Ryan turned to Oxley. “How did you get out of the gulag?”
“They were letting a lot of us political prisoners out at that point. I took a train to Moscow, I almost starved to death on the journey. Didn’t have a ruble in my pocket or an onion to eat. Staggered into the British consulate. Just a walk-in off the street. I waited in line nearly all day to see someone.
“I told the woman at the counter I was a British citizen, which caused a bloody ruckus. I was taken into a room, where I was interviewed by an SIS employee. I told him I’d been run off-book by MI5, but I gave him a name.”
Ryan looked to Castor, and Castor raised his hand. “I was on the next flight over.”
Ox said, “I also told the woman about Zenith, and she had a file faxed over from London. On it was a reference to the explosion at the Meisser restaurant in Rotkreuz. I told her I had been picked up by police there, and she jotted down my code name next to the mention of the incident in the report, intending to research it later.”
Jack said, “So when I showed you the file—”
“I knew exactly what it was. I was sitting in front of the woman when she made the note. Funny how you remember the little things.”
Oxley continued. “When Castor showed up, he told me I was lucky to be alive. The Americans sold me down the river. The KGB had been hunting me, but they didn’t know I was in the gulag. He told me I needed to stay off the radar, forever, because if the off-the-books op from the eighties got out, a lot of people would suffer.” Ox shrugged. “Firstly and mostly, me.”
Castor picked up the story here. “Oxley just wanted to live out his years in peace. I allowed him that. I said nothing to the Russians that he existed, and I said nothing to MI5 that he had reemerged.
“We had an agreement, the two of us. I sent him money every year, enough to keep him in the manner in which he has become accustomed, and he stayed quiet. He knew there were powerful people in Russia who could have ended him whenever the hell they chose. I kept that from happening.”
Ox said, “Now I am learning that no one in Russia knew a goddamned thing about me. It was all a lie.”
Castor shook his head. “At least I didn’t inform on you, you miserable fuck.” He turned to Ryan. “Victor and I have lived in a state of mutually assured destruction for some twenty years, haven’t we?”
Oxley mumbled. “I just wanted to come home and be left alone.”
There was one thing Jack didn’t understand. He asked Oxley, “Why did you agree to come help me in all this if your only intention was to be left alone?”
“Because once the Seven Strong Men attacked me, I knew the Russians were onto me, and I knew Castor here had reneged on his side of the bargain. It was over. I had to fight back.”
Castor looked into the fire. “Which brings me to you, Ryan. The Seven Strong Men had been following you during your Gazprom investigation. I tried to push you away from that affair, gently, through Lamont, and then more forcefully when I had you in my office to order you off the case. But the Seven Strong Men knew you were too close to stop looking. Then, the other night, one of their international operatives came to my house and said you were meeting with a man in Corby. They gave me the address, I realized you and Oxley had gotten together, and I told them who Oxley was. What he knew.”
“And at that moment they decided to kill him,” Jack said.
“Of course they bloody well did.” Castor leaned forward; his eyeglasses caught the firelight and it obscured Ryan’s view of his eyes. “Even after all this time, it’s not too late for bloody Bedrock here to ruin everything.”
81
Thirty years earlier
CIA analyst Jack Ryan returned to London during an afternoon thunderstorm that bounced his Lufthansa 727 all over the sky above Heathrow. Jack tightened his body on the left and the right as if trying to steer the aircraft with the muscles in his back and legs, and he squeezed the armrests, although the burning sting in his bandaged right forearm made this excruciating.
The plane finally pitched and yawed all the way down to the runway, where the wings leveled with the ground effect, and Jack was relieved to find the landing mercifully smooth.
He wanted to go straight home to Chatham and be with his family, but that wasn’t an option. He knew he’d need to head to Century House, and he imagined he’d be there until very late in the evening.
He had only enough time to put down his suitcase and slip off his raincoat before Simon Harding stepped into his office. “Welcome back, Jack. How did everything go? Wait a tick! What have you done to your arm?”
