by Tom Saric
“Officer Christopher Hanson here.” He always answered his cell phone that way when he didn’t know the caller, which meant that he had deleted her from his contacts. Now, hearing his voice, she realized that calling him was a bad idea. If Crilley found out what she was doing, she would lose her job altogether. If she could just speak to someone in Paramilitary, maybe she could find out where the intelligence on the weapons came from. Chris would know. She had thought she could get him to tell her what he knew. But maybe he had moved on.
“Hi,” she swallowed hard. “It’s me.” A long moment passed before he spoke.
“Bailey?”
“Yeah.” It came out as a grunt.
“What is it?” his voice turned cold, icy.
“I need to meet with you. As soon as possible.”
“What?” She had caught him off guard. “I don’t have time for this, Bailey. I’m busy, we’ll have to--”
“It’s not about that,” Bailey said. “It’s about this Somalia thing. I can’t tell you everything over the phone, but it’s serious. I need to speak to you, someone I can trust. You’re the only one I can turn to right now.”
Chris exhaled into the receiver. “Come to my office in fifteen minutes.”
“No, that won’t work.” Bailey shook her head. “It needs to be off-site.”
“What’ve you gotten into?”
“Starbucks on Chain Bridge in fifteen minutes.” She hung up before Chris could protest.
Bailey parked her Honda Civic in front of the Starbucks on Chain Bridge. A random car search ahead of her at Langley's North parking lot exit had caused a fifteen-minute delay. No amount of horn honking or steering wheel smacking could speed up a search. Bailey was relieved that she had made it out so quickly. She just hoped Chris had waited for her.
She scurried across the parking lot, shielding her head from the pouring rain.
She opened the door, shook the rain off, and scanned the coffee shop. On the surface, this Starbucks looked like every other Starbucks. Customers sat around the bistro tables. The staccato of baristas frothing milk and background jazz music drowned out any conversations. The difference was that this Starbucks was a quarter-mile up the road from the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Men and women in suits and long coats regularly made the trip down for coffee runs, returning to work with trays full of coffee for their department. The excuse was that the coffee at headquarters was subpar and stale. While there was some truth to that, many people drifted in to discuss matters off the record.
She saw Chris sitting at a table by the window across from two cups of coffee. He stared out the window at merging traffic on the highway and hadn't noticed her come in. The first thing Bailey felt was relief that he waited for her. The second thing was a wave of apprehension. It had been five months since Chris asked Bailey to leave the apartment. Six months since she had told him about Blake. Up until then, in their three years together, they had never had what Bailey would have considered a real argument. Bailey knew that a large part of what had kept them together during those three years was her ability to keep Chris' ego inflated and his ability to make her feel safe.
Her father said that Chris was silver-spooned from the cradle. His upbringing couldn't have contrasted more with Bailey's. He was the son of a state senator and heiress to a mining corporation, while she was raised by a widowed, unemployed, alcoholic father. He used trust fund money to go to boarding schools and then attended West Point. Afterwards, Chris joined the Army Rangers. Within two years, the CIA’s paramilitary division recruited him.
It was at a morning intelligence debriefing that Bailey had first seen him. He stood up and delivered a report on rebel activity in Southern Armenia. He immediately gave her the impression of being a strong, loyal person. Someone who made her feel secure. To her surprise, later that day, he stopped her at the elevator and asked her point blank if she would go to dinner with him. While she realized that many women would take offense to a man ordering for them, she let him. It made him feel good, and if he felt good doing things for her, then all the better. Shortly after, she moved in with him. A year later, he proposed at the foot of the Washington Monument at night. Two years of bliss followed.
But that all changed. After she told Chris about the affair with Blake, they both agreed they would work through it. In the month that followed, they had vicious arguments. The arguments would start benignly enough, with her going out with some girlfriends and Chris asking her repeatedly what time she would be back. She would become defensive and even hateful. Chris just couldn’t seem to let things go.
She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t let herself feel loneliness or pain. The one feeling she let creep in and grab hold of her was her disdain for Chris.
But the thought that troubled her most right now was that he looked good.
His blonde hair was freshly trimmed and he had finally got rid of the goatee. He was just over six feet tall, with a lean frame that filled out his trench coat. The ensemble was complete with a pair of polished, caramel-colored loafers.
He noticed Bailey standing at the entryway of the coffee shop and half raised his hand, acknowledging her. She walked over and lowered herself into the chair across from him.
“It’s for you.” Chris motioned to the coffee on the table.
“You remembered my drink.” Bailey smiled.
“It’s hard to forget extra foam, non-fat, extra hot, vanilla latte with cinnamon sprinkles.”
They both let out a nervous laugh but it quickly faded. Bailey shifted her gaze to her coffee cup.
“You look good,” Bailey offered.
“Thanks.” Chris furrowed his brow. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you kind of look like hell.”
“Thanks, Chris. Let’s just say it’s been a long, long day. And I don’t think it’s over.”
“The Somalia thing? Sounded like it’s over to me.”
Bailey looked him straight in the eye. “Is it?”
