Duty and Honor

3

Muggers are opportunistic criminals, Jack knew. Their planning is limited. Their ambushes usually consist of blindsiding their victims. They don’t use delay-attention tools. Another thing: Who passes out flyers in a rainstorm? Thinking back, Jack didn’t recall seeing flyers on any of the other cars’ windshields.

Was he overthinking this?

No. The knife.

He got up from the couch, walked into the kitchen, and opened the dishwasher. Using a dish towel, he pulled the still-hot knife from the utensil rack and laid it on the counter. He studied it, from the tip of the blade to the end of the haft, but found no markings save a lone six-digit number beside the thumb stud.

Jack pulled out his phone, took several pictures of the knife, uploaded them to his Dropbox account, then sat down at the dining table with his laptop. In his browser he went to tineye.com, loaded the images, and hit the search icon. The results appeared instantly on his screen.

The knife was made by Eickhorn Solingen, a model called Secutor. Jack Googled the company. It was based in Solingen, Germany, with plenty of online retailers. Jack clicked on several of them and found a price: $175.

What was a crackhead doing with an expensive knife? At the first sign of withdrawal a real junkie would have sold it for a couple rocks. Jack zoomed in on the knife. Along the blade’s swedge was the word Secutor; beneath it a four-digit number. Near the thumb stud was Eickhorn Solingen’s logo, what looked like an upright squirrel holding a sword.

“Same knife, different markings,” Jack said to himself.

Jack picked up his phone and scrolled through his contacts until he found what he was looking for. He tapped dial.

“Shiloh River Gun Club,” the voice on the other end said.

“Is this Adam?”

“Yep. Who’s this?”

“Jack Ryan.”

“Hey, Jack. Haven’t seen you around for a while. You need to come in, put some rounds downrange.”

“I know. Listen, I need a favor. A buddy of mine is looking at buying a knife on eBay, an Eickhorn Solingen—”

“Nice blade.”

“—but the markings look odd. Can you take a look?”

Adam Flores was the co-owner of Shiloh River Gun Club, a private shooting club John Clark and Ding Chavez introduced him to. Outside of a military base, Shiloh River had one of the most realistic combat ranges on the eastern seaboard. He and Adam, a militaria aficionado, had become passing friends. If it went boom or was sharp, Adam knew about it.

This was normally a question Gavin Biery, The Campus’s director of information technology, would field, but that avenue wasn’t open to Jack. Gavin had stuck his neck out for Jack countless times when he was an employee, and he’d probably do it now, but Jack wasn’t going to put him in that position.

“Sure,” said Adam. “E-mail the pics and I’ll have a look around.”

“Thanks.”

Jack disconnected. From the pocket of his anorak he pulled the hotel key card he’d found at the scene. Emblazoned on the card’s blue front was a large red 6. Motel 6, Jack realized. But which one? He turned the card over, looking for markings. He found several, all number sequences. In turn, he typed each one into Google alongside the search term “Motel 6.” The third sequence—1403, the franchise identifier, apparently — found a match belonging to a motel in Springfield, about eight miles west of Alexandria.

This, too, made no sense. While Motel 6 wasn’t exactly a five-star hotel line, it was branded, mid-priced, with what Jack thought was a decent reputation. Assuming this card belonged to his attacker, it wasn’t the kind of dive motel a junkie would choose, or could afford. And why Springfield? Why not one of the half-dozen motels within walking distance of the Supermercado?

Jack realized his scalp was tingling. Someone had tried very hard to kill him last night, and that someone was looking less and less like a crackhead mugger. Having someone hunting for his head was nothing new, but this felt different. He realized his separation from The Campus had lured him into a comfort zone.

Ysabel.

Jack snatched up his phone and dialed her number, a flat owned by her father in London. Jack checked his watch; it would be midafternoon there. Before the line started ringing, he changed his mind and disconnected. Until he knew more, he didn’t want to tell her what was happening. She would worry. She would be on the next plane out of Heathrow.

He dialed Ysabel’s father’s direct line. He answered immediately.

Arman Kashani was no fan of Jack’s. Rightly or wrongly, he held Jack responsible for an assault on his daughter. In an attempt to get to Jack, Yegor Morozov’s people had nearly beaten her to death. She’d spent three weeks in the hospital before moving first to a private-care rehabilitation facility in London, then to her father’s flat. Jack didn’t begrudge Arman’s animosity. If and when Jack had a child of his own — especially a girl — God only knew how he’d react if that child was threatened. For her part, Ysabel had been slowly but steadily working to change her father’s mind about Jack. It seemed to be working.

