“The director will see you now,” she announced as he continued forward without breaking stride.
“Thank you,” he said, feeling small for judging her.
She sat at that desk, day in, day out, guarding a powerful man’s time, completely oblivious to the dark secrets and life-altering decisions made beyond those thick mahogany doors. It had to gnaw at her. Returning home every day, with the full understanding that her job was so close to the epicenter of everything, yet utterly disconnected from any meaning. He returned her look, a moment of understanding passing between them before he stepped into Pushnoy’s den of iniquity. The door closed quickly behind him.
“Let’s get this over with,” said Pushnoy, pointing to the chair he would occupy.
He didn’t bother with apologies or any obsequious flattery. He moved immediately to the chair next to Pushnoy’s desk and sat down. The director’s light blue eyes burned a hole through him, but he maintained his quiet composure.
“The silent treatment, huh?” said Pushnoy. “Incompetent, maybe. Stupid? Definitely not.”
The director pressed a button on his desk phone and placed both elbows on the desk, resting his chin on his hands.
“General Sanderson, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
“Likewise, Director Pushnoy. I appreciate you taking my call.”
“Yes, about that,” said Pushnoy. “What do you propose?”
“Not much, in the grand scheme of things,” said Sanderson. “I want a truce. Your word that I’m off whatever hit list you keep over there.”
“And you’re going to hang up your jacket and never interfere with Russian Federation affairs again?”
“It’s hang up your hat, Director,” said Sanderson. “And yes, I agree to that term, with a few conditions.”
“And what might those be?”
“I need your help with something,” said Sanderson. “Something that concerns us both.”
“I can’t wait to hear what this might be.”
“It involves Reznikov,” said Sanderson.
“How so?”
“First I need you to answer a question.”
“That depends on the question.”
“How did you find me?” asked Sanderson.
“You really want to know?” said Pushnoy. “Sometimes the truth hurts.”
“I just lost most of my organization on a remote island in the middle of the Atlantic. People I’ve known for years. People I’ve trained personally. I can handle the truth.”
Pushnoy briefly explained how they had acquired the information regarding Sanderson’s presence in Argentina, and that it had been his idea to lure Sanderson’s people away to Africa.
“You expect me to believe that you didn’t know who you were talking to on the other side?” said Sanderson. “Just an anonymous email exchange?”
“What did it matter?” said Pushnoy. “We vetted the information provided to our satisfaction. They upheld their end of the bargain. Speaking of bargains. Reznikov?”
“Well, that’s where this gets really interesting. I have reason to believe he’s in the United States—by invitation.”
“From whom?”
“From the same group that used the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service to cripple the only force capable and willing to rescind that invitation. A group with quite a stranglehold on things in my country right now.”
A pause so long ensued Ardankin nearly broke the interminable silence himself.
“I’m listening,” said Pushnoy.
Sanderson explained his theory and the early stages of a plan to track down the scientist. Pushnoy listened, his face never changing. When he finished, Pushnoy agreed to Sanderson’s truce and gave him contact instructions to use if the American unearthed evidence to support his theory. The director replaced the handset and rubbed his chin while Ardankin waited patiently for instructions.
“Still silent?” said Pushnoy. “There’s hope for you yet. Get Osin and Colonel Levkin’s Spetsgruppa out of Argentina immediately.”
“Yes, Director,” said Ardankin, starting to get up.
“Did I say I was finished?”
“No, Director.”
“Send part of Levkin’s team to Ciudad Juarez. I don’t care how you do it. I want them standing by to assist General Sanderson with the elimination of Anatoly Reznikov.”
“You trust this Sanderson?”
“I trust he wants to find and kill Reznikov. That’s all that matters to me.”
Chapter 59
FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
Ryan Sharpe pressed the microchipped ID attached to the lanyard around his neck against the card reader and waited for the adjacent fingerprint scanner to activate. A few seconds later the biometric security device confirmed his identity, permitting him to open the windowless metal door to the National Security Branch section of the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
He navigated the expansive maze of fluorescent-lit cubicles and dark conference rooms, glad to find it still empty. He had about a half hour before it started to fill, the sound of ringing phones, clacking keyboards, and voices rising to a crescendo shortly after that. Then Assistant Director Fred Carroll would arrive, and Sharpe wouldn’t get a minute to himself until he left twelve hours later. He needed this hour to clear out any unfinished business from yesterday and make some progress on longer-term tasks that would undoubtedly get pushed further behind once the section rolled in.
When Sharpe rounded the corner that led directly into the cluster of cubicles and windowed offices that defined the National Security Branch’s “executive suite,” he was surprised to find Dana O’Reilly’s office door open and brightly lit. Maybe she forgot to turn off her light last night. She had planned on staying another hour to tie up the quick investigation into Berg’s mystery group. He hadn’t wanted her putting any more time into it.
