Command Authority Read online

  Adler did a double take. “I think that might be a bit excessive.”

  “There are some details you don’t know yet. Better get your Maalox out while Jay briefs you on what’s going to show up in the Russian papers tomorrow.”

  Adler sat down slowly on the sofa. “Terrific.”

  10

  A lone figure walked purposefully through the London night, moving silently through the streets of Kensington. He wore a black hooded sweatshirt and black cotton pants, so he disappeared perfectly in the dark between the streetlamps. Even when he reappeared under the lights, his face was still obscured by his beard and mustache.

  He walked with his head down, and the pack on his shoulder swung along with his athletic gait. He meant business, but the two middle-aged women heading home from the Tube station didn’t know just what business he was in. They saw the man approaching them, and they crossed the quiet street, just to be on the safe side.

  Jack Ryan, Jr., watched the women cross the street; he was certain they were doing it to avoid him, and he chuckled. He didn’t get any sort of thrill out of scaring innocents, but it showed him how far he had come with his metamorphosis.

  His transformation had been dramatic. He wore a full beard and mustache now, and he’d cut his hair shorter than he’d ever worn it in his life.

  When he was at work at Castor and Boyle Risk Analytics, Jack dressed in beautifully tailored suits from a shop on Jermyn Street just off Piccadilly, but away from the office he wore jeans and sweatshirts or workout gear.

  He’d studied martial arts for several years, but now he went to a gym on Earl’s Court Road every day, usually late in the evening, as tonight, and lifted with an eye to gaining some size. In eight weeks of heavy weights and a high-protein diet he’d put on nearly ten pounds, most of it in his chest, back, shoulders, and arms, and this made him carry himself differently than before. His walk was a little longer, his footsteps a little wider, and he knew enough about surveillance techniques to realize the benefit of the change in his gait.

  He hadn’t been recognized by any strangers in well over a month, and by now he was sure even most of his friends in the States would walk right past him on the street without any idea who he was.

  He liked the feeling of anonymity, despite the jokes he heard from those around the office about his relentless workout schedule and his new facial hair.

  In addition to his extracurricular activities, Ryan had been putting in more than fifty hours a week at work. He had been assigned to a case for a client named Malcolm Galbraith, a Scottish billionaire in the oil and gas industry who owned several companies around the world, including a large natural-gas-exploration concern that mined in eastern Siberia. After he and other private investors poured billions into building Galbraith Rossiya Energy up from nothing, taking a decade to explore and drill in the harsh environs of Siberia, they finally began earning a profit.

  But within a year of achieving profitability, and with no warning whatsoever, the company was hauled into a courtroom in Vladivostok on charges of tax evasion. Before Galbraith could get on a plane for Russia to try to sort the whole mess out, the entire company was ordered liquidated by the Russian tax office to repay its debts. Remarkably, all the company’s holdings and capital equipment were ordered to be sold immediately at ridiculous knockdown prices, completely wiping out the value of the shares owned by Malcolm Galbraith and the other foreign shareholders.

  The ultimate recipient of the assets was Gazprom, Russia’s quasi-state-owned natural-gas concern and the largest company in Russia. Gazprom paid under ten percent of the actual value, and of course, they did not spend a single ruble during the years of R&D required to make the speculative enterprise profitable.

  Gazprom removed “Galbraith” from the name of the natural-gas exploration company, and they had Rossiya Energy running again within days.

  The entire affair was blatant theft; the Russian state had unabashedly colluded to renationalize a company after foreign private business had spent billions to achieve profitability.

  Malcolm Galbraith had hired Castor and Boyle to dig through the sludge of the murky deal so that, he hoped, he could find evidence of criminal wrongdoing and recoup some of his huge losses in court. Not in a Russian court. All parties knew that would be futile. But Gazprom owned companies and parts of companies all over the world. If Castor and Boyle could somehow tie any of these worldwide assets directly to the missing billions, then a court in the third-party nation just might award the assets to Malcolm Galbraith.

