“Your father pushed ND through,” Beaumont said. “He paved the way for the program’s funding, which is always the most difficult part. Paper is cheap; men and equipment aren’t. Because of its early success, the ND has grown into a vital program. Without it, the ATF’s gunrunning interdiction would be set back by months, possibly years. A lot’s riding on this for everyone involved, especially your father. If the ND succeeds, its address is 1600 Penn, but if it fails, its address changes to the Russell Senate Office Building.”
“Politics as usual,” Nathan said.
“And it looks like failure is what we’re facing,” Beaumont said. “Every undercover operative could be exposed and killed, probably horribly.”
“They’re only at risk if Mason blows their cover,” Nathan said. “Are you worried he’ll do that?”
“I honestly don’t know. I want to believe he’s not vindictive, but I used to believe he’d never betray his oath either. Our employees swear an oath, just like the military does. But if he felt up against the wall, the threat of blowing the program would clearly be a source of leverage.”
“So, gentlemen, what are we going to do about this?” Stone asked.
“Harvey and I think we have a lead, but we’ll need some help pursuing it. Dad, will you show George the photos we took at the soccer fields?”
“Photos?” Beaumont asked. “You took photos of the bodies?”
“It’s fortunate they did,” Stone said. “Mason went back and removed them. Without Nathan’s photos, there’d be no hard evidence the murders took place, even with Mr. Haynes’s testimony.”
“So Mason did that after he found out about Mr. Haynes?” Beaumont asked.
“Yes,” said Stone. “I think we can conclude he initially wanted the bodies to be discovered or he wouldn’t have left them there in the first place. I’m showing George the photos.”
A brief interval of silence followed.
“If we can ID the dead men,” Harvey said, “it might give us some answers. We’re also looking into why Mason chose a soccer field for the murder site. We’re thinking it wasn’t randomly chosen, that it has some underlying meaning.”
Nathan added, “Without giving any detail, I showed the double-headed dragon tattoo on the South Korean man to someone I trust. I was told it’s a North Korean assassin’s tattoo. Harv and I also think the money pinned to their foreheads is a signature of some kind.”
“It is,” Lansing said.
“We also think our interference in Mason’s scheme tonight puts us at risk.”
“I believe it does,” Lansing said. “That’s why I’m going to share some classified information. It’s clear you and Harvey are on the right path and you’d eventually discover what I’m about to tell you, so I’ll save you the time. The money pinned on the dead men’s foreheads is the signature of Alfonso Alisio. He’s the crime boss of a huge cartel out of Mexico City with dozens of satellite gangs all over the Western Hemisphere. He uses the gangs to distribute his wares. I’m assuming those are 10,000-peso notes?”
“Yes,” Nathan answered.
“They’ve been demonetized for years.”
“So why did Mason do it?” Nathan asked. “And why use a soccer field? Was he hoping to frame Alisio’s cartel for the murders?”
“No,” Beaumont said.
“You sound certain about that, George,” Stone said.
“I am. Our Mexican division of the ND’s main mission has been to infiltrate Alisio’s cartel. The tattoo on the Mexican guy, the one with the red heart and black dagger piercing it? That’s Alisio’s trademark. All his people have them, and once they’re on, they never come off. Alisio owns a professional soccer team along with several minor-league teams. I can only assume the soccer-field location is somehow related. Maybe one of Alisio’s minor-league teams is scheduled to play there tomorrow and Mason left the bodies out there to send a message to Alisio.”
“To what end?” Harv asked. “And why would Mason use Alisio’s murder signature on the guy’s own men?”
“That’s what we need to find out,” Beaumont said.
“More than that,” Nathan added, “we need to know why a North Korean assassin with a South Korean ID was murdered alongside Alisio’s man.”
“We’ve long suspected Alisio has a connection with criminal elements inside North Korea, but we’ve never been able to make a solid connection until a week ago.”
“A week ago?” Lansing asked.
Stone’s voice was calm, but urgent. “Please tell us what you know, George. Now isn’t the time to hold anything back.”
