Locked On Part 39

"He's got that big red nose, but what does that have to do with his trip to London?"

"Check for a room with minibar charges, or a bar tab charged to the room."

Biery ran another report on his computer, and as he was doing so he said, "Or room service. Specifically, a liquor tab."

"Exactly," agreed Ryan.

Gavin began going through the itemized credit card charges of the subset of rooms that had ordered room service or charged bar items to their room. He found a few possibles, then a few more. Finally he settled on one charge in particular. "Okay, here we go. Here is a room paid for by an American Express Centurion card under the name of Carmela Zimmern."

"Okay. So?"

"So it looks like Ms. Zimmern, in her one evening at the Mandarin Oriental, enjoyed two servings of beluga caviar, four bottles of Finlandia vodka, and three p.o.r.no movies."

Ryan looked at the digital receipt on Gavin's laptop. When he saw the three "in-room entertainment" charges, he was confused.

"How do you know they were p.o.r.nos?"

"Look, they all ran at the same time. I guess Oleg wanted to channel-flip through the chatty parts."

"Oh," Ryan said, still putting this together. He started scrolling through the names on his sheet again. "Wait a second. Carmela Zimmern also booked the Royal Suite the same night. That's nearly six grand. So Kovalenko was in the other room? He was there to see her, maybe?"

"Sounds plausible."

s.h.i.+t, thought Jack. Who is this Carmela Zimmern?

They Googled the name and found nothing. Well, not nothing, there were several Carmela Zimmerns. One was a fourteen-year-old girl in Kentucky who played lacrosse and another was a thirty-five-year-old mother of four in Vancouver who loved to crochet. They looked them over, one at a time, but there was certainly no one that looked like they'd be spending lavishly on five-star hotels or entertaining Russian spies in the UK.

"I'll find the address on her card," Biery said, and he began clicking his keyboard.

While he did this, Jack Ryan Jr. hunched over his laptop, reading through anything he could find on Carmela Zimmerns in social media, on random websites, anywhere in open source. Within a minute of beginning his search, he said, "Holy s.h.i.+t."

"What?"

"This one works for Paul Laska."

"The Paul Laska?"

"Yep. Carmela Zimmern, forty-six years old, lives in Newport, Rhode Island, works for the Progressive Nations Inst.i.tute."

Gavin finished his check of the AmEx card. "That's our girl. Address in Newport."

"Interesting. Laska's PNI is based in New York."

"Right, but Laska himself is in Newport."

"So she works directly with the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Looks that way."

When Clark phoned back the call came through the speakerphone in the ninth-floor conference room. All the princ.i.p.als were there, some still poring over the information Ryan and Biery had just dug up.

"John, it's Ryan. I've got everyone here with me."

"Hey guys." Everyone in the room quickly called out to Clark one at a time.

Clark hesitated before speaking. "Where's Driscoll?"

Hendley took this. "He's in Pakistan."

"Still?"

"He's a POW. Haqqani has him."

"f.u.c.k. G.o.d d.a.m.n it."

Gerry interjected, "Look, we have a viable lead on getting him out of there. There is hope."

"Embling? Is he your lead?"

"Nigel Embling is dead, John. Killed by Riaz Rehan." Hendley said it softly.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on?" Clark asked.

"It's complicated," Gerry said, putting it extremely mildly. "But we're working on that end. Let's concentrate on your situation for now. How are you?"

Clark sounded tired and angry and frustrated, all at the same time. "I'll be better when this gets worked out. Any word on Kovalenko?"

Hendley looked at Jack Junior and nodded.

"Yes. Valentin Kovalenko, age thirty-five. He is SVR's a.s.sistant rezident in London."

"And he's in Moscow?"

"No. He was there, in October, but only for a couple of weeks."

"s.h.i.+t," said Clark, and Ryan got the impression from this reaction that Clark was in Moscow.

"There's more, John."

"Go."

"Kovalenko's father, Oleg. Like you said, he was KGB."

"Yesterday's news, Jack. He's got to be eighty."

"He's nearly that, but listen for a second. This guy never goes anywhere outside of Russia. I mean not as far back as Homeland Security's records go. But in October he flies to London."

"To see his kid?"

"To see Paul Laska, apparently."

There was a long pause. "The Paul Laska?"

"Yep," said Ryan. "This is preliminary, but we think it is possible that they knew each other in Czechoslovakia."

"Okay," Clark said it with a confused tone. "Go on."

"Right after Oleg's visit to London, Valentin races over to Moscow for two weeks. He gets back to London, and a few days later, the indictment on you drops out of the sky."

