Command Authority

31

It was near the end of the workday, and Jack Ryan, Jr., had not left his desk except for runs to the cafeteria for coffee and sandwiches and to the bathroom — he found himself unable to call it a “loo”—but he was looking forward to heading straight home and then opening up his computer there for a few hours’ more research before bed.

His phone rang and he did not look at the number before answering: “Ryan.”

“Sandy here, Jack. Wonder if you could come upstairs when you get a chance.”

“Upstairs?”

“Yes. I’m up here with Mr. Castor. No rush at all.”

Ryan had been here long enough to know the subtle understatement of British-speak. Lamont was telling him to get his ass up into the director’s office on the double.

“Be right there.”

“Lovely.”

Jack sat down at a coffee table in the ornate office of Hugh Castor, managing director of Castor and Boyle Risk Analytics, and he sipped coffee from a bone-china cup while Castor finished a phone call in French at his desk. Sandy Lamont sat across from him with his legs crossed.

Ryan whispered, “What’s going on?”

But Lamont just shrugged as if he had no idea.

The sixty-eight-year-old Englishman finished his call. He strode over to the sitting area and took the wingback chair at the end of the coffee table.

“You have done a remarkable job. We are all incredibly impressed.”

Jack liked an affirming compliment as much as anyone, but in this case he sensed a “but” coming.

He raised his eyebrows.

“But,” Hugh Castor said, “Jack, we are, quite frankly, nervous.”

“Nervous?”

“Locating the nexus between Russian business, Russian government, and Russian criminal enterprise is, frankly, part of our job here at Castor and Boyle. Having said that, your methods might be perceived by some as overly aggressive.”

Jack looked at Sandy. At first he thought this was about what had happened in the alley in Antigua. But Sandy’s almost imperceptible shake of his head told him this pertained to something else. “Perceived by whom?” Jack asked.

Castor sighed. “A name came up in your investigation the other day.”

Jack nodded. “Dmitri Nesterov. What about him?”

Castor examined his fingernails for a moment. In an offhand way, he said, “As it turns out, he happens to be a large shareholder in Gazprom, as well as a high-ranking official in the FSB.”

Lamont said, “Double trouble, you might say.”

“Quite,” agreed Castor.

Jack said nothing for several seconds.

Castor responded to Jack’s silence: “You are trying to decide just how to ask me how it is I know this about Nesterov.”

Ryan said, “I looked into him. He is a restaurateur in Saint Petersburg. I didn’t discover any connection to FSB or even to Gazprom. You must have other means at your disposal.”

“In light of your father’s profession before he went into politics, I’m sure you know something about the work of the intelligence services.”

You might say that, Ryan thought. He just nodded.

“It is mutually beneficial that we here at Castor and Boyle and the good men and women in British secret service communicate from time to time. We might come across a name, as you did, and want to ask them about it. Or they might like to learn something about what we have discovered in our work.”

I knew it, thought Jack. C&B had ties to SIS. But again, he didn’t say it.

“Makes sense.”

“So I inquired about Nesterov, and they came right back to me and said, in their unique way of doing things, that we should be careful with him.”

“Okay,” Jack said. And then he added, “I’m careful.”

Castor paused. “Flying down to Antigua and Barbuda, going through rubbish bins on private property. This is not careful. I can’t imagine the negative press Castor and Boyle would have received if our employee, the American President’s child, no less, was seriously injured or killed while on some sort of a secret mission on a Third World island in the Caribbean. It’s a right dangerous world out there, lad, and you aren’t trained to deal with some of the unsavory characters who operate on the fringes of our industry.”

Sandy Lamont cleared his throat slightly, but he said nothing.

“You sending investigators to Tver, your applications to the Russian tax office for information, your research into the aircraft Nesterov uses to get around. This is all far above and beyond our normal scope of inquiry. I am concerned FSB might make things difficult for us, same as they do for many of our clients, and I can’t have that.”

Jack asked, “Is this about the FSB, or is this about the fact I’m the President’s son?”

“Frankly, it’s both. It is our job to fulfill the wishes of our clients. In this case, you have done a bang-up job, but we are not going to recommend to Galbraith that he pursue his case any further.

“The problem, lad, is that if Nesterov is an owner of IFC, there is zero chance Galbraith will ever see a shilling of his money. We can’t pull them into court, not in Russia, and not in any European country, because Russia controls the flow of energy into Europe.”

Jack said, “If we reveal the fact that Gazprom colluded with the tax office to raid Galbraith’s company, and that this FSB guy earned a one-point-two-billion-dollar payday, then we can put a stop to this sort of thing continuing.”

