The hand stopped moving, slipped out of the coat. Shaking.
The woman spoke in Lithuanian now. “Tell them to speak English.”
Herkus looked to Dom and Ding. “Say something in English.”
Dom said, “What do they want us to say?”
The bald man turned to the woman. “You don’t think Spetsnaz can learn English?”
Herkus tipped his head, then relaxed noticeably. Turning back to the Campus men, he said, “I get it. They are locals. They think we are Russians.”
Ding slowly pulled his passport out of his coat. It said his name was Thomas Kendall, but it was as good a U.S. passport as any of these four rural Lithuanians had ever seen. Dom pulled his own identification out, giving his name as Andrew Martin. The four Lithuanians looked them over in the road, and collectively they breathed an audible sigh that was almost comical to the two Americans by the van.
The relief was so complete the woman began to laugh. She spoke in halting English. “Sorry. We thought you are Little Green Men.”
Dom looked down at his coveralls. “No, ma’am. We’re medium-sized blue men. We’re just here to work on the Internet.”
The bald-headed man wasn’t smiling. “We don’t need Internet from America. We need tanks from America.”
Chavez nodded. “Trust me, if I had a tank, I’d give it to you.”
Dom said, “Why did you think you would find Little Green Men up here? Russia is threatening the south.”
The woman replied, “That’s what we think, too. But the Green Men are already here.”
“Wait. You’ve seen Russians? Are you sure?”
“We are here our entire lives. We know when someone not belong here.”
Dom and Ding looked at each other. They both knew they had to be careful to not give their cover away. Even though these locals weren’t the enemy, if rumor got out that a group of Americans wearing linemen’s uniforms were asking questions about the Russians, it wouldn’t take a spymaster to put together what was going on. And in rural communities such as here, rumors had a habit of spreading like wildfire. Ding said, “We don’t get paid enough to deal with Russians. Where did you see them?”
“They were in Zalavas yesterday, near the border. Ten men, maybe more. Taking pictures.”
Kind of like us, Dom thought but did not say.
The woman continued. “We told police, but the Russians left before police came.”
The three men in the DataPlanet uniforms broke away from the Lithuanian locals soon after and headed off to the next GPS coordinate on their list. They had planned on breaking off for lunch at noon, but the three men agreed it would be better for everyone if they just kept working as long as there was light to do so.
They were more convinced than ever that Lithuania didn’t have ten days.
29
On Jack Ryan, Jr.’s fifth day of surveillance of the Luxembourg attorney Guy Frieden, he realized he had managed to reach a level of symbiosis with his target that he had never wanted to achieve. All week Jack had been taking bathroom breaks at the same time Frieden did. This was by necessity, of course; he had learned through uncomfortable missteps in the field that he needed to take advantage of every available opportunity to go when there was a lull in the action.
But now as Jack zipped up his fly and washed his hands he realized his last few calls of nature had corresponded naturally with Frieden’s. His bladder had fallen into a rhythm with the man’s down the street.
Jack found it both depressing and funny that his biology had melded sympathetically with his target’s, but he shook the feeling away and headed back into his dark little office.
Not to watch Frieden so much — although that remained his main duty — but to get back to his computer.
So far, the only interesting person who had come into contact with Frieden — physically, anyway — was Andrei Limonov. Jack had gotten no closer to the money-laundering network used by Mikhail Grankin, and it didn’t look like he would do so unless and until Gavin Biery cracked the man’s files.
But while the objective that sent Jack to Luxembourg in the first place seemed — temporarily, at least — out of reach, he had been able to dig into Limonov and uncover a few things about the man’s patterns. He had no information at all about Blackmore Capital’s clientele, so he didn’t know if Limonov invested one thousand rubles for one million clients, or one billion rubles for a single client. But through his research he had succeeded in discovering that Blackmore Capital Partners of Moscow had just very recently opened an office on Callcott Street in the Kensington district of London.
The computer techs at The Campus had successfully managed to tap into London’s municipal camera feeds on an operation there a year and a half earlier, so Jack logged on to a Campus portal that served as his way in. It was estimated there was a camera for every eleven citizens of the United Kingdom, and through the portal Jack had access to every cam in the nation.
He tapped the address of Blackmore Capital into the program, and instantly he was shown the seven cameras within a one-block radius. One of these cameras even pointed right at the street and pavement in front of the little house with the gold BCP sign on the front door.
He saw no activity on the street or obvious movement through the half-open blinds of the house.
Between glances up to his monitor showing him the activity in Frieden’s office, Jack closed the program displaying the London CCTV feeds, and he began to research how Limonov and Kozlov had gotten to Luxembourg.
He knew they’d first visited Frieden on Monday, so he looked at direct flights from both Moscow and London that arrived on that day. Through a Department of Homeland Security database, he checked passenger manifests on the airlines, but found nothing. If the men were traveling under their real names, they hadn’t flown commercial on that day. He widened the search, but still came up with nothing.
The next step, he knew, was to check private aircraft. Luxembourg Airport was really the only potential location for a private flight to deposit someone into the city, so Jack pulled up a list of fixed-base operators working there. Within minutes he had a list of all the registered flights that came in on Sunday or Monday. There were seventy-three, which sounded like a lot to Jack until he considered the amount of money in play here in the city, at which point he realized it should come as no surprise that a bunch of people with private planes would come here to bank or to shop.
Of these seventy-three, eight had come directly from Moscow and nine directly from London.
Jack started with the London aircraft first, thinking it relevant that Limonov had opened an office there just a month earlier. He researched each plane to try to determine the owners and their passengers.
This took a half-hour, and when he was finished there was only one plane, a Bombardier Global model 6000, that he could not identify. It had arrived in Luxembourg just ninety minutes before Limonov and Kozlov met with Frieden in his office and, according to civil aviation information, it was still at the FBO at Luxembourg Airport.
Jack jotted the tail number down, not positive this was Limonov’s aircraft, but certain he had no other leads.
He expected it to just return to London soon, so he wasn’t over the moon with his potential discovery. Perhaps the two Russians were meeting with other bankers here in Luxembourg, setting up some new network for a big player in the Kremlin. Jack knew short of switching his surveillance from Guy Frieden to Andrei Limonov, finding out which hotel he was staying at, and trying to get photos of the man with any other associates here in town, he had pretty much exhausted investigative potential.