The Shadow List

by Todd Moss

  Adding to this combustible mix of people, wealth, and supertankers—each carrying two million barrels of oil through a narrow space—was the heavy presence of naval warships. Each of the bordering nations had deployed dozens of vessels, as had Japan, Australia, and Russia. The U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet also patrolled the region by air and by sea. And of course the U.S. government monitored it all from space. This dangerous cocktail had turned the South China Sea into the most crowded, strategic, and contested pressure cooker on the globe.

  And Judd Ryker was supposed to come up with a plan in case it all blew up.

  —

  He was excited by the opportunity. It was true that the Crisis Reaction Unit, his special office known inside the building as S/CRU, had been created to spur the State Department to respond more quickly to international emergencies. But he was more than a little surprised that the South China Sea assignment had fallen to him. He wasn’t exactly the most popular person in the State Department.

  It had all started nearly two years earlier when Judd was just a professor at Amherst College trying to use data to figure out what caused political conflict around the world. Landon Parker, the Secretary of State’s chief of staff and the man who ran the U.S. diplomatic machine from behind the scenes, had invited Judd to the State Department to present his “golden hour” theory that timing was decisive in ending war or political unrest. The conclusion was unmistakable: The United States needed to respond faster to events around the world. Parker was sold. He launched the Crisis Reaction Unit and hired Judd as its first director.

  Unfortunately, like an organ transplant rejected by the host body, State Department insiders wanted no part of Judd Ryker and his S/CRU. To many of the old guard, Judd was just a pointy-headed professor with ivory tower ideas. They whispered that S/CRU was some crazy pet project of the chief of staff’s and would eventually go away. The message was twofold: S/CRU could be ignored. And Judd Ryker was Landon Parker’s pet.

  Senior policymakers and diplomats never openly voiced their opposition to Judd’s ideas. No one ever complained directly to Parker. They just quietly maneuvered to keep S/CRU out of their business and schemed to push Ryker as far from their turf as possible.

  Judd had fallen into his first major mission by accident. A confluence of circumstances had given Judd an unplanned opportunity to fly to the West African nation of Mali to restore an ally who had been deposed in a coup—and the bureaucracy had never forgiven him for it.

  After his success in Mali, Judd had been handed special projects by Landon Parker to rescue an election in Zimbabwe and later to secretly recover American hostages in Cuba. Judd had won these battles but was still fighting a longer war inside the building.

  Word about his exploits in Africa and the Caribbean had gotten around the State Department hallways enough that ambitious young staffers were starting to make quiet inquiries about joining S/CRU. Among a certain segment of the Foreign Service—the thrill seekers and idealistic risk takers who still wanted to change the world come hell or high water—S/CRU was starting to look attractive. Judd Ryker’s unit was becoming, to a very few officers in the know, even a little bit . . . sexy.

  Yet Judd knew that, even as he racked up wins and quietly gained fans, he was still seen by the old guard as an interloper. And Judd’s power and influence was still as beholden as ever to Landon Parker.

  Part of Judd’s strategy had been to accept, no matter how much it pained him, that the really big foreign policy hot spots—Iran, Egypt, Russia, China—were probably off-limits to S/CRU. They were too big. There were too many power players. The State Department’s internal antibodies were just too strong. Judd was relegated to the minor leagues. Until Parker handed him the South China Sea.

  Judd’s mandate was to anticipate national security situations so the United States could spring into action in time to shape events. And there was no bigger potential national security situation than the South China Sea. So it made perfect sense that Parker asked Judd to analyze the risks and come up with new ideas for how the State Department could exert greater influence in that part of Asia.

  What didn’t make much sense was the total secrecy. The State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, the part of the bureaucracy that was officially responsible for the South China Sea, wasn’t supposed to know anything about Judd’s project. Neither was the Pentagon, the CIA, nor the White House. Landon Parker insisted that all intelligence requests were to come strictly through his office. Judd was instructed to figure out a plan in total isolation from the rest of the government. Judd Ryker was a one-man diplomatic Red Cell.

