And I mean clean. There was, so far as the Russkies could tell, no evidence left behind. Nothing. Nada. Worse, so far as I was concerned, was the fact that Yudin and pals had slipped away despite the fact that, so far as Boris had been told, the dacha had been under continual surveillance by the Ministry of the Interior for the past eight hours.
Yeah, right—you saw the colonel’s new solid gold Rolex, too.
Knowing that there was little if any OPSEC—that’s OPerational SECurity—here in old Mother(fucker) Russia meant I’d have to watch out for my own well-worn butt. You know, friends, I’ve often been accused of operating in a rogue fashion—to be specific, without getting the permission of my superiors before I initiate action. But that tactic has kept me and my men alive, confused my enemies, and made me a highly successful warrior.
Yes, there is a time for going through channels. But there is also a time and a place for silence—and for stealth. And Russia, I decided, was a country in which I was going to play things very close to the old gilet.
Now, just because the Russians hadn’t been able to find anything of consequence in the dacha didn’t mean it was an evidence-free zone. So despite complaints from Boris and Misha I methodically examined the dacha’s interior, working my way from the splintered front door to the kicked-out rear in a classic pattern search. Much of what I found was puzzling. Indeed, the situation here was a new one—and it presented a series of fresh, tough, and unsettling problems for me.
As you know I’ve been fighting terrorists for the past few years. Well, terrorists are real bureaucrats when it comes to record keeping. They annotate everything. From Mao Zedong’s notes made during the Great March, to Che Guevara’s diary of his disastrous Bolivian expedition, to the Tamil Tigers’ expense accounts, FMLN supply catalogs, Islamic Jihad ordnance requisitions, or Kahane Chai bomb manuals, every terrorist group I’ve ever come up against has been a prodigious keeper of paperwork. They keep itemized records, lists, inventories, diaries, journals, notebooks—all filled with a mixture of hard facts about what they have and where it is, to political musings (most of that is bull puckey), to tactical theories (ditto), to detailed notes about where they’ve been, what they’ve seen, and—this is the part I always like the best—the names and contact numbers of the people who help them.
You might wonder why they perform this scribbled ludicrousness—and have done for as long as I can remember, when it is so dangerous. That, my friends, is a question I cannot answer. All I can say is that I’m glad that tangos, which is how I most commonly refer to terrorists, are writers as well as fighters. Because it makes my job, which in broad terms can be described as hunting and killing as many tangos as I can lay hands or bullets on, much easier.
But that, as they say, was then—and this is now, and now there was nothing of note (yes, that word is used sarcastically here) to discover. The few sticks of furniture were early rustic—old and very well used. The rugs were cheap and mud encrusted. The closets were empty—cleared out except for the odd wire or plastic hanger. There was a film of dust in the hallway closet. But that dust had been caused by the concussion of the flashbangs—I knew that because the closet shelves in what must have been the master bedroom were clean.
In fact, the entire place was pretty bare. Oh, there was a shot-up Sony TV set hooked up to one of those new, half-meter satellite dishes. A shattered ghetto-blaster with integral CD player sat on the kitchen sideboard. The OMON team in their black clothes pawed over a box of pirated Chinese CDs of American, English, and French rock and roll, and Russian popski music, stuffing souvenirs in their pockets.
I worked my way through the basic kitchen, whose tiny, two-burner stove was powered by a four-foot high steel bottle of gas—maybe propane—parked outside. There was half a loaf of hard black bread, half a dozen tins of pressed caviar, several cans of sweet condensed milk, and a bunch of half-empty bottles of vodka, Chivas, and Remy Martin in the cupboard. But the few dishes were chipped, and the thick drinking glasses looked as if they’d originally been filled with grape jelly.
There was a double bed with an old bare mattress, two moth-eaten pillows, and a single bedside table in what had to be the master suite. I went through the small drawers. Nada. I lifted the ragged pillow on the ladder-back chair. Nothing. The three smaller bedrooms were each stripped bare. No beds. No furniture. Even the floors had been swept clean—not a single dust bunny in the corners or inside the built-in cabinets. There was something strange with this picture; something terribly awry. And it troubled me that I had no idea what it might be.
