Command Authority

80

President of the United States Jack Ryan realized he was squeezing the side of his desk with his free hand as he listened to the gravel-voiced Englishman tell a story that had turned out so well for Ryan and so poorly for him.

When the story stopped, Jack knew there must have been much, much more, but he recognized the Englishman was waiting to hear something from Ryan, just to know he was still there.

Jack said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Did you call it in? Did you report what happened?”

“Did I call it in? I was with the German police five minutes after the fact, looking for you. An hour later, I had every U.S. intelligence asset in the city on the hunt. By the next day, I was in London in the office of the director of the SIS. Of course I looked for you. I did not know you were a British operative, but I had everyone hunting for you and Marta nonetheless.”

Oxley said, “Fair enough, Ryan. I’ve got reasons to believe you now, thanks to your boy here, but I spent thirty years under the impression you’d kept your mouth shut about the whole bloody affair. I’ve been holdin’ a bit of a grudge, to be honest. I didn’t know you from Adam at the time. But years later I was sitting in my pub when your face came up on the telly saying you were the American President.”

Jack Junior spoke up now: “Dad, Ox was the man who gave SIS the intel about Talanov being Zenith. He was in a gulag when Talanov was there. He didn’t meet him, but he picked up the story.”

“Is it credible?”

Oxley said, “Seemed so, but it was a long time ago. My memory is not what it once was.”

“I understand, Mr. Oxley.”

Jack Junior said, “We have to go. I’m going to get answers for you on Zenith, but I don’t have them yet.”

“Just tell me you are okay.” Jack Junior could hear the emotion in his father’s voice. He was lost in the past now, and had no idea what his son was involved in at present.

“I’m with Ding, Dom, and Sam in the Hendley jet.”

“The Hendley jet? You aren’t in London?”

“We’re going to check a lead or two on the continent. I’ll call you when I know something. You’ve got enough on your plate right now dealing with Ukraine.”

“It is a difficult situation,” Ryan said, “but as long as I know you aren’t in the middle of it, I’ll feel a little better.”

Jack Junior just said, “I’m a long way from Ukraine, Dad.”

Ryan, Chavez, Caruso, Oxley, and Driscoll arrived in Zurich in the early evening, rented a pair of Mercedes SUVs, and headed south toward Zug. There was heavy rain and fog, which Ryan hoped would work to their advantage, as they had no idea who was looking for them.

The four Americans were armed now. Before they left the G550, Adara had passed out pistols that had been hidden in an access panel on the flight deck. Jack and Ding both chose the Glock 19, and Driscoll and Caruso took SIG Sauer P229s. The men knew if Castor was protected by any sizable security force they would not be able to initiate any sort of real attack with handguns, but at least with the firearms hidden inside their jackets they would be able to defend themselves from most threats.

They had little information about the physical property of Castor’s place, other than some notes Galbraith made for Jack regarding the layout. From this and a careful search of online maps, the men decided their best chance to enter undetected was via the lake at the rear of the property.

They rented a boat and scuba gear in the marina, and by seven p.m. they were a quarter-mile offshore from Castor’s lake house, scanning the two-acre grounds through binoculars. They could see some activity inside through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, as well as plainclothes security men patrolling with submachine guns around the building’s exterior and down a hill in the rear of the property at a pier and boathouse on the lake.

The security men looked like a professional group, and it gave Ryan confidence that Castor was, in fact, on the premises.

Ding said, “I see eight to ten guys. We are not getting through them undetected, and we aren’t shooting it out with Swiss rent-a-cops.”

Ryan agreed. “We’ll have to figure out another way in.”

The Americans sat on the boat, discussing some way to covertly gain access to Castor without being detected by his security.

Oxley had been silent, sitting alone up on the bow. Finally he said, “Gents, I don’t want to tell you your business, but I would like to offer a suggestion.”

Ding said, “By all means.”

“Why don’t we just walk up his bloody driveway and talk to him?”

“Talk to him?” Ryan asked.

