by Ward Larsen
Zhukov’s eyes narrowed, and he responded in a sulfurous tone, “Not quite, my friend. You have done everything I’ve asked so far. But now I can tell you the rest—the one thing that remains.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Tikhonov.
Zhukov explained the project’s final test. Then he explained why Tikhonov was going to perform it. When he was done, the engineer was no longer smiling.
FIFTY-THREE
The helicopter did indeed fly.
As a rule, Slaton trusted things mechanical—snipers, after all, bet their lives on well-machined levers and bolts. The contraption in which he was riding, however, was a stern test of that conviction. It clattered and rumbled, and every buffet from the turbulent midday air seemed to translate directly into his seat. He was riding up front, at the right-hand copilot’s station. The flight instruments before him vibrated to a blur, needles bouncing chaotically inside gauges trimmed with red-and-green arcs. Most of them, thankfully, remained in the green.
Slaton had ridden in his share of helicopters, usually advanced military models that whisked him across borders on moonless nights. On those flights he was invariably weighed down by weapons and gear, not to mention the attendant trepidation that came with such equipment. The mission he was conducting now—a sightseeing excursion over sunsplashed coastline, perusing seaside hotels and mansions—was a new line for his résumé.
“We’ll be clear of town soon,” said Omar. “The coastline you wish to see begins a few miles ahead.”
Slaton heard Omar loud and clear through the noise-canceling headset he’d been given, a necessity against the din of the engine and whump whump of the rotor blades. On Slaton’s request, they were cruising a thousand feet above the water and half a mile offshore—distant enough to not draw attention, but keeping a clear view of things.
“There is the property I would choose!” said Omar. He pointed to a particular villa along a beach that was thick with them. Slaton saw an expansive pool, and on the adjacent deck a young woman was sunbathing nude, oblivious to the passing helicopter.
“I don’t see a for sale sign,” he said.
“Too bad. Perhaps she could be part of the bargain.”
Slaton contemplated a number of responses, taking into account his budding relationship with the man, Islamic moral standards, and guys being guys. In the end he could think of no reply that would advance his mission.
A mile farther on, Omar pointed out a midsized hotel on a bluff overlooking the sea. “This place was recently sold—it was owned by one of the richest men in town. I suspect it is quite profitable. I can tell you it does a good wedding business.” As if to prove the point, a large group of well-dressed people were mingling on a broad terrace. Tables with catered food had been set up to one side, and white curtains billowed beside flowered trellises.
“I prefer to invest in private residences,” Slaton said. “They’re easier to manage from a distance.”
They were fifteen miles from Casablanca’s airport, skimming southward at a hundred knots, when the trappings of civilization began to fall away. Sand beaches and man-made breakwaters yielded to stone tide pools and natural escarpments. Hotels and condos gave way to private residences. There were grand new villas and old cabins, at first shoulder to shoulder, then spreading farther apart as the city faded behind them. Slaton thought most of the homes looked unoccupied, meaning this seafront was no different from any other—as more of the world’s wealth coalesced in fewer hands, the lucky winners were increasingly spread thin. They rotated between beaches like these and marinas in Capri. Mountainsides in Davos.
Yes, Slaton thought, this is just the kind of place Ovechkin would run to.
Omar maneuvered toward a promontory that jutted into the sea, a thousand-foot-high finger of stone presiding above rough-hewn shores. As they neared the crest, an updraft caught the chopper, and Omar fought the controls momentarily as the aircraft lurched sideways. The old Jet Ranger seemed to groan in protest, and something behind them clattered to the floor. Omar seemed not to notice.
“The coastline is rugged for the next twenty miles,” he said. “There are many cliffs and coves. You’ll see fewer villas here, but some are very nice, very private. I can fly closer to any that catch your eye.”
“Thanks, I’ll let you know.”
