He strode quickly toward River Valley Road, past the modern, chain stores and bars, ignoring the sign that read THE PARTY NEVER STOPS AT CLARKE QUAY. The anger was rising up inside him. He had worked for this little city-state country for more than two decades, helping their fledgling foreign intelligence service in tradecraft, talent spotting, and agent handling, everything he had done so well in his own country. His advice had helped them penetrate the U.S. Navy, the Australian Army, the Indonesian President’s office, and the Malaysian police. And what gratitude do they show? When the money entrusted to him by his old colleagues suddenly increases, they think he’s been paid off for spying on Singapore? He had been completely loyal to his new home. Furthermore, who would pay him half a billion dollars U.S. for spying on Singapore? He would have to sell their giant casino complex, that ugly monstrosity, to get paid that kind of money.
He knew that getting mad like this was not good for his blood pressure, so he exhaled and tried to calm down. He reached the road and thrust up his arm to hail one of the ubiquitous blue taxis. As he did, a 9mm bullet pierced his forehead just above his nose. Cornelius Coetzee leaned backward and then folded like a Macy’s parade balloon, falling to his knees and then forward, his head hitting the sidewalk and covering it with a quickly expanding pool of bright red blood.
Hearing the shot, Weemin Zhu ran toward him, pulling a handgun from her purse, but there was no one to shoot at, no indication of the shot’s origin. She looked down at Coetzee and knew that the single bullet had been fatal. She replaced the gun in her handbag and removed her mobile. She called the Watch Command at the Internal Security Division and identified herself. “I need a response unit immediately at Clarke Quay. There has been a murder of my subject. The police will be here soon. Do you want me to tell them that this is my case?”
They did want her to. The Internal Security Division thought the police would never be able to figure it out and, besides, maybe Coetzee’s murder would reflect badly on their rival, his employer, the SID. After all, they said to Weemin, a murder in Singapore had to be an espionage-related event. There was no street crime in the city.
THE ROCKS, SYDNEY
NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA
“I’m taking the rest of the day off. Got some chums in town, going to go do the Manly thing with them,” Willem Merwe announced to his staff as he bounded out of the office of Merwe-Wyk-Roux in the restored brick building in the old part of town. “See you all in the morning.”
His small team was used to him disappearing for rugby, or volleyball on Bondi Beach. It was clear to them that the younger Mr. Merwe was nothing like his late father, who had spent long hours poring over investments and accounts. They should have known that he would be different as soon as he moved them from the downtown office tower to the funky town house in the Rocks district. “Roux in the Rocks,” Willy had jokingly proclaimed, his only attempt at a rationale to the staff for moving. The real reason, his staff knew, was that he wanted to abandon the staid old image and become more hip. He never wore a tie and he biked to work. Despite his youth, his investment strategies which included Chinese computer components, media and real estate had paid off. One of them must have just hit big, the staff assumed, because he had told them that morning that there was a substantial amount more to invest and he wanted “transformational” ideas.
At twenty-nine, Willy Merwe looked like the All Australian Male—tall, blond, broad shouldered, with the muscled legs of a champion bicyclist. No one on Bondi would have guessed he was an immigrant and, if they had, no one would have cared. He was cool and Australia was a nation of immigrants.
Merwe locked his bike on the rack at Circular Quay Ferry Terminal and ran for the 0315 boat from Pier 3 to Manly Beach, across Sydney Harbor. He made his way upstairs to the bar, got a KB Lager and then climbed higher up to the top deck, which was open to the sky and the breeze.
He looked back at the Sydney skyline and smiled. It was a view that always made him happy, the Opera House, the Bridge, the skyscrapers. He never understood why so few people came up to the top deck, like now, when he was the only one there. Why also did people live in these crowded financial centers like New York, Tokyo, or London, he wondered, when you could bloody well do the same bit of business in a city that was livable and liked to have fun?
He knew his team at the office thought he was going over to Manly Beach for a good time. He did not want to disabuse them of that idea, because it was actually to meet up with some people from his father’s organization who had showed up in town without notice and suggested a get-together where they might all look like old buddies doing the tourist thing. His dad’s old organization was now his, he supposed. The role was something that he inherited, something he had been trained to do because he had been designated as his father’s successor. There was always a designated successor. Even he had one now, a guy about his age in New Zealand, Paul Wyk.
Willy Merwe, however, planned to do the job for the next twenty years. He would manage the funds, hidden in various safe havens, grow the principal, pay the families on a regular basis, and make emergency disbursements when he thought that one of the families had a legitimate need for more. If any family did not like his decision, they could appeal to the four others, but no one ever did. He was fair and he was generous. He was also more successful with his Discretionary Investment Fund than any of the other four had been in the last two years. Now that they had made the Deacquisition Decision, as he and Karl Potgeiter had advocated, there was a real opportunity to put some big money to work. Willy Merwe never forgot what he had learned in his finance class at Wharton: there are opportunities only open to big money, opportunities to get IRRs in the forties. “It takes big money to make big money,” Professor Meitzinger had said. Now, Willy thought, I am going to do just that.
