Commander-In-Chief

  But every now and then, somehow someone still realized who he was.

  “How did you find my apartment?”

  “I followed you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “You didn’t see me,” Salvatore said with a smile. Jack could see blood captured between the man’s teeth. “I am good.”

  “If you’re a photographer and you saw me, why didn’t you take any pictures?” Jack had checked the man’s cracked camera and found nothing but a few pictures of a fountain.

  Salvatore said, “The girl at restaurant told me who you were, but I no sure. I want follow you, wait you are sitting so I can get good pictures.”

  That made sense to Ryan, and he caught himself actually wishing this guy had been some sort of an assassin, because he’d roughed him up so bad.

  Ysabel stepped up behind Jack now. She whispered, “You need to let him go.”

  Jack nodded. Of course he did.

  He looked down at the man on the chair. Blood dripped from his chin again, and his shoulders hung slumped.

  This was going to be awkward.

  Jack knelt down and, with a tone much more conciliatory than before, said, “Look . . . Mr. Salvatore. Here’s the situation. I don’t have security protection, I don’t really need it . . . but the Secret Service insisted I go through some . . . specialized training so I could protect myself if something bad happened.”

  Salvatore said nothing.

  “I’ve had a couple of crazy people come after me in the past. I guess I just overreacted a little this time.” Jack held out a hand. “I hope you will accept my apology.”

  The Italian just stared at him, but after a moment he shook the extended hand.

  Jack said, “I think you’ll be fine, but I’d be more than happy to take you to a doctor.”

  Salvatore shook his head. He said, “You got anything to drink?”

  “Sure, of course.” Jack stood quickly, headed to the refrigerator, and pulled out a bottle of still water. As he turned toward the paparazzo sitting at the kitchen table, the man shook his head. “Wasn’t talking about water. You have grappa?”

  Jack didn’t have any grappa, an Italian brandy, but he did have a six-pack of Moretti beer in his fridge. He wanted more than anything to get this guy out of his apartment, but he felt obliged to drink a beer with him.

  Salvatore drank in silence—mostly, he seemed like he wanted the alcohol, not the fellowship of sharing a beverage.

  Jack muttered a few words here and there about wanting to protect his privacy for the benefit of the people around him, but Salvatore did little more than nod and drink.

  When he finished he stood. Jack said, “Your camera equipment and your phone. What’s that worth?”

  “Ten thousand euros.”

  Jack shook his head. “Try again. That camera is fifteen hundred, and it’s repairable. The lenses might be five hundred each. Another five hundred for the phone. That’s less than three thousand euros.” Jack sighed. “I’ll give you five.”

  Salvatore shrugged, then nodded.

  Jack always carried a lot of cash when he worked an operation. Less this time than usual, because this was only half a mission, as much analysis as anything else. Still, he had exactly five thousand euros hidden under a shelf in the bathroom. He pulled an envelope containing one hundred fifty-euro notes out of a hiding spot in the back bathroom, then handed them over to the Italian.

  Salvatore took the bills and tucked them into his pocket. Ysabel held out the backpack, and he took that and left the apartment without another word.

  Ysabel locked the door behind him, then turned to look at Jack. He could see what she was thinking by the look on her face. She was also worried about what this meant for their time in Rome.

  She asked, “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. Something about that guy . . . I don’t know.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I have to leave. Get out of town. It’s the only way to protect the operation.”

  She said, “Why? I’m sure you aren’t the first person to punch a paparazzo in the nose. It’s a known job hazard for guys like Salvatore.”

  “He’ll talk about this, you can bet on it.”

  “Do you think he’ll call the police?”

  Jack shook his head. “He had enough dope in his backpack to get himself thrown in prison. He knows that I know, so the last thing he’s going to do is go to the cops. They’ll give him a drug test, and that guy is an addict. He won’t be clean, and he knows it.”

  Ysabel shrugged, as if the matter were settled. “So . . . he tells some friends. Some other paparazzi. Maybe somebody camps out with a camera outside. We’ll just deal with that when it happens.”

  Jack shook his head. He’d been playing the double game of espionage a lot longer than Ysabel Kashani had. “I wish we could do that, I really do. But I need to get out of here. You, too, just to avoid any hassle if more media show up. We can sanitize this place and get a hotel room tonight, and I’ll head up to Luxembourg tomorrow.” He wanted to invite her with him, but he had not yet cleared that with his bosses at The Campus.

  Ysabel said, “I thought we had more galleries to check out.”

  “We do. There is another week’s worth of work here. But I can’t compromise the mission by sticking around. If Salvatore really did have a confidante at that café, he might have others all over town. Who’s to say someone in the hotel won’t tip him off, too?”

  Ysabel thought for a moment. “I can stay here, Jack. I’ll just stay in a hotel and visit the remaining galleries. I’ll be finished in less than a week. Done by Saturday.”

  Jack hesitated.

  Ysabel smiled at him. “You said I was a natural.”

