side hall that ended in the room where the servers were kept.
All the gunfire had been suppressed except for the single shot Melanie fired from John Clark’s.45 SIG, but that noise got the attention of Crane. He called his men over and over on his headset, but while he did so he also grabbed Biery by the neck and pulled him out of his chair.
With the Steyr to Gavin’s right temple and his arm around his neck, Crane yanked him into the hall, only to come face-to-face with an old man with gray hair and eyeglasses. The man had one of Crane’s men’s weapons held up in front of him, pointed directly at Crane’s head.
“Put it down or I kill him,” Crane said.
The old man did not respond.
“I will do it! I will shoot him!”
The American with the machine pistol narrowed his eyes slightly.
Crane looked into the eyes. He saw nothing but focus, nothing but purpose, mission, intent.
Crane knew the look; Crane knew the mind-set.
This old man was a warrior.
Crane said, “Don’t shoot. I surrender.” And he dropped the Steyr on the floor.
Back in the conference room, Melanie had freed the Hendley Associates staff. She did not know what the hell was going on, but by now she had long since come to the obvious conclusion that her boyfriend, the President’s son, did not work exclusively in the financial management field. Clearly this was some sort of super-secret government intelligence or security contractor, and clearly they had run seriously afoul of the Chinese.
She would make Jack tell her every last bit of detail about this place before she passed final judgment, if he allowed her the opportunity to talk to him ever again. His accusation that she was working for the Chinese, while it did not make any sense to her, had Melanie worried that the rift between the two of them might be too wide to repair with simple explanations.
Clark and three other men brought the two surviving Chinese men into the hallway by the elevators and tied them together, back to back. Crane, the leader of the group, spoke loudly, announced that he was a member of Divine Sword, a PLA special-missions unit, and he and his men demanded to be treated as prisoners of war. Clark responded to this by pistol-whipping the man behind the ear with his SIG, which shut him up quickly.
Other Hendley men began searching floor to floor for more victims and more killers; everyone was armed with pistols and machine pistols while doing so.
Clark had just searched Crane, pulling an odd-looking mobile phone from him, when the phone vibrated. He looked down at the device. Of course he did not recognize the number, but he got an idea.
“Gerry?” he called over to Hendley. “Are there any Mandarin speakers here in the group?”
The ex-senator was shaken up, especially after the death of his friend Sam Granger, but Clark was glad to see the man retained his wits.
“Afraid not, but these two speak English.”
“I’m talking about whoever might be calling.” The phone buzzed again, and John looked down and saw the same number calling back.
Gerry said, “If you need a Mandarin speaker, I think I know where we can get one quickly.”
Jack Ryan, Jr., rode in the passenger seat of a two-door Acura compact driven by Adam Yao. They had left Hong Kong and were now driving through the New Territories, heading north toward the border with China.
They had been on the road only a few minutes when Jack’s mobile chirped. Ryan, a little punch-drunk from the jet lag of the seventeen-hour flight, answered it on the fourth ring.
“Ryan.”
“Jack, it’s John Clark.”
“Hey, John.”
“Listen carefully, kid, I’m in a rush.” In the next thirty seconds Clark told Ryan what had happened that night at Hendley. Before Jack could even respond, he explained someone was calling the leader of the assassins, and he wanted to patch Yao through to the man’s phone, call the number back, and then see if Yao could fake the caller into believing he was one of the Chinese killers.
Ryan quickly relayed the situation to Yao, and then put the earpiece in Yao’s ear for him while he drove.
John said, “You ready?”
Adam knew who John Clark was, but there was no time for a formal introduction. He just said, “You don’t know who will be on the other end?”
“No idea. You’ll just have to wing it.”
“Okay.”
Winging it was what a NOC did for a living. “Dial the number.”
It rang several times before it was picked up on the other end. Adam Yao did not know what he would hear, but he did not expect to hear someone speaking English with a Russian accent.
“Why did you not answer when I called?”
Adam was ready to answer in Mandarin. He switched to English but affected a strong Mandarin accent.
“Busy.”
“Are you clear?”
“We’re at Hendley.”
A slight pause. “Of course you are at Hendley. Is all the opposition dealt with?”
Adam was beginning to understand. This individual knew what was supposed to happen.
“Yes. No problems.”
“Okay. Before you erase data, I’ve been instructed to upload any encrypted files on the workstation of Gavin Biery, and then to send them to Center.”
Yao remained in character. “Understood.”
There was a short pause. Then, “I’m out front. I’ll come through the front door. Alert your men.”
Jack had Clark on speakerphone. Before Jack could relay the message, John said, “Got it. We’ll take care of it. Clark out.”
A minute later, Clark was still on the second floor, standing over the two prisoners, when Tony Wills came through the stairwell door, holding a.45 to the head of a bearded Caucasian man in a suit and tie. The man’s hands were cuffed behind him, and his raincoat had been pulled down behind him to his elbows.
John made certain Biery had the Steyr machine pistol pointed at the ground in front of the two Chinese prisoners and his finger outside the trigger guard, and then he started up the hall to see what the new guy in the mix had to do with all this.
He had closed to within twenty feet when the bearded man’s eyes widened in shock.
Clark stopped, looked harder at the man.
It took him a few seconds to recognize Valentin Kovalenko.
The Russian tried to back up, away from Clark, but he just pressed the back of his skull into Wills’s.45.
Clark thought Valentin was going to faint. He directed Tony to take him into the IT conference room nearby, and then he sent Tony out to guard the prisoners with Biery.
When Clark and Kovalenko were alone in the room, John pushed the man roughly down into a chair and then sat down in front of him. He looked him over for a brief moment. Since the previous January, not a day had passed without Clark’s thinking about snapping the neck of the little twerp sitting inches from him now. The man who had kidnapped him, tortured him, stolen from him his last few good years in the field by severely damaging his hand.
But John had other, more pressing objectives now.
He said, “I’m not going to pretend like I know what the fuck you are doing here. As far as I knew, you were
