Command Authority

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.”

“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.