Instead, he felt a sharp, overwhelming pain in the back of his skull, so dominating his consciousness that he never felt the fall until he hit the water. His brain was so jarred by the impact of the strike to his head that it was unable to send messages to his arms and legs. His body was swept up in the spinning water of the ferry’s propeller wash. No one would be too surprised that another drunken passenger had fallen off a Sydney ferry and drowned. Unfortunately, it happened a lot.
2
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2
POLICY EVALUATION GROUP
NAVY HILL, FOGGY BOTTOM
WASHINGTON, DC
SCIFs, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, weren’t supposed to have windows, but his did. Dugout loved to stare out at the Potomac and the jumble of trees on Roosevelt Island. Usually there were rowers on the water on Sunday afternoons, but not today.
Sunday afternoons were a great time to work. No one else was in the building, except maybe the guys in the little room that passed as an operations center and they were probably watching football. It was even more pleasant for Dugout to work when Sunday was like today, rainy. It was not a cold or windy rain, just steady, and it darkened the sky. A good day to be inside, with hot Earl Grey tea in a mug, sweetened by honey he had bought at the farmers’ market.
Dugout blamed the dark sky for his sleeping in, but it may also have had something to do with the fact that he had played the last set before closing at Twins on U Street. Hadn’t gotten home until after three. The jazz kept him sane, he told himself, playing the tenor sax oiled his neural pathways. He wondered how Mrs. Wrenfrow’s neural pathways had been doing since he had left her yesterday.
Mrs. Wrenfrow was what Douglas Carter III, Dugout to his friends, called the kludged-together cluster of servers that ran his modified Minerva software. He had named it after the ever-helpful woman at the Belmont Public Library who had assisted him in finding Curious George books when he was in kindergarten and obscure volumes and articles on mathematics when he was in high school. Minerva, the software package that ran on the computer cluster, was a big data analytics package he had gotten his old boss to buy him from a Silicon Valley start-up. Dug had modified it
significantly, made it a kick-ass machine learning program, able to plow through the exabytes and zettabytes of data he could access, legally and otherwise.
Saturday afternoon he had set Minerva looking through the last two years of international interbank transfers for any unusual patterns involving noninstitutional players, individuals. NSA had gladly given him access to the data. His goal was to find pseudonyms of people who were actually Mexican government officials with overseas accounts, which had been the recipients of large deposits from suspect senders. Winston Burrell, the National Security Advisor, had in mind giving a list of miscreants to the new Mexican President who was going to visit the White House in two weeks.
Dugout, with his long hair, looked a little like the typical image of Jesus, but with glasses. He had been recruited to PEG from DARPA, the Pentagon’s creative, geek hive. Raymond Bowman, PEG’s first Director, had promised Dugout all the toys he wanted, the chance to work on “things that matter,” and most importantly, a work schedule of his own making. Dugout hated the nine-to-five mentality and seldom showed up before ten in the morning or left work prior to midnight.
For almost five years now, it had been a perfect home for Dugout, an eclectic band of geniuses with an all-access pass to the treasure trove of data gathered by U.S. intelligence and a sub-rosa virtual pathway for their analyses to get to the West Wing. Then, last year, Ray Bowman had left, gone on indefinite leave of absence. As PEG Director, Ray was supposed to be a desk jockey, but Winston Burrell had asked him to save the U.S. drone program from its critics, foreign and domestic. In the process, Bowman had been forced to go operational, become a field guy, and stop a major terrorist attack in the United States. In the end, he had stopped the attacks, but also had dealt up close with a lot of deaths, including some people very dear to him. After that, Bowman had checked out, disappeared, and left Dugout to catch some of the balls the National Security Advisor had sent bouncing off the left field wall.
Dugout tapped his keyboard to uncover the results of his search. He was surprised at how many people around the world had gotten several deposits into their personal accounts, each of ten million dollars or more. He then asked the program to list those who in one month got sums totaling one hundred million dollars, and then in one hundred million dollar increments up to one billion dollars. Then he asked the software to sort the people into groups with similarities of some sort. What popped up first was not what he was expecting, but with Minerva the unexpected was getting to be the norm.
What was at the top of the list was a group of five men who had each received deposits over a one-month period totaling five hundred million dollars each. What they had in common was that they were all South Africans living abroad. Dugout paused a moment to try to guess what else this group of men had in common that made them suddenly so rich. Nothing came to mind.
He entered their names into a master database of current intelligence and media reports. The current intelligence files had nothing, which meant that nobody in the seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies cared about them. The media files, however, had a few small stories about each of the men. The stories were about how they had died, mostly in bizarre accidents. They were all, now, dead men.
Well, that was something else they had in common, he thought. Then he saw the dates of the stories.
He tapped on the links and pulled up the media accounts of their deaths. All five men had died on the same day, August 15, indeed at almost the same time, in five different countries. When he taught intelligence analysis classes, he always pointed out that coincidences do actually happen. This, however, was more than a coincidence. He doubted very much these were accidental deaths, although the media stories indicated that, except in Singapore, the police thought they were.
