Tom Clancy Duty and Honor (A Jack Ryan Jr. Novel)

by Grant Blackwood

  “The lot’s coming up on our right,” Effrem warned.

  Jack slowed the Sonata. He checked the dashboard clock. The train had pulled in five minutes ago.

  Outside his window Jack glimpsed a figure—a man, based on his build and gait—passing beneath the trees bordering the sidewalk. He glanced that way, but in the darkness he could make out no details of the person’s face. As far as Jack could see the man carried neither luggage nor a briefcase.

  “Is it?” asked Effrem.

  “Can’t tell. You see anyone else around?”

  Effrem was staring out his window at the train platform. “A couple people, but they’re too far away for faces.”

  Jack pulled to the curb and watched in his side mirror as the figure continued down the sidewalk. After a few moments the person was swallowed by the shadows.

  Jack made a snap decision. “You’re driving. Go down the block, then left on the next street. See if you can catch him coming the other way. Be careful. If it’s him, he knows your face. Stay in touch.”

  Jack opened his door and climbed out. As Effrem slid into the driver’s seat, he asked, “What’re you going to do?”

  “Check out the platform.”

  As Effrem pulled away, Jack crossed the street to the entrance of the dirt parking lot and paused beside a tree. He pulled up the hood on his jacket; Waterbury was a good three hundred fifty miles north of Alexandria, and Jack could feel the difference in the chill night air.

  The lot before him was large, enough for a few hundred cars, but he counted fewer than ten, all in a line before the platform. The area had an industrial feel, with what looked like warehouses on the opposite side of the tracks, and beyond these the highway cloverleaf. Jack got the impression the station had been placed here out of necessity rather than for convenience. In the distance Jack could hear the faint rush of cars on I-84.

  After a minute of watching and seeing no one, Jack strode into the lot and headed for the platform. He broke into a jog, playing the desperate traveler afraid he’d missed the train. Fifty feet from the line of parked cars, one of them started backing out, its reverse lights bright in the darkness. It was a white Subaru.

  “Ah, man . . . !” Jack called, and stopped running. He checked his watch, then called, “Damn.” At the same time he reached under the hem of his jacket and drew his Glock.

  Whether his showmanship was impressing the car’s occupant Jack didn’t know, but he decided to err on the side of caution. If Möller was inside this car, Jack was an easy target. He had no cover.

  Twenty feet ahead, the Subaru slowed its reverse course, did a Y-turn, then headed toward Jack. The headlights pinned him. The car picked up speed, veering slightly left to take Jack down its passenger side.

  As the Subaru drew even with him, the passenger window rolled down a couple of inches. Through the gap came faint strains of easy-listening jazz.

  “Hey,” a man’s voice called from the car’s darkened interior.

  Jack could see nothing through the window.

  “You looking for the train? You just missed it.”

  Jack dropped his head in dejection, shading his face with the hood, and raised his hand in thanks. “Really? No one else got off?”

  “Just my wife. Sorry.”

  The voice didn’t sound like Möller’s, Jack thought. Unless he was disguising his voice, that was. It seemed unlikely. Why stop at all? Why not just drive on past?

  “You need help or something?” the voice asked.

  “Nah, thanks,” Jack replied in his best SWNE—Southwestern New England—accent. In his own mind he sounded like an extra from the set of Good Will Hunting. “Ah, man, she’s gonna kill me.”

  As the car sped off, Jack memorized the license plate, then watched it turn onto Meadow Street and head south toward the highway.

  He holstered his Glock, pulled out his cell phone, and speed-dialed Effrem. It rang four times, then went to voice mail. “What the hell?” Jack muttered. “Come on, pick up . . .”

  He dialed again and got the same result. He texted in all caps: CALL!

  Jack walked the rest of the way to the platform. Nine or so cars remained in the lot. Better safe than sorry. As he neared the compact car’s parking spot something on the ground glittered under the platform lights. He pulled out his penlight and panned the beam ahead.