  Now Jack chuckled. “Okay. But only to look for pieces that have already been purchased. If you find one of the paintings that has sold, you call me, and I’ll call Gavin to have him hack the gallery. If he can’t, we just move on. I don’t want you sneaking around, trying to plant bugs on their computers. Without me ready to help you out of there, it’s too dangerous.”

  “No problem.” She looked around and sighed now. “I’m going to miss this place.”

  “Me too. I’m sorry. This is my fault. I just thought he was going for a weapon when he reached in his bag.”

  She nodded. “That’s good to know. I won’t make any sudden moves in front of you.”

  “I guess I’m a little jumpy. We saw a lot of action in Dagestan. When this guy started following me, then showed up again, it felt like the real deal.”

  She stepped over and kissed him slowly, running her fingers up the back of his neck and into his hair.

  Jack smiled a little. He was in a shitty mood, but Ysabel was helping. He put his arms around her.

  Ysabel said, “I can hear it in your voice. You feel like you’ve done something wrong. You haven’t. You are very good at what you do, Jack, but you will always have to deal with the fact that your father is a public figure.”

  He shook his head. “Nobody has recognized me in months. Doesn’t happen more than a handful of times a year, and almost never when I’m outside of D.C.”

  She shrugged. “Obviously the guy was telling the truth. You were recognized.”

  Jack nodded, then he changed the subject. “Listen. I was going to ask you after I got it approved, but I’m sure it will be okay. I’d like you to come up to Luxembourg when you’re done here. You can fly up next week. You can help me on my surveillance there.”

  Ysabel broke into a wide smile. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

  “We work well together, don’t you think?”

  She kissed him again. “I think so. We also play well together, wouldn’t you agree?”

  He nodded. “I would.” In minutes they began sanitizing the apartment together. Regardless
of the fact that today’s compromise didn’t put him or Ysabel in danger, Ryan knew he needed to get moving, because just the possibility another paparazzo might show up would destroy the operation he was working on, and he could not let that happen.

  There was something else Jack knew he should do now, but he decided to wait. Standard operating procedure was to report this contact to John Clark. Clark was director of operations for The Campus, and he’d want to know that one of his ops guys was compromised in the field, even if it wasn’t by any foreign intelligence agency or enemy actor.

  Clark would be pissed, not at Jack but at the situation. Jack had busted his ass to transition from straight analytics into fieldwork, and he’d acquitted himself well during many operations, but there was always the possibility that his cover would be blown. Not by any errors in his operational security, but simply by virtue of the fact that he still looked just a tiny little bit like the son of one of the most well-known people on planet earth.

  Jack decided he could wait till tomorrow to let Clark know. For now he grabbed the two beautiful rib eyes wrapped in butcher paper, and he tossed them in the garbage. He had to get moving. For operational security reasons, he and Ysabel had no time for a cookout tonight.

  • • •

  A half-hour after he left Jack Ryan’s rented apartment, Salvatore pulled his scooter into the little driveway next to his apartment on Via Arpino in Municipio V, east of the city center. He locked it to a rack in front of his building, then took the outside stairs quickly to his first-floor flat.

  Inside his apartment, he threw his backpack on a chair, then opened his freezer. He pulled out a frosty bottle of grappa and poured himself a double shot in a water glass, and he drank it down while he walked back to his bedroom.

  Here he grabbed his cordless phone off his bedside table and headed straight to the bathroom, dialing a number from memory as he walked. He looked in the mirror while he waited for the connection to be made.

  A man answered in Italian, with a thick foreign accent. “Prego?”

  Salvatore touched his broken lip with the tip of a finger. He replied in English, “It’s him. You were right.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I just drank a beer with him.”

  “You what?”

  “It’s fine. He does not suspect anything. The identity is confirmed.”

  There was a long pause. Then, “You will find the money in your mail slot in the morning. We have more work for you.”

  Salvatore was surprised by this. “For the same fee?”

  A pause. “The fee is acceptable to us. But the work will be outside of Rome. In Brussels.”

  “No problem.”

  “Good. One week from now, maybe two. We’ll let you know.”

  “Tutto bene.” Then, “Wait . . . there is something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “He is suspicious. He thinks someone is after him. And he’s ready. For trouble, I mean.”

  Salvatore heard the man chuckle, then the line went dead.

  9

  Kaliningrad Oblast is a strange artifact of the Second World War: a Russian province that is not connected to the rest of Russia. It was created out of the redrawing of German borders, when Stalin demanded for himself the German Baltic seaport of Königsberg and the territory around it.

  For nearly fifty years the sequestration of the province from the rest of the Soviet Union served as a strategic benefit for Moscow. Bordered by Poland to the south and east, and Lithuania to the north and east, Kaliningrad Oblast was nestled between Soviet client states, so there was minimal threat of losing it to the West, and it gave the Navy of the USSR easy access to the Baltic. Their Baltic fleet became their most strategically important, as it patrolled waters bordering several NATO nations.

  Kaliningrad was called the most militarized place on earth during the Cold War, because the Soviets staged so many armaments and troops throughout the oblast, ready to defend the Iron Curtain or attack south through Poland and into Germany.