Clark filled in what he knew. "When he was in Moscow, Valentin sent a crew of thugs out to get intel on me from sources in my file with the KGB."

"Weird," said Caruso, who'd been silent until now. "If he is SVR, why didn't he send his own people?"

Clark answered this quickly. "He wanted to use cutouts to insulate him and his service from this."

"So Valentin knows about you through Laska?" asked Ryan.

"Looks like it."

Ryan was confused. "And Laska knows about you . . . how?"

Sam Granger answered this. "Paul Laska runs the Progressive Const.i.tution Initiative, the group that is defending the Emir. Somehow the Emir fingered Clark, and Laska is orchestrating this all with Russia because he can't let on that the Emir is pa.s.sing intel to him."

Hendley ran his fingers through his gray hair. "The Emir may have described Clark to his lawyers. They, somehow, got a picture of you from CIA."

"So Paul Laska and his people are using the Russians, running their version of a false-flag operation," said Clark.

"But why would the Russians go along with this?" asked Chavez.

"To hobble the Ryan Presidency, or maybe even kill it outright."

"We have to go after Laska," said Caruso.

"h.e.l.l, no," Hendley said. "We don't operate inside America against Americans, even misguided sons of b.i.t.c.hes like him."

A mild argument broke out in the room, with Caruso and Ryan on one side, and the rest of the men on the other. Chavez stayed out of it for the most part.

Clark stopped the argument. "Listen, I understand and respect that. I will try to get more information on my end that we can use, and then I will report back."

"Thank you," said Gerry Hendley.

"There is another situation."

"What's that?"

"A crew coming after me. Not Russians. Not Americans. French. One of them died in Cologne. I didn't kill him, exactly, but he's just as dead. Don't guess his buddies are going to listen to my side of it."

The men in the conference room looked at one another for a moment. They had all heard the news about the death of the Frenchman, supposedly at the hands of John Clark. But if Luc Patin was part of a team after Clark, that meant there was another force involved in all this. Finally Rick Bell said, "We'll try to find out who they are. Maybe we can look into the dead guy a lot closer than the international media has, try and find out who he was working for."

Clark said, "I appreciate it. It wouldn't hurt to know what I'm dealing with on that front. Okay. Got to go. You guys focus on getting Sam back."

"Will do," said Chavez. "Watch yourself, John."

When Clark hung up, Dominic turned to Domingo. "Ding, you've known Mr. C the longest. He sounded tired, didn't he?"

Chavez just nodded.

"How much longer can he go on? The guy's what? Sixty-three, sixty-four? s.h.i.+t. He's more than twice my age and I'm feeling the effects of everything I've been through the past few weeks."

Chavez just shook his head as he looked off into the distance. "No point in speculating how long his body can hold up to the day-to-day wear and tear."

"Why not?"

"Because if you do what John does, sooner or later, you're going to go out quick. One of the bullets that have been whizzing past his head for d.a.m.n near a half-century is going to have his name on it. And I'm not talking about that little scratch he got in Paris."

Caruso nodded. "I guess we all have an expiration date on us, doing what we do."

"Yep. We roll the dice every time we go out."

The meeting was breaking up, but the conference room was still full when a call light on the phone console in the center of the table blinked again. Hendley himself picked it up. "Yeah? Good, put him through." Hendley looked to the men standing around. "It's al Darkur."

He punched the conference b.u.t.ton to put the call through the speakers. "h.e.l.lo, Mohammed. You are speaking to Gerry, and the others are listening in."

"Good."

"Tell me you have good news."

"Yes. We have found your man. He is still in North Waziristan, in a walled compound in the town of Aziz Khel."

Chavez leaned over the desk. "What are you going to do about it?"

"I have planned a raid on the compound. At this point I have not asked for approval because I do not want the information to leak out to the men holding him. But I expect the rescue attempt will launch within three days' time."

Chavez asked, "How did you happen to find out about this compound?"

"The ISI has known about the compound-it is used as a prison for kidnap victims of Siraj Haqqani. But the ISI did not have anyone of value held there, so there was no reason to risk tipping our hand about the existence of our intelligence a.s.set that provided the information. I persuaded someone to tell me."

Chavez nodded. "How many gomers you think are there?"

Al Darkur paused on the other end. "How many what?"

"Sorry. How many of Haqqani's people? How much opposition at the compound."

A longer pause. "Maybe you would prefer to not know the answer to that question."

Chavez shook his head. "I'd rather have bad news than no news. Something I learned from a friend of mine."

"I think your friend is very wise. I am sorry that the news is bad. We expect there will be no less than fifty Haqqani fighters billeted within one hundred meters of where Sam is being held."