Alden’s eyes widened, and then narrowed, and he immediately worried that his host might have seen the change in his expression. This drawing was of an older man, much older than the others. Quickly he scanned down to the notes Saif Yasin had written about Kidnapper 3: “Maybe sixty years old. Healthy. Thin. Very strong and angry. Cold eyes. Speaks fair Gulf Arabic.”
Could it be? A sixty-year-old who was still out on the sharp edge? There were a few, but it certainly narrowed it down. One man did stand out, however, and he bore a more than passing resemblance to the drawing.
Alden thought he recognized this man, but he was not certain.
Until he turned to the next page.
A rendering of a Hispanic male, mid-forties, with short hair. The caption below his name said he was “Kidnapper 4: short but very powerful.”
Alden did not try to hide his amazement now. He let the other pages fall to the floor of the library, and he held each photocopy in a hand. Clark in the left, the Hispanic fellow in the right.
These two men had sat in Alden’s office a year earlier. He’d sent them packing, cashiered them from the Central Intelligence Agency.
And now there was credible evidence linking them with a kidnapping operation that had infiltrated Saudi Arabia and captured the most wanted man in the world. Who the hell could they be working for? JSOC? No, the military has its own units to do that sort of thing. DIA, NSA? No way, this wasn’t their type of mission.
“You know these men? They are CIA?” Laska asked. His voice sounded so hopeful.
Alden looked away from the images, up to the old man on the other leather sofa. Laska held a brasked andy snifter as he leaned forward with excitement.
Alden took a moment to compose himself. He softly asked, “What can you do with this information?”
“My options are limited, as are yours. But you can order an internal investigation against the men, use other evidence to bring this to light.”
“They aren’t CIA.”
Laska cocked his square head and his bushy eyebrows rose. “But… clearly you recognize them.”
“I do. They left the Agency a year ago. I… I don’t know what they are supposed to be doing now, but they are long gone from CIA. Suffice it to say, wherever they are working, they were acting sub rosa when they went terrorist hunting.”
“Who are they?”
“John Clark is the white guy. The other… I can’t remember his name. It might be Dominguez. Something Hispanic, anyway. Puerto Rican, Mexican, something like that.”
Laska sipped his Cognac. “Well, it is clear that if they are not working for the CIA, then they are working for someone. And they had no authority whatsoever to detain Saif Yasin.”
Alden realized Laska did not understand the scope of this. The man was just trying to get that shit the Emir out of prison. “There’s more going on here than that. John Clark didn’t just work for Jack Ryan at CIA. He was Ryan’s driver and Ryan’s close friend. I imagine he still is. They worked black ops together before Ryan rose through the ranks. Their history goes back thirty years. That was one of the reasons I shit-canned the old bastard instead of letting him hang around as a trainer for a few years.”
Laska sat up straight. He even grinned a little, a rare occurrence. “Interesting.”
“Clark has a lot of blood on his hands. He was everything that was wrong with CIA operations. I don’t know many of the details, but I do know one thing.”
“What is that, Charles?”
“I know that President Ryan himself gave Clark the Medal of Honor for actions in Vietnam, then he pardoned him for his killings in the CIA.”
“A secret presidential pardon?”
“Yes.”
Alden was still shaking his head in amazement at this revelation, but slowly he regained control. Suddenly his job with a Laska foundation was forgotten. He all but berated the older man with his tone. “I don’t know what ground rules DOJ has given your organization, but I find it very hard to believe the attorneys would be allowed to pass this information to you. You aren’t a lawyer yourself, nor are you part of the legal team.”
“That is all very true. I am more a figurehead. But nevertheless, I have this information.”
“You know that I can’t do a damn thing about this, Paul. I can’t walk into my office tomorrow morning and start asking questions about what happened to Clark and Dominguez without people wanting to know why. You and I both could get in a lot of trouble passing around this information because of the nature of the source. You have implicated me in a felony.”
With that, Alden picked his snifter off the table and drained it into his mouth. Laska took the old bottle and poured him a hefty refill.
Laska then smiled. “You don’t need to tell anyone about this. But this information needs to come out somo c.
“What do you mean?”
“Can you get me more information on Clark’s career with CIA? I’m not talking about this. The Emir incident. I’m talking about everything he’s done that’s in the record.”
Alden nodded. “I remember that Admiral James Greer had a dossier on him. That goes way back; I could dig a little more on my own to see if there are details since then. I know that he ran Rainbow in the UK for several years.”
“Men in Black,” Laska said with disdain, using the nickname for the secret NATO anti-terror outfit.
“Yeah. But why do you want this information?”
“I think it could help Ed.”
Alden looked at Laska for a long time. He knew there wasn’t a damn thing that could help Ed Kealty, and he knew Paul Laska was smart enough to know that, too. No, there was some game going on in Laska’s head.
Alden didn’t challenge the old Czech. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Just get me what you can, and I’ll take this off your hands, Charles. You have been most helpful, and I will not forget that come January.”
28
The skyline of a city as large and as developed as Volgograd, Russia, should have been visible for many, many miles in all directions. But as Georgi Safronov raced southeast on the M6 Highway, only a dozen or so miles until he hit the city limits, the view in front of him was low rolling pastureland that disappeared quickly into thick gray fog, and it gave no hint of the huge industrial metropolis that lay just ahead. It was ten in the morning, and he’d been driving all night along the Caspian Highway, but even after eight hours behind the wheel the forty-six-year-old continued to push his BMW Z4 coupe, desperate to arrive at his destination as soon as possible. The man who’d asked him to drive five hundred seventy miles today would not have summoned him to this meeting without good reason, and Georgi fought sleep and hunger so that he would not have to keep the old man waiting.
The wealthy Russian was middle-aged, but other than a tinge of gray in his red hair, he did not look it. Most Russian men drank, and this tended to age their faces prematurely, but Georgi had not touched vodka or wine or beer for years; his only peccadillo of consumption was the sugary sweet tea of which the Russians are fond. He was not athletic at all, but he was thin, and his hair was a bit long for a man his age. A flop of it fell across his forehead,
