Command Authority

37

Jack Ryan, Jr., arrived at the Belgravia town house of Sir Basil Charleston during a midafternoon squall. He’d called first, of course, even though he’d been warned by his dad that the octogenarian might not be able to communicate by phone. Ryan was surprised when a younger-sounding man answered the phone. He introduced himself as Phillip, Charleston’s personal assistant, which Ryan assumed meant bodyguard.

Two hours later, Ryan was invited inside Charleston’s home by a housekeeper who was herself up in years, and he met Phillip in the hall. Although the man was well into his fifties, Jack could tell right away he was carrying a weapon and he knew how to use it.

Phillip went to the kitchen to help the housekeeper with the tea, and while Jack waited for Sir Basil in the library, he wandered around the room, taking the opportunity to look through shelves of books, photos, and memorabilia.

He saw pictures of children and grandchildren and several prominently displayed photos of an infant who, Jack assumed, must have been a great-grandchild.

Displayed on the shelves was a British Army helmet from World War One and a set of leather leggings, and a Second World War helmet as well. A German Nazi Luger in pristine condition hung under glass, and various medals, commendations, and letters from the British government adorned the shelves and walls. Ryan marveled at a photo of Sir Basil with Margaret Thatcher, and another picture of Basil with Jack’s father. Ryan recognized the era; it was during his dad’s first term, when he’d visited the UK.

Prominently displayed on the shelf next to this picture was his father’s first book, Options and Decisions. He opened the front cover and saw that his dad had signed it.

Just then Sir Basil Charleston stepped into the library. He was tall and thin, and he’d dressed up for his afternoon meeting with the U.S. President’s son; he wore a blue blazer with a red ascot and a carnation boutonniere. Basil walked into the library with a cane and a pronounced stoop to his posture, which gave Jack the initial impression that his health had seriously declined since the last time he’d seen him. But this notion was quickly dispelled when the ex — British spymaster crossed the room quickly with a wide smile and a shout.

“My heavens! Look at you, boy. You’ve grown since I’ve seen you, or is it just the beard that makes you look so mature?”

“Pleased to see you again, Sir Basil.”

Charleston’s housekeeper brought tea, and though Jack would have preferred a cup of coffee to give him a kick on this rainy afternoon, he had to admit the tea was quite good.

Charleston and Ryan talked for several minutes, and the older man kept Ryan in the crosshairs during the conversation. Questions about his work at Castor and Boyle, his family, and the inevitable question of whether there was a special woman in his life. Jack had to lean forward and repeat himself often, but despite his hearing loss, Basil was very much engaged in the conversation.

Finally Sir Basil asked, “What is it I can do for your father?”

Jack said, “He is very interested in Roman Talanov, the new head of the FSB.”

Charleston nodded somberly. “As someone who lived the majority of his life going toe-to-toe with the KGB, nothing makes my blood run colder than seeing Russian state security’s comeback. It’s a bloody shame.”

“I agree.”

“The bastards will be invading Ukraine, mark my words.”

“That’s what people are saying,” said Ryan.

“Yes, well, people are saying they will just move on the Crimea, but I know these Russians, how they think. They will take Crimea in a couple of days, and then they will see how easy it was, how muted the reaction from the West is, and then they will keep going, all the way to Kiev. Look at Estonia. If your father hadn’t pressured NATO to stop them cold, the Russians would have taken Lithuania by now as well.”

Sir Basil knew more about this topic than Ryan did. Jack silently chastised himself for having his head so deep in illegal acquisitions and shell-company shenanigans that he was only remotely aware of an impending war.

Charleston continued, “But I can’t say I know a thing about Talanov. Most of the upper-level chaps running Russia now were, at least, lower-level chaps at KGB or FSB back when I was in the service, but Roman Talanov was not someone we knew about when I was at Century House.”

Jack said, “My father says there is one old reference to Talanov in your files that connected him with Zenith.”

“With what?” Charleston put his hand up to his ear to help him hear.

Jack all but shouted, “Zenith.”

“Zenith?” Charleston leaned back in surprise. “Oh, dear. The mysterious KGB hit man? In the eighties?”

“Yes, sir. There was just one note in his file, one piece of intelligence, no follow-up or corroboration.”

Charleston frowned. “I am surprised there was no follow-up to the record. We ran a tight ship with our files. Obviously, nothing was electronic then. I doubt the youngsters today could keep up with the file clerks we had back then.” He waved a hand in the air. “Anyway, any reference to Talanov on that case must be some sort of a mistake. Zenith turned out to be a ploy used by Germany’s Red Army Faction terrorist group. I remember your father expressed his doubt of the official findings quite vociferously, but our investigations never were able to prove Zenith ever existed.”

“Well, my dad also says there is a handwritten note in the margins of one of the files that he would like more information about.”

“Handwritten note? Handwritten by me, I take it? Is that why you’re here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what did it say?”

“Just one word. ‘Bedrock.’”

