'A' for Argonaut

by Michael J. Stedman

  “I’m talking world-class style, Amber.”

  “You look like you know something about that.”

  She ordered her usual Absolut vodka, neat. Her wavy hair was swept into a French roll clamped tight by an ebony comb ringed with small diamonds. She wore a short, black leather skirt slit up the side. His gaze dropped to her legs. Sitting sideways in her chair, she crossed them; it made their vitality hard to ignore. Tough as she was, his leer set off a parade of goose bumps that crept up her back, turned her stomach.

  “What do you know about the Russian presence here?” he asked.

  “KGB, GRU‌—‌SVR. The regime changed, but the game is still the same, corrupt. They’ve been here forever. My father knew them. I never paid attention.” The lie amused her.

  “Your father would have been tasked by Guoanbu, China’s secret foreign spy agency, to track the diplomatic corps, the commercial attaché’s, no?”

  She shrugged, jiggling her white silk blouse. He noticed. The top buttons were opened.

  “He never mentioned you,” she said.

  “They say he was plugged in to the diamond cutters in Antwerp. Big diamond smuggler.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she added. “He never talked about it.”

  Thoughts of her father, a Chinese intel officer who worked undercover as a trade attaché in China’s Angola embassy, brought up old history. It opened a wound she thought had healed. Amber had been raised in the Angolan capital. Her mother, a product of Portugal’s 1956 colonization of the province, was half-Portuguese, half-Bakongo; her grandfather was a tribal witch doctor who had infibulated her mother as a teen. Her father’s intervention saved Amber from the ritual practice of female genital mutilation that included the removal of the nerve-filled center of female sexual arousal, the clitoris; nevertheless, the specter haunted her like an obsession-crazed stalker. She never forgot that it was her father who saved her from such pain and humiliation. It was also he who had trained her, not just as a smuggler but as a combatant, and a survivor. He had taken her with him to Kinshasa and to Antwerp to moonlight. It was strictly prohibited by their intelligence authorities, but it wasn’t unusual for Chinese Communist agents in Africa to deal diamonds on the side. Before long, Amber was tight with her father’s most important contact, a major cutter in Antwerp’s Jewish Orthodox gemstone community, Chaim Tolkachevsky.

  Boyko’s talk of her father stoked her hatred. Her anger hardened like a tempered steel blade.

  The carp was undercooked; she needed a knife to cut it. She relished the idea of one day plunging one just like it into Boyko’s heart, or whatever passed for one.

  “I know your father worked for the Chinese government smuggling diamonds from Kin through Cabinda into Antwerp. It was his relationship with Chaim Tolkachevsky in Antwerp that led me to you after he disappeared. What happened?”

  Her vodka arrived neat. She knocked it back with a flair worthy of a dock-worker.

  She mulled over his question, controlling her revulsion. She had learned early that you make your own bed and it better be made right.

  The harder you work the luckier you get, her father had always told her. But he had everything but luck. Amber figured she would make her own. Now this. She picked her words.

  “My father took my mother back to China; he had enemies in the Security Ministry. They killed him. Then they killed my mother. I stayed here, had my son, and started dealing. Junk, anything anyone needed. That led to diamonds. You do what you have to do.”

  “Life is tough.”

  “Maybe you’ll make it easier.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “All ears.”

  “D-Perfect stones.”

  “What’s the trick?”

  “I live right.”

  Boyko let loose a belly laugh. The irony didn’t escape her.

  “The cartel. How do they take it?”

  “Bull fuck, the cartel!”

  “But how do you sell around them?”

  “They’re going down the tubes, the greedy pricks. We have three tricks. Price. Price. Price. And matchless quality. Every stone. We’re undercutting those fucks so bad the gemstone markets are falling all over the world. The damage is spilling over into precious metals, commodities, and stocks.”

  “They’ve noticed.”

  “Bet your ass. Already‌—‌”

  “I have,” she interrupted.

  He ignored her sarcasm. “…the bankers in London and New York are already demanding an investigation. They have no idea what’s going to hit them. This final shipment will do them in. That’s why we want you‌—‌among other reasons,” he sniggered.

