Command Authority

88

President of the United States Jack Ryan sat at his desk in the Oval Office. On the blotter in front of him was a legal pad with several bullet points written in his own hand. He looked at the clock quickly, then down at his telephone, and he did his best to control his racing thoughts.

This was one of those crucial moments of statecraft where he knew that everything he did in the next few minutes could determine life and death for thousands, tens of thousands, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands.

He’d spent hours in meetings the night before, with Scott Adler, with Mary Pat Foley and Jay Canfield, with Bob Burgess and Mark Jorgensen and Dan Murray.

They had all talked him through this conversation, but more important than the input of any of these learned professionals was a ninety-minute phone call he’d had with his own son that set the ball rolling.

Jack Junior had started the conversation with the news that Bedrock had been killed by the Russians. His father’s first question was about the safety of his own son. Jack Junior convinced his father he was safe only by putting Domingo Chavez on the line.

Once that was done, and with President Ryan still reeling with the news that the man who’d once saved his life had died saving the life of his son, Jack Junior then bombarded his father with facts and figures and details. Stories about Roman Talanov and Valeri Volodin and the man who poisoned Golovko and his relationship to a mafia boss in Ukraine.

Jack Senior had jotted notes down, asked for clarifications, and then made notes under his notes about things he would be able to double-check on his own.

The news that the account at Ritzmann Privatbankiers had been liquidated into diamonds owned by another account holder had been especially interesting to him. Ryan vaguely remembered that at the time there had been a question about diamonds, though he could not recall any specifics after thirty years.

When he got off the phone with Jack Junior he called everyone into the Situation Room and he explained everything. Foley and Canfield and Murray hustled out to check what items they could. Adler had advised the President on what he needed to do about all this.

Ryan made the decision to order the immediate arrest of Dmitri Nesterov. Burgess suggested operators in the field in Kiev could handle it, and Ryan signed off on the plan.

Now that Nesterov was in pocket, even though he hadn’t said a word yet, the consensus was that President Ryan needed to get on the phone with Volodin and lay everything out. It was little more than a Hail Mary attempt to marginalize the man by threatening to reveal everything they had, or everything they could convince Volodin they had, which was a lot less than what they could actually prove.

The light on the phone blinked, letting Jack know the call had been put through to Moscow. He took one deep breath, situated his paperwork in front of him, and lifted the receiver off the cradle.

Volodin’s voice came over the line. He spoke Russian, of course, but Ryan recognized the fast tempo, the self-assuredness. The voice of the translator in the Communication Room was louder than Volodin’s, so Ryan could hear the translations easily.

“Mr. President,” Volodin said. “We speak at last.”

Ryan spoke English, which was handled quickly by Volodin’s translator in the Kremlin. Ryan said, “President Volodin, I need to start this conversation by making a suggestion that I hope you will seriously consider.”

“A suggestion? Maybe you will suggest that I resign. Is that the idea?” He laughed at his own joke.

Ryan did not laugh. He said, “My suggestion is that you ask your translator to leave the conversation. What I have to say to you is for you alone, and my translator can convey this. If you choose, when I finish, you can bring your man back into the conversation.”

“What is this?” Volodin asked. “You do not set the terms for our conversations. This is just some ploy so you can control the dialogue. I will not be bullied by you, President Ryan. That was the last president of Russia, not me.”

Jack listened to another few seconds of bluster conveyed through his translator, and then he said, “This is about Zenith.”

This made its way through Volodin’s translator, and then all was quiet on the line for a moment.

“I don’t know what that is,” said Valeri Volodin.

“Well, then,” replied Jack Ryan, “I will tell you. I will tell you every last detail. Account numbers, names, dates, victims, consequences. Would you like your translator to step away, or shall I go ahead?”

Jack didn’t expect to hear anything on the other end, but Volodin said, “I will indulge you briefly.” His voice already sounded on guard.

When there was no one else at the Kremlin on the line, Ryan went in a different direction: “Mr. President, I have direct evidence that connects you to the polonium poisoning of Sergey Golovko.”

