Command Authority (16 page)

C
hief of CIA Station Keith Bixby had spent the morning in meetings in the U.S. embassy, and now, just after lunch, he had begun a surveillance detection run that would take him into the midafternoon. He had a meeting at four with an Italian businessman who owned a small trucking company that smuggled contraband back and forth from Russia.

As chief of station, Bixby found it a little unusual to be having clandestine meetings with agents, but this was nothing if not an unusual situation. Every warm body on Bixby’s staff was working, either here in Kiev or in other parts of Ukraine. He also had nonofficial cover operatives working in country, but right now most of the NOCs were off near the Russian border and in the Crimean peninsula, trying to get intelligence about the Russians and their intentions.

Kiev Station did not have the number of personnel Bixby needed, but this was not due to the fact it was some far-flung outpost forgotten by the CIA. The problem was, rather, that most every Russian- or Ukrainian-speaking case officer was already employed in Russia or Ukraine, and the CIA could not crank out Ukrainian-speaking case officers fast enough to meet the intense demand.

As the drums of war beat louder and louder, Bixby took on more and more responsibility to help his office keep up with the workload. This meant he had to leave the embassy himself, and travel the streets on long SDRs, and meet the occasional bad person over a bad meal. This Italian smuggler wasn’t terribly important, especially considering how the Russians looked like they would be attacking soon enough, but he did provide intel, so Bixby decided he’d meet with him.

The COS was only twenty minutes into his SDR and had just stopped at a bus stop in front of the massive and magnificent Cathedral of Saint Volodymyr when a man approached him and stood close. The man wore a coat with the hood up, and a scarf was wrapped over his mouth.

The CIA station chief looked the hooded man over. Suspicion was an occupational hazard, but it could also prove to be a lifesaver for someone in his position.

The man lowered his scarf. “I’m John Clark. We spoke last week.”

Bixby looked over Clark’s face, and he recognized him from the one or two pictures he’d seen of the old CIA legend. Still, he remained on guard. “I’m not sure how you could have misconstrued anything in our conversation as an invitation.”

Clark chuckled. “No, of course not.”

“Then what the hell are you doing here?”

“I just thought I’d pop over for the borscht.”

Bixby’s eyes flitted left and right. “Why don’t you come back to my office so we can talk?”

“Actually,” said Clark, “I’d prefer to keep this between the two of us.”

Bixby thought it over for a moment. “All right, then. We’ll need to keep moving. Let’s go for a walk.”

Clark followed Bixby up Taras Shevchenko Boulevard for a few blocks, and then into the Alexander Fomin Botanical Garden, next to the university.

Here the two men walked along a wide path between trees that were not yet showing any life after the long winter. The blustery weather, as well as the fact it was a workday, meant there were very few visitors walking the pathways. Still, Clark wasn’t comfortable with the location. He spoke softly. “Not exactly secure here. I assume the local opposition knows your job at the embassy.”

Bixby, on the other hand, was relaxed. “We’re fine.”

Clark looked around. It looked peaceful, but he had no idea who or what was out in the trees. “Directional mikes?”

The younger CIA man said, “No doubt about it.”

“Then why are we here?”

“The thing about the FSB is this. They are everywhere, but they aren’t superhuman. We’ve determined it takes them a good ten minutes or so to set up any type of surveillance. Right now there are probably four guys scrambling out of a van up by the metro station ahead, pulling mikes and walkie-talkies out of bags, trying to get into position ahead of us. I always try to get the important parts of our conversations out of the way quickly, so that by the time the listeners are in place we’re out of here.”

“Okay,” Clark said, and he pulled his hood forward to further hide his face from any cameras that might try to catch him meeting with the local CIA station chief.

Bixby said, “First things first. Tell me why you are in Kiev.”

“I’m a concerned citizen who thought he might be able to help out.”

“I hesitate to say this, Clark, because you’re an American hero and all. But that’s a load of horseshit.”

Clark chuckled. He liked this guy. “I am worried about Gleb the Scar. When we spoke the other day, I got the impression you didn’t have enough to go on to check this guy out the way he needed to be checked out.”

“That’s true. I’ve got FSB running all over the place. A new personality from Russian organized crime operating in the city is interesting, but at this point it’s not actionable, especially with a war looming.”

