“Yes, but frankly, even the Russian troops on Ukraine’s eastern border can jeopardize Kiev. Defense spending in Ukraine hasn’t even been enough for the upkeep of the equipment they have. The Russians can take the Ukrainian capital from either direction.” It seemed to Jack as if each day brought a potential invasion even closer. Jack had sent Scott Adler, his secretary of state, to Europe to drum up support on the diplomatic front to try and stop a Russian invasion before it began, but so far Adler had received much in the way of private platitudes but little in the way of public diplomacy from the European nations.
Ryan had a meeting planned with Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess in the morning to discuss the military ramifications of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and he knew he needed to start planning for what was beginning to look more and more inevitable.
With everything on his plate right now, Jack knew his focus should remain on the present. But try as he might, Mary Pat Foley’s throwaway comment earlier in the day concerning a rumor of an assassin called Zenith and a spate of killings thirty years earlier had his mind wandering back to those days.
He had not thought of Zenith in a long time. In the four years Jack was out of office, he had worked on his memoirs. This had been a slow process, made slower by the fact that many of the things Ryan had done had been classified, and he therefore could not very well put them in his book.
But the Zenith affair—they called it the “possible Zenith affair” at the time because no one ever proved there was, in fact, a Zenith—was an event that not only was classified but had been all but stricken from the record. Jack had not spoken of Zenith to anyone for thirty years.
And this made it all the more surprising when Mary Pat mentioned it in the context of a current crisis.
There were so few mysteries left from the Cold War. When the Iron Curtain dropped, virtually all the answers poured out like the Curtain had been a floodgate.
But despite the Russian government investigating the matter, the questions surrounding Zenith had never been resolved.
Jack knew Mary Pat had been right; this wasn’t like him to chase details on a single piece of intel. Ostensibly, he wanted to see if Talanov was somehow involved in the Zenith murders; if he was, this would be an important piece of the puzzle and part of developing an understanding of his background and his personality. But if Jack was honest with himself, he would have to admit that he had ordered the look into the Zenith case mostly because it had been one of the few remaining question marks of his career, and if Roman Talanov had something to do with it, however unlikely that might have been, Jack damn sure wanted to know.
He closed his eyes and willed himself to fall asleep. Tomorrow he would need to be fully involved in the dangerous present; he didn’t have the luxury of lying awake tonight to think about the dangerous past.
—
Sandy Lamont was worried about his young and high-profile employee for a couple of reasons. Number one, since returning from the West Indies, Jack had been working so hard he was starting to look like a bit of a zombie, and Lamont was concerned that one of the principals of his firm might pass young Ryan in the hall and then pull Lamont into his office to read him the riot act for abusing his employee.
And the other reason Sandy was concerned was that he was getting calls from Moscow, all basically saying the same thing. Some of the work they had been doing on behalf of Jack Junior was starting to earn them unwarranted attention from the local authorities.
Jack was back on Gazprom, it was clear from the calls. In the course of his investigation, the young American had been sending investigators from Castor and Boyle’s Moscow office out to tax offices to request records. This was causing trouble at the tax offices, and Sandy knew he needed to gently persuade his highly motivated new employee to take it a little slower for both his own health and the good of C&B Risk Analytics. Sandy knew there would be serious hell to pay once Castor found out Jack was focusing his investigative efforts on the cash cow of the siloviki.
Sandy found Jack right where he knew he would be at the end of the day, hunched over his computer keyboard with his phone to his ear. Sandy waited for the young man to get off the phone with one of the in-house translators, and then he knocked on Jack’s office door.
“Hey, Sandy.”
“Got a minute?”
“Sure. Come on in.”
Sandy came into Jack’s little office, shut the door, and sat in the one other chair in the room. “What are you working on?” he asked, but Sandy knew the answer.
“A Swiss shell that does business with Gazprom.”
