by Lou Dobbs
The room had little natural light because files and invoices sat on the windowsill and took up more than half the window space. Even though it was fall, the sun was shining. That was good: It would give these Americans a false sense of security. Nothing bad ever happened in sunshine.
Katazin was still amazed he was allowed to take such a big part in an extensive operation from outside Moscow. On the other hand, if something went wrong, he had no illusions. He would be the scapegoat, and no one in the Russian government would acknowledge that he ever had anything to do with them. And if he somehow escaped American custody, his own government would stop at nothing to eliminate him. There was nothing more terrifying to a government than a loose cannon who knew too much. This was not Hollywood. There were no tales of forgiveness and redemption. Only success or failure.
He’d really done very little so far. A few financial transactions, that was it. The only thing that really made him uneasy was the alliance his government had made, however temporary, with extremists who cared little about Russia’s interests. Katazin wondered if they even realized these Islamic extremists would turn on them in a heartbeat. But he worked with the resources that had been provided, and so far they had done everything they said they would.
Yesterday, Katazin had been able to leak the story of Thomas Brothers Financial sending money to an account accessed by terrorists. In addition, if anyone cared to look into it, Thomas Brothers would be missing hundreds of millions of dollars. The story hadn’t broken to the general public, but there were already rumors burning across the Internet.
He had a lot to keep track of. Some would say too much, but after years of relative inactivity, enjoying the good life as an American, he was ready for some excitement. His meeting in Battery Park in forty minutes would give him a better idea of how things were really going and whether his superiors were happy with him.
There was a barely audible knock on his closed office door. He turned and rolled across the hard wooden floor in his black leather chair to unlock the door, letting it open a few inches. He saw the pale face of his twelve-year-old daughter, home from school with strep throat.
She croaked, “Papa, can I watch TV?”
He motioned the girl into his office, and she automatically climbed up on his lap. He rocked her gently and said, “Yes, but don’t tell your mother. She doesn’t approve of TV when you’re home from school.”
She gave him a weak smile as he felt her forehead. She was still warm but getting better. She scurried out of the office, and he heard her pounding down the stairs. Her mother wouldn’t be home for another few hours, so he was safe from her murderous stare for overruling one of her strictest edicts. But his daughter’s smile made the risk worth taking.
Someone once told him they would rather have the flu in America than be healthy in most Eastern European countries. That was probably accurate. Most Americans never appreciated how good they had it. They would scoff at the thought of waiting in line for groceries or a new pair of jeans.
Now they were about to get an idea of how the rest of the world lived.
*
Major Anton Severov sat in the billowing tent hidden by tall trees on the border with Estonia and stared at his commander. The temperature had dropped in the last two days, and he felt a chill, but at the moment he wasn’t sure what the cause was. He took a step back and absently plopped onto a wooden bench. It was just after sunset. He wondered why this assignment couldn’t wait until tomorrow. All Severov could do was stare at the plump colonel with jowls that wiggled as he turned his head. The man was a stereotype of a Russian held by Westerners. He had a bottle of Dovgan vodka sitting on his camp desk, and he continued eating pork chops as if they were cookies on a stick, smacking his lips as he tore the meat from the bone.
Severov said, “Sir, I don’t understand. I’m a tanker, not Spetsnaz. I have a company to administer. I have been lining up my tanks for days and making sure they have plenty to eat and are well covered from satellite surveillance.”
The jolly colonel said, “Listen, Anton, you need to see this for what it is. You being asked to do this is an honor. It actually makes sense for a change. There’s little enough of that in the army.”
“But a scout? In civilian clothes? Isn’t that something intelligence should do? What good is the GRU?”
The colonel’s eyes shifted in both directions, and he lowered his voice. “Don’t talk like that, Anton. The fact is you were told to do this and you’re going to do a good job.”
“If I’m not in uniform, I could be shot as a spy.”
