Command Authority

66

Jack Ryan, Jr., and Victor Oxley made it back to London just before five p.m. Of course, Ryan knew better than to return to his flat. Instead, he rented a room at a motor lodge on Wellesley Road in Croydon. Oxley had recommended it, explaining that he came to London from time to time and always stayed there, and he assured Ryan it was an out-of-the-way and suitable place for a “no questions asked” encounter, which was, Oxley pointed out, just what the situation called for now.

They had made one stop along the way. After growing tired of Oxley’s pestering, Jack pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket and fanned some bills out of his wallet, passing them over to the former spy. Oxley ducked into the market and returned ten minutes later with two shopping bags.

They pulled back onto the road, heading for the lodge, and this was when Jack learned Oxley had bought a fifth of Irish whiskey, a liter of cola, and two large bottles of beer. As for food, he’d picked up some snack cakes and a stick of sausage that looked to Jack as if it might have been as old as Oxley himself.

As Jack suspected when Oxley described the place, the motor lodge was a complete dump. There was peeling paint, and burns on the carpet and mold on the walls, but each room was over its own tiny one-car garage, clearly for the express purpose of hiding the vehicles of whoever was staying inside.

They pulled into their allotted garage and closed the door, then Jack and Victor heaved the Russian mob enforcer out of the trunk of the Mercedes. Victor yanked the man’s jacket up over his head so he couldn’t see. They then frog-walked him up a flight of stairs out of the garage and into the hotel room.

The bathroom was tiny and filthy, but it was a good place to stash a Russian gang member for a few minutes. There was exposed piping along the walls, and Oxley expertly tied the man in a fashion that kept his hands high behind his back so that he could not maneuver more than a couple inches without causing himself incredible pain in his shoulders. Oxley then took a pillow with a suspicious stain on it from the bed, removed the pillowcase, and hooded the man with it.

They shut the Russian in the bathroom, and then Jack turned up the television in the bedroom. He and the fifty-nine-year-old Brit stepped out onto a tiny balcony that overlooked a busy six-lane road.

Oxley was angry the lodge did not have a single piece of glassware for his use, but he made do by drinking a few long gulps out of the bottle of cola and then filling the bottle back up to the top of the neck with Irish whiskey. They sat on cheap aluminum chairs on the balcony while Jack watched the man drink and eat for a few minutes, using every last vestige of his patience, telling himself that the more satiated and sauced the ex — English spy was, the more he might talk.

Finally Jack said, “All right, Oxley. I want to question that asshole in the bathroom, but first I would like some answers from you. Do you feel like talking?”

The white-bearded Englishman seemed relaxed; Jack was sure it had something to do with all the whiskey in his cola. He shrugged, said, “First, start by calling me Ox. Second, know this. I’d rather not talk to you at all, but I don’t fancy armed Russian thugs chasing me till the end of my days, so I’m willing to work with you to get this all sorted. Still, there are things I can say, and there are things I’ll take with me to me grave.”

Jack opened a bottle of beer and took a sip. “Fair enough. Let’s start with something easy. When did you get back from Russia?”

After a moment, Oxley said, “I returned from the Motherland about twenty years ago.”

“What have you been doing the past twenty years? Can you talk about that?”

“I’ve been around. Here and there. Collecting government assistance, mostly.”

“Unemployed?”

“On and off the dole, lad. Do what I can.” He shrugged. “But not much more.”

Now Ox asked a question: “How is it that the son of the bleedin’ American President knows about me?”

Jack said, “My father wanted info on Bedrock, and he thought Sir Basil Charleston would know. I was over here anyway, so I went to ask him. Basil told me you were Bedrock. I tracked you from there, using SAS contacts.”

“Good ol’ Basil.”

“He thinks you want him dead.”

Oxley cocked his head. “Does he, now?” Oxley shook his head with a chuckle. “No. Charleston wasn’t part of the dirty tricks I was involved with. Old Basil didn’t do me any favors, but I can’t say he’s all bad.”

“He said you operated behind the Curtain. You fit in like a native.”

“My mum was from Omsk, in Siberia. She defected with her parents through Berlin, back before the wall. She met an English Army officer and they moved to the UK. Settled in Portsmouth. Dad became a fisherman, he wasn’t home much. My mum became part of the local Russian émigré community, so I grew up speaking more Russian at home than I did English.”

Oxley gulped from his bottle. “And why on earth was your father interested in an old story like Bedrock?”

Jack had brought along the photocopied page from the Swiss police report. He pulled it out of his jacket and handed it over to Oxley.

Oxley looked at the page, then reached into his pocket and scrounged around for a moment for a pair of reading glasses. He put them on and looked at the page again.

“It’s bloody German.”

“Yes. But your code name is on there in pencil that someone erased. Next to a story from the Swiss police of a man who was detained after the bombing of a restaurant in Rotkreuz, Switzerland.”

Oxley nodded very slowly, almost imperceptibly.

“So you remember.”

Oxley looked off into space, as if recalling a moment in the distant past. “I was ordered to track down a rumor in the East about a killer the KGB called Zenith.”

Jack wondered if Basil had been untruthful about Bedrock’s lack of involvement with Zenith, or if he’d just forgotten. Ryan said, “Zenith was in Western Europe. Why did you go to the East?”