Jack had thrown his suit coat away at the CIA station in Berlin. The tear in the arm of the coat wasn’t repairable, and the bloodstain wasn’t something he wanted to bring home to Cathy after assuring her he’d avoid any danger on this trip.
Without the coat, his cut shirtsleeve was visible, rolled up to his elbow; a thick layer of white gauze was wrapped on his forearm. This wasn’t something he’d be able to hide from Cathy, either.
Hell, he hadn’t even been able to hide it from Simon.
Jack said, “Had a little accident.” It wasn’t a great surprise that Harding didn’t know about everything that had happened to Jack, but it was still awkward to keep information from an SIS man inside the SIS HQ.
“Let me guess. Flatiron? Every time I venture off without the missus, I am useless when it comes to ironing my own shirts. I’ve taken to just steaming up the loo and—”
The phone on Jack’s desk rang. With an apologetic smile, he snatched it up. “Ryan.”
“Oh, good, you’ve made it in.” It was Basil. “Do come up as soon as you’re settled.”
—
Jack sat on the sofa in Charleston’s office; across from him were Nick Eastling and Sir Basil. He’d been offered tea or coffee, but he’d taken neither. His stomach had tied itself into knots in the skies over London, and this was added to the other stresses he’d endured in the past few days. He didn’t want to pour coffee into the acid that churned there.
He spent several minutes going over his actions since Eastling had left him in Berlin. His retelling went smoothly at first; he wanted to make clear to both men that the $204 million in in-house transfers he’d discovered at Ritzmann Privatbankiers needed further scrutiny, although he didn’t know how that could possibly be accomplished.
When it came to his decision to return to the Sprengelstrasse flat of the RAF cell, his explanation lost a lot of its detail and emotion. He still wasn’t sure what had driven him there, other than some sort of last-ditch effort to learn something actionable in what had been a disastrous trip abroad. Neither Eastling nor Charleston pressed him on the matter; it was more a case of Jack trying to justify his actions to himself.
Then he went into his late-night meeting with Marta Scheuring in her bedroom in the RAF flat. Eastling asked a few pointed questions about how he could be certain this was the real Marta and not, in fact, an imposter. As usual, Eastling’s track of thinking annoyed Ryan, but he explained as thoroughly as he could. Eastling wrote down the name of Ingrid Bretz, and promised he’d look into her.
Jack said, “I’ve checked already with my sources. Langley doesn’t have anything on her. Neither does BfV. If she’s an Ossi, that’s to be expected.”
Nick said, “And your Marta, the real Marta. She said nothing about David Penright, correct?”
Jack saw what Nick was doing. His job was to look into the Penright death, and that was it. He saw all the rest of the intrigue as irrelevant. “How the hell would Marta know about Penright, Nick? She wasn’t in Switzerland. Ingrid was in Switzerland, using Marta’s ID.”
“I’m just clarifying, Ryan. No need to be defensive.”
Sir Basil turned to Eastling. “Nick, go carefully. Jack’s been through quite a lot.”
Jack skipped over some details now, and fast-forwarded to the point when he lost Marta in the street. Then he told them about the cars racing into the area, and the two men who had jumped him
.
Finally, he told them about the Good Samaritan who’d stepped in and quite literally saved his life.
When he was finished, Charleston mumbled, “Incredible story.”
Eastling said, “The BfV found the tunnel this afternoon. They used your statement to go through all the vacant buildings, but it turned out the tunnel was under the floor of an ear doctor’s office on Boyenstrasse. About one hundred meters from where the girl slipped away from you. No telling how long it had been up and running, but from what she told you, it was run by the Stasi themselves, with the doctor being their agent on this side.”