She’d quickly verified what Berg had passed along. While intriguing, it didn’t warrant continued FBI attention. Brown River definitely had personnel and accounting problems, something that Treasury would find interesting given the billion-dollar scope of the issue. Then again, Sharpe wasn’t sure how he could pass the information along to Treasury given that the files were obtained illegally. He could give them a nudge through one of his contacts and let them sort it out.
And what about Berg’s phantom army? Ajax Global solely existed as a paper corporation based in Delaware, which wasn’t uncommon. Delaware and Nevada had some of the most flexible business laws, plus no state corporate income tax. A publically available record search yielded a short list of corporate officers, all fictitious names from what O’Reilly could determine. Once again, not exactly a surprise, but more importantly, none of their business.
Berg had no doubt stumbled onto something strange. Sharpe just didn’t see how or where the National Security Branch, or the FBI in general, could get involved. The two kidnapping attempts referenced were FBI business, but the FBI field office determined by regional jurisdiction would handle that. Sharpe could call over to check on the progress and stress the importance of the investigation to NSB, but that was pretty much the extent of his influence in that matter.
“That you, boss?” O’Reilly called out well before he reached her door.
“Yes. The evil boss,” he said, poking his head inside. “Please tell me you didn’t come in early to work on that project.”
She had that look he had come to recognize over the years. Sharpe knew her next words before she spoke.
“I found something,” she said. “Been here all night, actually. Take a look at this.”
“All night?”
“I left to grab dinner and slept for a few hours on the couch in the break room.”
He took off his jacket and threw it on a low filing cabinet next to the door. “What the hell did you find, O’Reilly? Things tend to get crazy when you find things.”
Sharpe stood behind her desk and leaned against the windowsill, glancing
at a digital map on a flat-screen monitor. The second screen immediately to the right displayed a detailed list, resembling the payroll file sent by Berg.
“Taking a few last glances at the payroll file, I noticed a pattern that Berg’s people might have missed or perhaps they purposefully withheld. I almost missed it myself,” said O’Reilly.
“Why would they withhold anything?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they wanted us to find this on our own. Generate an aha moment. Or like I said, they just missed it, like I almost did.”
“They’ve been poring over this for longer than you have,” said Sharpe.
“Either way, it’s interesting, if not disturbing. The addresses highlighted by Berg are all P.O. boxes, which we already knew, and that’s not exactly unusual for people in the Brown River line of work. I do find it a bit odd that all of the employees suspected of being part of Berg’s phantom army use P.O. boxes. I found that roughly seventy percent of Brown River’s non-phantom army employees have personal addresses listed. Odd, but nothing earth-shattering.”
“Let’s move on to the earth-shattering part,” said Sharpe.
“I started to see some repeat P.O. box locations, so I mapped a sample of two hundred mystery employees, finding this,” she said, clicking her mouse button.
Tight clusters of icons appeared across the United States, centered on a few dozen major cities.
“People come from all around,” said Sharpe, not fully vested in his counterargument.
“Then I mapped a thousand more. This takes time, by the way. We need a software upgrade,” said O’Reilly.
“I’ll get right on that,” said Sharpe. “Well?”
She clicked the mouse, and the identical pattern remained, with another dozen clusters appearing in some less populated cities. If Sharpe had to roughly guess, the clusters appeared in forty to fifty cities. He could immediately see a direct relationship between the number of icons appearing in a city and its population, with a few notable exceptions like Fredericksburg, Virginia, which had a disproportionately high number compared to New York City or Los Angeles. The picture represented a purposeful distribution.
“What about now?” she said.
“I’ll admit, that’s pretty unusual.”
“They don’t all use the same postal building for their P.O. boxes, especially in the larger metro areas, but they’re still tightly clustered,” said O’Reilly.
“Could they be spreading this out for tax reasons or something corporate related?”
“Based on Brown River’s latest quarterly statement, they shouldn’t have a billion or so dollars to fund an expansion. They’ve barely kept the doors open as it is,” said O’Reilly.
“Strange,” said Sharpe.
“You want to see something even stranger?”
“Probably not.”
She clicked the mouse again, the pattern remaining the same, but more concentrated. “This is all three thousand six hundred and forty-two phantom employees.”
“Same exact pattern,” muttered Sharpe.
“You haven’t seen the strange part yet,” she said. “I broke all of this down in a spreadsheet by city and metro area, salary, military or police specialty, years in service prior to joining this payroll, and a few other factors. I created a graphic with bar graphs, pie charts, and all kinds of bells and whistles.”
“That’s a lot of work,” said Sharpe.
“I think you’ll agree it was worth the time. There’s nothing random about the distribution of this group. In fact, it’s organized down to a level that suggests something more nefarious than corporate tax evasion. I identified forty-six geographical clusters, each with the same proportion of employees, based on salary. Six at the seventy-five-thousand-dollar level per one at the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand level. Sounds like a team of grunts with a team leader. For every ten at the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand level, you have one at the four-hundred-and fifty-thousand level. Like an area coordinator. The grunt to team leader ratio never varies. The area coordinator to team leader number stays consistent until you start dissecting either the highest population metro areas or low population clusters. Makes sense. One area coordinator runs a few states out in the Great Plains, while the New York tri-state area requires a more intensive management approach.”