“Of course. Castor believes in self-preservation. He believes in playing both sides. He’s not a madman. He is not going to kill the President’s son when others know you are with him. It is possible things won’t go the way we want them to, so maybe your friends can get as close as possible, but my vote is you and I just confront the sod and see what he has to say for himself.”

Ryan looked to Chavez. Ding said, “Your call, kid.”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t have anything better than that.”

Sam said, “We can drop you up the coast, then we can anchor a half-mile away and do a covert entry on the back of the grounds with the scuba gear. We might be able to parlay the distraction of your arrival into us getting a little closer to the house than we could otherwise.”

Chavez said, “I like it. But remember, Jack. They will search you before you see Castor. You can’t take a gun or any communications gear that shows them you brought company.”

“I understand.”

Jack wanted Oxley to stay on the boat. He knew the fifty-nine-year-old ex-spy had every reason in the world to want to confront Hugh Castor. He sensed there was more to the relationship than Ox had let on, but he’d not mentioned it. Jack saw nothing good coming from Oxley’s facing Castor right now. The threat of Oxley’s revealing Castor as a Russian spy, Jack reasoned, would be a lot more useful than actually having Oxley enter Castor’s grounds, where he would be vulnerable.

But Victor Oxley was having none of it. He made it clear that he would be involved in the meeting, and Jack and his mates would have to tie him to the rigging to keep him from going.

The Russians arrived in Zug in a Russian-built Mi-8, which was not an unusual occurrence at all, as there was a lot of offshore banking still done in Switzerland, and no one did more offshore banking these days than the Russians.

Anyone looking over the men who climbed off the chopper, however, might have noticed that most of their suits were brand-new and off-the-rack, and their average age was only thirty or so, which was young for the average Russian investment banker or white-collar criminal.

These were not Seven Strong Men henchmen. They were Spetsnaz, FSB Special Forces, but their leader straddled the line between both organizations. His name was Pavel Lechkov, he was Seven Strong Men and FSB, and he, like the rest of his unit, carried a small, collapsible, Brügger & Thomet MP9 submachine gun in a shoulder holster under his coat, and a hooked knife in a sheath in the small of his back.

The Russians had a schematic of the lakefront property of Hugh Castor, and they had gone over it in the helo, and by the time they arrived in Zug and climbed into a van to take them to a property on the west side of the lake, each man in the unit knew his part in the operation to come.

At a small lakeside chalet at the edge of the forest, the men changed clothes, removing the business suits they had worn for cover and putting on dark cotton pants and dark jackets that would help them blend into the night.

Although there were eight of them and they knew they might well be up against a slightly larger force, Pavel Lechkov also knew they would have skill and surprise on their side.

They moved down to the waterline, where an eight-man Zodiac rigid inflatable boat was waiting for them.

Just after eleven p.m. Jack Ryan, Jr., and Victor Oxley walked together up an unpaved winding street. It was almost perfectly quiet, the only noise coming from drips of condensation off the trees on either side of the road and, every few minutes, a passing vehicle, usually a Porsche or BMW or Audi.

They had to walk nearly a mile from the closest place Ding could land the boat, so they had plenty of time to talk about their plan to get Castor to reveal information. Jack knew his best option was to clearly and immediately let the man know that a lot of people knew he was there. He hoped Castor was desperate enough to talk to save himself, but not so desperate that he would just shoot Ryan and Oxley in the head and try to flee to some country with no extradition treaty with either the United States or Great Britain.

This all seemed like a long shot, but Jack was emboldened somewhat by the fact three very able men would be lurking in the darkness outside the lake house.

As they walked, Ryan asked Oxley about what had happened after he was taken out of East Berlin. Oxley said he spent days in a train car under guard, while outside the landscape of East Germany, Poland, and Belarus passed by. He passed into Russia, continued all the way to Moscow’s Leningradskaya station, where he was placed in the back of a truck. They drove him around the city, and he was able to see it all through a slit in the wall of the vehicle. Through the slit he saw a sign that made his heart sink. Energeticheskaya Street. He knew then they were taking him to Lefortovo Prison.

