Black Flagged Redux Page 6

  At the mention of Buenos Aires, Sharpe glanced at O’Reilly, and Agent Warner continued. “I figured he was grasping at thin air, trying to come up with some conspiracy theory nonsense to get us thinking about a deal. Either way, he was killed before any further discussions could progress. His lawyers kept him buttoned up good. Nothing really came of this information, until my team entered it into the intra-agency database, with the search tags ‘rogue U.S. assets’ and ‘Argentina,’ among many others. That’s when I got a call from Special Agent O’Reilly.”

  O’Reilly broke into the conversation.

  “Right. The tagged information came to me through a routine system alert, since we’re subscribed to get any information tagged close to this title. I get over two hundred alerts per day, but ‘Argentina’ caught my eye. This information got tagged again with ‘domestic terrorist group’ less four hours later.”

  “My techs added this tag because one of the agents recalled being told by Mr. Navarre that these guys were collecting weapons right here in the U.S. When pressed further, Navarre verified that one of the meetings took place on U.S. soil,” Agent Warner said.

  “As soon as I saw this, I called Frank and Marianne to compile any information regarding Navarre’s business contacts. I know Navarre supposedly dealt with Al Qaeda at some point, so I figured Terrorist Operations would have a file on him. Photos, aliases, travel records…anything. That’s when I stumbled upon an incredible coincidence in the ATF files. I found a picture of Navarre with a suspected buyer in Amsterdam. ATF didn’t have any follow up information on the buyer, but I recognized the photo immediately. Robert Klinkman…or in this case Reinhard Klinkman.”

  At this point in the conversation, Sharpe stood up and picked up a different file on his desk.

  “Sorry to hit you with this, Agent Warner, but I wanted to do this in person and not over the phone. I need to permanently requisition all files associated with Javier Navarre, as directed by this executive Justice Department order.”

  “What? This is highly—”

  “Unusual? Yes, it is, but I’m not prepared to completely yank this out from under your feet. I understand this may feel like a rude slap to the face after all of the work your team has put into tracking and assembling evidence in Navarre’s case, but the link between Mr. Klinkman and Mr. Navarre now falls under Compartmentalized Information Security Category One classification.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Warner muttered.

  “Not even J.C. has access to this information,” Mendoza quipped, failing to amuse Warner.

  “I want you to work with Special Agent O’Reilly to sort through all of Navarre’s files, and see if we can find any more links like these. I’m specifically interested in Navarre’s travels to South America. This has all been cleared by the assistant director in charge of your investigative division, and I have CIS Category One paperwork here for you to sign…whether you accept the assignment or not.”

  “Do I really have a choice?” she said.

  “Probably not, but we really need your help with this. You know Navarre’s case inside and out, and with Navarre shot dead by the Sinaloa Cartel, your investigation is running on fumes. Trust me, I know the feeling. This is a great opportunity to work on a project that has the direct attention of my director and a few extremely high-placed officials in the Justice Department.”

  “How did you know the Sinaloa Cartel killed Navarre?”

  “Sign those papers, and Dana will explain it to you. Navarre’s murder was big news in certain circles. Is there anything else that will help make this temporary transition any less painful?”

  “We should bring over my lead data analyst. He can work directly with Dana to speed up and optimize the process of merging and analyzing the files,” she said.

  “Dana, please make this happen and ensure that the CIS agreements are fully explained, signed and filed. Welcome aboard, Special Agent Warner,” he said and extended his hand for a formal handshake.

  Agent Warner accepted the file in one hand and shook Sharpe’s hand briefly without saying a word. Once O’Reilly and Warner stepped out of the room and the door was shut, Mendoza sat back down.

  “Good to see you again, Frank. Looks like we might be back in business.”

  “We? I’m working on Muslim extremists, not Black Flag. I have to admit, you might be on to something finally,” Frank said.

  “I have a gut feeling about Argentina. This is the second link in three months. We busted Victor Almadez flying back into the country using false papers.”

  “Part of the reconstituted list?”

  Since the Black Flag file had been stolen in its entirety by Colonel Farrington, and the late Harris McKie had been parsimonious in the dissemination of its contents to the FBI during his short stint as gatekeeper in the Sanctum, Sharpe had less than half of the list of living Black Flag operatives. His reassigned and significantly reduced task force spent the first six months creating the missing list. They started with missing persons reports filed within a block of time extending two months before and after May 26, 2005. Specifically, they categorized male adults, aged thirty years or older, and started to compile a surprisingly large list of missing males. They eliminated any reports filed by direct family members, since the families of known east coast and Midwest operatives had either disappeared with the operative, or had gone to live with relatives in protest.

  The only home they found occupied had contained Jessica Petrovich, and there had apparently been a good reason for that. The FBI’s database had been hacked shortly after Edwards temporarily vanished from the grid. The cyber-attack appeared to be a simple probe, using Edward’s computer and intranet password. Probably designed to confirm the information released by McKie to the FBI and view any key FBI assumptions that might hinder their vanishing act.

