Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Murray could have simply told Ryan what he’d discovered or passed him a two-page brief on the investigation, but he knew his boss liked to get his hands on actual intelligence product, so the AG laid out a set of photographs on the coffee table.

Ryan picked the first one up. It was a color photo of surveillance quality of a young Hispanic-looking woman entering what appeared to be a 7-Eleven-type market.

Jack said, “This is the suspect in the Golovko poisoning?”

“Correct. Felicia Rodríguez.”

Jack nodded and looked at the second picture. It appeared to have been taken in the same location, but a different person was passing through the doors. Male, short hair, a fit build, and he wore shorts and a white linen shirt. The photograph was surprisingly clear—it occurred to Jack that the prevalence and quality of CC cameras had been a hell of a boon for counterintelligence and law enforcement work in the past couple of decades.

“Who’s he?”

“We don’t have a real name yet, but using facial-recognition software we found that he entered the United States on a private jet from London. His passport is Moldovan, the name on it is Vassily Kalugin, but it doesn’t check out. The jet is registered to a shell corporation in Luxembourg. It doesn’t check out, either.”

Ryan understood the ramifications of all this. “He’s a spook.”

“Damn right he is.”

“A Russian spook?”

“Don’t know for sure, but we just put out a BOLO with his face and bogus passport info.”

Ryan reached for the next photo.

This was a copy of a passport photo and page of a man named Jaime Calderón. “Another spook?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. He is a Venezuelan intelligence officer. Real name is Esteban Ortega. We’ve tracked him into the U.S. before, we’ve watched him, but we’ve never had anything solid on him.”

“I still don’t see anything solid here.” Ryan held up the last photo. It was an excellent-quality image of a small yellow house with a palm tree in the fenced-in front yard. “Tell me what’s going on in this little house.”

Dan said, “We know Ortega flew into Miami and rented this house in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. He was there for two days.

“The mystery Moldovan, whatever the hell his real name is, cleared customs at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. Ninety minutes after landing in Fort Lauderdale, he popped into this market, which happens to be ninety-five feet from this little Venezuelan intelligence safe house.”

Jack just looked up at Dan. “Ninety-five feet exactly?”

“Exactly. Went down myself yesterday.”

Ryan smiled. Dan still liked to use his own shoe leather. “Go on.”

“Then, the day after the mystery Moldovan and Ortega arrive, Felicia Rodríguez shows up. She goes in the market, for what it’s worth, but more importantly, a GPS track of her mobile phone puts her inside the Venezuelan safe house.”

“Hot damn,” Jack said in excitement.

Murray added, “She was only there an hour, then she checked into a hotel in the neighborhood. The next morning, she drove back to Kansas.”

Ryan looked over all the pictures again quickly, then up at Murray.

The AG said, “Before you ask, we picked up very faint traces of polonium-210 in the house and in Rodríguez’s hotel room. However it was stored at that time was much better than how it was stored right before Golovko was poisoned. Clearly, Rodríguez had it in some sort of lead-lined container, but she took it out at the cafeteria at the University of Kansas.”

Ryan said, “So let me see if I follow you here. We think the mystery Moldovan is a possible Russian FSB agent who brought the P-210 into the U.S. in the private jet, and then passed it off to the assassin with the help of Venezuelan intelligence officer Ortega.”

“That’s our theory. It’s impossible to say for sure if the Moldovan was in the safe house himself, but again, he was spitting distance away. I know we don’t have a real smoking gun here, but—”

Jack cut him off. “We need to find these guys. Ortega and the other guy.”

“Actually, we only need the other guy.”

“Why don’t we need the Venezuelan?”

“Because three days after the meeting in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, the day before the Golovko poisoning, Esteban Ortega was murdered in Mexico City. A drive-by shooting into his taxi. Gunman on the back of a motorcycle, no real description. Only witness was the cabbie, and he was pretty useless.”

Ryan leaned back on the sofa. “Covering their tracks.” He blew out a frustrated sigh. “They will kill anyone who can pin this on them. Get whatever you need for an international arrest warrant. If we can figure out who the Moldovan is, then we can pick him up.”

“Will do.”

Ryan looked again at the photo of the young Venezuelan woman. She seemed so young, her entire life ahead of her. “What was her motivation?”

“Not sure we will ever know. She has family back home in Venezuela, there could have been threats against them. We are pretty sure she had no idea what she was handling, so we think the Russian or the Venezuelan tricked her.”

“And any clue why the Venezuelans would be involved?”

“Not yet. Again, quite possible Ortega didn’t know anything more about what Rodríguez was actually putting in Golovko’s Sprite than she did.”

“So,” Jack said, “Russians get like-minded useful idiots to help them in a plot, and then the Russians screw them over, use them for their own devices.”

Murray nodded.

“That sounds like the playbook of Roman Talanov.”

“The FSB guy? Really? Sorry to say, I can’t say I know too much about his past.”

“No one does, for sure,” said Ryan. “But I’m working on rectifying that.”

Jack Ryan, Jr., arrived in Corby at eleven a.m. The sky was even grayer here than it had been in London, and the air felt noticeably colder as he climbed out of his Mercedes on the street in front of Oxley’s building.

On the two-hour drive up he’d convinced himself this would be a dead end. He was not letting himself think for a moment that this morning’s attack had been a random event, but he could not put together how this old ex-spy would have had anything to do with it. He’d almost turned around in Huntingdon, but he’d pushed on, telling himself that it wouldn’t hurt to continue on up to see Oxley—if nothing else, just to annoy the old fart one more time.

Jack decided to tell him about the attack and then gauge his reaction. Jack was confident that if Oxley had been behind it, for whatever the reason, just showing up at his place would cause him to give away his involvement.

Jack took the stairs up to Oxley’s first-floor unit, and as he climbed he noticed his knee was aching from his run-in with the two thugs earlier that morning. He should have known to ice the damn thing; sitting still in the car on the ride up would probably ensure he’d be walking with a limp for the next few days.

He pushed this irritating thought out of his brain and focused his attention on the annoying prospect of having to speak with Oxley again. He told himself that if the man made any more disparaging comments about his dad, Ryan would punch him in the jaw.

He would not hit the man, and he knew it, but it made Jack feel good to think about it.

Jack stopped at Oxley’s door and brought his hand up to knock, but as he did this, he noticed the door wasn’t latched. He looked down at the latch and saw a smeared black boot print right below the lock. Next to it, the doorjamb was broken.

Someone had kicked in the door, recently enough that Jack could see mud in the boot print.

Ryan’s blood began pumping hard and fast. Just as had happened this morning during the attack, his threat indicators were redlining. He spun around, looked down the little hallway toward the back stairwell, but there was no one else around.