Black Flagged Redux Page 5

  The nondescript, gray metal door leading out of the courtyard opened, and Josif Hadzic stepped through the solitary breach in the courtyard’s walls. Josif had changed significantly since Srecko’s imprisonment, transformed from the young, scrawny, awkward nephew into a muscularly lean, handsome, young Serbian man. His thick black hair, prominent brow, and deep-set brown eyes proclaimed to the world that he was of pure Serbian stock. A true testament to the cause Srecko had spent his entire life fighting for…and for which he had been summarily discarded by the so called “patriots” that now lived in luxury.

  Despite Josif’s soft, almost serene composure upon entering the courtyard, Srecko harbored Josif’s secret. He was a dedicated ultra-nationalist, like his uncle, after having seen the direct impact of the NATO-imposed restrictions on their just campaign to carve out a little space for the true Serbia. His family had lost everything due to their allegiance with Milosevic’s army, but fortunately, none of them had been imprisoned. Josif’s father, Andrija, Srecko’s younger brother by three years, had wisely kept his nose out of the seductively lucrative spoils of Srecko’s enterprises.

  He had taken care of his brother, but always from a distance. He respected Andrija’s choice, and his brother had served loyally in the regular Yugoslavian Army for several years, fighting for the cause during the Bosnian war. Now, Josif’s family was in shambles. His father an absent, raging alcoholic and his mother a catatonic drone working several shift jobs in the outskirts of Belgrade. She refused to accept the modest amount of money Srecko had offered to keep them afloat. “Poisoned money,” she would say.

  Josif started visiting Srecko during the early days of his incarceration at The Hague. Srecko immediately recognized the hunger and intelligence in his eyes. He soon arranged for Josif to stay close by in Amsterdam. Srecko had unfinished business and plenty of hidden money to keep an underground organization alive. More than anything, he needed loyalty that would not abandon him in his time of need.

  Josif walked briskly to the stone table. “Uncle,” he said, and Srecko rose from the table to hug him with the cigarette still burning in his right hand.

  “My Josif. Have you brought me some good news?” he said, glancing at the hardcover book in Josif’s hands and signaling for the young man to have a seat at the table.

  “Always good news, Uncle. And a gift. I know how fond you are of the Fruska Gora National Forest,” Josif said and slid the book toward his uncle.

  “One of the thickest, most mysterious forests in the world. We used to take a lot of trips there, your father and I. Lots of good memories…and a few bad,” he said and raised a knowing eyebrow at Josif.

  “I think you’ll find page twenty-three to be your favorite,” he said and looked away at the sky.

  Srecko opened the book and casually thumbed through the pictures, stopping once or twice to admire the picturesque scene of a forest engulfed village, or a hidden waterfall. He stopped on page twenty-three and his eyes narrowed to a reptilian quality. Page twenty-three was not part of the original picture book’s publication, but rather a cleverly-designed and professionally-inserted counterfeit addition. Designed to look the same in structure and layout, the half-page-sized picture had nothing to do with the Fruska Gora National Forest from an outsider’s perspective. To Srecko, the photograph had everything to do with the forest.

  “This was taken recently?” he said, still staring intensely at the picture.

  “A few days ago in Buenos Aires. Our guy emailed the pictures while they finished lunch.”

  “Do we still know where they are?” Srecko said and looked up from the photo.

  Josif lowered his head slightly in a subconscious deference to his uncle.

  “No. Once they started walking, our guy found it impossible to follow them without tipping them off. I’m sorry about that, but…”

  “No need to apologize, Josif. Never apologize. Not even to me. This is great work. It shows great patience and intellect, my nephew. Very important traits to have,” he said, glaring at the picture.

  “They’ll show up again. That bitch is predictable and has a taste for expensive things. She won’t be hard to find. As for him, tell our people to be extremely cautious. This one is capable of just about anything.”

  “What would you like to do about them, Uncle?”

  “I want them dead, but first, I want to know what they did with my money. I don’t care what needs to be done to get this information out of them. They’re trying to indict me on charges that I ordered the systematic rape of over two hundred Kosovar whores…why not add another rape to the list? Or two.”