Nevertheless, I kept up with my search. I pawed through the fireplace. The ashes were consistent with wood, which meant that no sizeable quantity of paper had been burned recently. Paper leaves a much different residue than wood. Still, the stones were warm—which meant somebody’d been in residence here in the not-so-distant past.
After about an hour of continued fruitlessness, Boris decided I’d seen enough. He picked up an unopened decanter bottle of Remy Martin Louis XIII cognac from the crudely painted rustic pine sideboard, smacked me on the back, then put his hand in the small of my back to guide me out through what was left of the front door frame. “Come on, Dicky,” he said. “Nothing here for us. Let’s go get drunk.”
“Give me a few more minutes, huh?”
He sighed in resignation and saluted me with the cognac bottle. “Okay, okay, boychik, take as long as you want—we’ll be outside.”
I gave him an upturned thumb. “Thanks, Boris.” Now I was able to be specific about what had been troubling me about the place. The surveillance photos had indicated movement. We’d assumed that people were coming to call on Andrei. Now I realized that premise was flawed. They’d been cleaning the fucking place out. Shutting it down. Taking evidence away. But evidence of what? The dacha had been swept clean.
Maybe. But maybe not. There was no way I was going to leave until I’d turned this place inside out. I’ve been doing this kind of work for a long time—and I know that it is virtually impossible to sweep a place absolutely clean. Remember this fact, because you’re going to see it again. It is a truth: bad guys always leave something behind. A single shard of evidence. A fragment. A sliver. A shred. A fleck. But you cannot find it if you are rushed. So you must take your time and be methodical. And then, if you have gone over everything three times and the location is still absolutely vacuum clean, then you know you’re dealing with real professionals, and you react accordingly.
I found my evidentiary fragment in the dented, tin-lined copper washtub that served as a log bin, next to the stone fireplace. I pulled out the chunks of wood and set them on the floor. A half sheet of wood-stained scrap paper they were probably going to use as kindling lay covered with wood chips and other detritus in the tub’s tin bottom. I turned the page over to discover it was a blurry photocopy of the upper half of an Air France lettre de transport aerien—an air shipment waybill. The sheet bore the waybill number 059-5391-1572, but no date. The shipment was addressed to a Limon, Limited, in Mustique, the British Grenadines, by way of a Banque Lasalle in Geneva, Switzerland.
The original sender’s name wasn’t legible. But the shipment had been represented and insured through a company called Lantos & Cie, Paris XVI. The value: just over five-and-a-half million francs—about a million and a quarter dollars. The shipment was comprised of—and here I quote to you: “components for environmental testing chamber, crane, crane accessories, trollies, hot-freon tanks, heating tubes.” Total weight, 24,500 kilos—just about 54,000 pounds.
An incongruous coincidence, huh—an Air France waybill used as kindling in a Russian dacha. Yeah, well in my long and ding-filled career, bub, there have been very few instances of coincidence, incongruous or otherwise. What the hell did a company named after a Spanish (or Italian) lemon need an environmental testing chamber for in Mustique, British Grenadines, anyway?
And who the hell were the Banque Lasalle of Geneva and Lantos & Cie of Paris XVI? These, I knew, w
ere questions that I would spend the next few days answering to my own degree of personal and professional satisfaction. Why? Because they were associated with Andrei Yudin. And Andrei Yudin was connected to the death of my shipmate Paul Mahon. I see you out there. You are saying that the chain of evidence here was very tenuous. Well, you’re right. It was. But it was all the evidence I had—and so I’d follow it until I couldn’t go any further.
I peered down at the paper in my hand. From the old creases, it looked as if the photocopy had been folded in half horizontally, then into precise vertical thirds—maybe stuck in someone’s suit pocket. It had been torn along the center crease when it was discarded. I refolded the sheet and stuck it in the pocket that already held the matchbook. I replaced the firewood in its tub, and headed for the door.
