by Ward Larsen
In the course of its rushed inquiries, the CIA learned that Ovechkin was registered with Air France’s frequent flyer program, was a season ticket holder of the Chelsea Football Club in London, and had recently placed a down payment for a new personal jet with the Canadian company Bombardier. Enlightening details one and all, but nothing to establish his whereabouts in that moment. As it turned out, the most alluring hit for the newly created “Ovechkin desk” came in the early hours of that morning.
FORTY-SEVEN
Slaton allowed one hour for debriefing after they docked in Eilat. At that point, he shut the interview down and was given a room in a quiet hotel. The other members of the team took rooms in the same wing.
Exhausted after the all-night mission, he slept for six hours, to be awakened just after noon by the sound of a jackhammer. He went to the window and saw a work crew battering a hole in the sidewalk directly outside his window. The noise was insurmountable, but the sleep had done its work—he felt much improved. Yet if his body was reinvigorated, his thoughts remained in disarray.
The mission to reveal what was being carried on Argos had been a success. Unfortunately, that truth did nothing to lighten his own dilemma. He still faced the matter of an assassin running amok with a revolutionary weapon. And Slaton remained the prime suspect in two of his shootings. Argos, along with the arms she’d been hauling, was inextricably linked to the deaths of Ivanovic and Romanov. Unfortunately, Slaton was no closer to revealing what that link was.
He looked at two phones on his nightstand: one a simple landline provided by the hotel, the other a secure CIA device. He knew what he had to do. His first call was to room service for a sandwich and coffee. His second utilized the mobile, and involved ten minutes of connections, security protocols, and just simple waiting. In the end he got what he wanted—the ear of CIA director Thomas Coltrane.
“You did well last night,” Coltrane said.
“It worked out. Now that we know what was on board, how are you handling it?”
“I can’t go into specifics, but we’ve informed the Saudis—they’ll have to take the lead on the response.”
“Have any of these shipments been interdicted?”
“A handful. We’re hoping to find more soon.”
“Hoping,” Slaton repeated.
“We’re dealing with it,” said the CIA director, irritation creeping into his voice.
Slaton suspected he might have gotten more sleep than Coltrane in the last twenty-four hours. “Where are the ships?” he asked.
“All three are under way, headed in the general direction of the Horn of Africa. We believe they’re empty.”
“Could they be going to pick up another load?” Slaton wondered aloud.
“Possibly, but it hardly matters. We’re watching them closely. By the time they reach any port, we’ll have a solid case built—there’s already more than enough evidence to shut down MIR Enterprises. The more pressing concern now is to help the Saudis track down these shipments. It might take a week or two, probably longer for anything that went through Yemen—but we’ll catch up.”
“That might be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
Slaton hesitated. “I don’t know. Something about this seems too simple, too obvious. We’re talking about a significant influx of arms. The Saudis have always had their share of domestic enemies—there’s a restless Shiite minority, Al-Qaeda and ISIS elements. Houthi militias are right across the border in Yemen. We’re talking about a country where one-third of the population are immigrants. And, of course, Iran would be happy to throw fuel on any fire.”
“The Saudis also have a competent National Guard who’ve dealt with this kind of threat before. Their first and foremost mission is to protect the royal family, and they generally do it well.”
Slaton knew Coltrane was right. The House of Saud spared no expense in assuring their own safety. There had been no WMD on Argos, no secret weapon. Only large caches of guns and ammo. It was enough for a minor revolution, but the kind of thing the king and his princes had stamped out before. He looked out the window and saw the port of Eilat, the high sun glistening on Israel’s southern playground. It was time for the question. The real reason he’d called.
“What about Ovechkin? Have you found him yet?”
Coltrane answered without hesitation. “No. But we are making headway.”
* * *
The CIA was indeed making progress. Their first lead in the search for Ovechkin, as was increasingly the case these days, came by way of the internet, and from a source no analyst could have predicted: one photograph, taken the previous evening and posted online, of a charity gala in Paris. Standing atop a red carpet in a stunning Dior strapless was none other than Ovechkin’s wife, Estrella.
Among the few verifiable truths in Ovechkin’s file, and in divergence with many of his nightlife-loving peers, was that he generally traveled in the company of his wife. It was simplicity itself for the CIA’s data-trackers to confirm that Estrella Ovechkin was checked into the same five-star hotel in central Paris that had hosted the charity event.
At first light that morning a surveillance team was dispatched from the Paris station, among them a stunning young woman whose French was nearly perfect and whose curvature was unquestionably so. She had little trouble prying from a bellman that Estrella, who was a frequent guest, had in fact not arrived in the company of her husband. To the contrary, free from the watchful eye of his overbearing security team, she had spent the last three days shopping with abandon along Avenue Montaigne.
The initial disappointment at Langley that they’d not found Ovechkin was fast forgotten as new leads were chased. Signals intelligence seemed the best bet, and it was here that an improved operational relationship with the National Security Agency proved invaluable. By chance, the NSA had for weeks been busy at the same hotel on an unrelated matter: tracking the phone calls and internet traffic of a deposed African strongman who was in the process of recharacterizing billions of dollars of U.N. aid into a comfortable retirement plan. Already having extensive coverage on the property, NSA quickly determined that Estrella’s phone, provided by her husband, was quite secure. Yet the phone was not her sole channel of net access.
