Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (461 page)

“You know, Jack,” the Chief of Staff said after sipping his coffee. “We really haven’t got past the idea of kings and queens. A lot of people really do think you have that sort of personal power—”

“But I don’t, Arnie, how can that be?”

“It just is the truth, Jack. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just is. Deal with it.”

I do so love these lessons,
Ryan thought to himself. “Okay, today is ... ?”

“Social Security.”

Ryan’s eyes relaxed. “I’ve been reading up on that. The third rail of American political life. Touch it and die.”

For the next half hour, they discussed what was wrong and why, and the irresponsibility of the Congress, until Jack sat back with a sigh.

“Why don’t they learn, Arnie?”

“What do they need to learn?” Arnie asked, with the grin of a Washington insider, one of the anointed of God. “They’ve been
elected.
They must know it all already! How else do you think they got here?”

“Why the hell did I allow myself to stay in this damned place?” the President asked rhetorically.

“Because you had a conscience attack and decided to do the right thing for your country, you dumbass, that’s why.”

“Why is it you’re the only person who can talk to me like that?”

“Besides the Vice President? Because I’m your teacher. Back to today’s lesson. We
could
leave Social Security alone this year. It’s in decent enough fiscal shape to last another seven to nine years without intervention, and that means you could leave it to your successor to handle—”

“That’s not ethical, Arnie,” Ryan snapped.

“True,” the Chief of Staff agreed, “but it’s good politics, and fairly Presidential. It’s called letting sleeping dogs lie.”

“You don’t do that in the knowledge that as soon as it wakes up, it’s going to rip the baby’s throat out.”

“Jack, you really ought to be a king. You’d be a good one,” van Damm said, with what appeared to be genuine admiration.

“Nobody can handle that kind of power.”

“I know: ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power is actually pretty neat.’ So said a staffer for one of your predecessors.”

“And the bastard wasn’t hanged for saying it?”

“We need to work on that sense of humor, Mr. President. That was meant as a joke.”

“The scariest part of this job is that I do see the humor of it. Anyway, I told George Winston to start a quiet project to see what we can do with Social Security. Quiet project, I mean classified—black, this project doesn’t exist.”

“Jack, if you have one weakness as President, that’s it. You’re into this secrecy thing too much.”

“But if you do something like this in the open, you get clobbered by ill-informed criticism before you manage to produce anything, and the press crawls up your ass demanding information you don’t have yet, and so then they go make up stuff on their own, or they go to some yahoo who just makes up bullshit, and then
we
have to answer it.”

“You are learning,” Arnie judged. “That’s exactly how it works in this town.”

“That does not constitute ’working’ by any definition I know of.”

“This is Washington, a government town. Nothing is really supposed to function efficiently here. It would scare the hell out of the average citizen if the government started to function properly.”

“How about I just fucking resign?” Jack asked the ceiling. “If I can’t get this damned mess to start working, then why the hell am I here?”

“You’re here because some Japanese 747 pilot decided to crash the party at the House Chamber fifteen months ago.”

“I suppose, Arnie, but I still feel like a damned fraud.”

“Well, by my old standards, you are a fraud, Jack.”

Ryan looked up. “Old standards?”

“Even when Bob Fowler took over the statehouse in Ohio, Jack, even he didn’t try as hard as you to play a fair game, and Bob got captured by the system, too. You haven’t yet, and that’s what I like about you. More to the point, that’s what Joe Citizen likes about you. They may not like your positions, but everybody knows you try damned hard, and they’re sure you’re not corrupt. And you’re not. Now: Back to Social Security.”

“I told George to get a small group together, swear them to secrecy, and make recommendations—more than one—and at least one of them has to be completely outside the box.”

“Who’s running this?”

“Mark Gant, George’s technical guy.”

The Chief of Staff thought that one over for a moment. “Just as well you keep it quiet. The Hill doesn’t like him. Too much of a smart-ass.”

“And they’re not?” SWORDSMAN asked.

