by Jon McGoran
Chapter 23
Red hadn’t meant for Keen to end up as a contestant inside the Dead Ring, and he was incensed that the decision had been made without consulting him.
Sometimes she seemed determined to aggravate him, to put herself in danger for the sole purpose of defying him, and ignoring his wisdom.
The task force was going ahead with this plan despite his strong objections, but Red had ways of influencing things less directly.
That’s why he was calling Dominic Corrello.
“I guess you liked what I got you,” Corrello said.
Red could practically hear the smirk over the phone. He wondered if Corrello could hear him rolling his eyes. The man was useful, but he had a ridiculously inflated sense of his own value.
“With the kind of work you do, Mr. Corrello, I imagine your discretion is almost as important as the information you provide.”
“If you’re asking can I keep my mouth shut, the answer is yes.”
Red grimaced at the choice of words. Corrello may well have been able to maintain confidence, but keeping his mouth shut seemed beyond him. He almost ended the call right then, but instead he said, “Otherwise, I guess, your clients would come back and kill you, right?”
Corrello paused. “My clients got nothing to worry about.”
“Good. Then I guess we can continue to do business and I will never have to worry about tracking you down and killing you.”
“I guess so.”
“The Dead Ring is real. And it is taking place as we speak, in west Texas. I need to know who is hosting it. If you can find that out for me, I will compensate you generously.”
“Who am I looking for? What kind of guy?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Corrello, that would be what I’m paying you for. Among its enthusiasts, I would imagine hosting the Dead Ring is somewhat prestigious. Proving you have the resources and the connections to pull something like this off, especially in the United States, would be quite a feather in some people’s caps. I’m fairly confident the person I am looking for is not deeply involved in local organized crime, but perhaps might be looking to become involved in international crime.”
Corrello grunted, like maybe this was a bigger fish than he wanted to go after.
“Second thoughts, Mr. Corrello?”
They both knew that it was too late for that.
Corrello had encouraged Red to share sensitive information with him. If he backed out now, they both knew the fact that Red was looking for this person could become the sensitive information someone else was looking for.
So Red would have to kill him.
Like it or not, Corrello had just advanced to the big leagues. Like it or not, he would have to produce for Red or else find himself out of the game completely, or even retired in a more elemental way.
Both men remained quiet. Red was letting the man acclimate to his new reality, and the risks and rewards that went with it.
“Right,” Corrello eventually said, his voice laden with new gravity. “I’ll see what I can turn up.” He sounded like a new man, and that was as it should be, thought Red. He was either a new man, or a dead man. “I’ll get back to you in the next day or two.”
“Excellent,” said Red. “I knew I could count on you.”
Chapter 24
Navabi woke to a soft tapping at her door. She was disoriented for a brief moment. It should have been night time, yet golden light was streaming through her curtains across simple and utterly unfamiliar furniture. In an instant, though, she had regained her bearings and was standing next to the hotel room door, one hand on the doorknob, the other hand holding her gun.
“Who is it?” she asked, her voice quiet and terse.
“Sadek,” came the reply, equally hushed.
Recognizing his voice, she opened the door.
Sadek slipped inside and closed the door behind him. He seemed both worried and excited. Under his arm he had two thick manila envelopes. He dropped them onto the coffee table and sat in the chair facing it, then opened one of the envelopes and slid its contents out onto the table.
“This is the control room,” he said. “There’s a full forensics report, although nothing that turned up any leads before the investigation was shut down. There were several sets of fingerprints, but none of them matched anything on our database. Nothing.”
He picked up a thin sheaf of photos and laid them down one-by-one on the table. They showed a simple room with roughly cut holes in the wall, and bundles of cable protruding from them. The room looked like it had been stripped, but that it had once contained lots of high-tech electronics.
Sadek pointed to the cabling. “You see why I say it looks like a control room, eh?”
She nodded. “That’s a lot of bandwidth.”
“Exactly. Multichannel video perhaps, or something similar.”
Navabi studied the photos for another moment, then leafed through the forensics reports. She held up the sheets of fingerprints. “You said you ran these but didn’t come up with anything?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you mind if we run them on our end?”
“I hope you do, and that you have better luck. Just make sure it doesn’t come back on me. That means you don’t fax it or email it, anything like that. Not from here. You take it and you go.”
Navabi picked up the case summary, her eyes traveling down the page, looking for information Sadek hadn’t previously told her about. When she got to the bottom, she looked up at him. “There is another case referenced here. Another case with some of the same fingerprints.”
He smiled, his eyes gleaming, as he held up the other envelope.
“I was ordered to destroy this last year as well. When I went to do so, it was not in the file. I assumed someone else had already destroyed it. Just to be sure, I checked again before I came over here, and there it was.”
“What is it?”
“When we ran the fingerprints from the control room, we didn’t come up with any hits. Shortly after the warehouse fire, police responded to reports of a disturbance, and found four men in a room, unconscious. The room had been heavily secured, but it had been broken into and left open. It also showed the same type of high capacity computer infrastructure as the control room.”
