Command Authority

55

CIA analyst Jack Ryan had spent much of the day on the frigid streets of Zug, Switzerland, following around SIS counterintelligence officer Nick Eastling as he went to each location visited by David Penright in the days before his death. They’d been to his hotel room, the car rental office where he’d picked up his Mercedes, and a pair of restaurants he’d visited.

At each location, Ryan prodded Eastling to ask whether Penright had been seen with anyone else. In most cases, other than the restaurant where he’d met with Morningstar on the night of Penright’s death and the bar where he’d apparently tried and failed to pick up the German woman, he’d been alone.

It was evening before they finally arrived at the MI6 safe house where David Penright had worked in Zug. It was a few minutes north of the town proper, set on a hill in a residential neighborhood of two-story half-timbered homes with small gardens in front and large fenced-in backyards. Ryan and Eastling came through the front door and greeted the rest of the counterintelligence team, who’d been working here much of the day.

“Anything, Joey?” Eastling asked the first man in the living room. Ryan saw the home had been all but disassembled. Floorboards had been prized up, wall paneling had been removed, sofa cushions looked as if they had been hacked apart.

“Nothing out in the open. He had some documents locked in the safe.”

“What sort of documents?”

“All in German, of course. Look like internal transfers at RPB. A printout from a dot-matrix printer. Numbered accounts, transfer amounts, that sort of thing. Pages and pages of the bloody things.”

Eastling said, “He hadn’t shared anything with Century House since he arrived. He met with Morningstar the evening he was killed. Might be that he received them from Morningstar, then brought them back here before going out again to the bar.”

Joey replied, “Well, if he did, he followed proper protocol. Good job he didn’t get caught with RPB documents on his body when the ambulance took him to the morgue.”

Eastling acknowledged this with a nod. “Keep looking.”

It was a nice enough house, with modern furnishings and a fifty-inch front-projection TV set in the living room. There was a VHS player next to it, with a library of cassettes on a bookshelf alongside the television. One of the counterintelligence officers was systematically going through each video, watching it in fast-forward.

Nick and Jack walked into the kitchen now, and here they found a man pouring cereal out of boxes into bowls, then running his hands through the muesli and corn flakes, searching for any hidden items. A third SIS man crawled on the kitchen floor with a flashlight in his hand, checking the seams in the tile for any sign they had been moved or prized up.

While all this was going on, Ryan asked Eastling, “Why didn’t Penright just stay here? Why did he go to a hotel?”

Eastling shrugged. “He wanted to be close to a lobby bar. He wanted a place where he could bring girls home.”

“Do you know that, or are you guessing that?”

“As I said, David Penright isn’t the first dead officer I’ve had to investigate. So far, everything I’ve seen and learned today goes along with my assumptions that this was an accident. Look, Jack. I guess you want this to be some sort of a KGB hit, but the KGB doesn’t rub out our officers in the streets of Western Europe.”

Before Jack could respond, the phone in the small home office rang. One of Eastling’s men took it and then handed it over to his boss.

While Nick Eastling took the call, Ryan wandered out onto the balcony over the backyard. There was a nice view here, looking down across the town and farther on, over Lake Zug itself. Beyond the black water, the far bank of the lake was visible as twinkling streetlights and glowing windows in buildings. The cold, clear air gave Jack the feeling he could reach out across the water and touch the distant shore, although it was surely miles away.

The British counterintelligence officer met Jack outside a few minutes later. In his hands were two bottles of Sonnenbräu beer from the fridge. It was too cold to drink beer outside, Ryan thought, but he took one of the bottles and sipped it as he turned his attention back to the lake below.

Eastling said, “Just got off the phone with London. A medical examiner, one of ours, examined Penright’s body this morning in Zurich. No puncture marks, like those made from a hypodermic needle. We know we’ll find alcohol in his blood, but toxicology on anything else will take weeks. From the ME, however, it certainly doesn’t look like he had been in any way drugged or poisoned.”

Ryan said nothing.

Eastling looked out over the yard. “He got himself drunk enough to trip and fall on the street. Bad show for a man in the field.”

“He took his job seriously, you know,” Ryan said. “You make him out to be some sort of a clown. I didn’t know him well, but he deserves better than this treatment you’re giving him.”

Eastling said, “He wasn’t a clown. He was a man walking on the fine edge for so long he turned to drink and casual encounters to distance himself from the danger. It happens to the best of them, the traveling officers. I am sympathetic to the stresses and strains of what they have to deal with, but at the end of the day, my job is to make sure I have answers.”

The two men looked out over Lake Zug and toward the lights on the far side of the bay. It was beautiful; Jack could imagine Penright sitting here just days earlier, planning his next move with Morningstar.

Ryan said, “So that’s it, then? We just go home?”

