Locked On Part 38

"It means . . . 'f.u.c.k your mother.'"

"Very nice." Clark raised his weapon back to the Estonian's forehead.

"If you shoot me, you have no chance. I have ten armed men in building. One bang from your gun and they come kill you. And if you are right about more men coming, then you should think about your own . . ." He stopped talking and watched Clark holster the pistol.

The older American stepped forward, took Ardo Ruul by his arm, spun him around, and shoved him hard against the wall.

"I'm going to do something that will hurt. You will want to scream b.l.o.o.d.y murder, but I promise you, if you make a sound, I will do it to your other arm."

"What? No!"

Clark bent Ruul's left arm back violently, then drove his elbow into the back of the Estonian's hyperextended elbow.

Ardo Ruul started a shriek, but Clark took him by his hair and slammed his face into the wall.

Close in his ear, John said, "Another pound of pressure and your joint snaps. You can still save it if you don't scream."

"I . . . I tell you who sent me for Manfred Kromm." Ruul said with a gasp, and Clark let up the pressure. "A Russian f.u.c.k, Kovalenko is name. He is FSB or SVR, I do not know which. He sent me to see what Kromm knows about you in Berlin."

"Why?"

Ardo's knees went slack and he slid down the side of the wall. Clark helped him to the floor. There the man sat, his face pale, his eyes wide with pain as he held his elbow.

"Why, Ruul?"

"He did not say me why."

"How do I find him?"

"How do I know? His name Kovalenko. He is Russian agent. He pay me money. This is all I know."

From downstairs at Klub Hypnotek, the crack of a gunshot, then screams from women and men.

Clark stood quickly and headed toward the window.

"Where you going?"

Clark raised the windowpane and looked outside, then turned back to the Estonian gangster. "Before they kill you, remember to tell them I am coming after Kovalenko."

Ardo Ruul pulled himself up to his feet with his one good arm and the corner of his desk. "Don't leave, American! We fight them together!"

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 life.

There the similarities ended. The Estonian was a drunk, a b.u.m, p.r.o.ne 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 b.u.m. 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 dest.i.tute 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 b.u.m from shadow to shadow, looking for the next train to Moscow.

Jack Ryan Jr. spent the morning in his cubicle at Hendley a.s.sociates reading through reports generated by Melanie Kraft at the National Counterterrorism Center. Melanie's a.n.a.lysis 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.n.a.lysis, and pull from the raw intel that she possessed what might answer some of the questions he and The Campus had about their princ.i.p.al 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 s.h.i.t! 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 would 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 a.s.semble 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."

A minute and a half after Clark's call, Ryan had a conference call going with a dozen employees around Hendley a.s.sociates, 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 a.s.sistant rezident in London.

At only thirty-five years old, a.s.sistant 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 a.n.a.lysts began searching through CIA traffic looking for information on Valentin Kovalenko. These a.n.a.lysts 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 a.n.a.lysts 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 a.n.a.lysts all digging into Valentin. He decided there was no sense in his duplicating their efforts, so instead he figured, what the h.e.l.l, 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 histories 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 d.a.m.n 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. "s.h.i.t."

Biery said. "Maybe."

"How long will it take?"

"Couple of days, at least."

Ryan sighed. "Never mind."

Biery started to laugh. Ryan thought, What a f.u.c.king weirdo.

But only until Gavin said, "Just messing with you, Jack. I can have that for you inside of ten minutes. E-mail me the guy's name and anything else you have on him and I'll jump on it."

"Umm. Okay."

Ten minutes later, Ryan's phone rang. He answered with, "What did you find out?"

Gavin Biery, mercifully, recognized the urgency in Ryan's voice. "Here's the deal. He was in London, no question. But he didn't pay for a hotel or a car or anything like that. Just a few gifts, and an incidental or two."

Ryan sighed in frustration. "So it sounds like someone else paid for his trip."

"He bought his own plane ticket, put it on a card. But once he was in London he was on someone else's dime."

"Okay . . . Guess that won't do me any good."

"What were you hoping to find?"

"I don't know. Just fishing. I hoped this trip had something to do with the Clark situation. I guess I thought if I could track him for the thirty hours he was in town I could get an idea-"

"I know where he stayed."

"You do?"

"He bought a box of cigars in the gift shop of the Mandarin Oriental at seven fifty-six in the evening, then he bought a box of Cadbury chocolates in the gift shop there at eight twenty-two the next morning. Unless he was just really in love with that gift shop, it sounds like he bedded down there for the night."

Jack thought this over. "Can you get a look at all the rooms that night?"

"Yeah, I checked. No Valentin Kovalenko."

"Oleg Kovalenko?"

"Nope."

"So someone else, not his son, paid his way. Can we get a list of every credit card that held a room for that night?"

"Sure. I can pull that out. Call you back in five?"

Ryan said, "I'll be at your desk in three."

Ryan showed up at Biery's desk with his own laptop, which he opened as he plopped into a chair next to the computer guru. Biery handed Ryan a printout, so Ryan and Gavin both could scan through the list of names of those registered at the hotel. Ryan didn't know what he was looking for, exactly, which made delegating half of the search to Gavin practically impossible. Other than the name "Kovalenko," which Biery had already said was not here, or the highly unlikely discovery of the name "Edward Kealty," he didn't really know what would pique his interest.

He wished like h.e.l.l he could be sitting with Melanie right now. She would find a name, a pattern, something.

And then, from out of the blue, Jack got an idea in his head. "Vodka!" he shouted.

Gavin smiled. "Dude it's ten-fifteen in the morning. Unless you've got some b.l.o.o.d.y Mary mix-"

Ryan wasn't listening. "Russian diplomats who visit the UN in New York are always getting in trouble for drinking all the vodka in their minibars."

"Says who?"

"I don't know, I've heard it before. Might be an urban legend, but look at this guy." He pulled up a photo of Valentin Kovalenko on his laptop. "You can't tell me he wasn't tipping back the Stoli."