Oxley spent weeks in a small cell in Lefortovo with an asphalt floor and a single twenty-five-watt bulb that burned both day and night.

Every day he was taken into interrogations. He claimed he was nothing but a simple defector to the West who walked up on a fight among some plainclothes men, and he got involved. He said he thought one man was being attacked by West German police, and he’d gotten involved only because he was no fan of Western governments.

The KGB did not believe his story, but they’d caught him in no verifiable fabrication, either. After weeks of sleep deprivation, stress positions, torture, and the threat of execution, none of it made him change his simple yet doubtful story.

They were unable to break him.

Normally, the KGB would have made explicit threats involving his family, but this arrow had been removed from their quiver, because the KGB could not pin down any family.

It would have been an easy matter to take the twenty-nine-year-old Russian defector into a field and shoot him, but this was the mid-eighties. The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.

It was much easier and cleaner to lock him up and let nature take its course.

Ox was placed into the gulag system and shipped in a train into the Ural Mountains in the Komi Republic.

Ryan wanted more; he hadn’t yet gotten Oxley to explain how he’d made it home to Great Britain after leaving the gulag, but by now they had almost arrived at Hugh Castor’s lake house. They turned to head up the long driveway and made it less than a third of the way to the house before a man stepped out from the darkness and shone a flashlight on them. “Halt!”

Jack shielded his eyes from the light. He said, “We are here to see Castor.”

“Name?”

“Ryan and Oxley.”

“Ja. We have been waiting for you.”

Ryan had not expected this. He was hoping Castor would be put on his heels with the surprise visit, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

The security man spoke into his walkie-talkie, and an SUV rolled down the drive. Men climbed out and searched the two visitors thoroughly up against the hood of the vehicle, then they all walked up to the front door as a group.

Sam Driscoll rose out of the cold black water of Lake Zug slowly, inch by inch, so the water on his insulated wetsuit would return to the lake without dripping and making noise. He’d already taken off his swim fins and his tank; he pulled them along with one hand as he held his pistol with the other, scanning the darkness to the north of the pier.

Soon Ding Chavez appeared from the black water on the south side of the pier, and he carried his equipment with him as well. He stowed it against a low retaining wall at the edge of the property, making certain it could not be seen from the house, as he did not want any beam cast from a flashlight to reflect off either the tank or the mask.

Dominic Caruso rose from the water under the pier itself, and he tied off his gear and climbed out onto the rocks behind the wooden boathouse.

A two-man security patrol passed the area less than a minute after Dom made it into position. He rolled under the raised boathouse, keeping his body off the sharp rocks by holding himself in a plank position till they passed.

After another minute, the patrol had finished its circuit of the rear of the property and disappeared around the side of the house up the hill. Ding, Dom, and Sam took their Bluetooth headsets out of waterproof boxes and attached them to their ears. They established comms with one another, and all three used binoculars from their packs to search the windows of the house itself to look for Ryan.

Hugh Castor stood in front of a roaring fire in the living room of the lake house, and he greeted Ryan and Oxley as they were escorted in by the security officers. The sixty-eight-year-old man wore a black sweater and corduroys, and his eyeglasses and short silver hair shone in the light from the fire.

Oxley and Castor made some eye contact, but Ryan was surprised there were no real words between them. He halfway expected Ox to launch across the room and grab Castor by the throat, but nothing of the sort happened.

Instead, Castor just directed Oxley and Ryan to a sofa, and he sat down on a wingback chair facing them.

Two Swiss security men had been in the living room, but once Ryan and Oxley sat down they stepped into an adjacent kitchen. Ryan could hear them there, just around the corner, and he suspected that was their intention.

Three glasses of red wine had already been poured and sat waiting on the table in front of the men. Castor took his glass and drank a slow sip. Oxley and Ryan did not touch theirs.

Neither Jack nor Ox had been handcuffed or tied, which surprised Jack greatly. So far, none of this was going the way he had imagined it. It was almost as if Castor were happy to have the visitors.