  “We’ll try for both, but what if we can only grab one?”

  “Grab the woman first. I can’t stress to you how badly I want her to suffer…and I want to see it on video. I have a DVD player, and I’m getting tired of the usual movies.”

  Josif grinned and stood up. “Understood, Uncle. I’ll keep you informed. See you next week,” he said and his grin faded into a deadly serious gaze.

  “You know, the security here is pretty terrible. I’m worried about your safety,” Josif said.

  Srecko stifled a laugh at the audacity of what Josif had just implied.

  “Perhaps one day it will come to that, my nephew. For now, I’ll let the lawyers work their magic. One of my dearest friends was granted a provisional release a few weeks ago. Haven’t heard a word from him since, of course,” Srecko said.

  “Mr. Stanisic hasn’t disappeared, as some expected, which is a good thing. Maybe the lawyers can get you the same deal,” Josif said.

  “Maybe,” he said and hugged his nephew.

  He watched Josif stride toward the door, which buzzed and opened from the inside. He waved one more time at his nephew before the door closed, sealing him off from his only contact with the outside world besides his lawyers. He sat down slowly and removed a crumpled pack of generic cigarettes from the front breast pocket of his wrinkled gray collared shirt. He tapped a cigarette and lit it with a disposable butane lighter retrieved from the back pocket of his threadbare pants. He took a long drag on the cheap tobacco, then exhaled the thick smoke through his nose several seconds later, tapping his free hand on the picture in front of him.

  Staring at the picture of Marko Resja, or whoever he claimed to be now, sitting alongside that supposedly beheaded whore, stoked the deepest embers of his seething rage. He started to feel sick and immediately took another nicotine-filled drag on his cigarette, igniting the tobacco embers in a fierce orange glow that lasted for three seconds. The wave of nicotine filtered through his bloodstream and entered his brain, triggering pleasure receptors, which barely cut into the anger. It gave him a moment of clarity to process a few level thoughts.

  Two years ago, by sheer luck he had stumbled across Resja again. He had been sitting around a large fold-out table on a different floor in the detention center, attending the “release” party of Idriz Dzaferi, one of the Albanian terrorist leaders his paramilitary unit had scoured Kosovo trying to kill. Apparently, the testimony against Dzaferi hadn’t been compelling enough for the tribunal to move forward, and once again, Srecko found himself eating cake and “celebrating” someone else’s release. As he pushed the tasteless cake around his mouth, his eyes were drawn to the common area’s television screen. Two images, side by side, appeared on the CNN feed, and Srecko froze, unable to chew.

  The screen showed a man named Daniel Petrovich, wanted in connection with a string of high profile killings throughout the Washington, D.C., area that included the brutal slaying of a police officer and several military contractors. He disappeared after a spectacular neighborhood shootout with FBI and local police that landed several more law enforcement agents in the hospital. Daniel Petrovich? Srecko knew this man by another name. Marko Resja.

  Srecko still hadn’t made the connection between the stolen money and Daniel Petrovich, until he studied the fleeting image of the woman on the screen. Jessica Petrovich. That’s when he almost choked on
the mouthful of cake still mulling between his clenched jaws. She looked different now, but he knew he was staring at that deceptive snake, Zorana Zekulic. The woman responsible for the theft of his money, or so he had been told…by the man apparently married to her in the United States! The man who had thrown her supposed head down on the ground before him.

  It all made sense to Srecko in those few seconds. Marko Resja’s sudden disappearance had been no coincidence. He had engineered the entire thing with the help of that cunt. The theft of over 130 million dollars, leaving him high and dry in Belgrade with a bloodbath on his hands. On May 27, 2005, over cake and fruit punch at the United Nations Detention Unit, he swore to God and the Serbian people that he would see these traitors’ heads roll. It gave him a renewed sense of purpose and temporarily lifted him above the fact that he was sitting at a hastily assembled card table amidst two dozen other chubby fifty-year-olds; most of whom had run successful criminal enterprises on the Balkan Peninsula, but now were reduced to eating yellow cake and drinking Kool-Aid like toddlers.