Ryan just nodded, then said, “Marta was adamant the RAF had nothing to do with the attacks in Switzerland. She said she’d been set up by a Russian who went by the code name Zenith. I didn’t tell the BfV about this, but when I got back to CIA station Berlin, I called Jim Greer. He’d never heard the code name, and he checked into it. It’s not something that has ever been on our radar. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Nick Eastling shook his head, but Basil turned to Eastling and said, “Nick, can I ask you to excuse us for a few minutes, please?”
Eastling seemed confused. Basil just nodded at him, and slowly the counterintelligence man stood and left the office.
When the door closed behind Nick, Basil said, “There have been some developments late this afternoon. Things we don’t need to involve Nick in. Frankly, I’m not cleared to involve you, either, but I think you deserve to know.”
“Know what?”
“First things first. West German soldiers manning the border near Göttingen heard a land mine go off in the no-man’s-land between East and West Germany this morning. The area is riddled with mines, of course—it’s how the East keeps its people in. The West German soldiers arrived at the sight of the incident and saw the body of a young German woman there in the no-man’s-land, just as it was being recovered by the East Germans.”
Jack put his head in his hands. “Marta. They fucking killed her.”
“I think that is what happened, but you know how it will be reported in the news, don’t you?”
Jack kept his head down. “They will say East German citizen Ingrid Bretz attempted to flee into the West and was killed by a land mine.”
“Yes,” said Sir Basil. “And proving otherwise will be impossible.”
Jack lifted his head up. “Why couldn’t Eastling hear this?”
“That wasn’t what I wanted to keep from him. It’s Zenith. I first heard the name Zenith today in a meeting I had at Number Ten.”
Ten Downing Street was the headquarters of Her Majesty’s government.
Charleston said, “The PM wasn’t in attendance, but her top staff was, along with Sir Donald Hollis, the director of MI5.”
“MI5? Domestic intelligence?”
“Yes. The meeting was to inform me that Five has been running a concurrent operation in Europe. First I’ve heard of it. It involves the Russian operative called Zenith, who is, at this point, only a rumor.”
“What is MI5’s interest in Zenith?”
“They have an asset in the field who was trying to track Zenith down. Apparently, their asset is missing, somewhere behind the Curtain but last heard from in Hungary.”
“I don’t understand. Hungary is MI6’s responsibility.”
“Quite,” said Basil. “It might not surprise you to know I gave them a bloody earful about the fact I’m just learning about a program run on our turf. I do not have the particulars as to why this was determined to be in the purview of MI5. Perhaps if we knew about this asset in the first place, had some operational influence over him, then he might well still be up and running and not missing.”
“And now they want you to help find him?”
“That’s right. MI5 has gone directly to Downing Street, and they have come to us. Maggie Thatcher herself is asking for updates on this case.”
“Do you think Zenith might really have been the assassin in Switzerland?”
Charleston said, “Jack, you as well as anyone know that the KGB normally uses proxies for international wet work. Bulgarians, for example.”
“That’s the model we’ve seen,” Jack acknowledged. “But there is a lot about the last week that has been a deviation from the Soviet playbook.”
Basil said, “Admittedly true. That said, despite what Marta Scheuring told you, we think it was likely the KGB ordered the RAF to do the killings in Switzerland. Perhaps it wasn’t Marta herself, perhaps it wasn’t even her cell, but we believe Ingrid Bretz was working with the RAF nonetheless. There have been a number of cases of collusion between the organizations, expressly for the benefit of the KGB.”
“So you don’t believe in Zenith?”
“I can only say we have found no evidence there is any sort of KGB assassin running amok in Western Europe. You don’t even know it was KGB who did this. Think about it. Why would they kill Tobias Gabler? According to Morningstar, he managed their account. He was their bloke.”
“Maybe he was going to talk.”
“To whom? Not to Langley. Not to us. Doubtful he was talking to any other Western intelligence service.”
“What if Gabler was talking to the KGB?”
Sir Basil blinked in surprise. “If he was talking to the KGB, why would the KGB kill him?”
Jack said, “I have a theory, Basil. But I can’t prove it.”
