Tom Clancy - Command Authority

The photos were several shots of the same group of six men, all wearing coats and standing in front of a restaurant, smoking cigarettes and talking. They were definitely Slavic in appearance; five of them looked like they were in their late twenties to mid-thirties; one man was much older, perhaps in his late fifties.

Bixby whistled. “Look at these blockheads. OC?” OC was shorthand for organized crime.

Herman reached for a bag of pretzels on the table and grabbed a handful. “Yeah, they think so. This group was photographed meeting with enforcers for the Shali Wanderers, which is a franchise of a Chechen group active here in Kiev.”

Bixby gave Herman a look. “Kid, I didn’t just ship in this morning.”

“Oh… sorry, boss. I count tanks and helicopters. OC isn’t my beat. I’d never heard of the Shali Wanderers before today. I guess I’m not all that familiar with the mafia guys running around Kiev.” Herman had spent nine years in the Marine Corps, and his area of focus was the Ukrainian military.

“No problem.” Bixby looked at the pictures more closely. “Why did SSU send these pictures to the Ukrainian Army?”

“They were running surveillance on the Chechens, and then these guys turned up. They followed them back to the Fairmont Grand Hotel, and realized they had booked the entire top floor for a month. It’s obvious they are OC, but they aren’t local. One of SSU’s crime guys thought these guys looked military, or ex-military, so he sent it over to the Army to see if they recognized any of the faces. They didn’t, so a contact of mine in the Ukrainian Army reached out to me.”

Ben added, “They do look military, don’t they?”

Bixby was still going through the photos. “The younger guys do, that’s for sure. The older dude, not so much.”

Keith passed the pictures around to the other men at the table. At first no one recognized any of the men, but the last man at the table, a senior case officer named Ostheimer, whistled.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“What do you see?” asked Bixby.

“The older dude. I’ve got a name for him, sort of.”

“Spit it out.”

“He’s Russian, I think. They call him Scar.”

“Charming.”

“A couple years ago when I was posted in Saint Petersburg, this guy popped up on the radar. There was a BOLO for him with the local cops, they had a picture and his nickname. As far as OC guys go in this part of the world, he’s done a damn fine job of keeping himself off the radar. Nobody knows his real name. Scar’s gang was wanted for bank robberies and armored-car heists and contract hits on local government officials and businessmen.”

Bixby joked, “I don’t even want to know where his scar is.”

All the men at the table laughed.

Ben Herman said, “I guess since I’m the low man on the totem pole, it’s my job to find out.” He muttered, “For this I got a master’s in international affairs?”

Bixby said, “Fun and games aside, this Scar guy is clearly in charge of these younger men. Look at the pictures. The military dudes are holding doors for him, lighting his cigarette.”

“Could be his security team,” someone suggested.

“Doesn’t look like security to me. Their coats are zipped up, so they aren’t packing heat for defensive purposes, and they aren’t looking out at the street for threats. No. These are hard-charging frontliners. Looks like a squad of ex-Spetsnaz guys or something.”

“And a Russian crime boss is running them?” Ben said with surprise.

“Would be odd,” Bixby admitted.

Ostheimer said, “What’s even stranger is this allegation they are meeting with Chechen mobsters. Those are some strange bedfellows for ex-Spetsnaz types. OC here in Kiev is so entrenched, there are shootouts in the street anytime one goon tries to operate on another’s turf. I don’t understand how the hell some Russian guy can just waltz into town like he owns the place without getting his ass tossed into the Dnieper.”

Ben said, “I’ll send a cable back to Langley to see if anyone knows anything about Scar.”

Ostheimer shook his head. “I checked when I was in Saint Pete. His file was thin. Maybe they’ve got more on him, but I kinda doubt it.”

Bixby handed the pictures back to Ben. “With everything else we’ve got going on, I don’t want anyone getting distracted by this. I’ll make some calls tomorrow and reach out to some of the older Russian hands at Langley and see if that nickname makes anything click with them. A guy his age would have been early thirties in the Wild West days of the nineties. If he was a player in Moscow who survived that shooting gallery, someone might recognize him.”

Bixby drained the rest of his drink and dealt the next hand. He figured he’d go ahead and lose his last fifty bucks quick so he could go home and get some sleep, because he liked to get an early start.

Being COS in Ukraine was a challenging posting, indeed.

Jack Ryan, Jr.’s Monday morning started at 8:15 when he arrived bleary-eyed at his office at Castor and Boyle Risk Analytics, dumped his jacket and his bag, and headed down to the little cafeteria on his floor. He ordered an egg sandwich and a coffee—not tea—and brought his breakfast back to his desk.

The egg was fried in butter and nearly the size of a dinner plate; it hung out of the bread and dripped all over his hand. And the coffee was instant and tasted like road tar. But he ate the egg and he drank the coffee because he knew he would need the protein and the caffeine today.

He’d spent virtually the entire weekend conducting research into the complicated auction of his client’s company, Galbraith Rossiya Energy, as well as the subsequent sale of the assets to Gazprom. He’d slept little, and now he was running on fumes.

In his two and a half months here at Castor and Boyle, Jack had dug through reams of corporate documents and file cabinets full of accounting ledgers and transcripts of board meetings. As dry as this sounded, Jack was finding the intricate process anything but, because the work he was doing seemed to have more to do with crime than it did with legitimate business.

And the one inescapable truth he had found in his research of the Galbraith Rossiya case was that the beneficiaries of much of this crime seemed to be the men and women who ran the government of Russia.

The phenomenon of criminal takeover of entire businesses in Russia had a name; it was called reidversto , or raiding. This wasn’t corporate raiding as it is thought of in the West. With reidversto , blackmail, fraud, threats of violence, and falsifying of documents were all used, as was the bringing of frivolous lawsuits whereby bribed judges adjudicated on the side of the criminals. Police and government officials were paid off for their help, often with a portion of the stolen venture used as reimbursement.

Official Russian government statistics claimed as many as four hundred companies a year were successfully taken over by raiders, and Ryan knew what this meant for the nation of Russia. This scared off foreign investments, and it damaged the Russian economy in ways difficult to measure.

His company’s client, Scottish billionaire Malcolm Galbraith, had fallen victim to an incredibly intricate and organized scheme to strip him of one of his largest holdings in Russia in one fell swoop. And now Jack found that those working on Galbraith’s behalf—law firms, investigators, and other associated businesses based in the East—were themselves falling victim to the Kremlin’s wrath.

He’d just heard over the weekend that a lawyer hired by Galbraith directly had been arrested in Saint Petersburg, and an officer of one of Galbraith’s pipeline maintenance firms in Moscow had been beaten up by thugs who, he had told the authorities, had freely stated they had been sent to pass a message along to Galbraith to drop the Rossiya Energy investigation.