“That’s the beauty of the European Union. No one knows where you came from or where you’re supposed to be. A German will think you’re a Pole, a Pole will think you’re Ukrainian. And besides, you’re going to have someone with you that’s supposed to speak several languages.”
Severov still wasn’t convinced and stared off into space as he tried to find a new angle on this assignment. All he had ever done was arrange tanks in attack formation and fire the main gun. His dream was to meet NATO soldiers on an open battlefield, not creep around towns and villages dressed like a tourist.
The colonel said, “Relax, Anton, you could have fun. You eat some good food, meet pretty girls. You’ll be traveling with someone as soon as you cross the border. I’m told your contact will be with you for several days. Just scout out what routes are acceptable to the tanks and supply train and look for possible resistance. You’re the perfect choice. An intelligence officer won’t know where a T-90 can go or if a building would house enough soldiers.”
Severov said, “I could walk all of Estonia in a few days. Why so long?”
“You think too small, my boy. This trip could take you into Poland or perhaps even Germany. With the price of oil plunging like it is, no telling what we might need to do to survive. This is what drove the breakup of our great Soviet Union. We had nothing to sell but our oil. At least now we have leaders that are looking to the future and figuring out how to avoid another disaster.”
Severov just stared at him. Then he mumbled in a low voice, “We might go into Germany?”
“I’m telling you we’re on the verge of history.”
“Has anybody in command read history? The last time we tangled with the Germans it almost didn’t work out well. If it weren’t for the Americans, we’d be speaking German right now.”
The colonel put on his paternal act again and chuckled. “Anton, you’re a good soldier. Do your duty. You’re a good-looking, single young man. Have some fun for a change. I’ll have Lieutenant Poola take over your company. He’s quite a competent but humorless new officer.”
“Poola! The Georgian? He’s a Muslim.”
“We have almost seventeen million Muslims as citizens. They do their duty just like everyone else.”
Severov didn’t want to look like a sullen schoolchild, so he sat up straight and tried not to sulk. He didn’t like it, but he’d do it. It wasn’t as if he had a choice.
*
Walsh had given Charlie a little more cash and sent him the other direction, away from the growing chaos. The last thing he wanted was his elderly friend getting caught up in a riot. He jogged for the entrance to his building and made it past several of the shouting protesters. The keypad on the courtyard entrance was disabled, and one of the security guards had to unlock the huge glass doors to let him into the lobby. The young Hispanic man, whose name was Hector, gave him an odd look. Walsh gave his usual greeting and passed the man and another guard on his way to the elevator.
He couldn’t help checking his phone again as the elevator doors shut. Now the Dow was down almost eight hundred points. That was scary.
On the thirty-first floor, he turned down the wide hallway into the office that held his cubicle. He was barely looking ahead as he kept scrolling through the information on his phone. Once he was in the office he looked up and felt like every eye in the office was fixed on him. Maybe they didn’t realize he was supposed to be late today. The brightly lit offi
ce was augmented by the tall glass windows with the sun streaming through. Now a few of the other workers had turned to look out the windows at the protesters. Another police car had been flipped over, and six cops were backing up in the face of aggressive protesters armed with boards and pieces of a crushed police cruiser. A helicopter buzzed low overhead.
His boss, Ted Marshall, looked grave. The portly Northwestern grad was not his usually jovial self.
Walsh stopped and said, “What’s going on, Ted?”
Ted gave him a funny look and said, “Have you been living on the moon the last twelve hours?”
“No, but I don’t live here.”
Ted, always trying to be the diplomat, said, “Cheryl will handle this. You need to talk to her.”
“Handle what?” He was about to ask exactly what was going on when Cheryl, dressed as usual in an immaculate pantsuit, motioned him over toward her office. She was a pretty woman in her early forties, but her no-nonsense approach and brusque manner made her seem much older. She was the perfect enforcer for Ted.
