Commander-In-Chief

  He passed over Ysabel’s body without allowing himself to focus on it yet as he moved to the window. He looked outside at a fire escape, trained the CZ pistol up toward the roof and then down to the street.

  Three men ran across the little cobblestoned square in front of his apartment building and jumped into the back of the panel truck he saw earlier, just as a pair of police cars rolled onto Place de Clairefontaine.

  Ryan tossed the gun under the bed and then ran to Ysabel’s lifeless body, sliding across the polished hardwood floor on his knees for the last several feet. Cradling her limp head in his hands, he felt wetness in her hair. He knew it was blood; he didn’t have to look.

  “Ysabel?”

  He started to lean down to listen for a heartbeat, fearing the worst, but just as his ear rested on her chest she coughed, weakly.

  Her eyes remained shut and her breathing remained shallow.

  Jack shouted loud enough to be heard all over the floor of the building in both French and German. “Aidez-moi! Hilf mir! Ambulance! Krankenwagen!”

  Ryan shoved his hand into the side pocket of his blazer and breathed a prayer of thanks that he found what he was looking for.

  John Clark had demanded of his team that they never went anywhere without their personal trauma kit, a tiny package of items designed by Clark and Chavez. Jack and Dom hated the things; while Clark touted them as being tiny, as far as the two rather fashionable men in their early thirties were concerned, they weren’t nearly small enough. Dom derisively referred to the PTK as his “diaper bag,” and Jack called it “Clark’s booboo pouch.”

  After listening to the two younger members of his team bitch long enough, Chavez came up with the idea to have the kit items taken out of their pouch and put in plastic bags, which could then be vacuum-sealed, and this made them just larger than two decks of cards stacked on top of each other. They would just fit in the front pocket of a pair of pants now, and Jack and Dom stopped their complaining. It was still a hassle to carry a med kit twenty-four hours a day, even when they weren’t in the middle of a mission, but both men knew when to pick their battles, so they kept the packets on them at all times.

  Now Ryan thanked God that he’d been forced into carrying the damn thing, and he tore the PTK open with his teeth and dumped the contents onto the floor next to Ysabel. He tossed the tourniquet to the side; she wasn’t hemorrhaging from an appendage, although she was bleeding badly from several head and neck wounds.

  He used one of the pressure bandages on her forehead and another on a gash on her neck that looked like a deep puncture wound. While covering the bloody cut, he realized she’d come a half-inch from having her carotid artery severed by a knife’s blade.

  He used gauze and electrical tape from the kit to stanch the bleeding on her upper-left arm and the bridge of her nose.

  He knew the paramedics would likely just remove the majority of his bandaging and apply their own dressings, because they would want to evaluate the wounds. But Jack didn’t care. He had no idea how much blood Ysabel could lose between now and when they’d get here, so stopping the bleeding and keeping her stable were paramount.

  With cuts and bruises as bad as he could see, he feared she might have many broken bones and even damage to her organs. He had no idea if she was bleeding internally. He’d done good work on the injuries he could see, but he had no idea if he’d done enough to save her life.

  Her face was pale under the smeared blood and the gray and purple contusions.

  After stabilizing her head, he moved her arms onto her lap. While doing so he noticed all the defensive wounds on her hands. There were cuts on her palms and fingers. In addition to this, her knuckles looked like she’d punched one of her attackers, and hard.

  “Good girl,” he whispered, his voice cracking with emotion as he did so.

  From behind he heard a man’s voice, speaking English. “Who are you?”

  Jack spun around quickly, his right hand moving closer to the gun hidden under the bed.

  A heavyset man in his early twenties stood in the doorway to the hall, shock on his face. His hands were empty.

  Jack slipped his hand away from the pistol. “I live here. Who are you?”

  “I am a neighbor.”

  “Call an ambulance.”

  “Four C has already called. The ambulance is coming.”

  Jack had no idea who this guy was, but he needed the help right now. “Did you see who did this?”

  “No. I only just arrived.”

  Jack felt the man staring at him.

  “You are husband? Her husband?”

  “No.” He thought while he worked on her arm. “I am her friend. I just got here myself.”

  The young man relaxed a little; he’d been scared by the possibility he’d stumbled onto some sort of a domestic fight, and the man who now treated the woman had just minutes ago beaten the woman. This made Jack confident the man had not been involved in the attack himself, although this guy was too portly to fit in with the three other members of the crew Jack had already encountered.

  The neighbor asked, “Who did this?”

  Jack shook his head while he frantically treated her. He had the presence of mind to answer the man carefully. He knew the police would be here soon, and they would take statements. What he said to this neighbor could mean the difference between the cops letting him leave Luxembourg or throwing him behind bars. “I don’t know. She comes from a political family back home. There had been some threats.”

  The young man nodded again, and he asked no more questions.

  Other neighbors entered soon after, and the police made it up to the fourth floor not long after that. They assured Jack the ambulance was on its way.

