by Shane Crosby
For a week, Scott and I planned. We prepared for our meeting by studying our opponent. We practiced our hand to hand combat, linguistics and strategies if cornered. By the end of the end, we felt we were as ready as we could be to meet the illusive Popovich in person.
Seeing the Popovich estate for the first time is impressive. You want to know what he did to acquire all of this beauty. Fifty acres, tree lined, immaculately manicured lawn, bushes shaped into cute little circles, water falls flowing out of concrete statues around the property, expensive cars line the basketball court size drive way that you have to follow for two miles before you see the top of the house and another mile before you arrive at your destination. I was sickened by my admiration of this home and the nerve it took to do whatever he had to, to get it.
Waiting in the sprawling sitting area for the man of the hour to arrive, I was thinking about how many houses I’ve passed and entered that were the same size of this room. Beautiful true enough, but why would anyone need this much space?
The sound of footsteps interrupts my thoughts and those twenty five feet tall doors swing open. At first glance, Popovich is nothing like what I thought he would look. He’s older probably in his sixties or possibly early seventies. His hair is all white and balding, he has a little pouch and wrinkles when he extended his hand to shake mine you could see dark spots caused by aging on the back of his hands. He has a turkey neck piercing blue eyes, with grey darting throughout his eyebrows. I wondered how this old ass man can be so menacing.
Following him to his study, my only thoughts were of not letting him go this time, this time around, he wasn’t going to win. I came here to bury him once and for all.
We were shown to a sitting area right out front of his office. He went into prepare and to speak with his minions. After a few moments of wondering if someone was going to walk up to us and shoot us in the head, the doors opened.
“Hello, come in.”
“Welcome, welcome to my home. Thanks, you for coming.” He says in a thick Russian accent and a smile that hides his evil black soulless heart.
“Thank you for the invitation.” I said, in Arabic. Scott, posing as my interpreter, spoke to him in Russian, which pleased him. I could have held this discussion in Russian, but, going into the Lion’s den, you’re wise to bring backup.
For the next couple of hours, we met about the sale of some of his properties. I made my intentions known by speaking in Arabic with Scott translating in Russian. He asked why I was interested and I told him I wanted to build a chain of luxury condominiums and luxury hotels. From the research I’d conducted, those properties I was interested in were the perfect locations. I offered him a substantial amount of money to take possession of them. He was hesitant about parting with them and said he would consider my proposition. I expressed my disappointment and inquired if he had any additional properties other than ones we were discussing that might be a good fit for my project. He said he didn’t at the moment but something was always changing around him. I thought the meeting was going to be a bust until he offered me a concession. He asked me if I was looking for some excitement. The way he presented it, successful men are often faced with the same mundane tasks every day, making decisions, enforcing orders, closing large business dealings, having sex with the same woman daily. He said he had a way to make these days better. I couldn’t imagine what he was referring to, but I jumped at the chance to know more. He said I would receive the coordinates of a meeting. He explained that it was a diplomatic meeting of sorts. The attendees are very successful men who are looking to find a way to wind down and escape the daily pressures and boring details of their lives. Great, a bunch of emotionally needy rich men sitting around in their underwear in a sauna drinking champagne and complaining about the gazillion dollar deal they almost lost and the amazing way they saved it. I could envision me wanting to stick pins in my eyes to wake myself up.
He went into how to attend. My name had to be on a list, which he would handle. He said a courier would bring the address where I would pick up the coordinates and dates to the meeting. After I retrieve the coordinates they would contact me with further details. Further checks would be ran on each participant’s credentials. If we all checked out, we’d be allowed to attend the meeting. When I arrive at the meeting, there would be coordinates and dates for future meetings. The one glaring caveat would be I must come alone and give a fingerprint. The fingerprints would be taken at the door. I objected to coming alone. My reasoning being, I don’t speak English, my native language is Arabic. He assured me everything would be okay. When placed on the list of attendees, the country, native language and any other preferences are noted. When you arrive, they will hand you your program written in your native language and while at your table, you’ll have headphones to listen to the details of the meeting all done in your native language. If I’d like, they would have someone who speaks my language to stand with me to translate.
I thought, damn! A bunch of well-organized sons of bitches. They were doing everything possible to insulate themselves from being penetrated by outsiders. To prevent the appearance of illegitimacy, I agreed to the terms and that I was in need of an escape from my ho hum lifestyle of business deals and making money. This pleased him and he informed me of the time the courier would arrive at my hotel. I needed to be present to accept. Upon departure, we shook hands and Scott and I left the estate.
When we got in the car Scott let me know his thoughts.
“Why would you agree to go to that meeting alone? No damn way that’s going to happen. You must be out of your mind.”