Chris shrugged.
“So, what happened on your end?”
“Bailey, those things are classified internally. You know that.”
“I’m looking into something here. There’s some inconsistencies that my department needs to sort out. It’s a bit outside of protocol. Can you help me?”
Chris leaned back and crossed his arms, looking at Bailey sideways. “Sure,” he said. “But first, can I ask you something?”
Bailey nodded.
"Are you seeing anyone?”
It took a second to register. She let out a sound of disbelief and looked out the window. “Are you kidding? I can’t believe you’re asking that.” She looked at Chris, his face unfazed. “No, I’m not.”
“I want you to know Bailey, that I think I’m ready to forgive you.”
She processed the information, the way he sat relaxed, nose in the air. “You’re a real asshole, Chris.” Bailey stood up.
“Bailey I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he said, grabbing his coffee cup.
“Do you think I called you here to get back together or something? To come crawling back?”
Chris shrugged. “The fact that you showed up, the coffee, the attempt at small talk.”
She shook her head. “No, Chris, it’s over. It’s been over. And I don’t need your forgiveness. What I needed was your support.”
His face turned red. “You always took it too far, Bailey. Trying to move up. By any means necessary. Inching closer and closer to the fire until it got too hot. Then you got confused.”
Chris drummed on the table for a few beats, then made for the door.
Bailey closed her eyes, reminding herself why she was there. She turned and followed Chris to the parking lot outside. Rain poured over her as she galloped and grabbed Chris by the arm.
“I need to know about what happened today,” she shouted over the rain pounding the asphalt. “Where did the intelligence come from about the location of the weapons?”
“I don’t know.” Chris tried to pull
away, but Bailey held his arm.
“I can tell when you’re lying, Chris. What do you want from me?”
Chris considered for a moment. “Nothing.”
“Stop being a dick, Chris. You owe me this, at least.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“I know you don’t. We all own our own shit. So I’m just asking as a favor. Old friends.”
Chris sighed and scanned the parking lot.
Bailey continued, sensing she was getting through to him. “Can you tell me who got the information about the weapons. It came from your division.”
“No, it didn’t.” Chris pulled away from Bailey’s grip. “We just acted on the intelligence once it was passed on to us. We didn’t gather the intel. I don’t know where you got that from.”
“Where did it come from, then?”
“I should be asking you.” Chris started up the parking lot. “Because it came from your office.”
22
Paul drove across the desert, eventually reaching a broken-up road he followed for over an hour. Most of the roads in this part of Somalia hadn’t been repaired since the 1969 coup d'etat that many felt knocked the nation into its downward trajectory.
Bullet holes dotted the Jeep's driver's side, and the nylon roof was torn to shreds. Something rattled around under the hood, and Paul thought that at any minute the Jeep would either stall or burst into flames.
By the time he reached the town of Ceerigaabo, the pain of his injuries had settled down, replaced by a whole-body numbness. His mind, too, seemed to shut down.
Paul parked across the street from an Internet café where decals in the front window claimed they not only had the best Internet and phone rates in Somalia but all of Africa. While Paul didn't pay much attention to their advertising, the lights were on inside, so he entered, paid the worker behind the desk enough for two hours and a pack of Italian Marlboros, and sat in front of the computer closest to the back wall.
As his computer booted up, he lit a cigarette and didn't mind the smoke drifting into his eyes. He thought of Ellen being dragged into the helicopter. He was troubled that he didn't feel much of anything. He believed that most people, when faced with a desperate scenario like his own, would (and should) feel emotions ranging from anger to sadness to confusion. He was somehow set-up to look like a terrorist, he was considered an enemy to his own country, and the one person he truly loved had been abducted. He realized that when the stress of a situation stretched far beyond the limits of which one could cope did the mind do the only thing it could still manage: denial. That had to explain the numbness, the emptiness. He was in denial.
He took another drag on his cigarette and stared at the monitor. His only lead at this point was the helicopter serial number. He took the pencil resting on the keyboard and wrote the number down on the pack of cigarettes so he wouldn’t forget: VO4-66A.
The helicopter was a private one. The kind that billionaires owned. That meant Hadad had to be working with someone, or for someone.
Hadad worked with many different businessmen, mafia, politicians, and military officials over the years. He had a history of carefully manipulating each deal to suit his own needs. In 1992, Hadad controlled a mercenary force of retired Senegalese soldiers and made a large backroom financial deal with the United States government to invade the Liberian capital Monrovia and restore order after warlord Charles Taylor had taken over the government. Instead, Hadad funneled the funds into a personal bank account, informed the Taylor regime of the planned invasion, and sent his own men into slaughter. Then he went off the grid for six years, occasionally mentioned in relation to terrorist activities, until he carried out the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam embassy bombings. He got away with that too.
Paul searched the Internet for two hours, trying to match the serial number with a helicopter. By that point, he had already popped open his second pack of cigarettes, polished off two stale pastries and a cup of tea. The Internet connection was dial-up and slow as hell, but he searched a series of photographs to try and match the helicopter.
