Laurie Gibbons had just become flustered.
“What’s this?” She was looking at her computer screen, which was filled with electronic gibberish. “I don’t recognize any of these symbols.”
That admission, in itself, was stunning.
“None of us do,” said the man looking over her shoulder. His name was Rosh Patel, and next to Gibbons, his boss, he was considered the brightest bulb in the section. “But NICKY spit it out as a Priority 1(A). First one I’ve ever seen.”
NICKY was the name of one of the unit’s two most-powerful computers, mirror images of each other. Most people who knew about them assumed the letters in their names meant something, scientific shorthand for their abilities or components. Actually, they were named for the Hilton sisters. The other computer was, of course, called PARIS.
“As far as I know,” Gibbons said, “it’s the first 1(A) anyone here has ever seen. What about PARIS?”
“She flagged it, too, but two nanoseconds later.”
Except when one of them was down for maintenance, NICKY and PARIS worked together. The unit rotated daily which of them got the electronic feed first. Today it was NICKY, which immediately transmitted the data to her “sister”. But the term “immediately” is relative. The data travels at light speed, 29.9 centimeters in 1 nanosecond, or billionth of a second, through wire and conduits that slow it down. Hence, the almost imperceptible delay when it has to go from one computer to another.
“Where did the transmission originate?”
“As near as we can tell, in and around a small town in northeast Georgia.”
“Russian origin?”
“Not that Georgia. Our Georgia. The town is Commerce. Horse country. They ride to the hounds, or whatever you do when you want to hunt foxes. Although much of the time they go after coyotes.”
Gibbons looked at Patel, who was a wonderful analyst but tended to go off on tangents.
“And how do you know that?”
“Wikipedia,” he said sheepishly.
“Maybe we can check Wikipedia to see where the transmission went,” Gibbons said sarcastically.
“Sorry. We know it went to somewhere in Switzerland, but we’re having trouble pinning it down to an area less than 50 square miles, possibly because of interference from Hadron.”
“Who is Hadron?”
“Hadron is a thing, not a person,” Patel said. “The Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator, where physicists smash atomic particles together to study hadrons, which are composite particles called quarks. They were recently in the news for discovering an exotic meson called a tetraquark. They think other types of exotic hadrons may exist, such as pentaquarks. And, of course, there are the antiquarks, which are real interesting.”
“Stop! You’re giving me a goddamn headache.” Obviously, Patel didn’t read the same news she did, Gibbons thought. “You’re telling me this Hadron thingamajig screws up our detection.”
“The Hadron facility has given us problems before. They have several of those colliders over there and when they are fired up they can distort transmissions. The biggest of the colliders is in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference. It’s deep underground. The machines above ground are the ones that cause us the most trouble. But we’re working on it.”
Laurie Gibbons stared at the screen. She had seen encrypted data before, but nothing like this. Why would it go to the White House before military and C.I.A. code breakers had a shot at it? That made no sense. But she didn’t like it.
“What can be worse than terrorism or a nuclear attack?”
“I don’t want to know,” Patel said. “But I guess you have to call the President.”
Gibbons stared at him.
“How the hell do I do that?”
CHAPTER 6 – HEADWIND
Castine, Maine - One Week Later
Cole Sudden pulled the rental car into the parking spot outside Hoover’s Dry Cleaner in Castine, Maine at 8 A.M. sharp. When he’d first seen the store’s name, he was taken aback. The F.B.I. was not noted for its sense of humor. But it turned out that the original owner was one Elmore Hoover and the new proprietor, Paul Colfax, anxious to keep existing business, kept the name.
Sudden had come up from Boston the day before, a brisk June Sunday, taking US 1 and enjoying the six-hour drive along the Massachusetts and Maine seacoast, fueled by the occasional lobster roll and mug of Sam Adams. Once in Castine, he found a Comfort Inn, had a satisfying seafood dinner at Dennett’s Wharf, and went to bed. He fell asleep writing some additional background color material for his next Jake Harms thriller novel, written under a pseudonym. His other persona as an author was more than a cover — although it was an excellent one. Sudden was a fairly successful mid-list writer with a growing following.