  Jack was in the center of this complicated but fascinating case as well as other more mundane mergers, acquisitions, and market research tasks: other situations where in-depth business intelligence was required.

  —

  Jack Ryan, Jr., made it home to his flat on Lexham Gardens, and he peeled out of his workout clothes. He was just about to climb into the shower when his phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Jack, old boy. Sorry to wake you from your beauty sleep.”

  Ryan recognized the voice as belonging to Sandy Lamont, his manager at Castor and Boyle. “Is everything okay?”

  “No chance you’ve seen the news?”

  “What news?”

  “Bloody awful stuff, I’m afraid. Tony Haldane was killed tonight.”

  Jack only knew of Haldane, he’d certainly never met the famous fund manager, though his office building was just a few blocks away from where Jack worked.

  “Damn. Killed how?”

  “Looks like terrorism or something like that. Somebody blew up a restaurant in Moscow. The head of Russia’s foreign security agency was there. He’s a goner, too. It seems Tony had the misfortune of eating at the same place as someone on a hit list, poor old sod.”

  Jack knew instantly that Sandy was calling him because of the high-stakes business implications of the death of one of The City’s most successful international fund managers—in Russia, no less. But Jack’s mind was out of The City at the moment, and back in the D.C. area. He thought of The Campus and the activity the assassination of one of Russia’s two intel chiefs would do to the operational tempo for the analysts there. Perhaps there would even be an increase in the OPTEMPO for the operations arm of the organization.

  No. Scratch that thought . . . They are all on stand-down, aren’t they?

  “That’s terrible,” Jack replied.

  “Terrible for Haldane,” Sandy agreed. “Not so terrible for us if we look over his client list for prospects. There will be a lot of worried investors without Haldane piloting the ship. They will pull money out of his fund and start looking for new places to stash it, and they’ll need a firm like Castor and Boyle to help them vet potential opportunities.”

  “Wow, Sandy,” Jack said. “That’s cold.”

  “It is cold. It is also money. It’s the real world.”

  “I get it,” Ryan said. “But I’m slammed right now. I’ve got conference calls all day tomorrow with investigators in Moscow, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, and Grand Cayman.”

  Lamont just breathed into the phone for a moment. Then he said, “Aren’t you the pit bull?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “You know, Jack, the Galbraith case is a particularly tough one, as it is starting to look more and more like well-positioned types in the tax office were involved. From my experience, these types of cases are never resolved to the satisfaction of our clients.”

  Ryan asked, “Are you suggesting I don’t bother?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Just suggesting that you don’t break your back on it. You’ve hired investigators in five countries, you’ve pulled a lot of resources from our legal department, our accounting department, our translation department.”

  “Galbraith’s got the money,” Jack countered. “It’s not like we’re paying for it.”

  “True, but we don’t want to get bogged down with one case. We want new cases, new opportunities, because that’s where the real money lies.”

&nbs
p; “What are you saying, Sandy?”

  “Just a warning. I was young and hungry once. Wanted to bloody well fix the system by shining a light on all the schemes in Russia, to make a difference. But the system is cracked, man. You can’t beat the bloody Kremlin. You are going to get yourself burned out with this work rate, and it will leave you frustrated as hell when it doesn’t pan out.” He paused; it seemed to Ryan he was struggling for the words. “Don’t shoot all your powder on this target. It’s a lost cause. Bring some of that killer instinct toward getting new clients. That’s where the money is.”

  Jack liked Sandy Lamont. He was intelligent and funny and, even though Jack had worked with him for only a few months, the forty-year-old Englishman had taken Jack under his wing and treated him almost like a kid brother.

  It was a cutthroat industry he was in now. Not literally, of course, but figuratively speaking; the well-dressed men and women in The City were always hunting opportunities, and always protecting what they had with vehemence.

  Jack could not help thinking that some of their anger and excitement in chasing the next buck or pound or yen or ruble was rather misplaced, considering the life-and-death struggles he himself had been involved in over the past few years.