“You were naive with that, Jack. The people you tried to get elected, non-politicians, well, you semi-succeeded. A lot of them
were
regular people, but what you didn’t allow for was the seductive nature of life in elected government service. The money isn’t all that great, but the perks are, and a lot of people
like
being treated like a medieval prince. A lot of people
like
being able to enforce their will on the world. The people who used to be there, the ones that pilot fried in their seats, they started off as pretty good people, too, but the nature of the job is to seduce and capture. Actually, the mistake you made was to allow them to keep their staffs. Honestly, I think the problem down there is in the staffers, not the bosses. You have ten or more people around you all the time telling you how great you are, sooner or later you start believing that crap.”

“Just so you don’t do that to me.”

“Not in this lifetime,” Arnie assured him, as he stood to leave. “Make sure Secretary Winston keeps me in the loop on the Social Security project.”

“No leaks,” Ryan told his Chief of Staff forcefully.

“Me? Leak something? Me?” van Damm replied with open hands and an innocent face.

“Yeah, Arnie, you.” As the door closed, the President wondered how fine a spook Arnie might have made. He lied with the plausibility one might associate with a trusted member of the clergy, and he could hold all manner of contradictory thoughts in his head at the same time, like the best of circus jugglers ... and somehow they never quite crashed to earth. Ryan was the current president, but the one member of the administration who could not be replaced was the chief of staff he’d inherited from Bob Fowler, by way of Roger Durling ...

And yet, Jack wondered, how much was he being manipulated by this staff employee? The truthful answer was that he couldn’t tell, and that was somewhat troubling. He trusted Arnie, but he trusted Arnie because he had to trust him. Jack would not know what to do without him ... but was that a good thing?

Probably not,
Ryan admitted to himself, checking over his appointment list, but neither was being here in the Oval Office, and Arnie was at worst one more thing not to like about this job, and at best, he was a scrupulously honest, extremely hardworking, and utterly dedicated public servant ...

... just like everyone else in Washington, D.C.,
Ryan’s cynicism added.

CHAPTER 6

Expansion

M
oscow is eight hours ahead of Washington, a source of annoyance to diplomats who are either a day behind the times or too far out of synch with their body clocks to conduct business properly. This was more a problem for the Russians, as by five or six in the evening, most of them had had a few stiff drinks, and given the relative speed of all diplomatic exchange, it was well into the falling night in Moscow before American diplomats emerged from their “working lunches” to issue a démarche or communiqué, or a simple letter of reply to whatever the Russians had issued the previous working day. In both capitals, of course, there was always a night crew to read and evaluate things on a more timely basis, but these were underlings, or at best people on their way up but not quite there yet, who always had to judge which possibility was worse: waking up a boss with something unworthy of the nighttime phone call, or delaying until the post-breakfast morning something that the minister or secretary ought to have been informed of
right now!
And more than one career had been made or broken on such seeming trivialities.

In this particular case, it would not be a diplomat’s hide at risk. It was six-fifteen on the Russian spring evening, the sun high in the sky still, in anticipation of the “White Nights” for which the Russian summer is justly famous.

“Yes, Pasha?” Lieutenant Provalov said. He’d taken over Klusov from Shablikov. This case was too important to leave in anyone else’s hands—and besides, he’d never really trusted Shablikov: There was something a little too corrupt about him.

Pavel Petrovich Klusov was not exactly an advertisement for the quality of life in the new Russia. Hardly one hundred sixty-five centimeters or so in height, but close to ninety kilos, he was a man the bulk of whose calories came in liquid form, who shaved poorly when he bothered at all, and whose association with soap was less intimate than it ought to have been. His teeth were crooked and yellow from the lack of brushing and a surfeit of smoking cheap, unfiltered domestic cigarettes. He was thirty-five or so, and had perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of making forty-five, Provalov estimated. It was not as though he’d be much of a loss to society, of course. Klusov was a petty thief, lacking even the talent—or courage—to be a major violator of the law. But he knew those who were, and evidently scampered around them like a small dog, performing minor services, like fetching a bottle of vodka, the Militia lieutenant thought. But Klusov did have ears, which many people, especially criminals, had an odd inability to consider.