Castor said, “Jack, you might not believe this, but I did not know a thing about what happened in Corby until Sandy told me this morning. I looked it up on the news, and the only conclusion I can come to is that clearly some associates of mine double-crossed me, the same as they did you.”

“Sandy told you I went to see him yesterday?”

“He did.” Castor shrugged. “No, no. I know what you are thinking. Sandy is not aware of any of this at all. He is just a good company man, and a decent lapdog. He has been a faithful servant for many years. He knows there is more than meets the eye, but he is not so curious about my private dealings with Russia’s elite away from Castor and Boyle.”

Castor pointed at Ryan with his wineglass. “You, on the other hand, young Ryan. You are the curious one. I must say how terribly impressed I am with everything you have accomplished. Obviously, I underestimated your abilities.”

“And I overestimated your character.”

Castor’s eyebrows rose, and he looked to Oxley. “You’ve been talking, I see.”

Ox said, “You’ve been talking, ya fuck. I owe you not a bleedin’ thing.”

“I could have left you to rot, you bloody fool! Or I could have let them shoot you!”

“You should have done just that, you old bastard.”

“It’s not too late, Bedrock. They just might get you yet.”

Jack was utterly confused by the back-and-forth.

Castor looked at Ryan, and then back at Oxley. “What does he know?”

“He knows I was shanghaied by the Stasi while trying to help out his father. He knows I was then passed to the Russians. He knows I went in the gulags, and he knows I came out a few years later.”

“And clearly he thinks this is somehow my fault.”

Ox said nothing.

Castor crossed his legs. To Jack, it appeared an affectation. He wasn’t as relaxed as he pretended to be. The short, biting argument with Oxley was evidence of that.

Castor said, “Jack, I had nothing to do with our friend Victor here getting waylaid by the East Germans in Berlin. It was bad luck. That was all. I spent years, literally years, trying to find out what happened to him.”

Ryan looked to Ox, and Ox conceded Castor’s remarks with a half-nod.

Oxley said, “Castor wasn’t dirty then. He didn’t turn dirty till the Iron Curtain fell down and a bunch of money poured out. That’s when he became one of them.”

Castor shook his head vigorously. “I wasn’t one of them, Jack, old boy, I was an opportunist. I’d spent the years looking into Oxley’s disappearance, something of a personal mission, because MI5 had given him up for dead. I made contacts throughout the region in this endeavor. In Hungary. In Czechoslovakia. In Russia. Here in Zug. When the Iron Curtain fell, I was in a position of leverage over some powerful individuals. I used that leverage. Simple as that.”

Jack said, “Malcolm Galbraith told you about the stolen KGB money Zenith was involved with.”

“He told me bits and pieces, indeed. Others told me other things. But by the time Galbraith told me about the Russian account, the money was long gone from RPB. Zenith got it out via diamonds.”

“Diamonds?”

“Yes. Zenith’s control officer transferred the entire two hundred four million into another account at the bank, an account owned by a diamond man in Antwerp. Philippe Argens. He met with Zenith here in Zug, passed him two hundred million in uncut diamonds, and Zenith returned to Russia.”

“What happened to the diamonds?”

“The Russians in control of the black fund kept them until 1991, and then they sold them back to Argens. Slowly, they liquidated their assets. A few million here, a few million there. It worked for both sides. Argens was able to hide the transactions, so he effectively laundered money for years. And the Russians had the assets they needed to buy up state-run businesses when Russia was nationalizing everything and offering it in rigged auctions for peanuts.”

“A quarter-billion dollars buys a lot of peanuts,” Ryan admitted. “Who stole the money in the first place?”

Castor smiled. “This is where the bargaining starts, my boy.”

“What bargaining?”

“I’ll tell you what I want in a moment, but for now, I will whet your appetite.” He sipped his wine and then looked into the glass. “It’s French, not Swiss, so it’s quite good.”

Neither Ryan nor Oxley had any interest in the wine.