  —

  Judd eyed the photo of the artificial island, Beijing’s latest audacious move to change the strategic calculus of the South China Sea, and thought again of Stratego. What the Chinese were doing—asserting their growing power and daring the United States to react—was obvious. How the U.S. should countermove without igniting World War III was still a puzzle.

  Judd tacked the island photo onto a map identifying all the disputed international lines and contested islands. He stood back and studied his whiteboard wall. He had scribbled headings for disputed borders, military facilities, sea-lanes, energy, fishing, finance, regional alliances, and USG assets. As Serena brought him the most important information from Landon Parker’s office, he sorted each item and either discarded it or placed it beneath one of the headings. This triage was the first step in Judd’s process, a path to the big picture of the major issues.

  Next, Judd would crunch the numbers. As he had done with an Egypt assessment that had accurately predicted political upheaval—which, sadly, had been buried in departmental clearances and never saw the light of day—Judd would throw all the data he could collect on economic and political factors into an algorithm he had written to identify any irregularities. His program could find numbers—troop movements, construction of a port, a spike in social unrest—that were out of the ordinary, that didn’t fit the normal pattern. Judd would then correlate these anomalies with the current U.S. intelligence coverage to identify gaps. That’s exactly where he would know to hunt for the unexpected: where no one else was looking.

  Judd was fired up. Maybe it was the complexity of the task ahead. Maybe he felt on a roll and ready for a bigger challenge. Maybe it just felt good to work on something more consequential than a few hostages or a small country far off America’s national security radar. Something potentially historic. Or where failure could be catastrophic.

  “Serena,” Judd punched his intercom. “I’m ready for the sea-lanes intelligence.”

  “Yes, sir,” Serena replied. “I’m bringing in the cart.”

  Cart? Judd thought as Serena backed into his office pulling a dolly with four large cardboard file crates.

  “Here’s the first batch, Dr. Ryker. Where do you want it?”

  “There’s more?”

  “Christmas in April,” she said without a smile. “I’ve got six more boxes in the lobby. Everything from Taiwan to the Malacca Straits. And this is just the shipping lanes. Wait until you see the oil files.” Serena hoisted one of the boxes and dropped it with a heavy thud onto Judd’s desk. “You need a bigger office.”

  “I have to narrow the intel request. This is a fire hose. Call up to Landon Parker’s office and—”

  “Hello, Ryker,” Landon Parker interrupted, his face suddenly appearing in Judd’s doorway.

  “Sir, I wasn’t expecting you,” Judd said, startled.

  “I came down to see how you’re making out,” Parker said. He pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles up on his nose and scanned Judd’s whiteboard. “You getting everything you need from my people?”

  “Yes. Serena and I were just discussing the intelligence requests. I think we’re going—”

  “I’m sorry, Ryker,” he interrupted. “I came to talk to you about something else. It’s sensitive. Can we have the
room?”

  “I’ll be at my desk if you need anything, gentlemen,” Serena said, and slinked out, closing the door behind her.

  “I’m making progress on the South China Sea project. It’s great to be working on something meaty. S/CRU won’t disappoint you,” Judd said.

  “Yeah, I’m going to need you to stand down on that.”

  Judd’s heart sank.

  “I don’t understand. You asked me—”

  “The South China Sea will still be a powder keg next week. It’s not going anywhere. I need you for something urgent, Ryker.”

  “Okay. . . .”

  “I’m going to need your utmost discretion.” Parker removed his glasses and cleaned them with his tie.

  “Always, sir.”

  Parker replaced his glasses. “I got a call this morning from Shep Truman.”

  “Shepard Truman, the Congressman from New York?”

