“That doesn’t sound Russian.”
“No. It looks commercial, but top of the line.”
“Do you know how it was planted?”
“Last week she told me a woman knocked over her purse in the bathroom, then helped her pick up all the contents. About a half-hour after that a man who was following me showed up in my apartment building.”
As soon as Ryan said this, he winced, anticipating the admonitions to come.
Clark’s voice rose and his tone lowered. “What man?”
“I should have called this in, John. I screwed up. It’s just that he didn’t—”
“What man, Ryan?”
“An Italian paparazzo tailed me in Rome. I thought I shook him, but he showed up back at the condo. I roughed him up a bit, thought he was a bad actor of some sort, but when he proved he was just a stupid photographer, and convinced me he’d been tipped off to me by a girl in a café who recognized me, I didn’t think it was anything related to the op I was on. Just the occasional negative aspect of being Jack Ryan’s son.
“Still, though, just to be safe, Ysabel and I left the condo immediately. She got a hotel down there to finish up our work in Rome, and I came up here to Lux City. I thought that was the end of it.”
“Damn it, Jack! It is your job to call in contacts and compromises. Do you have any idea the danger that exposure put you in?”
“Yes… I mean, no, I didn’t. It’s pretty fucking clear now,” Jack said darkly. His eyes shot back up the hall toward Ysabel’s room. A pair of orderlies were rolling her unconscious body down the hall to surgery.
Clark asked, “Who was the photographer?”
“Salvatore.”
“Salvatore what?”
“He just goes by one name.”
Clark mumbled softly, “I hate him already.”
“Tell me about it. I didn’t trust the bastard, but we checked him out online, and he is a legit paparazzo… if such a thing exists. Anyway, I was satisfied he wasn’t working with the Russians.”
“But if it was the same GPS tracker that got him to your Rome condo that the attackers in Luxembourg used to track Ysabel, then obviously they are related.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “As soon as she gets out of surgery and into a room here, I’m going back to Rome to get my hands on this Salvatore.”
“No, Jack. You are not. You aren’t going to be operating alone anymore. You need to get out of there.”
“I need to protect Ysabel.”
Clark ignored the comment. “I’ll get Christine there now. I have associates from my days in Rainbow right over the border in France. I can put two tier-one shooters outside Ysabel’s door when she comes out of recovery, and keep them there twenty-four/seven. That’s more than you could do.”
“I’m not leaving her side!”
“Look, Jack. She was attacked because she was by your side. You aren’t going to help her with your proximity to her. You said it yourself: You were the target, not Ysabel. I know it feels wrong to leave her, but that’s just exactly what you have to do.”
The realization hit Ryan like an ax handle to the head. Yes, he knew she was attacked because of him, that was obvious. But now he recognized that not only could he not protect her, but the longer he stayed around her, attempting to do just that, the longer she was going to remain in mortal peril.
It took him half a minute to respond to Clark. “You’re right.”
“Good. You are coming home. Now. It will take the Gulfstream ten to twelve hours to get to you, and I want you gone before then, so get yourself on the first train out of Luxembourg, and then the first transatlantic back to the States. Don’t use the main station. Too dangerous. Take a taxi to the burbs and board there.”
Jack wanted to argue some more, but he knew Clark was exactly right about everything. He just said, “When I get home, I’m going to see what I can find on Salvatore. We might have other avenues of attack beyond just threats. He’s a drug abuser. Heroin. Normally, that might be incriminating, although in his line of work I don’t suppose anyone gives a damn what he does in his free time.”
Clark said, “We’ll also run this video through facial recog, see if we get some pings on the faces of these men who attacked you and Ysabel. The quality is shit, but we might get lucky.”
Ryan got off the phone a minute later. He had a direction now, a plan to find the men responsible for what happened to Ysabel. He wouldn’t leave the hospital till Christine arrived, but he knew that was just to make himself feel better.
Clark was right, Ysabel was in more danger when he was around.
33
Kaliningrad’s Chernyakhovsk air base was blanketed by fog at five thirty a.m., but this was of no great concern to Captain Chipurin, the pilot of the Ilyushin Il-20M on the taxiway. He flew through the clouds all day long, after all, so taking off into thick, obscuring vapor was hardly an issue. Landing, on the other hand, required more skill, but Chipurin and his crew would not be landing for another eight hours, and that would be 800 kilometers away at Saint Petersburg, where the weather was predicted to be cold but clear.
The one thing that was a potential concern for Chipurin today, however, was the weather out over the Baltic Sea. Massive thunderstorms had developed overnight and moved northeast from Germany, and at sea level now there were reports of forty-mile-per-hour winds and twelve-foot waves. It was a typical Baltic autumn storm, lots of cells popping up then petering out, and other pilots in the area had reported that the tops of many of the cells rose above 40,000 feet. Chipurin knew this meant he’d have to be on the lookout for weather, even at his cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.
Upon gaining clearance from the control tower, the captain goosed his power levers forward slightly, turned the nose of the big, dull gray aircraft to face the length of runway 6, and then he pushed the levers all the way forward, sending full power to his four turboprop engines.
This aircraft wasn’t based here in Kaliningrad — rather, its home was Chkalovskaya, near Moscow — but it had left for its reconnaissance flight of Sweden two days earlier, and halfway to its destination it had developed a problem with its electrical system. Chernyakhovsk had been the nearest friendly place to land, and as this was a spy plane, Chipurin very much preferred landing at friendly airports, lest he be stripped of his rank and thrown out of the military.
The electrical problem was fixed after a day, so this morning the Il-20M was again taking to the skies.
At five thirty-four a.m. it did just that. The controllers in the tower watched the plane lift off, fading quickly into the mist above their runway. Only the small red star on the vertical stabilizer was visible at fifty meters off the ground, and this too disappeared within a few seconds as the gray airship melded with the saturated air.
Of course the aircraft’s flight path had been altered by the fact that it was beginning its day at a different airport than planned, but once Chipurin left Kaliningrad and got up to his cruising altitude he would merge with his original flight path and carry out his orders. This would take him northwest over the Baltic to Sweden’s Gotland Island, which he would circle, just outside Swedish airspace, at an altitude of 20,000 feet. After this he would turn due north, flying along the Swedish coast, passing Stockholm out his port-side window before performing a series of racetrack patterns in the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland. Here the sensor operators in their seats behind Chipurin and his copilot would conduct tests on Swedish radar capabilities and listen in on military communications. After two hours of this, the big Ilyushin would leave the skies over the gulf and return to the Baltic Sea proper, heading east past Helsinki before descending over the Gulf of Finland to land finally in Levashovo air base, north of Saint Petersburg.