Page 109 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
It couldn’t have been about his situation. Perhaps it had something to do with how he got there in the first place. He was connected to a middleman, the conduit between the North Koreans and the operation to steal the quantum computing technology and the attempt on Jack’s life. What was that guy’s name? He couldn’t pull it up. He called Gavin.
“Gavin, what was the name of that yahoo that was running Rhodes like a rented mule on the Singapore operation?”
“Zvezdev. A CIA SOG team found him—or at least parts of him—in a kimchi jar.”
Gerry thanked him and called the director of national intelligence, Mary Pat Foley, a friend for many years. He had her personal number.
“We found him in Croatia. A Bulgarian. The rumor was he was connected to some kind of criminal syndicate, but we never got more than that. I’ll forward the particulars of what we have.”
“Thanks, Mary Pat. I might have to circle back to you on this.”
“You have my number.”
Bingo,Gerry thought.
Rhodes was connected to Zvezdev, some kind of syndicate mobster who wanted Jack killed but he winds up dead instead.
Zvezdev dead.
Rhodes dead.
And somebody connected to Zvezdev still wants to kill Jack.
Zvezdev is the key.
That’s it.
Gerry’s e-mail dinged. It was the Zvezdev file promised from Mary Pat.
He opened it and scanned it for details. Zvezdev was the link to everything. The Bulgarian had fled to Croatia to hide, and it was the place where he had been killed.
Gerry pulled out his encrypted cell phone and speed-dialed Dom.
“I’m forwarding a file to you guys right now. I need you to get over to Croatia, pronto.”
53
Jack woke up with the alarm, refreshed and ready for a new day. He threw himself on the floor by his bed, banging out two hundred push-ups in sets of fifty before he even allowed himself to take his morning piss. Nothing like a sense of urgency to motivate the will.
It was time to get his head out of his ass.
Time to Get After It.
Nothing wrong with a vacation, but it was no excuse for letting himself go, and the last two weeks had been too much of a slide. After he took a leak, he thought about changing into a pair of running shorts and going for a run along the river. But he never saw any runners in the city and the sidewalks were crowded in the mornings, so he opted instead for four sets of twenty-five burpees.
He nearly puked his guts out, but he finally finished, gasping for air. Feeling a nice little pump all over his body, and a few aches he hadn’t felt in a while, he padded barefoot into thekitchen to boil up enough water for his last bag of Jocko White Tea and fry a couple eggs.
After finishing up his breakfast, he turned on the English-language local news at the top of the early-morning hour. The two lead news items caught his attention.
The first was about the upcoming Serbian Orthodox Renewal service in just two days, and the growing excitement among Serbs in Bosnia and the region, with video clips of faithful Orthodox people boarding buses and smiling bearded priests packing suitcases. “Local officials are anticipating fifty thousand participants tomorrow, up from estimates of just thirty thousand a week ago,” one commentator noted.
The second story featured the gruesome massacre of a Muslim wedding party three days before near Višegrad in Herzegovina, a region of the country through which he had passed with Aida on their trip to Dubrovnik.
The images were horrible and all too familiar to Jack, both on television and, unfortunately, in person. In catechism, the nuns taught him the theological concept of original sin, but life with The Campus proved to him it wasn’t just a theory.
The grim newscasters introduced English-subtitled video clips of grieving families and Bosniak community leaders calling for swift justice against the murderous Serb White Eagles. They complained that the corrupt and incompetent government was either unwilling or unable to deliver it.
At least one Bosniak called for justice “to be taken into our own hands,” and a raging imam called for jihad against the Serbs from his pulpit. A news crawl along the bottom of the screen read:#remembersrebrenica is trending number one on Twitter in Bosnia...
