Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Soon Ding Chavez appeared from the black water on the south side of the pier, and he carried his equipment with him as well. He stowed it against a low retaining wall at the edge of the property, making certain it could not be seen from the house, as he did not want any beam cast from a flashlight to reflect off either the tank or the mask.

Dominic Caruso rose from the water under the pier itself, and he tied off his gear and climbed out onto the rocks behind the wooden boathouse.

A two-man security patrol passed the area less than a minute after Dom made it into position. He rolled under the raised boathouse, keeping his body off the sharp rocks by holding himself in a plank position till they passed.

After another minute, the patrol had finished its circuit of the rear of the property and disappeared around the side of the house up the hill. Ding, Dom, and Sam took their Bluetooth headsets out of waterproof boxes and attached them to their ears. They established comms with one another, and all three used binoculars from their packs to search the windows of the house itself to look for Ryan.

Hugh Castor stood in front of a roaring fire in the living room of the lake house, and he greeted Ryan and Oxley as they were escorted in by the security officers. The sixty-eight-year-old man wore a black sweater and corduroys, and his eyeglasses and short silver hair shone in the light from the fire.

Oxley and Castor made some eye contact, but Ryan was surprised there were no real words between them. He halfway expected Ox to launch across the room and grab Castor by the throat, but nothing of the sort happened.

Instead, Castor just directed Oxley and Ryan to a sofa, and he sat down on a wingback chair facing them.

Two Swiss security men had been in the living room, but once Ryan and Oxley sat down they stepped into an adjacent kitchen. Ryan could hear them there, just around the corner, and he suspected that was their intention.

Three glasses of red wine had already been poured and sat waiting on the table in front of the men. Castor took his glass and drank a slow sip. Oxley and Ryan did not touch theirs.

Neither Jack nor Ox had been handcuffed or tied, which surprised Jack greatly. So far, none of this was going the way he had imagined it. It was almost as if Castor were happy to have the visitors.

Castor said, “Jack, you might not believe this, but I did not know a thing about what happened in Corby until Sandy told me this morning. I looked it up on the news, and the only conclusion I can come to is that clearly some associates of mine double-crossed me, the same as they did you.”

“Sandy told you I went to see him yesterday?”

“He did.” Castor shrugged. “No, no. I know what you are thinking. Sandy is not aware of any of this at all. He is just a good company man, and a decent lapdog. He has been a faithful servant for many years. He knows there is more than meets the eye, but he is not so curious about my private dealings with Russia’s elite away from Castor and Boyle.”

Castor pointed at Ryan with his wineglass. “You, on the other hand, young Ryan. You are the curious one. I must say how terribly impressed I am with everything you have accomplished. Obviously, I underestimated your abilities.”

“And I overestimated your character.”

Castor’s eyebrows rose, and he looked to Oxley. “You’ve been talking, I see.”

Ox said, “ You’ve been talking, ya fuck. I owe you not a bleedin’ thing.”

“I could have left you to rot, you bloody fool! Or I could have let them shoot you!”

“You should have done just that, you old bastard.”

“It’s not too late, Bedrock. They just might get you yet.”

Jack was utterly confused by the back-and-forth.

Castor looked at Ryan, and then back at Oxley. “What does he know?”

“He knows I was shanghaied by the Stasi while trying to help out his father. He knows I was then passed to the Russians. He knows I went in the gulags, and he knows I came out a few years later.”

“And clearly he thinks this is somehow my fault.”

Ox said nothing.

Castor crossed his legs. To Jack, it appeared an affectation. He wasn’t as relaxed as he pretended to be. The short, biting argument with Oxley was evidence of that.

Castor said, “Jack, I had nothing to do with our friend Victor here getting waylaid by the East Germans in Berlin. It was bad luck. That was all. I spent years, literally years , trying to find out what happened to him.”

Ryan looked to Ox, and Ox conceded Castor’s remarks with a half-nod.

Oxley said, “Castor wasn’t dirty then. He didn’t turn dirty till the Iron Curtain fell down and a bunch of money poured out. That’s when he became one of them.”

Castor shook his head vigorously. “I wasn’t one of them, Jack, old boy, I was an opportunist. I’d spent the years looking into Oxley’s disappearance, something of a personal mission, because MI5 had given him up for dead. I made contacts throughout the region in this endeavor. In Hungary. In Czechoslovakia. In Russia. Here in Zug. When the Iron Curtain fell, I was in a position of leverage over some powerful individuals. I used that leverage. Simple as that.”

Jack said, “Malcolm Galbraith told you about the stolen KGB money Zenith was involved with.”

“He told me bits and pieces, indeed. Others told me other things. But by the time Galbraith told me about the Russian account, the money was long gone from RPB. Zenith got it out via diamonds.”

“Diamonds?”

“Yes. Zenith’s control officer transferred the entire two hundred four million into another account at the bank, an account owned by a diamond man in Antwerp. Philippe Argens. He met with Zenith here in Zug, passed him two hundred million in uncut diamonds, and Zenith returned to Russia.”

“What happened to the diamonds?”

“The Russians in control of the black fund kept them until 1991, and then they sold them back to Argens. Slowly, they liquidated their assets. A few million here, a few million there. It worked for both sides. Argens was able to hide the transactions, so he effectively laundered money for years. And the Russians had the assets they needed to buy up state-run businesses when Russia was nationalizing everything and offering it in rigged auctions for peanuts.”

“A quarter-billion dollars buys a lot of peanuts,” Ryan admitted. “Who stole the money in the first place?”

Castor smiled. “This is where the bargaining starts, my boy.”

“What bargaining?”

“I’ll tell you what I want in a moment, but for now, I will whet your appetite.” He sipped his wine and then looked into the glass. “It’s French, not Swiss, so it’s quite good.”

Neither Ryan nor Oxley had any interest in the wine.

Castor shrugged and said, “Even before Gorbachev came to power and started liberalizing things, the KGB realized they had a problem. Members of the First Chief Directorate’s leadership began meeting in secret, discussing the inevitability that their model could not continue much longer.

“They wanted a fallback plan. They could see the potential for a complete collapse of the system as far back as the mid-eighties. They began pulling money out of accounts set up to support communist revolutions in Latin America, or to bankroll communist dictators already in power.

“Later, my contact in this group told me ten percent of all the money earmarked by the Kremlin for Cuba and Angola for a two-year period had been skimmed by a single young KGB officer working for the leaders.

“He created this black fund, ready to support them in case they had to run. They studied what the smartest of the Nazis did after the end of the Second World War, and they learned from them, but the KGB had longer to plan and more resources to pull from. The Third Reich had only been around for a decade. By the late eighties, Soviets had been in power for seventy years.”