by Sean Parnell
The team was always composed of locally contracted emergency medical technicians—EMTs were used to blood and gore—and led by one American expat contractor who could be depended upon to keep his mouth shut no matter what he heard or saw. Bleach was one of the few substances that could effectively eradicate blood traces, thus the term for the teams, but the moniker also reflected the team leader’s ability to erase the fact that an act of violence had occurred—which usually involved large sums of money.
A crew of four bleachers and a team leader had arrived at the Montmartre in a phony ambulance, dressed like Parisian EMTs, and had trotted up the stairs with two large black Pelican cases full of cleaning equipment and a rubber body bag, double-extra large. Steele left soon after they got there, having decided to sleep on the floor of the Program’s Level One safehouse. An hour later, the bleachers exited, along with the corpse, leaving the Romantic Artist Room pristine and Madame LeBarge considerably richer.
There would be no police report, because the Gendarmerie had never been called. Steele sometimes wondered what the bleachers did with the corpses, but he never asked because it wasn’t his need to know.
His mood was still on slow burn as the taxi wound through Paris traffic, but he told himself to cool off and analyze the situation. What was the train of recent events?
There was the job in Aleppo. Done, perfectly executed. Then, about a week later, and seemingly unrelated, Jonathan Raines had been murdered right here in Paris, ostensibly by a woman, who in turn knew forbidden details about the Program. This apparent leak had caused Cutlass Main to be moved from its historical location. Or, was that really the reason? Hard to know without hearing it directly from Ted Lansky, which he hoped to do as soon as possible.
So then, Steele had gotten himself a new keeper, that prick Goodhill, but that had no bearing on these events as far as he could tell. Then Pitts and Goodhill had sent him off to Paris to track down this alleged female assassin, and before he could say Joan of Arc, some Russian version of Odd Job nearly burst his heart right out of his chest in the same B&B where Stalker Six had spent his last night.
But were the events even related? Did this Russian have anything to do with Raines’s death? And it was extremely rare that adversaries ever went directly after Alphas, because nobody knew who they were. Covers were airtight, trails were “dusted” electronically and digitally. For anyone to target Steele with this Russian, they’d have to know who he was, where he was going, and where he was likely to camp for the night. Who’d know that except for . . . ?
Someone in the Program.
We’re not going there, Steele decided. There’s another explanation. We don’t have a traitor or a mole inside. It’s a disinformation operation, exactly what someone wants us to think. Somebody got me on facial recognition on some op somewhere, and that’s how they’re chasing me down. That’s how they got Stalker Six as well. Yeah, that’s it. . . .
But he wasn’t completely sure, and it was far from comforting.
He told the cabbie to first swing by the Paris Gare du Nord train station and wait for him outside. Steele trotted down the stairs to the gray metal lockers with their yellow numbered tags and stowed his REI backpack with his pistol and knife inside. He knew the Louvre had some serious security and metal detectors, so showing up with a piece and a blade wouldn’t do. Plus, the Gare du Nord was a good location around which to center a backup exfil plan, so stowing his weapons down there seemed right.
Before making his way back up to the street, he tucked himself into a corner near the locker banks and made a call to the Montmartre B&B. He hadn’t forgotten that Madame LeBarge owed him a description of the “brochure girl.”
“Comment puis-je ne pas vous aider?” LeBarge answered in her gnarly tone. How can I not help you?
“It’s your guest from last night,” Steele said. “You promised me a description, Madame.”
“I owe you nothing,” she snorted. “And you made a terrible mess.”
“And you were very well paid for the cleanup. But if you like, I can have the Gendarmes ask you the questions. I am already gone, but you are not. N’est-ce pas?”
The madame said nothing for a long moment while she considered the merits of courtesy versus the consequences of ill temper. Then she coughed and said, “Casino Royale.”
“Excusez-moi?”
“The girl from that movie. She looked like that actress, but meaner.”
“But meaner,” Steele said. “Good enough, Madame.”