The blinds on Cheryl’s office were pulled down. As he stepped through the door he saw a tall, attractive black woman about his age standing with an older, plump white guy fighting a losing battle against a receding hairline. The woman watched Walsh with sharp eyes like a hawk about to dive on an injured bird. The man seemed tired and possibly bored. All Walsh could think of was that they were auditors of some type. Great.
Cheryl shut the door behind him and wasted no time saying, “Derek, these folks are from the FBI.”
He offered a hand. The man ignored him, but the woman took it and said, “Tonya Stratford.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Take a seat.”
He hesitated, wondering if he should ask some questions first.
The FBI agent added in a calm voice, “Now.”
The command reminded him of the marines. He just followed orders.
6
Derek Walsh leaned forward in the awkward rolling chair he had plopped into ten minutes earlier. He was still in his supervisor’s office, which Cheryl kept immaculate. There were books on marketing and management lining the top row of the shelf behind her wide modern desk. A copy of Jack Welch’s Winning lay on her desk like a Bible. This was the first time he had thought Cheryl might have delusions of grandeur, thinking that she could move from supervisor at a financial house to head of a major corporation through her management skills, which mainly came down to her making fun of people until they did their job.
Now all of his attention turned to Tonya Stratford. Her dark complexion framed very sharp brown eyes that felt like lasers. He realized she was studying him as much as he was studying her. The woman knew finance, and he could tell she was not used to people evading her questions.
Walsh didn’t want to seem like an idiot. He recognized he was sitting silently with his mouth open. Finally he was able to say, “You think I did what?” He didn’t have to fake any outrage. It was all boiling up. He was still scared, but now he was pissed off as well.
Stratford’s partner, whose name was Frank Martin, sat like a pudgy, middle-aged pet, watching everything unfold but not appearing to understand what was being said.
Tonya Stratford repeated her first statement. “According to your company’s records, six nights ago at 7:50 P.M. Eastern Standard Time several transfers were made on your ID from your computer. I’m asking if you have any explanation for why you made the trades at almost eight o’clock at night.”
Walsh tried to keep his voice from cracking. “For how much?”
“The total is a little more than a hundred and eighty million.”
Walsh raised a hand and started to wave it in front of him. “I’ve never made a trade that big. I’d remember. There must be a mistake.” The panic started to creep up from his stomach into his chest. How often did someone tell these guys they were having a heart attack?
Tonya Stratford just gave him a look.
Then Walsh started thinking clearly. He snapped his fingers and said, “That was last Tuesday night, right? I wasn’t even here. I was on a date. I left at quarter after six.”
The FBI agent casually looked over to Walsh’s supervisor.
She just raised her hands and said, “I can’t swear to that. They all slip out every chance they get. No one wants to be noticed leaving. Probably worse than government work. Am I right?”
Tonya Stratford’s look shut her up, too. Then she focused on Walsh again. “According to the logs from your security key, which was in your computer at the time, someone using your password and your computer made the four transfers. A hundred million went to an account in Switzerland, and the rest went to accounts in Asia and one in the Cayman Islands, all owned by the Swiss bank. All the money has been withdrawn. You are now a target of an FBI investigation. Is there anything you don’t understand about that, Mr. Walsh?”
Walsh stammered, “What would be the charges?”
“For starters, wire fraud. There’s a grand theft in there somewhere, and we’ll see what else we might be looking at. I’m not charging you at this minute. It’s an investigation. What I’m doing is giving you a fair chance to help yourself.”
Cheryl said, “Derek, I think you should probably keep quiet. You need an attorney.”
Tonya Stratford calmly turned her head and said to Cheryl, “You need to leave.”
“Derek needs representation.”
“Are you an attorney?”
“No.”
“Then get out.” She added a “Now” in a flat tone.
