Commander-In-Chief Read online

  Jack understood why business in this field was booming. The business of money, not surprisingly, came down to money. Simply stated, the people hiding the money were paid a lot more than the people looking for the money.

  Jack was one of the lookers, and he felt the title particularly apt today while he stared through his scope and wondered how he was going to get closer to the answers bouncing around in the head of the man in the office down the street.

  Jack enjoyed the puzzle, even if several times a day he wanted to pull his hair out trying to piece together the murky parts of the relationships among all the players.

  He did know one thing above all. Next to the actual holder of the assets—the individual attempting to launder money—no one in the ladder was more important than the attorney. Rarely did they know the entire picture—only the person who set up the network did—but attorneys usually knew more than anyone else along the ladder.

  Lawyers were integral to financial shenanigans for one reason above all. With an attorney, Jack knew, a person attempting to hide assets from regulators had one more tool in the toolbox. A lawyer could represent a shell company as a nominee in lieu of the actual owner of the assets and keep things organized, all with the get-out-of-jail-free card of attorney-client privilege.

  Guy Frieden was just such an attorney. He was involved, at what level Jack still didn’t know, in a complicated scheme to launder money for Mikhail Grankin, a powerful government intelligence official in Russia. And Jack told himself he wasn’t leaving Luxembourg until he knew where to find the next rung in the ladder.

  When Jack was just fifteen minutes into his surveillance of Guy Frieden’s office, he realized something that had held true for the past forty-eight hours.

  Surveillance, even surveillance of one man, was no one-man job.

  Although Jack’s target didn’t move around the city during the workday other than his daily eleven a.m. foray for coffee with his secretary and his afternoon lunches with clients, it was damn difficult to keep eyes on someone all day long in hopes of identifying his associates.

  After two weeks of sitting outside art galleries in Rome while Ysabel hobnobbed with those inside, and now two more days’ worth of nine-hour stretches peering into cameras, binos, and night-observation devices, he was bored stiff.

  Jack told himself the next time Frieden went to the bathroom, he would do five minutes of yoga on the floor to loosen up his aching muscles.

  But for now, while he watched and waited, he thought about Ysabel down in Rome. He missed his romantic evenings with her, and each night as he walked the fifteen minutes from his rented space across the street from Frieden’s office to his rented apartment, he made mental note of the nicer restaurants he passed, hoping he’d have an opportunity to take Ysabel out to dinner a few times when she finally made it up here.

  Jack’s apartment here wasn’t as spectacular as the place they’d shared in Rome, but it was in a great neighborhood, in the Old Town, overlooking the small and serene Place de Clairefontaine. It met all his requirements, which were not necessarily the things he would personally look for in an apartment. The Campus maintained a long list of security criteria that needed to be satisfied any time one of their people rented a safe house, so Jack had to make sure from his first arrival there that he’d be as protected as possible. He’d been relatively impressed with the building he’d found, the apartment inside, and the options for dining and exploring in the quarter around it. But still, his place wasn’t anything like his place in Rome.

  Jack thought about Ysabel now while he looked through his spotting scope at the back of Guy Frieden’s bald head. He worried about her, hoped she was keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary that might spell danger. They’d spoken on the phone each of the last three evenings and they exchanged texts throughout the day. While half their correspondence was just the idle chat of two people who missed each other and enjoyed each other’s company, the other half was work-related; she’d managed to track even more sales back to the trust maintained by Guy Frieden, putting the total amount of the sales well above ten million U.S. dollars.

  More than satisfied Frieden was a willing participant in the Russian/Roman art world money-laundering scheme, Jack had e-mailed Gavin Biery the night before, asking him to research the man’s office computer network to see if The Campus could get a look at his files. Jack had learned from digging into the art galleries’ systems that it was a hit-or-miss proposition, and often Biery would come back to him and tell him he’d have to physically plant a remote access tool to give The Campus the on-ramp into the network they needed to begin the encryption process.

  Jack hoped that wasn’t going to be the case here, since he was alone, and while Frieden’s office didn’t look that terribly secure, Frieden’s building did have standard security measures that would take time to defeat.

  Jack sat up, taking a break from looking through his scope at the office across the street. He checked his watch and realized it was two p.m. here, which meant it was eight a.m. in Virginia. Gavin Biery would just be arriving in the office.

  Jack pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed the number.

  As he expected, the portly IT director answered his phone just slightly out of breath.

  “Biery.”

  “Morning, Gavin. Sorry for hitting you right as you come through the door. Do you at least have your coffee and your doughnut in front of you?”

  “It’s a bear claw, but yes.” Jack heard the squeak of Gavin’s chair as he sat at his desk. “I got your e-mail last night and spent some time looking into the network of this Guy Frieden character.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I just used a secure Linux system at home and pinged Frieden’s network, took a look at his firewall, tried to find some open ports, all the basic stuff. Bad news, Ryan, he’s locked down tight.”

  “Damn,” Ryan said.