  Sitting in the dirt was a small mound of glass that reflected green.

  Auto glass. From where the Subaru’s driver’s door would have been.

  Jack turned and started running.

  —

  The pursuit was hopeless, he knew, but realizing he might have just been talking to Stephan Möller, might have just watched him drive away into the night, overrode rational thought. He turned onto Meadow and sprinted down the sidewalk toward the next intersection, some three hundred yards away, glancing at the parked cars as he went.

  Panting, his lungs burning slightly in the cold air, Jack reached the intersection and stopped. He looked left, saw nothing, looked right. A quarter-mile away, a white car sat at a stop sign, its right blinker on.

  The car turned and disappeared.

  Jack’s cell phone trilled. He pulled it out, checked the screen: Effrem.

  “Where are you?” Jack demanded.

  “Uh, I don’t know. A few blocks away from the train station. Just a sec . . . State Street. I thought I saw him, so I followed. It wasn’t him.”

  No kidding. God damn it!

  “Why are you breathing hard?” asked Effrem.

  WATERBURY, CONNECTICUT

  By the time Effrem had made his way back to the intersection, Jack had already logged into the Enquestor portal and punched in the Subaru’s license-plate number. As he climbed into the passenger seat the results appeared on his screen:

  Eunice Miller

  6773 Willow Drive

  Wolcott, CT 06716

  Without looking up, Jack said, “Find a coffee shop or diner or something.”

  Using his Yelp app, Effrem located a Denny’s on Division Street, about a mile to the west, and started heading that way.

  Having caught his breath and cooled off, Jack said as calmly as possible, “The next time I call you, answer the phone.”

  “I couldn’t. I was afraid I’d lose him.”

  Jack repeated, “The next time I call you, answer the damn phone.”

  “Okay, I will. Sorry.”

  “And I didn’t tell you to follow anyone. I told you to keep in touch.”

  “You didn’t tell me not to follow anyone, either.”

  Jack bit off the sharp reply on the tip of his tongue. Effrem had a point. They lived in different worlds. What Jack considered obvious or implied might be neither to Effrem. Effrem didn’t have the experience to know when initiative crossed into recklessness, or perhaps even the discipline to pull himself back across the line.

  A thought struck Jack: He could easily imagine John Clark or Gerry Hendley saying the same things about him. And they wouldn’t be wrong.

  “What’s happened?” asked Effrem.

  “I think I might have been talking to Möller. He was right there, within arm’s reach,” Jack replied, then explained the encounter.

  If it had been Möller, had he recognized Jack? Back at the nature preserve Möller’s attention had been divided between Effrem and his SUV and Jack and his Glock, and Jack’s cap had been pulled low. It was a toss-up.

  “If it was him, why stop at all?”

  “To check me out, maybe.”

  “Maybe, but they’ve tried to kill you twice. It sounds like you were an easy target standing in that lot. Why not take advantage of it?”

  “Good point.”

  Then again, if Möller’s sole focus was escape—

  Jack caught himself. Leave it.

  The world in which he
and the others at The Campus moved was one where there could always be a wheel within another wheel. At some point you had to stop the recursive thinking and make a choice. For someone like Jack, who was blessed or cursed with a fertile imagination, this was often challenging. It wasn’t unlike chess, a game he both loved and hated. He had read somewhere that the number of available piece positions was represented by a 1 followed by 43 zeros, and this was governed by strict rules and limited space. Neither of these factors existed in Jack’s world.

  Still, Möller’s theft of the Subaru seemed like a departure for him. So far the man’s E&E—evasion and escape—plan had felt paint-by-numbers, with little room for improvisation. He’d used a credit card to call attention to his location, a risky but often effective strategy, especially when those pursuing you are part of a larger, less nimble force like the Secret Service or FBI, both agencies you’d expect to be called on to hunt down the would-be assassin of a VIP. Perhaps Möller and whoever he was working for had planned his exfiltration based on this assumption. Schrader was ex–German Special Forces. Möller might be as well, in which case their doctrine might be steeped more in rote response than it was in flexibility.