“Scott, relax. True, we just stumbled upon this whatever it is and now we have the opportunity to stop it. The only thoughts I had while I was in there, was this, we’re going to have to be better than they are. Our plan has to be executed with precision, no room for errors.”
“I knew this was a bad idea.”
“What’s your deal? You’ve been on missions before, hell, you’re a freaking fighter pilot. You fly through bullets and bombs for a living and you’re stressing out about this?”
“Dub! I have a team with me. You’re going in there alone! There’s a difference!”
“I’ll have a team with me. Better than that, I have a clan, bonded by blood nothing can puncture that.”
Scott didn’t respond, but I could tell he wasn’t convinced. To tell you the truth, neither was I. Popovich is the most ruthless individual I ever had to hunt down. He puts a barrier up that to this date, even with the best highly trained operatives and the most elite state of the art technology, we haven’t been able to penetrate it. He’ll kill before he asks questions and eat a seven course meal over your dead, bleeding body. Capturing him won’t be easy and right now, I’m wondering if it’s possible.
CHAPTER FORTY – FOUR
IT’LL TAKE SOME CONVINCING
BERLIN
Dub
Back at the bunker everyone was mulling over my proposed plan. To me, there was nothing to discuss except how we were going to carry this out. They were wasting their time figuring out a way to talk me out of it. I didn’t have time to waste so I got on the horn and started to take action.
Calling Jared Morgan....
“Hey baby brother! How do those new shoulder pads feel?”
“They feel pretty good, bro. I’m not planning on keeping them long, though, I have my eyes set on a higher office.”
“Good, good, the higher you go the more juice you got. And, I need all of it right now.”
“How did the meeting go?”
“Smoothly, except, they’re going to take fingerprints at the meeting. I’m sure they’re going to run them through the system, if what we’re thinking is true, they’ll be coming to your office. My cover should hold, shouldn’t it?”
“As long as you’ve been a field agent, yes. What I have to do is plant your new identity to these fingerprints. Your prints aren’t going to come back with anything, but what I assign to them.”
“Stop saying that, I’ll make sure everything checks out on this end.”
“There’s something else, when everything clears, the million dollars must be forwarded to their account.”
“I can get you that, no problem.”
“Can you keep it in there longer than a week?”
“Yes, figured out a way to do that, but it’s a loop and there’s an expiration date. You have to get this wrapped up quickly.”
“Thanks, J. I’ll do what I can. “
“When is the meeting?”
“In two weeks.”
“Two weeks? Wow. You don’t have much time to prepare.”
“I’ve been studying this bastard for decades but didn’t know it. I’m ready. I just have to get everyone else ready.”
“Let me know what else you need. I’ll test your cover to make sure it’s bullet proof.”
“Any news on Jaheeb?”
“Nothing, but I’m still working on it. Don’t give up on baby brother, yet.”
“Never. We’re all we got.”
“Thanks J. I’ll be in touch.”
“Love you, bro.”
(Click)
STILL UNDECIDED
BERLIN
Dub
Home sweet home for now. It’s difficult for me to think of Germany as being my home. I’ve been so many places for the past decade or so, it’s hard to picture any place being home. Since this horror began, its allowed me to spend more time with my brothers. I’d forgotten how much I missed them. Each day that I can spend with them makes me want to find one place to call home. You know an industrialized city instead of a cave with a hole dug outside for the bathroom. Maybe get a house. A real one with real walls instead of a tent. Cable TV, Wi-Fi, a normal phone instead of having to build a backdoor and use a satellite phone to mask my location. Oh well, decisions, decisions. I can figure it all out when this is over.
Last, I checked, I had everything I needed to attend the meeting. The fella’s one hundred percent approval, that’s another story.
Mase calls the family into the meeting room.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ve been looking at this print out and I think we’ve neglected to look at the entire document.” I pulled out the side of the page that had been folded over.
“Look at this, this side has numbers or something. It looks like a code of some sort with countries listed by them.”
“More coordinates?”
“I don’t know.”
“This doesn’t look like coordinates.”
“A code?”
“Could be. Damn the Attorney General was really trying to keep this hidden.”
“Just what we need; another encrypted puzzle to decode.”
“We still haven’t gotten into the thumb drive.”
“How we miss that?”
“With everything going on around us, easy.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Just keeps getting better and better, now what else?”
“I say, if they have one located in Europe close to Germany, we go check it out.”
“There’s no telling how long it’ll take to find how to break that code, then find those locations.”
“True, it’s up to you if you want to research that. We can all take some, it’ll speed up the process or we can get Dub prepared for this meeting and look up those codes afterwards.”
“Allow me to bring up something else we’ve put on the back burner, the Florida trip. Are we going to take it?”
“I like this topic. We postponed the trip because of Mase and Dub’s injuries. How does everyone feel about going now?”
