All The Big Ones Are Dead

by Christopher A. Gray

  Looking at him, Diane thought that she rarely saw her boss so physically restless. He likely hadn’t slept much, and she knew he wasn’t fond of coffee, so she wondered if he chose to walk about the room in an effort to keep alert.

  “We have reason to believe that the entire poaching apparatus has taken a massive step forward in sophistication. Powderhorn uses satellite phones with a complex encryption algorithm that we haven’t been able to break. We don’t know how they’ve done it and we don’t know who’s supplying the technology. Max says that the encryption is not an off-the-shelf product. That means, somebody with real money has hired a real expert. Also, and of more immediate concern, the track and gather plan that Bishop incepted has worked to the point that we know a large shipment of ivory and horn will be sent out of Marseille to land here in New York. We have no idea yet when it will arrive. We’re working on that now.”

  DeCourcey stared out at the Statue of Liberty as he wondered if his small team was enough. As in so many cases in the past, organized crime had an unfair advantage. They had government officials on the payroll. They had adapted their operation to take advantage of the latest technology, hiring experts to thwart efforts to bring them to justice. He had to have faith in these people, handpicked by himself and Linders.

  DeCourcey straightened up and turned to the group. “Linders, bring up a photo of William Ling, will you?” The flat screen cycled to show a smiling middle-aged Chinese couple, standing at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

  “More than twenty years ago, William Ling was a confidential informant, someone I had worked with personally. He was never more than a minor player. Worlds away from and nothing like the nasty buggers we’re tracking now. Recently, he was contacted by some of his old network. Instead of going back to his old ways, he decided to call us, Interpol that is. As the Working Group on this project, you need to understand and remember that when you make action recommendations. We underestimated the resolve and resources and the reach of PowderHorn.”

  DeCourcey paced the room slowly, frowning as he remembered William and his wife. “Ling had been out of the trade for many years, and hadn’t had any contact with his former associates. He was considered low risk to reoffend. The risk of retaliatory action from said former associates was also downgraded, so he had not been under regular surveillance for years. With his distress call we had dispatched a handler, who was due to arrive the next evening. Ling was killed the day after contacting us, well before the handler could reach him. Even considering Ling’s case had been dormant, the handler was dispatched as quickly as possible. He couldn’t make it in time.”

  The members of the group looked around the table at each other in near disbelief. The poaching machine had indeed thrust itself into the big time by killing a civilian it had failed to coerce, who had been under Interpol’s protection.

  “He was killed here... in New York?” Phillips asked.

  “No. At his shop in Hong Kong. This is organized crime at the highest level. Think international every time. They have operators in every port in every city where they do major business. They are adaptable and have shown a ruthless sophistication. Unfortunately for us, the bureaucratic wheels turn slowly. Until we can get additional branches on board, this team is the first and only line of defense. We have a brilliant encryption expert in mind recommended by Gauss. Name of John Logan. We are going to find a way to persuade him or recruit him to help us break the code. The recruitment process has already started.”

  “Richard,” Gauss said, “I know I recommended Logan, but I’m not comfortable hearing about what happened to the last CI. Wouldn’t we be putting him at the same risk as Ling?”

  “Despite a contact gap of about twenty years, William Ling was still known to the bad guys,” Linders said. “When they re-established contact, they put him under surveillance from the very first moment. He never had a chance. We were behind the curve and didn’t even know it. We know better now.”

  “I still have to ask why would we put another civilian in harm’s way,” Gauss added.

  “Good question,” DeCourcey said quietly. His shoulders slumped slightly, but then he straightened up and looked directly at Gauss. “Initially, Linders and I figured we would take advantage of Logan’s natural ability and knack for problem solving. We tried an indirect approach.

  “You mean teaser messages in his mail, that sort of thing?” Gauss asked, unable to keep a note of surprise out of his voice.

