by Jon McGoran
“Please,” gasped the man on the floor. “You said you’d help me.”
Red smiled and put a bullet in the man’s head. “There’s help and there’s help.”
Chapter 12
It was early the next morning when Navabi arrived in Turkey. She was used to travel. It was second nature to her. But a redeye to Istanbul followed by a two-hour drive combined with a seven-hour time difference left her feeling less than her best when she sat down for a meeting first thing in the morning with her contact at Turkish Police. She had splashed some water on her face at the airport, but you could only do so much. Now she was sitting in a slightly run-down office in the local police station, feeling pretty run down herself.
Sadek walked in with a nervous smile and closed the door to his office. “Good morning, Agent Navabi.”
“Good morning, Agent Sadek,” she said, even though it still felt very late at night.
His eyes moved up and down her, and he smiled again, differently. She was not unused to that, and she didn’t even hold it against him, if that was as far as it went. But she felt like she’d been run over by a truck, and she was pretty sure she looked that way as well. She wondered in the back of her mind if she could trust the man’s judgment.
She gave him a cold look that took the smile off his face.
“How was your trip?” he asked, avoiding her eyes.
“Long,” she said. “I am hoping it will be worth it.”
“As do I.” He cleared his throat and sat back in his chair. “Ahmet speaks highly of you.”
“He’s a good man.”
He lowered his voice. “He told me about Chechnya.”
She paused. That was a highly classified operation. She knew he was feeling her out, and at the same time demonstrating Ahmet’s trust in him. “We’ve worked together on a number of operations.”
“But on that one, you saved his life,” he said.
She exhaled slowly, determined not to speak about that operation. “Ahmet says I can trust you.”
“He says the same about you.” He pursed his lips for a moment, then opened a drawer and took out a small stack of file folders. “This is what we have on the warehouse fire at Tüzel Antrepo.” He slid them toward her. “It is not much.”
She felt a swell of anger that she knew was premature, but she’d come a long way. “You said you agreed that the fire had something to do with the Dead Ring.”
His eyes flicked to the door and back. “I said I agreed. The official report says nothing about it.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I should show you the warehouse. But you have come very far. Would you like to rest first?”
She closed her eyes for a moment and thought about it. “Maybe afterward,” she said with a sigh.
“As you wish.”
* * *
The day was heating up by the time they got outside, but once they left the station, Sadek seemed more relaxed. When they got in the car and turned on the air conditioning, he became more voluble, too.
“If you like, I can have translations made of the files I showed you.”
“Thank you.”
“I doubt you’ll discover anything of value in them. I didn’t. They find that the fire was caused by a hydraulic fluid leak, and quickly spread due to the plastic machine parts being molded there. A tragic accident that killed everyone inside. That is all.”
“You don’t agree?”
He looked at her. “I saw bullet holes, explosive residue. I know the machinery. In the right conditions some of the plastics can be explosively flammable. But that is not what I saw.”
They had zigzagged down the narrow streets of an industrial area, but the buildings had quickly thinned out and now they were leaving the town.
“So you think someone is hiding the true cause.”
He shook his head, sadly. “It would not be unusual for such things to be hidden, even if it was as they say: workers killed in a factory owned by a local big shot. But things I have seen with my own eyes, things I reported to my superiors, were left out of the report and never investigated. This is bigger than that.”
Chapter 13
They drove in silence for a moment. The landscape alternated between parched, dusty earth and dense but dry greenery. On a hill to the left, sheep grazed on brown grass.
“Do you know anything about a train crash several days before the fire?”
He looked at her sideways as he drove. “Why do you ask?”
“We suspect it may be related.”
“I suspect it as well. There were indications of sabotage, but nothing conclusive. There was another tragedy several days earlier, as well.”
“The sinkhole.”
“Yes! An entire mosque in Tokay Province swallowed up along with twenty-seven people.”
“You think they are all related?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. But I am suspicious. The mosque sat above a limestone deposit. A satellite scan had said it was vulnerable to a sinkhole, but someone in a nearby village said they heard a small explosion right before the sinkhole appeared. And there were markings on the edge of the sinkhole, as if people had climbed out of it using climbing gear.”
“You think someone caused the sinkhole intentionally?”
He looked away. “What do you know of this Dead Ring?”
“I know it’s supposed to be some sort of deadly game. It’s supposedly shown online, on the Dark Web, so rich psychopaths can bet on it. But I don’t even know if it’s real.”
He kept his eyes looking straight ahead. “I’m convinced it’s real. I’ve been digging. Researching. Looking into all this.”
“What have you learned?”
“The Dead Ring takes place once a year, a different place each year. There are several rounds within the space of a week or so. There seem to be one or two preliminary rounds. Like qualifying heats. The contestants must survive them in order to compete for the prize. The rounds themselves seem to be challenges set in real-life situations. Climbing out of the sinkhole, maybe, or escaping a flaming warehouse. The innocent lives—the collateral damage—that seems to be part of the entertainment factor. Part of the show.”