There were no other cars parked in the little strip mall where Hoover’s was located. Sudden planned on being the first person through the front door of the cleaner. The second person presumably would get quite a shock.
The Federal agents who handled the witness-protection relocation of Frankie “The Divot” Battaglia, a.k.a. Paul Colfax, had done a good job. Castine, on the Maine coast 30 miles south of Bangor, was a sleepy little shore town. It was not likely the Ukrainian mob that wanted Frankie dead would ever have found him there. Unfortunately for Frankie the Divot, Sudden’s C.I.A. unit knew the location of everyone in witness protection, federal or state.
In an era when Government secrets appeared regularly on the nightly news, Americans would be astounded to know that one of the C.I.A.’s most-clandestine operations was located in the Philadelphia Naval Business Center, formerly known as the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The PNBC only had a few remaining military occupants: the Naval Surface Warfare Ship Systems Engineering Station (NSWSSES), the Naval Facilities Engineering Command (NFED), the Mid-Atlantic Public Works Department Pennsylvania (MAPPA) and the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility (NISMF), which stored and maintained mothballed ships. Sudden’s unit was humorously and aptly named the Base Unified Resource Yard (BURY). The rest of the facility was comprised of private companies, including a Norwegian tanker builder, various distribution hubs for clothiers and drug companies, and CinneKakes, the national bakery chain that produced breakfast pastries and snack treats the BURY staff tried to work off in the gym.
BURY was located in Philadelphia for two reasons. For one thing, it was assumed that no one would ever suspect that some of the C.I.A.’s top assassins worked in Philadelphia. For another, no one at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, wanted to acknowledge that BURY even existed, let alone that it was the agency’s primary funding source outside of Congress.
Years earlier, the C.I.A.’s crack computer hackers had broken into the computers of sister agencies, sometimes just on a lark. C.I.A. bigwigs had ignored the witness protection lists, assuming they were worthless. Nigel Buss, a former field agent who was also a Rhodes Scholar, happened across the lists and immediately realized their value as a profit center. The various American mobs — Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Native American, Irish, Hispanic, African-American, Native-American (new ones seemed to pop up every year) — were delighted to pay huge sums to settle accounts with turncoats. In return, they were expected to provide domestic intelligence on possible terrorists, as well as leads on corrupt politicians the C.I.A. could blackmail when crucial votes on agency appropriations were imminent.
The number of corrupt politicians proved to be unwieldy. The agency on occasion had to ask some of its pet legislators to vote against an appropriation so that its approval had some semblance of legitimacy. Buss now ran the tight-knit BURY operation, which made millions the C.I.A. never reported to Congress or anyone else.
Sudden, the senior officer in the unit’s small operational arm, left the engine of his car running and screwed the silencer into the business end of the Tokarev pistol. It was show time. He was almost fully recovered from his previous assignment, which left him ba
ttered both physically and emotionally. Buss had given Sudden a few easy surveillance jobs, a ton of paperwork and too many damn retraining courses before he rebelled and threatened to resign unless he was sent into the field. Now, after almost a month of planning, following, tracking, and covering every possible base, he was ready to take Frankie “The Divot” Battaglia off the board.
Sudden waited patiently for Battaglia, who had used the back door and was already inside, to reverse the “Closed” sign on the glass door to “Open.” Despite all the preparation, this would be a clean sanction, not involving the usual subterfuge Sudden’s C.I.A. unit employed.
“Sanction.” Nigel’s latest attempt to use a word that didn’t sound as bad as what the unit actually did. Of course, it had been used before, both by the C.I.A. and other agencies, American and foreign. It was, in effect, being recycled. “Recycled?” Why not that? It even had an environmental ring to it. Perhaps they could get an endorsement from the E.P.A. or Greenpeace. I’ll have to mention it to Nigel, Sudden decided. He’ll probably play around with it. Maybe combine it with another euphemism, like “extreme prejudice.” Use it in certain situations. A wood chipper would surely qualify as “extreme recycling.”