He slid out more photos that looked like they could have been from the same room as the previous case. “The four men were taken to the hospital with signs of opioid overdose. They were found to have high levels in their blood of a chemical called remifentanil, an opioid gas that is known to have been used as an incapacitating agent. The Russians used it on Chechen militants when they took over that theater a few years back. Also found at the scene was a syringe with traces of naloxone, which counters the effects of opioids, including remifentanil.”
Navabi let out a soft grunt as she considered that.
“Security footage from a nearby bank showed a man being bundled into a van by two other men. Police had assumed it was an abduction, but the four men brought to the hospital said no one was missing. They said it was a robbery.”
“And what was taken?”
“They were hazy about it. They said nothing.”
“So what is the connection?”
“Police took their information, then they were treated and released. When police had follow-up questions, the men had vanished. Someone ran their fingerprints and they matched some of the unidentified prints at the control room.”
“So what is the connection?” she said again.
He shook his head. “The fingerprints match. Both files were ordered destroyed. What is the connection? I don’t know. But I know that there is one.”
Chapter 25
For the first twenty miles or so, Keen was shocked every time she looked into the rearview mirror. Her hair was darker and her eye make-up totally different. Each time she got over the shock of it, she was pleased to observe that her expression was different, too. Her whole demeanor had changed.
She was weari
ng five hundred dollar Dolce and Gabbana Chelsea boots, three hundred dollar black jeans, a black sweater identical to LeCroix’s, and the garnet pendant and bracelet she’d been wearing when they brought her into the hospital. At the small of her back was a flat knife in a soft leather sheath they had also taken from LeCroix. She was also wearing what she hoped was a pretty close imitation of the cat burglar’s knowing smile.
All of it helped her get into character enough that by the time she’d been on the road for fifteen minutes, it was like someone else was looking back at her in the mirror.
The GPS coordinates from the invitation led to an old abandoned tourist camp. A subsequent satellite sweep showed the place had been recently updated, with a brand new fence. A handful of pickups and SUVs were parked outside it.
As she drew nearer Keen saw a massive black and gray RV with some sort of apparatus on top, a couple of Humvees—one matte black and covered in dust, one bright red and shiny with chrome—along with a handful of jacked-up pickup trucks with monster truck suspensions, several motorcycles, and a smattering of plain old cars.
Cooper had suggested she wear an earpiece or at least have a cell phone, so she could be in touch until the very last moment. Keen had declined. She didn’t want to risk tipping her hand, in case they were monitoring signals or had hacked into the local cell towers. Plus, she wanted to use the drive to get into character, to let herself become LeCroix. She had studied what little there was in the way of a file, and done her best as a profiler to get to the heart of the woman, to understand her background, her motivation, as well as her affectations and speech patterns.
Keen was glad she had met LeCroix, however briefly. She felt much more prepared than she would have otherwise.
As she approached the camp site, she felt a physical wave of pure fear wash over her. She had no idea what she was getting herself into, other than that many people would consider it a suicide mission. Her foot eased off the accelerator and the car slowed as she fought the intense urge to turn around and go back the other way.
But the feeling slowly subsided. She gritted her teeth and pushed down her foot.
Three minutes later she pulled up between one of the Humvees and a trio of Harley Davidsons and parked with the front of her car a foot from the brand new cyclone fence that surrounded the place.
She got out carrying nothing but the invitation LeCroix herself had retrieved from the hotel room and resisted the urge to look skyward at the CIRRUS high-altitude surveillance drone she knew was up there silently watching her.
As she approached the gate, it slid open on metal rollers.
With a tremendous force of will, she walked through without hesitation. Directly in front of her was a boxy, cement stucco building, with a sign over the door that said PINELLA HUNTING CAMP—CHECK-IN.
She walked straight up to it and entered.
The inside was like the lobby of a crappy motel. A small sitting area with saggy armchairs surrounded a worn bentwood and wicker coffee table. There was a registration desk, and the guy sitting behind it looked even worse than the rest of the place—his hair greasy and his clothes grimy. He smiled as she walked in, what would have been a toothy grin if he’d had more teeth. Standing behind him were a pair of almost identical-looking guards carrying assault rifles. They had the unmistakable appearance of PMCs—Private Military Contractors—and they looked crisp and clean compared to the man sitting in front of them.
The guy at the desk made it clear that his smile was about him enjoying the view and not being friendly. When he was done looking her up and down, he said, “Who the hell are you?”
Keen slapped the invitation onto the counter. “You can call me Le Chat.”
He inspected her invitation then shrugged and made a note in the log book in front of him.
“I’m Yancy.” He opened a metal strong box and put it on the counter. “Car keys.”
She took them out of her pocket and tossed them in with the other sets of keys, which nearly filled the box.
“You got any weapons?”
She pulled out the knife from the sheath at the small of her back.
He nodded toward a large plastic bin on the floor to the side. It was already half full with firearms, switchblades, blackjacks, and trench knives.
He laughed. “Don’t worry, you’ll get it back if you win.” Then he laughed harder. “Hell, you can have all of ’em if you win. Everyone else will be dead.”
