Ysabel’s eyes widened suddenly. “I’ve got an idea! To celebrate, I am going to make you a fantastic dinner tonight.”
Ryan did not adopt her same sense of excitement. With an air of suspicion, he asked, “What’s on the menu?”
“A dish my grandmother taught me. Kookoo sabzi.”
“I really hope that’s not Farsi for ‘Grandma’s vegetarian mush.’”
She punched him playfully on the arm again. “Of course not! It’s an herb-and-vegetable quiche.”
“Oh, boy.”
Ysabel sighed and climbed off Jack’s lap. “It’s delicious, you’re gonna love it. I’ll go by the Persian market on the way home and get everything I need.”
Jack looked up at her without speaking, but he faked a look of enthusiasm.
Clearly, she saw right through it. “Why don’t you pick up some steaks at the butcher? Get a cut you would eat at home. You can grill while I make stew. We will have the kookoo sabzi as a side dish. An Iranian-and-American meal.”
Jack almost leapt up from his chair, his enthusiasm real this time. “The world in harmony, right there on our plates. I like it. I’ll meet you back at the apartment in a half-hour.”
They kissed again and Ysabel left the café, turning south. Jack headed east, a spring in his step because he was already thinking about dining on juicy steaks and drinking great wine on the balcony of his apartment, all with such a beautiful and amazing woman.
As he walked through central Rome’s late-afternoon swarm of pedestrians, cars, trucks, and scooters, he thought about his situation, and some of the spring left his step because he was reminded how temporary this all was. He and Iranian national Ysabel Kashani had spent the past two weeks here in one of the most romantic cities in the world, and he’d loved every minute of it, but it wasn’t going to last much longer.
He didn’t know what kind of a future he had with Ysabel, it was too early to say, because they had known each other for just over a month. They met on an operation in Asia and a relationship had developed quickly, and despite his reticence about getting into anything serious at this stage of his life, Jack had to admit he found himself falling for this girl.
And he knew this could be problematic for a few reasons, not the least of which was that they lived in different hemispheres.
Jack quickly scanned his six o’clock as he reached the left bank of the Tiber River and began walking south toward the nearest bridge to the east. He didn’t see anyone tailing him. Even though he wasn’t expecting anyone to be following him on this op, he didn’t need Clark reminding him to keep his personal and operational security at the forefront of his thoughts; OPSEC and PERSEC came naturally to him now. His countersurveillance tactics had become ingrained in his past several years working with The Campus. Everywhere he went, even back in the States, he used varying routes to and from his apartment; he didn’t go to the same coffee shops, restaurants, or markets every day; and he made subtle checks of the people around him, both in front and behind, at irregular intervals.
He completed his scan, and then he allowed his fertile brain to go back to work. His thoughts drifted off Ysabel — for the time being, anyway — and he started thinking about finances.
Not his finances — he was making good money, and he came from a well-to-do family. Hell, his dad was President of the United States and his mom was chief of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins.
But the finances on his mind at present were those of the upper echelon in the Kremlin.
He’d come here to Italy on a mission that was one part operational fieldwork and two parts analysis, and Jack considered himself perfectly suited to the job, as he was both an operations officer and an analyst, specializing of late in the financial analytics helpful in tracking money laundering.
The U.S. intelligence community knew that the key to dealing with the criminal regime at the Kremlin was to understand both where their money came from and, perhaps more important, where it was going. Russia was a kleptocracy, all the power in the hands of a corrupt few. The term thrown around these days was “elite capture”; the privileged of the nation had taken over the democratic process, wresting the power from the masses through bribery, election rigging, and other underhanded tactics.
Around the time Russia’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies merged with each other, the CIA began tasking a lot of analytical manpower to identifying the personal assets of the small cabal of Kremlin and FSB policy makers at the center of influence, many of whom were themselves ex — intelligence officials. Jack’s father, the President, had managed to convince several other nations to join him in imposing sanctions on many in this group of Russian elite as a way to press back against that nation’s aggression against its neighbors. This wasn’t a perfect foil to the Kremlin’s actions by any means, but it hit several of Russia’s top power players where it hurt, and it had increased pressure on President Valeri Volodin from within.
But while some of the oligarchs’ accounts were seized and their travel privileges in the West curtailed, The Campus had begun focusing not on the oligarchs aligned with the Kremlin themselves, but on the economists, mathematicians, bankers, money managers, offshore business experts, and accountants who worked under them. Jack knew Volodin’s top men weren’t themselves hunched over computers setting up foreign trusts and buying and selling holdings, property, and other assets. No, it was the men and possibly women — though so far The Campus had identified only men — below these powerful Kremlin players who possessed both the financial talent and the political reliability.
These Russian money movers had been a project of the analysts at The Campus for some time, though Ryan himself had been away, involved in operations around the world, so he had only recently gotten involved.
Together Jack and the other analysts had identified roughly three dozen men who seemed to be in the trenches controlling the two-way spigot of money that propelled the Russian government kleptocracy. There were undoubtedly many more than those they knew of, but the deeper Jack got into the weeds while looking into the known players, a question in Ryan’s mind grew and grew: Which of these men, if any, did Valeri Volodin himself entrust to handle his own finances?
It was rumored Volodin had untold wealth — before the recent huge drop in oil prices it had been suggested he had north of $40 billion. Presumably, it was held in a combination of stakes in state-owned businesses, offshore banks, and other property. Most in the U.S. government suspected Volodin’s own money traveled through the same secret financial-haven networks as that of the other members of Russia’s powerful elite, so it was just a matter of peeling apart the layers of the network and looking for the masterminds who build it, and then perhaps The Campus would find the men in control of Volodin’s hidden riches.
The U.S. government, of which Jack’s father was the chief executive, had expressly precluded the Department of Justice from targeting Volodin’s personal wealth. There were international treaties and accords set up to prevent one nation from dredging up world leaders’ personal finances, set in place to keep bickering countries from simply filing charges against one another’s heads of state as a means of diplomatic pressure.
But The Campus had no such restrictions.
The director of The Campus, Gerry Hendley, had given his analytical shop the green light to seek out the players involved with Volodin’s personal amassed billions. That had led them to a lot of sleepless nights of work, but finally it had led one of them — Jack Ryan, Jr., to be exact — here to Europe.