The Backup Asset

by Leslie Wolfe

  ...26

  ...Tuesday, April 19, 9:31AM EDT (UTC-4:00 hours)

  ...Federal Bureau of Investigation—Norfolk Division

  ...Norfolk, Virginia

  Under the cafeteria’s flickering fluorescent lights, Jeremy Weber waited for the coffee machine to finish brewing his second fix of the day, then headed back to his office.

  “Hey, Weber, SAC Taylor was looking for you,” one of the operational support technicians said, passing him in the hallway.

  “When?” Jeremy asked?

  “Just now,” the tech replied and disappeared behind a door marked Special Investigations.

  Jeremy left the coffee cup on his desk and walked right out, heading for his boss’s office.

  Special Agent in Charge Taylor was a procedural investigator, more focused on the procedure manual than on following his gut. Jeremy rarely interacted with Taylor; both of them liked it that way. Jeremy’s way of thinking, of following leads and uncovering information, was more in line with what one saw in old detective movies than in the standing FBI procedures, despite his almost twenty years with the bureau. All that mattered to Jeremy was the truth and catching the bad guys as fast as possible. He routinely followed his gut and forgot to file the paperwork. That’s why Taylor wasn’t his biggest fan.

  He knocked on Taylor’s open door.

  “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  “Come in, get the door,” Taylor replied, pointing at one of the chairs in front of his desk.

  Jeremy closed the door behind him, then sat on the indicated chair.

  “Before we start,” Taylor said, “please note this is the final verbal warning you’ll get from me. If I have to repeat today’s spiel ever again, it will be in writing and it will go on your permanent record. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Crystal, sir,” Jeremy replied, clenching his jaws. He felt his palms starting to sweat.

  Taylor opened a file and started reading from his handwritten notes.

  “You have interrogated a minor without a legal guardian present. You have used borderline excessive force during the interrogation of the Mortimer kidnapping suspect, and he wasn’t even the right suspect to begin with. He’s filed a lawsuit. All this, in the last month. Oh, here’s a real gem. You drove off and left your partner at Starbucks, where he was buying you both breakfast, and didn’t return to pick him up.”

  “I’d just received a tip from one of my informants in the Wilson case. I thought human trafficking takes precedence over donuts, sir.”

  “Don’t be a smartass with me, Weber. Your partner wasted half his day, waiting for you, covering for you, then taking a goddamn cab to get back to the office. Now he’s filed a request for reassignment.”

  “Oh, I see . . . ” Jeremy whispered.

  “Yeah . . . how many times have we been on this path, Weber? How many partners? No one wants to work with you, and I understand why. You don’t care about your partners. They believe you don’t have their back, and they don’t trust you!”

  Taylor ended his tirade forcefully, slamming the folder on the desk, and his open palm on top of it. Jeremy almost flinched, but remained quiet. There was no point in arguing.

  “You’re not a cowboy, Special Agent Weber,” Taylor said after a minute or so, “You’re not some Midwestern small-town sheriff who thinks he is the law and nothing else matters. You are a federal agent. And it’s about goddamn time you start behaving like one.” Taylor paused, waiting for Weber to respond.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “People smarter than you have written our procedures manuals. Follow them at all times. If in doubt, don’t break protocol; just follow the manual, without any exceptions. And learn how to be a team player. There’s no way I’m gonna allow you to work without a partner; it’s in the manual for many reasons. So find one who’ll work with you and do whatever it takes to stay in his or her good graces, because one more reassignment request from one of your partners and it goes on your record. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jeremy answered. “If I may—”

  “You may not! Dismissed!”

  Jeremy left Taylor’s office and headed back to his own. Yeah . . . he’d have to change a few things. He promised himself he wasn’t gonna go through another one of Taylor’s rants, no matter what he had to do, and whose ass he had to kiss.

  He sat down at his desk and took his weary head in his hands. It was amazing how all the things that seemed right to do in the heat of the moment ended up biting him in the ass.