Yeah, I’d have a cognac or two with Boris and Misha on the way back to town—just to be sociable. But I had other things on my mind tonight besides doing shots of five-hundred-dollar-a-bottle booze. I wanted to check up on the folks, locations, and supplies mentioned in the waybil1l and amalgamate that information with certain other documentational slivers I had in my possession. I also wanted to goose things along by taking a gander at the Moscow club scene—in particular, a spot called the Dynamo.
I’ve mentioned this kind of chain of command structure before. Like my old boss, CNO Arleigh Secrest, I call it “stovepipe” chain-of-command because each separate command structure goes straight up and down, which means there is no interaction among them. Most of the time the system works to my detriment and the bad guy’s favor because no one outside my particular “stovepipe” shares information. On this occasion, however, I am happy to report that my “stovepipe” was entirely separate from the DCM’s. The good news was that the motherfucker couldn’t lay a finger on me, and we both knew it. The bad news was that he could make my life miserable, because it was he who controlled the environment—e.g., everything that went on at the embassy.
Despite all promises and treaties to the contrary, the Chinese are still making hundreds of millions of dollars from pirated compact disks. They manufacture bogus CDs in China, then ship ’em via a clandestine pipeline that runs through North Korea, Japan, and Brazil.
Chapter 2
I REALIZED JUST AFTER I GOT BACK TO THE HOTEL THAT A FORAY to the Dynamo would have to wait a day. First, Boris and Misha had insisted on finishing the whole damn bottle of cognac. So we did. And since they were the ones with the car, I’d been trapped, wasting precious time, sitting in the dacha’s deserted courtyard sucking on Louis Treize. Why didn’t I protest? I’d considered it. But after today’s security lapse, I wasn’t about to say anything to anybody—not even the barest hint that I might have come upon something. Besides, it was long past 2130. And what was 2130, you ask? That was the military time written inside the matchbook cover. I knew that by the time I cleaned myself up, got dressed, and (more to the point) found the place, it would probably be closed—or closing down—for the night. Besides, I had no idea whatsoever what precise day the time referred to. It could have been tonight. But it could also have been two weeks ago—or two months.
Not to mention the fact that there were more immediate problems to attend to. Like my soggy weapons, which had to be cleaned, lubed, and stored in the heavy steel diplomatic lockbox we’d brought with us and kept under the bed. My lacerations, lumps, sprains, and bruises needed first aid, too.
But I also wanted to put the Air France waybill in some sort of perspective. It was, I realized instinctively, one small piece of a very large puzzle. I had a few other pieces of the puzzle in my hands right now—the papers, notes, and pictures that I’d removed from Paul’s desk and safe. If you examined each one separately, they presented no greater significance—no “big picture.” I, however, had learned how to peruse, study, and evaluate evidence from a great teacher. Arleigh Secrest, the last of the warrior CNOs, who was murdered by Islamic fundamentalists, showed me the path to enlightenment.
Ah, tadpoles—you are clamoring out there. You want to hear the old master’s words. Well, I will repeat them for you.
“Intelligence organizations are stovepipes,” CNO Secrest had said in his wise, simple declarative fashion. “Treat them as such, and you will persevere.”
And why, Master Marcinko-san, are intelligence organizations like stovepipes?
Because, tadpole, they stand parallel to one another, and the smoke (and mirrors) inside them go only one direction: up.
First, the parallel principle. CIA people report only to CIA people. DIA people report only to DIA people. State Department people report only to State Department people. Nobody pools information. Moreover, Christians In Action, which is what SEALs call the CIA, doesn’t want to share any of its sources and methods with DIA, the State Department, or anyone else. Why? Because it is afraid it will get ripped off—that other agencies will steal its agents as well as its secrets. Now, the logic of that outlook escapes me. Why DIA or State would want to steal an agent like Manny Noriega from the Agency is something I cannot understand. King Hussein of Jordan, okay. The late Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, sure. Guys like them are real assets, because they run countries. But most of the agents recruited by CIA overseas are, to put it bluntly (and kindly), scumbags.