Sandy feigned surprise. “Remember, mate, Gazprom was the ultimate beneficiary of the Galbraith theft, true, but they weren’t the ones who stole the company.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Lad, if you buy a piece of property that someone else has stolen, you might be forced to hand it back over if it was acquired illegally, but that doesn’t mean you are a criminal yourself. We need to help Galbraith and his lawyers prove culpability of one of the companies that actually pulled off the deal, not Gazprom, the firm that bought up the assets after the deal was done.”
Ryan said, “This thing is big, Sandy. It might go all the way up to Gazprom and the big shots who own it. I know Castor has some trepidation, so I’m proceeding as carefully as I possibly can.”
Sandy knew he had his work cut out for him trying to get his energetic analyst to take his foot off the gas pedal. He stifled a sigh. “What have you learned?”
Ryan said, “In all the data I found in the paperwork from Randolph Robinson’s garbage, I came across one document for Shoal Bank, the bank we think is owned by the people behind IFC. It was an account transfer from a company in Germany to Shoal Bank. I looked into that company, and from shareholder information I just swam upstream, following names, addresses, looking into holding companies it deals with and loan signatories for purchases it’s made.”
“What sort of company is this?”
“Germany buys natural gas from Gazprom. This Swiss-registered German firm receives the payments from the German government, and then processes the payments for Gazprom.”
“Processes them?”
Jack chuckled. “Yeah. They are just an intermediary. Germany wires money to the Swiss account of this company, and then they wire it on to Russia, minus their processing charge. Gazprom uses them for no discernible reason.”
Sandy said, “Clearly, the reason is to overcharge the Germans for their gas so that someone gets a payoff.”
“Yep,” Jack said. “But it’s even worse than that. I found the Germans, on Gazprom’s request, made a ten-million-dollar payment to a consulting company in Geneva, and they used Shoal Bank of Saint John’s to do it. There are attempts to obfuscate the owners of the consulting company, I’m still working on that, but I’m sure it is nothing more than a shell, or a shell of a shell. It was a kickback of some kind. As near as I can tell, the only reason this Geneva firm is around is to facilitate below-board payments.”
“Makes paying bribes extra-easy,” Sandy said. “Companies like that only exist on paper, and they produce nothing but illegal invoices.”
“Right,” said Jack. “Some German official who okayed the natural-gas contract with Gazprom sets up an untraceable company in Geneva so his own country can pay him off.”
Ryan knew Sandy had been at this a lot longer than he had, and he was going to be hard to surprise. He said, “And this is just one payment, for ten million. Over four billion has gone from the Germans to Gazprom via this Swiss intermediary. There is no telling how much has been skimmed and where it all has gone.”
Sandy said, “Well done, lad. When old man Castor told me I’d have Jack Ryan, Jr., working under me, I thought you’d be just a pretty face with a powerful name. Now I’m starting to look over my shoulder thinking you might be sitting in my seat before too long.”
Ryan appreciated the compliment, but he had the sense he was being buttered up for
some reason. He said, “I inherited a lot of curiosity from my dad. I love digging into a good mystery, but to tell you the truth, all I want to do is solve these riddles. I have no ambition of running a department, much less a company.”
Sandy replied, “I was a pit bull myself back in the day. This was the late nineties, Russia was a different animal then. Blokes with gold chains shooting each other in the back of the head. Might seem grim now with all the financial shysters about, but nothing like the nineties.”
“Well, we did get jumped the other day in Antigua.”
“You’ve got a point there. That was all the rough stuff I ever want to see.” Lamont prepared himself to start his lecture, but Jack interrupted.
“Anyway, I found something else in the Robinson data. I found a note stating Shoal Bank’s board of directors flew to Zug, Switzerland, on March first of this year for a meeting with the bank there. I decided the key to blowing the entire gas deal open is finding out who showed up from the board.”
Lamont’s eyebrows rose. “Travel records?”
“Yes, but it’s tricky.”
“I would suspect so. The nearest airport is Zurich, and there must be a hundred flights a day.”
