Tom Clancy - Locked On

Clark climbed out onto the fire escape. “Those guys downstairs are your concern. I’ve got my own problems.” And with that he disappeared into the cold darkness.

Both men, American and Estonian, were roughly the same age. They were within an inch of the same height. Not more than ten pounds separated them in their weight. They both wore their salt-and-pepper hair short; both men had lean faces lined with age and hardened by lif뀀ith thate.

There the similarities ended. The Estonian was a drunk, a bum, prone on the cold concrete with his head propped against the wall and a see-through plastic crate holding his life’s possessions.

Clark was the same build, the same age. But not the same man.

He’d been standing here in the dark under the train tracks, watching the bum. He regarded the man a moment more, with only a brief hint of sadness. He did not waste much energy feeling sorry for the guy, but that was not because John Clark was coldhearted. No, it was because John Clark was on the job. He had no time for sentimentality.

He walked over, knelt down, and said in Russian, “Fifty euros for your clothes.” He was offering the destitute man seventy bucks in local currency.

The Estonian blinked over jaundiced and bloodshot eyes. “Vabandust?” Excuse me?

“Okay, friend. You drive a hard bargain.” Clark said it again. “You take my clothes. I give you one hundred euros.” If the homeless drunk was confused for a moment, soon it became clear. It also became clear that this was no offer.

It was a demand.

Five minutes later, Clark strolled into the main rail station in Old Town Tallinn, staggering like a bum from shadow to shadow, looking for the next train to Moscow.

Jack Ryan Jr. spent the morning in his cubicle at Hendley Associates reading through reports generated by Melanie Kraft at the National Counterterrorism Center. Melanie’s analysis dealt with the recent spate of attacks in India, and speculated that all the disparate cells involved had been run by the same operational commander.

Ryan did feel some shame that he was, figuratively speaking, looking at the work over the shoulder of the girl he was dating, but this shame was offset by the knowledge that he had a crucial job to do. Rehan’s escalation of violence, both in North Waziristan and in Dubai, indicated to everyone at The Campus that he was a dangerous and desperate man. Now, looking at Melanie’s analysis that indicated similarities in the recent terrorist carnage across India, Ryan could imagine that PDF Brigadier General Riaz Rehan, the director of foreign espionage in the ISI, could well be this character Melanie referred to as Forrest Gump in an e-mail to Mary Pat Foley.

Jack so wished he could take her to lunch right now and fill her in, fill in the blanks missing in her analysis, and pull from the raw intel that she possessed what might answer some of the questions he and The Campus had about their principal targets.

But telling Melanie about his work at The Campus was verboten.

His phone rang, and he reached for it without taking his eyes from the screen. “Ryan?” “Hey, kid. Need a favor.” It was Clark.

“John? Holy shit! Are you okay?”

“I’m holding together, but just. I could use your quick help.” “You got it.”

“I need you to look into a Russian spook named Kovalenko.” “Russian? Okay. Is he FSB, SVR, or military intelligence?” Clark said, “Unknown. I remember a Kovalenko in the KGB, back in the eighties, but that guy woteluld be long out of the game by now. This Kovalenko could be a relative, or the name could just be a coincidence.” “All right. What do you need to know about him?” Ryan was scribbling furiously as he talked.

“I need to know where he is. I mean physically where he is.” “Got it.” Ryan also thought, but did not say, that if Clark wanted to find this Kovalenko, it was probably because Clark wanted to put his hands around the man’s throat. This Russian dude is a dead man.

John added, “And anything else you can get me on the guy. I’m flying blind at this point, so anything at all.” “I’ll assemble a team to go through CIA data, as well as open source, and we’ll pull out every last thing we can on him. Is he behind this smear on you?” “He’s got something to do with it — whether or not he’s the nucleus of it remains to be seen.” “You going to call me back?”

“Three hours?”

“Sounds good. Sit tight.”

Aminute and a half after Clark’s call, Ryan had a conference call going with a dozen employees around Hendley Associates, including Gerry Hendley, Rick Bell, Sam Granger, and others. Bell organized a team to dig into this Russian spook, and everyone immediately went to work.

It did not take long for them to realize that Clark was right about the family connection; the Kovalenko he was looking for was the son of the Kovalenko Clark remembered from the KGB. Oleg, the father, was retired though still alive, and Valentin, the son, was now the SVR assistant rezident in London.

At only thirty-five years old, assistant rezident in London was a pretty high-level job, all agreed, but no one could figure out how he could possibly be connected to any operation that the Russians could be running against John Clark.

Next the analysts began searching through CIA traffic looking for information on Valentin Kovalenko. These analysts did not normally spend their days tracking Russian diplomats, and they found it rather refreshing. Kovalenko was not holed up in a Waziristan cave like many of The Campus’s targets. The CIA had information, the vast majority obtained through the United Kingdom’s Security Service, also known as MI5, about his London apartment, where he shopped, even where his daughter went to school.

It soon became obvious to the analysts that MI5 did not follow Kovalenko on a day-to-day basis. They did show that he had traveled from Heathrow to Domodedovo Airport in Moscow for two weeks in October, but since then he had been back in London.

Ryan began to wonder about Valentin’s father, Oleg Kovalenko. Clark had said that he knew of the man, though it didn’t sound like John harbored any suspicions that the old man himself might be involved in his current predicament. Still, Jack saw a lot of brilliant analysts all digging into Valentin. He decided there was no sense in his duplicating their efforts, so instead he figured, what the hell, he’d work the Oleg angle.

For the next half-hour he read from the archives of the CIA about the KGB spy, specifically his exploits in Czechoslovakia, in East Germany, in Beirut, and in Denmark. Jack Junior had been in the game for only a few years, but to him the man did not seem to have a particularly remarkable career, at least as compared with some other personal historhe hies of Russian spies that he had read.

After digging through the man’s past, Jack put his name into a Homeland Security database that would tell of any international travel he might have made to Western countries.

A single trip popped up. The elder Kovalenko had flown on Virgin Atlantic to London in early October.

“To see his son, perhaps?” Jack wondered.

If it was a family reunion, it was a damn short one. Just thirty hours in country.

The short trip was curious to Jack. He strummed his fingers on the desk for a moment, and then called Gavin Biery.

“Hey, it’s Jack. If I give you the name of a foreign national, and I give you the dates he was in the UK, could you find his credit cards and get me a list of transactions he made while he was there so I can use that to try and track his movements?” Jack heard Biery whistle on the other end of the line. “Shit.” Biery said. “Maybe.”