Sir Basil fell silent; the hollow ticking of the grandfather clock echoed in the library.

Jack sensed a pall of concern cast over the old man. He was suddenly not as bright and cheery as his home and his red ascot made him out to be.

“Might I presume you brought the document with you?”

Jack reached into his coat and retrieved the Swiss police record that had been e-mailed over from the White House. Basil took it, pulled a small pair of eyeglasses out of a side pocket in his blue blazer, and put them on.

For a full minute Basil looked at the page, at the handwritten marking, and brought it closer to his eyes. Ryan assumed the man must have been able to read German, as the one English word would not have taken so long to read, even though it had been partially erased. While he sat there, Jack heard the footfalls of Phillip on the wooden floor of the hallway, slowly pacing back and forth.

Charleston looked up at Ryan, then took off his glasses and handed him the page of the file back. He said, “Suddenly, thirty years ago seems like just yesterday.”

“Why do you say that?”

He did not answer the question directly. Instead, he said, “‘Bedrock’ was the code name for an operative.”

Jack cocked his head. “Mary Pat checked with British intelligence, and they said Bedrock meant nothing to them.”

Charleston thought that over for a moment. “Yes, well, I certainly do not want to ruffle any feathers.”

“Sir Basil, I am sorry, but my father says this is extraordinarily important. It very well might make an impact on the problems going on between the U.S. and Russia today.”

Charleston said nothing; he seemed lost in the distance.

“Are you able to tell me anything?”

Charleston looked out the window for a long time, seemingly lost in thought. Jack almost thought the old man was about to tell him to get out of his house, but instead Basil turned back to him and spoke, softer than before.

“In any intelligence organization, even a well-meaning one, even one in the right, with history and honor on its side… mistakes are made. Projects that look good on paper, projects born out of desperate times, have a tendency to make it off the paper and into the real world, where, in hindsight, they don’t seem quite so perfect.”

“Of course,” Jack urged him on. “Mistakes happen.”

Sir Basil Charleston’s lips pursed as he thought about something. “Quite so, lad.” His eyes cleared with resolve, and Jack knew Basil was about to talk. “If Mary Pat went to MI6 and asked about Bedrock, they very well might have looked into the matter and come up with nothing. As you said, it was a while ago. But if she went to our partners at MI5, British counterintelligence, and they told her they’d never heard of Bedrock…” He made a face of distaste. “Then that would be inaccurate.”

“A lie, you mean?”

“Well. Perhaps the MI5 of today does not know about the actions of the MI5 back then.”

Jack thought Charleston was dissembling, but he let it go. “So Bedrock was MI5?”

“That is correct. He was…” The old man chose his words carefully. Then his face cleared a little. “He was an operations man. Victor Oxley was his name.”

“He was English?”

“Yes. Oxley was Twenty-second SAS Regiment, a member of Pagoda Troop. Quite an elite unit. They are a Special Forces group, quite like your Delta Force.”

Ryan, of course, knew this.

“MI5 wanted an operator to work behind the Iron Curtain. To track down leads about spies from KGB and other intelligence services, to break up attacks on our realm before they made it over here to us.”

Jack was confused. “Activities behind the Iron Curtain seem like they would have been more the work of your old organization, MI6, not counterintel, MI5.”

Basil acknowledged this with a nod and said, “One would think so, yes.”

“There was some interagency rivalry?”

“Something like that. MI5’s investigations occasionally led them into denied territory. Oxley bridged the gap in these investigations. He could go to Riga to get pictures of a British turncoat living there, he could go to Sofia to track down reports of a Bulgarian intelligence training evolution that taught their spies how to fit in on the streets of London, he could go to East Berlin and find the name of the bar where Stasi director Erich Mielke liked to take lunch meetings, so if a highly placed British double agent slipped over to be recruited by the DDR’s top dog, we knew where to look for him.”

The rain on the windows of the library picked up a little.

“Occasionally, he was tasked with doing more than this. From time to time he was ordered to find counterintelligence threats — I’m speaking of citizens of the Crown who committed treasonous acts and then ran for cover behind the Curtain — and then to liquidate them.”

Ryan was impressed. “Liquidate?”

Basil looked at Ryan without blinking. “Kill them, of course.”

“That’s incredible.”

“They say Oxley was quite incredible in his day. MI5 recruited him from the military and trained him up for their needs. He had language — one of his parents was full-on Russian, so he spoke it like a native — and he had the skills and the stones for behind-the-lines work. He was extremely good. He hopped the border better than anyone we had in our service at the time.”

Basil added, “I don’t suppose you know too much about the history of the British intelligence services, but we’ve had some traitors in the past, right at the top of our establishment.”

“The Cambridge Five,” Jack said.

“There was worry that there were more than five. For that reason, it was determined a British asset behind the lines would help keep the men and women in British intelligence honest. If some bloke passed official secrets to KGB and then ran off to Moscow to receive their Order of Lenin and a rent-free flat, chaps at the top of MI5 thought it would have a salutary effect on other UK intelligence personnel if that bloke turned up garroted in a public loo in Gorky Park.”