  “Yes, among other methods. We had already given him a few bites of information. However, we didn’t get the results we wanted. The approach turned out to be absurdly over-cautious. So we’re back to square one with Logan. Linders will contact him directly. She will be his only point of contact. No association with us, and no hint that he’s even ever met any of us by accident, no matter what happens. Make no mistake, Max, that Logan is to be protected at all costs, and we have Executive Order 12425 as a backstop.” Gauss flipped through the folder in front of him. He glanced at Linders as DeCourcey continued.

  “You’ve got Logan's dossier in front of you. One of the most important considerations, in my view, is that Logan is a brilliant mathematician, but he’s not experienced. He can think in multiple dimensions and work on multiple complex projects simultaneously when he’s immersed in his professional life in mathematics. Out in the world though, he’s just not very experienced or quick on his feet.”

  Richard DeCourcey was scanning the room. He was tired, he needed something to wake himself up again, his nerves were stuttering at him and his brain was bouncing off the inside of his skull.

  “Where are our communications experts?” Phillips said, a little louder than he intended. He looked at Max. “I mean, Max comes highly recommended, but he’s not a team. So cooperation from the FBI and NSA and Interpol gets us… what? Not even a wiretap into the U.S. end or the French end of mobile device communications? I mean how hard can it be to get the originating call code or device ID, ESN or even the phone number? That’s technical access with cooperating providers. Warrant based. It’s been a part of what we do for decades.”

  “The problem is as stated before, Brock,” Diane jumped in before DeCourcey popped a blood vessel. “The communications encryption being used by the few key players we’ve tried to track has been completely baffling. Can’t get a warrant if you can’t identify something specific and a specific location. Not anywhere. Seriously. ESA ran their Cray over some of the data streams. Came up with goose eggs. This is highest level stuff.”

  “Bishop grabbed a couple of phones while he was in Cameroon,” Max spoke up. “Richard passed them to me and I had the best techs we’ve got access to have a deep look at them. But they’ve come up with nothing. ‘They’re just phones’ is all the techs have had to say so far.”

  That’s why Bishop,” Diane picked up again, “has been using some, uh, old school techniques to encourage cooperation from some low level players. There’s progress, and this is farther than we’ve been in two years of pushing hard, but it’s very slow going. Logan is a solid shot I think.”

  “So Powderhorn is the big poaching gang,” Alla spoke up. “We know this for a fact. Gangs don’t exist in a vacuum. Who’s behind the curtain then? Powderhorn is not taking orders from any number of buyers it was doing business with up until a couple of years ago. Where there were twenty or thirty smaller poaching gangs a couple years ago, now there’s Powderhorn and only a handful of others, none of which have managed to fly under the radar the way Powderhorn has. So who’s the kingpin and where is he or she or them or it? Have we tried to back-trace the money that Powderhorn is getting? It has to be coming from a series of at least partially traceable waypoints.”

  “Therein lies the problem, June,” Linders said. “Powderhorn’s technical expertise must be coming to them through a key man or a key group somewhere near the top of whatever organization we’re dealing with. They sure as hell aren’t developing it in the bush.”

  “You’ve got program ba
ckgrounders, Powderhorn background and personal dossiers to review.”

  ***

  The sergeant dialed the number on the name card. An operator at Interpol’s secure communications office answered quickly.

  “What is the nature of your call?”

  “I wish to speak with Inspector Linders.”

  “One moment please,” the operator replied, as she patched the call through to Linder’s mobile phone.

  “The party will answer shortly,” the operator said, then rang off her own connection.

  At 2:45 AM in New York, Diane Linders was trying hard to open her eyes and not to croak like a frog as she groped for her mobile, seemingly ringing as loud as a fire alarm. She was tapping at the screen, but it was not responding. After a few more seconds, she woke up enough to swipe the screen instead and connected the call.

  “Linders here,” she said, trying to sound like she was always awake and alert at this hour.

  “Sergeant Foncha here, in Douala.”