“We are not a police force. We are not an army. Your father might be the leader of the free world, but that carries no weight in this situation. The FSB can make things difficult for us if we hit too close to home in our investigation.”

Ryan gritted his teeth. “If you are telling me the fact I am employed here makes seeking justice more difficult for you, then I will resign.”

Castor said, “That’s just it, lad. What we do here is not about justice.”

Lamont leaned in helpfully. “It’s about money, mate. We want to help our client retrieve lost assets. That is possible if we find tangible assets in the West, but if you start naming high-ranking FSB geezers, Galbraith will not receive any recompense, I can assure you of that.”

Castor said, “Jack. You, quite simply, have aimed too high on this one.”

After a moment of silence, Jack said, “I understand.”

He did not, in fact, understand, but he felt like if he sat here for one minute more he was going to put his fist through the wall.

Castor said, “We’re going to put you on something else. Something less incendiary. You do very fine work, we just need to direct your efforts to a new task.”

“Sure,” Ryan said. “Whatever you think is best.”

Jack left Castor and Boyle at six-thirty p.m. Sandy invited him out for drinks and dinner in an attempt to make up for the tough meeting with the director, but Jack didn’t feel like he would be much company tonight. Instead, he went to a pub on his own, picked at a shepherd’s pie, and drank down four pints before leaving for the Tube.

Ryan’s foul mood intensified as he walked up Cannon Street in the rain. He’d forgotten his damn umbrella again, and he punished himself by not allowing himself to buy another. No, he would just let himself get soaked; he thought that might help him remember to grab it next time.

He was thinking about stopping off at one more pub on the way home. He would pass by the Hatchet on his way to the Tube; he’d been there before, and he’d liked the place well enough. Another beer would hit the spot, but, he decided, it would only make him more pissed off and sullen.

No. He’d go home and get some sleep instead.

He crossed the street, glancing back quickly over his right shoulder as he did so. Force of habit, nothing more, and as always, there was no one there who looked in any way out of the ordinary. He chastised himself; it was as if he was having a very difficult time switching into this life. He was overzealous in his work, treating shady businessmen as though they were an international terrorist syndicate, because that’s what he’d been dealing with in his old life. And he ran mini-SDRs and stayed on the lookout for surveillance, because that’s also what he’d been trained to do in his last job.

And, as another nod to his personal security, he treated every female who got within ten yards of him as a potential enemy plant.

Because that’s what happened to him in his last job.

Ryan entered the Mansion House Tube station, cold and soaking wet. On the escalator down to the tracks an attractive woman in front of him turned around and looked up at him. She gave him a sympathetic half-smile. Like he was a puppy who’d come in from the rain. Then she turned back, away from the wet guy in the nice suit.

Twenty minutes later he walked out of the Earl’s Court station, hands in his pockets and his collar up. He’d dried off a little in the Tube, but even though the rain had stopped, the evening mist was so incredibly thick he was soaked again within minutes.

After he passed a few people standing under umbrellas in front of an Indian restaurant on Hogarth Road he was all alone, walking along the sidewalk in front of a long set of row houses. He crossed the street over to Kenway, and his mind was lost back in his work. He’d just been kicked off the Galbraith case, but he couldn’t help himself; he was still trying to get his head around the mazelike structure of the companies, trusts, foundations involved.

He crossed the little street to cut through a footpath between buildings that would take him to Cromwell Road, and he automatically used the opportunity to look over his shoulder, as if checking for any traffic.

A long shadow under the lamplight around the corner behind him was moving when he turned, but whoever was casting the shadow stopped suddenly and then, slowly, began backing away, causing the shadow to slide back along the street.

Jack stopped in the middle of the road, watching the receding shadow for a moment, and then he started walking in that direction. The shadow disappeared quickly. Jack heard hurried footfalls, and then running.

Ryan began running himself, his leather messenger bag bouncing off his hip as he shot toward the corner. He spun around, hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever was running away.

There was no one. Just two-story white townhomes on both sides of the two-lane road, and cars parked along the street. The heavy mist seemed to hang around the streetlamps, adding a particular eeriness to the scene.

Ryan stood in the middle of the little street, his heart pounding.

He turned back in the direction of his flat and started walking again. For a fraction of a second he wondered if it could have been a potential mugger. But Jack had learned enough in the past few years to know there was no such thing as coincidence. And in this case, there was no other explanation. Someone was following him.

His heart thumped even harder now.

His mind filled with an assortment of government agencies, foreign governments, criminal enterprises, and terrorist groups, trying to come to some sort of conclusion about the entity that had him under surveillance, but until he actually spotted something more solid than a shadow, this was unknowable.

As he made his way home, he felt the palpable sense of potential danger, but he could not deny to himself that with this came an unmistakable exhilaration.