by Tom Clancy
Golovko waved a hand in the air. “Europe wants their oil and their natural gas, and Russia supplies it. They have been kowtowing to Moscow for a long time.”
“To be fair,” Ryan countered, “they need their oil and their natural gas. I might not like it, but keeping Russia happy is in their interests.”
“That may well be, but as Russia moves closer and closer to them by installing puppet after puppet in Eastern and Central European nations, the NATO states will have less mobility on the issue than before. They should exert their leverage against Moscow while they still have a little left.”
Ryan agreed with Sergey, but this problem had been growing for years, and he knew it would not be settled over lunch.
—
After a dessert of assorted sorbets that Sergey did not touch, Mary Pat and Ed said their good-byes, and Jack and Cathy invited the Russian across the hall to the Yellow Oval Room, a formal parlor Cathy liked to use for private receptions.
On the way, Golovko excused himself to go to the restroom, and Jack led him to the bathroom off the living room. As soon as he stepped back into the hall, Cathy approached him.
Softly, she said, “He is ill.”
“Yeah, he said he ate something that didn’t agree with him.”
Cathy made a face. “It looks worse than that. I don’t know how you are going to do it, but I want you to talk him into letting Maura take a look at him before he goes to the airport.”
“Not sure how—”
“I am confident you can charm him. I’m really worried, Jack. I think he’s really sick.”
“What do you think is wrong?” Jack was taken aback.
“I don’t know, but he needs to get checked out. Today, not tomorrow.”
“I’ll try to persuade him, but he always was a tough son of a bitch.”
“There’s tough, and then there’s foolish. I need you to remind him he is a smart guy.”
Ryan nodded, acquiescing to his wife. He was President of the United States, but he was also a dutiful husband, and as much as anything, he didn’t want Cathy haranguing him about Sergey for the rest of the afternoon.
8
Dino Kadic made it back to his rented room thirty minutes after the bombing, pulled a beer from his refrigerator, and flipped on the television. He needed to pack, but it could wait for the length of time it would take him to have a dark Yarpivo. He would leave Moscow by train first thing in the morning, but for now he would take a few minutes to enjoy himself a little and watch the news coverage of his operation.
He did not have to wait long. After only a few sips he saw the first images from the scene: shattered glass and fires burning at the front of the restaurant. The camera moved to the left and panned past several SUVs scattered and tossed on the street; beyond them was the domed Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the flashing lights of emergency vehicles reflecting off the windows.
Kadic leaned back on the sofa, enraptured by the beauty of the chaos he created.
An attractive female reporter, just on the scene, seemed utterly shocked by the carnage around her. She lifted her microphone to her mouth and struggled to find words.
Kadic smiled while she went into the few details of the bombing available to her. Mostly she just stammered and detailed the devastation with poorly chosen adjectives.
After a minute of this, though, she brought her hand up to her ear and stopped talking suddenly, as she listened to a producer on her earpiece.
And then her eyes went wide.
“Is this confirmed? Can I say this on air?” She waited for a reply in her earpiece, and Kadic wondered what was going on. With a quick nod, the reporter said, “We have just been told that the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Stanislav Arkadyevich Biryukov, was leaving the restaurant at the exact moment of the explosion, and has been injured. His condition is presently unknown.”
Kadic lowered the beer bottle slowly and stared at the screen. A less cynical man might have taken the first news reports about the Vanil bombing as some sort of error. Surely she was mistaken. Incorrect information from stand-up reporting in the first minutes on a scene like this was the rule, not the exception.
But decades of work with intelligence agencies and mafia groups had made Dino Kadic nothing if not cynical. As soon as he heard Biryukov had been on the sidewalk at the moment the bomb detonated, he took the report as accurate, and he knew it was no coincidence.
He’d been set up. The contractor of the Haldane hit had instructed him on the time and location of the bombing, and had demanded more explosive be used to increase the blast radius. Whoever had done this had orchestrated Kadic’s operation to take out the real target, the head of the SVR.
