by JC Ryan
Despite her good looks, enchanting personality, and no prospect of romance between them, although they liked each other, she was the perfect trainer and support person for Rex in Italy.
Catia lived in a second story, four-bedroom apartment she’d inherited from her parents. She used one bedroom for herself and the others for short-term tourist rentals to show legitimate income. Her income from Mossad she expertly hid in secret untraceable accounts. Her apartment was on a small street off the Piazza di Spagna, where one would find the famous Spanish Steps — a set of steps climbing a steep slope between the Piazza di Spagna at the base and Piazza Trinità dei Monti, dominated by the Trinità dei Monti church, at the top.
Rex found he enjoyed learning about the history and the streets of Rome far more than he’d observed in the other countries. Each day, no matter how serious the lesson, was a delight to him. After a few weeks training with Catia, she had turned him over to an MI6 agent, who introduced him to their permanent operation in Rome. They said goodbye, and that should have been it until Rex would need her services when on a mission in Rome.
However, Rex couldn’t resist seeing her once more before he left. He’d followed instructions for how to contact her. One of the waiters at the trattoria would always be able to contact her, she’d told him. It was an annoying fact of life that he could not phone her, so in the future, if he needed her, he was to come here, order a specific dish, and say, “My friend, Abrielle Magni, recommended it. Perhaps you know her?”
After the waiter established his identity, through another set of phrases she had Rex memorize, he would contact her, and she would join Rex there. Or, if it wasn’t safe, the waiter would direct Rex to another location where she’d be waiting.
On what was to be his last day, he sat with Catia outdoors at the trattoria she’d introduced to him when they first met. He didn’t know that her apartment was in the same block. He hadn’t seen Catia for several weeks, and then it was time to go back to the United States.
Once again, they were saying goodbye. Rex wondered if he’d made a mistake. She didn’t seem particularly happy to see him, but he took some comfort that she didn’t look particularly unhappy, either. They had run out of conversation. Rex waved away a lazy fly and finally broke the silence that had fallen between them.
“I’ll miss you.”
Her eyes warned him that he was straying into forbidden territory. She didn’t answer, but the slight blush in her neck didn’t escape Rex’s eyes. She might as well have said, “So will I.”
Another few minutes passed while both finished their wine. The decanter had another glassful left. Rex questioned her with raised eyebrows as he lifted it and gestured toward her glass. She nodded, just a small gesture, and her face remained composed, but her eyes smiled sadly.
Rex poured most of the remaining wine into her glass, and a few drops into his. He raised it. “Chin-chin.”
Catia’s expression softened. “Chin-chin,” she returned. A fleeting smile, then she sipped delicately at the ruby-colored liquid. She looked away.
“Arrivederci.” The word used for saying goodbye when there is an expectation of not seeing each other again. The word hung in the sultry air, unadorned. Final.
“Addio,” Go with God, she’d whispered.
Rex nodded, downed the few drops of wine in his glass, and left the table without touching her, knowing he might regret, for the rest of his life, not kissing her then. He pacified himself with the thought, if I ever see her again I’m going to make up for not doing it this time and kiss her.
She always waited until he left before she did. A glance back over his shoulder revealed that she still sat, unmoving, where he’d left her, staring at him.
During his flight back to the US, he reflected on the past six months in Europe, and especially his time with Catia. What was it about her that had broken through the walls he’d placed around his heart? He’d met beautiful women before. He’d met capable women before. He’d met beautiful, capable women before.
He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something about her, a vulnerability, perhaps. A mysterious poignancy that called to something like it in himself. He didn’t dwell on it for too long. That train of thought was fruitless.
The shortest flight home, or as close to home as he could get on a commercial airline, was about fifteen hours, routed through London on British Airways. He’d be chasing the sun, and he’d have one hell of a jet lag to overcome when he got to Phoenix, where a CRC car would meet him for the drive to the compound.
Still thinking about the beautiful woman he’d left behind, Rex settled himself to sleep until he had to change planes. By the time he got to Phoenix, he’d made peace with leaving her.
There were no guarantees in this life. Maybe he’d be killed on a mission. Maybe she’d meet someone and fall in love, quit the spy business.
It wasn’t meant to be. Such is life.
Chapter Eighteen
2011 The Mediterranean
AFTER CRC HAD unleashed Rex on the enemies of the state, he had racked up a breathtaking trail of corpses across Asia, South America, the Middle East, and now Europe. He and the other operators had accomplished in three years what the entire CIA could not do in more than nine years since 9/11.
As a CRC agent, Rex was part of a highly-secret, strategic group of rapidly deployable, fast-moving, low overhead, no nonsense operators. Not James Bond types at all and not really cloak and dagger types either. Exhibiting more dagger and less cloak, their MO was shock and awe — surprise and overwhelming force. They were the best wet-work unit in the business. Some of their targets were those who caused headaches to the CIA and other western security forces. Targets who couldn’t be extracted and interrogated. Some of their targets were those whose deaths would strike fear into the hearts and minds of the enemy.