  “Oh yes,” Diane said, roughly. She paused for a moment to shove the phone under a pillow as she coughed to clear her throat. She put the phone to her ear again, staring at the luminous dial on her wristwatch sitting on the nightstand. “What can I do for you, Sergeant?”

  “It is what I can do for you, Inspector,” the policeman replied. “Your information was good. The broker received a call. I was on shift in his office when the call came in on his mysterious satellite phone. It was his shipping contact. The shipment destination is Marseille.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Linders replied, now fully alert. “Are you able to email the details to me?”

  “I can do that in a few minutes. I have in my hands the manifests of four shipments with four destinations in Marseille. There is a scanner in the broker’s office. My constable will attend to it shortly.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant. I am in your debt.”

  “Possibly so. But I think that we may be equally in each other’s debt, Inspector. I think that I will speak with Mr. Okeke to investigate where some rats hide. I think that if I leave him to our agreement of judicial cooperation, he will run away into the deep shadows just like a rat on one of the big freighters I can see moored in the harbor right now. We would not want this little rat bunny to bolt the nest before your man makes contact in Marseille. Is that not so, Inspector?” Sergeant Foncha was looking out the broker’s office window at the teeming Douala seaport.

  “Most definitely, Sergeant,” Linders said, smiling to herself as she sat up in bed. “You see things clearly. And he is definitely your citizen, Sergeant. He is all yours. Enjoy your investigation.”

  “Most assuredly, Inspector. Most assuredly.”

  “Thank you for your help.” Diane was wide awake as the sergeant in Cameroon rang off the call. She tapped the speed dial icon, then tapped her office.

  “Good morning, Inspector,” a smooth female voice answered. “What is your request?”

  “Please connect me with Agent Michael Bishop,” Diane replied. The operator would route the call after retrieving the correct contact information from Diane’s active case file.

  “Connecting,” the operator said after a few moments.

  Diane heard nothing except elevator music as the operator kicked the call into a secure Hold of some sort. It was irritating at this time of night. The sudden rise of tension because of the call from the good sergeant in Douala, the promise of hard evidence scanned and emailed, a break in their on-again/off-again hunt for poachers and masterminds and distributors and smuggling routes, and then—elevator music.

  It was a full minute before the music was cut off and the operator came back on the line.

  “I have your party for you,” she said. “Please speak now.”

  “It’s Linders,” Diane said. “I think we caught a break.”

  “I can use that,” Bishop said. Diane was startled. The connection was so good that she actually thought for a split second that Bishop was in the same room with her. She quickly reached over and switched on her nightstand lamp, looking around the room as the light came on.

  “Uh,” she paused for a moment, still shaking out some cobwebs, “the good Sergeant Foncha in Douala was on-shift in the fixer’s office when the fixer was contacted by a facilitator. The sergeant thinks, and I agree with him, that the facilitator may be a direct connection to the distributor we’ve been trying to identify.”

  “What’s the play?”

  “You’re going to Marseille. I’m going to forward an information attachment to you. I’m expecting it within the hour.”

  “Oui, Mademoiselle Inspecteur. Je vais partir immédiatement.”

  “Wait until the attachment arrives. It won’t be long. Charter a flight. Do not use Debonair Charter. The owner owes us, I mean he owes Interpol, but he talks too much. Use PrivateFly instead. No background connections there. You’re just a businessman with an urgent need to get to Marseille.”

  “It’s still a reasonable hour here, so I’m heading for the airport now. I hope the good policeman will come through before I take off.”

  Chapter Five

  Barely 48 hours after Richard DeCourcey gave his instructions to the Working Group, Diane Linders was trying to focus. She was standing, looking out of the windows of an old office on the fifth floor of 303 Broadway in Manhattan. The room was a bit too warm and she was gazing out at the early morning, gathering her thoughts for the security and protection team meeting that was about to start. The building was almost directly across the street from the FBI at 26 Federal Plaza. The FBI kept space in the old office building across the street specifically for special operations.