  Jack wished like hell he was back with the guys, sitting on Clark’s porch with a beer and brainstorming ways to find out details of what happened this evening in Moscow. The camaraderie he’d experienced in the past few years was something he’d almost taken for granted. Now that he was here, on his own, all he could do was wonder what the rest of the men of The Campus were up to back in the States.

  He felt incredibly alone and unimportant here in London tonight, despite the fact that his colleague was on the other end of the phone.

  Suck it up, Jack. You signed on to do a job and you will damn well do it.

  “You there, mate?”

  “Yeah, Sandy. I’m here. I’ll be there first thing in the morning. We can start coming up with a plan to pitch to Haldane’s clients.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. Killer instinct. See ya.” Lamont hung up.

  Jack stepped into the shower. Killer instinct. If you only knew, Sandy.

  11

  The White House might have been referred to as the People’s House, but for the last decade no family had lived within its walls more than the Ryans.

  President Jack Ryan may have been well into the second year of his final term in office, but he still felt like an outsider here. His real home was up in Maryland. The White House was a temporary address for him, and though he had to admit he enjoyed much of the work of being the President of the United States, he would also enjoy retiring back to the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, once and for all.

  An hour before heading to bed, Ryan strolled into the main residence of the White House after putting in a full evening of work in the Oval Office. He and Cathy went into Jack’s private study, and together they called George Washington University Hospital to check on the condition of Sergey Golovko. They learned nothing new; a barrage of tests were being run and the Russian remained weak, with low blood pressure and a litany of gastrointestinal and endocrinal complaints. He had been moved to the ICU while they diagnosed his condition, but he was conscious and alert, if very uncomfortable.

  Jack and Cathy thanked the doctors for their efforts, then Jack forced himself to brighten his mood so he could accompany Cathy on their nightly rounds of tucking in the kids for bed.

  Evenings at the White House were not very different from bedtime in most homes with children in America. Just as everywhere, the nightly ordeal of getting the kids to brush their teeth and ready to go to sleep happened more smoothly some nights than others.

  They first dropped in to say good night to Kyle Daniel. His room was the West Bedroom, and it looked in many ways like most American boys’ bedrooms; there were toy chests brimming with train tracks, action figures, puzzles, and board games, and the bedspread and curtains had a NASA motif, with planets and satellites and astronauts on a sea of black sky and stars.

  The room wasn’t huge, but it was admittedly larger and statelier than the average eight-year-old boy’s room. This had been the bedroom of John F. Kennedy, Jr., when he was a toddler, and Ronald Reagan used the room as a gym.

  Kyle’s room wasn’t terribly neat, which derived chiefly from Cathy and Jack’s instructions to both children to pick up after themselves. Jack constantly reminded the kids they wouldn’t have attendants at their beck and call for their entire lives, so there was no sense in becoming overly accustomed and dependent on them.

  Kyle seemed to be genetically predisposed to removing Legos, trains, Matchbox cars, and other small, sharp objects from his toy box and leaving them all over the floor.

  Although the Ryans gave firm instructions to the residence staff to leave enough of the daily straightening to the kids that they could develop a respect for responsibility, more than once Jack passed Kyle’s room and caught one of the Secret Service agents scooping up toys and putting them back on a shelf or in a toy box. Each time, the President would lean in the doorway with a long gaze at the offending agent, and each time, the agent would sheepishly make some excuse, usually saying the cleanup was only for operational reasons, since she might need to cross the room quickly to get to Kyle, and having an eight-inch-long Lego fire truck in the way might somehow compromise her ability to accomplish her mission.

  Jack would invariably raise an eyebrow, give a tiny smile, and shake his head before moving on.