“Picku matirinu!” It was Serbo-Croatian, akin to “Oh, fuck,” but even more profane.
And Dino Kadic knew something else. The people who set him up like this wouldn’t think twice about sending someone to silence him, so he could take the fall without being able to bring anyone else down with him.
As he sat there on the little sofa in his rented flat, he was sure.
It wasn’t if they would come for him . . . It was when.
And Kadic, being the cynic that he was, didn’t give himself much time. He would pack in sixty seconds and be down in his car in one hundred twenty seconds.
“Stay frosty.” He threw the beer bottle at the TV and leapt to his feet, began collecting his most important belongings and throwing them into a rolling duffel.
—
As a pair of dark green ZiL-130 truck-buses pulled up to the entrance of an apartment building on Gruzinskiy Val Street, the back door of each vehicle opened. In a matter of seconds, twenty-four members of the 604th Red Banner Special Purpose Center leapt to the pavement. They were Interior Ministry troops, some of the best trained and most elite in the Russian police force. To those walking by on the sidewalk on Gruzinskiy Val, the men looked like futuristic robots in their black body armor, black Nomex balaclavas, and smoked Plexiglas visors.
Eight men remained at ground level, while two teams of eight took the two stairwells up to the fourth floor. As they ascended, they held their AK-74 rifles against their shoulders and pointed them just offset of the man in front of them in the stack.
On the fourth floor they left the stairwells. A few apartment owners opened their doors in the hallway and found themselves staring down teams of masked and visored men with assault rifles. The residents quickly shut their doors, and several turned up the volume on their televisions to shield themselves from any knowledge of whatever the hell was going on.
The Red Banner men converged outside room 409, and the team leader moved up the train, positioning himself just behind the breacher.
—
Time to go,” Kadic said, sixty seconds exactly after leaping from the couch. He zipped his duffel closed and reached to pull it off the bed.
Behind him, the apartment door burst open, breaking from the hinges and flying into the room. Kadic spun to the movement and then threw his hands into the air, dropping the duffel. He had no choice but to attempt to surrender, though he understood almost instantly what was going on.
He was, after all, a cynic. There was no way in the world these men could have made it here so fast unless they were tipped off.
Unless he had been set up.
He croaked out one word in Russian.
“Pozhalusta!” Please!
The leader of the Red Banner unit paused, but only for an instant. Then he opened fire. His team followed suit, guns erupted, and the Croatian assassin jerked and spasmed as round after round ripped into his chest.
He toppled back onto the bed, his arms outstretched.
The team leader ordered his men to go through his belongings, while he began searching the body himself. They turned up a handgun—it had been stowed in his case—and the officer who found it took it by the barrel with his gloved hand and passed it grip-first to his leader. The team leader slipped it into the hand of the dead Croati
an, closed the man’s bloody fingers around it, and then let it drop onto the floor.
A minute later he said, “We’re clear.” He pinched the transmit button on the side of his shoulder microphone. “Clear. One subject down.”
The team leader had his orders. Someone on high wanted this man dead, and a nice neat package of justifiable force had been easy enough to arrange.
Red Banner did what the Kremlin told them to do.
9
Jack, Cathy, and Sergey entered the Yellow Oval Room. Coffee was laid out for them, but Sergey did not touch his, so Jack and Cathy ignored theirs as well.
Golovko said, “I apologize for my passion at lunch.”
“Not at all,” said Jack.
“My wife died years ago, and since then, I’ve had little to think about but work, and my nation’s place in history. Under Valeri Volodin, Russia is sliding backward to a place the younger generation is not wise enough to fear, and nothing scares me more. I see it as my role to use my intimate knowledge of the darker aspects of our past to ensure we do not repeat it.”
Sergey spoke for a moment more about his trip to the United States, but he seemed distracted, and the perspiration on his forehead had only increased since lunch.
After an imploring look from Cathy, Jack Ryan said, “Sergey, I would like you to do me a personal favor.”