Ryan nodded. “I looked at the commercial flights that arrived from any point in Russia in the seventy-two hours before the meeting. I just checked first class because, well, because these people were involved in a one-point-two-billion-dollar swindle, so I figured if they went commercial, they weren’t back in steerage.”
“Safe assumption.”
“There were CEOs and CFOs flying into Zurich all day long, but nobody with the connections or the juice to be involved in this level of an operation.”
Lamont said, “I assume you checked out private jets.”
“Of course. I figured from the beginning I’d probably need to investigate private jets. I looked into all the declared flights, but not very hard, because I figured these guys would be coming in on a blocked flight.”
“What is that?”
“The FAA of Switzerland is called Skyguide. Skyguide can block a flight so that the public can’t find out any trace of it. We have the same thing in the USA. All you have to do is ask nicely and FAA will hide the identity of your private aircraft and its flight path. Businesses need to be able to conduct business without their competitors tracking the movements of the CEO, movie stars want to avoid paparazzi, plus, there are security concerns.”
Lamont said, “I’m sure there are lots of other reasons of the more underhanded variety.”
Ryan nodded and reached for his coffee. “Undoubtedly. Anyway, I knew I couldn’t just look up a record of the tail numbers and trace the jets that way, so I pulled up the audio files of the Zurich airport tower for the seventy-two hours and downloaded them into a speech-to-text app. Even if the flight number is blocked on all written logs, the plane still has to communicate with the tower and use its flight number. Using the speech-to-text, I pulled out every tail number for a private aircraft and researched each plane individually.”
Lamont was amazed by the tenacity of Jack Ryan. He said, “I told you you were a right pit bull.”
“It wasn’t that hard, because I knew I’d be looking for a blocked aircraft, one whose flight track wasn’t also available online. I found several, of course—there are lots of shady corporate planes flying into Switzerland. But there was an Airbus A318, tail number NS3385, that landed at nine-thirty a.m. on March first, the day of the meeting. The ACJ318 is a corporate jet with a bedroom, a lounge, a seating area, and even a closed-off boardroom.”
“That’s a bloody expensive jet.”
“I researched the aircraft and found nothing, so I looked into the records of the FBOs on the ramp in Zurich, and saw that one A318 was refueled that morning. That bill was paid by a holding company based right there in Zurich, and this company also paid for fuel for another aircraft a few months before this at the same FBO. This one was owned by a restaurant group in Saint Petersburg.”
Sandy’s head cocked to the side. “Restaurant group in Saint Petersburg?”
Jack smiled. “That’s right. The same one Randolph Robinson works for down in Antigua. He set up the shell corporation, and he also manages Shoal Bank, owned by IFC.”
Sandy said, “You have a name associated with the restaurant company?”
Jack looked at his notes. “I do. Dmitri Nesterov. He owns a chain of restaurants. Other than that, I don’t know anything about him. I’ve searched and searched. He never went to any business school, he’s not a member of the Duma or an employee in the Kremlin.
“But he is a principal in a company that has bought up over twelve billion euros’ worth of oil and gas infrastructure in the past four months.”
“Bloody unbelievable.”
“Yes,” said Ryan. “We need to find out who Nesterov is, and why the Kremlin set him up to make one-point-two billion dollars in the raiding of Galbraith Rossiya Energy.”
Lamont nodded, but slowly and cautiously. He had to admit to himself, the Yank had gotten further with this than anyone else here in the office could have. He knew Castor was against anyone in-house working against Gazprom, but Jack Ryan was onto something, and Sandy Lamont was not going to get in his way.
Ryan asked, “Was there something you wanted to talk about?”
Sandy just shook his head. “Not at all. Carry on.”
26
The situation on the ground in Kiev seemed to be deteriorating by the day. What had begun as a series of daily speeches by pro-nationalist Ukrainians in the city’s massive Independence Square had, in the span of just a few days, morphed into ten-thousand-strong rallies where speeches, banners, and chants proclaimed the anti-Russian leanings of the attendees.
