“He’s got something to do with it — whether or not he’s the nucleus of it remains to be seen.”
“You going to call me back?”
“Three hours?”
“Sounds good. Sit tight.”
A minute and a half after Clark’s call, Ryan had a conference call going with a dozen employees around Hendley Associates, including Gerry Hendley, Rick Bell, Sam Granger, and others. Bell organized a team to dig into this Russian spook, and everyone immediately went to work.
It did not take long for them to realize that Clark was right about the family connection; the Kovalenko he was looking for was the son of the Kovalenko Clark remembered from the KGB. Oleg, the father, was retired though still alive, and Valentin, the son, was now the SVR assistant rezident in London.
At only thirty-five years old, assistant rezident in London was a pretty high-level job, all agreed, but no one could figure out how he could possibly be connected to any operation that the Russians could be running against John Clark.
Next the analysts began searching through CIA traffic looking for information on Valentin Kovalenko. These analysts did not normally spend their days tracking Russian diplomats, and they found it rather refreshing. Kovalenko was not holed up in a Waziristan cave like many of The Campus’s targets. The CIA had information, the vast majority obtained through the United Kingdom’s Security Service, also known as MI5, about his London apartment, where he shopped, even where his daughter went to school.
It soon became obvious to the analysts that MI5 did not follow Kovalenko on a day-to-day basis. They did show that he had traveled from Heathrow to Domodedovo Airport in Moscow for two weeks in October, but since then he had been back in London.
Ryan began to wonder about Valentin’s father, Oleg Kovalenko. Clark had said that he knew of the man, though it didn’t sound like John harbored any suspicions that the old man himself might be involved in his current predicament. Still, Jack saw a lot of brilliant analysts all digging into Valentin. He decided there was no sense in his duplicating their efforts, so instead he figured, what the hell, he’d work the Oleg angle.
For the next half-hour he read from the archives of the CIA about the KGB spy, specifically his exploits in Czechoslovakia, in East Germany, in Beirut, and in Denmark. Jack Junior had been in the game for only a few years, but to him the man did not seem to have a particularly remarkable career, at least as compared with some other personal histories of Russian spies that he had read.
After digging through the man’s past, Jack put his name into a Homeland Security database that would tell of any international travel he might have made to Western countries.
A single trip popped up. The elder Kovalenko had flown on Virgin Atlantic to London in early October.
“To see his son, perhaps?” Jack wondered.
If it was a family reunion, it was a damn short one. Just thirty hours in country.
The short trip was curious to Jack. He strummed his fingers on the desk for a moment, and then called Gavin Biery.
“Hey, it’s Jack. If I give you the name of a foreign national, and I give you the dates he was in the UK, could you find his credit cards and get me a list of transactions he made while he was there so I can use that to try and track his movements?”
Jack heard Biery whistle on the other end of the line. “Shit.”
Biery said. “Maybe.”
“How long will it take?”
“Couple of days, at least.”
Ryan sighed. “Never mind.”
Biery started to laugh. Ryan thought, What a fucking weirdo.
But only until Gavin said, “Just messing with you, Jack. I can have that for you inside of ten minutes. E-mail me the guy’s name and anything else you have on him and I’ll jump on it.”
“Umm. Okay.”
Ten minutes later, Ryan’s phone rang. He answered with, “What did you find out?”
Gavin Biery, mercifully, recognized the urgency in Ryan’s voice. “Here’s the deal. He was in London, no question. But he didn’t pay for a hotel or a car or anything like that. Just a few gifts, and an incidental or two.”
Ryan sighed in frustration. “So it sounds like someone else paid for his trip.”
“He bought his own plane ticket, put it on a card. But once he was in London he was on someone else’s dime.”
“Okay … Guess that won’t do me any good.”
“What were you hoping to find?”
“I don’t know. Just fishing. I hoped this trip had something to do with the Clark situation. I guess I thought if I could track him for the thirty hours he was in town I could get an idea—”
“I know where he stayed.”
“You do?”
“He bought a box of cigars in the gift shop of the Mandarin Oriental at seven fifty-six in the evening, then he bought a box of Cadbury chocolates in the gift shop there at eight twenty-two the next morning. Unless he was just really in love with that gift shop, it sounds like he bedded down there for the night.”
Jack thought this over. “Can you get a look at all the rooms that night?”
“Yeah, I checked. No Valentin Kovalenko.”
“Oleg Kovalenko?”
“Nope.”
“So someone else, not his son, paid his way. Can we get a list of every credit card that held a room for that night?”
“Sure. I can pull that out. Call you back in five?”
Ryan said, “I’ll be at your desk in three.”
Ryan showed up at Biery’s desk with his own laptop, which he opened as he plopped into a chair next to the computer guru. Biery handed Ryan a printout, so Ryan and Gavin both could scan through the list of names of those registered at the hotel. Ryan didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly, which made delegating half of the search to Gavin practically impossible. Other than the name “Kovalenko,” which Biery had already said was not here, or the highly unlikely discovery of the name “Edward Kealty,” he didn’t really know what would pique his interest.
He wished like hell he could be sitting with Melanie right now. She would find a name, a pattern, something.
And then, from out of the blue, Jack got an idea in his head. “Vodka!” he shouted.
Gavin smiled. “Dude it’s ten-fifteen in the morning. Unless you’ve got some Bloody Mary mix—”
Ryan wasn’t listening. “Russian diplomats who visit the UN in New York are always getting in trouble for drinking all the vodka in their minibars.”
“Says who?”
“I don’t know, I’ve heard it before. Might be an urban legend, but look at this guy.” He pulled up a photo of Valentin Kovalenko on his laptop. “You can’t tell me he wasn’t tipping back the Stoli.”
“He’s got that big red nose, but what does that have to do with his trip to London?”
“Check for a room with minibar charges, or a bar tab charged to the room.”
Biery ran another report on his computer, and as he was doing so he said, “Or room service. Specifically, a liquor tab.”
“Exactly,” agreed Ryan.
Gavin began going through the itemized credit card charges of the subset of rooms that had ordered room service or charged bar items to their room. He found a few possibles, then a few more. Finally he settled on one charge in particular. “Okay, here we go. Here is a room paid for by an American Express Centurion card under the name of Carmela Zimmern.”
“Okay. So?”
“So it looks like Ms. Zimmern, in her one evening at the Mandarin Oriental, enjoyed two servings of beluga caviar, four bottles of Finlandia vodka, and three porno movies.”
Ryan looked at the digital receipt on Gavin’s laptop. When he saw the three “in-room entertainment” charges, he was confused.