She felt she had Ryan dead to rights, and this would make him want to sweep the Emir back under the rug by fulfilling his campaign promise to turn the man back over to a military tribunal.
But she had a plan to stop that.
“Good morning, Judy. You look wonderful today,” Yasin said as he sat. His smile was attractive, but Judith saw a hint of melancholy in it.
“Thank you. Before we start, I know you might be feeling down today.”
“Because Jack Ryan will be the next President? Yes, I admit it is distressing news. How can your country allow this criminal back into power?”
Judith Cochrane shook her head. “I have no idea. I do not have a single friend or coworker who voted for him, I can promise you that.”
“And yet still he wins?”
Judy shrugged. “Large portions of my country, I am sad to say, are in the hands of racists, warmongers, and ignorant fools.”
“Yes. This must be true, as there seems to be no justice for an innocent man in America,” said the Emir, with a hint of sadness.
“Do not say that. We will find justice for you. I came tn Aoday to tell you that Ryan’s victory is actually a good thing for your case.”
The Emir cocked his head. “How so?”
“Because Ryan’s friend, John Clark, was one of the men who kidnapped you. Right now the man is a fugitive from justice, but once Kealty’s people capture him, he will be offered immunity to tell everything he knows about who he was working for when you were captured. Jack Ryan will be implicated.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because it is possible Ryan was directly involved. And even if he was not directly involved or aware of your kidnapping, we will use back channels to threaten him. To tell him that, if you are sent to military custody, we will have no other course of action but to try your case in the media, and we will use the fact Ryan gave a secret pardon as evidence Ryan himself wanted John Clark to be free to kill and kidnap innocents. Ryan might win in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion, with the vast majority of the world media on our side, it will be as if President Jack Ryan himself shot you and kidnapped you. He and his administration will have no choice but to acquiesce to our demands.”
“And what are our demands?”
“Minimum security. A reasonable sentence. Something that has you behind bars for the length of his administration, but no longer.”
The Emir smiled. “For someone so pleasant and attractive, you are certainly a very shrewd individual.”
Judy Cochrane blushed. “I am just getting started, Saif. Mark my words. You will win your case or we will destroy President Ryan in the process.”
Now the Emir’s grin showed no evidence of his earlier melancholy. “Is it too much to hope that both of these things happen?”
Judy herself grinned. “No. Not too much to hope at all.”
It had been ten days since Clark found Manfred Kromm in Cologne. The wanted American had spent the majority of that time in Warsaw, Poland. Clark had no operational reason to go to Warsaw, but his visit became operationally prudent when it became clear his body would need some recovery time after the evening fleeing the men chasing him in Germany. His right ankle had become swollen and purple, the cut on his hand needed time to heal, and every joint in his body ached. His muscles were exhausted, his low back went from a dull ache the morning after the activity to complete spasms on the morning of day two.
Warsaw was not just a town on his way from Germany to Estonia. It was a much-needed pit stop.
Clark used a phony ID to rent a one-star en-suite room at a no-name hotel in the city center. He filled the porcelain bathtub with Epsom salts and water nearly hot enough to boil a lobster, and he lowered every bit of his body in it, save for two extremities. His right foot, which was wrapped tight with a bag of ice and compression bandages, and his right hand, which held his SIG Sauer P220.45-caliber pistol.
The hot bath and over-the-counter anti-inflammatories slowly helped him tackle his spasmed muscles.
In addition to his bumps and bruises, Clark also found himself sick with an incredible sinus infection. Running through the icy rain had seen to that. Again, he used over-the-counter meds to fight this, along with a steady supply of tissues.
Hot baths, downing pills, blowing his nose. Clark repeated this process over and over?ste for almost a week before he felt, not like a young man, but at least like a new man.
Now he was in Tallinn, Estonia, walking past the Viru Gate, the entrance to the cobblestoned Old Town. He’d grown a decent beard in the past two weeks, and he’d changed his dress from the look of a late-middle-aged businessman to the look of a rugged world-weary fisherman. He wore a black watch cap low over his head, a black sweater under a blue waxed-cotton raincoat, and leather boots that kept the mobility in his still sore right ankle to a minimum.
It was a Thursday evening, and the November air was frigid, so there were few pedestrians on the streets. As he headed up the narrow medieval Saint Catherine’s Passage, Clark walked alone, feeling also the self-imposed isolation of the past few weeks. When he was younger, much younger, Clark moved in the black as a singleton asset for weeks at a time without noticing a shred of loneliness. He was not inhuman, but he was able to compartmentalize his life so that when he was operational, his mind remained on the operation. But now he thought of family and friends and colleagues. Not so much as to turn around and head back to them but certainly more than he would have liked.
It was weird, Clark thought to himself as he headed closer to his target. More than Sandy, more than Patsy, the one person he wanted to talk to right now was Ding.
It was crazy that his diminutive son-in-law was at the forefront of his thoughts, and he would have laughed at the realization of it if everything going on around him weren’t so damn serious at the moment. But after a moment of introspection, it made sense. Sandy had been there with him, through thick and thin. But not like Chavez. Domingo and John had been in tight spots together more often than either man would be able to count.
But as much as he would have liked to, he did not entertain the thought of checking in with a quick phone call. He had walked by enough public phones — yes, they were still around here and there — that it would have been damn easy to make a quick call.
But no. Not yet. Not until it was absolutely necessary.
No, he was operating in the black, not in the gray. He could not reach out to those who would be the most imperiled by contact from him. He did not doubt for one second that Ding would be taking care of his wife, his daughter, and his grandkids, beyond the reach of photographers and reporters and long-dormant assassins, and any other asshole who would make trouble for the family of the ex — CIA operative.
Even though Ding wasn’t here, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, John Clark knew Chavez still had his back.
And that would have to do for now.
Ardo Ruul was the Estonian mobster who had sent the heavies to interview Manfred Kromm. The Russians had a note in a file from 1981 that the KGB had heard rumblings that a CIA heavy named Clark had come to Berlin the day Stasi agent Lukas Schuman was shot dead in a ghost station under East Berlin. The KGB interviewed Schuman’s partner, Kromm, and Kromm had admitted nothing. But the loose end was still there, in the Russian’s file on John Clark, thirty years later.
So Valentin Kovalenko contacted Ardo Ruul. The Estonian gangster had worked in his nation’s intelligence service in his twenties, and now that he was out of government and operating on his own, he did odd jobs for the SVR here and there. Kovalenko asked Ruul to send men to find this Kromm character, if he was still alive, and get to