  He’d given the bureau the best twenty years of his life and he loved his job. He didn’t just think of himself though, he thought of his son; he needed to consider his family. He wasn’t going to throw everything down the drain for some gut feeling in some stupid case, or anything. Going forward, he was gonna follow procedure at all times; he had to. He’d promised himself that many times before, but this time he really meant it.

  ...27

  ...Wednesday, April 20, 3:44PM EDT (UTC-4:00 hours)

  ...Nikolai and Olga Novachenko’s Residence

  ...Smithfield, Virginia

  Smithfield represented the best rural Virginia had to offer for someone like Evgheni Aleksandrovich Smolin. Quiet neighborhoods with houses sitting on large lots, far enough from one another to present numerous advantages from a privacy perspective. Scarce law enforcement presence, their services not needed much in one of Virginia’s safest neighborhoods. A small community of close-knit families, where a visiting family member from abroad would be instantly adopted and incorporated in the community, not many questions asked.

  That was Smolin’s cover. He had arrived in the small town as the father of Olga Novachenko, visiting from Russia, there to stay a couple of months then go back home. He’d arrived ten days before, and people on the street already knew him and greeted him. It was perfect for his needs.

  No matter how peaceful Smithfield was, Smolin wasn’t there to relax. He constantly worked on his laptop, installed in the home’s living room, from behind window treatments that maintained his privacy and kept all curious neighbors in the dark.

  Smolin was comparing two long lists of IPs, closely reviewing each entry, and marking on the second list whenever a corresponding IP was associated with a name of interest from the first list. The first list was quite simple, only holding corporate names, their IPs, and their physical locations—their headquarters address in most cases. The second list was significantly more complex. It had primary IPs on each row, most of them matching entries in the first list, then a secondary IP associated with a user name, password, website, even credit card information for some entries. From studying both lists, Smolin got the information he was looking for: the people identified on the second list and their Web browsing habits were employees of the companies of interest found on the first.

  Smolin put his headset on and made a Skype call to his aide back in Moscow. It rang a few times before being answered, maybe because in Moscow it was well after 1.00AM.

  “Yes, sir,” his aide answered the call, recognizing his Skype ID.

  “Anton, get me Valentina Davydova on the line. She’s staying at the Sosnovaya safe house.”

  “Umm . . . they moved her back to the detainment center two days ago, sir.”

  “Chto za hui, Anton, what the fuck? So she can get raped and killed by some idiot in there and leave us hanging? She’s an asset, Anton, what the fuck were you thinking?”

  “Sir, if I may, no one asked me. I just found out last night. They needed the house for something else.”

  “Who?”

  “Major Vorodin from FSB.”

  “He’ll be first in line to serve soup at the detention center, tomorrow and for the rest of his insignificant life. You wake him up and tell him that, Anton, you hear me?”

  “Umm . . . yes, sir,” Anton answered hesitantly.

  “Now get Davydova on the phone and then move her back to the safe house immediately. Call me when you have her.”

 
Less than an hour later, an incoming Skype call broke the silence in the quiet Smithfield residence. Smolin connected with video.

  She’d been roughed up. Her left eye was swollen shut, her jaw was almost black and distended on the left side, and her hair hung in dirty strands sticking to her bruised face. Her left hand was wrapped in dirty gauze and hung limp. She’d developed the demeanor of someone who’s constantly expecting to be assaulted or killed: jumpy, averting eye contact, trying to look small.

  Considering how badly he needed her to cooperate, that roughing up might have been for the best after all. Good thing they didn’t kill her, the stupid fucks.

  “Y–yes?” she said insecurely on the Skype call.

  “Valentina, good morning,” Smolin said.

  She squinted into the camera, trying to recognize the man in the blurry, choppy video transmission.

  “Ahh . . . g–good morning, sir,” she managed to articulate.

  “This shouldn’t have happened. You’ll be going back to the safe house immediately, right now,” Smolin said.

  A tear started rolling from her swollen eye. She didn’t say anything.