“I thought perhaps I could help.”

“Help
how
?”

“I’ve got a friend or two over here. I speak Russian. I retain TS clearance, and I follow orders.” He shrugged. “This isn’t exactly my first time out of the block.”

“I can’t take responsibility for you, Clark.”

“Not asking you to. I’m not asking for classified intel, either. I’m just asking for your blessing, and an open channel so I can get anything important back to you.”

“You know, I’ve heard of walk-in agents, but I’ve never heard of a walk-in case officer.”

Clark wasn’t making the headway he’d hoped. He changed the subject. “What’s going on down in the Crimea? Is the Ukrainian military ready for a Russian invasion?”

Bixby shrugged. “I can only give you an unclassified answer. I know you retain clearance, but I haven’t figured out what the fuck your deal is yet.”

“Hey, like I said, I’m not asking for anything sensitive. I’m just an American tourist thinking of going on holiday in Odessa.”

Bixby shook his head. “Okay. Well . . . I would suggest you go to Maui, instead. Maybe you could get a senior discount on a hotel room there. Crimea is going to blow up soon. The Russians are ready to invade, just looking for an excuse. The Ukrainians are moving troops into the region to dispel them—that’s in the local news, so I’m not giving you anything TS there—and it’s as likely as not the Russians will use the Ukrainians’ movements as a provocation for them to go in.”

“Because of all the Russian nationals living in the Crimea.”

“Yep. You probably know those Russian nationals only got their citizenship because Moscow handed out passports to Ukrainians of Russian heritage. It was an FSB op all the way, setting the stage for the invasion. They called it ‘passportization.’ The Russians began offering passports to civilians in the Crimea with Russian heritage. They are creating a land of Russians in Ukraine, and then they will say, ‘We have to come in to protect our citizens.’ They did exactly the same thing in Georgia a few years ago. There were two autonomous regions inside Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The FSB went in and discreetly distributed passports to a percentage of the population. Then the Russians used the fact there were so many Russians in these regions to justify sending in their army to kick out the Georgian Army.”

“And you make it sound like there’s nothing that can stop it.”

Bixby shrugged. “I believe they will attack, and I believe they will take the Crimea. That is the low-hanging fruit. What I am worried about is the whole country falling. Russia sees the Ukrainian nationalists in power as a clear and present danger to Russian citizens in the country. Volodin might just march his forces all the way to Kiev.”

Clark said, “What could I do that might help you out?”

Bixby stopped in the path and looked at the older man. “You aren’t alone, are you?”

Clark did not answer at first.

“Look, man. I sure as hell don’t have the time, the energy, or the resources to check you out. The only thing I could do would be call someone in Ukrainian border control and get your visa revoked.”

“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” Clark said. “No. I’m not alone. I’m here with Domingo Chavez.”

Bixby’s eyebrows rose. Chavez was also well known in the Agency. “Are you here on some sort of a commercial contract? You working for one of the oil companies?”

“Nothing like that. Believe me, I’m not getting paid to be here. But I want to help. I’ve got a couple other hands, and a local guy who worked for me in Rainbow. We are set up to look into Gleb the Scar and his operation here, but I don’t want to get in the way of anything you are already doing. We can provide you a little skilled labor. That’s all.”

They started walking again, and Bixby shrugged while he walked. “Look. I appreciate the effort you made in putting together a crew and coming halfway around the world, but I’m not a trusting guy. This is my turf you are on, and although I don’t have the manpower I wish I had, I’m not prepared to cut you in on my operation.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Clark said. He took a card out of his pocket. On it was the number to his satellite phone. “If you change your mind, I’ll be around.”

Bixby took the card as he walked, and slipped it into his coat pocket.

As they neared the metro station, Bixby started moving away from Clark on the footpath. He was nearly ten feet to Clark’s right when he nodded to a spot in the trees on Clark’s side of the path. “We’ve got company. An FSB flunky is getting into position over there.”

Clark said, “There’s a second guy behind you. They don’t have their mikes or cams set up yet.”

Bixby did not look. Instead, he kept his eyes on the path in front of him as he said, “See ya around, Clark. Try and stay out of trouble. I’ve got enough problems.”

