Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“And at that moment they decided to kill him,” Jack said.

“Of course they bloody well did.” Castor leaned forward; his eyeglasses caught the firelight and it obscured Ryan’s view of his eyes. “Even after all this time, it’s not too late for bloody Bedrock here to ruin everything.”

CIA analyst Jack Ryan returned to London during an afternoon thunderstorm that bounced his Lufthansa 727 all over the sky above Heathrow. Jack tightened his body on the left and the right as if trying to steer the aircraft with the muscles in his back and legs, and he squeezed the armrests, although the burning sting in his bandaged right forearm made this excruciating.

The plane finally pitched and yawed all the way down to the runway, where the wings leveled with the ground effect, and Jack was relieved to find the landing mercifully smooth.

He wanted to go straight home to Chatham and be with his family, but that wasn’t an option. He knew he’d need to head to Century House, and he imagined he’d be there until very late in the evening.

He had only enough time to put down his suitcase and slip off his raincoat before Simon Harding stepped into his office. “Welcome back, Jack. How did everything go? Wait a tick! What have you done to your arm?”

Jack had thrown his suit coat away at the CIA station in Berlin. The tear in the arm of the coat wasn’t repairable, and the bloodstain wasn’t something he wanted to bring home to Cathy after assuring her he’d avoid any danger on this trip.

Without the coat, his cut shirtsleeve was visible, rolled up to his elbow; a thick layer of white gauze was wrapped on his forearm. This wasn’t something he’d be able to hide from Cathy, either.

Hell, he hadn’t even been able to hide it from Simon.

Jack said, “Had a little accident.” It wasn’t a great surprise that Harding didn’t know about everything that had happened to Jack, but it was still awkward to keep information from an SIS man inside the SIS HQ.

“Let me guess. Flatiron? Every time I venture off without the missus, I am useless when it comes to ironing my own shirts. I’ve taken to just steaming up the loo and—”

The phone on Jack’s desk rang. With an apologetic smile, he snatched it up. “Ryan.”

“Oh, good, you’ve made it in.” It was Basil. “Do come up as soon as you’re settled.”

Jack sat on the sofa in Charleston’s office; across from him were Nick Eastling and Sir Basil. He’d been offered tea or coffee, but he’d taken neither. His stomach had tied itself into knots in the skies over London, and this was added to the other stresses he’d endured in the past few days. He didn’t want to pour coffee into the acid that churned there.

He spent several minutes going over his actions since Eastling had left him in Berlin. His retelling went smoothly at first; he wanted to make clear to both men that the $204 million in in-house transfers he’d discovered at Ritzmann Privatbankiers needed further scrutiny, although he didn’t know how that could possibly be accomplished.

When it came to his decision to return to the Sprengelstrasse flat of the RAF cell, his explanation lost a lot of its detail and emotion. He still wasn’t sure what had driven him there, other than some sort of last-ditch effort to learn something actionable in what had been a disastrous trip abroad. Neither Eastling nor Charleston pressed him on the matter; it was more a case of Jack trying to justify his actions to himself.

Then he went into his late-night meeting with Marta Scheuring in her bedroom in the RAF flat. Eastling asked a few pointed questions about how he could be certain this was the real Marta and not, in fact, an imposter. As usual, Eastling’s track of thinking annoyed Ryan, but he explained as thoroughly as he could. Eastling wrote down the name of Ingrid Bretz, and promised he’d look into her.

Jack said, “I’ve checked already with my sources. Langley doesn’t have anything on her. Neither does BfV. If she’s an Ossi, that’s to be expected.”

Nick said, “And your Marta, the real Marta. She said nothing about David Penright, correct?”

Jack saw what Nick was doing. His job was to look into the Penright death, and that was it. He saw all the rest of the intrigue as irrelevant. “How the hell would Marta know about Penright, Nick? She wasn’t in Switzerland. Ingrid was in Switzerland, using Marta’s ID.”

“I’m just clarifying, Ryan. No need to be defensive.”

Sir Basil turned to Eastling. “Nick, go carefully. Jack’s been through quite a lot.”

Jack skipped over some details now, and fast-forwarded to the point when he lost Marta in the street. Then he told them about the cars racing into the area, and the two men who had jumped him.

Finally, he told them about the Good Samaritan who’d stepped in and quite literally saved his life.

When he was finished, Charleston mumbled, “Incredible story.”

Eastling said, “The BfV found the tunnel this afternoon. They used your statement to go through all the vacant buildings, but it turned out the tunnel was under the floor of an ear doctor’s office on Boyenstrasse. About one hundred meters from where the girl slipped away from you. No telling how long it had been up and running, but from what she told you, it was run by the Stasi themselves, with the doctor being their agent on this side.”

Ryan just nodded, then said, “Marta was adamant the RAF had nothing to do with the attacks in Switzerland. She said she’d been set up by a Russian who went by the code name Zenith. I didn’t tell the BfV about this, but when I got back to CIA station Berlin, I called Jim Greer. He’d never heard the code name, and he checked into it. It’s not something that has ever been on our radar. Does that name mean anything to you?”

Nick Eastling shook his head, but Basil turned to Eastling and said, “Nick, can I ask you to excuse us for a few minutes, please?”

Eastling seemed confused. Basil just nodded at him, and slowly the counterintelligence man stood and left the office.

When the door closed behind Nick, Basil said, “There have been some developments late this afternoon. Things we don’t need to involve Nick in. Frankly, I’m not cleared to involve you, either, but I think you deserve to know.”

“Know what?”

“First things first. West German soldiers manning the border near Göttingen heard a land mine go off in the no-man’s-land between East and West Germany this morning. The area is riddled with mines, of course—it’s how the East keeps its people in. The West German soldiers arrived at the sight of the incident and saw the body of a young German woman there in the no-man’s-land, just as it was being recovered by the East Germans.”

Jack put his head in his hands. “Marta. They fucking killed her.”

“I think that is what happened, but you know how it will be reported in the news, don’t you?”

Jack kept his head down. “They will say East German citizen Ingrid Bretz attempted to flee into the West and was killed by a land mine.”

“Yes,” said Sir Basil. “And proving otherwise will be impossible.”

Jack lifted his head up. “Why couldn’t Eastling hear this?”

“That wasn’t what I wanted to keep from him. It’s Zenith. I first heard the name Zenith today in a meeting I had at Number Ten.”

Ten Downing Street was the headquarters of Her Majesty’s government.

Charleston said, “The PM wasn’t in attendance, but her top staff was, along with Sir Donald Hollis, the director of MI5.”

“MI5? Domestic intelligence?”

“Yes. The meeting was to inform me that Five has been running a concurrent operation in Europe. First I’ve heard of it. It involves the Russian operative called Zenith, who is, at this point, only a rumor.”