Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (386 page)

“What sort of people are they?”

“The SAS team? Good blokes, very polite chaps. They make no trouble for me and my mates at all.”

“What about the Americans?” Popov asked. “I’ve never really known any, but you hear stories about how they do things their own way and—”

“Not in my experience. Well, I mean, only lately have we had any at the base, but the two or three I’ve worked for are just like our chaps—and remember I told you, they try to tip us! Bloody Yanks! But friendly chaps. Most of them have kids, and the children are lovely. Learning to play proper football now, some of them. So, what are you doing around here?”

“Meeting with the local ironmongers, trying to get them to carry my brands of tools, and also the local distributor.”

“Lee and Dopkin?” The plumber shook his head. “Both are old buggers, they won’t change very much. You’ll do better with the little shops than with them, I’m afraid.”

“Well, how about your shop? Can I sell
you
some of my tools?”

“I don’t have much of a budget—but, well, I’ll look at your wrenches.”

“When can I come in?”

“Security, mate, is rather tight here. I doubt they’ll allow me to drive you onto the base . . . but, well, I could bring you in with me—say, tomorrow afternoon?”

“I’d like that. When?”

“Tomorrow afternoon? I could pick you up here.”

“Yes,” Popov said. “I’d like that.”

“Excellent. We can have a ploughman’s lunch here and then I’ll take you in myself.”

“I’ll be here at noon,” Popov promised. “With my tools.”

Cyril Holt was over fifty, and had the tired look of a senior British civil servant. Well dressed in a finely tailored suit and an expensive tie—clothing over there, Clark knew, was excellent, but not exactly cheap—he shook hands all around and took his seat in John’s office.

“So,” Holt said. “I gather we have a problem here.”

“You’ve read the intercept?”

“Yes.” Holt nodded. “Good work by your NSA chaps.” He didn’t have to add that it was good work by his chaps as well, identifying the line used by the
rezident.

“Tell me about Kirilenko,” Clark said.

“Competent chap. He has a staff of eleven field officers, and perhaps a few other off-the-books helpers to do pickups and such. Those are all ‘legals’ with diplomatic cover. He has illegals as well who report to him, of course. We know two of them, both covered as businessmen who do real business in addition to espionage. We’ve been building up this book for some time. In any case, Vanya is a competent, capable chap. He’s covered as the embassy’s third secretary, does his diplomatic duties like a genuine diplomat, and is well liked by the people with whom he comes into contact. Bright, witty, good chap to have a pint with. Drinks beer more than vodka, oddly enough. He seems to like it in London. Married, two children, no bad habits that have come to our attention. His wife doesn’t work at all, but we haven’t seen anything covert on her part. Just a housewife, so far as we can discern. Also well liked in the diplomatic community.” Holt passed across photographs of both. “Now,” he went on, “just yesterday our friend was having a friendly pint in his favorite pub. It’s a few blocks from the embassy in Kensington, close to the palace—the embassy dates back to the Czars, just like the one you have in Washington—and this pub is rather upscale. Here’s the enhanced photo of the chap he had his beer with.” Another photo was passed across.

The face, Clark and Tawney saw, was grossly ordinary. The man had brown hair and eyes, regular features, and was about as distinctive as a steel garbage can in an alley. In the photo, he was dressed in jacket and tie. The expression on his face was unremarkable. They might have been discussing football, the weather, or how to kill someone they both didn’t like—there was no telling.

“I don’t suppose he has a regular seat?” Tawney asked.

“No, usually sits at the bar, but sometimes in a booth, and rarely in the same seat twice in a row. We’ve thought about placing a bug,” Holt told them, “but it’s technically difficult, it would let the publican know we’re up to something, and it’s very doubtful that we’d get anything useful from it. His English is superb, by the way. The publican seems to think he’s a Briton from the North Country.”

“Does he know you’re following him?” Tawney asked, before Clark could.

Holt shook his head. “Hard to say, but we do not think so. The surveillance teams switch off, and they’re some of my best people. They go to this pub regularly, even when he’s not there, in case he has a chap of his own there to do countersurveillance. The buildings in the area allow us to track him fairly easily by camera. We’ve seen a few possible brush-passes, but you both know the drill on that. We all bump into people on a crowded sidewalk, don’t we? They’re not all brush-passes. That’s why we teach our field officers to do it. Especially when the streets are crowded, you can have a dozen cameras on your subject and not see it being done.”