  The memory faded, and Srecko Hadzic snapped the picture book shut. He smothered the cigarette against the side of the stone table and got up to leave the courtyard. The fresh air was killing him.

  Chapter 6

  10:35 AM

  FBI Headquarters Building

  Washington, D.C.

  Special Agent Ryan Sharpe adjusted the files on his desk and checked his watch for the fifth time in the last minute. He was nervous about this meeting. His career hadn’t exactly flourished since General Sanderson and his crew popped up and decapitated HYDRA. The Black Flag group vanished into thin air and proved near impossible to track. The quick revenge demanded by the FBI’s director, Frederick Shelby, never materialized, and his significantly smaller task force began to shrink with every uneventful month, until he was finally absorbed by the Domestic Terrorism Branch.

  The time they had spent scouring the earth for traces of Sanderson’s organization hadn’t been completely fruitless. His task force stumbled upon some unsavory funding links between foreign organized crime syndicates and a rising domestic ultra-nationalist terrorist organization, True America. Soon after establishing these links, he had been given command of a specialized task force dedicated to investigating foreign funding sources linked to homegrown domestic terrorist groups. Thanks to Director Shelby, Sanderson’s crew had been designated a Tier One domestic terrorist organization, which relanded Sanderson high on Sharpe’s list of priority investigative targets.

  He had the best of many worlds working for the DTB, a renewed sense of purpose, job security and the ear of Director Shelby, who had vowed to bring the wrath of God down upon Sanderson if Sharpe ever located his new stronghold. After reading the preliminary report forwarded by Special Agent Mendoza, he felt goosebumps. Something about the ATF summary gave him the first real glimmer of hope he had experienced in nearly two years.

  Sharpe heard a familiar knock at the door and stood up to walk around the desk. “Get in here, Frank,” he boomed.

  Special Agent Frank Mendoza entered, followed by Special Agent Dana O’Reilly and a short, angular-faced female wearing a navy blue suit jacket over a sharp-collared white blouse and matching dark blue trousers. She looked extremely serious, and her dark blue eyes pierced the room with a hint of disapproval. She wore an ATF badge clipped to her suit lapel.

  “There he is. Special Agent Mendoza. Recently promoted to Ops Section One. You better not give up my favorite chair,” he said, vigorously shaking Frank’s hand.

  “Well, it needs to find a new home. My so-called ‘promotion’ landed me in a cubicle. It’s a whole different world down there. Small fish in a big pond. Ryan, this is Special Agent Marianne Warner. She leads the task force that nabbed Javier Navarre.”

  “Special Agent Warner, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to meet with me. Please have a seat,” he said and nodded at Dana O’Reilly, who closed the door behind them.

  Once they were situated in his cramped office, he opened the file sitting at the top of the smallest pile on his desk.

  “Special Agent Warner, tell me a little more about Javier Navarre?”

  “My task force had been watching him for quite some time. He specialized in what we consider to be exotic, special order weaponry. Not the usual crates of former Eastern Bloc discounted Kalashnikov rifles or RPG-7’s. High end stuff. Modern assault rifles, large caliber sniper rifles, armor piercing ammunition. Scary shi…stuff, from our perspective.”

  “Please speak freely here, Marianne. Special Agent O’Reilly curses like a trucker, and Mendoza here, well…he taught me a few words I didn’t learn in college,” Sharpe said.

  “I might reinstate that HR complaint,” O’Reilly said.

  “Don’t listen to her. She’s still pissed I dragged her along into Domestic.”

  “Shit, we all wanted to get away from you,” Mendoza said, and they all laughed.

  “Anyway. Please continue, and remember, these people are about as real as it gets in these organizations,” Sharpe said, and Warner’s face relaxed slightly.

