by JT Sawyer
Ritter moved away and stepped into a side room to call Monroe on his cellphone. “My good man, in another two hours you will be richer than God.”
“So, it’s underway,” the assistant sec-def replied while making a chewing sound.
“Soon; the shipment has arrived and will be dispersed to the main players. Tomorrow at this time all eyes will be upon Iran and they will be forced to pull out of the disputed pipeline boundaries.”
“And here I thought I was having a good day with this Argentinian filet mignon on my plate. What about making sure there’s no trace back to you, my friend?”
“Aeneid will soon be clear of any worries,” he said, looking through the door window at the security monitors. “Plus, the target is a college campus that my daughter from my third marriage attends, which will further place me out of the spotlight. Not to worry, though, she’s supposed to be away in Spain this week.”
“After all of this is over, we must get together again in Tahoe and hash out the details of the mergers for the pipeline and accompanying villages that will need to be removed.”
“I’ll be in touch shortly.”
Ritter put his phone away and looked out the window again, this time studying Perry. What to do with him after this is over? Maybe I should hire him on directly for overseeing the project abroad. He could be a further asset and obtaining another fed that’s even slightly competent is such a headache.
Perry resembled so many other ladder-climbing miscreants who could be wound up for hire with the proper six-figure inducement. That’s why Ritter lamented Drake’s demise. He was a simple brute who was good at squashing problems and had few aspirations in life other than serving at the feet of a good master who patted him on the head every few months. Still, Perry could work given the proper incentives. Ritter emitted a bleak smile, his face looking like old parchment in the fluorescent lighting while he mulled over the power he was about to hold in his palm and what he would do with the life of the man in the next room.
Chapter 30
Ketamine was a tricky drug to use on humans. Too much and the subject wouldn’t recover, succumbing to heart failure. Too little and you’d have a wobbly drunk coherent enough to trigger the alarm and foil your breaching plans.
The use of ketamine by covert operatives was considered old school and many of the newer operators simply relied on more powerful opiates that were less risky. Anatoly however had used the drug enough to be able to roughly estimate the subject’s weight to deliver the approximate dosage. More importantly, the drug and accompanying rifle could be obtained through surreptitious entry into a veterinary clinic, which Anatoly had done on 7th and Broadway in a quick after-hours stop he and his men had made in Bakersfield. The rifle was used for subduing feral dogs or the occasional coyote or bobcat that wandered into the neighborhood and Anatoly had liberated it from the clinic along with a number of other sedatives.
As he squatted on one knee in the bushes beside the electric fence of the building ahead, he slipped the miniscule dart inside the tranquilizer rifle and steadied the front sight on the lone guard, twenty yards distant. Killing wasn’t in the plan for breaching the compound unless things really went south, though he wouldn’t hesitate to drive a round through Nelson Ritter’s caveman skull if given the opportunity tonight.
He had never met the man but all of his covert work during the years kept pointing to the despicable creature as the conductor of endless suffering in the nations bordering the Caspian Sea. Thwarting his plans would put an end to the strife Ritter had promulgated for decades, costing the lives of thousands of innocent villagers in Turkmenistan where the proposed oil pipeline was supposed to be constructed.
Anatoly’s mind drifted back to another time and what seemed like a different era of warfare. Just after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Turkmenistan went from being a Soviet constituent to its sovereign nation. Many other countries, including Israel, wanted to have their claws sunk into the back of the world’s fourth largest reserve of natural gas. Anatoly was a young Mossad officer on his first major assignment overseas. His unit inserted into the Badkyz desert region that bordered northeastern Iran and provided training and support for Turkmen rebels fighting against a newly formed group called Al Qaeda that had just recently sprung up along the border in northwestern Afghanistan. The Cold War carryover of the mujahedeen were hoping to gain a foothold for opium production fields in the newly formed country of Turkmenistan.
Anatoly was instructed to teach the ad-hoc group of Turkmen rebels that were strung out in villages over a hundred mile region in the Sangar Valley, a rugged desert region that depended on a centuries-old trade route to move cotton to ports in the Caspian Sea. For eight months, he lived and trained with the hardy desert dwellers whose austere lifestyle he came to admire, eventually growing fond of a young widow and her son.
During the onset of fall, he was to lead their first large resistance fight against a fledgling Al Qaeda group massing near the mountain pass thirty miles to the southwest. Policy intervened at the last minute, the order to pull out coming from central command in Israel. He later found out this was caused by dwindling support for the rebellion in U.S. political circles due to their backing of the Gulf War, which had just unfolded. Anatoly and his men along with their battery of weapon platforms situated in the mountains were recalled within days.
Two weeks after returning to Tel Aviv, he learned that the main villages in the Sangar Valley were overrun by armored vehicles from Afghanistan, his informants and friends amongst the Turkmen either dead or missing. Eventually news of the deaths of the young woman and her little boy reached him. He still remembered the dreadful December day that tore the fabric of his soul. Anatoly never spoke of the failed mission and its aftermath except to his daughter and only then after the veil of secrecy was removed by the Israeli government when they de-listed classified documents years later.