Halfway up a small hill, they came to a pile of bricks and rubble. Sadek coasted almost to a stop, but then he gave the car some gas and they crested the hill. Below them, a quarter mile away, was a building with blackened windows and walls breached with jagged holes. There had obviously been a terrible fire, but even from a distance, it looked like there had also been great violence.
They approached it in silence.
Sadek stopped the car directly across the dirt road from the gaping hole where the main entrance had been.
“It is supposed to be bulldozed,” he said softly as they got out. “Inefficiency is the only reason it hasn’t been. All evidence surrounding the mosque and the train crash has already been destroyed.”
Navabi looked through the entrance. The interior was filled with the rubble of the upper floors. Sadek leaned inside and shone his flashlight up on the walls.
“It is hard to see because of the soot, but there are bullet marks, do you see? From automatic weapons.” He shined the light along several rows of marks.
Navabi nodded. Even from some distance, she could identify them as such, lots of them. “What did forensics say?”
“Not much. The bullet holes were old, they said, from before the fire. That is why they are coated in soot. Even though the fire burned for a full day.”
They walked along the front of the building and Sadek pointed up at the holes in the wall. “These, they said, were caused by the equipment exploding.”
“Who owned the factory?” Navabi asked, as they walked around the building.
He shook his head. “A conglomerate. It was underinsured and they suffered a significant loss. I didn’t find anything suspicious there.”
When they came back to the car Sadek leaned against it. “Here’s the thing. The mo
sque in Tokay Province disappeared without a trace. Twenty-seven people went missing and never turned up. But we don’t know who went into that sinkhole. Fifteen bodies were taken out of the train crash, all badly burned. Six were never identified. And right here,” he hooked his thumb at the burned-out factory. “This warehouse had sixty workers and four managers, all killed in the blaze. Every one of them. But there were seventy bodies removed from the rubble. Four extra people.”
“You think they were part of the game? The players?”
“I do. We could only identify one of them. Oskar Bielski. A Pole. Served with distinction in the military until he got kicked out of GROM, the special forces unit, under a cloud for excessive violence against noncombatants. Became a private contractor with G78, but got kicked out of that, too.”
“Huh.”
“There is no reasonable explanation for why he would be in that warehouse.”
“Unless it was part of the Dead Ring.”
“Exactly.”
They were quiet for a moment. Navabi leaned against the car as well, letting the information sink in. With it came a wave of exhaustion like she’d never felt outside a combat situation.
“You look tired,” Sadek said softly.
“If it’s as you say, I don’t have time to be tired.”
He nodded, thinking. “I wanted to show you the factory first, but there was a second site.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not far from here. It is some type of control room, I believe. Unfortunately, it has already been bulldozed. We passed it on the way here. On the other side of that hill.”
“The pile of rubble back there?”
He nodded. “It was bulldozed immediately after forensics processed it. They said they didn’t find much. But even so, the files were ordered destroyed.”
She waited for him to continue. Even out there in the middle of nowhere with no one around, he looked over his shoulder to be sure they were alone.
“I kept the files,” he whispered. “I snuck them out of the office and hid them in my house.”
“Why didn’t you send them to me?”
He shook his head. “I can’t send them. It’s too risky. I will give them to you when you are leaving. But you must keep them secret.” He put his hands on her upper arms, as if holding her steady so he could stare intently into her eyes. “If it is discovered that I kept these files— that I gave them to you—they will kill me.”
Chapter 14
Red was standing next to his car sipping coffee when Keen emerged from her motel room for her morning run. She was ambivalent about seeing him: a little curious about what he was doing there but probably more interested by the second cup of coffee sitting on the roof of the car.
Near-identical wisps of steam rose from both cups in the morning chill. He took her cup off the roof and held it out.
“Welcome to Texas,” she said as she took it.
“Yee-haw,” he said dryly, sipping his own coffee. He looked tired and vaguely rumpled.
“Have you been up all night?”
“Something like that.” He held out a slightly grainy-looking photo, a candid shot of a strikingly attractive woman with long dark hair. “Marianne LeCroix, also known as Le Chat. She was one of those runners on the bridge. She is one of the players in the Dead Ring.”
“Who is she?”
“An old friend. An acquaintance, really. One of the best cat burglars in Europe. Apparently, she robbed the wrong people—dangerous and powerful people. A man named Claude Corbeaux. Now he and his men are after her. She told a mutual friend that she was doing one last, high-stakes, long-shot score before retiring and disappearing forever.”
“That doesn’t make sense. I thought the players were mostly mercenaries and other trained killers. And the odds of winning…”
He sipped his coffee. “I agree, it doesn’t quite make sense, but that was definitely her.” He shrugged. “LeCroix is desperate, and desperate people don’t always behave logically.”