“Of course, Ivan Emmetovich.”
“I want to have someone look you over, just to make sure you are okay.”
“Appreciated, but not necessary.”
“Look at it from my perspective, Sergey. How will it play in the world media if the former head of SVR comes over here to the States and gets sick on a bad brisket?”
The Secret Service personnel standing around chuckled softly, but Sergey just smiled weakly. Jack noticed this, and he knew his friend to enjoy a good laugh. His inability to go along with the joke only made Ryan more certain he needed Maura, the physician to the President, to look him over.
Ryan was about to press the issue further, but presidential chief of staff Arnie Van Damm leaned in the door from the hallway. Ryan was surprised to see him here; he did not normally leave the West Wing during the day to come over to the residence. Ryan knew, by his presence, something was up. Protocol intervened for a moment, and Ryan had to introduce Golovko to Van Damm. The Russian shook the chief of staff’s hand, and then sat back down in his chair across from Cathy.
“Mr. President, can I have a quick word?”
“Okay. Sorry, Sergey, give me just a second, but you’re not off the hook.”
Sergey just smiled back and nodded.
Ryan followed Arnie into the Center Hall, and then farther, to the West Sitting Hall. There, waiting for him, was Mary Pat Foley. Jack knew whatever was going on, Mary Pat would have only just heard about it, since she had been at lunch ten minutes earlier, and there seemed to be no great emergency then.
“What is it?”
Mary Pat said, “It’s Russia. Thirty minutes ago SVR director Stan Biryukov was killed in a bombing in central Moscow, less than a mile from the Kremlin.”
Ryan clenched his jaw. “Oh, boy.”
“Yeah, we liked him. Sure, he was a Russian spy, but he was as straight a shooter as we could have asked for in that role.”
Ryan felt the same about Biryukov. Although he didn’t know the man, he did know he had been instrumental in rescuing Ryan’s friend, John Clark, from the hands of brutal torturers in Moscow more than a year earlier. Then, even more recently, Biryukov had secretly assisted The Campus in getting Clark into China. As far as Russian intelligence chiefs were concerned, President Ryan thought Stan Biryukov eligible for sainthood. He asked, “Any chance at all this was a random terrorist act and not an assassination?”
Foley said, “I would say no chance at all, except we are talking about Moscow here. There have been, what, five or six bombings since Volodin came to power last year? The restaurant was popular with the kulturny—it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibilities it was targeted for its high-flying Russian clientele, and not specifically because the head of the SVR was in the building.”
“But?” asked Ryan. He’d worked with Mary Pat Foley for long enough that he could hear the thoughts behind the inflections in her voice.
“But . . . as you know, there are rumors some of the other bombings were false flag attacks perpetrated by FSB. Biryukov was not a Kremlin insider the way FSB director Roman Talanov is. In fact, he and Talanov are seen as bitter rivals.” She corrected herself. “Were seen as rivals.”
Ryan cocked his head in surprise. “Are you suggesting the chief of the FSB had the chief of the SVR killed?”
“Not suggesting it, Mr. President. Just thinking out loud. It’s almost too provocative to comprehend, but everything that has happened in Russia since Valeri Volodin came to power has been dramatic, to say the least.”
Ryan thought for a moment. “All right. Let’s meet in the Oval Office in an hour with the full national security team. Try to get more answers by then.”
Mary Pat said, “It’s too bad for Golovko. If he had played his cards right and sucked up to Volodin when he came to power, he might have gotten himself a job offer out of this. There is a vacancy at SVR now, after all.”
It was dark humor, but Ryan wasn’t laughing. “Sergey wouldn’t work for Valeri Volodin if there was a gun to his head.”
—
Ryan headed back to the Yellow Oval Room. Normally, he would cut short a get-together like this to deal with something of the magnitude of the possible assassination of a Russian intelligence chief, but he wanted to use this opportunity to get Golovko’s take on the event.
