Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Arnie Van Damm said, “Look, Jack. Maybe we can set up a CCTV between the West Wing and his room in the ICU, but I don’t want you exposed to—”

“I’m going to the hospital. He is my friend. I want to talk to him in person. If I have to be decontaminated after or if I have to wear a fucking rubber suit, I still owe him a face-to-face visit, especially considering the fact I’m ordering his doctors to wake him up and take him off the sedation.”

Murray said, “If you are going to push for this, I’d like to get an agent in there to interview him, too. We can see if he knows when and how this happened.”

“That’s fine,” Jack said. “But they go in after I talk to him. We need to catch the assassin, but the larger ramifications of this are even more important. I don’t want them to wear him out before I get a chance to talk to him.”

Jack sipped his coffee. “I wish I thought finding the culprit in Golovko’s poisoning would lead back to Volodin and cut him off at the knees. There are those in the West, those on the margins, who will be swayed, but that’s not the point.”

Dan Murray, the law-and-order man, said, “The point is to catch an assassin. I’ve got my best people on it. We will find out when, where, and how. The why is going to have to come from CIA or State, I guess.”

Ryan put down his cup and thought about the prospects of catching the assassin. “Whoever did this is probably long gone from the U.S. CIA or State might end up involved in the takedown of the perpetrators. Keep them updated on the investigation.”

Murray nodded. “Will do.” He shook his head. “Can you believe it’s come to this? What the hell has happened to Russia? We’d come so far since the Cold War. A few years ago I was over there, working hand in hand with their Interior Ministry.”

Ryan said, “And I supported their short-lived move to NATO, helped them in their conflict with China. Times change.”

Mary Pat said, “The leadership changed, and that changed the times.”

“All right, everyone, keep me posted.” Jack looked to Arnie. Before he could say a word, Arnie spoke.

“I know. You want to be made available for anyone here if they need you.”

“You got it.”

The new U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine, was on A. I. Sikorsky Street, in a leafy section on the western side of the city. Deep within the walls of the sprawling compound, the CIA station occupied a six-room professional suite on the third floor of the main embassy building. During the day a small cadre of case officers, administrative assistants, and secretaries filled the cubicles and offices, but in the evening the space had a tendency to quiet down. Virtually every weeknight at nine p.m., however, the lights in the small but well-appointed break room flicked on, and a gaggle of mostly middle-aged, mostly white men pulled whiskey and scotch out of a cupboard and sat at one of the break room’s large round tables.

The chief of Kiev Station was a forty-eight-year-old New Jerseyan named Keith Bixby. He ran a sizable staff of case officers here at the embassy, each of whom was tasked with running agents in the Ukrainian government, military, and local businesses, as well as with reaching out to diplomatic personnel from other nations who were themselves stationed in the city.

For many years Kiev Station was given short shrift by Langley for the simple reason that the best and the brightest officers, along with the vast majority of the dollars, went to combating Islamic terrorism, meaning this and other former Soviet republics were relegated to yesterday’s news.

But this had changed, slowly, at first—with the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the reduction in focus on the Middle East in general—and then more quickly, with the ascendance of Valeri Volodin to power in Moscow and his imperialistic aspirations. The former Soviet republics began receiving more focus from Langley, and nowhere was that renewed focus more important than in Kiev.

Even though the CIA was putting resources into Ukraine again, it remained a tough posting for Keith Bixby and his team. The country was divided between the nationalistic and somewhat pro-Western west side of the nation, and the staunchly pro-Russian eastern side of the country. Russia itself was actively meddling in the nation’s affairs, and like a dark cloud, a very real threat of Russian military power being used against the nation hung over everyone’s head.

Keith Bixby had started his career as a young case officer in Moscow, but because of his organization’s focus on Islamic-based terrorism, he had spent the entire past decade in Saudi Arabia, scrambling to learn the lay of the land in a completely different environment and culture from what he was accustomed to. Only nine months earlier had that phase of his career ended, and he was given the top posting in Kiev.

And Kiev was, as far as he was concerned, ground zero in U.S. dealings with Russia.

Sure, COS Moscow would be a more prominent posting, but the Moscow Station chief’s movements were highly controlled and curtailed. Of course, Keith knew there were FSB agents here in Kiev, and they were no doubt monitoring U.S. embassy personnel to the extent they could. But Bixby and his case officers had a lot more mobility around the city and much more access to the cordons of local power than if they had been working in Russia itself, and for this reason he felt Kiev was a better and more important place to serve as COS.

Bixby worked extremely hard at his difficult job, and he’d been getting less than five hours of sleep a night ever since the conflict up north in Estonia, but he rewarded himself every evening by getting together a group of his staff to play Texas-hold-’em poker and drink Jack Daniel’s and Cutty Sark.

As much as he wished he could hang out in a local pub and take in the nightlife here in Kiev, his poker games were with his case officers, and they doubled as one more opportunity to talk shop each day. That wouldn’t be possible in the city, of course, so the office’s boring and antiseptic-smelling break room was the venue for the nightly event.

Some of Bixby’s best case officers were women, which came as no surprise to him, because Mary Pat Foley was known in CIA circles as perhaps the best on-the-ground case officer ever employed by the Agency. But every female case officer on Bixby’s staff had a family, and juggling their difficult jobs along with a domestic life was tough enough without adding on the additional chore of heading back up to the office each evening to play poker with the boss.

Keith and a half-dozen of his staff had been at their table for more than an hour when Ben Herman, the youngest case officer in the station, entered the break room with a folder in his hand.

One of the men at the table looked up from his cards and said, “Ben, if that folder in your hand is work, then get out of here. If it’s full of cash that you’re ready to lose, sit down and I’ll deal you in the next hand.”

The table erupted in laughter; it was funnier after a few shots of Jack, but COS Bixby waved away his subordinate’s comment and said, “You’ve got something you want to show me?”

Ben pulled up a chair. “Nothing earthshaking, but I thought you might be able to help.” The young officer opened the folder and pulled out several eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. Bixby took them and spread them out on the table over the poker chips and cards.

“Where did these come from?”

“I got them from a guy in the Ukrainian Army who got them from a guy in the SSU.” The Security Service of Ukraine was the federal law enforcement arm of the nation’s judicial system, akin to the FBI in the United States. “These photos came from the corruption and organized-crime division.”