She hung up without a farewell, and right away his phone buzzed. It was Betsy Roth, Mike Pitts’s adjutant, calling from D.C.
“Immediate recall order, Mr. Sands. You can head for the airport.”
“I just got here. I’ve only just started my sales calls.”
“You can argue about it with the boss. Would you like to?”
“Skip it,” Steele said, and he clicked off and cursed under his breath. Pitts knew he’d almost been killed the night before, because he had to approve the bleacher tasking. Maybe Pitts was getting really nervous about losing another Alpha.
Well, he’d still go over to the Louvre, cold, without any sort of introduction. He had friends in Gendarmerie’s tactical unit, GIGN, and could have them make a call to Louvre security, but he didn’t want to alert anyone who might be on the wrong side. It was better to just pose as a guy lusting after a girl.
Twenty minutes later, the cab dropped him off in the circular drive at the Louvre, where to the west the view of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel recalled the height of Napoleon’s glories, but when he turned around the magnificent buildings of Phillip II’s twelfth-century castle were now blasphemed by a glass pyramid plopped in the center of the museum’s vast courtyard. Steele didn’t care much for modernization of any sorts of classics, which was why he didn’t like 1940s Chevrolets turned into hot rods, or, for that matter, Botox on aging movie stars. He thought the Louvre’s pyramidal entrance was crass, but then again, he’d lost some of his enthusiasm for Paris ever since they’d let some nutjob torch the roof of Notre Dame.
He paid the cabbie and got out. Given the early hour, the usual endless ticket line that wound around the fountains was only fifty tourists long, so he waited his turn and paid his way instead of trying to muscle inside on some ruse. Fifteen minutes later, he was at the bottom of the escalator and hunting for the security office, which he located by following a guard who was munching on a chocolate croissant.
The office was tucked away beyond the magnetometers, where Steele found a chubby bald supervisor and two of his men, one of whom was the roll-muncher. The security personnel outside the museum all wore Kevlar and hefted G-36 subguns. These guys wore rumpled dark suits.
“Good morning, my friends,” Steele said in French as he strode, uninvited, through the security station’s door.
“And good morning to you, sir, as well,” said the supervisor. “How may we help? You’re here at the entrance so you cannot possibly be lost yet.”
The guard with the croissant smirked. The other one was more surly and sipped a mélange.
“Not lost, no,” Steele said. “I’m actually looking for a girl.”
“Aren’t we all?” the supervisor said. “Chercher la femme!”
Steele grinned. “This one was special.” He pulled the art brochure from his jacket pocket and smoothed it out on the supervisor’s desktop. “It was about ten days ago. I spotted her hanging around this exhibit and chatted her up, but then I lost her.”
All three men peered at the brochure, and shrugged.
“Do you have any idea how many exhibits and lectures we have here, mon ami?” the supervisor asked. “Or how many beautiful women pass by?”
“Well, I thought maybe you’d still have security footage from that day,” Steele said.
“If there are no significant incidents, we erase them after seventy-two hours,” the supervisor said.
“And we certainly don’t show them to tourists.” The surly one sne
ered.
Steele ignored that and took out his smartphone.
“Well, she looks exactly like this,” he said as he googled for an image of the actress Eva Green. Her stunning visage and figure popped up and he showed the phone to the trio. “But perhaps a bit . . . crueler, if you know what I mean.”
All three men peered closer.
“Yes, I remember a woman like this,” the supervisor said.
“Who the hell could forget her?” the croissant man said.
“Even I would notice her,” said the surly guard, “and I have no interest in women.”
“I believe she was associated somehow with the artist Emile Sadat,” said the supervisor. “Perhaps his daughter? Although with these kinds of men she could be a paramour. Did she hint at anything like that?”
“I’m afraid I didn’t have a very long conversation with her,” Steele said. “But I intend to, gentlemen. And thank you so much.” He turned and made for the door.
“Pas de problème,” the supervisor said. No problem. “And good luck.”