“Avseyenko was killed by two men from St. Petersburg. I do not know their names, but I think they were hired by Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov. The killers are former Spetsnaz soldiers with experience in Afghanistan, in their late thirties, I think. One is blond, the other red-haired. After killing Grisha, they flew back north before noon on an Aeroflot flight.”

“That is good, Pasha. Have you seen their faces?”

A shake of the head: “No, Comrade Lieutenant. I learned this from ... someone I know, in a drinking place.” Klusov lit a new cigarette with the end of its predecessor.

“Did your acquaintance say why our friend Suvorov had Avseyenko killed?”
And who the hell is Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov?
the policeman wondered. He hadn’t heard that name before, but didn’t want Klusov to know that quite yet. Better to appear omniscient.

The informant shrugged. “Both were KGB, maybe there was bad blood between them.”

“What exactly is Suvorov doing now?”

Another shrug: “I don’t know. Nobody does. I am told he lives well, but the source of his income, no one knows.”

“Cocaine?” the cop asked.

“It is possible, but I do not know.” The one good thing about Klusov was that he didn’t invent things. He told the (relatively) unvarnished truth ... most of the time, the militia lieutenant told himself.

Provalov’s mind was already spinning. Okay, a former KGB officer had hired two former Spetsnaz soldiers to eliminate another former KGB officer who’d specialized in running girls. Had this Suvorov chap approached Avseyenko for cooperation in a drug venture? Like most Moscow cops, he’d never grown to like the KGB. They’d been arrogant bullies most of the time, too besotted with their power to perform proper investigations, except against foreigners, for whom the niceties of civilized behavior were necessary, lest foreign nations treat Soviet citizens—worse, Soviet diplomats—the same way.

But so many KGB officers had been let go by their parent service, and few of them had drifted into menial labor. No, they had training in conspiracy, and many had done foreign travel, and there met all manner of people, most of whom, Provalov was sure, could be persuaded to undertake illegal operations for the right inducement, which invariably meant money. For money, people would do anything, a fact known by every police officer in every country in the world.

Suvorov. Must track that name down,
the militia lieutenant told himself as he took a casual sip of his vodka.
Examine his background, determine his expertise, and get a photo.
Suvorov, Klementi Ivanovich.

“Anything else?” the lieutenant asked.

Klusov shook his head. “That is all I have uncovered.”

“Well, not too bad. Get back to work, and call me when you discover more.”

“Yes, Comrade Lieutenant.” The informant stood up to leave. He left the bill with the cop, who’d pay it without much in the way of annoyance. Oleg Gregoriyevich Provalov had spent enough time in police work to understand that he might just have discovered something important. Of course, you couldn’t tell at this stage, not until you ran it down, every single option and blind alley, which could take rather some time ... but if it turned out to be something important, then it was worth it. And if not, it was just another blind alley, of which there were many in police work.

Provalov reflected on the fact that he hadn’t asked his informant exactly who had given him this new flood of information. He hadn’t forgotten, but perhaps had allowed himself to be a little gulled by the descriptions of the alleged former Spetsnaz soldiers who’d made the murder. He had their descriptions in his mind, and then removed his pad to write them down. Blond and red-haired, experience in Afghanistan, both living in St. Petersburg, flew back just before noon on the day Avseyenko was murdered. So, he would check for the flight number and run the names on the manifest through the new computers Aeroflot used to tie into the global ticketing system, then cross-check it against his own computer with its index of known and suspected criminals, and also with the army’s records. If he got a hit, he’d have a man talk to the cabin crew of that Moscow—St. Petersburg flight to see if anyone remembered one or both of them. Then he’d have the St. Petersburg militia do a discreet check of these people, their addresses, criminal records if any, a normal and thorough background check, leading, possibly, to an interview. He might not conduct it himself, but he’d be there to observe, to get a feel for the suspects, because there was no substitute for that, for looking in their eyes, seeing how they talked, how they sat, if they fidgeted or not, if the eyes held those of the questioner, or traveled about the room. Did they smoke then, and if so, rapidly and nervously or slowly and contemptuously ... or just curiously, as would be the case if they were innocent of this charge, if not, perhaps, of another.