Battaglia deserved a wood chipper, not the quick oblivion he was about to get. But the Teslenko mob in Seattle wanted everyone to think that they personally eliminated him. Hence, the pistol favored by Ukrainian hit men. Sudden would drop it in a nearby dumpster where the police would surely find it. Cops always checked the nearest dumpster.
Sudden’s team assassinated only a few men a year (never a woman), all of whom were in the unofficial parlance of the unit’s operatives, “S.A.’s” — Scumbags All. No innocent witnesses. No one coerced into informing with Government threats against their families. Only dyed-in-the wool rats with blood on their hands.
The Battaglia assignment was a “special,” since it was designed to show that the vaunted wit-prot system was not infallible. Most assassinations were staged as natural events — apparent heart attacks and strokes being the most prevalent — to prevent other Federal agencies from going bananas. Usually the mobs were happy to pay cash and provide the needed intelligence, both domestic and foreign, in return for personal payback, even accepting the anonymity of the killings. But if a mobster was willing to pay a premium – which usually meant an extra “0” added to what was already a six-figure fee – an exception was made.
That only happened once every two years, on average, a span that the F.B.I., the U.S. Marshall Service and various state babysitters could live with. They chalked the occasional “lost” witness up to breakage and swept the odd body under the bureaucratic rug.
Sudden could hardly blame the Ukrainians for seeking revenge. Frankie the Divot was the trusted representative of San Francisco’s Scarpati Mafia family, which had many business interests in common with Marko Teslenko, the Ukrainian mob boss. But not only had Battaglia worn a wire to his meetings with the Ukrainians, allowing the F.B.I. to prosecute some of their top lieutenants, but when one of the Ukes became suspicious, Frankie killed him. The fact that the murdered man was Osip Teslenko, the youngest son of Marko, was bad enough. But the garish manner of Osip’s demise enraged his father.
Battaglia was a pilot, and often flew his Cessna to and from his meetings in Seattle, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His plane also came in handy when it became necessary for someone to disappear. His modus operandi was to take his victims for a flight out over the Pacific, and return without them. Sometimes the passengers were dead when they were put on board. But not always. It didn’t matter. They were invariably dead after hitting the water from 2,000 feet.
The police were fairly certain that Osip Teslenko was alive when he exited Battaglia’s aircraft without a parachute. For one thing, several people claimed they heard him screaming on the way down. For another, the medical examiner could discover no other wounds other than those caused by impact.
Unfortunately for Battaglia, and the Government agents who were using him as an informant, Osip’s body wasn’t lost at sea. Frankie had been careless. The Northern California coastline was shrouded by fog the morning he took Osip up, ostensibly for a flight back to Seattle. Slowed by a headwind and thinking he was over open water, Battaglia ditched the Ukrainian too soon, over California’s scenic Monterey Peninsula.
To be more precise, Osip was launched over the world-famous Pebble Beach Golf Resort. He plowed into the middle of the 13th fairway just in front of a foursome hitting their approach shots through the mist to the green. It had rained the night before and the ground was soggy and soft. The body made quite an impression, both on the golfers and in the fairway. When a responding cop saw the crater, he said, “That’s what I call a divot.”
Frankie Battaglia picked up a mob nickname for the ages and a target on his back. His own family wanted him dead, since his actions threatened to spark a mob war. His F.B.I. handlers immediately scooted him into witness protection.
All this Sudden knew from his briefings. He had been trying to figure out how he could weave the Osip murder into one of his novels. He was afraid that readers would find it too far-fetched.