He thought that was hilarious. When he was done laughing, and tainting the air with the sour milk smell of his breath, he put an old-fashioned room key on the counter. “You’re in cabin number twelve. Game starts at sunrise. When you hear reveille over the loudspeaker, report to the flagpole in the main square.”
Keen swiped the key off of the desk, gave him a dead-eyed stare, then turned and left. She was relieved to see the cabins were prominently numbered. The last thing she wanted right then was to go back in and ask for directions. Number twelve was on the right, toward the end of the row.
As she walked down the thoroughfare, the door to number seven opened and a massive pillar of muscle and menace emerged onto the small stoop. He picked at his teeth with the corner of a matchbook and stared at her. She glanced at him with the same dead eyes she’d given the guy at the desk, then looked away and kept walking.
She slipped her key into the knob and the door easily opened. The rest of the place might be run down, but the locks were brand new. As soon as she closed the door, Keen wanted to curl into a ball in the corner and give herself over to the shakes that had been trying to set in since she got out of the car. But she didn’t trust the place wasn’t wired for video.
The interior was rustic but clean and in decent shape.
There was a small table with a single-cup coffee maker, a case of bottled water, a box of protein bars, and a dozen MREs, military field rations. In the bathroom, she found an admirably complete toiletries kit.
After she had inspected the room, she slid off her boots and lay down on the bed, closed her eyes and practiced her breathing. Lying there in the dark, she went over the plan and her profile of LeCroix in her head, again and again, and waited for sleep, and for sunrise.
Chapter 26
“She’s in,” Aram said, looking up from the dot on the screen that represented Keen’s line-of-sight tracking device. “Looks like she’s in cabin twelve.”
Cooper nodded, but didn’t say anything. Neither did Ressler.
As much as it made sense on paper, no one was crazy about the plan. No one liked the idea of Keen being in there on her own with a bunch of lunatic killers, much less entering into a deadly game that could only have one survivor.
Aram knew that just like him, they were telling themselves she’d only have to survive five minutes of actual game time before the tactical team shut things down and got her out safely. But the fact remained, Agent Keen was inside the Dead Ring.
He knew that’s what they were all thinking about. As they were about to go back to their work, the heavy exterior door opened, and Agent Navabi walked in.
Aram shot to his feet. “You’re back.”
Ressler looked at his watch, a confused expression on his face. “You must have only been there a few hours.”
Cooper walked in and said, “You look tired, Agent Navabi.”
“You might say that, yes,” she said, briefly looking around the place, then leaning against the wall. She handed him the two envelopes Sadek had given her. “These are the files Sadek’s superiors wanted destroyed. He insisted I keep them on me, to make sure they couldn’t be traced back to him.”
Navabi told them what Sadek had told her, and they told her about LeCroix, and about Keen going into the Dead Ring undercover. She was worried like everyone else, but conceded right away that the logic behind the plan was sound.
“I need a shower and a bed,” she said, yawning. “Where are we staying?”
Aram told her about the cots in the upper school wing, but gave her a slip of
paper with the name and address of a nearby motel on it. She looked like she needed a real bed. “It’s good to have you back, Agent Navabi,” he said, smiling.
She took the piece of paper and smiled back. “Thanks.”
As she turned and left, Aram watched her and considered that smile.
Director Cooper came up behind him and cleared his throat. “Aram, perhaps you could get started running those fingerprints while we’re waiting for the signal from Agent Keen.”
“Of course, sir,” he replied, momentarily flustered.
Once he opened the file, and immersed himself in the tasks at hand, he was grateful for the distraction. It would stop him from worrying about Agent Keen, or thinking of Agent Navabi, for that matter.
Much of what Navabi had brought back consisted of reports from the Turkish forensics lab, in Turkish. Much of that he simply forwarded to Interpol for translation. But there were some fingerprints, as well, and he got to work scanning them and entering them into the system.
One set of prints seemed like it was physically encrypted, jumbled like a jigsaw puzzle. Aram spent some time trying to make sense of it, then gave up and put it aside as he finished processing the rest of them.
When they were done, he sat back and waited for the algorithm to run them through the various databases. With an idle moment, his mind quickly turned to worrying about Agent Keen.
Twenty minutes later, he was surprised to see he’d gotten a match on one set of prints. A small wave of trepidation passed through him when he saw that he was blocked from the result. It was from the US Department of Defense database.
“Sir?” Aram called out. Cooper reappeared in an instant, Ressler following behind, in case it involved Keen. “I got a hit on one set of prints on the DOD database, but I don’t have clearance to access it.”
Cooper scanned the screen, then leaned forward and started typing. A moment later, the screen showed a picture and biography of a man named Simon Wall.
He had a round, open face and intelligent eyes. Aram scanned the text and summarized it. “Former cryptographer for US Army Intelligence, a handful of awards, recruited several years ago by Hoagland Services the military contractor. Stayed with them when they were bought out by another military contractor, G78. Pretty straightforward stuff—oh wow.”