For some reason, Walsh felt the overwhelming need to speak to either Mike Rosenberg or Bill Shepherd. He felt like his friends would know what to say and make him feel better. If they had gotten him through the marines, they could certainly handle a couple of FBI types. But he didn’t have his friends. Walsh was alone with the two FBI agents. He knew they could hear his stomach rumble as he considered vomiting. He just didn’t think it would help.
*
Michael Rosenberg sat in the media room watching ten TVs at the same time. This section at the CIA headquarters in Langley monitored news reports and sifted them into usable intelligence. Their duty overlapped with the National Security Agency, but they rarely shared information. Watching the news was a good tactic and resource. Why not let guys like Anderson Cooper or Shepard Smith do the work for you? Each of the big networks had correspondents and news crews all across the world. The problem was that CNN tended to focus on the most video-friendly of issues and ignore any with real substance.
Two TVs in the corner, 55-inch Samsung high-definition units, played the political talk shows from MSNBC and some of the Fox panel shows. The analyst who tracked these shows did it to get a pulse of what the American people were worried about. Or at least what some of the commentators thought the American people should be worried about.
Rosenberg liked watching the shows when he had a chance and hearing everyone’s view. His time in the military had taught him the importance of seeing the big picture. He didn’t understand how the different networks decided to hire people. But today it didn’t matter because he was only watching a New York channel and CNN as they covered a rising tide of violence and unrest that had started in the financial district of Wall Street and spread across the entire city.
At first it appeared to be just the Stand Up to Wall Street group. An FBI report had indicated that this new group was largely leftovers from Occupy Wall Street. Neither seemed to have a cohesive message or any respected spokesman. As far as Rosenberg could tell they just wanted a reason not to work or pay their own way. He had seen them up close when he visited his friend “Tubby” Walsh in New York. They were a surly group who didn’t seem interested in civil interaction. They were clearly the ones who’d started this by trashing a couple of police cars and then spread general mayhem with rocks and bottles.
About an hour ago someone had dropped a hand grenade at the entrance to one of the subway stations and killed
eleven people. A few minutes after that, on the other side of the city, gunmen fired fourteen shots into a bus, killing an elderly woman and wounding two children. Somehow it didn’t feel all that random to Rosenberg.
He was afraid this all fell in with the new tactic of lone assailant terrorists. They all seemed to be vaguely connected to the group ISIS; at least that’s how the media portrayed it. There had been three beheadings in the last two weeks. One in Chicago, one in Kansas City, and the last a schoolteacher in Denver.
In Los Angeles, a ritual severing of the hands of four men accused of being thieves had caused a huge reaction from the Latino population. The men all survived and told the tale of a Muslim shopkeeper who had branded them shoplifters. The next thing they knew, a van with three masked men had scooped them up, and a few minutes later they were left to bleed on the sidewalk.
The final piece of the puzzle, as far as Rosenberg was concerned, was the attacks on tourist attractions across the country. The Liberty Bell, the Atlanta Aquarium, and the Lincoln Memorial had all seen violence in the past week. It made him think of a couple of attacks his unit had suffered in Afghanistan. At least his friends were there to help. Now, even though he still worked for the U.S. government, Rosenberg felt all alone as he watched the world disintegrate.
Rosenberg recognized it was one thing to study trends in terrorism, or even watch it on newscasts, and it was another to experience it firsthand. He had seen the results in a couple of the cities in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the closest he ever came was in their forward operating base outside the village of Landigal in Afghanistan. The marines would venture out to strike at insurgents deep in the heart of the Korengal Valley and pull back to the base for resupply. The longer they were there, the more they worked with the local population. His unit even provided protection to the UN medical personnel who vaccinated everyone in the vicinity.
But one evening, in the middle of the base, during a lull in the fighting that had lasted more than two months, when no one was expecting it, trouble had started. Rosenberg was just coming out of the small mess tent with Bill Shepherd at his side and Ron Jackson telling them the story about his football prowess in college. No one bothered to remind Ron that he had told the story before, always with a different, more spectacular ending.