Command Authority

72

Sandy Lamont lived in the Tower Hill neighborhood of London in a ninth-floor flat that gave him a spectacular view of the Thames as well as the Tower of London. His place was right in the middle of some of the best nightlife in the city, and Sandy, a bachelor, enjoyed spending his evenings in the pubs with his mates. This evening had been no different, and as usual, Sandy hoped to end the night with some female companionship.

Also as on most nights, Sandy thoroughly struck out, so around midnight he walked alone up the steps of his building to his lobby and then stepped into the empty elevator.

A minute later he entered his flat, then tossed his keys on the table in his entryway and put his jacket on the rack by the door. He flipped on the TV, turned to a sports channel, and sat down on the sofa.

Just as he began checking football scores, a light flicked on in the far corner of the living room, causing him to jump a full foot off the sofa.

Sandy saw a man there, sitting by the window over the street in a chair that he’d obviously moved in from the kitchen.

“Bloody hell!” Lamont shouted in surprise.

The Englishman leaned forward, his hand on his pounding heart, and he said, “Ryan?”

Jack Ryan looked out the window for a moment before speaking. Finally he said, “I might be making a mistake.”

Lamont needed another moment to get over the shock of the intrusion, then replied, “I guarantee you’re making a mistake! What are you doing in my flat?”

“I mean, I might be making a mistake by trusting you.”

“This is a show of trust? How the fuck did you get in? Did you pick the bloody lock?”

“No. He did.” Ryan nodded to the opposite corner of the room. There, in the dark, Sandy could just make out the silhouette of a heavyset man leaning against the wall as if bored.

“Who… Who the fuck is that?”

Ryan continued as if he hadn’t heard him: “I wouldn’t trust you at all, except you were there in Saint John’s. You had no idea that we were in any danger, I could see it on your face.”

“What are you on about?”

“If you knew about the men after me, you wouldn’t have reacted like that. And even though you pressured me to drop Gazprom, that was only after you took heat from Castor. You were as gung ho as I was in the beginning, weren’t you?”

“You are freaking me out, Jack. Either you tell me what is going on or I call the police.”

The big man in the corner spoke in a gravelly voice: “You won’t make it anywhere near your phone, mate.”

Jack walked over and sat next to Sandy now. “I trust you,” Jack said, almost to himself. “I don’t believe you are part of what Castor is doing.”

“Castor? What’s Castor doing?”

“Hugh Castor is working for the Russians.”

Sandy laughed. It seemed nervous, Jack recognized, but he did not detect deceit. He saw more confusion. Incomprehension.

“Bollocks.”

“Think about everything going on at Castor and Boyle. We are part of the system the Kremlin is using to pummel its enemies. All of our successful cases are against oligarchs who oppose Volodin. All of the cases against holdings of the siloviki, like the Galbraith case, are slow-walked or left in limbo.”

“That’s preposterous. We’ve won cases against members of the siloviki.”

“I researched it on my own. The only siloviki cases we’ve worked on that had a positive resolution for our clients were ones against siloviki who’ve had a falling-out with Volodin and his top men.”

Lamont thought about that for a moment. He slowly shook his head. “You’ve lost your mind.” He seemed uncertain.

Jack looked out the window at the blackness of the Thames. “Castor met with a Russian in his home. A man named Lechkov.”

“Okay. So? He knows heaps of Russians.”

“Do you know Lechkov?”

“No. Who is he?”

“We think he is an agent for the Seven Strong Men. He sent some goons to beat the shit out of me, and to kill this man.”

Lamont seemed genuinely stunned. “Why?”

“Oxley here used to be MI5. Castor was his handler. I went to meet with Oxley at his home in Corby, and as soon as I did that, everything changed. The Russians who had been passively tailing me attacked me. They attacked Oxley as well.”

Lamont looked back and forth at the two of them. “Right. It’s on the news. The murders in Corby.”

Ryan just said, “It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense.”

Sandy Lamont leaned forward now; Jack thought he was going to vomit. Eventually he mumbled something, but Jack could not understand.

“What?”

Sandy repeated himself, louder: “Nesterov.”

“What about Nesterov?”

“When Hugh found out you’d zeroed in on Dmitri Nesterov, he went bloody mental. He wanted to fire you for continuing the Gazprom investigation when I warned you away twice. He wanted to fire me for not pushing you harder off it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He told you he found out from SIS that Nesterov was FSB, but that wasn’t true — he knew the name immediately, I could tell. I suspected he had some knowledge of the man. There was something off about the way he acted. I knew it at the time but couldn’t pin it down.”

Ryan said, “So Castor knows Nesterov somehow. The Kremlin passed well over a billion dollars to him. Why?”

Sandy said, “I don’t know.”

It was quiet in the room for a moment. Then Jack said, “I need to talk to Castor about this.”

“Why not just go to the police?”

“I don’t need him arrested. I need answers.”

Sandy said, “Castor left town this afternoon.”

“Where did he go?”

“I haven’t got a clue. He’s got property all over the world. He could be anywhere.”

Shit, Jack thought. If Castor left town after he learned that Jack and Oxley had escaped, it was probably because he was on the run.

Ryan and Oxley left a very shaken Sandy Lamont alone in his flat, and then they drove to Stansted Airport. Here they met the Hendley Associates G550 in its slot at a fixed-base operator. When the door opened and the stairs came down, Adara Sherman looked out onto the tarmac and eyed the two men standing there by the car. Jack saw her hand move behind her back slightly.

Ryan knew she kept a SIG Sauer pistol in a holster there.

He raised his hands. “Adara. It’s me. Jack.”

She cocked her head, then relaxed. “I’m sorry, Jack. You’ve changed, haven’t you?”

Jack smiled, pleased his efforts to disguise himself had worked.

Ding, Dom, and Sam stepped off the plane, and each man ran their hands over Ryan’s short hair, pulled on his beard, and commented on all the bulk he’d put on in the past few months.

Ryan felt a powerful sense of relief when he boarded the aircraft. Being back with some of his colleagues gave him new energy. As he gave Ding, Dom, Sam, and Adara each a hug, he wondered why the hell he’d come to the UK by himself in the first place.

The team introduced themselves to Oxley without knowing much of anything about who he was. For Ox’s part, he was more bemused than anything about sitting in a $25 million Gulfstream with a bunch of Yanks who seemed to be a special operations outfit, but he interacted with the son of the President of the United States as if he were some sort of long-lost colleague.

Adara asked Jack where he wanted to go. She helpfully explained that they could head over to France or Belgium without fueling, but if Ryan wanted to travel much farther they’d need to gas up, and if he was ready to go back to the United States they would need to obtain departure clearances.

He told her he wanted to go to Edinburgh. Now that Castor had run, Jack knew he’d have to find answers some other way. He needed to meet with Galbraith.

They were wheels-up in less than fifteen minutes.