Steele waved over his shoulder, took the escalator stairs in double leaps, and hailed a new cab. He told the driver to take him to the Gare du Nord. He’d have to return his weapons to the safehouse, book a flight, grab some food, and then head for the airport. He sat back in the seat and brooded some more.
Who the hell was she? A girl who looked like that should be easy as hell to track down, unless she was an expert in camouflage and disguise, or had a double. He’d have to have Ralphy Persko work his magic and run modified images of Eva Green through NSA-level facial recognition software, just to see if someone associated with Emile Sadat popped up.
That thought made him wonder what else Persko might be able to reveal. The Taxi Parisien Steele was riding in happened to be one of those old-style yellow Checkers that the French had purchased from New York. There was a plexiglass barrier between the driver and the rear passenger seat, and Steele leaned forward and slid it closed. He called Cutlass Main.
“Code in,” said Ms. Artificial Intelligence.
“Texting,” Steele said, and he tapped out the alphanumeric instead of saying it aloud.
A human came on the line. “What can we do for you today, Mr. Sands?”
“I’ve got a shipment needing urgent customs clearance. Can I talk to Mr. Wizard?”
“Just one moment, please.”
Ralphy Persko picked up the transfer. “Morning, Max. How’s it going over there?”
“Great, if you like mixed martial arts and you’ve got plenty of ibuprofen. Are you lonely today?”
“Do you want me to be?”
“Yes.”
Steele heard a door closing and knew that Ralphy had gone into an empty tank with his phone.
“Okay, I’m lonely,” he said.
“Tell me something. Who the hell is Kuznetsov?”
“You mean the Russian writer? Anatoly, as I recall from my lit classes. Wrote a famous novel about World War II called Babi Yar—”
Steele rolled his eyes. “Not that one. Another one somewhere, and recent.”
“Wait one,” Ralphy said, and Steele heard a laptop flipping open and Persko’s chubby fingers flying across the keys. He was running a search through any raw intel that had flowed to the Program over the past sixty days, while simultaneously pinging for anything that might match Steele or his target packages. After about a minute he came back on the line. “Um, say, do you know any of the real names associated with your last sales trip to Damascus?” He meant the Aleppo job, and the four big players whom Steele had executed.
“No, none of us were introduced.” Steele meant that he’d only been briefed on their IDs by descriptions and surveillance photos, but no names, in case he was captured. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t spill.
“Well, coincidentally,” Ralphy said, “not long after your trip to Happy Land, a Colonel Valerie Kuznetsov was buried in Moscow. Quietly, but with full military honors. She was a Russian nuclear warhead expert. Ring a bell?”
Steele didn’t say anything, but he slumped back in the taxi’s rear seat, lowered the phone, and watched the Parisians strolling by outside his window.
Yeah, I rang her bell in Aleppo, he thought. With a full metal jacket slug.
Chapter 11
Drammen, Norway
They called themselves Millennial Crude.
It wasn’t a subtle moniker, but it encapsulated their youth, the raw value of their particular talents, and the fact that they had few morals and were always willing to go for the throat.
There were eleven of them to date, all hailing from countries that used to be part of the Eastern Bloc, or were allies thereof, but were certainly no friends to the West or any imperialist capitalist states. Each of them was not yet thirty years old, some barely of legal drinking age, and all had MENSA genius capacities and were ensconced in the security establishments of their respective nation states, for which they secretly had no respect, or a hint of fealty.
They could all program in C++, Malbolge, INTERCAL, Whitespace and Brainfuck. They could manipulate blockchains that were triple-encrypted and uncrackable, and they dealt only in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether. They played Manhunt, Dead Space, Postal 2, and Helldivers, often around the clock as they hunched in blacked-out rooms before multiple HD screens, wearing headsets and sucking Red Bull from CamelBaks. They listened to Mayhem and Gorgoroth, and sometimes Rammstein when they were feeling nostalgic. They scoffed at Facebook and Instagram, unless those platforms were necessary to entrap a particular target. They didn’t do drugs, except for the occasional line of cocaine in mixed company, which meant only with one another. And they didn’t make love. They only fucked.