“I expected to hear this even sooner. I told the world you would have all manner of lies to implicate Russia.”

“Pavel Lechkov, an operative of the Seven Strong Men criminal organization, passed the polonium off to the Venezuelans, who in turned poisoned the victim. We have photographs of Lechkov in the United States.”

Volodin said, “No one believes photographs. Plus, if this man was a criminal, what does that have to do with me? Your own nation has trouble with crime, does it not? Shall I blame you for the activities of your gangs?”

“Lechkov was also photographed meeting with Dmitri Nesterov, a member of the Seven Strong Men.”

“I am putting my translator back on the call. You have nothing that cannot be heard by every citizen of Russia, although it will only show them the foolishness of an old Cold War spy.”

Ryan said, “Roman Talanov’s relationship to the Seven Strong Men was established by you as an intelligence operation, and he rose to the top of that organization, just as you have risen to the top of the Russian government. But Roman Talanov is now damaged. We have already informed key members of Seven Strong Men that Talanov was KGB before he became a made man, and that is very much a sign of disrespect to their organization.”

Ryan added, “I should think this will make life very difficult for him indeed.”

Volodin spoke up now, and Jack noted that he had not called for his own translator to return to the line. He said, “These are all lies.”

“Mr. President, Hugh Castor has given us evidence. Evidence you know exists. We captured Dmitri Nesterov alive last night. We have shown him the evidence, and he is angry enough to where he is talking quite a bit already. Once we put him on television explaining how he was paid one-point-two billion by the FSB to destabilize Ukraine, to poison Sergey Golovko, and to facilitate illegal business transactions so that the siloviki can continue to rape the public holdings of the people of Russia, then your situation will become dire.

“President Volodin, even though Talanov will be destroyed by this, there is a way forward for you, if you so choose. We will reveal our findings of the polonium investigation. They will point to the Seven Strong Men. That, and the fact that Talanov just became as toxic as Golovko was, gives you an opportunity to publicly distance yourself from him before your affiliation destroys you.”

Volodin asked, “What is your objective in all this?”

Jack knew what he meant. Volodin was asking what it was that the United States wanted in return for not exposing the Russian government’s payment to the Seven Strong Men.

Ryan said, “It is very simple. Your armor stops where it is, and returns to the Crimea. You will have won a small victory, but any victory at all is more than you deserve. If that happens, we will not connect the dots between yourself and Zenith.”

“I cannot be blackmailed!”

“But you can be destroyed. Not by me. I don’t want war. But you can be destroyed from within. Russia needs to know who is at its helm. No one in Russia will believe me. But there is evidence. Evidence from Nesterov and Castor and other men, and the evidence will speak for itself, and it will get out there.”

“If you think I am afraid of your propaganda, you are mistaken.”

“President Volodin, the old guard still alive in the KGB will look into the dates. The bankers will look into the account numbers. The bureau of prisons will look into information on Talanov. Several European nations will reinvestigate old crimes. If it is my propaganda that starts the snowball, it will only be for a moment, at the top of the hill. Everything I say will be proven now that everyone knows where to look.”

Valeri Volodin hung up the phone.

An aide came on the line a second later. “Mr. President, shall I try to get him back?”

“No, thank you,” Ryan said. “I delivered my message. Now we have to wait to see his response to it.”

Roman Talanov resigned from the FSB two days after Russia ceased offensive operations in Ukraine and pulled forces back to the Crimea. Typical of his career in government service, Talanov made no announcement himself; instead, Valeri Volodin went before his favorite news presenter, and after accepting high praise for his successes in stamping out terrorism in eastern Ukraine, he said he had a very unfortunate announcement to make.

“I have decided I have lost confidence in Roman Romanovich Talanov. Disturbing facts have come to light about his dealings with organized crime, and as the person responsible for the integrity of all Russian citizens, I recognize Talanov is not the right man for the job.”

