Tom Clancy - Command Authority

The Secret Service personnel standing around chuckled softly, but Sergey just smiled weakly. Jack noticed this, and he knew his friend to enjoy a good laugh. His inability to go along with the joke only made Ryan more certain he needed Maura, the physician to the President, to look him over.

Ryan was about to press the issue further, but presidential chief of staff Arnie Van Damm leaned in the door from the hallway. Ryan was surprised to see him here; he did not normally leave the West Wing during the day to come over to the residence. Ryan knew, by his presence, something was up. Protocol intervened for a moment, and Ryan had to introduce Golovko to Van Damm. The Russian shook the chief of staff’s hand, and then sat back down in his chair across from Cathy.

“Mr. President, can I have a quick word?”

“Okay. Sorry, Sergey, give me just a second, but you’re not off the hook.”

Sergey just smiled back and nodded.

Ryan followed Arnie into the Center Hall, and then farther, to the West Sitting Hall. There, waiting for him, was Mary Pat Foley. Jack knew whatever was going on, Mary Pat would have only just heard about it, since she had been at lunch ten minutes earlier, and there seemed to be no great emergency then.

“What is it?”

Mary Pat said, “It’s Russia. Thirty minutes ago SVR director Stan Biryukov was killed in a bombing in central Moscow, less than a mile from the Kremlin.”

Ryan clenched his jaw. “Oh, boy.”

“Yeah, we liked him. Sure, he was a Russian spy, but he was as straight a shooter as we could have asked for in that role.”

Ryan felt the same about Biryukov. Although he didn’t know the man, he did know he had been instrumental in rescuing Ryan’s friend, John Clark, from the hands of brutal torturers in Moscow more than a year earlier. Then, even more recently, Biryukov had secretly assisted The Campus in getting Clark into China. As far as Russian intelligence chiefs were concerned, President Ryan thought Stan Biryukov eligible for sainthood. He asked, “Any chance at all this was a random terrorist act and not an assassination?”

Foley said, “I would say no chance at all, except we are talking about Moscow here. There have been, what, five or six bombings since Volodin came to power last year? The restaurant was popular with the kulturny —it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibilities it was targeted for its high-flying Russian clientele, and not specifically because the head of the SVR was in the building.”

“But?” asked Ryan. He’d worked with Mary Pat Foley for long enough that he could hear the thoughts behind the inflections in her voice.

“ But … as you know, there are rumors some of the other bombings were false flag attacks perpetrated by FSB. Biryukov was not a Kremlin insider the way FSB director Roman Talanov is. In fact, he and Talanov are seen as bitter rivals.” She corrected herself. “ Were seen as rivals.”

Ryan cocked his head in surprise. “Are you suggesting the chief of the FSB had the chief of the SVR killed ?”

“Not suggesting it, Mr. President. Just thinking out loud. It’s almost too provocative to comprehend, but everything that has happened in Russia since Valeri Volodin came to power has been dramatic, to say the least.”

Ryan thought for a moment. “All right. Let’s meet in the Oval Office in an hour with the full national security team. Try to get more answers by then.”

Mary Pat said, “It’s too bad for Golovko. If he had played his cards right and sucked up to Volodin when he came to power, he might have gotten himself a job offer out of this. There is a vacancy at SVR now, after all.”

It was dark humor, but Ryan wasn’t laughing. “Sergey wouldn’t work for Valeri Volodin if there was a gun to his head.”

Ryan headed back to the Yellow Oval Room. Normally, he would cut short a get-together like this to deal with something of the magnitude of the possible assassination of a Russian intelligence chief, but he wanted to use this opportunity to get Golovko’s take on the event.

But as he entered the room, he immediately saw a commotion. A Secret Service agent standing along the wall rushed forward toward the sitting area. Only then did Jack notice his old friend on the floor, lying next to his chair on his back. Cathy was with him, cradling his head.

Golovko’s face was a mask of pain.

Cathy looked up at Jack. “Get Maura up here. And tell the ambulance to come to the South Portico. Let them know they will be going to GWU!”

Ryan spun back out the door. The Secret Service was already on their radios; surely they were doing the First Lady’s bidding, but Jack followed his wife’s instructions nonetheless.

Sergey Golovko was driven out of the White House’s east entrance in the back of an ambulance, while Jack and Cathy stood just inside the doorway.

The ambulance did not use its sirens until it pulled onto Connecticut Avenue, so as not to arouse the interest of the media around the White House.

Cathy wanted to go along with Golovko, but she knew she would be seen upon arrival at George Washington University Hospital and then, within minutes, the White House Briefing Room would be full of screaming press clamoring for information as to what they had missed. Still, Cathy knew Jack’s own physician was riding along with Golovko, and she was top-notch.

President Ryan left his wife after a moment and headed into the West Wing, pushing the shock of Golovko’s collapse out of his mind so he could concentrate on the upcoming meeting. He’d only just arrived when he was notified that Mary Pat Foley and CIA director Jay Canfield were in the anteroom, waiting to speak with him. He looked down at his watch. The meeting wasn’t scheduled to begin for another half-hour.

“Send them in,” he said over the intercom, and he sat back on the edge of his desk.

Foley and Canfield entered in a rush. Mary Pat did not waste time. “Mr. President… we have a problem.”

Jack rose from his desk. “They are piling up, aren’t they? Go ahead.”

“Russian television is saying police have cornered and killed a man in a Moscow apartment. They say he is the bomber of the restaurant. He is a Croatian national named Dino Kadic.”

“Why is that a problem?”

Mary Pat looked to Jay Canfield. Canfield nodded, then looked up at the President. “Kadic… is… known to us.”

“Meaning?”

“He used to be an Agency asset.”

Ryan’s shoulders slumped, and he sat back on the edge of the desk. “He was CIA?”

“By proxy only. He worked in the Balkans in the nineties. For a short time he was part of a unit on the CIA’s payroll. We gave them some training as well. We dumped Kadic when his group… went rogue, I guess you could say.”

“War crimes?”

“Of the worst kind.”

“Jesus. Do the Russians know he used to be on CIA’s payroll?”

Mary Pat spoke up: “Kadic has made a career in the underworld by exaggerating his former ties to CIA. The story he’s told anyone who will listen makes it sound like he had a corner office on the seventh floor at Langley. Trust me, the Russians know Kadic has Agency ties.”

“Great,” Jack said. “Volodin owns the media in Russia. Their morning papers will lead with the story of a CIA hit man whacking their foreign intelligence director.”

Canfield said, “You’ve got that right. We will deny it, of course, for whatever good it will do.”

Mary Pat changed the subject. “I heard about Golovko. Is he going to be okay?”

Jack shrugged. “No idea. Food poisoning would be my guess, but I’m not a medical doc, just a history doc. They rushed him to GWU. He was conscious, but weak and disoriented.”