Keen looked at the picture again. The woman had a wry half smile and a mischievous glint in her eye. She knew she’d never seen her before, but there was something familiar about her face.
She didn’t look like a desperate killer.
“Le Chat keeps her identity as LeCroix a secret. She keeps an extremely low profile, so that is likely the only picture you will ever see of her.” He stifled a yawn, something she couldn’t remember ever seeing him do before. “If you can find out where LeCroix is, maybe you can find the location of the next round of the Dead Ring. And if you can talk to her, maybe you can find out more than that.”
Keen nodded. “We can do a facial recognition scan, monitor global video and see if we come up with anything.”
“Just be careful not to tip your hand. If she finds out we’re onto her, or anyone else is, for that matter, she might just disappear. And if anyone else finds out we’re onto her, we could get her killed.”
Chapter 15
“Do you have a minute, sir?” Aram said, poking his head into Cooper’s office. He didn’t know what time Cooper had arrived, but he seemed like he was already settled in. Aram had never left the Post Office. He’d been up all night analyzing video code and the remains of the burned camera.
Cooper set aside the files he was reading and took off his reading glasses. “Of course. What have you got, Aram?”
“I’ve been analyzing that Turkish video file, and also the video from the bridge, studying compression and the codecs. The formatting. The Turkish video is definitely part of a multichannel video feed.”
“Meaning?”
“Well, whoever was downloading it would have several other channels that they could switch back and forth from in real time. Like changing channels on TV. In the bridge video, there appear to be multiple cameras, as well, suggesting multiple channels.”
“So you think they are related?”
“I believe that was part of the Dead Ring, yes. And whoever set it up put those cameras there, so viewers could watch the action from multiple angles.”
Cooper picked up his glasses again and glanced at his paperwork.
Aram hurried on before Cooper could tell him to. “But here’s the thing: the cameras shown on the video appear to be wireless, and the one Agent Keen sent almost certainly was. I’m sure the multichannel signal is encrypted, once it is uplinked to the satellite or the network or whatever, but it looks like the individual camera feeds, before they are combined, are not.”
Cooper remained quiet but his expression plainly asked Aram what he was getting at.
Aram continued. “If we can get someone close to one of those cameras and activate a very small transmitter while the video feed is active, we could slip our own program, like a Trojan horse, into the video feed before it’s encoded. So when it’s decoded by the computers on the other end, and the video file is opened, our program will be installed on their computers.”
Cooper put his glasses down again. A minor victory. “What would the Trojan horse do?”
“That depends on what we want it to do. The less we ask of it, the higher the certainty that it would work and escape detection, but at the very least we could infect every computer that’s connected to the Dead Ring, around the world, and reveal its IP address and maybe its physical location. We could possibly gain access to their other files on that computer, or even on their network.”
Cooper nodded. “Excellent. Good work, Aram. I’ve already been speaking with Interpol about coordinating arrests internationally, if it comes to that. I just spoke to Agent Navabi. Her contact in Turkey, Sadek, is convinced the events there were part of the Dead Ring. Sadek says that there are usually one or two preliminary rounds or qualifying heats that prospective contestants must get through in order to actually compete in the Dead Ring. The bridge was presumably the first. If there is a second, perhaps we could get an agent inside, undercover.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know if I can sign off on an
agent participating in something like this, even to stop it. I can’t put someone’s life at such risk. On the other hand, jeopardizing innocent lives seems to be a hallmark of these ‘games.’ I can’t knowingly stand by and let that happen, either.”
“I understand, sir, of course. But we would only need maybe five minutes of transmission to infect all those computers. After that, you could shut it down.”
Cooper stared at him for a moment, thinking.
“Okay.” He picked up the phone on his desk. “I guess it’s time to move operations to Texas.”
Chapter 16
Ressler came out of his motel room, talking into his phone.
“Yes, sir, I’ll tell Agent Keen about the plan.” As he lowered the phone he looked back and forth between Keen and Red’s car as it drove away. Walking up behind her, he asked, “What’s going on?”
“We might have a picture of one of the players.” She handed him the photo after taking a picture of it with her phone, then called Aram.
“She looks kind of like you,” he said, following her as she turned to go back into her motel room.
“What?”
He shrugged and held up the photo. “She looks a bit like you.”
She started to protest that no she didn’t, but then Aram answered.
“Aram,” she said. “It’s Keen. We might have IDed one of the players. I just sent you a picture. Can you search the database and monitor any closed-circuit video in the area of that bridge fire?”
“Absolutely. I don’t know what the density of coverage is in that area. I’ll start with a twenty-five mile radius and increase it from there if we don’t get any hits.”
“Okay. Let me know what you turn up.”
When she got off the phone with Aram, she briefed Ressler and opened her computer. “I’m going to see what we can find on this Marianne LeCroix. You spoke to Cooper?”