by Tom Clancy
Melanie just looked at him from across the floor. “He’s dead?” she asked, still not catching up to what she had just witnessed.
“Yes.”
She nodded. “You tricked him? You faked a heart attack?”
He nodded.
“I needed him closer. Sorry,” Clark said as he hung the Steyr’s sling over his neck.
“We have to call the police,” she said.
“No time,” said Clark. He looked the girl over quickly. Ryan had told Clark that Melanie had compromised him, apparently on the orders of a man she thought was an FBI agent. John was not sure who the young woman was working for or what her motivations were, but it seemed evident that this dead Chinese man on the floor was from the squad of assassins that had tried to kill her on the Rock Creek Parkway just hours earlier.
She was clearly not a confederate of theirs.
Clark had no idea how many more foreign killers there were in the building, nor how well armed and well trained they were, but if they were the group who took out the five CIA men in Georgetown, Clark was damn sure they were tier-one gunmen.
Clark did not trust Melanie Kraft, but he decided Melanie Kraft was the very least of his problems.
He held up his SIG pistol. “Do you know how to use this?”
She nodded slowly while she looked at it.
He handed it to her and she took it, then adopted a two-handed combat grip, holding the weapon at the low, ready in front of her at the waist.
“Listen carefully,” Clark instructed. “I need you to stay behind me. Far behind, but don’t lose sight of me.”
“Okay,” she said. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going upstairs.”
John Clark kicked off his shoes and entered the darkened stairwell. As he did so, he heard a door opening just one floor above.
SEVENTY
Crane had ordered Snipe to go downstairs to retrieve the woman, and then he had his three other men, Quail, Stint, and Gull, wait with the prisoners in the conference room while he brought IT director Gavin Biery over to a node in the server room. The American had told them he would start up and then log in to the system, allowing the Chinese men administrator-level access to do whatever they wanted.
Twice Crane hit the big man in the back of the head for deliberately stalling, both times knocking him from his chair. A third time, when he saw hesitation on the part of the American, he told him he would go into the conference room and begin shooting prisoners.
Gavin reluctantly logged in.
* * *
John Clark stood over the limp body of a young, muscular Chinese man. The sixty-five-year-old American had heard the man descending the stairs, then hidden under the first-floor landing, waiting for him to come down. As he passed, Clark cracked him from behind with a vicious downward thrust of the butt of the Steyr TMP. The man fell forward onto the concrete, and three more heavy blows to the head knocked him out cold.
Melanie came out of her hiding place below the stairs, and she pulled off the man’s belt, then used it to tie his hands behind his back. She pulled his jacket down to his elbows to make it even harder for him to get free. She took his machine pistol, but she did not know how to use it, so she just slung it around her neck and followed John upstairs with the pistol in her hand.
John slowly opened the door to the second floor and looked down a hallway, past a row of elevators, past the dead body of a security guard John recognized as an old friend named Joe Fischer, and toward the open door to the IT conference room at the end of the hall. As he did so he heard a transmission in Chinese in his borrowed headset. Of course he could not understand the words, but he had put the device on his head so he could get a heads-up when it became apparent to this crew of killers that members of their unit were not checking in.
And that time was now. The transmission came a second time, and then a third; each repetition was more alert- and alarmed-sounding than the one before. Clark quickly began walking up the hall with the TMP out in front of him in his left hand, his eye looking through the small glass sight.
He’d passed the elevators and was only fifteen feet from the entrance to the conference room when a man quickly stepped out, his gun rising but not yet fully raised. He saw John, tried vainly to yank his weapon up to a firing position, but Clark shot the man five times with a burst of automatic fire.
Now Clark was running; he entered the conference room as fast as he could, with no idea what he would find when he got there.
Before his eyes could take in the complete scene, an Asian man in black clothing fired a burst of bullets at him; John moved quickly to the side, lined up his gun on the threat, and saw that the man stood in front of a row of Hendley employees, all seated and tied. Clark did not hesitate — he fired a single round from the machine pistol, his left trigger finger pressed off another single round, and the man fell back onto Campus Analyst Tony Wills.
There was one more threat in the room. He had been facing in the other direction when John came through the door, but now he was facing the old American with the Steyr. As he aimed to fire, Melanie Kraft came through the door, a pistol clutched in both hands in a firing grip, and she lined up her sights on the man. She fired a single round that missed high, but the Chinese assassin spun his machine pistol away from Clark and toward the girl, giving John the half-second he needed to refocus on this threat and drop the man dead with a long blast to the upper torso.
As soon as the Chinese operator dropped to the floor, Gerry Hendley said, “There’s one more. He’s got Biery in the server room.”
Clark left Melanie with the eight Campus employees, and he rushed out of the conference room heading up a side hall that ended in the room where the servers were kept.
* * *
All the gunfire had been suppressed except for the single shot Melanie fired from John Clark’s.45 SIG, but that noise got the attention of Crane. He called his men over and over on his headset, but while he did so he also grabbed Biery by the neck and pulled him out of his chair.