Either bored or exhausted from her exertions on Avenue Montaigne, Estrella had taken to amusing herself on Instagram and Facebook. Better yet, apparently in need of an improved platform for her browsing, it was discovered that she’d recently purchased a tablet device from the Apple store on Rue de Rivoli, and thereafter set up a string of accounts in her true name. The NSA knew all of this because she freely utilized the hotel’s Wi-Fi, and because she ignored entirely VPN software. Such open networks were commonly referred to in the tech community as “plastic colanders”—nicely pliable and full of holes.
With a weakness identified, the NSA took up a fight that was hardly fair. In precisely seventeen seconds they cracked Estrella’s tablet password: vladimir had been their second choice, after password. From there, the pursuit of Vladimir Ovechkin began in earnest. It was an increasingly common blunder among criminals, and consequently a vein often pursued by data miners, that as diligent as they might be in securing their own communications, they too often, and too carelessly, associated themselves with amateurs. Neckless thugs, buxom mistresses, Bahamian lawyers—all were engaged regularly, but few effected stringent internet safeguards.
So it was, as Ovechkin’s third and best wife woke that morning and began exchanging shopping selfies with her friends, NSA analysts were hard at work sifting through her iPad. Files were downloaded, prioritized, and decrypted. As hoped, a string of emails with her husband was isolated, and that cyber address became the new target. Because Ovechkin himself was more security conscious, the subsequent trail took longer to follow. Yet he too had made mistakes.
Once the outer walls of Ovechkin’s account were breached, the real work began. His messages were scoured for any leads on his present whereabouts. The contents of h
is inbox were largely business related, although one with a subject line titled “Men’s holiday next February in Manila” was flagged for later follow-up. Disappointingly, the most recent email proved to be over a week old. This meant all activity predated the deaths of Ivanovic and Romanov, backing the idea that Ovechkin had indeed gone to ground in both an electronic and physical sense. Not to be defeated, the NSA did what they always did in such situations: they followed the money.
A link to an account with PVD Bank in St. Petersburg was extracted from a months-old email. As a rule, brick-and-mortar banks in Russia were a paranoid lot, and quite serious when it came to physical security. Guards stood in front of shored-up buildings to discourage armed gangs, and vaults were unusually solid. For the most part it worked.
More vexing, however, was the cyber back door. Banking regulators in Russia had become virtual bystanders, helpless to forestall online intrusions—an inevitable consequence of a government that turned a blind eye to, and at times even encouraged, hackers who wreaked chaos across the internet. This meant banks were on their own to fill online security gaps, and indeed they made a valiant effort, spending inordinate amounts of time and money to keep computer networks safe. By most accounts they were reasonably good at it.
The NSA, however, was better.
The firewall of PVD Bank was breached with little difficulty, and done in a way that left no evidence whatsoever of the intrusion. Ovechkin’s accounts were combed for leads, and based on certain large transfers, it was clear that he kept accounts in other countries. All were flagged for follow-up when time was less critical. The NSA easily identified a handful of transactions relating to MIR Enterprises, and it became clear that Ovechkin’s investment in the concern had so far been a one-way street—all expenses, no income. This wasn’t unusual for a fledgling corporation, yet given what the CIA knew about MIR’s business model—illegal arms shipments to high-risk Middle East neighborhoods—they strongly suspected that any profits were being piped elsewhere.
The most incisive find came near midmorning when Ovechkin was linked to a credit card. Hacking that account proved a challenge, but was eventually successful. The statements were a gold mine.
Teams pored over credit card transactions, and found charges from restaurants in Davos, Switzerland, and a spa in nearby St. Moritz. Ten days before that was an entire page placing Ovechkin in Moscow. At the top of the statement, however, were the two most telling purchases, both made within the last forty-eight hours. One was at a grocery store, the second a gas station. Finally, the bank’s transaction log evidenced an hours-old balance inquiry from Ovechkin himself, and this led to a new IP address. The IP address could not be pinpointed, but it arrived via an internet service provider whose geographic coverage was narrowly definable. This, in turn, correlated perfectly with the gas station and grocery store. More would undoubtedly be discovered in time, but seven hours after beginning its quest, the CIA had what it wanted.
Vladimir Ovechkin was holed up somewhere along the southern coast of Morocco.
FORTY-EIGHT
While the CIA working groups tracking down Ovechkin were having a productive morning, those hunting arms shipments in Saudi Arabia were making far less progress. Of the five caches that had reached the Red Sea shoreline, two were tracked to Duba, and one each to Gayal, Al Wajh, and Umluj. In what was thought to be a matter of atrocious bad luck, all the cargo was confirmed to have arrived ashore but subsequent movements proved untraceable due to gaps in satellite coverage. Embarrassing as it was, Langley could not track a single shipment beyond the docks.