  Biery said, “Yeah. I’m a genius, but I’m not a freaking magician. Whoever set his computer network up knows enough to keep it safe from outside vectors. You are going to have to gain physical access to his system and plant a RAT on it for me to hack into it. Even then, that will just get me into his network. I can’t promise he won’t have good encryption on his actual files, so you’ll need to allow me some time to get into them.”

  Ryan deflated. “How do I get a RAT onto his system?”

  “You are the secret agent man. I’m the computer guy. Remember?”

  “Right.” He thought a moment. “Has Clark made it in yet?”

  “Saw him in the elevator.”

  “Good. Can you transfer me?”

  “Now I’m the freakin’ switchboard?”

  “Gavin!”

  “Just kidding.”

  Clark came on the line seconds later. “John Clark.”

  “Hey, John, it’s Jack. I’d like permission to take Gavin off your hands for a day or two.”

  “Okay. Tell me why.”

  Ryan briefly explained what he needed.

  When he finished, Clark said, “You keep telling me that what you’re doing over there in Europe is mostly analysis. But what you are talking about sounds suspiciously like espionage.”

  “Yeah, I know. This is going to take a bit more subterfuge than what we’ve been up to recently, but this will be a lot less than normal Campus fieldwork. Guy Frieden works with one secretary in a busy office building; security to get into that building is controlled by RFID badges. I just need to get Frieden out of his office and in a situation where I can steal the electronic data on the badge, then have Gavin make me a quick working copy of it. This can be done in a day. At that point Gavin can go back home, and I can slip into Frieden’s office while he and his secretary run out. They go out for coffee together each morning, and their office is totally empty for at least twenty minutes.”

  “You can see the
ir entire office from your vantage point?”

  “Not exactly. I can’t see the door to the hall, and he has a little conference room to the left of his secretary’s desk that I can’t see into. But when Frieden and his secretary step out of the building, they shut off all the lights. I’m sure they aren’t leaving anyone in his office behind.”

  Clark asked, “How are you going to manipulate Frieden so you can be in a position to clone the badge?”

  “I haven’t worked that out yet. I’ll have to get him someplace where I can be within a couple of feet from him, but I can’t let myself get compromised, because who knows how close I’ll have to get at other times? Maybe you could send Ding or Dom over with Gavin, they can help me out.”

  Clark said, “No can do. They are on a business trip.”

  Jack knew that meant his mates were operational, and he suddenly felt an immediate twinge of regret bordering on jealousy. He preferred working on the team with the other ops officers of The Campus, and all three hadn’t operated together since Sam’s death. Still, he’d gone to Iran on his own volition, then Dagestan, and then Rome. He’d put himself here, and he believed in his work.

  He didn’t regret anything other than the fact that he wasn’t there, in an obviously dangerous theater, to help his friends. “Everything okay?” he asked.

  Clark said, “Sure. Just some technical support work for one of our clients. Still, it’s a crazy world. You know how even on a business trip you’ve got to keep your head on straight.”

  “I do indeed.” Jack’s mind drifted off his own mission for a moment. The work over here was child’s play compared with most everything he’d done in the field in the past few years. He knew he should appreciate it, and he certainly had when he’d been with Ysabel, but at the moment his mind was with Chavez and Caruso, somewhere out in the field without him there to help them out.

  Clark brought Jack back to Luxembourg when he said, “I think I know someone who might be able to help you over there. At the Agency I worked with a woman named Christine Hutton. Hell of a case officer. She got out of the biz a long time ago, she’s got to be fifty-five or sixty now. Anyway, I think she’s a German noblewoman.”

  Jack thought he misheard. “Sorry, she’s a what?”

  “She left the Agency when she married a German diplomat. He came from nobility, which used to be a big deal in Germany, but now it isn’t terribly useful. Poor guy died of cancer several years back, left everything to his wife. They have a couple of grown kids, but last I heard she was living in the family estate in Bitburg, just over the border from Luxembourg. She is completely out of intel work, has been for a long time, but she might be up for an afternoon of excitement.”

  “How do you think she can help?”

  “Simple. She’s filthy rich, and it’s old European money.”

  Jack understood. “She won’t have any problem getting a meeting with a financial lawyer in Luxembourg City.”

  “Right. She’s a down-to-earth girl who married into money but didn’t let it ruin her, so she doesn’t flaunt what she has. Still, I am sure if I called and explained the situation to her, I could get her to show up at your lawyer’s office putting on all the airs of Catherine the Great.”

  “I like it.”

  “Obviously, she’ll be going in without any cover at all. You’ll have to pull it off cleanly.”

  “That won’t be a problem. We’ll come up with a legit reason for the meet.”

  “I’ll get Gavin packed up for the trip over, and then I’ll reach out to Christine.”

  21

  There was no fanfare to the scene this day at Zapadnaya Litsa Naval Base, only a persistent sleet under overcast skies. Valeri Volodin was not present for the passage of this submarine out of Sayda Inlet and into the deeper waters of Kola Bay, although the Severodvinsk-class sub was, like the Borei that left a week earlier, departing on its maiden mission in the service of the Russian Federation.

  The Kazan was also similar to the Knyaz Oleg in that it was the best, most modern vessel of its class, and the Americans and other Western powers thought this Kazan, like the big Borei on its way across the Atlantic, was still undergoing sea trials. They had no idea it was operational.