Clark himself looked at the ground. No one watching them from distance would know they were together. Clark went around the left-hand side of the metro building for the stairs, where he descended belowground to catch a train.

Bixby walked to the road and hailed a taxi to take him back to the embassy. He’d need to start his SDR all over again before meeting with the Italian businessman.

P
resident Jack Ryan lay on his bed in Blair House. It was midnight; he knew this because the grandfather clock in the hall outside the master bedroom had just chimed the hour. He was to be awoken at six a.m., barring anything happening in the middle of the night that would need his attention, so he was hoping sleep would come soon.

But he didn’t think it was likely. New developments this evening were keeping him up. Jay Canfield at CIA reported that Russia had moved a mechanized battalion into Belarus. This was no invasion; on the contrary, they did it with the full backing of Minsk. Ryan knew Minsk did whatever the hell Moscow wanted. The authoritarian leader of Belarus was completely in Volodin’s back pocket.

No, the troop movements weren’t troubling because of what might happen in Belarus; rather, they were troubling because Belarus bordered Ukraine to the north.

Jack had asked Jay if the mechanized battalion in Belarus could put Kiev in jeopardy, and Canfield’s response was still running through Jack’s mind:

“Yes, but frankly, even the Russian troops on Ukraine’s eastern border can jeopardize Kiev. Defense spending in Ukraine hasn’t even been enough for the upkeep of the equipment they have. The Russians can take the Ukrainian capital from either direction.” It seemed to Jack as if each day brought a potential invasion even closer. Jack had sent Scott Adler, his secretary of state, to Europe to drum up support on the diplomatic front to try and stop a Russian invasion before it began, but so far Adler had received much in the way of private platitudes but little in the way of public diplomacy from the European nations.

Ryan had a meeting planned with Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess in the morning to discuss the military ramifications of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and he knew he needed to start planning for what was beginning to look more and more inevitable.

With everything on his plate right now, Jack knew his focus should remain on the present. But try as he might, Mary Pat Foley’s throwaway comment earlier in the day concerning a rumor of an assassin called Zenith and a spate of killings thirty years earlier had his mind wandering back to those days.

He had not thought of Zenith in a long time. In the four years Jack was out of office, he had worked on his memoirs. This had been a slow process, made slower by the fact that many of the things Ryan had done had been classified, and he therefore could not very well put them in his book.

But the Zenith affair—they called it the “possible Zenith affair” at the time because no one ever proved there was, in fact, a Zenith—was an event that not only was classified but had been all but stricken from the record. Jack had not spoken of Zenith to anyone for thirty years.

And this made it all the more surprising when Mary Pat mentioned it in the context of a current crisis.

There were so few mysteries left from the Cold War. When the Iron Curtain dropped, virtually all the answers poured out like the Curtain had been a floodgate.

But despite the Russian government investigating the matter, the questions surrounding Zenith had never been resolved.

Jack knew Mary Pat had been right; this wasn’t like him to chase details on a single piece of intel. Ostensibly, he wanted to see if Talanov was somehow involved in the Zenith murders; if he was, this would be an important piece of the puzzle and part of developing an understanding of his background and his personality. But if Jack was honest with himself, he would have to admit that he had ordered the look into the Zenith case mostly because it had been one of the few remaining question marks of his career, and if Roman Talanov had something to do with it, however unlikely that might have been, Jack damn sure wanted to know.

He closed his eyes and willed himself to fall asleep. Tomorrow he would need to be fully involved in the dangerous present; he didn’t have the luxury of lying awake tonight to think about the dangerous past.

—

S
andy Lamont was worried about his young and high-profile employee for a couple of reasons. Number one, since returning from the West Indies, Jack had been working so hard he was starting to look like a bit of a zombie, and Lamont was concerned that one of the principals of his firm might pass young Ryan in the hall and then pull Lamont into his office to read him the riot act for abusing his employee.

And the other reason Sandy was concerned was that he was getting calls from Moscow, all basically saying the same thing. Some of the work they had been doing on behalf of Jack Junior was starting to earn them unwarranted attention from the local authorities.

