Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “Family history, education, stuff like that?” Morton had asked. “Just Google him, no need to use up our resources.”

  “I want his real background.”

  “Ah, a skeptic among us,” he said. Although he was barely out of his twenties he was a portly man who in a business suit could pass for what most people pictured a banker or Fortune 500 looked like. But he was a lot smarter than most of that type. “I have a friend in the DI at Langley who owes me a favor, I’ll get her started.” The DI was the Company’s Directorate of Intelligence, where all sorts of research was conducted on, among other things, international economic activities and the people involved.

  “But quietly,” Lorraine had cautioned him. “I want this as low-key as possible, because this guy carries a lot of weight around here, and it would be too bad if we tipped something nasty over and word got back to him, we could all be in some deep shit.”

  The first surprise had been how open the facts of his background were. What Don’s friend in the DI had dug up on the oil billionaire exactly matched what was published on Wikipedia: his family was old money, able to trace their lineage back to the early Spanish sugarcane and tobacco fields, and, of course, oil. Octavio the younger had been educated at Oxford, specializing in international business and law, spending his vacations skiing in Switzerland and Austria, gambling in Monaco and Las Vegas, and romancing his way across Europe, his photographs on the front pages of tabloids everywhere. Until he turned twenty-five when he practically disappeared.

  “Except in the business world,” Morton had reported. “Miguel Octavio set out to become the richest man in the world, but very quietly, because some of his business deals were too sweet to be one hundred percent legit.”

  That had been two months ago when Don laid a thick file on her desk.

  “Give me a couple of for instances,” Lorraine had prompted.

  “He’s either the shrewdest or the luckiest man in the world, or — and this one’s my best guess — he has had a whole lot of insider info. He was in on the dot-com boom in the States in a big way, investing in everything from Microsoft to Google, and sticking with them, but he also spread a couple hundred million in a bunch of other IPOs that went ballistic, and then sold them at the peak, before they crashed. And he walked away with his first billion.”

  “A few moves like those would have made him a smart investor,” Lorraine agreed. “Did he ever fail?”

  “Not once, and it was more than a few calls. More like three dozen.”

  “Any common thread?”

  “Threads,” Morton said. “And it’s all in the file. Primarily three major U.S. banks where he has close personal friends on the boards of directors. They couldn’t directly profit from what they knew, and more important when they knew what they did, but Octavio sure as hell could and did.”

  “Any of that money make it back to his pals?” Lorraine asked.

  “Yeah, but that’s the slick part. The guy bet the entire billion — or at least most of it — in the U.S. housing boom, the bulk of it in Florida and California, through Anne Marie Marinaccio.”

  “The FBI wants her.”

  “That’s the even more interesting part,” Morton said. “Marinaccio bailed when the housing market started heading south, and she took a few billions of her investors’ money with her where she set up shop in Dubai under what’s called the Marinaccio Group. Lots of derivatives, most of which she managed to dump in time. But the curious part is that Octavio bailed at the same time Marinaccio did. Pulling out more than two billion which was legit on the surface.”

  “What about these days? Either of them been hurt by the recession?”

  “I don’t know yet about Marinaccio, although there’ve been rumors about her oil investments, especially in Iraq, getting shaky, but Octavio is apparently in great shape.”

  “So why is he involved with the UAEIBC?” Lorraine had asked, and now heading out to the airport she remembered that question and Don’s answer with perfect clarity.

  “I’m working on that part, but it’s almost certain that the Marinaccio Group is heavily involved in the bank, and of course Octavio and Marinaccio had a fabulously successful financial relationship. So there’s that, along with their shared interest in oil, and one other intriguing tidbit that I’m still trying to run down.”

  “Intrigue me.”

  “The Marinaccio Group has it’s own security division, headed by Gunther Wolfhardt, ex-East German Stasi. Rumors are that Wolfhardt might have been somehow involved with the heart attack of one of Marinaccio’s rivals, and the terrorist bombing of another’s office buildings. In each case Marinaccio came out on top financially. And there are other rumors.”