“This holds up in every cluster?”
“Yes. It’s structured like—”
“A sales organization,” interrupted Sharpe.
“Or a paramilitary organization,” O’Reilly countered. “I found something else, which doesn’t exactly shed any light on the purpose of this structure, but I found it interesting. Ajax wasn’t the only company recruiting military contractors. I ran a few search strings through the social-media tracking database—”
“Which doesn’t officially exist anywhere at the FBI,” said Sharpe.
“Yes. I used a system that doesn’t yet exist to link names on the payroll list to Ares Global and Mars Global. Two more Delaware companies with bogus corporate officers. The matches I made corresponded geographically. Ajax is East Coast to the Ohio River, roughly. Ares is everything west of the Rocky Mountains. Mars is everything in the middle. Not sure what that means, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some folks high up on the Brown River payroll had responsibility for these larger areas.”
“It looks like a deliberate arrangement,” said Sharpe. “Each a mythological name associated with warfare.”
“Berg claims they’re directly involved in two kidnapping attempts,” said O’Reilly. “Should we take this to Carroll? I’ll take the heat for it, say I was contacted by an anonymous source and stole some time away to investigate.”
“First, you’re not taking the heat for my problems, though I appreciate the offer,” said Sharpe. “Second, Berg warned me to be discreet with this. He sounded a little paranoid.”
“He’s a career CIA officer,” said O’Reilly.
“Right. Which also begs the question, why does he need to bring me into the fold? The CIA has resources,” said Sharpe, standing up. “I need to hear the rest of this story he alluded to. We’ll make a decision at that point.”
“One more thing, since you’ll have Berg on the line,” said O’Reilly. “Maybe I should have started our conversation with this. Sanderson and his known associates are back on the FBI’s most wanted list. Interpol. Europol. Everywhere.”
“Jesus. That does shade your findings a different color.”
“Or it’s just an incredible coincidence.”
Sharpe rubbed his face. “I know I’m going to seriously regret this call.”
He walked to his adjacent office and closed the door, dropping into the guest chair facing his desk, staring at the deep red patches of horizon peeking between the buildings of the East End. Sharpe did the same thing every morning, taking a few minutes to stare out his office window at the waking city. He really had a bad feeling about this.
Mumbling a few obscenities, he turned the desk phone in his direction and dialed the number scribbled on a Post-it note stuck to the secure phone. As he expected, the CIA officer answered immediately.
“Good morning, Ryan,” said Berg.
“That depends on one’s perspective, I guess,” said Sharpe. “Six men, one team leader, an area coordinator for every ten teams.”
“Each coordinator has one team comprised solely of former Special Operations types. Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and Fredericksburg each have a team of former tier one special operators,” said Berg. “This is an army on U.S. soil.”
“Tell me more about these attempted kidnappings.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who was kidnapped, and how do you know it was this group?”
“Are you sure you want to know?” said Berg.
“Cut the theatrics, Karl. If this group is behind domestic kidnappings, what else are they into? I need to know what to do with this.”
“Don’t say I didn’t give you a chance to sit this one out,” said B
erg.
“You reeled me in good,” said Sharpe.
“Technically, only one of the kidnappings was attempted,” Berg began. “I’ll keep this short.”
When he finished, Sharpe stared out at the buildings. He wasn’t sure what to do with the information Berg just shared. All he could summon was a simple question.
“Who can I trust?”
“Inside the Beltway? I don’t know yet,” said Berg. “We’re meeting to discuss this shortly.”
“Be careful who you discuss this with. Sanderson and his crew just went back on every law enforcement watch list in existence.”
“Son of a bitch. They had an immunity deal. Wide scope,” said Berg. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“I haven’t read the corresponding write-up for the watch list. Could be something completely different.”
“What are you doing this weekend?” Berg asked.
“This weekend? Why?”
“I’d like you to meet the people I know for a fact that we can trust.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“I can’t see you walking away from this, Ryan,” said Berg. “You’re going to need a tight circle of trust. One you can call on at any time for help and that can rely on you for the same. If my suspicions prove anywhere even remotely correct, we won’t get much help outside of that circle.”
“I’ll consider it,” said Sharpe.
“Call me when you’ve decided,” Berg said, and hung up.
Sharpe closed his eyes for several moments, wishing this nightmare away. When he opened them, the sun’s deep orange rays skimmed the tops of a few buildings in the distance. He buzzed O’Reilly, who appeared almost instantly, shutting the door behind her.
“What did he say?”
“What are you doing this weekend?” said Sharpe.
“Are you and Mrs. Sharpe on the outs?”
“Funny,” said Sharpe. “I think we need to meet with Berg’s circle of trust. If we decide to pursue this, we’re going to need a few friends to back us up. Friends that don’t fuck around.”
“As long as your wife doesn’t have a problem with it,” she said.
OMEGA: A Black Flagged Thriller (The Black Flagged Series Book 5) Page 29