  Ryan knew he needed to call Clark or Gerry and let them know what had happened, but he had no idea if Ysabel was going to survive the next few minutes. There was no way he was going to make a phone call until she was stabilized. Instead, he just huddled over her, rubbed her hand and her forehead with a wet compress one of the neighbors brought, and kept talking to her, telling her she would be fine.

  The police let him stay with her, only because they didn’t have a clue he’d just shot a man and severely injured two others in the building. As they tried to figure out what was going on, Jack hoped they didn’t look under the bed and find the pistol he’d slid there. To reduce the chance of this even more, as he knelt behind the police, he pushed his left foot back, slid it under the bed, and shoved the gun further out of sight of anyone who wasn’t specifically checking for something hidden there. They might find it eventually, but Jack was hoping he’d be long gone by then.

  Ysabel’s eyes opened a little, and they focused on his face. He soothed her with his words, again told her she would be okay, although he had no idea what sort of internal injuries she might have suffered.

  She said, “I’m sorry, Jack. There were too many.”

  “Don’t be sorry. You did great. You’re going to be fine, just rest.”

  But she wanted to talk. “The men . . .”

  “The men? Yes? Do you know who they were? I couldn’t identify the accents.”

  She just shook her head. “The one . . . the one in charge. The one who did this to me.”

  “Yes?”

  Ysabel’s voice cracked, and tears drained down the side of her face.

  “Russian.”

  Jack felt the life drain out of him. Russian. He felt certain this had happened to her because of him. Because of his safe little operation in Western Europe, the one with the opportunity to roam art galleries during the day and enjoy nice restaurants at night.

  “God damn,” Ryan muttered under his breath. Looking at Ysabel’s impossibly swollen face, the blood seeping through her bandages, her lip split and her eyes blackened, he knew this was all his fault.

  Two paramedics pushed through t
he growing crowd in the apartment, then they all but knocked Ryan out of the way. He stood back against the wall by the bedside table.

  They concentrated on stabilizing her neck, then they rolled her onto a backboard for transport.

  Within three minutes of arriving in the apartment, the paramedics were yelling for the police to make a pathway through the dozen or so people standing around so they could get by and back down to their unit.

  Jack stood to the side for most of this, but he helped clear out some space in the living room for Ysabel’s stretcher to pass.

  Jack started to walk out the door behind the paramedics and the stretcher, but one of the policemen stopped him. He said, “We’ll take you to the hospital, but we have questions.”

  “Ask me on the way.” Jack wanted to rush to be by Ysabel’s side, but he also wanted a few minutes to think about his story.

  “One moment first. Do you have identification?”

  Ryan handed over his actual passport, because he was not traveling undercover here. The police officer looked it over quickly, showing no recognition of the name. “What is the woman’s name?”

  “Ysabel. Ysabel Kashani.”

  “American, as well?”

  “No, Iranian.”

  The cop looked up at Ryan. After a moment he said, “This is your apartment?”

  “I am renting it, just for a week or two. Did you find the men outside of the apartment?”

  “The men? There was just one man. In the elevator.”

  Shit, thought Jack. The two less wounded goons managed to get out of the building before the police arrived. Still, at least they had picked up one of the men.

  “How is he?”

  “He’s dead. Did you shoot him?”

  “Me? No, of course not. I was on the phone with Ysabel when she was attacked. I raced over here and found the men outside. Then I found her.” Jack could not have admitted shooting someone without getting detained for a long time. Even if he could convince them he’d taken a weapon from one of the attackers, he knew it would take longer to sort out than he wanted to spend as a guest of the Luxembourg police.

  The police officer didn’t seem to buy his story. “There are cameras down in the lobby and in the elevators. One on each floor. We’ll see what happened.”

  Jack nodded, then said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Two cops stood outside the bathroom while Jack stumbled in. They were obviously suspicious of him still, though not enough to search him.

  In the bathroom he turned the water on, faked a few hacks, then he pulled out his phone and dialed a mobile number in Alexandria, Virginia. Jack held his breath, hoping the man who owned the phone would answer quickly.

  To his relief, he heard a voice. “Gavin Biery.”

  Ryan hacked loudly again, then whispered, “It’s Ryan. Listen carefully. Five Place de Clairefontaine, I need the security cam footage of the last hour removed from the drive. You have five minutes, tops.”

  “How many things can I do for you at one time, Ryan? Hack this art gallery, hack this lawyer, tail this aircraft, erase these cameras. You don’t think I have anything else going on?”

  “I just killed a man. The police have me and they are about to watch the footage.”

  The pause was short. “Holy shit! I’m on it, Ryan.” He hung up the phone.

  Jack hung up as well, flushed the toilet, and left the bathroom.

  There was a moment of confusion in the apartment while the police worked out who was going where and with whom, and men started to lock down the crime scene. Violent crime in Luxembourg was rare, rare enough that Jack saw the police weren’t defaulting to any real standard procedure. There was a lot of talking and even a little arguing, all of it in German. Jack took advantage of the moment to go into the kitchen and get a glass of water, and while he did so he saw Ysabel’s purse lying on the counter, its contents strewn all around it.

  He ignored the contents and concentrated on the bag itself, began feeling around in the material quickly.