  “If all that’s true, it means Marinaccio is a ruthless bitch who’ll stop at literally nothing to protect her investments.”

  “That would be to Miguel Octavio’s best interests as well.”

  “Keep digging,” she ordered.

  Last week Don had connected the Marinaccio Group with at least one probable assassination and one likely bombing as well as a direct connection with several of the UAEIBC-supported terrorist organizations, and a rumor floating around that al-Quaeda was planning another spectacular strike somewhere in the U.S.

  Marinaccio equaled oil interests, equaled terrorism and terrorists, equaled Octavio. And then Hutchinson Island happened. Make nuclear-generated electricity unpalatable, and oil and natural gas would be ready and able to step in because coal was coming up against the increasingly powerful global warming lobby, and wind and solar technologies weren’t ready yet to fill the gap.

  She didn’t have all the proof, but it was enough in her mind to make a damned good case for the CIA to spend some of its resources to take a closer look.

  Two motorcycle cops pulled up beside them and waved them over. They were on the highway now, the airport within sight a few miles across an open field.

  Lorraine didn’t know if she should be alarmed yet. The plates on the SUV were diplomatic and even though she was CIA, her embassy title was Special Adviser to the Ambassador, which gave her diplomatic immunity. But Venezuela was Miguel Octavio’s country, and just now President Chavez was acting particularly unkindly toward the U.S. And things happened down here.

  “Were we speeding?” she asked the driver as he slowed down and pulled over to the side of the busy road.

  “About ten miles over the limit, ma’am, the same as everyone else.”

  “Better get your passport out, Mrs. Fritch,” her bodyguard said. “This is probably just a routine hassle. Been happening a lot lately.”

  When they were stopped the driver powered down his window as one of the cops came over, while the second came around to the passenger side as Lorraine’s bodyguard lowered his window.

  “Is there some trouble, Officer?” the driver asked.

  Lorraine opened her purse, looked at her 9mm Beretta for just a second, but then grabbed her passport. Normally she didn’t travel armed, but this time she was spooked.

  The first gunshot was so loud in the confines of the car that she was so startled, so distracted she didn’t realize for the first instant that her bodyguard’s blood had splashed her face. She looked up as the second shot was fired, this one hitting the driver in the forehead, and then she was looking into the muzzle of a very large pistol, a SIG-Sauer, she thought, before a billion stars burst inside her skull.

  TWENTY-TWO

  All the way back up to Washington the next morning McGarvey had the feeling that nothing in his life had ever been meant to last. Not his work in the Air Force, not his career in the CIA, not with his wife and daughter and certainly not his retirement from the field.

  Getting out of the cab with Gail in front of the three-story brick-and-glass building that was home to the operational division of the National Nuclear Security Administration in Tysons Corner, just outside the Beltway, it struck him hard that his days as a teacher and Rapid Response team adviser were finished, and had come to an end
the moment he and Lundgren had responded to the Hutchinson Island call.

  The morning was bright and fresh, the countryside southern and lush, but McGarvey wasn’t noticing any of it, he was so tightly focused. And he had to ask himself if he was glad for the chance to get back into action, or regretful. He thought he knew but he didn’t want to admit it to himself, not yet, anyway, but the call from the Division of Emergency Operations Director Joseph S. French had been straight to the point: Drop everything and get up here as soon as possible, and he had responded without hesitation.

  “I’m sorry about Alan,” Gail said. “He didn’t deserve it.” She’d come up here to make her report to her boss, Louis Curtley, the operations manager in charge of in-place security operatives, the position she’d held — still held — at Hutchinson Island.

  “None of them did,” McGarvey said, and he really looked at her for the first time since yesterday afternoon.

  She was ragged, her oval features pinched with stress and fatigue. No one had gotten much sleep in the aftermath, but right now she seemed to be more affected than she should have been, almost beside herself.

