Page 150 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight

“And that would be?”

“Your organization has put out a hit on a good friend of mine. A fellow by the name of Jack Ryan, Jr. Sound familiar?”

“Too familiar.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

“I’m not. The hit should never have been initiated.”

“Good, then there won’t be a problem calling it off.”

“I’m afraid there is.”

John leaned forward, his cold-blooded scowl turning even more so, though the half-blind Czech couldn’t see it. “Why?”

“I didn’t place the order. Vladimir Vasilev did. He’s in charge of the organization, in case you weren’t aware.”

“He’s in some hospital in Paris, dying. We were under the impression you were in charge.”

“I’m the chief operating officer, yes, but he remains the CEO. And his last, dying wish is that Jack Ryan, Jr., should die before he does. I opposed the hit from the beginning, but alas, I couldn’t prevent it. And I couldn’t stop it, owing to certain organizational dynamics.”

“‘Organizational dynamics’? Be more specific.”

“If Vasilev were dead and I were in charge, I would call off the hit in a heartbeat. I would even go so far as to kill Vasilev myself in order to take charge and end the hit, but if Vasilev dies of anything other than natural causes, my life is forfeit. But more to the point, if you kill me now, the next person in line after me would be responsible for carrying out Vasilev’s order, and his life would be forfeit as well, all the way down the line, until Jack Junior is dead.”

“A dead man’s switch,” John said. “That’s a problem. But I have a funny feeling you might have a solution.”

“Indeed, I do. But it won’t be easy.”

“Don’t need easy. But it better damn well be good, or you’ll wake up tomorrow with your brains blown out all over that feather pillow and a suicide note pinned to your pajamas. Those are my ‘organizational dynamics.’”

75

STOCKHOLM

Goran Fazli trudged through the snow crunching beneath his boots, cursing the bitter cold of a record early storm. His gloved hands were shoved into the pockets of his worn-out down jacket, a gift from an aid agency. In fact, everything the Macedonian immigrant wore this evening had come from a Swedish refugee organization, which collected used clothing from the generous souls in the city.

The fools.

Fazli had just left a clandestine meeting in a public housing complex in Rinkeby, one of the famous “no go” zones in Stockholm, where police feared to appear at all, let alone intervene, despite the government’s denials to the contrary. He’d been walking for blocks, replaying in his mind the conversations he’d had with the others. It had gone very well.

The majority of residents in this part of town were foreign-born, as were so many other people in Sweden these days. Theliberal government’s generous open-door refugee policy had been particularly welcoming to persecuted Muslims like Fazli.

Fazli wasn’t his real name, of course. For the past twenty-three years, he’d been known by another.

Tarik Brkic.

But, of course, that wasn’t his birth name, either.

Brkic used forged documents supplied months earlier by Aida’s Peace and Friendship Center to gain refugee status and to climb to the top of Sweden’s immigration list. The center had also provided his credentials certifying him as a victim of persecution with no criminal record or terrorist affiliations. It even listed him as a skilled auto mechanic, which was actually true. This provided him immediate employment at a Volvo dealership in a refugee transition program in one of Stockholm’s affluent suburbs.

Brkic blended in nicely at work with his shaved head, shaved beard, mustache, and Western clothing, including a pair of cheap H&M sunglasses he wore to hide his distinctively blind eye.

And when he couldn’t wear his sunglasses? Well, it was evidence of the persecution he had suffered in life, wasn’t it?

But Brkic hadn’t picked Sweden because it would be easy for him to enter into it or to blend in with the locals. Sweden was a hunting ground for him now—a perfect one, really. It was another Yugoslavia in the making, with hundreds of thousands of Muslim Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Turks, Kurds, Somalis, Eritreans, and even Bosnians living in the Nordic country. Arabic was already the second mother tongue of Sweden, surpassing Finnish.

Brkic merely shrugged when he heard the BBC News report that the Unity Referendum had passed with a startlingmajority. He no longer cared. He was on a new mission now, and soon his wife and children would join him.