Clark and Tawney both nodded at that. The brush-pass had probably been around as long as spies had. You walked down a street and at most you pretended to bump into someone. In the process, his hand delivered something into yours, or dropped it in your pocket, and with minimal practice it was virtually invisible even to people watching for it. To be successful, only one of the parties had to wear something distinctive, and that could be a carnation in your buttonhole, the color of a necktie or the way one carried a newspaper, or sunglasses, or any number of other markers known only to the participants in the mini-operation. It was the simplest of examples of fieldcraft, the easiest to use, and for that reason the curse of counterespionage agencies.

But if he did a pass to this Popov guy, they had a photograph of the bastard. Maybe had it, he reminded himself. There was no guarantee that the guy he’d drunk with yesterday was the right fellow. Maybe Kirilenko was swift enough that he’d go to a pub and strike up a conversation with some other patron just to piss the “Five” people off and give them another randomly selected person to check out. Doing that required personnel and time, neither of which the Security Service had in infinite quantities. Espionage and counterespionage remained the best damned game in town, and even the players themselves never really knew what the score was.

“So, you’ll increase your coverage of Kirilenko?” Bill Tawney asked.

“Yes.” Holt nodded. “But do remember we’re up against a highly skilled player. There are no guarantees.”

“I know that, Mr. Holt. I’ve been in the field, and the Second Chief Directorate never got their hands on me,” Clark told the visitor from the Security Service. “So anything at all on Popov?”

He shook his head. “That name is not in our files. It’s possible, I suppose, that we have him under another name. Perhaps he’s been in contact with our PIRA friends—that actually seems likely, if he’s a terrorism specialist. There were many such contacts. We’ve got informers inside the PIRA, and I’m thinking about showing the photograph to some of them. But that’s something we have to do carefully. Some of our informers are doubles. Our Irish friends have their own counterespionage operations, remember?”

“I’ve never worked directly against them,” John said next. “How good are they?”

“Bloody good,” Holt assured him, catching a nod also from Bill Tawney. “They’re highly dedicated, and superbly organized, but now the organization’s fragmenting somewhat. Obviously, some of them do not want peace to break out. Our good friend Gerry Adams is by profession a publican, and if the Troubles come to an end, and he fails to get himself elected to high public office, as he clearly hopes, then his fallback job is rather lower in prestige than the position he now holds—but the majority of them seem willing to terminate their operations, declare victory, and give peace a chance. That has helped our informer-recruiting somewhat, but there are elements of the PIRA who are more militant today than they were ten years ago. It’s a cause for concern,” Holt told them.

“Same story in the Bekaa Valley,” Clark agreed. What did you do when Satan came to Jesus? Some would never want to stop fighting sin, and if that meant creating some sin themselves, well, that was just the cost of doing business, wasn’t it? “They just don’t want to let go.”

“That is a problem. And I need not tell you that one of the main targets of those chaps is right here. The SAS is not exactly beloved of the PIRA.”

That wasn’t news either. The British Special Air Service commandos had gone into the field often enough to “sort out” IRA members who had made the two serious mistakes of breaking the law and being known. John thought it a mistake to use soldiers to perform what was essentially a police function—but then he had to admit that Rainbow was tasked to that exact mission, in a manner of speaking. But the SAS had done things that in some contexts could be called premeditated murder. Britain, much as it resembled America in so many ways, was a different country with different laws and very different rules in some areas. So security at Hereford was tight, because someday ten or so bad guys might appear with AK-47s and an attitude, and his people, like many of the resident SAS troops, had families, and terrorists didn’t always respect the rights of noncombatants, did they? Not hardly.

The decision had come with unusual speed from Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, and a courier was now on his way. Kirilenko was surprised to get the coded message. The courier was flying Aeroflot to Heathrow with a diplomatic bag, which was inviolable so long as the courier kept it in his possession—countries had been known to steal them for their contents, which were often uncoded, but couriers knew about that, and played by a strict set of rules—if they had to visit the can, so did the bag. And so with their diplomatic passports they breezed through control points and went off to the waiting cars that were always there, carrying the usually canvas bags often full of valuable secrets past the eyes of people who would trade their daughters’ virtue for one look.

