Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Charleston stood at his desk with a half-dozen other men around him, none of whom Ryan recognized. As soon as he turned around and saw Ryan, Basil said, “Sit down, Jack.”

Jack moved to the sofa, and Basil sat in front of him. No introductions had been made of the other men.

“What’s wrong?”

“Terrible news, I’m afraid. David Penright… is dead.”

Jack felt a hot stab to his stomach as acid churned. “Oh my God.”

“We just learned of it.”

A wave of confusion washed over Ryan. “What the hell happened?”

“Hit by a bloody bus.”

“A bus?”

One of the other men came forward and sat down across from Ryan. He said, “They are going to find that he’d been drinking. Like most traveling officers, he tipped the bottle more than he should have.”

“I… I talked to him last night. He was fine.”

The man said, “He left the safe house in Zug at nine p.m. Immediately after talking to you, from what I gather. Then he met with Morningstar. After that, he hit the local bars.”

“Who are you?” Jack asked.

Basil cleared his throat. “Jack Ryan, Nick Eastling. Counterintelligence Division.”

The men shook hands, though Ryan was still in a state of shock.

Eastling nodded to the other men by the window. “That’s the rest of my team over there.”

The five men by the window just looked Jack’s way.

Jack turned to Basil for clarification, and Basil said, “Nick and his team will be investigating David’s death. The Swiss are well on their way to determining this was an accident, but our Zurich station will reach out to them to make sure their investigation ends quickly and quietly, so that ours can begin in earnest.”

Eastling said, “We’ll find the same thing. There were witnesses to the fact Penright came out of a beer hall about half past midnight, walked out into the street to flag a taxi, and then stumbled out of the empty lane and right in front of oncoming traffic. He was run over by a public transport bus. The bus driver is cooperating, to the extent he could. The Swiss say he was horrified by the experience.”

Jack was as incredulous as this Eastling fellow was certain. “You actually believe that story?”

Eastling said, “It wasn’t an assassination. Obviously, when we get the body back we will do a toxicology test on him, but my feeling is they will find he’d had enough gin to where the only mystery in his death will be how the hell he managed to climb off his bar stool and make it out the front door.” The man winced a little, as though he did not want to speak ill of the dead, but then he said, “David had a problem.”

Ryan turned away from the counterintel man and asked Charleston, “Does Morningstar know Penright is dead?”

“No. Penright was carrying false identity papers, in the name Nathan Michaels. This sort of death will make the news over there, but the newspapers will identify him as the alias he was traveling under. Morningstar won’t recognize it.”

“You’ve got to let Morningstar know.”

Basil said, “That has not been decided. We don’t want to alarm him unnecessarily.”

“ Unnecessarily? People are dying all around him.”

Eastling cleared his throat. “There have been two deaths. Neither of which we have been able to link to any compromise of Morningstar.”

Basil added, “These gentlemen will be heading over to launch an investigation. I’ve spoken to James Greer and Arthur Moore at Langley. We would like you to go along with them.”

The thought of not going to Switzerland had not occurred to him. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

Eastling appeared decidedly unhappy with this decision, but he did not say anything.

Charleston said, “Excellent. We will make a determination as to how Morningstar will be run as soon as the investigation into David’s death is concluded. For now, at least, we will not go near Morningstar, so there is no potential for compromise.”

Ryan just nodded. This was a lot to take in.

Eastling stood. “All right, Ryan. Off you go. I’ll meet you in the lobby in an hour. I have some more to discuss with Sir Basil.”

And with that, Nick Eastling all but shoved Jack Ryan out of the office.

It had taken Jack Ryan, Jr., days to track down Victor Oxley, the ex–MI5 spy known as Bedrock. He first called James Buck, his hand-to-hand combat trainer back in Maryland. James was a friend of The Campus’s, and was himself an ex-member of SAS, and he happily promised to make some discreet inquiries on Ryan’s behalf.

Jack knew he could have just told his dad about his conversation with Basil, and that would have been the end of it. But the younger Ryan found himself intrigued with the old story. He’d sent an e-mail to his father after his meeting in Belgravia with the ex-head of MI6, and told him simply that he’d learned a few details, but he’d like to look into it a little more.

After Buck did some extensive digging, he told Jack that as far as anyone in the SAS knew, Vick Oxley was still alive. They had no address for him, but by checking some old records, Buck was able to give Ryan his date of birth. This told Ryan that Oxley was fifty-nine. Ryan pulled up UK tax records, a perk of working for a company like Castor and Boyle, and he found exactly one fifty-nine-year-old Victor Oxley on the books. As it happened, the man lived in Corby, two hours north of London. Ryan called the phone number listed and found it out of service, but it was a Friday, and Ryan had banked a few hours of vacation time, so he told Sandy Lamont he’d be leaving after lunch to get an early start on his weekend.

The trip north was uneventful other than the fact Ryan had done very little driving on the left side of the road. More than once he’d winced as he’d passed oncoming traffic passing him by on the right, but after an hour or so his brain started to settle down and get used to this odd sensation.

He arrived in Corby and found the address just after four p.m. Oxley lived in a ramshackle two-story apartment building with a front garden smaller than the living room in Jack’s Earl’s Court apartment.

Ryan walked through the trash-strewn grass to the entryway and took a staircase up to Oxley’s flat.

He knocked, waited, then knocked again.

Frustrated, Ryan headed back to his car, but when he got down to the street, he noticed a pub on the corner, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to check in there in case someone knew the man he was looking for.

The pub was called the Bowl in Hand. Ryan found the place to be a little dark and dingy compared with the watering holes he’d been frequenting in The City. Even the locals seemed to agree that it wasn’t much of a hangout; it was four-fifteen on a Friday afternoon and Ryan counted fewer than ten patrons in the entire pub, all gray-haired men.

Ryan sat at the bar and ordered a pint of John Courage. When the bartender brought him his beer, Ryan put down a ten-pound note and said, “I was wondering if you knew a regular here.”

The burly man said, “I know when someone’s not a regular.”

Jack Ryan smiled. He expected this; the bartender didn’t look like he’d gotten his job for his chipper demeanor. Jack reached into his wallet and put down another ten-pound note. He didn’t have a clue what the going rate was for this sort of thing, but he wasn’t going to fan off any more money than he had to.

The bartender took the money. “The name of this chap?”

“Oxley. Victor Oxley.”

The bartender made a surprised face that Jack couldn’t read.

“You know him, then?”

“Aye,” he said, and now Jack saw that any suspicions the man carried before were replaced by a sense of mild curiosity. He got the idea there were some shady individuals who frequented this pub that the publican wanted to protect, but Victor Oxley wasn’t one of them.