Basil replied, “Jack, I want to hear it. I want to know what you make of all of this.”
Ryan said, “I’ve been thinking about it all day. Look at the evidence. Penright’s assertion that there were two groups of Russians in play at RPB. All the effort required to kill everyone with knowledge of the two-hundred-four-million-dollar account. The extraordinary measures to shift blame to the RAF cell, and then to wipe out the cell so they couldn’t proclaim their innocence.”
Jack blew out a long breath. He was almost afraid to say the next part, because, as an analyst, he realized he was reaching into the dangerous land of conjecture.
“I believe the KGB is fighting with itself.”
“Why?”
“It’s over money. The two hundred four million. That much is clear.
“As far as I can see, if the KGB wanted to kill the Swiss bankers and possibly the British agent, they could have gotten the RAF, or some other left-leaning group, to actually do it. They didn’t need to frame them. The fact that they framed them, and then killed them to hide the ruse, makes me think this was not a regular KGB operation.
“That said, the men involved had to have been KGB, because otherwise how would they have all the contacts in place in the Stasi necessary to make this happen?”
Charleston asked, “Why do you think KGB officers have money hidden from the rest of the KGB, and why is it in an account in Western Europe?”
Ryan said, “Isn’t it possible that some of them might be working together just to shave funds off other ops for a rainy day? Squirrel away a fortune in a numbered account—in Switzerland, for example—in case they need means for a quick getaway? Look at the Nazis at the end of World War Two. Those that had access to cash had a means of escape.”
Charleston said, “That’s all speculation, Jack. I don’t want to stifle your fertile brain, it’s come in quite handy, but look at it from my perspective. Have you brought me anything actionable?”
Ryan let out a long soft sigh.
“No. Nothing at all.”
Charleston put up his hands. He’d made a decision. “Eastling wants to close the investigation into the death of David Penright. I am going to deny his request, but without any new information, I suspect it will go dormant. I will also leave the matter of the Zenith operative up to MI5, as they already seem to be working on it without our help. We’ll do what we can for them in Central Europe, ask around about their missing man, but I am afraid if they are coming to us with their hat in their hand like this then it is very likely the man is in a great deal of trouble. It’s probably too late for him.”
Suddenly something occurred to Jack. “How long has this guy been missing? Could he be the man who helped me last night?”
Charleston shook his head. “They tell me he has not checked in for some weeks, and remember, he was an asset behind the lines. In Hungary, they said. West Berlin was not his turf.”
“I don’t have a hell of a lot of experience with the operations side of things, but don’t these guys go long periods of time without checking in? I mean, if he was operational in the field, he can’t exactly jump into a phone booth and call home to London. And don’t they do their own thing from time to time? Who’s to say he didn’t go to West Germany looking for Zenith?”
Charleston thought it over. “I can go back to Hollis and run your concerns by him, but as I said, the missing man is not one of mine, so I can’t speak to his methods of operation.”
Jack sighed again. “So, what happens now?”
Charleston was sympathetic, but there was only so much he could say. “You go home to your wife and your kids, and you hug them tight. You pushed Eastling when he needed to be pushed in Switzerland, and you saved lives in Berlin, nearly at the expense of your own. Be proud of what you’ve done. As long as the MI5 operative is missing, however, we must entertain the idea that he is behind the Curtain. It would be best for him—‘crucial’ is perhaps the better word—that no rumors make the rounds about a missing British spy.”
“You are asking me to keep this from Langley.”
“If MI5 wants to ask Langley for official help, allow them to do that. But as a liaison with MI6, I am requesting your complete discretion in the matter. We don’t want to get the bloke killed by talking about him.”
Jack shook his head. “This operation is nothing but a long list of loose ends.”
“Intelligence work is like that sometimes, lad. The opposition has a say in events just the same as we do.”
“This feels like losing, Basil.”
Sir Basil Charleston put his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “We didn’t lose, Jack. We just didn’t win.”