He heard a car on the road. Looking in his rear view mirror he could see a Sheriff Department cruiser slow down briefly as it passed the strip mall. Sudden wasn’t worried. There was nothing unusual about a car idling outside a dry cleaner at opening time. Who robs a dry cleaner? The cop would assume it was probably somebody dropping off clothes on the way to work. Sudden had picked Wednesday because he knew it was the dry cleaner’s slowest morning, both for Battaglia’s legitimate customers and for the gamblers who also stopped by.
When the Feds set Frankie the Divot up in the dry cleaning business, they urged him to keep a low profile. He did, for about a month. Then he returned to his bookie and loan shark roots. He couldn’t believe how much action there was in coastal Maine. Not much else to do in the winter, he reasoned. He was putting quite a bit of money away. Castine was turning out to be a very nice spot. Except in deepest winter, the climate wasn’t that different from Northern California.
He was even getting some excellent tail from some healthy local women, although a bit old for his tastes. Again, not much else to do in the winter.
Sudden thought about the sheriff’s car. If the cop was sharp, he might remember Sudden’s rental and put out an alert if Battaglia was found too quickly. That wouldn’t do. Sudden decided that after killing Battaglia he would reverse the shop’s “Open” sign again and lock the doors. When he got to Boston, he’d call a tip in anonymously, just in case. The delay wouldn’t matter. The cops would still find the gun.
When Sudden looked back to the front door, the sign said “Open.” He folded a couple of rumpled shirts over his arm to hide the Tokarev automatic and got out of his car. He was halfway to the front door when his cell phone began to vibrate.
CHAPTER 7 - SUDDEN CALL
When near a target at the climax of a mission, Sudden and his colleagues carried a special dedicated cell phone that was always turned to “vibrate”, for obvious reasons. A ringing phone in a movie theater is a rude annoyance. A ringing phone during a “sanction” can be fatal, and not to the target. The phone was for dire emergencies, to warn of a compromised mission, or to call it off completely. The vibration signaled a text message from Nigel Buss that could not be ignored.
When Buss first called off a mission, he simply texted the word “Terminate”, meaning the sanction, not the target. But that led to an early miscommunication, and to the subsequent demise of a target who had been reprieved at the last moment because the client’s check had bounced, so to speak. Actually it was a cash transaction, as most contracts were, but the cash was counterfeit, discovered by a former Secret Service agent working for the unit. The unfortunate victim, a multiple murderer, was no great loss to society, but the unit wasn’t into freebies. So “Terminate” was replaced by “Cease!” – the word Sudden was now staring at.
To say he was annoyed was
to put it mildly. Sudden had never had a vibration. It wasn’t so much the wasted hours. But he had built up a real animosity toward Battaglia, whose other proclivities in his previous life, other than tossing people from his plane, had included the sexual abuse of underage girls. In Castine, the ex-mobster was a fixture in his church, and a revered Scoutmaster!
For a second, Sudden considered ignoring the call. Who would know? Then another vibration, with a longer, text message arrived, with instructions. What the hell? He looked up when he heard a tinkle from a bell hanging from the dry cleaner’s door.
“Can I help you?” Battaglia had poked his head out the door and was staring out at him with a wary look. “I just opened.”
He’s naturally cautious, Sudden thought. And always will be. I can’t see his right hand. I wonder if he’s got a gun. His own weapon under the shirts on his arm was pointed at Battaglia. It would be a tricky shot, but he was confident he could put one in Frankie the Divot’s wheelhouse before the thug got a shot off himself.
But Sudden just smiled.
“I need these by tomorrow,” he said. “Big job interview. Got some lobster juice and drawn butter on them.”
“Sorry, pal,” Battaglia replied. “We ship our stuff out. Earliest I can have them back is Monday.”
I know that, Sudden thought. That’s why I asked. He noted that Battaglia was trying out a down-home Maine accent, and failing miserably. He sounded like a cross between a Brooklyn wiseguy and Gomer Pyle. Sudden eased the pressure on the trigger and shrugged. He got back in his car. Just as he closed the door, Frankie the Divot called out.
TWO SUDDEN!: A Pair of Cole Sudden C.I.A. Thrillers Page 19