Commander-in-Chief

23

Jack Ryan, Jr., met Christine von Langer, née Hutton, at a café on the Rue Notre Dame. When she first walked in the room, he was happy to see she absolutely looked the part of a woman of means. Mature, stately, and attractive, she wore chic clothes that looked expensive, and she held a fur coat over her arm that must have cost a fortune.

As she shook Jack’s hand and sat down, placing her Hermès bag on the chair next to her, she gave him a wide smile like she’d known him his whole life.

“Sorry, Mrs. von Langer, but can I ask why you are looking at me like that?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. You just remind me so much of your father.”

“I guess it makes sense that you would know my dad, but John didn’t mention it.”

“Can’t say I knew him well, but I had occasion to work with him from time to time.” She lowered the wattage of her beaming smile a little. “I don’t do politics, it’s never been my bag. Working in the government, under administrations of all different persuasions, I just found it better that way. But I knew your dad to be a hardworking man of impeccable character. That’s good enough for me.”

“Thanks. I hear that a lot, but I can’t help but just think of him as Dad.”

With a serious eye she said, “They beat him up in the press over here, you probably already know that.”

Jack gave a half-shrug. “They beat him up at home, Mrs. von Langer. I’m pretty sure it bothers my brother and sisters and me more than it bothers him.”

“Please. Call me Christine. Okay. Down to business. John says you are private sector, this is financial forensic accounting, but this might lead to something that traces back toward Moscow.”

Jack said, “It most definitely traces back to Russia, probably to Moscow, perhaps even to a specific building in Moscow.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Kremlin or Lubyanka?”

“Either/or.”

With a smile she said, “I love it already, Jack. I’m in.”

He told her exactly what he needed her to do; she asked a few questions about her target. He could tell she was a little disappointed she didn’t have more to her role, but she was certainly game, and he had no doubts she’d do one hell of a good job.

When he was finished she said, “This lawyer… do we think he’s corrupt?”

Jack thought about that a moment. “He definitely knows the kind of money he’s working with, and I doubt he’s into the art for the sake of art. He is an adviser for this offshore trust, so he’s funneling money into the art, paying inflated prices, obviously either as a kickback to a Russian or as a way to replace dirty money for clean money. So, in that respect, he’s corrupt but…” Jack’s voice trailed off.

Christine von Langer said, “But we’re talking about a lawyer here in Luxembourg, where ethics are… murky.”

“Right,” Jack said.

The fifty-six-year-old woman said, “I will have to be honest with you, though, I left the company twenty years ago. I’m not exactly up on the newest tech.” She started to ask about the technology she’d be using for the operation, but before she got very far, Gavin Biery entered the café. Ryan motioned him over and made the introductions.

He immediately opened his backpack and revealed a black box the size of a hardcover book, with a digital screen and a few buttons.

Gavin said, “This is an RFID emulator.”

Von Langer’s eyes flitted around the room nervously while Ryan reached over and put his hand on the backpack, closing it. “That’s okay, Gavin, we can do that later.”

“Oh… okay. Sorry.”

It was an uncomfortable moment, more for Christine than for Jack, because he was used to Gavin doing awkward things when out in the field. Jack dispelled the awkwardness by saying, “I want you to know how much we appreciate your help, Christine.”

“I am happy to be involved. I hope if your… organization needs me in the future they won’t hesitate to ask. My husband is gone and my kids are doing their own thing. I’ve got hobbies and diversions, but… nothing as cool as this.”

They all went back to Jack’s rented apartment on Place de Clairefontaine. Here Gavin set up his equipment and gave Christine a primer on how the scanner worked. After a few minutes of this — Gavin would have spent all day on the details if Jack didn’t hurry him along — Jack walked Christine through the best way to use the skimmer to steal the information off Frieden’s building access badge. She’d merely have to get it within three feet of Frieden’s access card, and keep it in the same position for at least three seconds while the antenna of the little device passively stole the coded information on the card.

With the technical and physical aspects of the job behind them, Jack and Christine worked together on a backstory that would have Frieden excited to meet with her. She would tell the attorney that she needed to set up an offshore, and was looking for an attorney to serve as the director. Frieden regularly represented such clients, Jack knew from his investigation into the man, so they both agreed that, despite the fact he was already making money working with a Russian oligarch, the prospect of taking on a client like Christine von Langer would be very appealing to him.

The next morning a call to the office of Guy Frieden earned Christine an invitation to get together for coffee that afternoon. They met and sat across from each other in an outdoor café. Christine kept her purse on the table with the skimmer on while she told an impressive story about a scheme by a half sister to use the courts in the United States to grab a share of Christine’s European riches. A property deal between the two women went bad, according to Christine, and her sister was sending lawyers to the courts in Germany in an attempt to settle her claim.

The Luxembourger nodded throughout the story with the necessary gravity to express concern, and then he assured the wealthy American that protecting estates from unmanageable relatives was one of the reasons he went into this line of work and one of his most fulfilling duties as an attorney. He talked about the way he would set up a trust to sequester money Christine’s husband had bequeathed to her and keep the German courts from having any access to it.

While Christine sipped her coffee and listened to the attorney, the real work was being done inside her Hermès handbag. The reader pulled the information off the card as if Frieden were swiping it at a security kiosk in his building, but Christine’s reader did it secretly and from farther away.

