Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“Right,” Jack Senior said, then caught himself. “Track down? Wait. I just said talk to Basil. I don’t need you to do anything else.”

“Right,” the younger Ryan said.

“So tell me, what’s going on at work?”

“I am up to my neck in shady Russians over here. They are swindling clients out of fortunes and businesses and intellectual property. They are lying with a straight face and using the court system to steal and intimidate.”

“It’s that bad?”

“You wouldn’t believe.” Jack Junior caught himself. “What am I saying? You used to go toe-to-toe with the KGB.”

President Ryan said, “Very true. Do you enjoy the work, at least?”

The younger Ryan sighed. “It’s frustrating. I’ve spent the last few years thinking about justice. Chasing down bad guys and stopping them. But here I am chasing down the bad guys, but the most I can hope for is that some court that has no real jurisdiction over the bad guys will order that some assets are seized, and that probably will never happen.”

“Justice moves slowly.”

“In this case, it doesn’t move at all. My boss, Hugh Castor, is apparently afraid to pin any corruption directly on the siloviki in the Kremlin. I understand he doesn’t want to get bogged down in court over there, or have his people harassed by the authorities, but we are letting the real criminals off too lightly.

“I can’t help but think about what I could do to some of these worthless bastards to make them change their ways. If Ding and John and Sam and Dom were here, I wouldn’t be reading old ownership transfer agreements, that’s for damn sure.”

“I understand. There were a couple of times in my analytical career where I felt like I had connected the dots that needed to be connected, but there was not enough follow-through from those above me to make a difference. There is very little more frustrating than that.”

Jack Senior said, “I’ll e-mail you the document I’d like you to show Basil. That, and what I’ve already told you, might be enough for you to prod his memory. I won’t go into the rest of it, because it’s a long story, and I don’t even remember all the details myself.”

“No problem. I’ll talk to Basil and let you know what he says. Sounds like fun.”

Jack Senior laughed a little. “I can’t promise you any more excitement than spending a few minutes chatting with an octogenarian in his study, but I guess it’s something.”

“It is something, Dad. You know I love stories about the old days.”

The President’s voice darkened. “Not this one, son. This story did not have a happy ending at all.”

Jack Ryan woke to the patter of light rain, although he barely noticed it. This was England, after all; the absence of rain this time of year would have been unique. He reached out with a long, slow stretch and found his wife’s warm shoulder in the dark. Cathy was sound asleep still, which, at twenty minutes before six in the morning, seemed to Jack to be perfectly reasonable.

Their alarm was set for a quarter till the hour, so Jack took his time waking up. Finally he reached over and turned off the alarm before rolling out of bed. He shuffled into the kitchen to start the coffee and headed out to the front porch to get the paper.

The street was perfectly quiet. The Ryans lived in Chatham, in North Kent, some thirty miles from London. He and Cathy were the only couple on Grizedale Close who had to commute all the way to the capital, so theirs was more often than not the first house on the street with its lights on and movement inside each morning.

The neighbors all knew Cathy was a surgeon at Hammersmith Hospital, and they thought Jack had some boring job at the U.S. embassy. And while that was officially true, the truth would have inspired much more gossip over the hedges on Grizedale Close.

The young American was, in fact, an analyst in the CIA.

Jack noticed the milkman had delivered his usual half-gallon of whole milk. His daughter, Sally, would drink every drop of it before the next delivery. He picked the milk off the porch, and then searched for a moment before finding the newspaper in the bushes near the door. The copy of the International Herald Tribune was wrapped in a plastic bag to protect it from the weather, indicating the paperboy had better sense than he had aim.

Ryan went back inside and woke Cathy, then made his way to the kitchen. After pouring himself a cup of coffee, Jack snapped open the paper and took his first sip of the morning.

Below the fold on the front page, a picture grabbed his attention. A body covered in a tarp lay in a street. From the look of the buildings, he guessed it was Italy or perhaps Switzerland.

He read the headline below the photo.

“Swiss Banker Shot Dead, Four Others Wounded.”

Jack scanned the details of the article. It seemed the banker’s name was Tobias Gabler, and he worked at Ritzmann Privatbankiers, a venerable family-owned bank based in the Swiss canton of Zug. Gabler was killed, and several others were injured, when someone opened fire from the window of a building into a street full of pedestrians.

So far, the police had no one in custody.

Ryan looked up from the paper when Cathy strolled into the kitchen in her pink housecoat. She kissed Jack on the top of the head, and then she shuffled on to the coffeemaker.

“No surgery?” Jack asked. She never drank coffee when she had any surgery planned for the day.

“Nope,” she said, as she poured herself a cup. “Just some follow-up appointments. A jittery hand while I’m fitting someone for glasses won’t be the end of the world.”

Jack had no idea how his wife could go to work most mornings and slice into eyeballs. Better her than me, he told himself.

On the way to the shower, Jack peeked in on his five-year-old daughter, Sally. She was sleeping, but he knew she would be up and wide awake by the time he got out of the bathroom. He liked to get at least one nice, peaceful look at his little girl while she wasn’t darting around like a moving target, and first thing in the morning was his only opportunity.

He next peeked in on Jack Junior. His toddler was sound asleep, facedown in his crib on the top of his covers, his diapered butt sticking up in the air. Jack smiled. His little boy would be walking soon, and that little crib wouldn’t keep him for much longer.

Jack started the shower and then took a moment to look at himself in the mirror. Ryan was six-one, in fair shape, although he’d let both his diet and his exercise slip in the past few months here in the UK. Two small kids in the house meant keeping a flexible schedule, which got in the way of his workouts, and it also meant there was an abundance of snacks and cereals and treats in the pantry, one or two of which seemed to call to Ryan every day.

As he did most mornings, Ryan poked at the pronounced white scar on his shoulder. A year earlier he had saved the Prince of Wales and his family from an assassination attempt by an offshoot of the Irish Republican Army. Jack earned himself honorary knighthood from the queen for his quick-thinking actions, but he’d also earned himself a gunshot wound from the terrorists for not being quite quick enough.

Ryan had had other run-ins with danger, both with the Irish and in Vatican City, during the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. He’d done his best to prevent the attack, but he’d narrowly missed the Bulgarian agent working under orders from Moscow.

Ryan left the mirror and stepped into the shower, and the hot water instantly relieved tight muscles in his back, another remembrance of his past. As a twenty-three-year-old second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, he’d been stationed on an amphibious assault ship during a NATO exercise in Crete. He’d been in the back of a CH-46 when the aft rotor failed, and the chopper full of Marines crashed into the rocks. Ryan broke his back, lost his commission, and endured years of pain after the fact before a successful surgery gave him his life back.