Jack was back on Gazprom, it was clear from the calls. In the course of his investigation, the young American had been sending investigators from Castor and Boyle’s Moscow office out to tax offices to request records. This was causing trouble at the tax offices, and Sandy knew he needed to gently persuade his highly motivated new employee to take it a little slower for both his own health and the good of C&B Risk Analytics. Sandy knew there would be serious hell to pay once Castor found out Jack was focusing his investigative efforts on the cash cow of the
siloviki
.

Sandy found Jack right where he knew he would be at the end of the day, hunched over his computer keyboard with his phone to his ear. Sandy waited for the young man to get off the phone with one of the in-house translators, and then he knocked on Jack’s office door.

“Hey, Sandy.”

“Got a minute?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

Sandy came into Jack’s little office, shut the door, and sat in the one other chair in the room. “What are you working on?” he asked, but Sandy knew the answer.

“A Swiss shell that does business with Gazprom.”

Sandy feigned surprise. “Remember, mate, Gazprom was the ultimate beneficiary of the Galbraith theft, true, but they weren’t the ones who stole the company.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Lad, if you buy a piece of property that someone else has stolen, you might be forced to hand it back over if it was acquired illegally, but that doesn’t mean you are a criminal yourself. We need to help Galbraith and his lawyers prove culpability of one of the companies that actually pulled off the deal, not Gazprom, the firm that bought up the assets after the deal was done.”

Ryan said, “This thing is big, Sandy. It might go all the way up to Gazprom and the big shots who own it. I know Castor has some trepidation, so I’m proceeding as carefully as I possibly can.”

Sandy knew he had his work cut out for him trying to get his energetic analyst to take his foot off the gas pedal. He stifled a sigh. “What have you learned?”

Ryan said, “In all the data I found in the paperwork from Randolph Robinson’s garbage, I came across one document for Shoal Bank, the bank we think is owned by the people behind IFC. It was an account transfer from a company in Germany to Shoal Bank. I looked into that company, and from shareholder information I just swam upstream, following names, addresses, looking into holding companies it deals with and loan signatories for purchases it’s made.”

“What sort of company is this?”

“Germany buys natural gas from Gazprom. This Swiss-registered German firm receives the payments from the German government, and then processes the payments for Gazprom.”

“
Processes
them?”

Jack chuckled. “Yeah. They are just an intermediary. Germany wires money to the Swiss account of this company, and then they wire it on to Russia, minus their processing charge. Gazprom uses them for no discernible reason.”

Sandy said, “Clearly, the reason is to overcharge the Germans for their gas so that someone gets a payoff.”

“Yep,” Jack said. “But it’s even worse than that. I found the Germans, on Gazprom’s request, made a ten-million-dollar payment to a consulting company in Geneva, and they used Shoal Bank of Saint John’s to do it. There are attempts to obfuscate the owners of the consulting company, I’m still working on that, but I’m sure it is nothing more than a shell, or a shell of a shell. It was a kickback of some kind. As near as I can tell, the only reason this Geneva firm is around is to facilitate below-board payments.”

“Makes paying bribes extra-easy,” Sandy said. “Companies like that only exist on paper, and they produce nothing but illegal invoices.”

“Right,” said Jack. “Some German official who okayed the natural-gas contract with Gazprom sets up an untraceable company in Geneva so his own country can pay him off.”

Ryan knew Sandy had been at this a lot longer than he had, and he was going to be hard to surprise. He said, “And this is just one payment, for ten million. Over four billion has gone from the Germans to Gazprom via this Swiss intermediary. There is no telling how much has been skimmed and where it all has gone.”

Sandy said, “Well done, lad. When old man Castor told me I’d have Jack Ryan, Jr., working under me, I thought you’d be just a pretty face with a powerful name. Now I’m starting to look over my shoulder thinking you might be sitting in my seat before too long.”

Ryan appreciated the compliment, but he had the sense he was being buttered up for some reason. He said, “I inherited a lot of curiosity from my dad. I love digging into a good mystery, but to tell you the truth, all I want to do is solve these riddles. I have no ambition of running a department, much less a company.”

Sandy replied, “I was a pit bull myself back in the day. This was the late nineties, Russia was a different animal then. Blokes with gold chains shooting each other in the back of the head. Might seem grim now with all the financial shysters about, but nothing like the nineties.”