Castor shrugged and said, “Even before Gorbachev came to power and started liberalizing things, the KGB realized they had a problem. Members of the First Chief Directorate’s leadership began meeting in secret, discussing the inevitability that their model could not continue much longer.

“They wanted a fallback plan. They could see the potential for a complete collapse of the system as far back as the mid-eighties. They began pulling money out of accounts set up to support communist revolutions in Latin America, or to bankroll communist dictators already in power.

“Later, my contact in this group told me ten percent of all the money earmarked by the Kremlin for Cuba and Angola for a two-year period had been skimmed by a single young KGB officer working for the leaders.

“He created this black fund, ready to support them in case they had to run. They studied what the smartest of the Nazis did after the end of the Second World War, and they learned from them, but the KGB had longer to plan and more resources to pull from. The Third Reich had only been around for a decade. By the late eighties, Soviets had been in power for seventy years.”

Jack leaned forward in rapt fascination. Castor seemed to be certain of his information, though Jack knew he had his own agenda here.

Ryan asked, “Who was Zenith?”

Castor said, “In order for the KGB graybeards to protect this covert operation, they moved staff out of the intelligence hierarchy, and set them up as their own private organization. A young officer was charged with setting up and protecting the assets in the West, and he brought on board an assassin from military intelligence, a man who had a lot of experience killing from his years in Afghanistan.”

Ryan said, “Roman Talanov.”

Castor nodded gravely. “The Roman Talanov. Of course, I’d never heard of him till Oxley told me when he got out of the gulag.”

“How do you know the rest?”

“The young KGB officer charged with protecting the assets realized his control over the man Zenith gave him greater power than the KGB graybeards in charge of the operation, so when the time came for the assets to be distributed to the men who came up with the plan in the first place, the KGB officer sent Talanov to kill them. It was a double cross of a double cross, you might say. There was a two-year period in the early nineties when former KGB and GRU big shots were falling off buildings, stepping in front of buses, turning up in the Moskva River, and committing suicide with guns that were curiously absent from the scene when the police arrived. This was all Talanov and his control officer tying up loose ends.”

Castor continued, “One of these men reached out to me in desperation, knowing I was British intelligence and I could protect him. General Mikhail Zolotov, of the GRU, Russian military intelligence. Misha told me about the plan, the black fund, and he told me about the double cross perpetrated by the young officer overseeing the accounts. He told me everything but the names. We were working up to that point when he died in a boating mishap in the Gulf of Finland.”

“A boating mishap?”

“Indeed. Apparently, he went to sea and forgot to bring his boat along. He was found floating three kilometers offshore of Saint Petersburg.”

“Why didn’t you go to MI5 when he told you about this?”

Castor shrugged. “I wanted some of the money. So I went to the Russians.”

“Fuckin’ cunt,” Oxley mumbled. “He knew Talanov’s name from me, and he found Talanov in Saint Petersburg. He told him what he knew, told him he’d keep his mouth shut if he could be cut into the deal.”

“Why didn’t Talanov just kill you?”

“Because I had an ace in the hole and he knew it. I told him about his time in the gulag. You should have seen the look on his face when I told him there was video of him in his typhoid rage talking about Zenith and the KGB.”

Ryan stood up. “There’s a video?”

Oxley answered for Castor. “There’s no bleedin’ video. He just told Talanov there was for leverage.”

Ryan sat back down. “You told him you made copies, had them hidden here and there, and if something happened to you, they would get out.”

“That’s right. He paid me off, but then something even better happened. We went into business together. He’s been giving me tips for over twenty years, and I’ve been helping him in his business pursuits.”

“What business pursuits?”

Castor did not answer this. Instead, he said, “What is important for you to understand, lad, is this. I committed no treason.”

Jack couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “How the fuck can you possibly make that claim?”

“Easy. Victor Oxley was not an employee of MI5. He was a civilian. Run completely off the books. When he returned from the gulags and reported in, I merely flew to Moscow and spoke with him, then accurately told MI5 leadership that the man was not an agent of ours, and no further action would be necessary. No official assistance would be forthcoming.”