He had spent the past thirty years doing what he could to trickle his own funds to the few survivors in Sangar, trying to rebuild their villages. With the formation of his own company, he opened several relief charities for people in Turkmenistan and always looked for ways to insert his organization into rescue operations there.
Now with the impending pipeline that Ritter was planning to build, the Sangar Valley people would be forcibly relocated or even eradicated if Ritter could find a way.
Anatoly took a deep breath and focused his mind back in the present, inhaling the fragrance of the lilacs around him. He looked over at Petra, who was disabling the electric fence at the junction box a hundred yards to his right. The young man with the anemic goatee turned and gave him a thumbs-up. Anatoly refocused his rifle sight and sent the projectile downrange into the soft tissue above the guard’s clavicle. The man winced, staggered a few feet to the entrance door, and collapsed on the blacktop.
Petra and three other men began feverishly snipping a small entrance through the fence with their bolt cutters while Anatoly kept his eyes focused on the building entrance and main road. Thirty seconds later, they all crawled through, running in a low squat across the open field to the steel front door. Anatoly paused to check the guard’s pulse while Petra took the man’s keys and opened the heavy door.
The sign above them indicated, State of California Power Relay Substation #12.
The location was ideal: off the main roads, minimally protected, and of small significance to the larger power grid in California. Anatoly’s computer techs back in Israel had identified the sight for its vestigial connection to estates and businesses located in northwest Anaheim. Aeneid’s internal power systems were too well-protected to breach from inside and they had their own internal generator system in the event of any issues with the power grid. However, any ripple effect in the electricity output from the relay substation would send an immediate alert to the Los Angeles County Fire Department which would then dispatch units to each of the affected homes or businesses to inquire about critical power surges that could result in
fires. Such lessons were gleaned from the ’94 Northridge earthquake and it was standard protocol for electrical-related emergencies.
Anatoly walked to the back room, opening the door silently and slipping behind another guard at a work station. He artfully slid his arms around the man’s wispy neck, employing a sleeper hold, then lowered his limp figure to the floor. He stood before the control console, searching for the manual override lever that would temporarily deactivate the current emanating from the forty acres of electrical towers outside the building.
He found the lever and then glanced at his watch. “Four minutes,” he muttered to his men behind him who were fanned out along the entrance door. “That’s a long time to be stuck in a building with only one exit.”
Chapter 31
Mitch was kneeling beside a terraced assemblage of rocks near the entrance to a two-story mansion. The eight-foot-high wrought-iron fence came to a flared point sharp enough to deter a climber. He knew it was also electrified given the faint humming emanating from the main support posts.
Through his binoculars he could make out the shapes of two Rottweilers roaming around the front entrance. The manicured lawn between the fence and the house was nearly one hundred feet long and he knew that such trained dogs would be on him within seconds. Mitch had done extensive counter-dog training against Belgian Malinois attack dogs while in the Special Forces and was well aware of the savagery contained beneath their stolid eyes.
“Why the hell didn’t we get a tranq gun like your pops?” he whispered to Dev, who knelt a few feet away, her eyes fixed on her small laptop screen.
Dev sighed and hit her fist against her leg. “We have to get closer to the house. I can’t force my computer to pair with Nelson’s system from here.”
Mitch rubbed the whiskers on his chin and took a hard swallow as he looked at the Rotties again. “What the hell do you mean, ‘pairing it from here’? I thought we were going inside to use his setup to decrypt the file you have.”
“The computer network inside Ritter’s estate is routed into the mainframe at Aeneid, true, but it doesn’t access critical files like the one in my possession. However, if I can hack into his remote work terminal from here and route it through Jessica Carter’s system in her office, we should be able to access it that way. Coupled with the power blackout my father is about to implement, it will hopefully create the panic needed at Aeneid to drive them to their weapons cache.”
Mitch grabbed her arm, pivoting her slightly. “You can’t access the files you have at all, can you? You never could.”
“At first I suspected it might work but the more I labored on it last night at the cabin, the more I realized the encryption was unbreakable except at Aeneid. If we can draw them out, make them think we’ve gained access through Carter’s system, then they can lead us to the staging area.”
“When were you going to tell me this?”
“Only when I knew for sure it was our only option. My father said you can be, well,” she paused, weighing her words, “rigid when it comes to certain things.” She averted her eyes from his and resumed glancing at her laptop. “I was here once for a work party he and his wife put on so I know the general layout. I need to be within twenty feet of the house for my malware to slip past the cyber defenses in his home office.”
Mitch kept glaring at her while shaking his head. “You and your old man make a good pair alright—all these endless fucking secrets. You sure that’s the world you want to live in?” He shrugged his shoulders and exhaled. “Anything else I should know?”
“Yeah, I need to be within twenty goddam feet of Ritter’s house—you got that?!”
He muttered to himself and then stood in a partial squat, waving his arm furiously for her to follow him along the fence line to the rear of the property.
“What’s your plan for tracking them if they buy into this?”
“I’ve got satellite imagery of their facility and my computer is set up for auto-surveillance of any of their vehicles coming or going from Aeneid.”
