Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Penright had been traveling under the name Nathan Michaels.

“That’s right,” Eastling said. “Were you working last night?”

The bartender poured a beer from the tap for a customer, then said, “I was here, but I was working the bar. He sat at that table over there.” He pointed to a table near the center of the room. Ryan caught Eastling raising an inquisitive eyebrow, perhaps because the spy had chosen such a prominent location in the bar.

“Did he, now?”

“ Ja. The waitress who served him has been suspended. The police are questioning if she gave him too much alcohol.”

Eastling rolled his eyes. “Oh, that’s ridiculous. How do you say ‘ridiculous’ in German?”

“We say Quatsch . It’s close, anyway.”

“Okay, then, that’s Quatsch . Nathan liked to drink. It’s not your waitress’s fault.”

“ Genau! Exactly. But this is bad publicity for the bar, of course. She will be fired.”

Eastling shook his head— “Quatsch” —and ordered another drink for himself and Ryan. Ryan knew he was in the presence of an excellent investigator. He only wished the man’s mind didn’t already seem made up.

As the second plum schnapps arrived, Jack forced himself to drink down the rest of the first sugary beverage. He thought it was pretty awful, but he was following along with Eastling’s friendly and earnest demeanor to try to get information out of the bartender.

“These are delicious,” Nick Eastling said, as he held up the glass. “Is this what my friend was drinking?”

“ Nein. He drank scotch. I remember because he was the only person in the bar drinking scotch at the time.”

“Ah,” Nick said. “Yes. Nathan enjoyed his scotch.”

The bartender nodded as he made drinks a few feet away. As he worked, he said, “He was not drunk. They seemed fine when they left.”

Jack cocked his head, but Eastling did not react at all. He just said, “‘They’ meaning Nathan and…”

“And the girl he was with.”

“What girl?” Ryan asked quickly, but Nick Eastling reached under the bar and squeezed his forearm.

“Oh. Didn’t I say? He met a girl. They sat together for over an hour. Very beautiful.”

“Right,” Eastling said. Jack saw just a hint of uncertainty on the man’s face. “She was a local girl?”

“She was not Swiss. She spoke with a German accent.”

“I see,” Eastling said.

Jack leaned forward toward the bartender. “You said he met her. You mean he met her here?”

“Yes. She was at the bar with some other men. Two of them. But they left, and she stayed. When your friend came in, he sat at the bar and started talking to her. They moved to a table.”

“And you never saw them before?” Ryan asked.

“ Nein. Although we get a lot of Germans here.”

He poured more beer, but before he served them he held up a finger and said, “Renate, komm mal her!” calling out to one of the other bartenders. He spoke to her in German for a moment. Ryan could not understand a word until Renate said, “Berlin.” The bartender said something, and she nodded and repeated, “Berlin.”

As she walked off, the bartender turned back to Nick and said, “Renate is from Germany. She waited on the girl before the Englishman arrived. I asked her if she could recognize the dialect. You know, the Germans have very specific dialects in different regions.”

Eastling nodded. “And she said the girl was from Berlin?”

“ Ja. She was certain of it.”

They left the bar a few minutes later. Ryan had the sickly-sweet flavor of sugarplums in his mouth, and his eyes hurt from the smoke of the bar. He and Eastling walked out into the street, standing more or less where Penright had been hit.

“Not exactly the autobahn,” Ryan said. The street was dark and quiet.

“No,” replied the Englishman, “but if you fall right in front of a bus, that’s pretty much it.”

“True enough.”

They started walking back to the car. As they did so, Jack said, “So we’re looking for a German girl.”

Eastling shook his head. “No, Ryan. Penright was looking for a German girl last night, but he found a bus instead.” He laughed a little at his own joke.

“Where did the girl go? There was nothing in the police report about a German woman at the scene.”

“Maybe they both left the bar and went in different directions. Maybe she wanted to get laid, then decided the dashing Englishman she picked up in a bar lost some of his allure when he died right in front of her.”

Jack sighed in frustration.

President Jack Ryan sat at the head of the conference table in the White House Situation Room, a cup of coffee and a stack of folders in front of him. He’d been going through this material for half an hour in preparation for this meeting, and now, as everyone got situated around him, he made a few notes on his legal pad: questions to ask, points to make.

Jack looked up from his papers. He was beginning to see as much of the Situation Room as he did the Oval Office, and he knew this didn’t say anything good about the current state of peace and stability in the world.

Around him, key members of his intelligence, diplomatic, and defense team filed into the room and sat down. Scott Adler was absent—he was still shuttling around Europe—but the rest of the major players were all present and accounted for.

Today’s meeting was to discuss the last seventy-two hours of activity in Ukraine. Six Americans had been killed at the Lighthouse Special Mission Compound, including the CIA chief of station for the country, and although the international news organizations covering the action there had framed it as a violent demonstration outside a NATO compound that led to the death of several NATO personnel, on Russian television they ran breathless stories about American imperialism turned deadly when CIA gunmen opened fire on a crowd of peaceful protesters.

And then, the next day, the assassination of Oksana Zueva. The brazen killing had been characterized by virtually all news outlets on the planet as the work of Ukrainian nationalists, perhaps even ordered by President Kuvchek himself.

Volodin shut off the gas pipelines to Ukraine and Western Europe after the Zueva killing, and then the bombing of the pro-Russian rally in Donetsk came the very next day. Donetsk was presumed to be the work of nationalists, although the Russian Gazprom-owned media was advancing the theory that the CIA outpost in Sevastopol was involved.

At this moment, President Ryan was well beyond the point of outrage. No, after everything the FSB had pulled off in the past few weeks, he’d managed to find a measure of inner calm by telling himself a serious crisis was at hand, and only his level head could bring a quick resolution to the situation.

He brought the meeting to order by addressing Jay Canfield, director of the CIA: “Jay, what are the Russians using as proof the CIA was involved in the Donetsk car bombing?”

Canfield said, “They are showing pictures of the wreckage of the Lighthouse, and they have lists of names of agents we used in country. They claim to have CIA documents that were given to pro-nationalists that instructed them to make the bomb that was used as well.”

“They are claiming they got this from their spy in the Security Service of Ukraine?”

“Correct, sir.”

Ryan had read all the reports of the Donetsk bombing. “Why the hell would the CIA use hexogen? That’s been around since the Second World War.”

Mary Pat Foley answered this one: “The Russians say we used hex because we wanted it to look like local yokels put it together. It’s easy enough to come by, and extremely easy to handle and detonate.”