“The first rumors about Zenith came from the Czechoslovakians. Two of their investigators working on a case in Prague were found floating facedown in the Vltava River. A Russian staying at a hotel in the area disappeared in a hurry without paying his bill. A search of the man’s room turned up some luggage. In it was a KGB cipher book with some writing on the inside flap. The Czechs managed to break enough of the code to decipher the word ‘Zenith.’ Whether or not that was the code name of the owner of the book with the Russians, no one knew, but ‘Zenith’ stuck nonetheless.

“The Czechoslovakians went to the KGB, but the Russians said they knew nothing about anyone named Zenith, nor did they admit to having any operatives in Prague.”

Jack said, “Yeah, well, the KGB lied a lot.”

“True,” Oxley said, “and I’m sure the Prague police were thinking the same thing, but suddenly the back alleys off Wenceslas Square started to look like a KGB convention. Russian spies rained down on the city, and all of them were hunting for this Zenith character.”

“And the UK learned this from a source in Prague?”

“MI5 got wind. Don’t ask me how. Before it was all over, he killed twice more in Czechoslovakia, and four men in Hungary.”

“All cops?”

“No. In Budapest he killed employees with the State Bank of Hungary, as well as a smuggler.”

“A smuggler?” Jack asked.

“Human smuggler. He was a bloke that helped defectors over the border. It was common in Hungary back then,” Oxley said. “Anyway, from our intelligence we got the impression Zenith was not KGB. He was some sort of a rogue. The KGB thought he was an ex — GRU man, who was now being run by a Western power. We were worried we would be implicated in his actions.”

“Why would the UK be implicated in his actions?”

Oxley’s chuckle was low and raspy. “Because we had an asset operating behind the Iron Curtain ourselves, doing a similar type of work.”

Jack’s eyebrows rose. Things were starting to make sense. “You?”

“Maybe you aren’t quite as daft as I took you for.” Oxley played with his reading glasses, moving them through his fingers slowly. He said, “Yeah. I was in Prague when Zenith was active there. I was in cover as a Russian, I was there alone, so naturally I was interviewed by the Czechs. I talked my way out of it, but when the killings continued in Hungary, some dim bulb in London thought I might get tied to the crimes. Zenith might hurt relations, right when we were hoping for a thaw. This was at the height of the arms race, but we liked the way things were heading. Poland was well on its way to democracy, Reagan and Thatcher had the Soviet Union by the knackers. There were still many battles to fight, but a new age was dawning. Zenith was upsetting the apple cart.”

“So you were sent to kill Zenith so that the KGB couldn’t blame the West for a rogue assassin running around whacking everybody?”

“That’s it.”

“Then what happened?”

“I couldn’t bloody find him. Neither could KGB.”

“But why did you go to Switzerland?”

“I was following some KGB geezers in Budapest who were themselves hunting Zenith. I was hoping they might lead me to him. I was quite surprised when they traveled to the West, to Zug, to visit a bank.”

“And then people started getting killed there, too.”

“Yes.”

“Zenith killed them?”

Oxley shrugged, a slow, tired gesture on his big frame; a long stream of air escaped through his nose. He watched the cars roll by on the road below the balcony. “Depends on who you believe.”

Ryan looked at Oxley. “Call me crazy, but right now, I believe you.”

Victor Oxley smiled a little. “Then, yes. Zenith killed the lot of them.”

The Englishman looked up from his drink now. “Now it’s your time to talk. Why is your father interested in this story now? This was thirty years ago. Hasn’t he created enough problems in the world to where this one could be left where it was?”

“I take it you disagree with my dad’s politics?”

“Politics? I’ve got no patience for politics. Don’t give a toss about it.”

“Then why do you hate my father?”

“It’s personal.”

“Personal? You know my dad?”

“No, and I don’t care to.” Ox waved his hand away, dismissing the topic. “I asked you the question, lad. Why now? What does your dear old daddy want with me?”

Ryan shrugged. “Your code name was found in the files relating to the Zenith case. Nobody had looked at them in a long time, I guess, but another old note in a dusty old file turned up suggesting that Roman Talanov was Zenith.”

Oxley looked at Ryan. “Talanov? Right. That’s the name. So? Again, that was ages ago. What the hell does it matter now?”

Jack was surprised. “Wait. You know Talanov is Zenith?”

“I suspect I am the one who put that old dusty note in that file. Back in ninety-two, I think it was. After I got out of the gulag. But you haven’t explained why anyone cares about the name of a rogue KGB assassin from a quarter-century ago.”

Jack thought for a moment. “I didn’t see a television in your flat.”

“No use for them. No radio, either. Occasionally, there will be a football match on at the pub, but I have no interest in the news.”

“That explains it, then.”

Ox was confused. “What are you on about, Ryan?”

“This isn’t about what happened a quarter-century ago. It’s about what’s happening now. You have no idea that Roman Talanov is the head of the FSB, do you?”

Oxley stared ahead, watching the traffic race by on Wellesley Road. After a long time he said, “No. I didn’t know that.” He took a thoughtful pull on his drink and stared off over the city. “Bloody fuckin’ hell.”