  If so, stealing a car didn’t fit.

  Unless Möller’s calf wound had worsened enough that he went off script.

  —

  Effrem pulled into the Denny’s lot and chose an open parking spot before the main doors. “Coffee? Anything to eat?”

  “Just coffee.”

  Jack used Enquestor to pull up Eunice Miller’s Department of Motor Vehicles file. The picture showed a woman with a plump face and short gray curly hair. Her birth date put her at sixty-five years old. According to Jack’s map, her address in Wolcott was about fifteen minutes north of Waterbury, off Highway 69.

  Effrem returned with two large cups of coffee. He handed one to Jack, then climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Jack showed him Eunice Miller’s picture. Effrem said, “Sweet old lady?”

  “The question is, was she on that train?”

  “And did Möller do something to her?” Had she been in the car with Möller, alive and bound, or dead in the backseat?

  Shit. Jack chastised himself for not having checked the scrub brush bordering the train platform. If Eunice Miller had been lying there dying, only feet from where Jack had been standing . . .

  “I need a pay phone,” he said.

  “There was one a few blocks back.”

  Effrem pulled out, retraced their route, and did a U-turn and pulled to the curb beside the pay phone. Jack got out, mentally rehearsed, then dialed 911. When the dispatcher answered, Jack put some gravel in his voice and said, “Hey, I was jogging by the train station on Meadow. I thought I heard a woman screaming. Either on the platform or on the train, I don’t know which.”

  He hung up.

  Please don’t find anything.

  —

  At this time of night the roads were largely deserted, so they made the trip to Wolcott in ten minutes. Eunice’s house, what looked like a post–World War II single-story saltbox on Google Earth, sat two blocks behind a bowling alley off the town’s main thoroughfare.

  When Effrem pulled up to the stop sign at the head of her block, Jack ordered him to cross the intersection and then pull to the curb and turn off the headlights.

  “How are we going to do this?”

  Jack didn’t respond immediately. He didn’t have an answer.

  “Okay, let’s drive past, see if we spot her car,” Jack said.

  Effrem turned the Sonata around, then turned onto Willow.

  “Should be the fifth or sixth house on your side.”

  Looking out Effrem’s window, Jack watched for house numbers. When they drew even with 6773, Effrem started to slow. “Don’t,” Jack warned.

  There was no white Subaru in the driveway, and no garage.

  Two houses down, there was a Subaru. The plate matched the one from the train station. Parked ahead of the Subaru was a green Rav4 SUV. The home, which was a duplicate of Eunice’s except for light yellow paint instead of white, was dark save the porch light and some yellow light around the edges of the front-room curtains.

  “That’s not her house,” Effrem said.

  “No, wrong number.”

  “So—”

  “I don’t know. Keep going, turn the corner, pull over.”

  Effrem did so, easing the Sonata beneath the low-hanging boughs of an elm tree and then killing the headlights.

  Jack punched this new mystery address into Enquestor. The deed record came back to Kaitlin Showalter.

  Jack had tilted the phone so Effrem could watch. Effrem said, “Kaitlin’s a younger name.”

  Jack went to Facebook and searched for her name, then sorted through several of them before finding the profile that listed a hometown of Wolcott, Connecticut. Kaitlin was single; her occupation: insurance agent in Bridgeport. Her last post, prefixed by a smiley-face emoticon, was from two hours ago:

  Long day, but almost over! Car wouldn’t start, late for work, missed lunch. Now some General Tso’s chicken and an egg roll for my savior, Eunice.

  Kaitlin had borrowed Eunice’s car to get to the train station for her daily commute.

  Effrem said, “Could it have been her boyfriend?”

  “Maybe,” Jack replied. Then: “No. The guy said ‘wife.’ He was picking up his wife.”