“All right, Minerva, let’s see what you can do with this one,” he said aloud to the empty room. “Time to turn on the Way Back machine.” He began searching the intelligence archives. Some of the dead South African men had been in their seventies and eighties, so he tapped into files going back to the 1970s, files which had been digitized in recent years. While the search was underway, he made another mug of Earl Grey and tried to recall if South Africa had organized crime. It must, he thought. Everywhere does.
Crime, however, was not the correlation that Minerva made, not unless you think that making nuclear weapons is a crime. These men, or their parents, had all done just that in the 1980s and ’90s in South Africa. Their names showed up many times in reports on the Apartheid regime’s weapons activities.
It came as news to Dugout that South Africa had ever made nuclear weapons. He tapped into the databases for a quick tutorial, entering the terms “South Africa” and “nuclear weapon.”
Minerva answered that request with a long list of references, in chronological order. The most recent report was not, however, from the 1990s. It was from earlier this year. He pulled up that file. The highlighted sentence read: “Although it is unlikely, South Africa must be considered one suspect for the recent nuclear detonation in the Indian Ocean. South Africa is one of two nations suspected of a similar shipborne nuclear test in 1979.”
The recent nuclear detonation in the Indian Ocean? That, too, was news to Dugout. His next query hit a roadblock. In answer to his input “nuclear test, Indian Ocean, 2014,” he got the following: “An intelligence report matching your query parameters is restricted. Contact your supervisor to determine if you can be made eligible to access the file. Reference TS/Q/G/20160909/A751.” From the file designator, Dug realized that the report had been written in August. His five dead men had all expired in August.
With his clearances, it was not often that Dugout hit roadblocks in his data searches. As he stared out the window, wondering what to do next, he realized that one of the few cars in the parking lot below belonged to his nominal supervisor, Grace Scanlon, the new Director of the Policy Evaluation Group. Well, if she were in the office on a Sunday afternoon, at least he probably would not need an appointment. He printed a few files and wandered upstairs. So much for a relaxing, rainy Sunday afternoon alone with his computers, he thought, as he strode up the stairs two at a time.
Grace Scanlon had been the Vice President of a Pentagon-funded think tank in California. A year ago when the previous Director of the Policy Evaluation Group had placed himself on indefinite leave, National Security Advisor Winston Burrell had tapped her to take over what he thought of as his personal intelligence analysis unit. She had proved a good analyst and a natural manager, but she remained largely clueless about the ways of Washington. Dugout was not surprised to see her in on a Sunday afternoon. She had impressed everyone at PEG as being a hard worker and, the rumor was, she had left her boyfriend behind in Santa Monica.
“God, I thought I looked scruffy today,” Grace Scanlon said, looking up to see Dugout standing in her doorway. “What the hell happened to you? A gang of homeless men stole your clothes and left you theirs? And the hair. Have you been electrocuted?”
He was still getting to know the new Director. People had said she was blunt, had a “New York City street sensibility about her.” Now he knew what they meant. “Sorry to interrupt, but I just hit on something I think you should see.”
A few minutes of story telling later and Dr. Scanlon was pulling up the restricted report on her desktop monitor. She scanned it and summarized for Dugout. “Nuclear detection satellite saw the double-flash indicative of a nuclear explosion on nine August in the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean. No corroborating intelligence from SIGINT or HUMINT helps to explain who might have done the detonation. Analysts speculate about various countries, but they have no evidence to support their guesses. Case remains open.”
“So there was a detonation on nine August,” Dugout said scanning his notes, “and on twelve August each of five South Africans formerly associated with their nuclear bomb program gets a half billion dollars deposited into their accounts. Three days later they are all dead.”
Grace Scanlon stood up from
her desk. In her old gray tracksuit, Dug thought she was no one to criticize him for looking scruffy. “And you are the first one to make the connection?” she asked. “And you just made it a half hour ago?”
“As far as I know, yeah, I am the only one who has seen all three pieces. The bomb blast, the money, and the murders. From what I can tell the local authorities in four of these cases classified the deaths as accidents. Only the guy who got shot in Singapore was classified as a murder.”
“Hard to avoid the conclusion that the cause of death was the bullet between his eyes?” she asked. “You know, Douglas, for the first time since I began working here at PEG I actually think I know a secret that nobody outside of this little outfit knows. We have a little secret. Or should I say a big one?”
“So have you come to the same conclusion I have?” Dug asked.
“My conclusion is we don’t have all the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle, but the ones we do have could be arranged into a very scary picture.” She walked close to him and spoke softly. “We’re going to have to see Winston Burrell tomorrow on this. I’ll get the meeting. In the meantime, you tell no one, but do see if you can find a few more pieces to the puzzle. Hopefully, they won’t look like a mushroom cloud to Winston when you’re done putting them together.”
“I’m afraid they may look like a whole mushroom garden,” Dug said.
“He’s going to fucking love this,” Dug heard her say as he walked out the door. “Potential loose nukes in the middle of a presidential election campaign.”
3
MONDAY, OCTOBER 17
ST. JOHN, U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS
Pinnacle Event Page 2