  Amber smiled at Boyko’s quid pro quo. Tony would be safe as long as she agreed to courier Boyko’s diamonds and she could play his game. But if she ever got the chance, she’d tear his throat open.

  AMBER WAS PLAYING HER cards the only way she knew how: cutely. Earlier Tony had been having an bad asthma attack, his life on the line again. His condition could trap air in his lungs. It had to be controlled with inhaled corticosteroids and bronchodilators; otherwise, it could end in suffocation. Boyko had shocked her when he took her across the Congo River to Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo, formerly known as the French Congo, past the river police patrols, to see her son in a private clinic where he had moved the boy from his villa in Presqu’ile de Banana.

  “Mum,” Tony wheezed from his bed. “Does this mean I can’t play soccer?”

  “No, it means you are not getting the proper medication.”

  Boyko had followed through on his promise. She hated him nevertheless, in spite of his phony compassion.

  After a shot of steroids, Tony got his breath back.

  “If this pulmonizer helps, you can go back and kick some ass, OK?” she told Tony.

  Hatred of Boyko burned deeply inside her.

  ELEVEN

  New York City

  Three days after his discharge, Maran camped himself in a room at the East Houston Manhattan hotel on the Lower East Side. Outside, the street was filling with delivery trucks unloading at the Jewish delicatessens and the Middle-Eastern bakeries on East Houston Street.

  On the tenth floor, far above the street, Maran could escape the worldly buzz. To reflect.

  He remembered that night, the night when Ae Sook threw him out of the house and filed divorce papers.

  He had been away on a leave that turned into a month-long bender. It was all she could take, but she had invited him to stay for dinner, always trying to soften his landings.

  “So how’ve ya been,” he smiled sheepishly.

  “Getting along,” she said. He knew she wouldn’t say what was on her mind, which was “I’m going to miss you, but I can’t get the fear of your repeated drinking bouts out of my mind. It’s clear booze is more important than I am. The trust is gone.” She had been through those promises too often.

  Her maiden name was Ae Sook Choi: Ae Sook for “Love and Purity.” In the Korean naming system, the last name is first when it has one character; so when they married and his bride took his name, Ae Sook Choi would have become Choi Maran. Neither of them liked the sound of that, so instead she became Mrs. Ae Sook Maran. “I Shook” became the joke when his Army buddies needled him: It was about time someone shook him up. Like Maran, she was a mongrel; with a Korean father, an agricultural crop seed specialist who married an Andalusian student from Seville.

  Losing her was huge.

  He remembered all the tender moments with her at the beginning, the day they had met in on the bank of the Charles River outside of Harvard Yard in Cambridge. She had just finished a sociology class in her extension program at the college, “Sacrifice and Women,” and was eating a pizza on the grass. Maran was on leave from the Army. He was driving by when he spotted her and pulled into the nearest parking space on Memorial Drive. He was wearing jeans topped by an emerald green South Boston L-Street Brownies T-shirt identifying him as one of the stalwarts who go in for a New Year’s
Day swim there. He took pains to catch her eye as he strolled by. It worked; they chatted: the weather, the sky, the river. She asked him if he went to Harvard. When he answered, “No, I didn’t go to Hahvid. Do I look like an Affirmative Action? Never mind. Don’t answer that,” he laughed. At that point in his life, he still entertained the reverse snobbery prevalent in all the big city neighborhoods. It was a sentiment he even shared with his urban friends at West Point.

  She pointed to his sassy tattoo and laughed along, captured by his open originality. They split meatball subs at her Cambridge apartment that night. When he showed up to pick her up for their next date, he brought his laundry and stayed through his leave.

  They married not long after.

  He still cared for her even though he’d learned, out of necessity, to live without her. He knew he’d pushed her beyond her limits. He was a good man, she always knew, soft at heart, a great father, but she could no longer take the uncertainty, the pain of not knowing when his drinking would raise its ugly head. The saving grace for him was that she brought his bottom up so hard it smacked him right in the face, beyond further denial. He finally surrendered to The Program.

