Tom Clancy - Command Authority

There was concern about leaving Gavin alone in an apartment the FSB had already raided once, so Igor arranged for two of his former colleagues in the federal police to stand outside the flat, telling them they were protecting a Canadian audio technician and his equipment.

At ten a.m. the two Highlanders arrived outside the Fairmont and parked in lots facing different directions within sight of the entrance to the massive hotel.

And then the men did that which they were very accustomed to doing in this line of work. They sat in their vehicles and waited.

It was no time at all before John Clark began attracting attention in the lobby of the Fairmont. Hard-faced men stared at him and even sat shoulder to shoulder with him on the sofa, but Clark did not blink, he just talked into his phone’s headset and worked on his tablet computer.

This was more of the “demonstration shadowing” FSB tactics that had been used against Clark and his men the other night.

But Clark was prepared for it now, and he wasn’t going anywhere. He ignored the men, regardless of their persistent attempts to get under his skin. Even when two of them sat on either side of him on the couch and carried on a conversation, the acrid smell of their bad breath filling his nostrils and their elbows jabbing him in the side as they gesticulated, Clark only continued reading his tablet as if he were alone.

When he talked on the phone, he acted as if he were in communication with someone overseas with his company, but in actuality he was on a secure conference call with his four men just outside the hotel.

In the vehicles outside, the men just listened to Clark drone on in their headsets about his dissatisfaction with his assignment here in Kiev and his refusal to start submitting his reports back to Vancouver until a new camera was sent in along with a new photographer to operate it.

By noon the FSB men had wandered off; perhaps they found the aged reporter as boorish as he found them. They remained in the lobby, mostly harassing other guests and giving the stink-eye to everyone who passed, but Clark could at least sip his coffee without having to keep his elbows pressed tight against his body.

Although Clark was forced to spend the vast majority of his efforts here in the lobby maintaining his cover, he was, in fact, here for a reason. With expert nonchalance, he was able to keep his head on a swivel and monitor the comings and goings to the elevators on the other side of the room, keeping a watchful eye out anytime someone went to the ninth floor.

Just after twelve-thirty, two men whom Clark immediately ID’d as potential Spetsnaz types entered the big hotel lobby and walked over to the elevators. Here they spoke for a moment with two thick ruffians wearing ill-fitting suits. Clark had pegged the two for Seven Strong Men goons, probably down here controlling who got on and off the elevator. After a few moments of conversation, the hard-cut military-looking men stepped into one of the elevators and the doors shut.

Clark adjusted his reading glasses on his nose. They were built with special lenses that gave him distant magnification when he looked through the very top of the glass. Using these, he was able to read the elevator numbers from across the room, and saw that the car traveled up to the ninth floor.

Yep, Clark said to himself, these guys are here to talk to the boss.

Twenty minutes later, the two men appeared in the same elevator car and then walked to the front doors of the hotel.

Clark waited until the instant they pushed through the revolving doors, and then he spoke into his phone as if responding to the other party he’d been talking to all along. “I’m glad you said that, Bob.”

This was Clark’s code to the cars outside to let them know whoever was leaving the hotel was someone of interest. It was now the job of the two car teams to ID the subjects and their vehicle.

Ding was behind the wheel of a black Toyota Highlander a hundred yards up the street, across from the road construction area. Dom sat next to him. They saw the two men exit the hotel and climb into a waiting Land Rover, and the vehicle took off to the north, toward their position.

Dom spoke into his headset, over the voice of Clark, who chatted away in an imaginary conversation: “Vehicle coming this way. We’ll take it from here.”

Chavez pulled into traffic a few cars behind the SUV when it passed, and then followed it up Naberezhno-Khreshchatytska Street, along the left bank of the Dnieper, and then onto Naberezhno-Luhova.

While they drove along, Dominic Caruso opened an app on his iPad and prepared himself to input a quick but crucial set of commands as soon as the time was right.

There was a great deal of traffic in both directions, but Ding stayed three cars behind the target vehicle until they hit a red light. The instant both cars stopped moving, Caruso tapped an icon on his tablet.

Under his seat, attached to the underside of the Toyota, a radio-controlled car the size of a brick lost its magnetic connection with the metal oil pan and dropped to the street. On his screen Dom saw the camera view of the little vehicle, and he pushed forward the throttle icon to accelerate the RC car below him, driving it under a truck parked in traffic directly in front of his Highlander, and then under a four-door sedan.

When the RC car arrived below the target SUV, he tapped an icon on the tablet, changing the image to an upward-looking camera. A tiny light automatically turned on, and now Dom drove his little car slowly, moving it left and right by turning the tablet accordingly, looking for just the exact location on the bottom of the vehicle.

He stopped his tiny remote vehicle below the SUV’s oil pan, then tapped a few icons, locking the wheels of the device in place. Once this was done, he switched to his deployment screen on the app, and he tapped a graphic that said, simply, “pneumatic deployment.”

Below the SUV the slap-on GPS device attached to the top of the RC vehicle popped into the air under the power of a compressed air-powered launcher. The matchbox-sized transmitter hit the metallic surface below the SUV and stuck to it with its powerful magnet, and instantly the transmitter began sending the GPS location of the target vehicle.

On the conference call, Gavin Biery, who was sitting in front of his laptops back at the safe house, said, “Receiving signal.”

“Roger that,” Dom replied, and as the vehicles in front of him began rolling forward again, he hastily unlocked the RC car’s wheels, switched his camera back to the forward view, and turned the little car around and raced it back to his Toyota Highlander.

Chavez drove forward while the RC car rolled back to him. When the two vehicles met, Dom pressed an icon on his screen and the vehicle itself popped into the air on its spring-fired wheels. With a loud and satisfying thunk , Ding and Dom knew the electromagnets on the RC car had reattached themselves to the oil pan, and they made the next turn to their left so they could head back to the hotel.

They stopped along the way back, pulling into a gas station on Volos’ka Street, and here they retrieved the RC car and loaded it with another slap-on. It was early afternoon, after all—Gleb the Scar might well have other appointments that would need tracking.

It was a frigid spring morning in Moscow, gray, with rain threatening. In Lubyanka Square, some four hundred fifty men and women stood stamping their feet to ward off the cold. All of those in attendance worked in the large neo-baroque building on the northern corner of the square, the main headquarters of the FSB and the former headquarters of the KGB.

Everyone in the crowd had been directed by e-mail and public-address announcements to leave their desks at ten in the morning to come out to the square. Here they chatted, many smoked, and they waited.