  “So, as much as we’d like to keep crates of assault rifles off U.S. soil, the special orders concern us the most. The crates go to groups that are easy to track, and the big orders or shipments are relatively easy to discover. We’re all over those, so to say. It’s the smaller, specialized orders that slip through the cracks and end up in very dangerous hands. High level drug cartel groups…not the street enforcers, but cartel execution teams or high value target protective details that operate on U.S. soil. They don’t attract much public attention, but they’re very real and pose a significant danger to law enforcement personnel that stumble on the wrong house, at the wrong time.”

  “Like last year in Dallas?”

  “Exactly. Latest generation G-36C assault rifles equipped with enhanced optics and armor-piercing bullets. The Dallas PD SWAT team lost eleven men on final approach to the target building. All but one from headshots, most of which punctured their Kevlar helmets. These are the kinds of weapons we try desperately to keep off U.S. soil. Mr. Navarre was a key player in this realm, which is a small, exclusive group. With most arms dealers we track, quantity is usually the key to profit. Not with this group. It’s highly competitive, cutthroat to be precise, and the clientele is brutal. Russian mob, South American drug cartels, and most recently, U.S. ultra-nationalists. Navarre had been around for nearly two decades, which is an eternity to survive dealing with these groups.”

  “You’re speaking of him like he’s dead,” Sharpe said and leaned back in his chair.

  Warner raised one eyebrow and looked across the office at Mendoza and O’Reilly.

  “This hasn’t been released for intra-agency consumption yet, for obvious reasons…but Mr. Navarre was shot in the face during a transfer from the Federal Courthouse to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. A Mexican gentleman with terminal pancreatic cancer and a very well forged California driver’s license fired three “frangible” 10mm bullets from a pistol at a range of five feet and tried to turn the gun on a U.S. Marshal, who had already drawn his service pistol. We didn’t get a chance to question the suspect.”

  “How many days had he been in custody?” Mendoza said.

  “Five. We discreetly snatched him out of a Beverly Hills home after DEA received a tip from an actress turned recently busted coke distributor, who wanted desperately to stay out of jail. The homeowner, a surprisingly well known director and kingpin for the coke distribution, apparently loved guns so much that he’d been paying Navarre exorbitant amounts of money to personally deliver the latest weapons. Bad timing for Navarre. The DEA’s snitch thought Navarre was the drug connection.

  “We get called in when DEA finds the director’s vault. This guy had a weapons stockpile that would put all of our agencies’ combined SWAT arsenals to shame. Anyway, you can imagine Navarre wasn’t very happy being snatched off the street like that. He didn’t know who to blame, but kept
a level head. I think he sensed that we had a spotty case at best against him because he lawyered up and shut up really quick. He did, however, have a few tender moments before his lawyer arrived.”

  “Which is why we’re here,” Mendoza added.

  “Navarre knew better than to start talking about the cartels, not that it made any difference in the end. Still, drug cartel activity remains one of the highest priorities for the ATF and DEA, so we started there. Javier was a shrewd businessman…his long tenure a testament to that fact, so before his team of lawyers could shut him up, he got a little cocky. He told us that we were being played by our own agents, and that he could prove it.

  “He wanted immunity for this information, which at that point wasn’t even a suggestion we were willing to entertain. Not until he expanded his theory a bit. Of course, we kept the talk alive and spoke about the amazing immunity deals granted to big time catches. His eyes widened a little and he told us more. According to Navarre, he’d been supplying some top shelf equipment to Argentinian contacts in Bolivia. Enough to equip a SEAL team. His exact words. He had also arranged smaller weapons cache deliveries for what he believed to be the same group in several locations around the world: the Middle East, northern Europe and western Russia.”

  “Why did he think this was an inside play?” Sharpe said.

  “He suggested these were rogue DEA assets. Undercover assets. Said they spoke flawless Spanish, every nuance and inflection, but he just knew they weren’t Argentinian. He couldn’t place it at first, but then he said it hit him. It was the way they carried themselves. He knew they were American. He got panicky and started to investigate the contacts. Navarre’s assets traced one of the men back to Buenos Aires, where he vanished. He did the same with the rest and couldn’t find a trace of them. He stopped dealing with them.”