  “I need you to do something for me,” Smolin said. She nodded, and he continued, “I received your first reports a few days ago and they were excellent work. Just what I needed. But I need more, and I need you to get me the physical addresses for some of those users. And I’ll need some kind of alert system to call me, or something, whenever one of these users is online. I’ll send you the list of the ones who interest me.”

  “I–I don’t have a computer,” she whimpered. “They took everything away from the house when they took me. I lost the program I wrote for you. They took it. It was on that computer.”

  “Tvoyu mat! You’ll have everything back,” he said, feeling anger raise a wave of bile in his throat. “Anton!”

  “Sir?”

  “Take her to a hospital first; see that she’s taken care of. Then take her to the house and have the fuckers who took my stuff bring it all back tonight. All of it! Then draft reports for every one of them and file them on their personnel records. Tell them to pray this doesn’t delay my op, ’cause if it does, I will kill every one of them with my own bare hands.”

  He hung up the Skype call without waiting for any confirmation from Anton, and started pacing the room angrily. Those ignorant, reckless motherfuckers could have ruined it all.

  ...28

  ...Friday, April 22, 7:48PM EDT (UTC-4:00 hours)

  ...Quentin Hadden’s Residence

  ...Norfolk, Virginia

  Normally, Fridays made him feel great, exhilarated almost. Just the thought of not seeing them for two whole days, of not going there two whole days. Quentin smiled bitterly at the thought that he probably wasn’t all that different from the vast amount of workers in the world. All the Friday jokes he’d heard over the years, all the expressions, all the “Happy Friday” wishes, all hinted to the same reality: most people just hated going to work every day, and they did that out of necessity.

  So why couldn’t he just accept that fact as one of life’s many crappy realities, and stop being so miserable? He wasn’t the only one; he got that. Yet he couldn’t find his balance.

  He paced the living room slowly, ignoring the muted TV and delaying the moment he’d have to turn on the lights. He loved the soft light of dusk; it brought peace and the promise of a restful night.

  He looked out the window at the evening sky. There were just a few scattered clouds, and the reddish hues of a great sunset. A beautiful end to another miserable day. Watching that amazing sunset, he wished he could just reset his brain, make it turn silent and stop obsessing over every word that had been said, every email, document, or schematic involving work. But no matter how hard he tried to stop the madness, his brain carried on internally and silently all the arguments he wished he could have had with Bob McIdiot, his infuriatingly irrational boss.

  Quentin wished he had the power to walk out of that building for good, slamming the door in the bastard’s face on his way out. He fantasized for a minute or two how that would feel. It would feel great for a second, and then what? Unemployed, without a fat bank account, without a serious job prospect, who knows how long it would take him to get back on his feet? Maybe in a few days he’d end up regretting his sudden departure, regardless of how great it would feel for those few moments. Nope, he couldn’t do that . . . His exit strategy needed some well-conceived tactics, like finding a new job first.

  Reaching that decision, he tried to relax, to idle his overactive brain. But the darn thing had a mind of its own and went instantly back into obsessing over arguments he could have made with his boss, things he could have said but didn’t.

  He weighed his options for a little while, then decided to find a friend online and talk about it. It always helped.

  He logged on to Rat Olympics and smiled recognizing some familiar names present in the chat room.

  DespeRatt:Happy Friday, folks.

  LostGirl: 2U2, dear Ratt.

  Slave19: How have you been, my man?

  DespeRatt: Ahh . . . don’t even ask. Just another day in paradise.

  LostGirl: What’s on your mind? What happened?

  DespeRatt: Nothing out of the ordinary. Same shit, different day. But today I can’t turn my brain off for some reason.

  LostGirl: Why? What’s going on in there?

  DespeRatt: Just thoughts . . . What I should have said and done instead of what I actually said and did. How it would feel when I’d finally be able to resign and get the hell out of there to never see them again. What my idiot boss meant when he said this and that . . . Pure insanity!

  LostGirl: Sounds like anxiety to me . . . racing thoughts and all that. Are you suffering from anxiety?