  The chilly late autumn night before had kicked on the old office building’s central heating system. It had ramped up quickly and heated the building and the planning room quite nicely. But the high, wide, arched windows on the south wall were now letting the 7:00 AM sun stream through to heat up the room even more. The rapidly warming early morning had caught up to the now silent heating system. The seven men and women assembled for the intense operational instruction session had already taken off jackets, loosened ties and top buttons, rolled up their sleeves, and given up worrying about sweat stains.

  There were four long, narrow tables arranged in a T-shape in the rectangular room. The top of the T was lined up parallel to the windows about six feet away. The tail of the T projected farther into the room. All four tables were covered with photographs of three locations, two public transit routes and four subway platforms, as well as the street approaches to each subway station. There was a stack of printed paper containing someone’s personal travel and work schedules laid out in a detailed list. There were also ten basic waiting room-style chairs haphazardly positioned in the room.

  While Gauss spoke with each of the other team members, Diane stood in front of one of the windows looking out at the new morning.

  Old wood, she thought, as she examined the long, early rays of the sunlight hitting the top edges of the rails and the muntins dividing each pane. There were many layers of brown paint, mottled and lumpy from too many coats. Each pane of glass was clean enough, but the generations of cleaning had gradually put fine scratches in the glass. She thought about the hazy glare of sunlight in her eyes when she was a little girl playing in the neighborhood park early on Saturday mornings.

  She’d grown up in Chicago. Her mother, retired now, had been a bus driver who seemed perpetually assigned to a shift that kept her away from Diane all week long. Weekends were theirs though. It was just the two of them. They would walk to the park playground every Saturday morning, her mother pointing out different things along the way, explaining them to Diane as they ambled along. Birds, trees, even odd looking people kept Diane fascinated, her mom telling her all about them. They always saw neighbors they knew. There were plants and flowers to be investigated and admired in the spring and summer, crazy patterns in the snow and ice during the winter. The park was east of their house, so the low morning sun was always
in her eyes as they walked.

  She smiled at the memory, took a deep breath and held it for a moment. She let the air out of her lungs in a rush. She took another deep breath almost as if she could make the fresh morning air from outside pass through the window to refresh her. It was going to be a classically beautiful day outside. Inside, not so much.

  “Agent Linders,” Gauss was calling her. “Diane, can you please brief us on the asset?”

  She turned to see that everyone was standing together, with Gauss separate from the agents and sitting in one of the chairs. Diane nodded her head at Gauss and then turned to fully face the group.

  “You’re all new here,” she said affably, “so let’s get introductions out of the way. Max has introduced himself to each of you. This isn’t the first time that local law enforcement has worked closely with the FBI on matters of domestic security, witness and evidence protection, or terrorist funding. So I’m the odd one out. My name is Diane Linders and I am a senior Interpol agent, deputy to Superintendent Richard DeCourcey. I’m the task force leader on this project. I worked for the FBI for five years before being assigned to Interpol and transferred to Lyon, France. I did six months of training there and then began field work. I’ve worked back home in the U.S. several times since then, out of the New York field office and the National Central Bureau in D.C., and in a couple of dozen locations in Europe and South Africa. I was born in Brooklyn. My parents are from New York and the Netherlands.”

  She waited a moment for the team to digest some of the information and realize that she was basically one of them. They were all silent, watching her with interest. Not frowning or bored, she thought, just waiting for more information. Diane felt a tinge of relief. Patience, concentration and quick thinking were definitely going to be needed for this little operation. Gauss had told her that the team was the best he could get on short notice, but that despite the short notice they weren’t bottom of the barrel. They were all senior grade officers and agents, a hundred years of field and beat experience between them, clean records, deep street experience and very solid reputations. Diane could be picky if she put her mind to it, but on paper at least the group was as competent and reliable as she could hope for.