In the process, the world had been rid of some very bad people. Among them a few nasty terrorists, their leaders and some of their financiers, arms dealers, slavery profiteers, and Russian Mafia principals, as well as a few drug lords who just didn’t understand how bad drugs were for their health, especially when they used the money to fund terrorists. Through the barrel of a gun, CRC operatives did their jobs to right wrongs, to protect the weak, and make the world a better place.
Some of these people drowned when they fell off their luxury yachts in the Bahamas or Greek Islands or off the coast of Monaco. Some were involved in nasty car accidents. One of them was poisoned by his wife after she evidently found out about his mistress, then the wife disappeared. Some committed ‘suicide’, and a few even tested the thickness of their skulls against the power of flying 9mm bullets from a SIG Sauer P226 pistol.
The life of a CRC field operator, they were told during their training, was one of endless traveling from one location to another, followed by extended spells of mind-numbing tedium, every now and then punctuated by bursts of absolute violence and terror.
And then there was the waiting. Waiting for the target or a contact to turn up, waiting for the target to make a move, waiting for someone to complete a task before the next one could begin, waiting for the right time, waiting, waiting and more waiting, and then quick action – get the job done, get out of the area, and go home. Then waiting again for the next mission.
It took a strong kind of psyche not to go crazy from all the waiting. For some of the experienced operators, this waiting was a terrible time as they were visited by the nightmares of their previous missions – the people they’d killed, the times when they were almost killed… Those were the times when hate for the enemy and what they did came to the forefront, but during their training they were taught to get rid of the emotions of hate.
“Don’t hate them – it will kill you. Instead kill them, so they can’t kill again,” was the refrain they played in their heads when hate wanted to take possession of them.
Rex had schooled himself and had learned to fill his waiting time by reading history, learning new languages,
and learning to peruse endless, blinding, lines of code to recognize what the NSA called ‘signatures’ – the tell-tale lines that appeared over and over in a given hacker group’s malware. He always had an eReader device to read books and an MP3 player with him, so he could perfect his accents and improve his vocabulary by listening to native speakers of whatever new language he was learning.
Rex Dalton’s personnel file at CRC, the only place on the planet where such a file existed, was probably the most boring read imaginable. It read more like the spec of the latest model sports car than the personnel file of a human. He had no friends that he kept in touch with. He had no family that he knew of, and if they existed he didn’t care about it. He had no girl. The one he once had, he’d dumped to go after terrorists. The one he might have had was off limits and didn’t even know his real name. He had no vices, no weakness.
His file showed he was trained as a sniper who could take a target out at eight-hundred yards to a mile. He could kill with a long gun, short gun, or no gun. He was lethal with edged weapons, explosives, poisons, or no weapon at all. Targets could be taken out from a mile away or die with the breath of a CRC agent in their face.
***
IN 2011, THE Royal House of Saud was about to number two fewer princes because they just didn’t want to heed the warnings that it was not a good business idea to partner with al Qaeda and ISIS, or any other jihadi outfit for that matter.
CRC had unfettered access to financial intelligence, or “Finint,” collected by the US intelligence agencies, of which there were many, seemingly unconnected. The Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence and the FBI’s Terrorist Financing Operations Section, as well as the CIA and private companies allied with the vast American national-security complex, tracked the flow of money through the legion of global jihadist movements. And the Finint showed, without a shadow of doubt, much of the money came from Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Muslim emirates of the Persian Gulf.
In a secret cable made public in December 2010, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote, “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.” She went on to say that, “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Osama Bin Laden and home to fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, was supposed to make the terrorists quit their fund-raising endeavors on its soil. But the House of Saud had proven to be unable or unwilling to do so. Terror groups, with impunity, conducted fund-raising inside Saudi Arabia under the mantle of charity and even openly held cash collections during the yearly Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.
Prince Mohammad Bin Nayef, leader of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts, said, “We are trying to do our best to stem the flow of cash to extremists and murderers. But, if money wants to go to terrorists, there is little Saudi authorities can do to stop it.”
The reality was that the US government and the governments of other countries did nothing about it. They were too unwilling to upset their biggest oil supplier. They didn’t want to upset their business partners and allies. The politicians were stuck in a diplomacy rut, just talking about it, maybe in extreme cases admonishing the House of Saud, but that’s where it ended. Nothing else was done.
For them, Saudi oil was thicker than the blood of their citizens.
But it was simple logic. The Saudis were not listening. It was therefore incumbent upon someone to explain a few things to them and leave a very clear and very comprehensible message in the process. Therefore, Rex was sent in to do a bit of ‘explaining’ and messaging’. His explanations of what was meant by, “stop funding terrorists” left two very rich and high-ranking (numbers fifty and fifty-one out of more than two hundred in the line of succession) Saudi princes dead.