Ryan wanted to kill the old man in front of him. He said, “Even if that were true, you were an MI5 man working with the KGB.”

“Wrong again, young Ryan. The men I uncovered in my investigation were working very much against the wishes of the KGB. They may have been former employees, but they were private citizens by this point. They had stolen funds from KGB. They weren’t even ideologically connected to them.” Castor waved his hand to stress the next point: “I traded no secrets with any foreign intelligence agency, at any time, while I was at Five. When I learned details from Oxley upon his release, I resigned from Five, and then I reached out to Talanov, aka Zenith. I merely entered into an agreement with these men that I would keep their secret in return for payment. I certainly did not tell the Russians that a just-released zek had been an MI5 asset. I knew they would kill Victor if they were aware who he was and what he knew about Zenith, but I prevented it by keeping my mouth shut.”

Ryan turned to Oxley. “How did you get out of the gulag?”

“They were letting a lot of us political prisoners out at that point. I took a train to Moscow, I almost starved to death on the journey. Didn’t have a ruble in my pocket or an onion to eat. Staggered into the British consulate. Just a walk-in off the street. I waited in line nearly all day to see someone.

“I told the woman at the counter I was a British citizen, which caused a bloody ruckus. I was taken into a room, where I was interviewed by an SIS employee. I told him I’d been run off-book by MI5, but I gave him a name.”

Ryan looked to Castor, and Castor raised his hand. “I was on the next flight over.”

Ox said, “I also told the woman about Zenith, and she had a file faxed over from London. On it was a reference to the explosion at the Meisser restaurant in Rotkreuz. I told her I had been picked up by police there, and she jotted down my code name next to the mention of the incident in the report, intending to research it later.”

Jack said, “So when I showed you the file—”

“I knew exactly what it was. I was sitting in front of the woman when she made the note. Funny how you remember the little things.”

Oxley continued. “When Castor showed up, he told me I was lucky to be alive. The Americans sold me down the river. The KGB had been hunting me, but they didn’t know I was in the gulag. He told me I needed to stay off the radar, forever, because if the off-the-books op from the eighties got out, a lot of people would suffer.” Ox shrugged. “Firstly and mostly, me.”

Castor picked up the story here. “Oxley just wanted to live out his years in peace. I allowed him that. I said nothing to the Russians that he existed, and I said nothing to MI5 that he had reemerged.

“We had an agreement, the two of us. I sent him money every year, enough to keep him in the manner in which he has become accustomed, and he stayed quiet. He knew there were powerful people in Russia who could have ended him whenever the hell they chose. I kept that from happening.”

Ox said, “Now I am learning that no one in Russia knew a goddamned thing about me. It was all a lie.”

Castor shook his head. “At least I didn’t inform on you, you miserable fuck.” He turned to Ryan. “Victor and I have lived in a state of mutually assured destruction for some twenty years, haven’t we?”

Oxley mumbled. “I just wanted to come home and be left alone.”

There was one thing Jack didn’t understand. He asked Oxley, “Why did you agree to come help me in all this if your only intention was to be left alone?”

“Because once the Seven Strong Men attacked me, I knew the Russians were onto me, and I knew Castor here had reneged on his side of the bargain. It was over. I had to fight back.”

Castor looked into the fire. “Which brings me to you, Ryan. The Seven Strong Men had been following you during your Gazprom investigation. I tried to push you away from that affair, gently, through Lamont, and then more forcefully when I had you in my office to order you off the case. But the Seven Strong Men knew you were too close to stop looking. Then, the other night, one of their international operatives came to my house and said you were meeting with a man in Corby. They gave me the address, I realized you and Oxley had gotten together, and I told them who Oxley was. What he knew.”

“And at that moment they decided to kill him,” Jack said.

“Of course they bloody well did.” Castor leaned forward; his eyeglasses caught the firelight and it obscured Ryan’s view of his eyes. “Even after all this time, it’s not too late for bloody Bedrock here to ruin everything.”