“As we all know, counterfeiting is one of North Korea’s biggest industries. They counterfeit everything under the sun, from pharmaceuticals to gold bullion. Paper money, tobacco products, liquor, DVDs, firearms, you name it, they’re illegally manufacturing it and shipping it all over the world. One of North Korea’s biggest markets for counterfeit products is Mexico because it doesn’t have nearly the resources to stem the flow.”
“May I interrupt?” Nathan asked.
“Of course,” Lansing answered for Beaumont.
“Are you saying North Korea’s doing business directly with Alisio?”
“Yes. The guns and other contraband from North Korea are being funneled through a South Korean organized-crime connection, probably via container ships. Think of it like a three-link chain, with South Korean smugglers being the middle link between Mexico and DPRK. Once we have our hands on Alisio, we’ll know more.”
“He’ll lawyer up,” Nathan said.
“There will be a brief interval of . . . questioning before that happens,” Lansing said. “Coupled with Ramiro’s testimony, we’ll be able to dismantle Alisio’s criminal organization and put him behind bars for the rest of his life. We’re also coordinating our efforts with South Korea’s Ministry of Justice.”
Nathan took a sip of water. “Ramiro? He’s one of the undercover operatives in the program?”
“Our first November Directive graduate,” Beaumont said. “Ramiro’s his code name. We’ve had him inside Alisio’s organization for a little over eighteen months.”
“I imagine getting him inside Alisio’s cartel wasn’t easy.”
“You’re right; it wasn’t. We set up a bogus hit on Alisio’s Santa Monica nightclub. Fake bullets, fake blood, you get the picture. We knew Alisio’s wife was in the club that night, and Ramiro saved her life. We’d spent months training for that sixty-second insert, choreographing the fight; we even built a mock-up of the nightclub at our academy. Needless to say, Alisio was extremely grateful. Adding to the deception, Ramiro refused Alisio’s initial offers to join his organization, but Alisio persisted and threw so much cash at Ramiro, he couldn’t turn it down.”
“And this was all orchestrated by Tanner Mason?” Nathan asked.
“Every step of the way,” Beaumont replied.
“So how do we find him?” Lansing asked.
“What I’m about to say,” said Beaumont, “is going to take everyone by surprise. There are certain things in an operation like this that must remain on a need-to-know basis, and before now, no one else needed to know.”
“What didn’t we need to know?” Lansing asked.
Nathan imagined his father’s expression mirroring Lansing’s: dismay.
“I built a safety catch into the program.”
CHAPTER 28
Two hundred miles off the
California coast—fifteen hours earlier
The Yoonsuh’s captain picked up the radar signature exactly where it should be.
When his ship closed to within three miles, he slowed to five knots and used field glasses to look for the other vessel’s nav lights. A quick radio call confirmed the other captain hadn’t encountered any problems and no other boats followed him. The Yoonsuh’s radar detector had picked up an occasional l
ow-energy sweep, but nothing powerful like a cutter’s penetrating EM burst had bounced off them. He knew the Navy and Coast Guard could disguise their sweeps to make them appear more distant, but he wasn’t concerned. There weren’t any large surface contacts within the twenty-mile range of his own radar. Even at flank speed, a cutter couldn’t sneak up on him. He’d have at least thirty minutes to move the ten duffels back into their smuggling compartment and secure the boiler. If a Coast Guard Black Hawk overflew his ship, it wouldn’t see anything out of order: the bags were belowdecks. He supposed a submarine could surface next to him, but he gave that pretty low odds. The Navy had bigger concerns.
Being in US waters always created some restlessness. A good captain read his crew’s collective mood, and there’d been signs over the last few days that everyone was anxious to dock. They’d been at sea for nearly ten days, and although the Yoonsuh offered every available amenity, there was no replacing the feel of being on solid ground. His ship was big, but far from a cruise ship; it pitched and rolled with the swells, often severely. Fortunately, his North Korean gemologist had weathered the voyage well.