With the Steyr to Gavin’s right temple and his arm around his neck, Crane yanked him into the hall, only to come face-to-face with an old man with gray hair and eyeglasses. The man had one of Crane’s men’s weapons held up in front of him, pointed directly at Crane’s head.
“Put it down or I kill him,” Crane said.
The old man did not respond.
“I will do it! I will shoot him!”
The American with the machine pistol narrowed his eyes slightly.
Crane looked into the eyes. He saw nothing but focus, nothing but purpose, mission, intent.
Crane knew the look; Crane knew the mind-set.
This old man was a warrior.
Crane said, “Don’t shoot. I surrender.” And he dropped the Steyr on the floor.
* * *
Back in the conference room, Melanie had freed the Hendley Associates staff. She did not know what the hell was going on, but by now she had long since come to the obvious conclusion that her boyfriend, the President’s son, did not work exclusively in the financial management field. Clearly this was some sort of super-secret government intelligence or security contractor, and clearly they had run seriously afoul of the Chinese.
She would make Jack tell her every last bit of detail about this place before she passed final judgment, if he allowed her the opportunity to talk to him ever again. His accusation that she was working for the Chinese, while it did not make any sense to her, had Melanie worried that the rift between the two of them might be too wide to repair with simple explanations.
Clark and three other men brought the two surviving Chinese men into the hallway by the elevators and tied them together, back to back. Crane, the leader of the group, spoke loudly, announced that he was a member of Divine Sword, a PLA special-missions unit, and he and his men demanded to be treated as prisoners of war. Clark responded to this by pistol-whipping the man behind the ear with his SIG, which shut him up quickly.
Other Hendley men began searching floor to floor for more victims and more killers; everyone was armed with pistols and machine pistols while doing so.
Clark had just searched Crane, pulling an odd-looking mobile phone from him, when the phone vibrated. He looked down at the device. Of course he did not recognize the number, but he got an idea.
“Gerry?” he called over to Hendley. “Are there any Mandarin speakers here in the group?”
The ex-senator was shaken up, especially after the death of his friend Sam Granger, but Clark was glad to see the man retained his wits.
“Afraid not, but these two speak English.”
“I’m talking about whoever might be calling.” The phone buzzed again, and John looked down and saw the same number calling back.
Shit, John thought. This would be a great opportunity to get more intel on this organization.
Gerry said, “If you need a Mandarin speaker, I think I know where we can get one quickly.”
* * *
Jack Ryan, Jr., rode in the passenger seat of a two-door Acura compact driven by Adam Yao. They had left Hong Kong and were now driving through the New Territories, heading north toward the border with China.
They had been on the road only a few minutes when Jack’s mobile chirped. Ryan, a little punch-drunk from the jet lag of the seventeen-hour flight, answered it on the fourth ring.
“Ryan.”
“Jack, it’s John Clark.”
“Hey, John.”
“Listen carefully, kid, I’m in a rush.” In the next thirty seconds Clark told Ryan what had happened that night at Hendley. Before Jack could even respond, he explained someone was calling the leader of the assassins, and he wanted to patch Yao through to the man’s phone, call the number back, and then see if Yao could fake the caller into believing he was one of the Chinese killers.
Ryan quickly relayed the situation to Yao, and then put the earpiece in Yao’s ear for him while he drove.
John said, “You ready?”
Adam knew who John Clark was, but there was no time for a formal introduction. He just said, “You don’t know who will be on the other end?”
“No idea. You’ll just have to wing it.”
“Okay.”
Winging it was what a NOC did for a living. “Dial the number.”
It rang several times before it was picked up on the other end. Adam Yao did not know what he would hear, but he did not expect to hear someone speaking English with a Russian accent.
“Why did you not answer when I called?”
Adam was ready to answer in Mandarin. He switched to English but affected a strong Mandarin accent.
“Busy.”
“Are you clear?”
“We’re at Hendley.”
A slight pause. “Of course you are at Hendley. Is all the opposition dealt with?”
Adam was beginning to understand. This individual knew what was supposed to happen.
“Yes. No problems.”
“Okay. Before you erase data, I’ve been instructed to upload any encrypted files on the workstation of Gavin Biery, and then to send them to Center.”
Yao remained in character. “Understood.”
There was a short pause. Then, “I’m out front. I’ll come through the front door. Alert your men.”
Holy shit, Adam thought. “Yes.” Quickly he hung up and turned to Ryan. “Some Russian guy is there, in the parking lot, apparently. He’s coming through the front.”
Jack had Clark on speakerphone. Before Jack could relay the message, John said, “Got it. We’ll take care of it. Clark out.”
A minute later, Clark was still on the second floor, standing over the two prisoners, when Tony Wills came through the stairwell door, holding a.45 to the head of a bearded Caucasian man in a suit and tie. The man’s hands were cuffed behind him, and his raincoat had been pulled down behind him to his elbows.
John made certain Biery had the Steyr machine pistol pointed at the ground in front of the two Chinese prisoners and his finger outside the trigger guard, and then he started up the hall to see what the new guy in the mix had to do with all this.
