“Not the President. His son.”
“He has a son? What about him?”
“Jack Ryan, Jr., works for a private equity company in the USA, Hendley Associates. He and a colleague, a woman, were running around Rome last week, looking into a sale of art Guy Frieden was handling for Misha Grankin.”
“Okay.”
“Grankin’s men sent local contract hires to get better photos of the woman, and through her they found Ryan, but then Ryan disappeared after confronting the surveillance on him.”
Limonov said, “He doesn’t sound like any private equity manager I know.”
“Me either. They kept a tail on the girl, nothing happened for several days, but at noon today she went to the airport in Rome and boarded a flight here. They had a man in a cab when she came through arrivals. He picked her up and she gave him an address. They were waiting for her when the cab arrived. It was Ryan’s apartment. He’s been here in Luxembourg.”
“Here?” Limonov did not understand the significance, and Kozlov could read it on his face.
“Grankin’s office knows I’m here. They don’t know what I’m doing, but they contacted me to warn me to get out of town. The men are waiting for Ryan to get back. I don’t know what they will do to him, but we don’t want to be anywhere around when it happens.”
Limonov still missed the point Kozlov was trying to make. He said, “Grankin can’t know we are meeting with Frieden.”
“They don’t know, damn it! But what if Ryan does? If he was looking into Frieden in Rome, and now he’s here…”
Limonov got it now. “He could have surveillance on Frieden here.”
“Which would mean he has seen us. Twice.” Kozlov grabbed Limonov’s underwear and pants off the bed and threw them to him. “You and I need to get to the aircraft. We are leaving tonight. Grankin’s people are going after Ryan as we speak. Move, man!”
Jack Ryan, Jr., stood on the fourth-floor landing, listening to the sounds in the hallway. He had beaten the elevator car up, this he knew when he heard the chime announcing its arrival. The elevator was only five feet from the stairwell door, so he waited to hear the doors open, then he swung out, the CZ pistol aimed forward, but close to his body so no one standing there could get a hand on it.
The hallway was dark; someone had removed the bulbs from the sconces along the wall. In the dim he saw two men wearing blue jeans and warm-up jackets in the hallway; both had weapons pointed toward the elevator. One man was crouched, facing away from Ryan, and the other was just stepping inside the car to look around.
Ryan took the first man from behind, striking straight down on the back of his neck with the grip of the heavy pistol. The man crashed, dazed, to the carpeted flooring without so much as a grunt, but there was no hiding what had just happened from the other man, because the sound of the impact of steel on bone had been loud enough to echo throughout the hall.
The man in the elevator reached out with his pistol, pointed it into the hallway without looking. Jack found himself staring down the barrel of a gun.
He dove flat for the floor just as the pistol cracked and the flash from the barrel illuminated the scene.
Jack fired back, through the wall of the hallway and into the elevator. He knew his rounds would be inaccurate and less potent after going through the wall of the hallway and the wall of the elevator car, but he also felt confident the nine-millimeter rounds from the CZ would penetrate. He fired over and over, desperate to suppress the threat there so he could get to Ysabel, who he assumed now was in his apartment, being held by others.
After seven shots through the wall, Jack heard a voice cry out inside the elevator. He stayed low, crawled with one hand and both knees along the hallway, keeping the weapon pointed at the elevator as he closed on the danger. Unsure whether the man in the elevator was trying to trick him with his continued moans.
Inside the car he found a middle-aged bearded man in coveralls, an earpiece in his ear. Blood poured from his groin area, pooled around him. He’d dropped his gun — it lay in the dark red — and he pressed hard against the wound.
He looked up at Ryan with resigned, fatalistic eyes.
Ryan climbed to his feet now, stuck his foot in the elevator to keep the doors from closing, switched his gun to his left hand, and aimed it at the door to his apartment, just ten feet away. Looking at the wounded man on the floor of the elevator car, he asked, “Combien? How many?”
The man replied in English with a heavy accent. “Eat shit and die, Ryan.”
Jack reached a foot out and dragged the pistol back out of the car, through the blood. He kicked it behind him in the hallway. He reached down and pulled the man’s earpiece and radio set out of his coveralls. Then he pressed the button for the ground floor.
The car closed and descended.
Ryan looked back at the other man on the floor. He was coming to, but slowly.
Jack stepped forward, sent a massive front kick into the man’s face, and dropped him back down and out. On top of this, Jack knew he’d broken the man’s nose and given him whiplash that would render him immobile for days, if not weeks.
Jack turned for the door to his apartment, and he fought every urge to forget his tradecraft and barrel through at top speed. He knew Ysabel was in there, and he seriously doubted she was alone.
He felt the latch and realized the door was unlocked, so he went flat on the floor, lying on his left shoulder. He switched his pistol to his left hand, used his right to unlatch the door above him, then quickly switched the gun back again to his dominant hand. With a quick breath to ready himself, he shoved the door open with his left hand, holding it in place so it didn’t bounce back on him.
His living room was in front of him. He saw no one there, but a floor lamp lay across the ground and the glass coffee table was shattered as if someone had fallen through it.
Jack rolled up to his knees but stayed as low as possible. He crept into the room, keeping his gun arm pivoting back and forth between the two exits in front of him. The kitchen was on the right, and the hall to the bedroom and bathroom was on his left.
He cleared the kitchen first, and what he saw here made him recoil in horror. Blood on the floor, smeared on the wall at knee height. Ysabel’s luggage lay open and strewn about the room. The room was empty, so he turned back out and headed for his bedroom.
His ears were tuned to hear any sound in the apartment, but it was deathly quiet. In the distance he detected some movement in the hallway, but quickly he heard the sounds of neighbors talking to one another, screaming at the sight of the unconscious man and the guns lying about. He knew he’d have civilians on him in moments, and police here shortly after that, but his only focus now was on getting Ysabel away from any danger.
Jack cleared the bathroom with his pistol, then lowered his body and pivoted into the bedroom.
He saw her hair first, down on the floor and matted on the far side of the king-sized bed. Behind it, a bloody handprint streaked the wall next to an open window.
“Oh, God, no,” he whispered.
31
Ysabel?” He retained the presence of mind to keep his gun on the blind corner, and he moved carefully over toward the large walk-in closet, training his weapon inside to make sure it was empty.
He passed over Ysabel’s body without allowing himself to focus on it yet as he moved to the window. He looked outside at a fire escape, trained the CZ pistol up toward the roof and then down to the street.
Three men ran across the little cobblestoned square in front of his apartment building and jumped into the back of the panel truck he saw earlier, just as a pair of police cars rolled onto Place de Clairefontaine.