  He stopped her halfway up the walk to the front entrance. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “It was exactly my fault,” she said angrily, her black eyes wide, haunted. And he knew what she was seeing. “I was in charge of security. I let the bastard get into my control room six months ago, and I let the other just waltz into my facility like any fucking tourist.”

  “You’re not an engineer, so there’s no way you could have known about the sabotaged systems. That was Strasser’s job. And it wasn’t yours to vet every person who ever took the tour.”

  She looked up into his face, her anger like a halo. “He walked right past me, Kirk. And I knew something was wrong, I could feel it, but I did nothing. Like you said, it wasn’t my job to vet those people. But it was most definitely my responsibility to follow my gut. And that’s something else you said. Remember?”

  She was on the verge of tears now, and McGarvey wanted to reach out for her, but he knew that she would resent anything like that, figuring that he would take her for being a weakling.

  “I remember,” he said. “That’s how we learn.”

  “But at what terrible cost,” she said bitterly.

  “We keep going. You keep going.”

  “And do what? I’m practically out of a job until — or if — Hutchinson Island gets rebuilt. Or do you think Curtley’s going to give me a new assignment as a reward?”

  “Prove your plant was sabotaged, find out who did it and why, and go after them.”

  She said nothing.

  McGarvey could see that he’d told her something she hadn’t expected. “You know that the engineer inside the control room was a part of it, and you have a suspect who you saw get in his car and drive away. It’s a start.”

  “The monitoring system is probably fried. The South Building took a big hit of radioactive water and steam.”

  “It may not have gotten inside the building,” McGarvey said, and he took out the disk he’d taken from the monitoring station. “The visitors center parking lot camera.” He’d planned on giving it to Otto to work on, but he suspected that Gail needed it.

  “You went back,” she said, taking the disk from him.

  “I figured I owed you that much.”

  “You paid your debt, Kirk, and then some,” she said with emotion. “If it hadn’t been for you taking charge and keeping Carlos from screwing things up, a lot more people would’ve been hurt.”

  “Well, it could be a lead, especially if you can lift the license number,” he said with more gentleness in his voice than he felt. The security lapses at Hutchinson Island were only a small part of the real problem, starting with Homeland Security that in some ways still believed the major threat to the U.S. was by air, just like 9/11.

  “Eric can do it,” she said, a hint of her old sparkle and excitement back in her face. Eric Yablonski was the NNSA’s resident computer geek, and served in a similar function for the administration as Otto Rencke did for the CIA. And now she had something to do that had merit, worth, and it was enough for her. A lifeline.

  * * *

  Joseph French had one of the corner offices on the third floor, and although this division of the NNSA had been pulled out of the DOE’s headquarters in the city, technically banished from the seat of power, he didn’t seem to mind. Out here, he’d once explained to McGarvey, he had a free hand.

  He was a short, tightly built man in his late fifties, with an athletic grace that came from playing racquetball twice a week, and the thousand-yard stare acquired from his naval career from which he had retired as a two-star rear admiral. He had been boss of a Sixth Fleet battle group, which should have qualified him for a more important position in the DOE, but he was an action man who was perfectly happy to spend his retirement years out of the bustle of Washington and especially away from the bureaucracy of the Pentagon.

  “You were right and everyone else at the DOE was wrong,” he said when McGarvey walked in. “Coffee?”

  “No thanks on the coffee,” McGarvey said. “And the other is no consolation. We lost some good people.”

  “It could have been worse,” French said, his mood unreadable. He’d been black shoe navy, and had never been able to completely trust the sometimes maverick tactics of special ops forces, including the Navy SEALs, and definitely not the CIA’s black ops officers — such as McGarvey had been. Yet he freely admitted that he considered Mac an asset too valuable to dismiss. He motioned to a chair.

  “There are one hundred and three other nuclear plants out there, just as vulnerable.”

  “We’re putting things in place.”

  “I’ll bet you are.”