“That’s up to London. If Sir Basil is going to send someone else to town to make contact with Morningstar, then we might stick around another day or so to report our findings directly to—”

Ryan’s eyes were on the far shore of Lake Zug, and near where he was looking, a brilliant flash of light appeared, casting a glow all the way up to a patch of low clouds hanging over the shore. The light seemed like it was on the land, not over water, but it was hard to tell immediately. Five seconds after the flash, a low rumble reached the balcony where the two men were standing.

Eastling had been looking in the same direction. “That’s an explosion.”

Ryan peered into the distance. “I think I see a fire.” He ran back into the flat, asked the men working there if they had seen any binoculars in the safe house. One of the men pulled a decorative but functional brass telescope off a tripod in the office, and the others chuckled as he offered it to Ryan.

The American snatched it and ran back out to the balcony.

He struggled to bring the big telescope up to his eye. Eastling just stood there and watched him.

On the far shore, almost lost in the twinkling of lights from the buildings, he could definitely make out a fire. It was a few blocks from the shoreline, higher on a hill.

“What is that place over there?”

“That’s Rotkreuz,” Eastling said.

“The same place the banker Tobias Gabler was killed the other day.”

“As a matter of fact, yes. It is.”

Jack lowered the telescope. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Over there? Why?”

“Why? Are you serious?”

“Ryan, what is it you think just happened?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to get a closer look.”

“You are being ridiculous.”

“Then why don’t you hang out here at the safe house and help your men search through the corn flakes? I’m heading over there.” Ryan turned and left the balcony. He scooped up off the table a set of keys belonging to one of the rented cars and then shot out the door of the suite.

As he stuck the key in the lock, he heard someone hurrying down the gravel behind him. It was Eastling. “I’ll drive.”

It took them nearly a half-hour to get around the lake to Rotkreuz. As they entered the little village, there was no mistaking which way to go. A structural fire raged fifty feet in the air. Eastling merely had to keep his car pointed toward the glow and, despite being rerouted by hastily erected roadblocks designed to clear the way for emergency vehicles, he managed to park near enough to the scene so that he and Ryan had to walk only a few blocks.

Jack and Nick worked their way forward through a large crowd of onlookers across the parking lot from the blaze. Jack could feel the heat on his face as he neared the fire.

The building looked like it must have been a beautiful restaurant; there was an open seating area with fire pits to keep the patrons warm on chilly nights, and behind this sat a long structure with floor-to-ceiling windows that afforded the patrons of the restaurant amazing views of Lake Zug. A sign high above the parking lot read “Restaurant Meisser.” But now the building was fully engulfed in flames, the windows were broken, and the wrought-iron tables and chairs around the fire pits had all been knocked aside so firefighters and other first responders could pull victims from the carnage.

There were bodies under black plastic sheets in the parking lot. Jack counted at least ten, but it was hard to tell in the wildly flickering firelight and the multicolored strobes of the emergency vehicles.

Dozens of firefighters still worked on the fire, hoses attacked it from a dozen directions, and police kept the crowd back with tape, shouts, and the occasional shove. Someone in the crowd said gas lines were feeding the fire, and then, minutes after Ryan and Eastling arrived, the entire tapeline was moved back to the opposite side of the street, in fear of a larger explosion.

While Jack and Nick stood there on the edge of the light from the roaring flames, Jack noticed a cluster of Swiss police cars on a street corner on the opposite side of the taped-off parking lot. Two police officers had a bearded man in handcuffs, and they walked him to one of the vehicles and placed him in the back. He looked to be a few years younger than Jack, but from this distance Jack couldn’t be sure.

Jack said, “Wonder what that’s all about.”

Nick started walking that way. “I suppose we could go find out.”

By the time they made it around the parking lot, the police car with the man in back had raced out of the parking lot and down the hill, out of view.

Two officers stood by another car at the edge of the police line. Nick Eastling walked up to them and said, “Entschuldigung. Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

In German, one of the officers replied, “Yes, but we are busy.”

“I understand. I was only wondering why that man was arrested.”

“He wasn’t arrested. He was detained for questioning. He had been in the building, but he left right before the explosion. He wasn’t a patron, he just walked through, then exited through the back. After the explosion, one of the waiters saw him in the crowd and pointed him out.”

“I see.”

“Were you a witness to the explosion?”

“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t see a thing.”

Eastling and Ryan turned away and pushed back into the crowd. They left the area a few minutes later, returning to the SIS safe house so Eastling could contact Century House via the STU phone. MI6 would need to pressure the Swiss for information on the crime, the detainment of the bearded young man, and any other information that could be more readily obtained at a higher level.

Eastling dropped Ryan back at the hotel on his way to the safe house. Once again the American CIA analyst felt as though he was being pushed aside by the counterintelligence officer, but he knew he wouldn’t have anything meaningful to do at the safe house, so he didn’t press the issue.