Commander-In-Chief by Tom Clancy, Mark Greaney Read Free Book Online Page B

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