  He hadn’t had a drink since.

  He had attended religiously to his child support payments. That and his visits. He remembered bitterly how his own father had abandoned him and his mother back in Lagos. He was determined to break the cycle.

  She had moved with their son into a garden apartment complex in Point Loma’s Sunset Heights neighborhood.

  They got together. They talked.

  “Are you getting the checks on time?”

  “Yes. Thanks.”

  The thought occurred to her that all their hopes had come to this. It was bad enough that she had lost her husband to alcohol‌—‌even if he was a working drunk. She didn’t have the patience that the Army seemed to have with it. Now it was too late. It took all her strength to hold back the flow of tears that backed up and burned her eyes.

  She had asked him to put Dennis to bed and when he did, Dennis asked his father to sing him the song. Maran, as he had so many times before, sat beside him on the bed and sang “The Wild Colonial Boy,” the Australian-Irish ditty about an Irish Robin Hood. Maran might not have been all that Irish, but he loved The Clancy Brothers as much as he enjoyed Ice Cube’s rap. When he finished, his son looked at him and told him not to worry.

  “You are the greatest father in the world, Dad,” he said. “Don’t you worry about me. I’m ready.”

  “Don’t talk crazy, Dennis. We’re still partners. Partners don’t give up.”

  “I don’t mean give up, Dad. Just like you always said. Take whatever comes, make the most of it. ‘Victoriae!’” His voice trailed off as he fell to sleep.

  For the previous four months, Dennis had been vomiting, experiencing increased weakness throughout his body, worst in his legs; that was symptomatic. According to Ae Sook, he was falling asleep at the dinner table.

  Maran recalled that day with Dr. Michelle Alex-Taylor Mellone at the San Diego Primary Care Clinic. The worst day of his life.

  “What do you do for a living, Mr. Maran? I can see how much your role as a father means to you.”

  Maran explained his situation, lying that he lived in Boston and, as a private international business consultant, worked all over the world. Her questions filled him with dread. His son was the most important thing in his life. Without him he had only the Army. He felt the knot rising from the depths of his stomach. His breath clutched at the back of his throat.

  “What the hell is it?” he pleaded, feeling defeated. “What does my son have?”

  “Mr. Maran, there is so much we can’t be sure of. Unfortunately that is not the case with Dennis.”

  “Oh, God, no,” Maran whispered.

  Maran just looked at her, speechless. He wanted to kill something. Outside the hospital lobby, he helped his son out of the wheelchair and into his car at the curbstone in front of the hospital entranceway’s revolving doors.

  It was one of the last times he saw him.

  SITTING THE EAST HOUSTON hotel room alone with his thoughts, one thought drove him: vengeance. It was keeping him from going insane or committing suicide. He had to find the traitors. It was the only way to acquit himself and clear his name.

  He was on his own now. He needed a plan, a mission of his own.

  But he knew he needed help, a team with access to powerful surveillance technology. And money.

  The rooms in the hotel all had Wi-Fi. The first thing Maran had done when they took away his SAWC computer was to buy a MacBook Pro laptop and equip it with encrypted Cloud Cover Assault Defense security software, the closest thing to the one that had protected his Army computer. He pecked out a message to Sergei Karakazov in Huntsville, Alabama, the site of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

  Sergei Karakazov had retired from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service after the 9/11 attack. Earlier, the Soviet spy wing had tasked him to steal U.S. hi-tech secrets, vital dual-use technology, “dual use” because its products could be put to either military or commercial use.

  In addition to the important military information they contained, the plans and blueprints had become the basis of their most lucrative commercial products, including IBM’s personal computer and Microsoft’s operating system. The Soviets sold them to countries around the world at the kind of discounts made possible only by letting the U.S. foot the bill for the breakthrough hi-tech research on which they were based. The more the Russians sold, the greater the bite it took out of the U.S. and allied job market. It was a classic violation of fair trade, war by other means. In the end, Sergei, the thief-in-chief, came to hate the system, but he never lost the pride for a job well done.