  DespeRatt: N–no, I don’t think so. If they leave me alone for one day or so, it completely disappears. So I guess the answer is no.

  LostGirl: Sounds like you may be heading in that direction anyway, you know. That’s how it starts. Welcome to the club, my friend. Soon we’ll be exchanging our experiences with anti-anxiety meds instead of having our regular bitching sessions.

  DespeRatt: Oh, I hope not! I just need to get my ass in gear and get that new job you’re recommending, LostGirl. That’s what I need to do.

  LostGirl: Go for it!

  Slave19: Why is it worse for you today?

  DespeRatt: I’m agitated, but also very angry. You see, this is my time, this Friday afternoon, my time off away from work. And what do I do with it? Obsess over work, over my idiot boss. I obsess and waste my free time on them. And that makes me incredibly mad . . . I could smash stuff right now. And I can’t turn this stupid brain off, no matter what I try. And don’t tell me about meditation, ’cause then I’ll really start smashing stuff.

  Slave19: LOL, no I won’t, don’t worry. I was wondering what’s making it worse today out of all days. Is it because it’s Friday? Or did something happen today?

  DespeRatt: I think it’s because it’s Friday, but you’re right, something did happen. Today it felt personal, my argument with him. Usually, it’s just technical . . . we argue over specs, blueprints, solution design, that kind of crap. Today it was more personal. He picked at the way I do things, my interactions with people, that kind of stuff. Oh God . . . how I hate this shit and what it does to my brain!

  LostGirl: Ahh . . . screw him! Just imagine him sitting on the toilet and running out of TP or something.

  DespeRatt: LOL, that might actually work, thanks much for that visual!

  Slave19: Hey, what are you planning to have for dinner?

  DespeRatt: Haven’t thought about that yet . . . I’ll order some pizza, I guess.

  Slave19: Here’s the deal: if you tell me where you order it from in the next half hour, I’ll cover your tab.

  DespeRatt: Whoa . . . are you stalking me or something? Sorry . . . paranoid here, but creeps are everywhere.

  Slave19: nah . . . no stalking, you
’re not that pretty. I didn’t ask for your home address or your name, just the location where you order your pizza. Put a code name on the order, say . . . My Free Dinner.

  DespeRatt: Sounds reasonable enough . . . all right, you’re on! With my many thanks!

  Slave19: Cool! Where do you order from?

  DespeRatt: From Pie in the Sky, it’s close to where I live.

  LostGirl:How about me? I’m just as hungry, pissed at life, and anxious as the Ratt is.

  Slave19: How about this: I’ll buy you dinner next Friday—same deal.

  LostGirl: You’re on! Thanks!

  DespeRatt: I just placed the order, thanks again! You must be making some really nice coin, treating strangers like this. How can I repay you?

  Slave19: No need. Just be happy, do what’s right for you, and enjoy your pie. And pay it forward someday, help someone in need.

  DespeRatt: That I can do.

  Slave19: Just called in and covered it—enjoy. Gotta sign off now, have an excellent weekend everyone!

  LostGirl: See you next week, 19!

  Quentin closed the lid on his laptop and leaned back in his chair. His anxiety gone, he decided to sacrifice the entire weekend to his newly fueled desire to find a new job. He had a résumé to finish, references to organize, a job search to conduct, and several recruiters to contact. All that considered, he should be done before Monday.

  He couldn’t hope for immediate results, but it was definitely better that sitting idle, obsessing over an idiotic boss who wasn’t gonna turn any smarter, revenge fantasies that were never gonna come true, and a new job that wasn’t gonna just materialize by itself.

  ...29

  ...Friday, April 22, 3:18PM AKDT(UTC-8:00 hours)

  ...Elmendorf Air Force Base

  ...Anchorage, Alaska

  Zane Pemberton was always first on the flight deck, and always mad at his wingman, who made a habit of being late. Not by a whole lot, not enough to get them in trouble with the commander. Just by a minute or two, enough to fuel Zane’s irritation and get them both a preflight jogging session to avoid getting canned.