Omar was right—as the coastline became more isolated, Slaton saw great stretches of barren cliff between residences. Unfortunately, even if things remained the same for another twenty miles he would be looking at hundreds of possibilities. He was struck by a sudden sense of futility, and began to doubt his strategy. The premise of renting a chopper had seemed a good option. Ovechkin was likely hiding somewhere along this thirty-mile stretch of shoreline. But even so, that left too many possibilities.
He checked his phone and saw a good connection. Disappointingly, there were no new messages. He was never going to find the Russian this way. Slaton tried to put his doubts aside, and soon began to think more positively. The tour flight wasn’t a waste of time—he was learning the lay of the land, getting a feel for coves and terrain he might soon have to negotiate.
He was watching the ever-changing shoreline whisk past when Omar said, “We are now thirty miles south. Do you wish to go farther?”
Slaton hesitated. “No,” he finally said. “Let’s head back.”
“Along the beach?”
He looked inland and saw a narrow valley nestled between banks of brown hills. Not wanting to rely too heavily on his assumptions, he said, “Let’s turn ashore. Fly up the first valley.”
The pilot did so, and soon the Jet Ranger was cradled between the gentle slopes of opposing tawny ridgelines.
It would be another day before Slaton realized his mistake. Had he asked Omar to continue another four miles southward, rounding one last wall of cliffs along the coast, he would have encountered a sight to behold. And a sight that would have changed his thinking entirely.
* * *
The vital thread of intelligence that put the CIA back on track came not from the usual sources. For an agency that prided itself on the efficacy of satellites, listening posts, and cyber intrusions, it was a flashback of sorts, and a victory for the few remaining hands of the Cold War, that they were saved that day not by technology, but rather a human source. Or more concisely: a Yemeni garbageman with a fondness for good Scotch.
The agent’s handler was an Omani-American, a deep-cover CIA officer who traveled extensively through Yemen’s coastal regions under the guise of selling bulldozers—a shockingly lucrative trade in a country that was continuously either demolishing war-torn buildings or erecting their replacements. As both a rearranger and collector of dirt, the CIA officer had long come to realize that municipal garbage workers were among the most useful of spies. They were natural visitors to every corner of a city, and notoriously poorly compensated. They also handled all manner of discarded trash, a long established source of valuable intelligence. Best of all—trash collectors were among the most unseen and unremembered individuals on the planet.
The recruit in question was particularly useful thanks to his route—he collected refuse every Monday from bins around the international airport in Aden. At the outset the handler paid cash, on a pro rata basis, for whatever intelligence the Yemeni could dredge up. The agent dead-dropped information to the CIA via false bottoms in select garbage cans around the city, and he proved consistently productive. Quite by accident—a spontaneous re-gift during the holiday season—the handler discovered that even better results could be inspired when the usual retainer was supplemented by a fifth of Macallan double cask Scotch. So incentivized, the agent put on display an extraordinary new show of industry. In short order, his code name was changed to Macallan, and his communication links were upgraded from trash can bottoms to a satellite phone.
It was through this device, during the course of his regular rounds, that he proved his worth once again that afternoon.
Macallan had received
an urgent, and very specific, message to keep a lookout around the airport. He’d no sooner pocketed his phone to dump a can into his truck than he spied something very near what he’d been asked to look for: a large contingent of non-natives arriving in a rush. Telling his partner he needed to pee, Macallan disappeared around the side of a small aviation repair shop. He took two pictures and sent them immediately. He could never have imagined the audience they would find thousands of miles to the west.
* * *
“The airplane near the hangar is an Embraer Legacy,” said an analyst at a central console in the Langley operations center. He was referencing an overhead image, refreshed every few seconds, of a parking ramp on the airfield in Aden—they’d wasted no time in getting drone coverage. “Macallan’s picture shows eleven men getting on board, all carrying equipment.”
“It doesn’t look big enough to hold that many,” remarked Director Coltrane, who’d just arrived and was being brought up to speed on the development.