  Sergei and Maran had become friendly over cocktails and cheap caviar at an embassy reception in Belgrade in 1989. Maran was on TDY, Temporary Duty, at the U.S. Embassy, covertly attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency to uncover the source of Semtex, a plastic explosive being used in countless Islamist terrorist bombings. He and Sergei quickly came to the assumption that they were on secret assignments from competitive teams, but by that time, such embassy engagements amounted to little more than tailgate parties.

  Maran figured Sergei was on a cyberwarfare contract with the Space Center. The former spies’ old employers, like the DOD, FBI, and CIA were hiring them back on mission-specific projects. One of those cases, he had been told, was to discover how one leading peanut butter manufacturer had achieved superior flavor by supplying Georgia peanut farmers with technology that assured a steady supply of pH-controlled water to the crops. In return, they were locking up exclusive rights to the enhanced, more flavorful peanuts.

  Maran knew Sergei would be perfect for the job he had for him. Everyone Sergei had ever known in his days with the Soviets jockeyed for position and booby-trapped one another, but the end of the Cold War gave rise to a new profession in the corporate world: competitive intelligence. In the tough new world of aggressive pricing and battles for market share and favorable financing, companies were hiring former CIA and FBI agents to help them keep up with foreign competitors supported by their own governments’ spies. Ex-spies from Cold War agencies around the world pulled every trick they knew in competing for the most lucrative jobs: risk assessments of foreign countries, governments, and regions, without which U.S. insurers would not take on new clients from the world’s less stable spots. Sergei had made such risk assessments his specialty. He had just the package of skills Maran needed: espionage, sabotage, and cyber warfare.

  Maran decided to get in touch. He outlined his plan to Sergei in an encrypted message. It didn’t take Sergei long to call back on a secure phone.

  “You’re still crazy, Mack,” Sergei laughed.

  Three days later, he was knocking on the door of Maran’s hotel room in New York City.

  “You’re setting up a corporate intelligence company as a cover to investigate diamond smuggling in West Africa?” Serge
i asked, incredulous.

  He thought for a moment.

  “I get it,” Sergei said. “As a business ‘consultant’ in corporate intelligence, and I assume you actually mean to include illegal espionage or you wouldn’t have called me, you have the perfect cover to go into the field to flush out the bad guys.”

  “And kill them,” Maran said.

  “It may sound insane, but it will work, patriot,” Maran added, laying out his plan.

  “BANG! Inc.”

  “A bizintel agency to cover a killing machine?”

  Maran had done his homework on the Internet. He already had plan in mind.

  “BANG! Inc. Business Analysis Network Group.”

  “I’ll bite.”

  Maran pulled out a black leather wallet. He handed Sergei his new calling card in the name of “Walter Q.R. Jackson, investigator: corporate intelligence.”

  “But before I can give it a legitimate front, I need a client,” Maran continued. I thought of you because I have a feeling there is a massive plot in the air. I can’t put my finger on it. But it has to involve trafficking, arms for diamonds‌—‌American arms. That’s the only way they could be getting them.”

  “How can I help?”

  “I have to move fast.”

  “How fast?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Whoa! I’m just winding up a project. I need a week.”

  “This operation is tailor-made for Sergei Karakazov. Besides, whatever you’re doing for P&G or Kellogg’s‌—‌”

  “It’s for the Rocket Center, asshole.” Sergei took jobs from corporate as well as government clients; Maran knew that already.

  “…or whatever it is you’re working on, it will never threaten your life‌—‌give you the blast you’ll get with BANG! Don’t shit me. You need this.”

  “Long as you put it that way.”

  “Thanks, patriot. I won’t forget it,” Maran said.

  TWELVE

  Doaktown, New Brunswick, Canada

  It took Sergei two days to pass his project off to his partner in Huntsville and fly up to join Maran at the cabin in Doaktown, a site popular with the “sports” who came to fish for Atlantic Salmon on New Brunswick’s Miramichi River. The cabin, at the end of a long dirt road ending at the riverbank, offered the mask that Maran wanted to put his team together.