The Operative

by Falconer, Duncan

  17

  Hobart sat in his office on the eleventh floor of the big grey Federal building on Wilshire Boulevard. The road ran east from Santa Monica’s cliffs three miles away and across the entire city. The FBI’s California headquarters was situated in Westwood, LA’s secondary business centre that was crammed with towering glass office blocks overlooking a vast university campus.

  It was mid-morning and Hobart was coming to the end of a pile of e-mails, a hundred and fifty-three in total, which was not an unusual number on most days of the week. He made a point of reading them every morning even on his days off and on holi -day simply because they would pile up relentlessly if he didn’t. About half of them were intelligence reports and minutes of meetings from all over the world that his rank gave him access to, the rest concerned FBI matters in California.

  The fifth e-mail on that morning’s list was from the forensics department two floors down and had been sent to Hobart late the night before. The subject heading referred to the case of Leka Bufi who had been killed in the Santa Monica courthouse and there was a sub-reference to Ardian Cano’s explosive demise in the Italian restaurant several days later. But instead of attaching the laboratory report as usual the e-mail was empty apart from a line requesting Hobart to make a personal visit to the lab at his earliest convenience.

  Like everyone else in his team, as soon as Hobart had heard that Ardian had been killed with an explosive charge he had assumed that the two murders were syndicate-related. Both men were lowlife runners for Skender but had also been involved in extracurricular criminal activity that included drug traffick ing and prostitution. There was, of course, one other connect ion between the two men that was known only by Hobart, his assistants and a handful of senior Bureau persons and that was their role in the murder of an Englishwoman in Venice. But that only served to confuse any theories Hobart had about the double assassination and he dismissed it as a coincidence.

  Hobart had considered the possibility that Skender was behind the executions since his employees’ link to the death of the Englishwoman as well as their private business were serious disciplinary matters that the Albanian gang-lord would have a serious sort of punishment for. However, the glaringly obvious reasons against Skender being involved in the deaths were that he did not need to go to such sophisticated lengths to get rid of two of his own men – they would simply have disappeared – and such an overt action would only complicate further the special relationship he enjoyed with the FBI. Hobart’s thoughts went to his filing cabinet that contained several highly confidential files, one of them concerning the murder of Sally Penton and containing practically conclusive evidence of Ardian and Leka’s involvement in it. The file could now be declassified since the perpetrators were deceased but Hobart decided that he would leave it where it was for the time being, along with several others that recorded a variety of crimes connected with the Albanians. One day Hobart hoped to connect Skender with them, a day he looked forward to with great enthusiasm.

  It seemed that never a week went by without something happening to stir up the greatest problem of Hobart’s career to date: the views he held regarding Skender’s special deal with the United States Government, views that were distinctly contrary to those of the most senior people in the Bureau. Due to the seriousness of the issue Hobart had not mentioned to anyone except his wife that he was livid with the deal that the Bureau had made with Skender. It was a complicated arrangement but in essence Skender was providing the Bureau with high-grade evidence that would put away some of the biggest brokers of organised crime worldwide. But more importantly he had made a promise to point the finger at some of the top members of al-Qaeda, something he had not yet delivered on. All this was in exchange for some very generous concessions on his past crimes.

  Only a few years ago, prior to 9/11, the best deal that Skender could have hoped for would have been some degree of immunity from prosecution but most likely he would just have got a reduced jail sentence and been put out of business. But 9/11 had changed everything and whoever helped to bring in big-name terrorists was now in a very strong position no matter who they were. Hobart did not agree that a criminal should enjoy such a high degree of immunity, regardless of what they provided in return, and certainly not Skender whom he did not trust and knew better than anyone else in the Bureau did. But the FBI mandarins thought differently.

  Hobart was left with little enthusiasm for finding whoever was behind the killings of the two Albanians since Skender was not a suspect. Add to the mix the fact that Ardian and Leka had both been members of the KLA whose atrocious activities Hobart was only too familiar with and he frankly found it very hard to assign precious agent time and taxpayers’ money to investigate it further. The fact was that the world was better off without the pair and although as a professional he could never condone the murders and was supposed to make all attempts to bring the killers to justice, his conscience was not pressing him very hard.

  All that aside, Hobart did have an urge to head downstairs right away and find out what the mystery e-mail was about. Its author, the forensics officer investigating the case, was an old friend who obviously had something interesting as well as secretive to say since he chose not to write it. However, Hobart had a few more e-mails to take care of, experience having taught him that since there would no doubt be another fifty or so by late afternoon he should clear them when he had the chance or end the day at his computer, which was something he loathed.

  An hour later, as Hobart finished reading the last e-mail and pushed his chair back on its wheels another two popped up onto the screen. He ignored them. They were daily situation reports from one of the Asian Pacific offices whose staff were just arriving at work and they could wait. He fastened the top button of his heavily starched white shirt as he stood up and drew his tie neatly to his throat as he headed for the door. A minute later he was jogging down the emergency stairs, avoiding the lifts as he usually did in a vain attempt to get some exercise. He opened the door onto the ninth floor and headed along the corridor to Forensic Department C, the smallest of the building’s forensic cells but the most specialised.