The first of Rex’s object lessons fell on the fiftieth prince in the line of succession to become the King of Saudi Arabia. Diplomatic intervention had failed. The Saudi will to curb his blatant funding of jihadists had failed. Though America could not be overtly involved in bringing consequences, CRC had no such limitations.
The prince was out on his sixty-five-million-dollar superyacht cruising around the Mediterranean when Rex caught up with him. One night, while sailing for the port of Monaco, he went out on deck to get away from the harem of hookers his aides always had on standby for him when he was on his yacht.
Investigators had many theories about how he ended up missing from the yacht more than twenty miles away from land. He must have slipped on something while leaning over the rails, they determined. It could have been oil, although there was no oil on the spotless deck. Maybe it was a freak wave, although the sea had been calm that night.
His body was never recovered; the sharks must have beaten the rescue teams to it. If they had seen his body before the sharks got to it, though, they’d have perhaps noticed that the prince had somehow managed to stab himself through the heart, from the back, before he took a dip in the ocean.
Prince number fifty-one in the line of succession, younger brother to the unfortunate shark victim, was holidaying on one of the Greek Islands at the time. When he got the news and it was confirmed a few days later that prince number fifty, his half-brother from another mother, was probably dead, he was so grief-stricken he locked himself in his hotel room and committed suicide with an overdose of heroin. Despite the fact that he was now one body closer to becoming the next King, and he’d hated his brother.
The public got the message that two Saudi princes had tragically died in the prime of their lives, in a short span of time. The Saudi royals got the same message but interpreted it a bit differently than the rest of the world. They, at least some of them, understood the message. “Stop funding terrorists” meant exactly that. “Stop it, or we will come after you again.”
This explanation helped a little, for some. But, as can be expected, some people were less adept at grasping things than others. So, every now and then, Rex had to be sent on a short one-on-one lecture tour to reinforce some of the concepts.
Chapter Nineteen
Arizona Headquarters of CRC, 2011
AFTER LEAVING EMPHATIC and unmistakable messages for the Saudis, Rex had a short break, during which he was bored out of his mind and begged for another mission. Brandt, however, insisted that Rex’s assignment for the next few months be training duty at CRC headquarters.
Rex couldn’t object. Ongoing training was fun, with plenty of challenges that didn’t include people shooting real bullets at him. At least, not people who genuinely wanted to kill him. The live-fire training was the exception, but by the time that happened, his trainees were expert in separating cardboard bad guys from real good guys in a split second. Even then, it was good to get his heart racing now and then. Kept him in fighting shape.
Hand-to-hand combat continued to be his forte, and he continued to be the undisputed champion. Naturally, he and his trainees tried not to inflict permanent damage on each other. He didn’t mind handing out bruises on bodies or egos. He didn’t mind taking them, either, only his ego was never in danger. He could take anyone they threw at him, singly or in pairs or threes. Four was sometimes a bit more of a challenge.
He’d kept himself busy and engaged for several months when Brandt called him to his office for a new assignment. They’d lost an agent. It would be his duty to find out who had killed him and how.
Brandt handed Rex a thick file with background about the operation. Rex already knew much of it. Nevertheless, he studied the file as if he knew nothing while he made his way to Rome.
***
SINCE THE DAY of the Madrid train bombings that killed Rex’s family, when al Qaeda announced its presence in the annals of terrorism, Europe, England, France, Belgium, Germany and Spain had suffered massive losses of life directly attributable to Islamic jihad. Of the major countries in Western Europe, only Italy had been spared
. Plenty of theories circulated to explain it. Most were poppycock.
It wasn’t because they had strict immigration policies – they didn’t – Muslim “refugees” from Africa and Middle Eastern countries arrived in droves on Italy’s shores. But it was perplexing that these Italian refugees seemed to be of a different brand – they never made any trouble, they didn’t send suicide bombers to blow up the Vatican, the epitome of the infidel, or any other historic place, they didn’t plant bombs, and they never drove trucks into crowds of people.
The official reason, according to Italian authorities; they had the best security and intelligence service in Europe and therefore prevented these things from happening by nipping the plans in the bud, before they could come to fruition. Even their own people laughed at that.
The true reason, the unofficial one, which every self-respecting security agency in the world knew, was that Italy had the Mafia. And although no one talked about it, everyone suspected, and some knew, the mob had made a deal with the terrorists.
The seeds of the modern Mafia began, most historians believe, with the nobility losing power and influence, starting around 1812. Especially after Italy annexed Sicily in 1860. The resulting upheaval from the transition from feudalism provided a fertile ground for any organization that could seize the initiative. The feudal barons no longer had the need or the wealth to maintain private armies, but the Italian government had neither the manpower nor the experience to deal with the social turmoil.