“The meeting should take precedent over anything else now.”
“It does. But, we have enough of us to split up.”
“With this case, I don’t like the idea of splitting up.”
“We’ve done it before.”
“Yeah, here in Germany, like five hundred miles from each other. You’re talking about putting thousands of miles between us.”
“And, you forget the states and Swiss.”
“Completely forgot about that one.”
“We all came back safe.”
“We barely got back!”
“Yeah more like we limped and crawled back.”
“You get the point.”
“Yes point is, we don’t ever need to do that stuff again.”
“I hear you. But, we need to get that trip out of the way and add it to what we have now.”
“It’s growing out of control as it is.”
“Ignoring it isn’t going to help make it go away. I think we need to do it.”
“We will, but we have something cooking now. Florida will be there.”
“Mase, I’m looking at this spreadsheet. You’re right. I think this is some kind of code.”
“We need to work on what we can decipher and come back to what we have no clue about later.”
“Let’s do that.”
“We’ve wasted enough time on dead ends.”
“Agreed.”
CHAPTER FORTY - FIVE
GO TIME
DUBAI
Dub
True to his maniacal word, they checked out my information. Thanks to baby brother, it all checked out. They sent a courier around to our hotel while we were in Paris.
Criminals, you can’t say they’re not creative. The note was folded over top to bottom. It had a gold plated seal on it and it was tied in a green silk ribbon. The note placed on a silver platter at the entrance of our door. The paper was made of cotton and cream in color. In order to open it, of course you had to break the seal. Once the note was unfolded, you had to figure out how to make the coordinates appear.
As a filed operative, this was right up my alley. I got a lighter and held it under the paper. Once the heat hit the paper, viola, the numbers appeared. We had the location and prepared for our trip.
In the instructions, we were to have a limo pick us up at our residence. We live in a fortified bunker outside of Berlin. There’s no way we could give them our address. We checked into a fancy hotel in Berlin and this is where they picked us up. We were all scooped up in time to arrive a day before the meeting actually occurred. We were told, they had events planned for us as well as more festivities they hoped would be to our liking.
Upon arrival, we were given a program of events and the location of our room. The day we arrived we went on a sight-seeing tour of Dubai. After the tour, we showered and was flown to a private villa for dinner. Everyone was chatting about what they did for a living, how much money they made on their last business deal and how many times they’d attended these meetings. For a moment there, I was looking for all of the men to unzip their pants to compare the lengths of their penis. Every time one man spoke about the money he made on his deal another one would chime in to say he made more money. It was sickening, but it was plenty to entertain you.
Diamonds were on every person there, including my camera doubling as a watch, my tie pin and the pinkie ring all recording devices encrusted with diamonds. There was so much glare from watches, bracelets, rings, earrings and someone had diamonds in their teeth, I saw a few people pull out shades to keep from being blinding from the glare.
Every man there was a metrosexual in every way. In their ten thousand dollar tailored Italian suits, complimented by their five thousand dollar smooth soft leather shoes. One guy even told me his shoes were made from the under bellies of sheep. He brought them because they mold to the shape of your feet and give you a comfortable fit all day. He sounded like a commercial for the company. I started to ask him if he owned it and if he could send me a pair.
Perfectly manicured nails, fresh haircuts, cleanly shaven faces were the fashion for each man in attendance and if they had a beard or goatee, it was trimmed, shaped and not a hair out
of place. I wished I’d gone to dental school because the smiles in this room are of perfection. I see why women whored themselves out just to be with one of these men. Gold diggers would go into convulsions in this room.
There were servants bringing out trays of food, fresh fruit, flutes of the best champagnes, whole roasted pig, beef and the most exotic fish all laid out for us to enjoy. I know I was there on a case but I see how you could easily get caught up into this world.
This dinner was just for the attendees to meet and get acquainted with each other before the big day. After we finished eating, we were invited on a tour of the property which was just as glamorous as everything we’d been exposed to up to this point. An infinity pool was just off the dining area, tennis court, basketball court the living room had a couch that had cushions large enough to double as a bed. I could see myself relaxing on this couch watching TV and enjoying the view. You would never need a bedroom or bed. You could just put sheets on the couch. The bathrooms were equipped with marble floors that had twenty-four karate gold flecks in every tile. I’m telling you, thinking about going back to the old me is looking pretty depressing right about now. Looks like I get to continue to live as my fake ID for a little bit longer. We’re not allowed to return to the hotel. We’ll have to spend the night here. In the morning, a Yacht will take us to the meeting location.
With listening devices attached to almost every part of my body, I’m starting to wonder how I’ll be able to spend the night here without being detected. If I’m able to leave here walking; I’m putting my name on the best covert operative awards list and retiring to a tropical island.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
WHATEVER IT TAKES