“Holy shit,” Ryan said. This story was much more than he’d bargained for when he popped over to a luxury town house to talk to an old man about a penciled note on an old file.

“My colleagues at MI5 played him close to the vest. He was run outside the normal chain of command, so very few knew Bedrock existed.” Charleston gave a half-smile. “There was a rumor Five had a hit man cleaning up intelligence messes, and the spread of the rumor was intentional, but almost no one knew if there was any truth to it. His control officer let Bedrock act as he saw fit, to work without a net, as it were.”

Jack was more fascinated by this than he let on. “This man had a license to kill?”

“He had no license at all. He knew he would be disavowed if he were ever caught.”

“Do you remember Bedrock’s relationship to the victims of the Zenith murders?”

Charleston shook his head. With his reticence in talking about Bedrock, Jack had started to look for any clues of deception. As far as he could tell, the old man was being truthful. His hesitations seemed to simply be born out of not thinking of this topic for a long time, and perhaps not being proud of whatever happened with Bedrock.

Charleston said, “As I said before, there was no Zenith.”

“But you wrote Bedrock was picked up at the scene of one of the Zenith murders.”

“No, lad. I didn’t write that.”

Jack raised his eyebrows.

“How can I be so certain? Because I knew nothing of Bedrock at the time, and I would never write Bedrock’s name down. I don’t know who wrote that. Obviously, these files have been around for thirty years. Someone, at some point, looked it over and made that notation. They also removed it, although not successfully. I assume it was someone at MI5 read in on the program, but I cannot be certain.” Basil looked at it again. “I don’t know anything about Bedrock being in Switzerland on this date. As far as I knew, he never worked west of the Iron Curtain.”

“Did Oxley know my father?”

Charleston barked out a quick laugh. “Heavens, no. Certainly not. They would have run in quite different circles. Even if Bedrock was in London for some reason, and I have no recollection that he was, he would not have bumped into your father at Century House. No, Oxley would have had no connection with Westminster Bridge.”

“You said you didn’t know about him at the time. When did you learn about him?”

“When MI5 came to me for help finding him. He disappeared behind the lines. I do recall that happened to be during the so-called Zenith affair.”

“Was he ever found?”

“I don’t know. Certainly not by MI6.”

“You don’t know if he is alive?”

“No, but I also don’t know that he’s not, and my bodyguard out there — you met Phillip — operates under the assumption that he is.”

“What does your bodyguard have to do with Oxley?”

“Phillip has orders to keep Victor Oxley away from me.” Charleston gazed out to the rain again. “One must be on the watch for anyone who might hold a grudge against those who directed British intelligence. Again, we looked for him… but we did not find him. There are chaps that might think we didn’t look hard enough.”

Ryan was wondering the same thing. Did they look hard enough for this missing man? He couldn’t imagine anyone finding fault with the polite urbane man sitting across the table from him. He tried to picture Charleston younger and in control of one of the world’s toughest intelligence agencies, but he couldn’t get the image right in his mind.

Jack asked, “Do you know how I can find out if he ever returned from the East? Does someone keep records on former MI5 members?”

“On MI5 members, yes, but remember, Bedrock was run black, outside their service.” Charleston thought. “He was SAS, though, and they have a fraternal organization.” Charleston sipped his tea. “Although I can’t imagine him taking part in meetings or attending banquets. I’d wager he dropped off their radar long ago, if he is even still alive.”

“Do you remember anyone he worked with? Someone I might be able to talk to?”

There was an extra-long pause now. But Charleston’s response was more revealing than anything else he had said in the entire conversation. “I am afraid I won’t be much help there.”

Jack noted Charleston’s word choice. He did know associates, but he either could not or would not put Jack in touch with them.

Jack said, “I’ll start with SAS, see if anyone knows where he is now.”

Charleston picked at the lint on his blazer. “Your father sent you round to my house to talk to me about Bedrock. It was a nice gesture to send family over. I don’t believe for a moment, however, that your father had any intention of you running around yourself looking for worn-out old ghosts.”

Jack asked, “What are you saying?”

Sir Basil smiled, a fatherly look. “Report back to your dad what I told you, he’ll have his people make inquiries through Scotland Yard. Don’t do anything yourself.”

“Do you mean to suggest Victor Oxley is somehow dangerous?”

“Presuming for a moment he is alive, and you do find him, then yes, I do. Blokes like Bedrock do not like authority, nor do they respect it. You popping round for a spot of tea and an interrogation about old operations… that will not go the way you hope it might.”

“What you are talking about happened a long time ago, Sir Basil. He’s probably over it.”

“Men like Oxley don’t change. Trust me, boy, if he’s still alive, he’s still filled with hate.” Basil sighed, and his shoulders slumped a little. “God knows he’s got every right.”

Jack didn’t know what Basil meant by that, but he knew better than to ask. Basil had said all he was going to say on the subject.