Command Authority

  He decided then and there he would grow a beard and mustache, he would cut his hair short, he would change the style of his clothing, he would even get back into the gym and bulk up to some degree.

  His transformation would not happen overnight, he knew this, but he had to make it happen before he could truly relax and get on with his life.

  6

  Two months later

  Dino Kadic sat behind the wheel of his Lada sedan, eyeing the row of luxury sport-utility vehicles parked on the far side of the square. A half-dozen BMWs, Land Cruisers, and Mercedeses idled nose to tail, and just beyond them, one of the city’s most chic restaurants glowed in neon.

  They were nice trucks, and it was a nice restaurant. But Kadic wasn’t impressed.

  He’d still blow the place to hell.

  If he were anywhere else on earth the motorcade would have tipped him off that some serious VIP was having a late meal in that restaurant, but this was Moscow; around here, any self-respecting mob goon or reasonably well-connected businessman commanded his own fleet of high-dollar vehicles and crew of security men. The half-dozen fancy cars and the steel-eyed entourage protecting them did not prove to Kadic anyone of particular importance was dining inside; he figured it was probably just a local tough guy or a corrupt tax official.

  His target tonight had arrived on foot; he was just some foreign businessman—important somewhere, perhaps, but not important here. He was not an underworld personality or a politician. He was English, a high-flying emerging-markets fund manager named Tony Haldane. Kadic had gotten close visual confirmation of Haldane as he entered Vanil restaurant alone just after seven p.m., and then Kadic repositioned here, under a row of trees on the far side of the street. He parked his Lada at a meter on Gogolevsky Boulevard and sat behind the wheel, waiting with his phone in his lap and his eyes on the restaurant’s front doors.

  The cell phone resting on his leg was set to send a signal to the detonator in the shoebox-sized improvised explosive device under the leafy foliage in one of the planters sitting outside the front door of the restaurant.

  Kadic watched from his position one hundred twenty meters away as the security men and drivers stood around the planter unaware, clueless to the danger.

  He doubted any of those guys would survive the blast. And he could not possibly care less.

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel—from nerves, not from boredom—and felt his heartbeat increase as the minutes ticked off. Despite how long Dino had been doing this sort of thing, each time brought the adrenaline rush anew. The battle of wits that came along with devising and orchestrating and executing an assassination, the anticipation of the explosion, the smell of burning accelerant and plastic and, yes, even flesh.

  Kadic first felt the thrill twenty years earlier when he was a young Croatian paramilitary fighting in the war in the Balkans. When Croatia signed its truce with Serbia, Kadic realized he was having too much fun with the war, and he wasn’t ready to stop fighting, so he organized a mercenary para unit that conducted raids into Bosnia, targeting Serbian Army patrols for the Bosnian government. The CIA took interest in the group, and they gave Kadic and his men training and equipment.

  It did not take long for the Agency to realize they had made a huge mistake. Kadic’s Croatian paramilitary force was implicated in atrocities against Serbian civilians living in Bosnia, and the CIA broke ties with Dino Kadic and his men.

  After the war ended, Kadic began plying his trade as a contract killer. He worked in the Balkans and in the Middle East, and then, around the turn of the millennium, he moved to Russia, where he became a killer-for-hire for any underworld entity that would employ him.

  He did well for himself in the industry for a few years and then bought property back in Croatia, where he settled into semiretirement, living mostly off the money he’d made in Russia over the past decade, although from time to time a contract came his way that he could not refuse.

  Like this Haldane hit. The contractor, a Russian underworld personality, had offered a princely sum for what Kadic determined to be a low-risk operation. The Russian had been very specific as to the time and the place of the hit, and he’d told Kadic he wanted to make a big and bold statement.

  Nyet problem, Dino had told the man at the time. He could do big and bold.

  He calmed himself with a slow breath, told himself to relax.

  A phrase, in English, had been taught to him by the Americans a long time ago, and he said it aloud now.

  “Stay frosty.”

  It had become a ritual in those quiet moments before the noise of a mission, and it made him feel good to say it. He hated the Americans now; they had turned on him, deemed him unreliable, but they could not take back the training they had given him.

  And he was about to put this training to use.

  Dino glanced at his watch and then squinted across the dark square toward the target area. He did not use binoculars; there was too great a chance someone walking past his parked car or even looking out a window in one of the nearby apartments or shops would notice the man in the car with the binos pointed precisely at the location where the bomb would soon detonate. Any description at all of his car to investigators after the blast would cause the Interior Ministry to search hours of security-camera footage of the area, and soon enough he would be identified.

  That would not do. Dino aimed to get out of this op clean, and this meant he’d have to eyeball it from distance. The people who hired him for this job ordered him to make an angry statement with his explosive, so the bomb was constructed with overkill in mind. For this reason Dino had positioned himself back a little farther from his target than he would have liked.

  From this distance he would have to ID his target from the color of his camel coat as he left the building, and, Dino decided, that would do just fine.

  He checked his watch yet again.

  “Stay frosty,” he said again in English, and then he switched to his native Serbo-Croatian. Hurry up, damn it!