They were killers with keyboards.
Dmitry Kreesak was the titular leader of MC. He was Russian, twenty-seven years old, the orphaned son of a Spetsnaz captain who’d been killed in Chechnya and a Moscow whore who’d died of an overdose when Dmitry was nine. He worked as the operational director of cyber security for a lieutenant colonel of the FSB, or Federal Security Service, currently headed by the notorious Alexander Bortnikov. Most of the mundane work of keeping the Service secure at its headquarters in Lubyanka bored him, but whenever the director tasked the lieutenant colonel, and in turn Dmitry, with something “outside the Service” and interesting, that’s when he relished the game.
He’d come up with the concept for Millennial Crude while playing a seventy-two-hour video game marathon with a female counterpart in North Korea, and after that, he’d selected and assembled his crew carefully. They had to be brilliant, like him untethered to family, ambitious, and vicious. Eventually he’d recruited government cyber security whiz kids from Iran, Syria, Bosnia, Pakistan, Nicaragua, the People’s Republic of China, and more. None of them were any good with firearms, explosives, or WMDs, but they could rattle their keyboards, open the locks on a hydroelectric dam somewhere, and take out an entire town downstream.
They were hot. If you touched any of them, your fingers would burn.
Dmitry, whose MC comrades knew him only as “Snipe,” was hunkered down at a desk in a suite at the waterfront Scandic Ambassadeur hotel, which was castle-ish and stuffy on the outside but appropriately minimalist on the inside. His lieutenant colonel boss, Ivan Kravchenko, had brought him to Norway for an economic conference, which the FSB was using as cover while they reconnoitered the beautiful blue-water fjord as a possible Russian submarine pen. Dmitry had taken one look at Drammen and suggested to his boss that in order for the access waterway to be properly utilized in the event of a global conflict, the bridges of Svelvik would have to be blown up and the water levels surreptitiously checked by Russian naval divers of the GRU.
“You’re very clever, for a geek,” his boss remarked.
“I believe they’re synonymous, Colonel,” Dmitry had replied with a grin.
But now Dmitry was buried head-down in his “real” work, which involved revenge for a terrible recent hit on a quart
et of nuclear missile mechanics in Aleppo, one of whom had been Russian. Some time ago, Dmitry and his MC mates had unearthed a top secret American intelligence and special operations cell, apparently known as the “Program,” and it was Dmitry’s assessment that one of their operatives had pulled off the hit. In turn, FSB chief Bortnikov hadn’t specifically ordered kinetic action, but he had emulated King Henry II and remarked, “Will no one rid me of this scourge?” Dmitry’s boss had taken it to heart.
And Dmitry had an ace in the hole, something he hadn’t revealed to his lieutenant colonel because it was just too delectable. A year prior, Millennial Crude, while trolling for U.S. government top secret–cleared employees, had uncovered a member of the “Program” and cleverly manipulated and turned that individual into an asset. They’d waited patiently, but now it was time to turn the screws.
“I like your skirt,” Dmitry said to a young woman who was sitting on one of the suite’s leather armchairs, long legs crossed and jabbing the air with a high heel. She was North Korean, a fan of leather, sleeve tattoos, and crimson lipstick. They spoke in English.
“You like what’s under my skirt, Snipe,” she said as she smoked a Virginia Slim.
“That too. But I’ve got to focus.”
“Yes, make the call, boss.”
Dmitry nodded and slipped something that looked like a Velcro collar with a microphone module from his black leather laptop satchel. He strapped it around his throat, donned wireless earbuds, and tapped on his iPhone. When he spoke again, his voice sounded two octaves lower and metallic. The North Korean girl, whose MC moniker was “Kendo,” could hear only one side of the exchange.
“Good morning,” said Snipe. Then his dark eyes became smoky and he ran his fingers through his gelled black hair. “Yes, I know exactly what time it is. So shut up and listen.”