  But after the fall of the Union, the fact that tiny Kaliningrad hung out alone, surrounded by nations no longer obligated to the whims of Moscow, made it extremely vulnerable. And then, when Poland joined NATO in 1999, the segregation of the half-million Russians living hundreds of miles from the Russian mainland became a significant issue indeed. And when Lithuania joined NATO in 2004 along with Estonia and Latvia, the Kremlin went apoplectic, as this meant a Russian province and home to their Baltic Fleet was now surrounded by NATO member states.

  These days the oblast was, essentially, a forward operating base for the Russian military, because Valeri Volodin had spent the last three years pouring troops and matériel into the province en masse as his relationship with the West became more adversarial. The Baltic Fleet had been beefed up with new ships, new missiles, and new naval infantry battalions, all of which threatened both land and sea around the Baltic. The naval air base at Chkalovsk, just a few miles north of Kaliningrad City, housed the Baltic Fleet Air Force, a naval aviation detachment of Su-27 Flanker fighters as well as helicopters, antisubmarine platforms, and transport aircraft. The most robust airfield in the oblast, however, was fifty miles east of Kaliningrad City, at Chernyakhovsk. Here Su-24 Fencers and MiG-31 Foxhounds lived in hardened bunkers and patrolled the skies over the oblast and west over the Baltic Sea.

  Getting all this equipment and personnel into Kaliningrad was no easy feat, but the Russians had it figured out. Supplies were brought in by air transport, of course, but that was only a small fraction of the military needs of the oblast. Since the Russian mainland did not border its most western province, Moscow hashed out an agreement with both Belarus and Lithuania, stipulating that Russia be allowed unrestricted access to Kaliningrad. Russia and Belarus were close allies, but Moscow’s deteriorating relations with all the Baltic nations caused the rail and highway transit routes through Lithuania to become a potential flashpoint for another European war.

  The situation had worsened to the point that many said it was only a matter of time before Volodin threatened Lithuania directly, and after Russia’s one-day attack of Estonia and their armed annexation of the Crimea, many Kremlin watchers determined it would take nothing more than a railroad strike in Lithuania or well-attended protests in Poland for Russia to send troops into their neighbors to establish a permanent corridor to Kaliningrad with the stated purpose of ensuring transit to their western province.

  And if they did this, it didn’t take an expert to know that the reverberations would reach far beyond the Baltics.

  Lithuania was a NATO member state, and one of the major founding principles of NATO’s charter was the concept of “collective self-defense.” This was embodied in the charter’s Article Five. “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense . . . will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith . . . such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

  During the Cold War it was presumed that any attack of any NATO country would be part of an all-out Soviet invasion of the West, so the prospects of NATO’s being drawn into a regional war it didn’t want by Article Five were slim. But now, as small NATO nations in Central Europe found themselves in the crosshairs of Valeri Volodin, NATO leaders across Europe had become shaky, to put it mildly.

  France, for example, wasn’t crazy about the idea of fighting a nation with 310 nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles to defend the honor of tiny Lithuania.

  It was clear that Volodin wanted more territory, and it was somewhat less clear, but still reasonable to assume, that Volodin did not want war with NATO. His Kremlin had become incredibly
adept at taking the political temperature of the NATO countries and then waging a kind of “hybrid war” in the Baltic, careful to keep their actions just below the threshold of an Article Five violation—or, more precisely, below the threshold of what the NATO nations could plausibly deny was an Article Five violation.

  But across the Atlantic, President of the United States Jack Ryan was pushing for tougher reactions against Russia. He had suggested, both publicly and privately to NATO leadership, that the organization’s indecisive moves and nonconfrontational stance to virtually all provocations by Russia was only encouraging a full-on attack. There was nothing stopping Russia from coming over the Lithuanian border, save the prospect of NATO countermeasures, so Ryan quite reasonably felt Europe’s feeble responses to Volodin’s threat and low-intensity action only encouraged him to do more.

  It also kept Lithuania in a constant state of frustration and uncertainty. Recent polls in the small Baltic nation showed most citizens believed their country would be invaded by Russia within the next year.

  All it would take would be that one spark, and the low-intensity hybrid action Volodin had been waging could morph into a full-on military invasion.

  • • •

  The troop train rumbled west over Belarus’s border with Lithuania, passing by the immigration-control buildings and the lines of fences shortly before midnight. It continued on without slowing, and the border guards from both nations barely gave it a glance.

  On board were nearly four hundred soldiers, most from the 7th Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment, but among them were a few dozen members of the 25th Coastal Missile brigade and a mishmash of men and women from other Kaliningrad-based forces returning from leave.

  Two dozen Kaliningrad Oblast government workers returning from vacation in Russia rounded out the personnel on the train, riding exclusively in the first-class cars in the rear.

  The train also carried several military trucks, mostly Army GAZ light cargo vehicles and heavier Ural Typhoon mine-resistant vehicles, along with more than twenty tons of ordnance ranging from handgun rounds for the Army to 130-millimeter high explosive shells for the Navy’s AK-130, a massive auto-fire cannon used by the destroyers in the Baltic Fleet.