For its part, DIA and State are convinced that CIA is riddled with moles. They won’t share information because they believe whatever they tell the CIA goes straight to our enemies. Now, while there is some hyperbole to this outlook, I can’t argue too strongly against it, given the CIA’s recent history of fiascoes, busts, bombs, turkeys, and goatfucks. Are you getting the picture?
You are? Good—then let’s add the other stovepipe element. Smoke—and intelligence—both rise—just like the hot air out of which they are all too often composed. Now, the more refined—or rarefied—intelligence is, the fewer people get to see it. That may be all right for strategic planning, but it doesn’t help poor tactical assholes like me, who need to know things sooner rather than later. During the Gulf War, for example, the generals in Norm Schwarzkopf’s bunker all knew where most of Saddam Hussein’s mobile Scud missiles were. But by the time that information was trickled back down the line to the knuckle-dragging Scud-hunters in the field, the missiles had moved on.
Okay. Now, what CNO Secrest preached to me was to go around the goddamn stovepipes—to obtain every bit of intelligence I could lay my hands on, borrow, purloin, or appropriate. Then, he told me, “Overlay it. Look for patterns.”
And that is exactly what I intended to do with the material from Paul’s office tonight. In fact, the scope of the documents I’d found made me wonder whether Paul had been taken under CNO’s inculcational wing the same way I was. Paul had never mentioned anything about CNO Secrest to me—but then, I hadn’t said anything to him either.
Let’s take a look at what I had in hand. There were the memos on the Russian Mafiya that I’ve already told you about. There were some miscellaneous papers—including the receipt I now realized was from the Dynamo, on which Paul had written the word Yudin. There was a Post-It on which Paul had written the words Sting, Mafiya—cover, Agcy/Mos, and Call KR. What it had originally been attached to, I had no idea. There were a handful of unidentified pictures—like the one of Andrei Yudin. There were news magazine clips (one was a story about U.S. Customs agents tracking down a businessman in suburban Virginia for shipping accelerometers to Jordan. Accelerometers, in case you don’t know, are used to measure nuclear detonations. Jordan don’t need ’em. And guess what? The BIQ—that’s businessman-in-question-had a Russian-sounding surname.
There was a DIA memo detailing break-ins at a dozen NATO installations, from the HQ building in Brussels to air bases in Italy and Turkey, over the past five months. Remote sensors had been discovered near perimeter fences; electronic jammers had been tried on secure communications networks. The NATO security force had been at THREATCON (CONdition) Charlie for six weeks—which is category three (of four), and was getting stressed.
A copy of a two-month-old Department of State E-mail message between the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs and the assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs classified SECRET-SENSITIVE chronicled a quartet of false flag recruitments of low- and mid-ranking embassy employees that had been uncovered recently. A false flag is when the recruiting agent makes you think he’s working for a friendly government, when in fact he is in fact working for a hostile power. The Israelis, incidentally, have enjoyed great success with false flag recruitments in the Arab world. Anyway, the State E-mail bemoaned the budgetary consequences if Congress ever found out. A communications clerk in Vienna, the DCM’s secretary in Paris, a junior consular officer in the visa section of the London embassy, and an administrative section chief in Rome had all been discovered passing documents or papers to folks they thought were American counterintelligence officers, but who had turned out to be impostors. Who the real bad guys were, State had no idea—but somebody was out there, trolling and prowling.
Another State memo, equally classified, noted that “thrice in the last thirteen-week cycle” (I guess that’s the bureaucratic way of saying once a month) the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, known as USOECD, had been the subject of an (let me quote this one for you, too) “unauthorized access during light-duty time sequencing, probably nocturnal.” In English, that means that some asshole broke in over the weekend, at night, when nobody was looking. And where had the break-in occurred? Paris—home of the Air France waybill, and Lantos & Cie. The memo did not state something that I knew: the building housing the USOECD is also the location of the Pentagon’s largest European counterterrorism operations center.
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