Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Lamont said, “I’m sure there are lots of other reasons of the more underhanded variety.”

Ryan nodded and reached for his coffee. “Undoubtedly. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t just look up a record of the tail numbers and trace the jets that way, so I pulled up the audio files of the Zurich airport tower for the seventy-two hours and downloaded them into a speech-to-text app. Even if the flight number is blocked on all written logs, the plane still has to communicate with the tower and use its flight number. Using the speech-to-text, I pulled out every tail number for a private aircraft and researched each plane individually.”

Lamont was amazed by the tenacity of Jack Ryan. He said, “I told you you were a right pit bull.”

“It wasn’t that hard, because I knew I’d be looking for a blocked aircraft, one whose flight track wasn’t also available online. I found several, of course—there are lots of shady corporate planes flying into Switzerland. But there was an Airbus A318, tail number NS3385, that landed at nine-thirty a.m. on March first, the day of the meeting. The ACJ318 is a corporate jet with a bedroom, a lounge, a seating area, and even a closed-off boardroom.”

“That’s a bloody expensive jet.”

“I researched the aircraft and found nothing, so I looked into the records of the FBOs on the ramp in Zurich, and saw that one A318 was refueled that morning. That bill was paid by a holding company based right there in Zurich, and this company also paid for fuel for another aircraft a few months before this at the same FBO. This one was owned by a restaurant group in Saint Petersburg.”

Sandy’s head cocked to the side. “Restaurant group in Saint Petersburg?”

Jack smiled. “That’s right. The same one Randolph Robinson works for down in Antigua. He set up the shell corporation, and he also manages Shoal Bank, owned by IFC.”

Sandy said, “You have a name associated with the restaurant company?”

Jack looked at his notes. “I do. Dmitri Nesterov. He owns a chain of restaurants. Other than that, I don’t know anything about him. I’ve searched and searched. He never went to any business school, he’s not a member of the Duma or an employee in the Kremlin.

“But he is a principal in a company that has bought up over twelve billion euros’ worth of oil and gas infrastructure in the past four months.”

“Bloody unbelievable.”

“Yes,” said Ryan. “We need to find out who Nesterov is, and why the Kremlin set him up to make one-point-two billion dollars in the raiding of Galbraith Rossiya Energy.”

Lamont nodded, but slowly and cautiously. He had to admit to himself, the Yank had gotten further with this than anyone else here in the office could have. He knew Castor was against anyone in-house working against Gazprom, but Jack Ryan was onto something, and Sandy Lamont was not going to get in his way.

Ryan asked, “Was there something you wanted to talk about?”

Sandy just shook his head. “Not at all. Carry on.”

The situation on the ground in Kiev seemed to be deteriorating by the day. What had begun as a series of daily speeches by pro-nationalist Ukrainians in the city’s massive Independence Square had, in the span of just a few days, morphed into ten-thousand-strong rallies where speeches, banners, and chants proclaimed the anti-Russian leanings of the attendees.

The division in the nation was on full display when pro-Russian Ukrainians started their own daily rallies on the other side of Independence Square. Any hopes the police might have had that the situation would defuse itself went away when tents started to be erected on both sides, and nationalists and Russian Ukrainians began clashes that turned more and more violent.

Riot police had broken up fights, tear-gas canisters and Molotov cocktails streaked through the air on a daily basis, and arrests and injuries were piling up by the day.

And this was not just happening in Kiev. In Sevastopol, in the Crimea, skinhead gangs of the Russian majority were shattering the shop windows of Ukrainian nationalists and Tatars, starting fires in the streets, and picking out people at random to beat up.

The morning after Clark surprised Keith Bixby with his offer to help him post surveillance on Gleb the Scar, the men of The Campus awoke in their flat to the sound of sirens outside. They were a few miles from the square, but the noise of a chanting crowd made its way up to their third-floor safe house.

Since they were playing the role of journalists, Clark, Chavez, Caruso, and Driscoll quickly dressed, grabbed their cameras and microphones, and headed downstairs. They walked out onto the street into the middle of a protest march that had begun outside of the city, supposedly spontaneously, and was heading directly for Independence Square. From the banners and the vitriol spouted by the marchers, it was clear this was a group of ultra-nationalists from the west of the nation.

It was obvious they hadn’t walked across western Ukraine to descend on the capital; clearly, they had been bused to a location during the night and then formed into a “spontaneous” march.

Once the group passed, the four men went back upstairs. Clark’s approach to the local CIA station chief had been spurned, so he decided he would have to improvise. Igor Kryvov had been a cop, and he knew quite a few personalities in the local underworld, so Clark decided he would use this access to get his own ear as close to the ground as possible.

Just after breakfast, he announced to the men in the safe house, “Igor, Ding, and I are going to head out for a little recon.”

Caruso said, “I get it, you Russian speakers get to hang out together while Sam and I stay back here with the nerd.”

Biery was hard at work on one of his laptops. Without stopping what he was doing, he said, “I’m a geek, not a nerd.”

Chavez said, “Igor is going to take us around to meet some people who can get us closer to the world we need to penetrate if we’re going to learn anything about Gleb the Scar.”

Driscoll said, “So you are off to meet drug dealers, pimps, and human traffickers. Have a nice time.”

“Will do,” Clark said.

Valeri Volodin was back on New Russia’s Evening News with his favorite interviewer, Tatiana Molchanova. Tonight the topic of conversation was a new trade pact enacted with China, but Molchanova had notes and follow-up questions in preparation for tackling a wide range of topics, depending on Volodin’s whims.

Volodin, as usual, spoke directly into the camera, and his “answers” were less in response to her questions and more the talking points that he’d come to the studio to get across to the viewers of the Evening News. With a strong jaw and a proud gaze into the lens, he said, “I am announcing a new trade pact with our friends in the People’s Republic of China. Our two powerful nations will tighten our energy security relationship. We will double oil shipments to China, securing their energy needs for growth, and securing that our markets are made stronger, despite the West’s attempts to rule us by starvation. The land routes have been decided. Our pipelines will begin construction almost immediately. We will build land bridges and high-speed rail between our two countries. We have begun coal exploration in Siberia in a joint agreement.

“We have put our past differences behind us, and together we will create the biggest economic market on earth.

“With America’s so-called Asia pivot, and the illegal attack against China’s mainland last year, the Chinese know it is in their interests to accept our friendship and our increased economic cooperation.”

The raven-haired beauty nodded thoughtfully and asked her next question as if it had just come to her organically as a response to Volodin’s last answer, although her questions had been written by her producers beforehand. “Mr. President, how do you feel this development will affect Russia’s relationship with the West? Recent conflicts with NATO and the USA have worried some Russians, who wonder if our economic future might be negatively impacted.”