Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“I told you. Your code name. I showed you where Bedrock was written in the file.”

“Yeah, you did. But how do I know Castor didn’t send you?”

“Send me? Why?” The young American could tell that with his mention of Castor’s name, the trust Oxley had slowly begun to give him seemed to be in jeopardy. “Who is Castor to you?”

“He was my control officer at Five.”

Ryan’s eyes went wide. “Oh, shit.”

Oxley just stared at Ryan. Jack could see the older man was looking for signs of deception.

“I didn’t know that.” Jack stood up. “I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but he never once mentioned your name. I’ve been trying to find a connection between my work at C&B and you, and now I guess I found it.” He rubbed a hand over his short-cropped hair. “But I don’t know what the hell any of it means.”

Oxley turned away. “I don’t know what it means, either.”

Jack could see the man had become emotional. His face reddened, but Jack couldn’t tell if it was anger or the whiskey.

“What happened between the two of you, Ox?”

Oxley just shook his head.

Ryan could tell now was not the time to press. “Okay. I understand. But listen to me. I want to unravel what’s going on. My dad sent me to find out about you, to see if it could help tie Talanov to the Zenith killings. You’ve got your theories, your memories of a story you heard, but that’s not actionable intelligence. I need to dig deeper in this, and I really need your help.”

Ox was back on the bed, drinking again. His eyes were distant, but Ryan suspected it was from the memories now, and not the alcohol. Ox asked, “What help?”

Jack said, “I need to know where you first heard the name Talanov.”

Oxley blinked. Again, it was obvious to Ryan that there was an incredible amount of pain in his memories.

He began speaking slowly: “It would have been about 1989, I guess. Time really had no meaning at all. I was in Syktyvkar, a gulag in Komi. No one there knew I was English. Sure as hell, no one knew I was MI5. I was just another zek. ”

“Zek?”

“A prisoner. Anyway, I’d been inside the system several years already, I was long past solitary. As a matter of fact, I was right popular. I knew enough battlefield medicine to keep some of the other zek s healthy, and I was fit enough, despite all I’d been through, to be the chap you wanted on your work crew. That goes a long way over there.”

“I’m sure.”

“I was still on the job, as far as I was concerned. I spent every day trying to pull intelligence out of the men around me. I thought someday I would escape, I really fuckin’ believed it, probably because I would have gone mad without havin’ a little hope. Anyway, I worked every other prisoner I could get to like they were a source or an agent. Prisoners know things, Ryan. I’d worked out the names and locations of most every secret military installation in the Soviet Union over the years. None of it made a bit of difference in the end, but as I said, as long as I lived like I was operational, even in the gulag, I had life, I had hope.”

Ryan nodded thoughtfully. “I understand what you mean.”

“One day I was eatin’ my supper and listening in on a conversation between a couple of zek s. One bloke starts off with a story about his day. He says he was mopping the floor in the infirmary when a prisoner from another cell block was brought in. The man had classic symptoms of typhoid: bloody nose, fever, delirium. He was a strong chap, still had his strength and fight. There were no tattoos on his body, so he hadn’t been in the gulag for too long.”

“Go on.”

“This bloke tells me the guy started ranting about the KGB.”

“What about the KGB?”

“He says he was a bloody KGB officer, starts telling the doctor to make a call to confirm it, he gives his name, which didn’t match the name on his chart.”

“Did they believe him?”

“Fuck no. I probably told somebody I was in the KGB at one point or another in Syktyvkar. Prisoners lie, Ryan. Once I met a chap in the gulag who said he was Yuri Gagarin. Of course, in his case, it wasn’t so much a lie as a fantasy, as I believe he meant it.”

“Back to the KGB guy, Ox.”

“Right. So this delirious chap says he’s KGB, and he’s in the gulag on an operation. Everyone just laughed or what have you, then he starts in with how he was a paratrooper who was there when the presidential palace was taken in Kabul on the first day of the Afghanistan war. Claimed he then went into GRU, that’s Russian military intelligence, fighting in Afghanistan.

“I was eatin’ me soup through all this, listening in to the bloke, of course, but it wasn’t until the guy told the doctor to contact a number in Moscow and report that Zenith needs emergency extraction that I knew I’d stumbled into a piece of me own history.”

Ryan was transfixed by the story. “What happened to him?”

“Like I said, no one believed him, but he was persuasive enough that one of the nurses picked up the phone. You’ve got to understand, everyone must have been thinking, ‘It’s probably just the fever talking, but if there’s a one-in-a-thousand chance he’s on the up-and-up, then we might as well make the call,’ because everyone working in that infirmary would have been shot if his story panned out and they had done nothing.”

“Right.”

“The nurse calls, the guy on the other end of the line says he doesn’t have a fucking clue what she’s on about, and he hangs up. Everyone figures that’s that. They decide the bloke on the gurney covered in his own puke and blood and shit has a coin toss of a chance to survive, and they roll him into a corner, just like they’d do to any other zek .”

Ryan realized there was more. His heart was pounding while he waited for Oxley to tell the rest.

“Five minutes later, I was in the kitchen pouring salt into hot water. I drank it down fast, and within a few seconds I was pukin’ across the chow hall. They wheeled me into the infirmary.”

Ryan was impressed. “What did you see?”

“I didn’t see Zenith, unfortunately, I was shackled to my bed. But I did hear what was going on. The trucks came around midnight. It was a regular prisoner transfer, wasn’t KGB, it was the Ministry of Prisons. They had the papers to take the other zek away. I heard the commotion as they wheeled him out.

“Later that night a bloke with a mop came by my bed. I offered him all the food I’d managed to save up in me cell to tell me what he’d seen and heard that day.

“He told me the zek sick with typhoid had called himself Talanov.”

“Oh my God,” Ryan muttered.

“The prisoner-transfer truck showed up with doctors in the back of the vehicle ready to tend to him. Didn’t sound like any prisoner transfer I’d ever heard of.” Ox shrugged. “By the time this chap told me the story, the zek named Talanov who’d said he was a KGB officer called Zenith was gone from Syktyvkar.”

Ryan believed the story, or he at least believed that Ox believed it.

Oxley kept his eyes on Jack now. There was a lack of trust there still, but Jack also got the impression Oxley didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t go home. After a moment, he said, “I’ll stick around for a wee bit, Ryan. But I’m watching you. You got it?”

“I’ve got it.”

“What’s our next move, then?”

“We untie that asshole in the bathroom, leave him here, get back in the car and go someplace else. Don’t know where, but we’ll wing it. Once we get there I’ll call a friend who can tell me everything I’d ever want to know about every phone number on Oleg’s phone. That should help.”