  At 111 meters long and 12 meters wide, the Kazan wasn’t as impressive as the Borei ballistic missile sub in sheer size, but it had a different role, and this role required it to be smaller and sleeker. The Kazan was a nuclear attack submarine, SSGN in the parlance of the U.S. Navy. To call it the most advanced submarine in the world was no stretch. Like the Borei to its U.S. counterpart Ohio, the Severodvinsk class was more sophisticated and cutting-edge than the comparable U.S. version, the Seawolf.

  Powered by a pressurized water reactor, its steam turbine could generate thirty-five knots below the waves and twenty on the surface. It also had a silent speed of twenty knots, and though it wasn’t quite as quiet as the Seawolf, it was far quieter than any nuclear attack sub any Western power had ever come up against.

  And far more powerful.

  The most potent weapon on the Kazan was the P-800 Oniks, a long-range antiship missile that could do Mach 3—a mile every two seconds—and deliver a conventional or nuclear payload out to a range of 327 miles, using an awesome assortment of computerized offensive and defensive measures to do so. There were thirty-two Oniks missiles on board at present, along with two dozen Type 53-65 torpedoes.

  With a hull made from low-magnetic steel, the 13,800-ton warship itself was incredibly difficult to detect, but with a bow array, flank arrays, and towed arrays, its own spherical sonar could “see” the water in all directions. This made the vessel a lethal hunter as well as a particularly difficult quarry.

  It was a big muscular fighter, a great white shark in the water, and the water it was heading to was rich with prey.

  Today marked the beginning of what was expected to be a long patrol for the Kazan. Most of its eighty-eight crew members knew little about their mission other than the fact it could last up to three months.

  But the captain had his orders. The Kazan would sail submerged into the Barents Sea, and from there through the Norwegian Sea and into the North Sea. After that things would get interesting. The Øresund Strait separating Denmark from Sweden is only two and a half miles wide at its narrowest. The Russian nuclear attack sub would need to negotiate these heavily trafficked and more heavily monitored waters without being detected, using intelligence and supreme stealth to do so.

  After the stress of the Øresund Strait, the Baltic Sea would seem as vast as the Atlantic to the sailors of the Kazan, but the captain and a select few of the boat’s thirty-two officers knew what they would be doing when they got there. They also knew that, unlike the Knyaz Oleg on its way into the two-hundred-mile exclusion zone around America, the Kazan’s mission was not merely about the threat of action.

  No, the captain of the sub fully expected to engage his enemy in battle.

  Russia’s Baltic Fleet, based in Kaliningrad, currently had only two operational attack submarines, older but capable Varshavyankas, called “Kilo class” by NATO forces. But with the arrival of the Kazan to the Baltic, the Varshavyankas would have a capable ally.

  As soon as the Kazan made it to its patrolling zone north of Poland, the Varshavyankas would begin seeking targets and destroying them with torpedoes, following a checklist that came from the Kremlin itself. The Kazan would join them with cruise missiles and torpedoes, and together they would intimidate all ships traveling in the waters around Kaliningrad.

  After standing for a while in the conning tower, enjoying the stinging impacts of sharp sleet on his face, the captain finally gave the order for his warship to submerge as soon as it was safe for it to do so. Western satellites might have identified the boat in the thirty-five minutes it was out of its hangar this morning, and they might even have been able to deduce it was putting out to sea. But the expe
rts would only think it was off on sea trials, like the Knyaz Oleg before it.

  They would learn the truth soon enough, and if the captain did his job correctly, they would know the Kazan was in play only when wolf packs of Oniks missiles began screaming toward their targets.

  22

  After a nine-hour flight from Baltimore, Ding Chavez and Dominic Caruso arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, during a mid-morning rain shower. There to meet them at the airport’s fixed-base operator was Herkus Zarkus, a thirty-one-year-old American of Lithuanian descent. Herkus was a technician for the CIA-linked company with a contract to install high-speed Internet service throughout the southern half of Lithuania.

  Though Herkus wasn’t a spy himself, he held a security clearance and he had been read in on Ding and Dom’s mission, at least as far as his responsibility in it. He knew it was his job to take the two American contractors wherever they needed to go, both in Vilnius and in the countryside, and make sure their cover as fiber-optic linemen remained sound.

  The two Campus operators loaded their bags into a van with the name DATAPLANET on the side, and all three men climbed in for the ride into town from the airport. While Herkus drove he explained that he had served in the U.S. Army with an electronic system maintenance military operational specialty. After working a few years in a support unit for 10th Special Forces Group, he left the service to go back to school for an advanced degree in electrical engineering.

  After he graduated he was heavily recruited for the job with DataPlanet, a Maryland-based fiber-optics technology company that worked government contracts around Central Europe installing and upgrading fiber-optic networks. He was surprised that the company pulled out all the stops to get him on board, but as soon as he accepted the position he was let in on the fact DataPlanet actually had an affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency. Herkus found out he had been head-hunted not only because of his job-related education and work experience, but also because of the security clearances he’d held in the Army.