  Hobart pushed through the door into the laboratory that was the size of a volleyball court. Half of it was divided into small cubicles, each with its own special piece of electronic equipment. He paused to look around. There were four technicians busy at work in various parts of the lab and he spotted the one he had come to see in a cubicle on the other side of the room.

  Hobart walked over and knocked on the glass door where a rotund balding man in his fifties was busy examining something through an electronic microscope. ‘Phil?’ Hobart said just softly enough for him to hear.

  Phil turned to see who it was, immediately stopped what he was doing, put on a pair of spectacles, got up from his stool and opened the door.

  ‘Hi, Nate,’ Phil said as he stepped out of the cubicle. Hobart’s Christian name was Nathan, though few people below his rank even knew he had a first name. Phil checked his watch. ‘I was expecting to see you earlier.’

  ‘You know how it is. So how’s your day going?’ Hobart asked with an uncommon degree of warmth that he reserved for his handful of friends. He had known Phil for over fifteen years, having worked with him in New York and then in Kosovo. There were few in the Bureau with whom Hobart mixed socially and even fewer he would describe as close but Phil was one of them. Having been in the job about the same length of time and having worked in many of the same theatres of operation they shared a similar cynicism and political leaning. Like Hobart, there were few people Phil would share his personal views with.

  The big difference between them was that, unlike Hobart, Phil had lost all optimism for the future, believed the world was going downhill fast and had long since ceased to expect any positive change, believing that he could not make an iota of difference no matter how hard he tried. His one saving grace was his genius for forensics. Phil was one of the best if not the best in the FBI and over the years h
e had provided crucial evidence in many a challenging case. As Phil often said, if the job hadn’t also been a damned good hobby he would have quit it years ago. Hobart, among others, was happy to see him stick around.

  ‘It’s been worth coming into work the past few days,’ Phil said in a low voice that he always reserved for negative comments about the job, even when they were alone. Being old school he was permanently afflicted with the paranoid belief that the walls literally had ears. Add to that his long-standing hatred of the CIA for personal reasons and the inference took on a more sinister meaning – he believed that the CIA spied on everyone including the FBI. Hobart himself wasn’t infected with that level of paranoia – although he too had little time for the CIA – and dismissed it as part of Phil’s particular brand of eccentricity.

  ‘The Bufi-Cano hit?’ Hobart asked. ‘Your report was interesting mainly because of its economy of detail, namely you said nothing.’

  ‘I didn’t e-mail the report because I wanted to talk to you about it first,’ Phil said, his voice remaining low. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  Hobart shrugged his okay. He had nothing too pressing at that moment and, even though Phil was eccentric, he wasn’t known for being melodramatic.

  Hobart walked to the door and went outside into the empty corridor. Phil followed and Hobart turned to face him, folding his arms across his chest, ready to hear what his friend had to say. An agent left an office down the corridor and walked towards them.

  ‘Let’s go outside,’ Phil said as the agent passed them to enter another office.

  Whatever Phil had to say was obviously too sensitive to reveal in the hallway and although this was turning into more of a chore than Hobart had anticipated he knew better than to argue with Phil’s paranoia. If he wanted to hear what Phil had to say he was going to have to go through the pantomime. Hobart sighed inwardly and headed for the emergency exit.

  ‘I’ll meet you down in the lobby if you’re going to take the stairs. I don’t do exercise.’

  Hobart stopped before opening the door to the emergency stairs, turned on his heel and headed down the corridor alongside Phil to the elevators.

  A couple of minutes later they were walking out of the front of the building, past the complex array of security sensors and the armed guards checking all who entered. They stepped through the glass doors into the bright warm sunlight, the air filled with the noise and fumes from the crowded six-lane boulevard a stone’s throw away.

  Phil did not say a word as he led Hobart around the side of the building, into the vast parking lot and across to an area that had few cars and was empty of people. He stopped at a location that he deemed suitable for his revelation, looked all around to check that no one was paying any special attention to them, and faced Hobart.

  ‘We’ve got something pretty interesting here, Nate,’ Phil said calmly.

  ‘I guess,’ Hobart replied, glancing around the parking lot.

  ‘ Dark interesting,’ Phil emphasised.

  ‘Dark?’ Hobart asked.

  ‘Can you level with me? I’m talking about Bufi and Cano.’

  ‘Level with you?’

  ‘Will you stop repeating everything I say? I’m being deadly serious here.’

  ‘Phil, I’m always serious and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Level with you about what?’

  ‘Okay. I’ll get to the point,’ Phil said, then paused to stare into Hobart’s eyes and double-check something. ‘You sure there’s nothing you can’t tell me about those guys and why they were hit?’

  ‘Nothing I can’t tell you?’