Through his field glasses, he watched the fishing boat’s skiff racing over the swells toward his boat. As it always did, the transfer of the duffels would take place while moving at a slow speed with a distance of two nautical miles between the two vessels.
The skiff would need to make two trips. One with the cargo, and another with their passenger.
The captain radioed his engine room to verify the duffels had been properly weighted to sink in a hurry. His first officer confirmed the bags were all set. He hated the idea of throwing the bags overboard in the event a cutter intercepted the fishing boat, but it beat spending the next twenty years in a seven-by-ten-foot prison cell.
The gemologist’s accommodations aboard the fishing boat would be quite different from what he’d enjoyed on the Yoonsuh. There’d be no oil massages, gourmet food, or home theater, proving the old adage that all good things must come to an end. The North Korean would just have to slum it through the last fifteen hours of his voyage.
Nestled in the mountains just east of Escondido, Mason’s safe house offered complete privacy. The single-story residence wasn’t more than a rustic cabin, but it sat low in a valley and no other homes were within eyeshot. The ten-acre property used to be an avocado orchard. The stumps of the trees were all that remained, their timber long ago sold as firewood. And the beauty of this place? It wasn’t even his. Its owners, an elderly couple who were friends with the old man, spent half their lives aboard a condominium-style cruise ship. In fact, the old man had no idea that Mason even knew about the place.
The notion of ripping Alisio off had come to him about six months ago after Ramiro reported seeing a huge pile of US cash atop Alisio’s desk—a mountain’s worth—at least $5 million. The whole idea had crystalized that day for Mason, triggering the long-dormant memories of Mullah Sanjari’s compound and that twenty-dollar bill he’d found as a child. The way to hurt Alisio badly, he’d realized, was to hit him where it counted: in the pocketbook.
The question was where and when? And the answer came soon afterward, in the form of critical intel from Ramiro. The news of the upcoming Korean exchange was too good to pass up. Mason had been waiting for the right opportunity to come along, and finally it had.
Recruiting Darla for the eventual heist hadn’t been part of the original plan. Hahn and Mason knew that bringing her in would involve risk, but they’d needed a third person. She’d seemed a kindred spirit, and her PMC background mirrored theirs. Sure enough, she’d wanted in on the move against Alisio, especially when Mason offered her an equal share. And the first thing she’d done for them was use her charm on BSI’s bookkeeper to locate the safe house they were using today.
He grabbed a bottled water and reentered the living room while Chip and Darla stayed in the kitchen.
Psychologically shattered, Michaels sat with his head hung. It hadn’t taken long to break him. Bound to a chair atop painter’s plastic, the man was a pitiful sight. Mason gave the guy credit: he’d lasted longer than predicted. But sooner or later, given the right kind of persuasion, the will to resist vanished. Although Mason believed everything Michaels had told them on the drive up here was true, he needed to verify the information with more forceful and—uncomfortable—methods. They hadn’t worked on his face and hands, but everything else had been fair game.
Mason didn’t enjoy this part of the business, but he knew it should bother him more than it did. Not surprisingly, it had been Darla who’d penetrated Michaels’s shell. He’d watched in awe as she’d systematically peeled him down to his core. The finishing touch had come when Darla whispered something in his ear. Michaels had looked at Mason with a shocked, almost disbelieving expression. Mason had shrugged, his message clear: I have no idea what she said, but I warned you . . .
Darla had run her hand down Michaels’s chest and stomach before brushing his groin. Mason knew from firsthand experience that men don’t like being interrogated by women, especially a woman who puts on a convincing act that most men are no better than pigs and deserve to be castrated.
Michaels became very cooperative once he’d been disrobed from the waist down. Darla had asked Mason to spread the man’s legs and secure them open for the “procedure.” She’d then produced a cigar torch, applied the flame to the business end of her small pocketknife, and hummed “Amazing Grace” during the process. The finishing touch came when she’d put on her goggles.