  Once O’Reilly’s team of data analysts compiled a list of missing males that fit the general demographic pattern, they further narrowed the field by discarding any profiles without prior military service. Known operatives to that point had been one hundred percent connected by military service, and this assumption whittled the list down to a manageable number. Examination of known operative military and personal backgrounds yielded no discernible pattern for further breakdown of their list. Black Flag operatives came from every branch of service, often from specialties not directly tied to combat, and examining personal history data offered a vastly diverse picture with no connections. At that point they started the real work, creating a database alert system linked to friends, relatives, work contacts…hundreds of variables that might trigger a possible contact event with one of the ninety-eight contacts on their list.

  Their hard work produced tangible results on February 8th of this year, when the system alerted Special Agent O’Reilly to the fact that Victor Almadez’s grandfather, living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack. Based on the alert, Sharpe issued the highest level priority terrorist alert for Victor Almadez, providing enough imaging data for both TSA and Customs to effectively utilize their new facial recognition software systems.

  Three days later, customs agents at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport seized Manuel Delreyo after debarking an American Airlines flight that originated in Buenos Aires and made a stop in Santiago, Chile. Almadez/Delreyo proved to be as difficult to read as the escape artist Jeffrey Munoz, and Sharpe couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being played again.

  He had been so badly burned by Sanderson’s Munoz play that he felt tinges of paranoia as soon as he received the phone call from Customs. Two months later, they still had Almadez in custody, held under some very tenuous Homeland Security Act provisions that wouldn’t hold up if put under any public scrutiny. Unfortunately for Almadez, he was a nameless prisoner stuffed away in an obscure detention facility designed and administered by the Hallister Corporation. Sharpe wasn’t worried about Almadez.

  “The capture kept me from being fired and resulted in my transfer
to Domestic. The last nod from Director Shelby I can expect. Unfortunately, Almadez hasn’t said anything substantive, other than a promise to ‘take this personally’ if he doesn’t see a lawyer by the end of June.”

  “He’s willing to wait four months?”

  “He said, ‘I’m a patient man, and I understand your predicament…I’m willing to wait four months,’ and that was it,” Sharpe said.

  “You’re going to let him go, right?”

  “Not with the Navarre link. I’m going to start poking around down south. Argentina and Bolivia.”

  “You gonna bring the CIA in on this?”

  “No. I don’t trust the CIA after the Black Flag debacle. Too many aspects of that day didn’t add up in the end. Jeremy Cummings is paid nearly two hundred thousand dollars to assemble an off the books team to kill Petrovich. All we get from the CIA is the suggestion that this might be a revenge play by Serbian nationalists. A little too convenient that they stumbled upon the same connection regarding Petrovich and Resja so quickly. The CIA liaison, Randy Keller, vanishes from the face of the planet after walking into a Georgetown residence that literally explodes minutes later. And the payment to Cummings came from an extremely sanitized money trail leading nowhere, deposited into his account after he was killed. The director himself told me to keep the CIA out of it. I’m going directly to our counterparts in Argentina and Bolivia. We have a good working relationship with Argentine Federal Police.”

  “Argentina’s a big country…let me know how I can help. We’re still shaking down the Navarre/Al Qaeda connection, but it doesn’t appear to have any meat. Even a scumbag like Navarre kept his distance from that group.”

  “Thanks, Frank. Always a pleasure. We should grab a drink soon. My treat,” Sharpe said.

  “Damn straight. Good luck with this. It would be nice to nail Sanderson to the wall. He set the domestic Al Qaeda investigation back two years with his stunt,” Mendoza said.

  “I’m keeping my fingers crossed on this one. Catch you later, Frank.”

  “You too,” he said and closed the door as he left.

  Sharpe had enough confirmation to contact the FBI legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, but he’d have to be careful. The embassy crawled with spooks, and the wrong conversation, at the wrong time, could bring the CIA into the fold. He desperately wanted to avoid this and needed to do a little more research into Dan Bailey and Susan Castaneda, resident legal attachés in Argentina.

  Chapter 7

  2:24 PM

  Monchegorsk Water Treatment Plant (A District)

  Monchegorsk, Murmansk Oblast, Russia

  Anatoly Reznikov was both surprised and relieved to find the water treatment plant nearly deserted. Construction on the modern, mostly automated facility had been completed two years ago, ushering in a new era of clean drinking water for the residents of Monchegorsk. Three decades too late in his view. The previous plant, which had stood guard over the city water supply for as long as anyone could remember, relied upon a disinfection process to purify the water, but did little to prevent the flow of heavy metals into the citizens’ blood streams, including his own.

  The Norval Nickel plant had been the main source of industry in Monchegorsk since the early 1930s, resulting in an ever-growing population boom that served the needs of Norval Nickel, further expanding the company’s lucrative nickel and copper mining enterprise. For all that the residents of Monchegorsk did for Norval Nickel, the multinational corporation gave little in return, aside from poor wages and a harsh work environment that would have made Joseph Stalin cringe. More than seventy percent of Monchegorsk’s population worked in some capacity for Norval, with the vast majority performing hazardous mining jobs or unregulated, unskilled jobs in the processing plants. Reznikov’s uncle worked the mines, and when Anatoly joined the family in late 1978, not much had changed in terms of work conditions from the early days of Norval Nickel.