He had closed to within twenty feet when the bearded man’s eyes widened in shock. “You?”
Clark stopped, looked harder at the man.
It took him a few seconds to recognize Valentin Kovalenko. “You?”
The Russian tried to back up, away from Clark, but he just pressed the back of his skull into Wills’s.45.
Clark thought Valentin was going to faint. He directed Tony to take him into the IT conference room nearby, and then he sent Tony out to guard the prisoners with Biery.
When Clark and Kovalenko were alone in the room, John pushed the man roughly down into a chair and then sat down in front of him. He looked him over for a brief moment. Since the previous January, not a day had passed without Clark’s thinking about snapping the neck of the little twerp sitting inches from him now. The man who had kidnapped him, tortured him, stolen from him his last few good years in the field by severely damaging his hand.
But John had other, more pressing objectives now.
He said, “I’m not going to pretend like I know what the fuck you are doing here. As far as I knew, you were dead or else eating snow soup in a gulag somewhere in Siberia.”
John had been striking fear into the hearts of his enemies for forty years, but he doubted he’d ever seen anyone this terrified in his life. It was obvious from his reaction that Kovalenko had no idea John Clark had anything to do with his operation.
When Valentin still did not speak, John said, “I just lost some good friends, and I intend to find out why. You have the answers.”
“I… I did not know—”
“I don’t give a shit what you didn’t know. I want to know what you do know. I’m not going to threaten to torture you. You and I both know there is no reason for me to threaten you. I will either break you apart, limb by limb, or not break you apart limb by limb, regardless of how helpful you are to me now. I owe you a lot of misery.”
“Please, John. I can help you.”
“Yeah? Then help me.”
“I can tell you everything I know.”
“Start talking.”
“Chinese intelligence is involved.”
“No shit! I’ve got dead and hog-tied Chinese soldiers all over the building. What is your involvement?”
“I… I thought it was industrial espionage. They blackmailed me, sprung me from prison, but made me an accomplice. The jobs started easy, but they got harder and harder. They tricked me, they threatened me, threatened to kill me. I could not get away.”
“Who do you report to?”
“He calls himself Center.”
“Is he waiting to hear from you?”
“Yes. Crane — that is one of the men still alive out there on the floor — was letting me come in to get some data, and I was to upload it, send it to Center. I had no idea anyone was going to be hurt or—”
“I don’t believe you.”
Kovalenko looked to the floor for a moment. Then he nodded. “Da, da, you are right. Yes, of course I knew what was going on. The first people they killed, the other day in Georgetown? No, I did not know they would do that. And then again, when they killed the cabdriver and tried to kill the woman today. I did not know that was the plan. But by now? I am no fool. I thought I would come into this building and find a stack of dead bodies.” He shrugged. “I just want to go home, John. I want no part of this.”
Clark looked him over. “Cry me a fucking river.”
He got up and left the room.
* * *
Back in the hallway, Clark found Gavin Biery talking to Gerry Hendley. When Biery saw the older man, he rushed up to him.
“That guy in there. Does he work for Center?”
“Yeah. Says he does, anyway.”
Gavin said, “We can use him. He will have a program on his computer that he uses to communicate with Center. It’s called Cryptogram
. I’ve created a virus that can go through Cryptogram and photograph the person on the other end.”
Clark said, “But we have to get him to agree to help us, right?”
Biery said, “Yes. You’ve got to convince him to log in to Cryptogram and get Center to accept an upload.”
Clark thought it over for a moment. “Okay, come with me.”
Biery and Clark returned to the conference room.
Kovalenko had been sitting alone, his hands tied behind his back, his body positioned so that the two dead Chinese assassins were on the floor near his feet. This was by design. Clark wanted Valentin to sit there with dead men, to think about his own predicament.
Biery and Clark sat down at the table.
Before he could speak, Kovalenko said, “I had no choice. They forced me to work for them.”
“You did have a choice.”
“Sure, I could have shot myself in the head.”
“You sound like a guy who wouldn’t mind living through this.”
“Of course I do. But don’t fuck with me, Clark. You, of all people, want to see me dead.”
“I’d get a few chuckles out of that, yeah. But what’s more important is defeating Center before this conflict gets any bigger. There are millions of lives at stake. It’s not just about you and me and a grudge.”
“What do you want?”
Clark looked at Gavin Biery. “Can we use him?”
Gavin was still in a mild state of shock. But he nodded and looked at Kovalenko. “Do you have Cryptogram on your computer?”
Kovalenko just nodded in reply.
Clark said, “I am sure you have some security check you use to establish that it is actually you communicating with Center.”
“I do. But it’s actually more complicated than that.”
“How so?”
“I am pretty sure that while we are talking on Cryptogram, he’s also watching me through my camera.”
Clark’s eyebrows rose, and he turned to Biery. “Is that possible?”
Gavin said, “Mr. Clark, you have no idea what we’ve been dealing with since you left. If this guy told me Center had microchipped his brain I wouldn’t bat an eyelash.”