Tom Clancy - Command Authority

As he made his way home, he felt the palpable sense of potential danger, but he could not deny to himself that with this came an unmistakable exhilaration.

After a week and a half of cleaning and repairs, the Ryan family returned to the residence of the White House with little fanfare. The President wanted to keep the event low-key, so without notifying the press in advance, Cathy and the kids were helicoptered from their home in Maryland to the South Lawn, and Jack met them at the south entrance. Katie and Kyle immediately ran up to their rooms and found them exactly as they had left them, though one member of the cleaning crew had picked up Kyle’s toys so that the carpets could be steamed and shampooed.

That afternoon, Cathy herself had the idea to host a pool reporter from the White House press office through a tour of the residence. As it turned out, it was a senior White House correspondent from ABC, and Cathy took her, along with her cameraman, all over the common areas of the second-floor residence to show America that the People’s House bore no physical scars from the unfortunate event.

The correspondent tried to back the First Lady into a corner by asking if, in retrospect, having a known enemy of the government in power in Russia over for lunch might have been a bad idea.

Cathy replied with grace, saying Sergey was a friend of the family’s, a friend of America’s, and a friend of Russia’s.

Jack Ryan was angry to learn that ten days after the incident, Golovko’s body was still in the United States and, effectively, stuck in customs. He personally called the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to see what the holdup was. The director of ICE found himself in the delicate position of having to explain to the President of the United States that his friend’s body had been, in compliance with U.S. law, classified as contaminated waste, and even though he was in a lead-lined coffin, there was an incredible amount of red tape involved in getting him transported to the United Kingdom for burial.

Ryan was both angered and saddened by this news, but he had the empathy to recognize the situation in which he’d just put the head of ICE. He apologized, thanked the man for his hard work and diligence, and let him get back to work.

The family spent their first evening back in the White House together in the theater room, watching a children’s movie. Cathy’s idea was to get the kids back into a comfortable routine at home, and to a large degree it was successful. At one point, Kyle made a remark about the “man who made the mess” in the bathroom, but otherwise the kids, like most kids, seemed virtually unaffected by the event they did not really understand. Jack realized it wouldn’t be long before Katie would piece together more about what happened that strange night when she was ten years old and had to sleep in her father’s office before taking a surprise vacation home for spring break.

The next morning, Ryan flew to Miami on Air Force One for a lunchtime speech to Cuban American leaders. He had planned on staying the evening to meet with local GOP fund-raisers, but he cut his trip short to deal with the situation in Ukraine and returned to Washington just after lunch.

As soon as his helicopter touched down from Andrews Air Force Base, he was told Ed Foley was waiting for him. Jack headed right over to the Oval Office and found Ed in the anteroom.

Foley had spent the past several days looking over raw data from the British secret service pertaining to the Zenith affair, a thirty-year-old set of murders in Europe. Ryan had tasked Foley with the research project without explaining much about its relevance.

Ryan leaned into the Roosevelt Room, where Ed was waiting for him. “Hey, Ed. Sorry to keep you waiting. Come on in.”

Foley followed Ryan into the Oval Office. He said, “No problem at all. How was Miami?”

“I wish I could tell you. I was there all of two and a half hours. Least I got a decent Cuban sandwich and a café con leche out of the trip.”

“Careful. That gets out and some folks will say you’ve gone commie.”

The President laughed, and the men sat down on the sofas in front of the desk. Ryan said, “I appreciate you digging in to all this old stuff.”

“My pleasure. It was fascinating.”

“What did you come up with?”

“More questions than answers, I’m afraid. I’ve spent five days reading everything sent to me about the events in question from the perspective of three nation’s intelligence agencies and police forces. From the British I have files from SIS, MI5, and Scotland Yard, and SIS also sent over reports they got from the Germans at the time—BfV intelligence reports, as well as relevant case files of the Swiss Federal Office of Police.”

Ed continued, “All the parties came to the same conclusion. There was no Russian assassin called Zenith operating in Europe. This was just a story cooked up by members of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction. These were politically motivated killings, but at that time the RAF was nearly dormant. Some of the terrorists wanted to keep it that way. The killings weren’t sanctioned within the organization, and those not involved were not happy to be tied to the killings, so they pushed the story that it was all a KGB plot.”

“And how did Roman Talanov’s name get tied to Zenith?”

“That came from British intelligence, but years after the fact. In the early nineties a source inside Russia, name redacted, claimed the Zenith assassin was real, and he was an ex-GRU Spetsnaz officer named Talanov who first served as a paratrooper during the invasion of Afghanistan.”

“The name of the source was redacted?”

“Yes, and that is very strange. It is the only redacted name in all of the SIS files sent to me. I showed it to Mary Pat, and she made a request through SIS. They claim the redaction is on the 1991 source document itself, and they don’t know who the source was.”

“That’s unusual.”

“Very. It was explained to Mary Pat that a determination was made that the information was false and their source not credible. They should have stricken the entire comment about Talanov, but someone screwed up and just redacted the name of the informant, and not the information itself.”

Ryan said, “So you are saying it is bad intel, from a bad source. And it is also a dead end, because we don’t even know where the intelligence came from.”

“I do have one clue, from the Swiss files, however. One of the Swiss reports was from their Zug Canton police; they detained a man at the scene of one of the killings. He was stopped as a witness, but he refused to comply with the cops. He was handcuffed and put in the back of a police cruiser, from which he promptly escaped.” Ed shuffled through his papers for a moment, then handed over a page. Ryan looked it over; it was a photocopied page of a document produced by an electric typewriter, and it was all in German.

Ryan did not see anything at first. He just said, “Ich spreche kein Deutsch.”

Ed chuckled. “I don’t speak German, either. But look carefully in the right-hand margin.”

Jack lowered his glasses on his nose, and now he saw a faint marking. It appeared that something had been written in pencil and then erased.

He looked closer. “Does that say ‘Bedrock’?”

“Yes.”

“What’s Bedrock?”

Ed shook his head. “No clue. I’ve never heard of it before, it’s certainly not mentioned anywhere else in any of the Zenith case files. I checked with Mary Pat. The SIS has no record of Bedrock as a code name for either a person or an operation.”

“And it’s right next to the mention of the witness who escaped from police custody?”