Acting on the CIA’s warning, the Saudis did their best to forestall whatever trouble was brewing. They inspected warehouses and delivery trucks in each of the identified ports. In a rented shed in Gayal, two crates were discovered that seemed to match the provided satellite images. Unfortunately, both had been emptied of their contents, and a witness reported that a group of men had loaded everything into a pair of trucks hours earlier. A description of the vehicles was quickly circulated, and one was found abandoned with a flat tire, still laden with its load, along a wadi outside town. The inventory discovered was exactly what the Americans had described—a dense collection of basic small arms. Another crate was discovered in a commercial garage in Duba, four men scattering to the wind minutes before the authorities arrived.
In National Guard headquarters in Riyadh, the influx of weapons was discussed at length during a hastily convened meeting of the security council. Everyone agreed that the smuggling operation was problematic, yet there was consensus that the Americans were exaggerating the scale of the operation. Many also expressed irritation that they had not been advised of the threat sooner—timely intervention as the boats came ashore would have been a showstopper. Their pique heightened further when a senior CIA man let slip that Israel had been helpful in uncovering the plot. The Saudi foreign minister in particular, who kept a seat on the security council, was nettled that Israel had inserted itself into the matter, no quarter given for their claim of “the good of the neighborhood.”
Farther afield, the shipments sourced in the Gulf of Aden had by all accounts disappeared into the wilderness of Yemen—this to no one’s surprise. Due to competing American surveillance commitments, the destinations of the shipments along the northern shores of the Persian Gulf had never been nailed down.
Up and down the Saudi establishment, everyone went through the motions. Detachments along the northern frontier were given vague orders to keep an eye out for possible weapons shipments, although no one could say just where or when they might take place. Police along both coastlines were ordered to look for suspicious vehicles. At various levels, the Saudi reaction vacillated from annoyance to caution to disbelief.
What those involved in the search—including the Americans—did not know was that leaders at the highest levels of the Saudi establishment were monumentally distracted by a wholly separate concern. It was not based on any specific threat, but centered around an event that had been on the books for months, and whose arrangements were proving a logistical nightmare.
For good reason, only a handful of princes and generals knew the full details. Among them, not a single one ever imagined that the two events could be linked.
* * *
Slaton’s CIA phone rang as he got out of the shower. He answered with wet hair and a towel around his waist. The number wasn’t familiar. The voice that greeted him was.
“We know roughly where Ovechkin is,” said CIA director Coltrane.
“Roughly?”
“We’ve narrowed it down to fifty square miles of a certain country.”
“Okay. Which miles in which country?”
“Before I tell you … I’d like to know why you’re so interested.”
Slaton hesitated. Only minutes ago, under a stream of hot water, he’d been asking himself the same question. He hedged with, “Because I don’t think the CIA is going to pursue him.”
“Ovechkin’s involvement in this scheme won’t be forgotten, I promise you that. But for the time being, he is not a priority. The situation in Saudi Arabia takes precedence. I’m sending Sorensen to Riyadh. She uncovered this threat, and the Saudis always respond better face-to-face—they’re funny that way.”
“You’re taking her out of Rome? What about—”
“Don’t worry, she told me about your arrangements. I issued the order myself—your wife and son will remain secure at the embassy.”
“Okay … thanks for that.” He decided that with Coltrane’s backing, security for his family would only get tighter. He also didn’t question the wisdom of sending a woman to deal with the House of Saud’s exclusively male leadership. All things considered, he liked the idea of having someone he trusted inside that fence.
Coltrane said, “Since you didn’t answer my question about your interest in Ovechkin, let me put it a different way. Is it him you’re after, or this mysterious assassin?”
“I think one leads to the other. A
nd sooner or later, both need to be reckoned with.”
“For whose sake?”
Slaton didn’t reply.
“You really want to chase this,” said Coltrane, more an accusation than a question.
“I don’t like loose ends. Right now I have an advantage, and I don’t want to lose it.”
“I’m not so sure about that advantage. Miss Sorensen briefed me on the bullet you recovered. It sounds like a revolutionary system.”
“That remains to be seen. Every weapon has its weaknesses.”
“So does every soldier.”
An impasse developed, the faint hiss of static carrying in both directions. Coltrane broke it. “Begin in Casablanca. Hopefully I can fine-tune your search by the time you arrive.”
“Casablanca,” Slaton repeated. He weighed it for a moment and thought it made sense. Some co-processing part of his brain began drawing maps and calculating distances in the background.
Coltrane gave Slaton a special phone number to reach him directly.
“And if I find Ovechkin?” Slaton asked.
“I can’t tell you what to do. But if he stays alive long enough … we’d like very much to have a word with him.”
* * *
At 12:35 that afternoon Sorensen learned she was booked on a 4:10 commercial flight to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Traffic on a Sunday would not be particularly bad, but all the same she rushed her preparations. With her bag packed and an embassy car being called up, she diverted to see Christine. Sorensen found her on the patio having juice and sweet bread with Davy.
“Care to join us?” Christine asked.
Sorensen thought she looked weary, but decided that was as it should be—she’d stayed up half the night watching her husband on a mission. “Wish I could,” she said. “They’re shipping me off to Saudi Arabia.”
“When?”
“I’m leaving in ten minutes.”
Christine’s tight visage remained unchanged. “Does this have to do with—”