From there, Trash went to a Hong Kong hospital, where he was met by Defense Intelligence Agency personnel and ferried to Pearl Harbor. He would heal, and he would be back in the cockpit of the F/A-18 soon enough, although he imagined it would never again feel the same flying without Cheese as his flight lead.
John Clark, Domingo Chavez, Sam Driscoll, and Dominic Caruso spent nine days in Beijing, moving from safe house to safe house, being passed from Pathway of Liberty to Red Hand and back again, until a large cash payment, hand-delivered by Ed Foley to an old man in New York’s Chinatown, really got things moving.
In the middle of the night the four Americans were taken to a building housing Russian pilots for Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state-owned weapons exporter, and they were covertly put aboard a Yakovlev heading to Russia after dropping off cluster bombs for the Chinese.
Clark had negotiated the return trip through Stanislav Biryukov, the head of the FSB. It went off without a hitch, though John knew that the favor Biryukov had owed him had now been paid in full, so he could not count on him again to be anything more than the head of a sometimes-enemy spy agency.
Valentin Kovalenko spent nearly a week locked in a room in a safe house belonging to Hendley Associates. He saw no one other than a couple of security men who brought him food and newspapers, and he spent his days staring at the walls and wanting to return home to his family.
But he never believed it would happen.
He feared, he expected, he was certain, that when John Clark returned he would walk into the room with a pistol in his hand and shoot Valentin Kovalenko in the head.
And Kovalenko could not say he blamed him.
But one afternoon a security man who called himself Ernie unlocked the door, handed Kovalenko a thousand dollars in cash, and said, “I have a message from John Clark.”
“Yes?”
“Get lost.”
“Okay.”
Ernie turned and walked out of the room. Seconds later, Valentin heard a car start and pull out of the driveway.
The bewildered Russian stepped out of the building a minute later to find himself in a condominium complex somewhere in suburban D.C. Slowly he walked toward the street, wondering if he would be able to hail a cab, and where exactly he should tell the cabbie to take him.
After returning from Hong Kong on the Hendley Associates Gulfstream, Jack Ryan, Jr., went straight to the Alexandria apartment of Melanie Kraft. He’d called ahead, giving her time to decide whether or not she would be there when he arrived, and to decide what she would tell him about her past.
Over coffee at the bistro table in her tiny kitchen, he told her what she already knew. He was working for an intelligence organization running sub rosa, working in the interest of the United States, but free of the constraints of a government bureaucracy.
She’d had several days to process this since the Chinese attack at Hendley Associates; she saw the benefit of such an organization, while simultaneously seeing the obvious dangers that went along with it.
Then it was her turn in the confessional. She explained how her father had been compromised and how she’d learned of it, then decided she would not allow him to destroy her life with his mistake.
He understood her difficult situation, but he was unable to make her believe that this FBI man, Darren Lipton, must have been an agent for Center and not actually working on a real investigation.
“No, Jack. There was another guy with FBI. Lipton’s boss. Packard. I still have his card in my purse. He confirmed everything. Plus, they had the court order. They showed it to me.”
Ryan shook his head. “Center was running you since he intercepted phone calls from Charles Alden discussing how you were working for him, providing information about me and Hendley Associates to discredit John Clark.”
“Lipton is real. He knows about my father and—”
“He knows because Center told him! Center could have got that information from hacking into Pakistani intelligence files. His operation could do that easily.”
He saw that she did not believe him; she felt her entire life was about to fall down on her head when the FBI charged her for lying about her father’s espionage.
Jack said, “One way we can clear this up right now.”
“How?”
“We go pay Lipton a visit.”
It took a day to find him. He’d taken a leave of absence from work, and both Jack and Melanie worried he’d fled the country. But Ryan got Biery to hack into the man’s bank records, and when he found out Lipton took out four hundred dollars from an ATM at a DoubleTree hotel in Crystal City just minutes earlier, Jack and Melanie headed over.
By the time they got there Biery had the room number for them, and minutes later Jack used a master keycard Melanie pilfered from a maid.
Ryan and Kraft came through the door and saw a half-naked Lipton and a fully nude hooker, and Jack told the girl to get her things, her four hundred bucks, and hit the road.
Lipton seemed scared seeing Ryan and the girl here, but he seemed in no great hurry to dress. Jack threw a pair of khakis at him. “For the love of God, dude, put these on.”
Lipton slipped into the pants, but did not put a shirt on over his wife-beater.
“What do you want with me?” he asked.
Jack said, “Center is dead, if you didn’t already know.”
“Who?”
“Center. Dr. K. K. Tong.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Look, asshole! I know you were working for Center. We’ve got all the transcripts of your conversations, and we’ve got Kovalenko, who can finger you.”
Lipton sighed. “The Russian with the beard?”
“Yep.”
It was a lie, but Lipton fell for it.
He gave up the ruse. “Center was my handler, but I don’t know K. K. Tong. I had no idea I was working for the Russians, otherwise I wouldn’t—”
“You were working for the Chinese.”
Darren Lipton winced. “Even worse.”
“Who was Packard?” Melanie asked.
Lipton shrugged. “He’s just some other poor schmuck that Center had by the balls. Just like me. He wasn’t FBI. I got the impression he was a detective. Maybe D.C., maybe Maryland or Virginia. Center sent him to me when the phony court order didn’t convince you to bug the phone. I dressed the guy up, gave him a fifteen-minute primer on the situation, and he did the good cop to my bad.”
“But you asked me to go to the J. Edgar Hoover Building to meet him. What if I said yes?”
Lipton shook his head. “I knew you wouldn’t walk through the front door of the Hoover Building.”
Melanie was so furious she had been played by this son of a bitch that, in a moment of fury, she hit him in the mouth. Instantly blood appeared on his lower lip.
Lipton licked at the blood, then winked at Kraft.
Her face reddened even more, and she growled. “Jesus! I forgot. He gets off on that.”
Ryan looked at Melanie, understood what she meant, then turned to Lipton.
Jack said, “Get off on this,” and he threw the most vicious right jab of his life, connecting with the FBI man’s fleshy face. Lipton’s head snapped back, and the big man went down in a heap. His jaw was swollen and purple within seconds.
Jack knelt down over him. “You have one week to resign from the FBI. Do it, or we come back for you. Do you understand?”