  “That’s right. Shep called in a tizzy because an employee of one of his bigwig constituents has gone missing in London. Who knows what this kid was into or what the hell he was doing there. He could be some punk on vacation who forgot to call his parents. Or he could be dead, for all we know. But Truman promised his man that he’d look into it.”

  “And now Truman wants State to look into it,” Judd said.

  “Bingo, Ryker.”

  “And that’s why you’re here?”

  “You got it.”

  “Isn’t missing persons a job for Embassy London?”

  “It is. But I spoke with the Consul General. She says they’ll add the kid to their list, but they’re overwhelmed. She says they’ve got six Penn State students locked up after they stripped naked, covered themselves in navy-blue body paint, and mounted the lions in Trafalgar Square.” Parker chuckled to himself, then became serious. “The point is this, Ryker: Truman is up my ass and I can’t tell him that the embassy is too busy saving drunken frat boys.”

  “So you need me.”

  Parker pointed a finger gun at Judd and clicked his tongue.

  “Who’s the missing kid?” Judd asked.

  “Name is Saunders, Jason Saunders. I’ll send you all the details I have from Truman, and whatever else we have on him. It’s not much. But it’s a start.”

  “Mr. Parker, as you can see, I’m already neck-deep in the South China Sea project. Is chasing a lost tourist really the best use of S/CRU?”

  “Nope. But Truman is on the National Security Oversight Subcommittee, next in line for chairman, and seems convinced that the State Department doesn’t do its job, which means it’s very much our job to keep him happy. Plus, Ryker, it’s an open secret that he’s gunning for the Senate. We definitely don’t need Truman making trouble right now. We need him to love us. That’s why I want you.”

  “But why me?”

  “Truman says it’s urgent, and you’re all about speed. I also knew you were the best man for the job once Truman mentioned Africa. There’s a chance this Saunders kid might have gotten himself mixed up in a scam. They found a letter.”

  “What kind of letter?”

  “You know, Ryker, one of those crazy letters from some prince in Nigeria who needs your help unlocking a secret bank account?”

  “Sure,” Judd said, failing to hide his scowl. “Everybody knows about those scams. But you said London.”

  “The kid’s gone missing in London. But these con games are global, and you know that the bulk of them emanate from Nigeria. Once I saw that, I knew it had to be you.”

  “But I’m no expert on Nigeria,” Judd said. “I once spent a few days in Kaduna as an election monitor, but that’s it.”

  “Didn’t you meet your wife in Nigeria?”

  “I met Jessica in Mali. Then, before we got married, we worked together in Niger. But never Nigeria.”

  “Niger? Close enough.”

  Judd wondered what Jessica would make of it all.

  3

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  MONDAY, 9:03 A.M. EST

  The Bear,” Jessica Ryker announced. On a large screen behind her flashed a grainy photo of a beefy man with a thick beard and long, wispy hair, his eyes covered by wraparound sunglasses. “This is our target,” she explained.

  Jessica’s team had been reassembled for this project at the behest of the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Unofficially, of course, since Purple Cell didn’t exist. That was the whole point.

  The windowless chamber in the third-level basement where Jessica was sitting was blandly labeled Conference Room B3-204/Logistics Assessments. Her most trusted member of Purple Cell, an analyst named Sunday whose day job was inside the CIA Africa Issue team six floors up, sat at the laptop and ran the slides. The rest of the unit appeared only on screens, each of their faces beamed live via digital encryption from safe locations in Marrakesh, Jakarta, Shenzhen, Nairobi, Tikrit, Caracas, and Moscow. None of the Purple Cell members could see each other. In fact, none of them even knew about the others, only that they were part of something special, something exclusive.

  Strict compartmentalization was one of the features that allowed Purple Cell to work anywhere, anytime, and to avoid detection. Purple Cell functioned completely black, off the books, with total deniability. Each operative reported only to Jessica, who in turn was accountable only to the Deputy Director. That was one of the benefits of Purple Cell. That was a big reason the Deputy Director had come to rely so heavily on Jessica Ryker and her team for his most sensitive assignments.