Volodin appointed a man no one had ever heard of — he himself picked him from a cabal of trusted advisers, though the man had no intelligence experience — and he ordered Talanov’s name removed from all official correspondence.

Roman Talanov knew what it meant to be a disgraced vory. There was no more dangerous position in all of Russia, because everyone he had surrounded himself with became, in the blink of an eye, the very people most hazardous to him. He retreated to his dacha in Krasnodar Krai, on the Black Sea coast, with a security staff of twenty trusted men, and he armed them all from an armory of weapons stolen from a KGB Spetsnaz unit.

Valeri Volodin sent an emissary — he would not speak with Talanov himself — and assured him he would have government protection and all the proceeds from selling his Gazprom shares, in exchange for making no public announcements.

Talanov agreed. He had been following the orders of Valeri Volodin for more than thirty years; he really didn’t know how to do anything else.

It was a member of his own staff who killed him. Six days after Talanov was outed as a KGB officer who misrepresented himself to earn vory v zakonye status, one of the junior members of his guard force, a civilian who secretly aspired to great things in the Seven Strong Men, waited for Talanov to step out of his shower and then stabbed him through the heart with a dagger. He took pictures of the body with his cell phone, and posted them on social media to brag of the event.

There was a special irony in the fact that the first image most Russians ever saw of the former intelligence chief was of his bloody naked body lying faceup on a tile floor, his eyes wide in death.

Jack Ryan, Jr., called his father from the back of the Hendley Associates jet when he was over the Atlantic. His dad had been worried about him for the past week for the simple reason that Jack had gone to London to move out of his flat, and even with Dom and Sam to help him, it still took a little time.

Jack didn’t want to call his dad while he was still in the UK. Instead, he called his mom and sent e-mails, assuring them both that he’d be home soon.

Dom and Sam loved the UK, and Jack had to admit he was going to miss it greatly. He recognized it was his own melancholy when he arrived that had made his time here tough going at first, long before the Russian mob made the experience even less cheery.

But now he was on his way home, which meant he could talk to his father without having to hear all the concern in his voice that Jack had heard so much of the past few years. He realized he made his dad’s tough life even tougher by his choice of profession, but he also realized one other thing.

If there was anyone on earth who understood the need to serve a greater good despite personal danger, it was his own father.

After establishing the fact that his son’s next stop would be the United States of America, Jack Senior said, “Son, I haven’t had a chance to thank you for passing me all the intel last week. You turned the tide. You damn well saved a lot of lives.”

Jack Junior wasn’t patting his own back, though. “I don’t know, Dad. Volodin is still alive and in power. They are dancing in the streets in the parts of Ukraine where he is now the head honcho. Doesn’t quite feel like a victory.”

Ryan said, “It’s not the ending any of us wanted. But we stopped a war.”

“Are you sure you didn’t just delay it?”

Jack Senior sighed. “No. I’m not sure at all. In fact, in some ways a weakened Volodin is even more dangerous. He might be like a wounded animal. Ready to lash out at anything. But I’ve been at this sort of thing for a while, and I feel like we maximized benefit and minimized detriment. A lot of good people lost their lives over this: Sergey, Oxley, men in and out of uniform serving in Eastern Europe. It’s okay to wish we got more out of this, but the real world bites back.”

“Yeah,” Jack Junior said. “It does.”

Jack Senior said, “We didn’t lose, Jack. We just didn’t win.”

That sank in after a moment. “Okay.”

Ryan asked, “What’s your plan now, son?”

“I want to come home. I’ve talked to Gerry already. He found a new building in Fairfax County, and Gavin has come up with some new technology to help us move forward.”

Ryan said, “That’s good. I know you miss working with the team. I can’t say I don’t wish you would live a safer life, though.”

Jack Junior said, “You saw what happened when I took a boring job with no chance for danger.”

“Yeah, I did. I sent you off after some of that danger, didn’t I?”

“You trusted me. I appreciate that. Thanks.”

“You bet, sport. Drop by as soon as you can when you get home. I miss you.”

“I will, Dad. I miss you, too.”