“Ah, I don’t even want to know what satellite was hacked to obtain that.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you anyway, cowboy.”
Arriving at the rear of the property, Mitch reached into his pack and carefully removed six water balloons whose liquid contents were an amalgamation of bacon bits, sardines, and peanut butter that he had picked up at a grocery store on the outskirts of Anaheim. “If this concoction doesn’t work, then I don’t know what will.” He readied one of the balloons in his palm. “Most high-end guard dogs won’t defer to a slab of meat laced with tranquilizers tossed on the ground as they’ve been forcibly trained out of that temptation. This shit, though, will trigger their scent drive long enough to distract them while you work your magic.”
She looked at the flash-bang grenades dangling off his vest. “You can always go the easy route. It won’t kill them.”
“No, but it will fuck their hearing up for life. Ritter is the only one that’s a true son of a bitch, not the dogs.”
Dev glanced at her watch, counting down the seconds to the timeline she and her father had calibrated on their watches. It was nearly 4 AM and they would lose the benefit of darkness soon. She raised her hand up, showing her five fingers extended, then counted down as the designated time arrived. When the last finger folded, Mitch flung the balloons thirty feet onto the pavement by the nearest wall then whistled. The exterior security lights went dim as Anatoly’s sabotage efforts came to fruition.
Dev bolted a hundred yards down to the gate and belly-crawled under the tiny spacing, making sure not to touch the metal in case the power went back on unexpectedly. Confirming that the dogs were gone, she ran from shrub to shrub until she was at the back wall. With her laptop bag slung on her back, she climbed up the protruding exterior rock façade until she reached a patio on the second floor. She saw French doors with thick glass. Inside was Ritter’s office with the computer a few feet away.
Dev knew the type of security system Ritter had in place and that she had to use her laptop malware to force pairing with his computer before the main power came back online. Once a modern hard drive was affected by power loss, its older network systems were vulnerable for a few minutes until security patches were overlaid. Dev began typing, uploading the malware that would insert itself into a back door into Aeneid’s mainframe via the portal inside the office. Whether she could access the file in her possession was another story but it would alert the technicians at Aeneid that there was a security breach and hopefully put the dice in play.
She just wanted this to be over. Too much time away from home, away from her parents, and submerging herself as Mira Sanchez had chipped away the layers of her psyche. She wasn’t sure if she was cut out to take over her father’s company one day as he had alluded to and while she was good at what she did, the main reason for staying was to be closer to him. Hopefully this will do it and my life can return to some version of normal. How I miss Tel Aviv, my mother’s cooking, and the smell of cedars. She saw the icon for the file indicating it was opening. Dev hastily scanned the documents and email headings, searching for the answers she had so desperately sought for days.
Down below, Mitch kept his suppressed pistol focused on the Rottweilers, which had swung over his way after the shrill sound only to come to a temporary halt at the wall of scent hovering over the cement pathway. The strong odor in the air was almost too much for him and he kept holding his breath.
A few minutes later, he saw Dev climbing down from the upstairs porch. A moment later, the lights flickered back on, illuminating her in the open like a dancer in the spotlight. The Rottweilers immediately caught sight of her movement and emitted a low growl, which turned into machine-gun barking before they bounded off in her direction.
There was no time to use the flash-bangs and it would only impair Dev’s escape. He took off running along the fence, raising his pistol and firing off two rounds into a propane tank attached to the outdoor barbecue. Th
e patio erupted in a small mushroom cloud, rattling the back windows and sending lawn chairs airborne. The dogs split apart in a panic, veering off from their trajectory and away from their target. They retreated to either side of a woodshed at the property’s edge while Dev retraced her steps under the fence, making it to the curb where Mitch caught up with her.
“Nicely done,” he said. “Now all we need is a helicopter to whisk us away to the crime scene I hope you’re gonna tell me you got the location of.”
She gave him a thumbs-up as they sprinted back to their vehicle. “Everything but the helo, anyway.”
Getting inside, Mitch gunned the Subaru down the winding road to the city lights below.
Chapter 32
Ryker was sitting at his desk at the downtown Phoenix office, tapping his pencil rhythmically on his laptop screen while analyzing the recent information from Interpol that had just arrived. The image of a woman who went by a half-dozen aliases pulled up. Ryker’s pencil stopped fluttering as he sat upright in his chair then hastily tore through papers on his desk, searching for the FBI bulletin he’d received the day before. He held the photograph of Mira Sanchez next to the new one, his eyes narrowing. Beside the listed aliases were the words: Person of Interest in international espionage undertakings and cyber-hacking.
Ryker picked up the phone and dialed Perry’s number, going straight to voicemail. He mentally replayed the details of the previous day’s debriefing with Perry and then reflected on Mitch’s disturbing phone call, which contradicted everything he’d been told. Ryker leaned back in his chair, folding his arms while staring at the original FBI bulletin. He picked it up again, studying the image and text. How did this woman make it up on the list so quickly without all the usual bureaucratic red tape?
Ryker picked up the phone and dialed in the tech and ballistics division on the second floor. “I’d like to put a trace on Agent Perry Kovac’s phone. Notify me when you have his location.”