  —

  Inside Vanil, a cordon of four bodyguards in black suits stood in front of a red curtain separating the private banquet area from the dining room, and although the locals in the restaurant were accustomed to plainclothes security men all over this most insecure city, a cursory look at this protection detail would indicate these were top-of-the-line bodyguards, not the much more common cheap “rent-a-thug” variety.

  Behind the armed guards and behind the curtain, two middle-aged men sipped brandies at a table in the center of the large, otherwise empty room.

  One of the men wore a Burberry suit in gray flannel. The knot of his blue tie was as tight and proper now as it had been at eight that morning. In English, but with a thick Russian accent, the man said, “Moscow has always been a dangerous place. In the past few months I’m afraid it has only become exponentially more so.”

  Across the table, British subject Anthony Haldane was as nicely dressed as the Russian. His Bond Street blue pin-striped suit was fresh and pressed, and his camel coat hung from a rack nearby. He smiled, surprised by the comment. “These are troubling words coming from the nation’s security chief.”

  Instead of giving a quick response, Stanislav Biryukov sipped his chacha, a Georgian brandy made from distilled grape skins. After wiping his mouth with the corner of his napkin, he said, “SVR is Russia’s foreign security service. Things are going relatively well in foreign environs at the moment. The FSB, internal security, is the organization presiding over the current catastrophe, both in Russia and in the nations adjacent to Russia.”

  Haldane said, “You’ll excuse me for not making the immediate distinction between FSB and SVR. To an old hand like me, it is all still the KGB.”

  Biryukov smiled. “And to an older hand, we would all be Chekists.”

  Haldane chuckled. “Quite so, but that one is even before my time, old boy.”

  Biryukov held his glass up to the candlelight; he regarded the deep golden color of the liqu
id before carefully choosing his next words. “As a foreigner you might not know it, but FSB has authority not just over Russia but also over the other nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States, even though our neighbors are sovereign nations. We refer to the border nations as ‘the near abroad.’”

  Haldane cocked his head. He pretended not to know it, and Biryukov pretended he believed Haldane’s lie. The Russian added, “It can get a bit confusing, I will allow.”

  Haldane said, “There is something off about Russian internal security operating in its former republics. Almost as if someone forgot to tell the spies that the Soviet Union is no more.”

  Biryukov did not reply.

  Haldane knew the SVR director had some objective by inviting him out for drinks tonight, but for now the Russian was playing his cards close to his vest. Every comment was calculated. The Englishman tried to draw him out. “Does it feel like they are operating on your turf?”

  Biryukov laughed aloud. “FSB is welcome to those nations. My work in Paris and Tokyo and Toronto is a delight compared to what they have to do in Grozny and Almaty and Minsk. These are ugly days for our sister service.”

  “Might I infer that is what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Biryukov answered the question with a question of his own: “How long have we known each other, Tony?”

  “Since the late eighties. You were stationed at the Soviet embassy in London, as a cultural attaché, and I was with the Foreign Office.”

  Biryukov corrected him on both counts. “I was KGB and you were British intelligence.”

  Haldane looked like he was going to protest, but only for a moment. “Would there be any point in me denying it?”

  The Russian said, “We were children back then, weren’t we?”

  “Indeed we were, old chap.”

  Biryukov leaned in a little closer. “I mean to cause you no consternation, my friend, but I know you retain a relationship with your government.”

  “I am one of Her Majesty’s loyal subjects, if that is what you mean to say.”

  “Nyet. That is not what I mean to say.”

  Haldane’s eyebrows rose. “Is the director of Russian foreign intelligence accusing me of being a foreign spy in the capital of Russia?”

  Biryukov leaned back from the table. “No need to be dramatic. It is quite natural that you have kept up old friendships in MI6. A little back-and-forth between a well-connected businessman like yourself and your nation’s spy shop is nothing at all but smart business practice for both parties.”

  So that is the game, Haldane thought, with some relief. Stan wanted to reach out to British intelligence using his old friend as a cutout.

  It makes sense, Haldane thought, as he drained his glass. It would not do for the head of SVR to pop around to the British embassy for a chat.

  Haldane said, “I have some friends well positioned within MI6, yes, but please, don’t give me too much credit. I have been out of the service for a long time. I can pass along any message you want me to convey, but the clearer you can make things for me, the less chance I will have of mucking the whole thing up.”

  Biryukov poured both men another snifter of chacha. “Very well. I will make things very clear. I am here tonight to inform you, to inform the United Kingdom, that there is a push by our president to reunite our two intelligence services, to reestablish an umbrella organization above both foreign and domestic security.” He added, “I think this is a very bad idea.”

  The Englishman nearly spit out his brandy. “He wants to reboot the KGB?”

  “I find it hard to believe the Kremlin, even the Kremlin of President Valeri Volodin, would be so brazen as to call the new organization by the title Komitet Bezopasnosti, but the role of the new organization will be virtually that of the old. One organization in charge of all intelligence matters, both foreign and domestic.”

  Haldane mumbled, almost to himself, “Bloody hell.”