“Standard crew of two, up to thirteen passengers in a normal configuration. It’ll be cramped, but under the circumstances I suspect our hijackers will squeeze in.”
Coltrane looked at the second jet on the drone feed before them. “And that one?”
“A Citation X, much smaller. One man got on board.”
“Are we sure these are the men who scuttled those ships?”
“It’s only circumstantial,” said the duty officer. “We suspect that twelve individuals, at least one a non-Arab, were responsible for the sinkings. That’s how many were plucked out of the sea by a fast boat and run ashore. Three hours later, twelve non-Arabs show up at the nearest airport and board a pair of private jets. That’s all we can say for sure. There’s a chance they could be something else—oil workers, maybe construction laborers.”
Coltrane didn’t bother to respond. The duty officer had made his point, but no one was buying it. “Can we find out where these jets are going?”
“We’re working on it,” the duty officer replied. “They look ready to depart, which means they’ll have flight plans in the system.”
“Do airplanes need flight plans in Yemen?”
“They do if they want to enter anybody else’s airspace without getting shot down.”
“Here it is,” announced a voice from the back of the room. “One jet filed to Kubinka Air Base, just outside Moscow.”
Moscow, Coltrane thought. Why am I not surprised? “Which jet is going there?” he asked, exchanging a glance with the duty officer.
“The Embraer,” said the technician. “The other is filed for a different destination. A place called … Ouarzazate.”
Coltrane tried to meet the technician’s gaze, but he was somewhere behind a bank of monitors. “Where the hell is that?” he called out.
“Eastern Morocco. Pretty much the middle of nowhere, except … there is some kind of industrial park there, one big runway and a couple of hangars. I’ll see what we have on the place.”
Coltrane nodded, then said in a reflective low voice, “So we know where these guys are, and we know where they’re going. But what do we do about it?”
Apparently not sure if the question was rhetorical, a new voice added her two cents. Connie Stine was from the Office of General Counsel—at least one lawyer was always on duty in the ops center. “Not much,” she answered. “There is no immediate threat to U.S. interests, and it’s not our airspace. Not to mention the fact that our sole source here is an alcoholic garbageman.”
“We could do a quiet intercept,” the duty officer said. “Reagan is in the Persian Gulf … we could have a pair of Hornets shadow them.”
Coltrane shook his head. “To what end? As soon as they hit Iranian airspace we’d have to call it off.”
The ensuing silence was an answer in itself. Their hands were tied.
“All right,” said the director. “Let’s keep an eye on them as long as we can—especially the one headed to Oraz … whatever the hell it’s called.”
“Anything else?” the duty officer asked.
The director thought about it. “Yeah. Send Macallan a case of his favorite, my compliments.”
FIFTY-FOUR
Langley got its second break soon after the first. In the twenty-four hours since nailing down a suspect IP address, the NSA had kept up the pressure. As was often the case in the cyber realm, success came not in black and white, but as a carefully assessed series of probabilities.
For years the NSA had been vexed by the use of burner phones by terrorists. Such devices were maddeningly difficult to track, particularly when used by individuals moving inside a big city. Nailing down where Vladimir Ovechkin had holed up, however, was a somewhat more level playing field.
For an agency that records the whereabouts of more than a billion phones a day, the filtering of large amounts of data is of paramount importance. Algorithms are leveraged to map calls, extracting from the cellular noise certain intersections of suspicious users. In the case of Ovechkin, whose geographic whereabouts were already narrowed down, the strategy taken to pinpoint his location involved burner phone clusters.
In effect, the local mobile network was monitored, and when any new phone was activated, its position was crosshatched to other numbers that had recently fallen off the grid near the same location. Over time, the method highlighted specific addresses where the use of throwaway phones flourished. Ovechkin was known to keep a sizable security entourage, along with support staff, and he himself would have to maintain contact with distant bankers and lawyers. Altogether, they could be expected to operate a minor constellation of limited-use handsets. For its part, the NSA knew the technique would work—the only variable was time. What surprised even its own analysts was how quickly the results came.