Whoa! Mason remembered thinking. Remind me to never cross this woman.
So they now had what Michaels hadn’t spilled on the drive up here. They had a date, time, and location for the arrival of the duffel bags at Shelter Island but no date, time, or location for the exchange of the duffels with Alisio. Michaels received the exchange info after the delivery to the marina was complete. Perhaps most importantly, they knew what the duffel bags contained, and Mason had a hard time wrapping his mind around it.
The bags held 300 million pesos in the form of state-of-the-art counterfeit bills that could fool most bank employees. In American dollars, it was the equivalent of nearly $24 million. Mason didn’t yet know how Alisio planned to exchange the bogus money, or how much it would be discounted. But based on what he’d learned from Ramiro over the last six months, he had a pretty good idea. It would be a sweet victory forcibly taking both halves of the exchange from Alisio’s grubby little hands.
Mason had re-grilled Michaels about the fishing boat’s role because, on the surface, it seemed outrageously risky. Michaels said that the fishing boat always towed a small skiff out to the coordinates, then sent the skiff to pick up the duffels from the yacht while it was still moving. Mason had to hand it to the South Koreans: they were savvy smugglers.
If everything went according to plan, the yacht should’ve transferred the duffels to the fishing boat about fourteen hours ago. Mason looked at his watch. Michaels said each leg of the fishing boat’s journey—out to sea and then back—took fifteen hours, putting the fishing boat’s return at 6:00 AM, around ninety minutes from now. An hour before docking, the fishing boat’s captain would text Michaels to verify everything was all set.
Mason thought it ironic that Alisio’s smuggling activities had become so closely monitored in Mexico that he’d been forced to move his ROK deliveries north of the border. The opposite should’ve been true. It gave new meaning to the definition of a “porous US border.”
Now all Mason and his team had to do was stay away from BSI headquarters, avoid the police, and elude the gunmen who’d protected Toby. None of that should be too difficult.
Everyone needed sleep. They’d been awake for thirty straight hours. One thing Mason had learned during OEF was to get shut-eye whenever you could. Depending on the timing of the exchange with Alisio’s people later today, they might be able to get some rack time. All things considered, his current fatigue
level paled in comparison to what he’d experienced in Afghanistan.
He stepped out the back door and looked up at the smidgen of stars. He missed that about Shindand: the incredibly dark night sky. He felt like knocking down several shots of whiskey, but that self-destructive behavior was no longer an option, especially now, being so close to achieving his lifelong dream. There were times when he wished he’d never seen the box of cash at Mullah Sanjari’s compound or the twenty-dollar bill. He still thought it strange that after all the carnage and bloodshed he’d seen—and dished out—the sight of a box full of cash had affected him so deeply. It was the allure of power, he suspected. Power not only to lead soldiers and operatives and succeed in one’s endeavors but also to travel the world, buy what you wanted, influence whomever you wished, and ultimately to control your own destiny.
In another ninety minutes, he’d be that much closer.
CHAPTER 29
“When I gave Tanner Mason the reins of the November Directive,” George Beaumont explained, “I didn’t want his control to be absolute, so I built in a safety catch to verify the information he gave me. Every one of my undercover operatives also reports directly to me or one of my sons, and Mason has no clue they’re doing it. Put simply, I’ve got a direct line of communication to Ramiro.”
Stone said, “So may we assume the information Ramiro’s been giving you has varied from what Mason’s been giving you? And tonight’s murders could be related?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so. I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began to suspect Mason, but it was several months ago. Just as you said, there were discrepancies in what Mason told me versus what Ramiro told me. At first I thought they were just oversights on Mason’s part. I had to remind myself that he’s dealing with twelve agents in three countries. The last time I spoke to Mason, a few days ago, there was a bigger . . . inconsistency. He failed to tell me something important that I’d just learned from Ramiro. It involved an unprecedented shipment of duffel bags out of North Korea. There’s no way Mason could’ve overlooked telling me something like that. Mason purposely withheld the intel.”
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