So it happened here. The courier arrived on the evening flight from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International, was waved through customs, and hopped into the waiting car driven by an embassy employee. From there it was a mere forty minutes through rush-hour traffic to Kensington, and from there to Kirilenko’s office. The manila envelope was sealed with wax to ensure that it hadn’t been tampered with. The
rezident
thanked the courier for this and two other packages and went to work. It was late enough that he’d have to pass on his usual pint of bitter tonight. It was an annoyance to him. He honestly enjoyed the atmosphere of his favorite pub. There was nothing like it in Moscow, or any of the other countries he’d served in. So now, in his hands was the complete dossier on Clark, John T., senior CIA field officer. It ran to twenty single-spaced pages, plus three photographs. He took the time to read the package over. It was impressive. According to this, in his first and only meeting with Chairman Golovko, he’d admitted to smuggling the wife and daughter of former KGB Chairman Gerasimov right out of the country . . . using a
submarine
to do it? So, the story he’d read in the Western media was true? It was like something from Hollywood. Then later he’d operated in Romania around the time of Nicolae Ceauçescu’s downfall, then in cooperation with Station Tokyo he’d rescued the Japanese prime minister, and again with Russian assistance participated in the elimination of Mamoud Haji Daryaei? “Believed to have the ear of the American president,” the analysis page pronounced—and well he should! Kirilenko thought. Sergey Nikolay’ch Golovko himself had added his thoughts to the file. A highly competent field officer, an independent thinker, known to take his own initiative on operations, and believed never to have put a foot wrong . . . training officer at the CIA Academy in Yorktown, Virginia, believed to have trained both Edward and Mary Patricia Foley, respectively the Director of Central Intelligence and the Deputy Director for Operations. This was one formidable officer, Kirilenko thought. He’d impressed Golovko himself, and few enough Russians accomplished that.

So, now, he was in England somewhere, doing something covert, and his parent agency wanted to know about it, because you tried very hard to keep track of such people. The
rezident
took the paper scrap from his wallet. It looked like a cellular phone number. He had several of those in his desk drawers, all cloned from existing accounts, because it kept his signals people busy, cost the embassy no money, and was very secure. Tapping into a known cellular account was difficult, but absent the electronic codes, it was just one more signal in a city awash in them.

Dmitriy Arkadeyevich had the same thing. In every city in the world were people who cloned phones and sold them illegally on the street. London was no exception.

“Yes?” a distant voice said.

“Dmitriy, this is Vanya.”

“Yes?”

“I have the package you requested. I will require payment in the terms we agreed upon.”

“It will be done,” Popov promised. “Where can we make the exchange?”

That was easy. Kirilenko proposed the time, place, and method.

“Agreed.” And the connection broke after a mere seventy seconds. Perhaps Popov had been RIF’d, but he still knew about communications discipline.

CHAPTER 20

CONTACTS

She knew she was sick. She wasn’t sure how much, but Mary Bannister knew that she didn’t feel well. And through the drugs, part of her worried that it might be serious. She’d never been in a hospital, except once to the local emergency room for a sprained ankle that her father worried might be broken, but now she was in a hospital-type bed with an IV tree next to her, and a clear plastic line that ran down into the inside of her right arm, and just the sight of it frightened her, despite the drugs going into her system. She wondered what they were giving her. Dr. Killgore had said fluids to keep her hydrated and some other stuff, hadn’t he? She shook her head, trying to get the cobwebs loose enough to remember. Well, why not find out? She swung her legs to the right and stood, badly and shakily, then bent down to look at the items hanging on the tree. She had trouble making her eyes focus, and bent closer, only to find that the markings on the tag-tapes were coded in a way she didn’t understand. Subject F4 stood back up and tried to frown in frustration but didn’t quite make it. She looked around the treatment room. Another bed was on the far side of what appeared to be a brick partition about five feet high, but it was unoccupied. There was a TV, off at the moment, hanging on the far wall. The floor was tile, and cold on her bare feet. The door was wood, and had a latch rather than a knob—it was a standard hospital door, but she didn’t know that. No phone anywhere. Didn’t hospitals have phones in the room? Was she
in
a hospital? It looked and seemed like one, but she knew that her brain was working more slowly than usual, though she didn’t know how she knew. It was as if she’d had too much to drink. Besides feeling ill, she felt vulnerable not in total command of herself. It was time to do
something,
though exactly what she wasn’t sure. She stood there for a brief time to consider it, then took the tree in her right hand and started walking for the door. Fortunately, the electronic control unit on the tree was battery-powered and not plugged into the wall. It rolled easily on the rubber wheels.