Within twenty-four hours of approximating Ovechkin’s location, they identified three distinct burner clusters. One, a farmhouse five miles inland, was quickly discounted when an intercepted call revealed a hashish smuggler coordinating a series of deals with northern distributors. Brief consideration was given to alerting local authorities, but that was put on hold on the advice of the CIA’s regional desk: seventy percent of Europe’s hashish was sourced from Morocco, resulting in both a significant trade surplus and a government that habitually turned a blind eye.
A second location was put down almost as quickly—the five-story walk-up outside Zemamra turned out to be a rooming house that was a waypoint for migrant laborers from sub-Saharan Africa, dozens of whom purchased prepackaged phones each day.
By default, the third address showing a spike in burner activity became the NSA’s focal point, a modest villa along a remote stretch of coastline. Over the course of that morning, the agency isolated and recorded three calls sourced from the villa. None offered particularly damning content, but they all displayed one highly unusual commonality—in each conversation the language spoken was Russian.
* * *
Slaton received the update from Langley within seconds of the Jet Ranger’s skids touching down. While Omar tended to the helo, its rotors spinning down and its turbine ticking with heat, Slaton veered from the flight line into the relative quiet of the hangar. He listened for a full two minutes.
“How sure are you about this?” he finally asked.
“It’s not a slam dunk,” said the Langley duty officer, who’d been instructed to pass on the news. “All we know for certain is that multiple Russian speakers are using throwaway phones from a particular seaside villa. NSA did go back over some old data, and they’re pretty sure this burst of burner activity began two days ago. Before that, the place was quiet.”
The duty officer suddenly excused himself to put out “an unrelated fire.”
Slaton used the ensuing silence to weigh what he was being told. He appreciated the man’s honesty—this new information was speculative. How often had he seen intelligence agencies push dubious data as being rock-solid? Still, the idea gelled with his own assumptions: that Ovechkin would go to ground in
a nice place along the coast, something remote and secure. He tried to recall the specific villa, but it was hopeless given how many he and Omar had flown past.
With Ovechkin possibly located, the question became what to do about it. He considered hiring Omar for a follow-up flight to explore a “property of interest.” Tempting as it was, repeated overflights by a helicopter would raise suspicion from Ovechkin and his security team. Even more likely—it could alert the man Slaton was truly after.
This final thought brought the end of any inward pretenses. He had come to Morocco to hunt down an assassin. A young man he’d missed by a day in the Davos outfitter’s shop. A man who’d assumed the role of Slaton’s own ghost. There was, of course, no guarantee the killer was even in Ovechkin’s neighborhood. Might he stop his deadly run after having eliminated two of the three principals of MIR Enterprises? Perhaps he’d failed to locate Ovechkin as efficiently as the CIA had. Either case was possible, yet in Slaton’s overdeveloped cautionary lobe he reckoned the opposite was true. The man was nearby. If so, Slaton hoped he wasn’t too late. Hoped that, as he stood in a hangar talking to the CIA duty officer, there wasn’t already a bullet in the air.
The duty officer came back on line. “Okay, where were we?”
“Do you have any overheads of this villa?” Slaton asked.
“Not yet. Our coverage in that area is less than optimal. We might have something tonight if we can get priority. Right now everyone is focused on what’s happening on the Arabian Peninsula.”
Slaton had already conceded that much—his priorities and Langley’s were increasingly divergent. “Okay,” he said, “but do you at least have something on file I could look at?”
“There’s no terrain on the planet that isn’t in one of our imagery databases. Recency might prove trickier, but I’ll get somebody on it.”
“And not just Ovechkin’s place. He’s only a reference point—the guy I’m really after could be nearby. I’d like a wide view, say everything within five miles. Close-ups of all residences and commercial buildings. Vehicles too if you come up with anything in the last few days.”