blocks from his apartment on Via Frattina, in the center of Rome. Glancing at his watch, he realized he’d been in the cab for a quarter-hour. He could have walked home from the Piazza del Popolo faster than the vehicle had gotten him here, since the tiny one- and two-lane streets in this part of town made footpower and scooters more efficient than four-wheeled transport. Still, he was sure he’d lost the man in the pandemonium of Roman traffic, especially with all the twists and turns the taxi driver took to get around the worst part of the chaos.

He approached his apartment on foot, a little warily, because he had not been able to rule out the fact that one follower he’d identified could have confederates. But he checked the four or five places he figured someone might position himself if he wanted to watch the front door of his place, and he saw no one who did not belong.

He opened the door to the building and entered a long echoing hallway of black-and-white-checkered tile. His place was four
stories above, on the third floor, and the slow, rickety, coffinlike elevator gave him the creeps, so he headed for the enclosed stairwell on his right.

•   •   •

T
hirty seconds after Jack entered the stairwell and started heading up, a brown-haired man with a ponytail, wearing a brown leather jacket and carrying a backpack on his right shoulder, entered the front door of the apartment building, carefully shutting the door behind him so it would not echo in the large entry hall. He then stepped to the stairwell, cautious to ascend softly so the noise of his footfalls would not carry upstairs.

He climbed the stairs almost silently, taking his time doing so, and stopped at the first floor. Here he slowly leaned his head out into the hall. He looked left, then right. Seconds later he was back on the stairs and ascending again, making the turn on the landing between the floors. At the second floor he poked his head out into the hall and looked left, then right.

Once again he returned to the stairwell, climbed up to the third floor, and moved to the doorway to the hall. He slowly craned his head out and looked to the left.

The tall bearded man stood there facing him, just two feet away.

•   •   •

J
ack reached out and grabbed the man by his jacket, spun him around 180 degrees in the hall, and slammed him hard against the wall. The man with the ponytail was stunned by the blow, but he was still aware enough to reach down to the backpack hanging off his shoulder. His right hand shot inside through a partially opened zipper, and he clutched something there.

Ryan fired a right jab straight out, connecting with the man’s nose, snapping his head back.

“Che cazzo . . . ?”
the man shouted. What the fuck . . . ?

Ryan grabbed the forearm connected to the hand in the bag in order to prevent the man from pulling out a weapon, and he smashed the man against the wall again by slamming into him with his left shoulder.

“Che cazzo . . . !”
the man screamed again, his words echoing down the tiled hallway of the old building. The man started to reach into his front pocket with his left hand now, so Jack head-butted him in the face.

The man with the ponytail dropped down on his knees, completely dazed, his bloody face wrapped in his hands, and Jack ripped the backpack off him. In doing so the pack slammed hard into the wall.

“What were you going for, asshole?” Ryan shouted at the man. His own words echoed down the hall, but they were partially drowned out by the groans of pain from the lungs of the man with the ponytail.

Jack pulled out a large thirty-five-millimeter digital camera, cracked from the impact, a couple of high-end lenses, both shattered, and a see-through plastic neck pouch. In it was a media identification card containing a passport-sized photo of the man kneeling on the floor in front of him. The writing on the card was in Italian, but Jack recognized the word
PRESSE
stamped in large letters across it. Jack then knelt down and found the man’s wallet in his front-left pocket. This had an ID card that said the same thing.

Ryan dug through the man’s bag some more, found a few small Baggies of off-white powder, a metal spoon, a cigarette lighter, and a cluster of syringes, all rubber-banded together. There was also a cell phone, but Jack had apparently smashed it, as well, when he
banged the pack against the wall. He dropped everything back into the bag, put it on his own shoulder, yanked the man back to his feet, and pushed him up the hall.

“If you’re press, then I’m the Pope,” Ryan said.

•   •   •

Y
sabel rushed to the door when she heard Ryan and another man shouting in the hallway. She looked out the peephole, then opened the door just as Jack came through, his hand pulling the bleeding man by the collar behind him.

Ysabel said nothing, although her eyes revealed her surprise.

Jack all but dragged the man through the living room and into the kitchen, their footfalls on the hardwood floors echoing off the high ceilings of the luxury apartment. He shoved the man onto a chair at the kitchen table and the man crumpled there, still stunned by the vicious head butt.

Ysabel walked up behind Jack now. Sarcastically, she asked, “Will our guest be staying for dinner?”

Jack didn’t answer. He took a moment to let his adrenaline dissipate, and while he did this he watched Ysabel take ice from the freezer and put it in a wet cloth. She cracked the cubes inside the cloth with a metal ladle.

He looked down at his hand now. It was scuffed, and he knew from past experience the knuckles would probably bruise to a yellowish gray, but his hand wasn’t bleeding.

“I’m fine,” he said.

She did not look up from her work. “It’s not for you. It’s for him.”

“The hell with him.”

“I’m not going to let him bleed all over the place.”

Jack would have done just that. He was furious that his feeling of safety and anonymity had been destroyed in the blink of an eye.
His time here in Rome, his utterly perfect two weeks, was over, just like that, and he was having a hard time accepting this fact.

Ysabel asked, “Who is he?”

“He’s been following me.”

“Then why on earth did you lead him here?”

“I didn’t. I shook him at the Piazza del Popolo, I’m
sure
I did. I spent fifteen minutes in a cab checking behind me the entire time, then I came back here and he followed me in. Somehow he knows where we live.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“Camera equipment, mostly. And some fake creds that say he’s a journalist.”

“No weapon, then.”

