Instead he sprinted through the middle of the town square, the Place Guillaume II, then made a hard right onto the Rue du Fossé. The occasional tourist glanced at the well-dressed businessman running as if his life depended on it, but his actions didn’t cause any alarm.
He slowed quickly right before he entered the pedestrian square in front of his apartment building, then he walked at a normal pace toward the front door. As he did so his eyes scanned the square, looking for any signs of trouble.
It didn’t take him long to see an unmarked panel truck parked in a fire lane on the far side of the little square. A man stood next to the driver’s-side door smoking a cigarette, and when Jack focused on him he turned away.
Jack stepped up to his building and reached for the door, but to his surprise a man in a suit and tie stepped out through the door and held it open for him. He was young, in his twenties, with a dark complexion and broad shoulders. He smiled at Ryan, but Jack saw the recognition on the man’s face.
Jack smiled back as he passed by. “Merci beaucoup.”
“Avec plaisir, monsieur,” the man said. He had an accent, but it didn’t sound French to Jack.
Just as he passed through the door, with the fake doorman right on his heels, Jack quickly scanned the tiny lobby, looking for anyone else. As he suspected, this man was serving as a lookout and there was no one else down here, but Jack was certain there were men in and around his place.
He barely broke stride as he headed toward the elevator. Taking three steps into the lobby, he felt the continued presence of the “doorman” close on his heels.
Jack spun and reached out with his left hand, grabbed the man’s necktie, and yanked him along with his spin. The man had his right hand on the grip of a pistol tucked in his belt under his jacket. Ryan grabbed the man’s wrist and then pivoted on his feet to his left. As he did so he brought his right elbow up, using the spin and all the muscles in his back and shoulder for added velocity.
His elbow connected with the man’s face, snapping his head back and dazing him, and Jack shook the man’s wrist as he fell, freeing the pistol from his grasp. It fell to the floor with a thud and bounced on the carpet.
Ryan had disarmed the man, but he didn’t have control of the situation yet. He threw another punch, following his right elbow with a powerful left jab, again into the man’s face. The man started to fall onto his back, but Jack leapt at him, spun his weak and dazed body around, and put him in a vicious chokehold.
The fake doorman couldn’t get his hands behind him, so tight was the hold, and the man’s knees gave out fully. Jack went down with the man, slamming him onto the ground.
Into his ear, Jack said, “How many? How many men?”
The man did not answer, so Jack released the hold, leapt off the man, and launched toward the pistol on the floor. It was a CZ Omega nine-millimeter. Jack wasn’t that familiar with it, but it operated like most other pistols. He found the external safety and flipped it off, then racked the slide just to make certain there was a bullet in the chamber. A cartridge arced high and dropped to the carpet, leaving fifteen more in the weapon, assuming the fake doorman had his gun fully loaded.
He pointed it at the man. “Last chance. How many?”
The man slowly raised his hands, rolled up to his knees, and then cleared his throat.
He pinched his thumb and forefinger together. Jack noticed this, but he didn’t understand what it meant, until the man shouted, “On imeyet svoy pistolet!”
Jack realized the man had a tiny push-to-talk button in his hand, probably wired through the arm of his suit coat, and although he couldn’t understand what he was saying, he assumed the man just transmitted to his confederate or confederates upstairs that Jack had his gun. Jack rushed up to him quickly, whipped the heavy pistol across his body, and struck the man across the side of his head, steel against skin and bone. Blood spilled onto the carpet as a massive wound opened on the man’s temple, and he dropped down into the blood, wholly unconscious.
Jack was running to the elevator before the man hit the ground, and he saw the car was open at the lobby. He reached into the car and pressed the button for the fourth floor, but he did not enter.
As the car headed up, Jack ran for the stairs. Time was his enemy now; every second worked against him, and against Ysabel.
Andrei Limonov stepped into the shower in his seventh-floor suite at the Meliá Luxembourg. He’d spent the day working in his room, although mostly he just sat around and waited.
He had come to Luxembourg to meet with Guy Frieden because Limonov knew Frieden had worked on a deal with a man in the Caribbean who was extremely choosy about who he worked with. Normally, in the world of international finance a man in charge of the amount of money Limonov now controlled would have no problem arranging meetings on his own, but this was a special situation, and Limonov had been unable to get a response from the man in the Caribbean on his own.
Frieden seemed agreeable enough about helping Limonov make contact. He promised three days earlier he would call the man immediately and set up the introduction, but in those three days he’d come back only with apologies. Apparently, his contact had been reticent about taking on new clients.
Limonov was annoyed, but he knew business relationships sometimes took time. Kozlov, on the other hand, was livid about the delay. He’d begun to do his own research on the man Limonov sought, and made his own arrangements to force the meeting. Limonov wasn’t happy about this, of course, but Vlad Kozlov had been ordered by Valeri Volodin to keep the wheels of this operation turning, and there was nothing Andrei Limonov could do to put him off his mission.
Limonov had wanted to return to London to wait for the go-ahead to fly to the Caribbean, but Kozlov had insisted they wait in Luxembourg until the meeting was arranged, because if the meeting could not be arranged, Kozlov insisted he could simply go back to Frieden’s office and encourage the attorney to be more persuasive.
Fortunately for all parties involved, Guy Frieden had called this afternoon with the news that the mysterious man in the Caribbean had agreed to meet the two Russians in twenty-four hours’ time. Limonov and Kozlov would fly out this evening, so Limonov wanted a long shower before the all-night flight across the Atlantic.
As he showered he thought about his trip. This was the big moment, the step in the process where money would actually begin leaving Volodin’s accounts and then disappearing, where it would exist in the ether before solidifying again in new accounts already set up by Limonov.
Limonov shuddered, thinking about the weeks to come. And then he smiled. They might be fraught with stress, but at least they would be spent in paradise.
He turned off the water and had just stepped out of his shower when he heard the door to his room open. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around himself quickly, stuck his head out of the bathroom, and found Vlad Kozlov rushing across the suite toward him.
“What the fuck, Kozlov? Who gives you the right to barge into my room?”
Limonov could see the worry on the older Russian’s face.
Kozlov said, “We have a problem.”
“What problem?”
“Jack Ryan.”
Limonov just stared at the other Russian. “President Ryan is everyone’s problem.”