After coffee Christine said she’d be in touch, and she left on foot. She did a forty-five-minute SDR, passing once through the Gare de Luxembourg, the main train station, where Jack sat drinking espresso at a stand-up table next to a bakery, his eyes out for anyone trailing behind or interested in Christine. He saw nothing that aroused suspicion, and this gave him and Christine one more layer of certainty that she was not being followed.

They met back at the apartment and Christine passed the reader to Gavin, who had his equipment set up in the kitchen. With a kiss good-bye to Christine and more effusive thanks for her help, Jack sat at the kitchen table and watched the Campus IT director work.

He extracted the info from the reader via a digital SD card and he programmed it into an RFID tag machine. Gavin had brought a photo of Jack from a file on the Campus network, and he affixed this on the card, along with the name of the building and other information represented on the cards held by building employees.

Last, he attached a black neck lanyard that perfectly matched the one worn by the employees of Frieden’s building.

All totaled, Gavin finished the job in under thirty minutes. He held it up for Jack to look at.

Jack asked, “How sure are you it will be accepted by the scanner?”

“One hundred percent.”

Jack looked at Gavin with incredulity.

“I’m serious, Ryan, find some other part of this op to stress about. That was a breeze.” Gavin then handed over an electronic device to unlock Frieden’s office door and asked Jack if he remembered how to operate it.

Jack said, “You’re kidding, right? You put me and the guys through two days’ worth of training on that gadget.”

“And now that training will pay off,” Gavin said, with a hint of satisfaction in his voice. He also handed Jack a completely nondescript thumb drive. “Here’s your RAT. It’s just like the one Ysabel used down in Rome. Get it into a port on any networked device in his office, wait nineteen and a half seconds for the program to upload, and then pull it out. After that, you’re done, I’ll take care of the rest remotely.”

Jack and Ysabel had joked in Rome about Gavin’s precise instructions to wait nineteen and a half seconds. They both agreed the first nineteen seconds went by quickly, but that last half second felt like an eternity.

Gavin returned to D.C. that afternoon on a commercial flight, and Jack spent the evening in a local gym, trying to undo some of the damage he had done over the past weeks wining and dining Ysabel and sitting on his ass all day.

The next morning at eleven a.m. Jack stood in a doorway six floors below his rented office and watched Guy Frieden and his secretary leave their building, the same as they had the previous four days. He knew they were headed to a café around the corner from Frieden’s office on the pedestrian shopping street. As soon as they disappeared up Grand Rue, Jack crossed the street, a purposefulness to his walk that gave an air that he did this every day.

He wore a gray suit under a brown Fendi wool overcoat and he carried a black leather Tumi bag. His beard was trim and neat and he wore Tom Ford clear-lensed eyeglasses with no correction to give him even more of a professional presence.

He entered the building and marched up to the counter, waved the badge Gavin made for him over the reader, careful to glance away from the camera that recorded his entrance while he did so. He was rewarded with a green light and a rotating turnstile. He pushed through and headed for the elevators, continuing the appearance of utter relaxation.

On the fifth floor Jack passed a dozen individual offices, most of them private bankers or attorneys, before he made it to a door with a gold nameplate that read Guy Frieden, Avocat. He continued on down to the end of the hall, then he turned and started back toward the door. When he was certain no one was coming, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a white box the size of a deck of cards. This he placed over the card reader lock next to Frieden’s door. Automatically the device began pulling in data from the reader and then decoding it.

It was another one of the Campus team’s inventions, and Jack knew it didn’t always work, but Gavin and company had researched the locking protocols used by this office building, and Gavin assured him he’d get in.

As usual, it took a little longer than Gavin said it would, but, also as usual, it worked as advertised. The door opened thirteen seconds after Jack pushed the lock decoder against the card reader.

Frieden’s office was dark and quiet. Jack looked out the window to his vantage point across the street, then hurried to the computer on the desk, pulling out the RAT as he moved. He plugged the device in, initiated it with the simple movement of the mouse on the desk, and left it there while it worked its magic.

He had a few seconds to snoop around, so he looked through the drawers on Frieden’s desk. He didn’t see anything that looked very interesting, so he headed back into the lobby to check the secretary’s desk.

Jack saw Guy Frieden’s secretary had a calendar blotter on her desk, so he pulled out his phone and began taking pictures of the handwritten notes on the pages. Each and every day of the exposed month had some sort of notation, but they were all in German.

He carefully checked the following month, but this page, and the two calendar pages representing the rest of the year, were completely blank.

Jack assumed at the beginning of each month Frieden’s secretary took all the appointments off whatever computer program she kept them on for scheduling, and she then hand wrote them on the calendar for quicker reference. It left him with a very incomplete picture, but enough notes were written on the blotter that Jack knew he didn’t want to pass it up.

He gave the RAT a full minute to do its thing, more than three times as long as Gavin said the device needed to install itself, but Jack figured it couldn’t hurt.

Jack was out of the building seven minutes after he entered — he doubted Frieden had managed to finish his biscotti yet — and he was on the phone with Gavin as soon as he was back in his tiny sixth-floor office. Gavin promised to get to work on hacking into the system immediately.

Next Jack called Clark, following the orders of the director of operations to notify him the moment he was clear. Jack felt a little silly checking in, like he was calling his mom to let her know he made it home safely, but Clark had requested the contact. Jack knew Clark didn’t like his men operating in the field, even if it was a low-risk mission in such a serene place as Luxembourg.