Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Galbraith looked at Ryan and sighed. “The bastard protected his friends in power at my expense, didn’t he?”

Ryan nodded. “It’s beginning to look like that’s exactly what he did.”

Galbraith said, “The sod even bought a house in Zug, just to be near his money, I guess.”

“Castor has a place in Zug?”

“He does. A chalet right on the lake. I’ve had dinner with him there a few times.” Ryan could see the muscles in Malcolm Galbraith’s jaws flex in anger. “And then he swindles me on behalf of bloody Gazprom. What do you suppose they are paying him?”

Ryan admitted he had no idea.

Jack said, “Mr. Galbraith, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. I am not sure what is going to happen, but I don’t really expect the FSB to write you a check for one-point-two billion dollars when this is all said and done.”

Galbraith replied, “I can’t remember the last time I used this phrase, but at this point, this isn’t about the money.”

Ryan was glad to see Galbraith understood.

Galbraith said, “You are a brave young man for an analyst.”

Jack smiled, thought of his dad for a moment, then said, “I have some men with me.”

“What kind of men?”

“Men to watch my back if the Russians come after me again.”

“These chaps, they aren’t employees of Castor’s, are they?” Galbraith asked.

“No. Why?”

The Scottish billionaire shifted in his seat uncomfortably now. “Because I’m afraid there is a complication.”

Ryan cocked his head. “What complication?”

“I called Hugh this morning, asking him what his junior analyst was doing flying up to Edinburgh demanding a meeting.”

Jack groaned. “When I asked for this meeting to be discreet, and just between the two of us, Castor is exactly who I was worried about.”

Galbraith held up his hands. “That’s clear now, isn’t it? Wasn’t clear then.”

Jack wondered what this meant, but at the very least he knew it meant he needed to get the hell out of here now.

He said, “Just one more question. What phone number did you reach him on?”

The Scotsman pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket. He scrolled through some numbers for a moment, then passed it over to Ryan. “Thinking about giving him a call?”

“No. I have a buddy who just might be able to find him through his phone.” Jack looked at Malcolm Galbraith. “At this point in the game, I’d much prefer a face-to-face meeting with Hugh Castor.”

After venturing out in the rain from his Berlin hotel, CIA analyst Jack Ryan found a small restaurant still open at eleven p.m., and he bought a meal consisting of bratwurst and french fries along with a large glass of pilsner. He sat at the front window and enjoyed his meal while looking out at the dreary weather. After a few minutes, he opened his map to orient himself, and he realized he was only a few blocks away from where the shootout took place on Sprengelstrasse very early that morning.

Though it was after eleven-thirty in the evening when he left the restaurant, he decided to walk the five blocks just to pass by the RAF flat.

It took him less than ten minutes to find the corner, and he was immediately surprised by how dead the area seemed now. The evening before, he had assumed the police cordon was keeping any traffic clear of the intersection, but tonight, with no police cordon whatsoever, the activity level in the neighborhood was virtually the same. Other than the occasional slow-moving taxi and one or two pensioners under umbrellas taking their dogs for late-night strolls, Ryan did not see anyone out on Sprengelstrasse.

The cold rain picked up as he neared the intersection, and he noticed a police car parked in front of the building, facing in the opposite direction. He couldn’t see anyone inside the vehicle, but the engine was running, so he suspected the police had posted a guard to keep any curious people away from the crime scene.

Jack stepped back into a darkened doorway on the northeastern corner of Sprengelstrasse and Tegeler Strasse, and from here he could take in the entire scene.

The bay doors of the auto repair shop were closed, which came as no surprise to Jack. There was no light coming from the big brick building at all, and the windows on the higher floors that had been shot out during the gunfight nearly twenty-four hours earlier were now covered with a shiny black material.

As he stood there, it occurred to him that he’d love to get another look inside that flat. Even though he was certain the BfV would have pulled anything of obvious intelligence value, Jack wondered if there was some way they might have missed some small thing, some tiny item that could possibly connect Marta Scheuring, the girl who died in Switzerland, with the Russians.

Ryan wondered what that might be. He wasn’t a cop like his dad, crime scene investigation was not his forte, so he recognized the fact he’d need to find something as obvious as a photo of Marta on Red Square to know he had the smoking gun he was looking for.

No chance of that, he told himself.

While Jack stood there, another police car pulled up close to the one parked in the street. Both drivers rolled down their windows and started talking. From a hundred feet away, Jack could hear muffled voices, and he saw the flash and glow as one of the cops lit a cigarette.

Jack stepped out of the doorway and crossed Tegeler Strasse, and began walking along the side of the building. Here he was surprised to see that the fire escape ladder he had climbed the evening before had not been reset all the way. He realized that if he were so inclined, he would be able to reach it and pull it down with the hook of his umbrella.

He was certain the patrol cars around the corner could not see him where he was, and he also knew the cops were distracted by their conversation, so, with no advance plan whatsoever, Jack decided to climb the fire escape and slip inside the building. He knew the police might wander around the corner here at some point, but he seriously doubted that they would be getting out of their warm and dry patrol cars anytime in the next few seconds.

Still, Jack did not reach for the ladder immediately; instead, he kept walking along, his umbrella and his waterproof coat keeping him dry, although he began to sweat as he thought about the prospect of getting another look inside the third-floor flat used as a safe house by the Red Army Faction. Twice he talked himself out of going ahead with his idea, but twice more he reasoned that, in the unlikely event the policemen caught him in the act, he wouldn’t be in any serious trouble. He could drop a few names of BfV officers he’d met in the past day, and he’d likely receive an uncomfortable tongue-lashing from the Germans, but the prospect of this paled in comparison with the possibility of having his curiosity satisfied by another look at the flat.

While considering his next move, he’d walked half a block up the street. He stopped, turned, headed back to the fire escape, and looked around at all the buildings, searching for anyone who might be watching what he was doing.

There was no one.

As Ryan arrived again at the fire escape, he used his umbrella to pull down the ladder slowly and relatively quietly, then tossed his umbrella between a couple of nearly bare bushes alongside the building and began climbing.

The window on the first floor had been shattered the night before; this was where Ryan had fired at the sniper two blocks east of here on Sprengelstrasse. Now cardboard wrapped in a black plastic tarp had been fitted in place of the window. Ryan had no trouble pushing in the cardboard and climbing inside the building. He looked back out onto the rain-swept empty street, then pushed the cardboard and plastic back into place.