  “The Bear operates a vast criminal syndicate from his base in St. Petersburg that extends around the world. His network has been linked to extortion, trafficking, sabotage, cybercrime, and terrorism.”

  While Purple Cell was a favorite of the Deputy Director’s, few other of the CIA’s senior management even knew about it. For the Deputy Director, it was his secret weapon. For Jessica, Purple Cell was a high-wire act without a safety net. Her team was a ghost. Jessica was a shadow. If things ever went wrong, she was on her own.

  “The Bear is running guns in Mexico, drugs out of Pakistan, and human organs in India,” she continued. “He financed Somali pirates to capture Saudi oil tankers in the Gulf of Aden. He was behind the theft of smallpox from the Russian Zagorsk Laboratory and the attempted sale of the virus to an extremist group in western China. His empire operates a pipeline that kidnaps thousands of young women in Romania and sells them into the sex trade in Western Europe, the Persian Gulf, and even on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.”

  Sunday flipped the slide to a cargo ship. “This is the Ocean Constellation in the Port of Baltimore last year,” Jessica continued. The slide changed again to show a news file photo of an open shipping container lined with the bodies of dead girls. “Forty-four women suffocated to death. All at the hands of the Bear.”

  Jessica paused for a moment to let the photo sink in.

  “The Bear is a monster. A savage. And he’s becoming increasingly bold, expanding his reach into the United States,” Jessica continued. “The Defense Intelligence Agency believes his hacker network was responsible for the breach of the Pentagon’s personnel system last year. And last week the FBI traced a series of blackmail attempts against members of Congress back to a hacker group in St. Petersburg that’s almost certainly working for the Bear.”

  Sunday clicked the slide to a photo of an old white man in a dapper business suit sitting in a chair, eyes wide, a bloody hole through the middle of his forehead.

  “The Agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center now believes that the Bear’s expanding further by taking out other mob bosses and appropriating their businesses. This is James Wilbur-Wilcox, who ran heroin and crystal meth throughout southern England. Until last month, when one of the Bear’s hit men did this. Now the Wilcox network works for the Bear.”

  Jessica faced her team. “The CNC says that this is a
common pattern. Criminal organizations use the same tactics, the same network, the same facilitators, regardless of the commodity they’re moving. Guns, drugs, uranium, girls. It doesn’t matter. It’s the network that matters. The only thing unique about the Bear is the scale of his operation. He’s gotten bigger than anyone else, faster than anyone else. He must have help. High-level friends. But we don’t know yet who.”

  The screen clicked back to the grainy photo of the bearded burly man. “We know what he’s into. We know what he’s capable of. But we don’t yet know who he is. This was taken from a nightclub security camera in Istanbul.” Sunday zoomed in, but the amplification didn’t help make the face any more recognizable. “It’s the best we have right now,” Jessica said. “The Bear is clever. Every one of his businesses is run like an intelligence operation. His network is strictly compartmentalized. He uses multiple layers of shell companies and even other criminal organizations to provide cover.”

  Jessica cleared her throat. “He uses special contract assassins that report only to him. It’s one way he maintains control of the empire.”

  Just like Purple Cell, Jessica thought, unsure of what Judd knew about Purple Cell—and what he did not

  “As we speak,” she continued, “there are multiple covert operations under way by a range of U.S. agencies to get underneath the Bear’s skin. To figure out his network, identify him, and to take him down.”

  “What’s our mission, boss?” asked one of the screens, her voice scrambled to protect her identity.

  “Most Russian mob are linked to ex-KGB. We don’t know yet about the Bear. He could be ex-KGB, he could be current FSB, he could be all on his own. We don’t know if he’s operating strictly for profit or with the collusion of someone high-ranking inside the Russian government. Our mission, for now, is to find out whatever you can about him and his dealings. You are each in a known location of his operations. Find the threads.”