Jack shrugged. “No. No weapon.”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“I’m going to find out who sent him.”

“Before you do that, I’m going to clean him up and stop the bleeding.”

Ysabel knelt in front of the man at the kitchen table, and Jack took the man’s backpack into the living room and sat down, careful to position himself so he could keep an eye on him in the kitchen.

He watched Ysabel kneeling in front of the man. He still seemed to be dazed, and she worked expertly on cleaning his bloody face, applying ice to the lacerations to slow the bleeding.

The man wasn’t badly hurt. Jack himself had taken blows much harder and kept his wits about him.

For just a quick flash it occurred to him that he should be appreciating the kindness of his girlfriend. Ysabel was in the same boat as he was; the appearance of this son of a bitch was a death knell to the perfect little world they had created. A temporary respite after the time of great danger and stress they’d shared on their last
mission, and before Jack inevitably returned to real fieldwork with The Campus.

But Ysabel’s compassion for this man just annoyed him. He didn’t have the humanity she did, he supposed. He was just pissed.

Jack stood back up and stormed into the kitchen now. Playtime was over. It was time for answers.

He asked, “Do you speak English?”

The man had clearly come out of his stupor, because he shouted, “Eat my shit, Jack Ryan Junior!”

Jack scooped the backpack up again and began to recheck it, looking for a false partition or hidden compartment. As he did this he said, “So . . . you know who I am. You are going to tell me who you are and who you work for.”

“You going to hell, man!”

This guy was pissed. Not scared. That seemed odd to Jack. He pulled out the camera. “This is a nice rig. Where did you get it?”

“From your mother.”

Jack sighed. “Right. Well, I found your fake media credentials in your bag and a fake ID in your wallet. I am going to do some digging into these and see if I can figure out who you really are.”

“Fake? What shit are you saying?”

“I’m saying your name isn’t”—Jack looked at the ID card again—“Salvatore.” He cocked his head in confusion. “What, you couldn’t be bothered to make up a fake last name?”

The man touched his face. “You broke my nose!”

Jack knelt down directly in front of the man now. He had four inches and twenty-five pounds of muscle on the seated man. “It’s not broken, but I’ll break your neck if you don’t talk.”

“I’m Salvatore.”

Jack just looked at him.

“Salvatore!”

“Right! I got it! You’re Salvatore. But who the fuck are you?”

“You see the ID, man. It say who I am. I am photographer. You know . . . celebrity photographer.”

Ryan looked down at the credentials again. “Wait . . . you are saying you are a paparazzi? Bullshit.”

“Paparazzo, sì,”
Salvatore said, and he fingered his swollen lip.

Ysabel had been listening in. She walked over to her laptop on a desk next to the doorway to the kitchen and began to type the man’s name into a search engine.

Jack asked, “Why were you following me?”

“You’re a celebrity, you son of a bitch.”

Ysabel called across the room. “Jack? Can I speak with you in here for a moment?”

Jack stepped up to Ysabel’s desk, a sudden pang of worry filling the pit of his stomach. When Ysabel looked up from the desk to face him, he said, “Don’t tell me.”

“He is exactly who he says he is. He’s just a photographer. A paparazzo.” She turned her laptop so he could see the website of Salvatore—just the first name, along with several celebrity photographs. Ysabel added, “And you just beat him up.”

Jack’s jaw muscles flexed under his beard.
Oops.
He turned and headed back into the kitchen. “Who sent you?”

“Nobody send me nowhere.”

“Bullshit,” Jack said again.

Salvatore said, “You had coffee at Café Mirabelle. The hostess . . . she send me tips when somebody famous comes in. She recognize you, and she send me a text.”

Jack remembered the hostess now. A beautiful college-age girl with eyes that stayed on his an uncomfortably long time. He’d mistaken the look as one of attraction.

It was a mistake that had nothing to do with vanity, just
experience. More women looked at Jack because he was good-looking than due to the fact he came from a famous family, because he’d done everything within his power to change his appearance. His beard, his powerful physical bearing, the eyeglasses with the uncorrected lenses—he was night and day a different person from the much younger man who had been on TV some when his dad was in the White House for his first term.

But every now and then, somehow someone still realized who he was.

“How did you find my apartment?”

“I followed you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“You didn’t see me,” Salvatore said with a smile. Jack could see blood captured between the man’s teeth. “I am good.”

“If you’re a photographer and you saw me, why didn’t you take any pictures?” Jack had checked the man’s cracked camera and found nothing but a few pictures of a fountain.

Salvatore said, “The girl at restaurant told me who you were, but I no sure. I want follow you, wait you are sitting so I can get good pictures.”

That made sense to Ryan, and he caught himself actually wishing this guy had been some sort of an assassin, because he’d roughed him up so bad.

Ysabel stepped up behind Jack now. She whispered, “You need to let him go.”

Jack nodded. Of course he did.

He looked down at the man on the chair. Blood dripped from his chin again, and his shoulders hung slumped.

This was going to be awkward.

Jack knelt down and, with a tone much more conciliatory than before, said, “Look . . . Mr. Salvatore. Here’s the situation. I don’t
have security protection, I don’t really need it . . . but the Secret Service insisted I go through some . . .
specialized
training so I could protect myself if something bad happened.”

Salvatore said nothing.

“I’ve had a couple of crazy people come after me in the past. I guess I just overreacted a little this time.” Jack held out a hand. “I hope you will accept my apology.”

The Italian just stared at him, but after a moment he shook the extended hand.

Jack said, “I think you’ll be fine, but I’d be more than happy to take you to a doctor.”