  ‘Yeah. Can’t. I ain’t asking you what it is. I’m just asking you if there is something. If you can’t tell me just say so.’

  ‘Come on, Phil. If there’s ever anything I can’t tell you about anything then I can’t say if I can or I can’t, can I?’

  Phil studied his old friend for a moment. ‘They were both former KLA, am I right?’

  ‘Yeah. They were ex-KLA. So what?’

  ‘And there’s nothing about them that’s special, no red flags, no involvement in anything against the government, our government – just tell me that much.’ Phil jumped in as Hobart was about to answer. ‘I wanna know if they were involved in anything against our government. It’s an important question.’

  ‘As far as I know they had nothing to do with anything against our government,’ Hobart said with an audible sigh. Phil was not privy to the connection between the two Albanians and the killing of the Englishwoman since it was highly confidential and Hobart would not tell him. But otherwise he could see no reason for Phil’s heightened concern.

  ‘Okay,’ Phil said, lowering his shoulders in a vain effort to relax his neck while taking another quick look around. ‘There’s no doubt that Bufi and Cano were killed by the same people or the same organisation,’ Phil stated.

  Hobart nodded. That seemed obvious enough.

  ‘Question is who, right?’

  Hobart nodded again. Phil was dragging this out like some kind of soap-opera sleuth but Hobart remained outwardly patient. He knew that Phil would eventually get to his point and the quickest way was to let him do it in his own time.

  ‘Nate. Those guys weren’t taken out by any ordinary hitter. In both cases the method was ingenious but there’s a lot more to it than that. I’m talking about the explosive material used. It was identical in each case. It was an RDX-governed compound with a tetryl booster and some of the most purified nitrates I’ve come across. It was plastic explosive, like C4, but twice as concentrated. The closest match I found on file was super-cyclo-tetryl -trimethylene-trinitramine 7, an experimental military compound that NASA refined for their ejection-escape capsules, but this stuff is a grade higher than that. My point is, you can’t get this stuff on the street. There are probably only a handful of countries sophisticated enough to manufacture such a compound. It’s highly specialised. And something else. Explosives are measured by the speed at which they burn. Basic C4 is around 24,000 feet per second, for instance. You need a detonator of similar power to ignite it, or if not, you need a primer to cover the middle ground between the explosive speed of the det and that of the actual explosive material. An ordinary C4 detonator would not have been powerful enough to initiate that type of SX. It would have just blown it away like it was cake. The detonator used to initiate those hits was of the same high-grade material but not only that, they were micro dets. Micro-super-X dets. You hear what I’m saying, Nate?’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Hobart said.

  ‘A micro-SX det is Star Wars, Nate. The people who use that kind of explosive get a government pay cheque and work out of an office that’s a long elevator ride underground.’

  Hobart did not outwardly respond but Phil had his full attention. The revelation was more than just fascinating. Hobart did not for a second doubt Phil’s evaluation of the specialised explosive and its non-availability on the street. The inference was the explosive was either given by a person in government to someone to use or was used by a person who themself had direct access to it – and that, as Phil was saying, implied that the hit was carried out by a government organisation. But then, when the quality of the targets was considered there was an instant erosion of that notion’s credibility since Ardian and Leka were essentially nobodies.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ Hobart asked. ‘I mean, I’m not questioning your analysis of the explosive, but what about its availability? What about the Chinese, or the Russians? If they have this stuff then it’s possible it could have found its way into the marketplace.’

  Phil was shaking his head in frustration well before Hobart had finished his sentence. ‘That would be like Microsoft’s latest software leaking onto the street. Yeah, there’s a million-to-one chance that it’s possible, but there’s something else that throws up a red flag here. The technique. The hitter used it to perfection, like he had training. It was surgery, Nate. That coin through the back of Bufi’s head was genius.
Ask yourself this. In all your years in the business, how many IED hits worldwide have you even heard of anywhere near as sophisticated as this? I haven’t, and I’m in the goddamned business.’

  Hobart was slowly becoming convinced and with that came a growing anger. The question, then, was not if Leka and Ardian could be a target of a government agency but why? And if it was true, someone from government, his own or someone else’s, had made a hit on his turf. Skender and his organisation were exclusively Hobart’s to control and monitor and anyone, no matter who they were, from the President down, had to go through him about anything to do with the Albanian syndicate in Los Angeles.

  If there was one thing that really pissed Hobart off it was the blatant flouting of protocol and the circumvention of government-ordained authority. It was a primary corruption of the system that was unprecedented in the US. If he could do anything to prevent it happening he would do so in a heartbeat, even if it meant taking those responsible to the Senate and exposing them publicly, no matter who they were. This sort of subversion tore into the very principles of governing authority that the country was built on. If Phil was right, and Hobart found him all too convincing, Hobart would get to the bottom of this if it took all the resources he had at his disposal. This was not just a double homicide: it was an invasion of his case and therefore personal. The Bufi-Cano file had just found itself reclassified and at the very top of his list.