  In ten seconds he found it, feeling a small, hard shape in the leather in a place where he could find no button or zipper. He pinched at the material for a moment more, then pulled out a one-inch-long pin with a small black head.

  He knew what this was, and he knew how it got there.

  32

  By the time Jack’s police minders got him to the hospital it had been worked out by the authorities that the man in their control was the son of the U.S. President. Jack explained he was in town working for his company, Hendley Associates, doing some forensic accounting on some potential acquisitions for the private equity firm. Ysabel was a friend who had just arrived for a visit, and she’d obviously stumbled onto a robbery in progress.

  The police weren’t sure about anything other than the fact that this crime made their tiny nation look bad, especially because of the high-profile friend of the victim.

  The police immediately became deferential to him, but Jack imagined they would change their tune quickly if the handgun at the crime scene was found and dusted for prints, and he refused to give his up.

  He wanted to be long gone by then.

  Ysabel had been given an MRI to check her head, neck, and torso for any internal injuries. Jack had only just arrived when a doctor came out of an exam room, introduced himself to Jack as a neurosurgeon, and told him that Ysabel was a lucky woman, considering all she’d been through, but she wasn’t out of the woods just yet. A small fracture in a cervical vertebra meant she would need immediate surgery.

  Jack went pale. “You are telling me she has a broken neck.”

  The doctor gave a sympathetic shrug. “It is something we can repair. There is no damage to her spinal cord.” He patted Jack on the arm. “A one-level cervical fusion is an extremely common procedure. Trust us, Mr. Ryan, we will take good care of her.”

  Jack wasn’t next of kin, and the doctors knew this. They were going ahead with the surgery despite any reservations he had. Jack just nodded distantly and sat back down, staring off into space.

  He thought about everything he and Ysabel had experienced together over the past month. He felt sick with the thought that after the events in Dagestan that nearly killed them both, he had led her headlong into even more danger.

  Ryan’s mobile buzzed in his pocket, bringing him back to the present. He pulled it out distractedly, looked down, and saw the call coming in was from Clark. He launched out of the chair and began to walk away from Ysabel’s room. “Please tell me Gavin got the camera feeds.”

  “He did. I just watched the entire event, including you taking out three hostiles. Obviously, I don’t have the context I need to understand what the hell is happening over there.”

  “Neither do I, to tell you the truth.”

  “Are you secure now?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I think so. Might have to slip the police at some point, but they don’t seem too interested in me, considering. I don’t think they have much of a plan to deal with a big gun battle around here. I get the feeling it never happens.”

  “How is Ysabel? I saw her removed on a stretcher.”

  “They say she’ll live, but she’s being taken in for surgery on her neck.”

  “Christ. I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, you need to take it from the top, tell me everything you know.” He paused for a beat, then said, “And I need you to do it right now.”

  Jack told him what had happened, and although he had no idea who was responsible, he let Clark know this looked like it could have been related to the work they were doing in Rome. He said, “It’s obvious by the fact they were asking her about me that she wasn’t the real target. I was.”

  Clark said, “Any idea how they found your place?”

  Ryan said, “Yeah. They used Ysabel to find the locati
on. I found a GPS tracker in her purse. It’s the size of a pushpin. Top-flight tech.”

  “That doesn’t sound Russian.”

  “No. It looks commercial, but top of the line.”

  “Do you know how it was planted?”

  “Last week she told me a woman knocked over her purse in the bathroom, then helped her pick up all the contents. About a half-hour after that a man who was following me showed up in my apartment building.”

  As soon as Ryan said this, he winced, anticipating the admonitions to come.

  Clark’s voice rose and his tone lowered. “What man?”

  “I should have called this in, John. I screwed up. It’s just that he didn’t—”

  “What man, Ryan?”

  “An Italian paparazzo tailed me in Rome. I thought I shook him, but he showed up back at the condo. I roughed him up a bit, thought he was a bad actor of some sort, but when he proved he was just a stupid photographer, and convinced me he’d been tipped off to me by a girl in a café who recognized me, I didn’t think it was anything related to the op I was on. Just the occasional negative aspect of being Jack Ryan’s son.

  “Still, though, just to be safe, Ysabel and I left the condo immediately. She got a hotel down there to finish up our work in Rome, and I came up here to Lux City. I thought that was the end of it.”

  “Damn it, Jack! It is your job to call in contacts and compromises. Do you have any idea the danger that exposure put you in?”

  “Yes . . . I mean, no, I didn’t. It’s pretty fucking clear now,” Jack said darkly. His eyes shot back up the hall toward Ysabel’s room. A pair of orderlies were rolling her unconscious body down the hall to surgery.

  Clark asked, “Who was the photographer?”

  “Salvatore.”

  “Salvatore what?”

  “He just goes by one name.”

  Clark mumbled softly, “I hate him already.”

  “Tell me about it. I didn’t trust the bastard, but we checked him out online, and he is a legit paparazzo . . . if such a thing exists. Anyway, I was satisfied he wasn’t working with the Russians.”