  The corporation had invested little money in the city’s infrastructure, despite the efforts of environmental activists and the few citizens that dared to defy Norval’s stranglehold on both the city and the local communist party. The effects of the smelting plant’s pollution on the population’s health was no secret, but asking the wrong questions in the wrong place came with serious risks.

  The best case scenario involved employment termination and immediate eviction from company subsidized housing, which could put a family on the streets in the middle of the night in harsh winter conditions. The worst case scenario varied by level of activism. A one-way train ride to Siberia was reserved for persistent, unorganized agitators. Sometimes these were family trips, which added to the deterrence factor. Organizers or nosy environmentalists either disappeared suddenly or slowly bobbed to the surface in the polluted Moncha Lake, which fed into the ineffective water treatment plant. Despite the growing voice of concern about the effects of heavy metal poisoning, the Norval Corporation continued to deny the mounting body of evidence, and instead produced more dead bodies. Norval was finally called to task by the Russian government in 2001, on behalf of Norway, Sweden and Finland, who had been the unwilling recipients of several million tons of sulfur dioxide (acid rain) over the past several decades. Permission was “granted” for NEFCO (Nordic Environmental Finance Corporation) to provide regional loans that would be used to improve several offending industrial plants near the Kola Peninsula and provide funding for localized environmental improvement projects.

  The Monchegorsk water treatment plant made the top of the list, which was probably influenced by the fact that senior Norval officials held influential positions on the Murmansk Oblast’s Natural Resources Agency executive board. The Natural Resources Agency had replaced the State Committee for Environment Protection in 2000, when President Vladimir Putin abolished the organization, which resembled the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

  The Natural Resources Agency was the organization responsible for managing the commercialization of Russia’s natural resources, and the move was seen as a direct measure to ensure that most environmental decisions favored the major corporations. Due to the overwhelming international pressure of the Kola Peninsula’s pollution problem, Putin’s government decided on a work-around. They leaned on Norval Nickel to accept NEFCO’s low interest loans to clean up Monchegorsk.

  By that time, the Monchegorsk plant had launched nearly one million tons of heavy metals into the air each year, including nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, selenium, platinum and palladium. The ground concentrations of platinum and palladium in the soil near the plant were so severe that mining of surface soil for these metals had become economically feasible in the past five years. Add decades of concentrated acid rain to the mix, and the health effects on the Monchegorsk population were devastating.

  Anatoly grew up in a poverty level neighborhood wracked with stunted growth, pediatric and early adult cancers, severe mental disabilities among adults and children, neurological disorders resembling early onset of Alzheimer’s, and frequent unexplained seizures. The local hospital was owned and administered by Norval Nickel, which only served to compartmentalize and minimize the problem.

  Reznikov had been lucky to join his aunt and uncle well past his early developmental years. He had been spared eight years of toxic exposure, and the results were dramatic. In the ten years he spent with his new family, he watched everyone in the filthy, cramped apartment suffer from Norval Nickel’s irresponsibility. His aunt died of pancreatic cancer five years after he arrived, and he experienced the daily sadness and brutality of his uncle slowly losing all semblance of mental function. Less than one year after his aunt’s death, his uncle had been banished to a local mental hospital.

  His three cousins, two boys and one girl, all younger than him by a few years, never grew at the same rate as Anatoly and barely progressed in school past a fifth grade level. They had all been remanded to state care when his uncle had been institutionalized. When Anatoly graduated from secondary school and left for
Moscow University, his cousins resembled drones: void of personality, intelligence and drive. Ten years earlier, they had been drastically different, similar to him in so many ways. He had painfully watched them suffer under Norval Nickel’s reign of terror in Monchegorsk, transformed into empty shells, unfit for employment outside of Norval Nickel’s mines.

  That was the cruel irony of life in Monchegorsk. They had been placed into the custody of mother Russia to live in a state sponsored orphanage, but the orphanage was funded by Norval Nickel, and the children were funneled back into the very jobs that put them there in the first place. Anatoly’s case had been different. He showed strong academic promise in science and math, so he was awarded a place at Moscow University to study biological engineering and chemistry, compliments of Norval Nickel, with the understanding that he would return to the corporation to work as an engineer. Reznikov never fulfilled his obligation, though he was seconds away from observing a promise he had silently made to his cousins and his own parents.

  By honoring his father’s legacy, Anatoly Reznikov had discovered the perfect way to exact revenge upon a corporation that had slowly destroyed his adopted family and a government that had brutally murdered his parents. He would also make a fortune. If everything went according to plan, his payment from Al Qaeda would look insignificant compared to the series of increasingly larger payments he could demand for his services or his product.

  He walked briskly across the long, grated catwalk toward a sizable brick building on the other side of a vast sea of light green, flattened metal domes. The domes capped immense underground tanks, which housed the disinfectant side of the Monchegorsk plant’s treatment process. The other side, located uphill, utilized a rapid sand filtration system, combined with a state of the art membrane filter. The combination of the two ensured the removal of any suspended particulate matter, including heavy metals, before the water was finally transferred to the field of tanks he now crossed, for the final step of the treatment process.