He learned that Sosnovsky, a large American Aircraft Corporation, manufactured the helicopter. The image he held of the massive helicopter most closely matched Model S-42A, a fourteen-passenger commercial helicopter. The company webpage listed that it had a range of nearly five hundred miles and that it could land in any open area. The helicopter could have come from any nearby country to pick up Hadad.
He subsequently searched the model number and found that forty-four were currently in commercial use worldwide. Forty-four possibilities, assuming it was registered. Large aeronautical and military corporations often made a surplus of weapons and vehicles that never got registered and sold them at huge profit on the black market. While government agencies tried to crack down on this, the truth was that there were likely as many unregistered helicopters as registered ones. If the helicopter was unregistered, Paul knew it would be impossible to trace.
As his tea grew cold, he scrolled through the list of registered helicopters and finally came across the serial number he was looking for.
It was registered to an American petrol company named VeritOil.
He kept searching for information about the company. According to Wikipedia, the company was initially founded in 1958, and bought up reserves in Columbia and Peru. It had later discovered reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, and by 1997 had grown to be the third- highest producer of natural gas and fifth-highest producer of crude oil among United States-based companies. A new CEO had been introduced in 1996, and since then, a combination of political unrest and failed explorations lead to major declines in profit. The company’s credit had become so poor that in 2004, it unsuccessfully applied for a $240 million government loan for exploration in Atlantic Canada. It had apparently stayed afloat by introducing new technology for clean fuel processing. It became a leader in clean fuel emissions and last year was the only U.S. petrol company to have met new government emissions standards.
He found the answer to their connection to Somalia in an archived BBC article from 2006. He rested his cigarette on an ashtray and stared at the screen. VeritOil Signs Contract with Somalia’s Transitional Government. According to the article, VeritOil had signed a contract granting them exclusive drilling rights to seventy percent of the Puntland as well as any oil reserves they found in the Gulf of Aden. In exchange, they forwarded the Somali government five billion dollars and would pay a twenty-percent tax on all profits.
Paul shook his head in disbelief. He had heard that Somalia was considered one of the few untapped oil reserves left on dry land. Only ocean and arctic deposits were bigger. From a strictly engineering perspective, Somalia’s reserve was considered more accessible. No one had drilled, though, because the country was far too unstable for major projects to begin. For a company to exclusively own that proportion of the reserve, it held incredible potential.
The company’s CEO, John Daniels, was pictured on an insert in the article shaking hands with the then-Prime Minister of the transitional federal government. They stood in front of a group of men and women in suits on the steps of the Puntland parliament building. At one point in time, Daniels had likely been a handsome man, with a strong jaw and gentle eyes. By the time this picture had been taken, however, he was at least fifty pounds overweight and balding. His graying temples and full beard suited his olive complexion. The BBC report quoted him as saying, “we hope that this contract can help bring about stability to this region and prosperity to this country. This is not a contract just for today, but for the future.”
No doubt, the contract hadn’t worked the way Daniels had hoped. Somalia was in worse shape than it had been two years ago. And there was no drilling to speak of.
But Paul was still missing the link between VeritOil and Kadar Hadad. Had they made a deal with Hadad? If anything, they would want to eliminate Hadad; he was a part of the reason for the unrest in Somalia. There had to be a reason, and Paul had to find it out if he was t
o have a chance of finding Hadad. Of finding Ellen.
23
Although Bailey told herself to turn back a dozen times, once she got off the elevator on the fourteenth floor she knew she was going to go through with it. She had systematically planned out each component of what she was about to do. First, she kept herself up until one in the morning by sipping strong coffee so she would be sure the floor of the NCS was deserted. As she tiptoed up the aisle, all she noticed were two cubicles with desk lights on, where a couple of keen analysts buried themselves in paper work. Behind the cubicles, at the far end of the floor, a cleaner ran a vacuum. She had managed to slip in without raising any suspicion. The first part of her plan had gone smoothly. Next, she would enter Crilley's office using the key he had given her when she started. Once in, she’d quickly scan all of the folders, and if she found MR-14406 she would read it quickly, just enough to make sense of the inconsistencies. She would replace the file, maybe take a few photos with her smartphone, slip out of the office, and be on the road back home. I'll be out in fifteen minutes, she said to herself.
That, of course, was the best-case scenario. The analytical part of her mind, the part that constantly weighed the risks and benefits, that annoying part that wouldn't shut off, kept going through worst-case scenarios in her head. If she were caught breaking into her boss's office, her career in the CIA was over. That much was a certainty. More likely, she would be charged with treason, made an example of in court, and sent to a military prison for five-to-ten years.
But those scenarios required someone to walk in on her. The chances of that happening were low.
She needed to make sense of what was happening. A clandestine operative claimed to have been given a ship’s manifest that conveniently had nuclear weapons aboard omitted. Then, he tracked the weapons down and notified her about them. All the while, her boss somehow managed to locate the weapons in the middle of a Somali desert and arranged a swift recovery operation in record time. And half of the operative’s file was missing.