  Unless Kaitlin had failed to change her relationship status on Facebook, which seemed unlikely, given how much time she spent there, she was still single.

  “So how can we be sure it’s Möller inside?”

  The quickest way to answer the question was also the one Jack didn’t like: Break into Kaitlin Showalter’s house and, if Möller was inside, snatch him up. Of course, as before, that approach left him with a captive and all the problems that came along with that. The other option was to wait until Möller moved again and follow. If the man was using Kaitlin’s house as an impromptu safe house/aid station, he was likely to make it brief.

  For a moment, Jack reconsidered his approach to Möller. Maybe this was one of those times when violence would solve problems. Kill Möller and be done with it. It would make it harder to find the answers he needed, and if there was such a thing as good luck, Jack had already strained his. Committing cold-blooded murder on U.S. soil would give him a constellation of bigger problems, starting with a moral line he could never uncross.

  Jack turned in his seat and reached into his rucksack, rummaged for a moment, then came up with a GPS tracker, the same kind he’d planted in Peter Hahn’s car.

  “What’s that?” asked Effrem. Jack explained and Effrem said, “Let’s just hope he doesn’t switch cars again. Plus, we’re making a lot of assumptions about—”

  “Welcome to my world,” Jack said. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

  WOLCOTT, CONNECTICUT

  With the tracker in place, they found another all-night diner off Lakewood Road, ordered a late dinner/early breakfast, then settled in to wait. It was just after three a.m. If Möller didn’t move before dawn, they’d go back to the house.

  They sipped their coffee in silence until Jack could feel the caffeine hit his bloodstream. He took a few moments to assemble his thoughts, then said, “Ready for some questions?”

  Effrem replied, “As long as they don’t require deep thinking. If I don’t get my usual fourteen hours of sleep a night, I’m not at my best.”

  “Tell me how you got onto the Allemand story.”

  “I got curious. Of course, soldiers disappear all the time, especially in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. Or Ivory Coast. It’s like your Old West out there. But it struck me that Allemand’s disappearance wasn’t getting the attention it warranted. In French military circles his family is renowned. And it’s a juicy mystery story. No one, not even his father, Marshal A
llemand, spoke out very much.”

  “Maybe the marshal simply accepted it. It comes with the job.”

  “Would you accept it if your son went missing? You would want answers.”

  “True,” Jack replied. “So you got curious and then what? Went down to Ivory Coast?”

  “Exactly. I tried to get some interviews through military channels but got nowhere, so I managed to track down some of René’s friends that were still stationed at Port-Bouët Airport, Abidjan. That’s where Operation Unicorn was headquartered. What they said about René’s disappearance didn’t add up; he didn’t fit the profile as either a deserter or someone reckless enough to get kidnapped. They all knew the off-limits areas of Abidjan. In fact, René was usually the voice of reason, the one talking others out of straying.”

  Jack noted Effrem’s use of Allemand’s first name. It was as though Effrem was speaking about a close friend. The young journalist was invested not only in discovering the truth behind Allemand’s disappearance, but also in finding the man. Did that mean Effrem had lost objectivity? Jack wondered.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  “In the previous eighteen months two other soldiers had gone missing. One had been kidnapped by COJEP—the Young Patriots, it’s an anti-UN group—and then released. The other deserted and was apprehended a week later in Korhogo.”

  “In other words, you found no cases of a soldier simply vanishing.”

  “Not one. But here’s where it gets interesting. After I’d interviewed all the military personnel willing to talk, I started visiting social hangouts favored by the soldiers—most of them in Koumassi commune—”

  “Which is what?” asked Jack.

  “Communes are sort of like boroughs in New York City. Koumassi is one of three on Little Bassam Island in the middle of Abidjan Harbor. It’s about two miles from Port-Bouët Airport.”

  “Got it.”

  “Eventually I found one local, a café owner in Koumassi named Fabrice, who claimed to have seen René kidnapped off the street by men in balaclavas.”