  Biryukov nodded somberly. “It will serve no positive function.”

  This seemed, to Haldane, to be a gross understatement.

  “Then why do it?”

  “There is a quickening of events, both domestically in Russia and in the former republics. Since the unsuccessful attack on Estonia a couple of months ago, President Volodin and his people are increasing Russia’s sphere of influence on all fronts. He wants more power and control in the former satellite nations. If he can’t take power and control with tanks, he will take it with spies.”

  Haldane knew this because it was all over the news. In the past year the nations of Belarus, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, and Moldova had all elected staunchly pro-Russian and anti-Western governments. In each and every case Russia had been accused of meddling in the elections, either politically or by using their intelligence services or those in the criminal underworld to affect the outcomes to Moscow’s advantage.

  Discord, in large part fueled by Moscow, was the order of the day in several other bordering nations; the invasion of Estonia was unsuccessful, but there remained the threat of invasion in Ukraine. In addition to this, a near–civil war in Georgia, bitterly disputed presidential campaigns in Latvia and Lithuania, riots and protests in other nearby countries.

  Biryukov continued, “Roman Talanov, my counterpart in the FSB, is leading this charge. I suppose with complete control over Russian intelligence activity abroad, he can expand his influence and begin destabilizing nations beyond the near abroad. Russia will invade Ukraine, probably within the next few weeks. They will annex the Crimea. From there, if they meet no resistance from the West, they will take more of the country, all the way to the Dnieper River. Once this is achieved, I believe Volodin will set his eyes on making beneficial alliances from a position of power, both in the other border countries and in the former nations of the Warsaw Pact. He believes he can return the entire region to the central control of the Kremlin. Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania. They will be the next dominoes to fall.”

  Biryukov drank, but Haldane’s mouth had gone dry. This was talk of a new Cold War at the very least, and it certainly could lead to a new hot war. But the Englishman had known the Russian long enough to know the man was not prone to exaggeration.

  Haldane asked, “If Talanov takes over SVR’s responsibilities, what will they do with you, Stan?”

  “I am concerned about our fragile democracy. I am worried about the freedom of the Russian people. I am worried about a dangerous overreach that could lead to a broad war with the West.” He smiled with a shrug. “I am not worried about my future employment prospects.”

  He added, “I will have more information for you soon. You and I have both developed sources before. It takes time.”

  Haldane laughed in surprise. “You want to be my agent?”

  The director of the SVR leaned over the table. “I come cheaper than most. I want nothing in return except comfort in the fact the West will do anything it can, politically speaking, of course, to thwart the FSB’s attempt to increase their hold on my nation’s foreign security service. If you publicize this internationally, it might have a cooling effect on Talanov and Volodin’s plans.”

  Haldane caught himself wondering about the impact this news would have on his investments in Europe. He was, after all, a businessman first and foremost. But he cleared his head of business and did his best to remember his past life in the intelligence field.

  He found this hard to do; he had not worked as an employee of MI6 in nearly two decades. He put his hands up in the air in a show of surrender. “I . . . I really am out of the game, my friend. Of course I can return to London straightaway and talk to some old acquaintances, and then they will find someone more appropriate to serve as a conduit for your information in the future.”

  “You, Tony. I will only talk to you.”

  Haldane nodded slowly. “I understand.” He thought for a moment. “I have business here, next week. Can we meet again?”

  “Yes, but after that we will need to au
tomate the flow of information.”

  “Quite. I don’t suppose it would do for us to have a regular date night.”

  Stanislav smiled. “I will warn you now. My wife is every bit as dangerous as FSB director Roman Talanov.”

  “I rather doubt that, old boy.”

  7

  President of the United States Jack Ryan stood outside the White House’s South Portico with his wife, Cathy, by his side and his Secret Service contingent flanking them both. It was a crisp spring afternoon in D.C., with bright blue skies and temperatures in the low forties, and as Ryan watched a black Ford Expedition roll up the driveway he could not help thinking this great weather would make for a nice photo op here with his guest on the South Lawn.

  But there would be no photos today, nor would the meeting go in the visitor log kept by the White House. The President’s official schedule, put online for all the world to see, for reasons Ryan could not fathom, was cryptic regarding Ryan’s activities today. It said only, “Private Lunch—Residence. 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.”

  And if Scott Adler, the secretary of state, had his way, this meeting would not be happening at all.

  But Ryan was President of the United States, and, on this, POTUS got his way. His visitor today was his friend, he was in town, and Ryan saw no reason why he shouldn’t have him over for lunch.

  As they waited for the Expedition to come to a stop, Cathy Ryan leaned closer to her husband. “This guy pointed a gun at you once, didn’t he?”

  There was that, Ryan conceded to himself.

  With a sly smile he replied, “I’m sorry, hon. That’s classified. Anyway, you know Sergey. He’s a friend.”

  Cathy pinched her husband’s arm playfully, and her next comment was delivered in jest. “They’ve searched him, right?”

  “Cathy.” Ryan said it in a mock scolding voice, and then he joked, “Hell . . . I hope so.”