“Good afternoon, Jack. What can I do for you?” The man’s tone sounded almost pleasant. Almost.

“Mr. Kashani, I may have a”—Jack paused, searching for the right word—“problem you need to be aware of.”

“Which involves my daughter?”

“Probably not, but just in case—”

“As she has been since the day she arrived, she’s well protected, Jack. I have two former SAS gentlemen who are never far away.”

That would do the trick, Jack thought. He hoped. If, in fact, last night’s attack had something to do with Morozov and some loose end Jack had missed, he’d prefer Ysabel have all of Hereford there. Thinking of this, Jack felt a knot of anger in his belly. They came after her and now him. They’d missed him, and he was going to turn that to his advantage.

“I’ll bet she loves that,” Jack said to Arman.

“She does not love that, not even remotely, but I love her, and until she’s fully recovered I will—”

“I wasn’t disagreeing with you, sir.”

“Good. You will keep me posted on this trouble of yours?”

“I will. As I said, it’s probably nothing. I’d suggest you don’t say anything to her until—”

“I wasn’t planning to. Take care, Jack.”

The line went dead.

Jack laid the phone down on the table and walked to the balcony windows and looked out. Below, the Potomac River was swollen. Its calm surface hid the strong spring current. A pair of yellow racing shells, their crews heaving and leaning in unison, glided past the mouth of the bay. Jack watched until they disappeared from view.

Who wants me dead? he wondered.

And why?

And had the mystery figure been a part of it?

He got an answer to his first question, at least a partial one, an hour later, when Adam Flores called back. “Jack, you’ve got yourself a pretty unique blade there. It’s an Eickhorn Solingen Secutor, all right, but not a commercial model. The blade’s thicker, there’s a lanyard slot—”

“Give me the condensed version, Adam.”

“Right. Eickhorn Solingen supplies the German Heer—the Army — with all its combat knives, but most of those are fixed-blade KM 2000 models. The one you’ve got is a special issue, a lot of one hundred issued to the KSK, probably for special commendations and whatever.”

“KSK?” asked Jack.

“Kommando Spezialkräfte — Special Forces Command. In 1997 the Bundeswehr rolled all its SpecFor units into one. KSK is the cream of the elite, Jack. Think SEALs, Delta, Green Berets, and Marine Force Recon all rolled into one.”

This explained a lot, but also raised more questions.

It explained why his attacker hadn’t behaved like your typical mugger. It also explained, at least fuzzily, the figure he’d seen standing at the guardrail. The backup man in case his attacker failed. If so, why didn’t he finish the job?

On the other hand, why a knife at all? Why not a gun and a noise suppressor? He could have dropped Jack from thirty feet away and kept walking.

Knives were silent, and perhaps the man’s command to Jack—“Hey, man, give it up!”—answered this. A cover story. If anyone happened to overhear and/or witness Jack’s murder, the details — from the man’s appearance to his language to his choice of weapon — would fit, and for an ostensibly homeless crackhead the trade-in value of a gun outweighed its usefulness. They’d chosen the right neighborhood for the attack. Finally, though the murder of the President’s son would trigger outrage and a massive law enforcement response, a mugging gone bad would, if staged correctly, lead nowhere substantial. But a professional killing would see the government turning the country upside down.

Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to assassinate him. If this had something to do with Yegor Morozov, the sophistication of the op made sense — but not the timing of it. Why wait so many months to come after him?

The choice of knife, a rare and expensive Eickhorn Solingen Secutor, was also curious. What did that mean? Jack knew plenty of special operators who felt attached to a particular piece of gear, whether it was a knife or a plastic army man his son had given him. In this business you took good-luck totems wherever you found them. Was this the case with his attacker?

Either way, one thing was certain: Whoever this was, they weren’t going to stop at one attempt. And he had to assume Ysabel was in fact on their radar. He had a choice: hide and call in reinforcements or handle it himself? Hiding was a nonstarter. Even if it was in his nature, given the lengths to which his attacker had gone so far, lying low would do no good.

For now, he was taking the latter route.

He’d take the fight to them.