Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Jack had been thinking the same thing. “Then come with me.”

Sandy hesitated some more, but Ryan could tell his English colleague was already thinking about beaches and piña coladas. “All right. We’ll fly down and take a look, but at the first sign of trouble we pack it in and run back to the lobby bar of our hotel, understood?”

“Understood, Sandy.” He held his hand up for a high five and said, “Road trip!”

Sandy looked at the hand in the air. “I beg your pardon?”

Jack lowered his hand. He’d overestimated the moment. “It will be fun. You better pack some sunscreen, though—you don’t look like you’d last long in the Caribbean without it.”

Sandy Lamont couldn’t help laughing.

It was past ten p.m. at the Emmitsburg, Maryland, farm of John Clark. John and his wife, Sandy, had spent the evening watching a rented movie, and they were getting ready for bed when the phone on the nightstand rang.

Clark scooped it up.

“Hello?”

“John Clark, please.”

“Speaking.”

“Hi, Mr. Clark. Sorry to disturb you so late. This is Keith Bixby, calling from U.S. embassy, Kiev.”

Clark ran the name through the massive database of contacts in his mind. It didn’t ring a bell, and, as far as he knew, he didn’t know anyone working in Kiev at the moment.

Before he could admit he’d drawn a blank, Bixby said, “Jimmy Hardesty suggested I give you a call.” Hardesty was CIA, he and Clark went back decades, and Clark trusted Hardesty.

“I see. What do you do at the embassy there, Keith?”

“I’m cultural attaché to the ambassador.”

This meant, to Clark, that Bixby was the CIA’s chief of station in Ukraine, and it also meant, to Clark, that Bixby was freely giving him this information. He would know that Clark would know he was COS.

“Got it,” said Clark, not missing a beat. “What can I do for you?”

“A name came up in my work over here, and we didn’t have much on the guy, so I did some digging. As I’m sure you know, Jimmy is the chief archivist at your former employer, and he’s pretty much my go-to guy when I have a question of this nature.”

“Understandable.”

“Jimmy didn’t have any more on this personality I’m looking at than I do, but he suggested I check with you. He says he recollects you might have run into him in your… travels.”

“Who’s the personality?”

“A Russian guy, I’d put him about fifty-five to sixty-five years old, an organized-crime big shot from Saint Petersburg, known as Scar.”

Clark said, “Haven’t heard that name in a while.”

“So you know him?”

“I know a little about him… but I don’t know you . Nothing personal, but let me give Hardesty a buzz, and I’ll call you back.”

Bixby said, “If you’d said anything else, I would have thought you were slipping.”

Clark chuckled into the phone. “Only physically, not mentally.”

“I doubt that. Let me give you my direct number.”

After Clark hung up, he called James Hardesty, established the bona fides of Keith Bixby, and confirmed the man was, in fact, chief of CIA’s Kiev Station. Hardesty spoke highly of the man, and Clark knew the CIA’s archivist was a hell of a judge of both ability and character.

Five minutes later, John Clark was back on the phone with Keith Bixby.

“Jimmy says you are both legit and a stand-up guy, but I want to make sure I’m talking to the right person. When and where did you last have a beer with Jimmy?”

Bixby did not hesitate. “A year ago last month. Crowne Plaza, McLean. I was in town for some meetings. I had a Shock Top and Jimmy had a Bud Light, if I’m not mistaken.”

Clark laughed. “Okay, you pass. Jimmy was surprised I didn’t know you already.”

“Keeping my ass under the radar has served me in my career to this point,” Bixby said. “I’ve probably slammed into the ceiling already working out in the sticks, but the seventh floor has never called to me like it has some of my colleagues.”

“You and me are cut from the same cloth. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, but keep in mind my intel is going to be several years old.”

“Fresher than anything I’ve got. Who is he?”

“I knew him as Gleb the Scar. A mob boss, but you probably know that already.”

“I had my suspicions. Can I send you a photo to see if you can ID him?”

“I’m afraid there is no need. I’ve never seen him.”

“Wow. He really is low-profile.”

Clark said, “He’s camera shy, but I do know something of his CV. He was born in Dzhankoi, in the Crimea, Ukraine, but he’s ethnic Russian. He moved to Saint Petersburg in the early nineties after doing a stint in a gulag for some mob murders, and then came out of Siberia tougher than when he went in.”

“Don’t they all?”

“Pretty much. He is an underboss in Saint Pete, working for one of the largest Slavic crime gangs, the Seven Strong Men: extortion, smuggling, heavy-handed things. I was running Rainbow for NATO several years back when his organization turned up on our radar. A group of armed gunmen busted into the city administration building, they were after some municipal ministers. A typical mob hit. But the police response was uncharacteristically fast, and the gunmen were surrounded. They took hostages. After two days of negotiations, we were called, and we came over from the UK. We monitored calls out of the building, and intercepted comms between the gunmen and their leader, none other than this Gleb the Scar character. He ordered them not to surrender, to stay and fight. It sounded to us like he was sacrificing them so they couldn’t implicate him in the hit.”

Clark continued, “Rainbow went in, we cleaned them out. We saved all the remaining hostages, but they’d executed three of the state ministers and a half a dozen building security. We took a couple of light casualties of our own on the takedown.” Clark paused, thinking back with regret on the incident. “It wasn’t as clean as we would have liked it to be. If we had gotten the green light from the Russians a few hours quicker, we could have saved a lot more lives.”

“And Gleb was never captured?”

“Negative. He likes to send his people to do all his dirty work. He’s a big shot, a hands-off type. Stays as clean as possible while letting the little fish take the risks.”

Bixby hesitated for a long moment. “Well, that’s interesting, because he’s over here in Kiev now, and he seems to be very much an on-scene commander.”

“That’s odd. From what I remember about him, Kiev wasn’t his turf. The Seven Strong Men aren’t active there, are they?”

“No, they aren’t. They run the show inside of Russia, and they are big in Belarus, but if they are operating here in Ukraine, that is a new development. Gleb was photographed with a crew of young guys who looked like ex-Spetsnaz. They were meeting with Chechen mob guys here in the city.”

“That really doesn’t track with what I remember about Gleb the Scar. His crew was all Slav. Before Volodin came in and cracked down on the mafia, Georgian and Chechen OC was all over the place in Russia. But the Gleb I remember didn’t have any dealings with them.”

“Maybe he’s become less bigoted as he’s gotten older.”

Clark chuckled. “My guess is he’s taking orders from someone who sent him on this mission. Moving to Kiev, running with ex-mil, working with ethnic OC. It doesn’t sound like Seven Strong Men, it sounds like a whole new business plan.”

“That’s a distressing thought, Clark.”

“Yeah, you got problems. You need to find out who he’s reporting to—that son of a bitch will be your real troublemaker.”