But as he entered the room, he immediately saw a commotion. A Secret Service agent standing along the wall rushed forward toward the sitting area. Only then did Jack notice his old friend on the floor, lying next to his chair on his back. Cathy was with him, cradling his head.
Golovko’s face was a mask of pain.
Cathy looked up at Jack. “Get Maura up here. And tell the ambulance to come to the South Portico. Let them know they will be going to GWU!”
Ryan spun back out the door. The Secret Service was already on their radios; surely they were doing the First Lady’s bidding, but Jack followed his wife’s instructions nonetheless.
Sergey Golovko was driven out of the White House’s east entrance in the back of an ambulance, while Jack and Cathy stood just inside the doorway.
The ambulance did not use its sirens until it pulled onto Connecticut Avenue, so as not to arouse the interest of the media around the White House.
Cathy wanted to go along with Golovko, but she knew she would be seen upon arrival at George Washington University Hospital and then, within minutes, the White House Briefing Room would be full of screaming press clamoring for information as to what they had missed. Still, Cathy knew Jack’s own physician was riding along with Golovko, and she was top-notch.
President Ryan left his wife after a moment and headed into the West Wing, pushing the shock of Golovko’s collapse out of his mind so he could concentrate on the upcoming meeting. He’d only just arrived when he was notified that Mary Pat Foley and CIA director Jay Canfield were in the anteroom, waiting to speak with him. He looked down at his watch. The meeting wasn’t scheduled to begin for another half-hour.
“Send them in,” he said over the intercom, and he sat back on the edge of his desk.
Foley and Canfield entered in a rush. Mary Pat did not waste time. “Mr. President . . . we have a problem.”
Jack rose from his desk. “They are piling up, aren’t they? Go ahead.”
“Russian television is saying police have cornered and killed a man in a Moscow apartment. They say he is the bomber of the restaurant. He is a Croatian national named Dino Kadic.”
“Why is that a problem?”
Mary Pat looked to Jay Canfield. Canfield nodded, then looked up at the President. “Kadic . . . is . . . known to us.”
“Meaning
?”
“He used to be an Agency asset.”
Ryan’s shoulders slumped, and he sat back on the edge of the desk. “He was CIA?”
“By proxy only. He worked in the Balkans in the nineties. For a short time he was part of a unit on the CIA’s payroll. We gave them some training as well. We dumped Kadic when his group . . . went rogue, I guess you could say.”
“War crimes?”
“Of the worst kind.”
“Jesus. Do the Russians know he used to be on CIA’s payroll?”
Mary Pat spoke up: “Kadic has made a career in the underworld by exaggerating his former ties to CIA. The story he’s told anyone who will listen makes it sound like he had a corner office on the seventh floor at Langley. Trust me, the Russians know Kadic has Agency ties.”
“Great,” Jack said. “Volodin owns the media in Russia. Their morning papers will lead with the story of a CIA hit man whacking their foreign intelligence director.”
Canfield said, “You’ve got that right. We will deny it, of course, for whatever good it will do.”
Mary Pat changed the subject. “I heard about Golovko. Is he going to be okay?”
Jack shrugged. “No idea. Food poisoning would be my guess, but I’m not a medical doc, just a history doc. They rushed him to GWU. He was conscious, but weak and disoriented.”
“So you didn’t get a chance to tell him about Biryukov?”
“No.” He thought for a moment. “With Golovko going into the hospital, it will come out that he was here in the White House. We need to get ready for the repercussions of this, as well as the Biryukov killing.”
Mary Pat whistled, putting the two events together. “Jack Ryan whacks the head of Russian foreign intelligence and then meets with a top critic of the Kremlin on the same day.”
Canfield added, “Who then pukes up his chicken salad.”
“Yeah, DEFCON two, at least,” Jack muttered.
Just then, Scott Adler, the secretary of state, entered the room. “Scott,” Jack said, “we need to get the Russian ambassador in here so I can express my condolences about Biryukov.”