  “The White House wants this thing to be handled low-key for now,” French said.

  “Why’s that, Admiral?” McGarvey wanted to know. “The president doesn’t want to start a panic by letting people know we haven’t a clue how this happened, why it happened, who made it happen, or if it’s likely to happen again?”

  “The FBI is working the case, so is the CIA. Anyway, you signed on to help with just that, remember?”

  This was a morning for remembering. “Nobody’s listening,” McGarvey said, wondering about the depth of his bitterness.

  “You’re wrong,” French countered. “I’m sorry about what happened in Florida. We all are, and not for the reasons you think — not for the negative PR impact. You came to me with a chip on your shoulder, and I understand that, too. Losing your wife and daughter. And I even understand your background, your deep background before you became director of the CIA. But here we are, and we need your … particular set of skills. And that comes directly from the White House via Walt Page who thinks like I do that you’re a loose cannon, always have been. But it’s a loose cannon we need.”

  “As you said, the FBI’s working the case,” McGarvey said. “And I’m sure Caldwell didn’t sign off on me.”

  “He had no choice, and before you dismiss him as just another bureaucrat, take a hard look at the man’s record. In two short years he’s managed to jump-start the alternative energy field despite the low oil prices. He’s an ass, but he does get the job done. On top of that, Homeland Security is in high gear, as is every other intel and LE agency in the country — just like after nine-eleven.”

  McGarvey knew what was coming next, and he had known it the moment French had called him up here. And nothing had changed in his mind about going back into the field versus simply turning his back and walking away, and yet he’d been intrigued since the call from the hotline OD. Even more intrigued now that Page had brought up his name.

  French was watching him closely, but he was bright enough to hold his piece. He’d said what had to be said and now the ball was in McGarvey’s court.

  “I’ll need a free hand.”

  “I’d expect you to work outside the system, especially independently from this office, but you’d
have our resources at your disposal.”

  “But quietly.”

  “Yes.”

  “That part won’t last, and you have to know it and understand why.”

  French nodded after a moment. “As I said, I saw your file before I hired you.”

  “I want Gail Newby to help out, and maybe Eric Yablonski.”

  “You can have them if they’ll go along with you. This is a strictly volunteer operation. The way it was explained to me, the Bureau and everyone else will be beating the bushes for evidence and making a lot of noise doing it. Reassure the public. In the meantime you’re to do what you’ve always done; go through the back door and the hell with the niceties.”

  “People are bound to get hurt.”

  “I imagine they will,” French said evenly. “Do you have any ideas yet?”

  “This was done by professionals. The very best, which means the most expensive. Considering what they tried to do — kill a lot of people — narrows down the list of organizations with that kind of money.”

  “Al-Quaeda?”

  “It’s a start,” McGarvey said. “But this time we’re not going to war, because I think the answers, when we find them, aren’t going to be so simple. Something else is going on.”

  “Find out what it is,” French said.

  “I’ll try,” McGarvey promised, and he got up and walked out.

  Back in the field, he thought, just that easy. And in some ways he was feeling something new, a new emotion, almost relief to finally be doing something worthwhile. He supposed he carried the same look now that he had seen on Gail’s face when he’d handed over the video disk, only with one added burden — people were going to die before this was over, and he was going to kill them.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Gail’s boss Louis Curtley, who was possibly the most disinterested and uninteresting man she’d ever known, had dismissed her out of hand when she’d reported to him on the Hutchinson Island situation, stopping her before she’d really gotten started. He’d told her that he had been sorry to hear about Larry’s death, insincerity dripping from just about every word, and about the other deaths, but whatever theories she might want to run past him would have to wait until she had all the facts. Not only Forcier’s true background, but the name of the man she’d seen leaving the facility and concrete proof that: A. he knew Forcier; B. that he had actually gotten inside the control room; and C. and D., who, if anyone, he was working for and some sort of motive that made sense as to why he’d wanted to sabotage the plant.