  —

  Once Kyle was tucked in for the night, Jack and Cathy stepped down the hall to check on Katie. Katie’s room was the East Bedroom; it had been Nancy Reagan’s study and Caroline Kennedy’s bedroom, as well as the bedrooms of “First Kids” Tricia Nixon, Susan Ford, and Amy Carter. It was noticeably neater than Kyle’s room, due chiefly to the fact that she was ten years old to Kyle’s eight. On the far wall stood a tall detailed playhouse, a replica of the White House itself, and this, along with a canopied bed in lavender, dominated the room. On a table was a photo of a beaming Katie with a smiling Marcella Hilton, a Secret Service agent who died while saving Katie’s life during a kidnapping attempt. Katie did not remember her anymore, but both her parents wanted to honor Marcella’s memory by keeping her picture in the White House residence, and they hoped future Presidents and First Ladies would reflect on the importance of the work of the Secret Service.

  Once the kids were tucked in, Jack and Cathy went back to their bedroom. Here they both climbed into bed and grabbed reading material. She picked up this month’s copy of the American Journal of Ophthalmology. Jack opened up a new book about the London Naval Conference of 1930.

  They read in silence for half an hour before flipping off the lights and kissing good night.

  —

  Jack and Cathy had been asleep for no more than a few minutes when Jack awoke to the sound of the bedroom door opening.

  Jack sat up quickly; as President of the United States, he had grown so accustomed to these late-night rousings he was no longer surprised to be brought out of a dead sleep by doors opening or men standing over him. Normally he liked to follow the night watch officer back to the West Sitting Hall so they could talk without disturbing Cathy. But as Jack put his feet on the floor and reached for his glasses, the overhead light in the bedroom came on.

  This had never happened before.

  Surprised and immediately on guard, Jack put on his glasses and saw Secret Service agent Joe O’Hearn moving quickly toward the bed.

  “What is it?” Jack asked, no small amount of concern in his voice.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. President, there is a situation. We need to move you and your family into the West Wing.”

  “The West Wing?” That didn’t make sense to Jack, but he was up and moving before he questioned O’Hearn any further about the danger. Jack had enormous respect for the work of the Secret Service, and he knew the last thing they needed was for him to act like a belligerent jackass in a mom
ent of crisis.

  He did ask one more question, though. “The kids?”

  “We’ve got them,” O’Hearn assured the President.

  Jack grabbed his robe and turned to Cathy, who was up and pulling on her own robe, and, though still pushing out the cobwebs from her sleepy brain, she rushed out the door with O’Hearn and her husband.

  The kids were in the hallway with their lead agents. Together, the Ryan family and their four protectors moved quickly but calmly enough down the stairs.

  O’Hearn spoke into his headset. “Heading down with SWORDSMAN, SURGEON, SPRITE, and SANDBOX. ETA three minutes.”

  Ryan’s Secret Service code name was SWORDSMAN; Cathy was code-named SURGEON, quite understandably; and Katie and Kyle went by SANDBOX and SPRITE, respectively.

  A minute later, the four members of the Ryan family were ushered outside and through the West Colonnade. The kids walked sleepily with their parents, but Jack knew it would be less than a minute before Katie began a virtual inquisition about what was going on. He hoped he’d get some answers before she started peppering him with interrogatories.

  There were six Secret Service agents around them now in a phalanx; Ryan saw no guns out, and no one was shouting or rushing the entourage along, but the entire detail was acting like there was some sort of threat out there from which the President and his family needed to be secured.

  O’Hearn conferred with someone through his earpiece as he kept everyone moving quickly. He said to Ryan, “We’re going to put you in the Oval Office for a moment.”

  Jack looked at O’Hearn as they walked. “I don’t understand, Joe. What the hell kind of threat is present in the White House bedroom but not twenty-five yards away in the West Wing?”

  “I’m not sure, sir, but I am told I need to get you out of the residence.”

  “What about Sally and Junior?” Ryan, not understanding the nature of the threat, quite reasonably wondered if his other children were in similar danger.

  O’Hearn didn’t seem to know. He was clearly operating on information just a few seconds removed from what the President was getting from him. He didn’t have a clue what was going on; he was merely getting his principals out of the residence as ordered.