“Well, we
did
get jumped the other day in Antigua.”

“You’ve got a point there. That was all the rough stuff I ever want to see.” Lamont prepared himself to start his lecture, but Jack interrupted.

“Anyway, I found something else in the Robinson data. I found a note stating Shoal Bank’s board of directors flew to Zug, Switzerland, on March first of this year for a meeting with the bank there. I decided the key to blowing the entire gas deal open is finding out who showed up from the board.”

Lamont’s eyebrows rose. “Travel records?”

“Yes, but it’s tricky.”

“I would suspect so. The nearest airport is Zurich, and there must be a hundred flights a day.”

Ryan nodded. “I looked at the commercial flights that arrived from any point in Russia in the seventy-two hours before the meeting. I just checked first class because, well, because these people were involved in a one-point-two-billion-dollar swindle, so I figured if they went commercial, they weren’t back in steerage.”

“Safe assumption.”

“There were CEOs and CFOs flying into Zurich all day long, but nobody with the connections or the juice to be involved in this level of an operation.”

Lamont said, “I assume you checked out private jets.”

“Of course. I figured from the beginning I’d probably need to investigate private jets. I looked into all the declared flights, but not very hard, because I figured these guys would be coming in on a blocked flight.”

“What is that?”

“The FAA of Switzerland is called Skyguide. Skyguide can block a flight so that the public can’t find out any trace of it. We have the same thing in the USA. All you have to do is ask nicely and FAA will hide the identity of your private aircraft and its flight path. Businesses need to be able to conduct business without their competitors tracking the movements of the CEO, movie stars want to avoid paparazzi, plus, there are security concerns.”

Lamont said, “I’m sure there are lots of other reasons of the more underhanded variety.”

Ryan nodded and reached for his coffee. “Undoubtedly. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t just look up a record of the tail numbers and trace the jets that way, so I pulled up the audio files of the Zurich airport tower for the seventy-two hours and downloaded them into a speech-to-text app. Even if the flight number is blocked on all written logs, the plane still has to communicate with the tower and use its flight number. Using the speech-to-text, I pulled out every tail number for a private aircraft and researched each plane individually.”

Lamont was amazed by the tenacity of Jack Ryan. He said, “I told you you were a right pit bull.”

“It wasn’t that hard, because I knew I’d be looking for a blocked aircraft, one whose flight track wasn’t also available online. I found several, of course—there are lots of shady corporate planes flying into Switzerland. But there was an Airbus A318, tail number NS3385, that landed at nine-thirty a.m. on March first, the day of the meeting. The ACJ318 is a corporate jet with a bedroom, a lounge, a seating area, and even a closed-off boardroom.”

“That’s a bloody expensive jet.”

“I researched the aircraft and found nothing, so I looked into the records of the FBOs on the ramp in Zurich, and saw that one A318 was refueled that morning. That bill was paid by a holding company based right there in Zurich, and this company also paid for fuel for another aircraft a few months before this at the same FBO. This one was owned by a restaurant group in Saint Petersburg.”

Sandy’s head cocked to the side. “Restaurant group in Saint Petersburg?”

Jack smiled. “That’s right. The same one Randolph Robinson works for down in Antigua. He set up the shell corporation, and he also manages Shoal Bank, owned by IFC.”

Sandy said, “You have a name associated with the restaurant company?”

Jack looked at his notes. “I do. Dmitri Nesterov. He owns a chain of restaurants. Other than that, I don’t know anything about him. I’ve searched and searched. He never went to any business school, he’s not a member of the Duma or an employee in the Kremlin.

“But he is a principal in a company that has bought up over twelve billion euros’ worth of oil and gas infrastructure in the past four months.”

“Bloody unbelievable.”

“Yes,” said Ryan. “We need to find out who Nesterov is, and why the Kremlin set him up to make one-point-two billion dollars in the raiding of Galbraith Rossiya Energy.”

Lamont nodded, but slowly and cautiously. He had to admit to himself, the Yank had gotten further with this than anyone else here in the office could have. He knew Castor was against anyone in-house working against Gazprom, but Jack Ryan was onto something, and Sandy Lamont was not going to get in his way.