No journalist likes to be called a shill for her government, not even a journalist who is a shill for her government. But she only nodded a little, and made no remark.
He said, “I am certain you will do a good job, but one thing is important to remember above all. No one can know about this but Jack Ryan. No one.”
“I understand.”
Volodin’s smile disappeared. His eyes narrowed. “I really hope you do. I would hate for anything to threaten our good relationship.”
“I will reveal nothing of my mission,” she said meekly.
Volodin nodded, smiled again. “You will ask for a private audience with Ryan as soon as your interview is over tomorrow night. I am going to tell you what to say to him. You will repeat my words verbatim to Ryan, that is crucial.”
“Of course.”
“He will, no doubt, have a message for me. Perhaps not immediately. He will want to confer with his brain trust. He doesn’t think on his feet like I do.”
“No. Not at all.”
“You will stay in Copenhagen until you have his message for me, and then you will return immediately. Once you get back to Vnukovo I will send a helicopter for you, and it will deliver you to me. Either at my home or at the Kremlin, depending on where I am at the time of your return. You will give me his message, exactly in content and tone, as he gave it to you.”
“I understand everything and will do as you ask. I am proud to serve you… serve Russia.”
Volodin spent the next several minutes telling Molchanova what to say to the American President. When he finished she repeated it back to him several times, as he commanded. He was not happy with her delivery at first, so they went over it for a while. A taciturn schoolmaster and an approval-seeking student. It was not a difficult task, but Tatiana Molchanova had difficulty because it was so incredibly hard for her to fathom that this was, by far, the coolest thing that had ever happened to her, and yet she could never tell anyone about this at all.
John Clark climbed the stairs up into the G550 Gulfstream executive jet. As he reached the top he was greeted by Adara Sherman.
“Good morning, Mr. Clark,” she said, taking his small pack from his hand and ushering him through the door.
“Ms. Sherman.”
Adara served, officially at least, as the Hendley Associates logistics coordinator and flight attendant. In reality, almost all her work revolved around The Campus, where she was not only a coordinator of logistics and a flight attendant, but also a security officer for the aircraft, and something of a fixer for the team to help them get out of the jams they often found themselves in overseas.
She helped stow Clark’s duffel while he poked his head through the cockpit door to greet the pilot and copilot, and then he took one of the big leather cabin chairs for himself. Adara set him up with a bottle of water, and she quickly discussed the flight plan for the day, along with the menu for lunch.
When she was finished with this, Adara said, “We’ll be taking off immediately. Can I get you anything else, Mr. Clark?”
“Yes, actually. I need a sailboat.”
She nodded, headed up to the galley, and grabbed a book full of cocktail recipes. “I don’t know that one, offhand. It’s probably here in Mr. Boston’s.”
Clark laughed. “No, Ms. Sherman. I need a real sailboat. And I need it ready for me by the time we get down to Tortola.”
“Oh.” She moved across the cabin to her laptop and sat down behind it. “I can do that, too.”
“Nothing too fancy or complicated. I will be staying within the BVIs, but I’ll need to slip quietly right up to an island resort with restricted access.”
“And make your own access,” Adara said with a little grin.
“You got it. I’ll need a short list of equipment as well.”
“I’ll arrange as much as I can while we’re in flight, and if I need to I’ll go out and scrounge up the rest when we land.”
“Excellent,” Clark said. Sherman had impressed him every time he had worked with her, and he knew she had also proven herself in the field once, when she and Dominic Caruso had found themselves in an in extremis situation in Panama.
He regarded her for a moment more and thought about how lucky the men were to have her on the team, especially now since Sam was gone. They were a thin operational outfit, so having a force multiplier like Adara Sherman was all the more important.
Clark went to work going over maps of the area of operations he was going to be working in when he got to the British Virgin Islands. He saw his ingress to the target to be the easy part of this operation. The difficult part would be convincing this virtual currency trader to work with him. He imagined the man wouldn’t be doing what he did, and working in a place like the place he was working in, because he had a great love of authority. Clark assumed Walker was a typical money-laundering crook, so as soon as Jack Junior landed in D.C. and got into the office, the two men would work on Clark’s game plan to encourage, cajole, or even threaten Walker to work against some very powerful and probably very dangerous Russians, and instead work for some very motivated, but not terribly forthcoming, American.
41
Terry Walker missed his home country the way many of his fellow countrymen do when they become expatriates, because Australia is a beautiful place, but he had to admit that his temporary digs weren’t half bad. As he looked around his massive bedroom, his eyes slowly adjusting to the early-morning light, he knew he was in the midst of pure luxury, and he wondered why this didn’t make him happier.
As he lay there in bed, the dawn approaching through the curtains to the balcony, he thought about his life for a moment. It wasn’t lost on him that he had most everything he ever wanted; those who knew him thought he was living a dream. But it also wasn’t lost on him that the dream he’d assembled for himself had come at a great cost.
He did his best to push all his worries from his mind, and he climbed out of bed quietly. He dressed in workout gear in the dressing room adjacent to his bedroom, then he kissed the mop of chestnut hair sticking out from between a clump of overstuffed pillows. The hair belonged to his wife, Kate, who would sleep for another hour, and when he tiptoed down the hall and looked in on his seven-year-old son, he saw that Noah was sound asleep as well, with a stack of comic books next to him in the bed.
A minute later Terry was out in the early-morning air, walking through the lush tropical property toward the five-thousand-square-foot gymnasium down at the bottom of a hill lined with jacaranda and coconut palms.
Tarpon Island was no regular resort hotel; it was an exclusive resort on an even more exclusive private island, owned by a British billionaire and a celebrated bon vivant. The man had purchased the island in the 1980s to use as his own private refuge, but he’d taken to inviting so many of his well-heeled guests to the place in the past three decades his entrepreneurial spirit told him he could simply open a corner of the island up as a resort for the rich and famous.
Perhaps rich or famous was a better way to frame it.
Rock stars, movie stars, and fashion icons all stayed here, but these were just the famous guests. More common were men and women like the Walkers, fabulously wealthy but unknown to anyone but a very few within their industry.
The Walkers were unique in one respect, however. Where most other guests at the Tarpon Island resort stayed a week or two at most, the Walkers had been living here for the past six months, and they planned on being here for six months more.
Terry worked out in the gym for nearly an hour, his mind appreciating the focus exercise gave him, and then he headed home, past the smallest units on the island, cottages that could sleep six, and back up the hill to his place, the four-bedroom mansion with floor-to-ceiling views of the Caribbean Sea from almost every single room.