The division in the nation was on full display when pro-Russian Ukrainians started their own daily rallies on the other side of Independence Square. Any hopes the police might have had that the situation would defuse itself went away when tents started to be erected on both sides, and nationalists and Russian Ukrainians began clashes that turned more and more violent.
Riot police had broken up fights, tear-gas canisters and Molotov cocktails streaked through the air on a daily basis, and arrests and injuries were piling up by the day.
And this was not just happening in Kiev. In Sevastopol, in the Crimea, skinhead gangs of the Russian majority were shattering the shop windows of Ukrainian nationalists and Tatars, starting fires in the streets, and picking out people at random to beat up.
The morning after Clark surprised Keith Bixby with his offer to help him post surveillance on Gleb the Scar, the men of The Campus awoke in their flat to the sound of sirens outside. They were a few miles from the square, but the noise of a chanting crowd made its way up to their third-floor safe house.
Since they were playing the role of journalists, Clark, Chavez, Caruso, and Driscoll quickly dressed, grabbed their cameras and microphones, and headed downstairs. They walked out onto the street into the middle of a protest march that had begun outside of the city, supposedly spontaneously, and was heading directly for Independence Square. From the banners and the vitriol spouted by the marchers, it was clear this was a group of ultra-nationalists from the west of the nation.
It was obvious they hadn’t walked across western Ukraine to descend on the capital; clearly, they had been bused to a location during the night and then formed into a “spontaneous” march.
Once the group passed, the four men went back upstairs. Clark’s approach to the local CIA station chief had been spurned, so he decided he would have to improvise. Igor Kryvov had been a cop, and he knew quite a few personalities in the local underworld, so Clark decided he would use this access to get his own ear as close to the ground as possible.
Just after breakfast, he announced to the men in the safe house, “Igor, Ding, and I are going to head out for a little recon.”
Caruso said, “I get it, you Russian speakers get to hang out together while Sam and I stay back here
with the nerd.”
Biery was hard at work on one of his laptops. Without stopping what he was doing, he said, “I’m a geek, not a nerd.”
Chavez said, “Igor is going to take us around to meet some people who can get us closer to the world we need to penetrate if we’re going to learn anything about Gleb the Scar.”
Driscoll said, “So you are off to meet drug dealers, pimps, and human traffickers. Have a nice time.”
“Will do,” Clark said.
—
Valeri Volodin was back on New Russia’s Evening News with his favorite interviewer, Tatiana Molchanova. Tonight the topic of conversation was a new trade pact enacted with China, but Molchanova had notes and follow-up questions in preparation for tackling a wide range of topics, depending on Volodin’s whims.
Volodin, as usual, spoke directly into the camera, and his “answers” were less in response to her questions and more the talking points that he’d come to the studio to get across to the viewers of the Evening News. With a strong jaw and a proud gaze into the lens, he said, “I am announcing a new trade pact with our friends in the People’s Republic of China. Our two powerful nations will tighten our energy security relationship. We will double oil shipments to China, securing their energy needs for growth, and securing that our markets are made stronger, despite the West’s attempts to rule us by starvation. The land routes have been decided. Our pipelines will begin construction almost immediately. We will build land bridges and high-speed rail between our two countries. We have begun coal exploration in Siberia in a joint agreement.
“We have put our past differences behind us, and together we will create the biggest economic market on earth.
“With America’s so-called Asia pivot, and the illegal attack against China’s mainland last year, the Chinese know it is in their interests to accept our friendship and our increased economic cooperation.”
The raven-haired beauty nodded thoughtfully and asked her next question as if it had just come to her organically as a response to Volodin’s last answer, although her questions had been written by her producers beforehand. “Mr. President, how do you feel this development will affect Russia’s relationship with the West? Recent conflicts with NATO and the USA have worried some Russians, who wonder if our economic future might be negatively impacted.”