“Imagine a world in which they can't snoop telecommunications. I'll bet they’re scared,” Bishop replied. “If Linders is on this, Logan will be protected. She knows her job.”
“You said it,” Rector replied. “NSA and DTRA are also pouty because Interpol got the Logan connection before they did.” He paused for a moment, hesitant about asking the next question.
“Never asked you exactly what happened with Trask, and you never talked about it outside the post-mission review.”
“Apparently, I missed. That’s what happened. Simple as that.”
“Missed? Word was, at the time, that you wounded him.”
Bishop was silent.
“Word was that you missed a kill shot because you had no angle. Citizens all around. A through-and-through would have killed a citizen.”
Bishop remained silent.
“Still, everybody thought he’d died later, after getting away. You’re attached to Interpol. There may be questions about this aspect of your mission. Interagency leaks come from the director-level offices about this sort of thing. I’ve been told to tell you that the Agency considers Trask a priority for permanent retirement. Quietly.”
“No doubt,” Bishop finally said. “I’ll take it as it comes. Mission first. Making up for a past mistake, second.” Bishop knew that everything he and Rector were saying was being actively recorded. There might even be an observer reporting the conversation in real time to the Assistant Director.
“Uh-huh. That’s the Bishop I know best.”
“Back to the business at hand. Any recommendations here?”
“Sure,” Rector said quickly. “A taxi will take you to the restaurant on Cargo Plaza. It’s called the JFK Food Shuttle. Major feeding station for cab drivers, truck drivers, van drivers. Ideally located. They can go north or south to catch the Van Wyck or the JFK. Food’s good. Get somethin’ to eat. Then flash your ID at one of the airport shuttle guys to hitch a ride to one twenty-two. There’s an unused hut outside the southeast corner of one twenty-two. You can use it to sally or sap or observe. It’s up to you. But my best advice is to walk in with your ID and have a look around unescorted until you find a vantage point inside one twenty-two near your crate. Either that, or a vantage point where you can see both the loading entrance and the crate. Problem is, no way of knowing if the operator at one twenty-two is in Mr. Dominican’s pocket or in Trask’s pocket or whatever. It’s up to you, field man.”
“Thanks,” Bishop replied.
Rector hung up without saying goodbye, but that was their way. Nothing left to say, so say nothing at all.
Bishop’s phone vibrated almost immediately.
“Yes,” he answered.
“We secure?”
“We are, Director.”
“Trask.”
“Yes.”
“Will he be a problem?”
“For a short while.”
“Do you want local assets or federal assets.” It was not a question, rather, the director was offering Bishop a choice.
“Neither right now," Bishop replied, declining both choices. “This one should be all mine. Trask will eat most assets alive anyway.”
“Except you?”
“Except me.”
“Don’t miss.”
“Director Savitch,” Bishop said in a remarkably normal tone, “if there is something you want to get off your chest, speak up now.”
“There is, Bishop. Don’t get killed. Trask has only gotten worse with the passing of years. What ails him doesn’t mellow with age. You could do worse than asking for help. Trask is a classic psychopath that we trained.”
“I could definitely do worse, Director. I could ask for a full field support team and then send the assembled team to run down Trask and get themselves all killed. And Director?”
“Yes?”
“The passage of time has made me a lot more unpleasant too.”
“So I’ve heard.” The Director paused for a moment. “You’ll have the order in writing within the hour.”
Bishop had run into David Trask during a joint-forces mission three years earlier in northern Iraq. Bishop was on assignment, tracking a group of smugglers suspected of bringing Russian-made-and-sourced RPGs by the crate through the mountainous territories west of Piranshahr in Iran, across the border into Iraq. Trask was working for a private contractor hired by the CIA field office in Baghdad. He was running a team of sixteen private security operators, all experienced, hired specifically to protect Bishop’s people from unwanted approaches and independent attacks from any Da’esh or al-Queda people who decided to make a move on them. The problems had grown rapidly. Trask and his team made new enemies every day because they simply refused to keep their heads down. The slightest approach by any local brought a swift and deadly response from Trask himself or one of his guys.
The situation rapidly reached the point at which two of the local leaders had sat down with Bishop to plead with him to get rid of Trask and his team. At first Bishop thought he was being set up. Stories of daily brutality, needless shootings, all meant to force Bishop to dump his main operational security force. To be sure, Bishop arranged to meet Trask later the same day. What he encountered was unpleasant.
Bishop traveled the thirty five kilometers from Choman to a location near the Iranian border where Trask’s forward base was set up in anticipation of an interdiction. When Bishop had entered Trask’s main tent, what he was greeted with stopped him cold.
“Who’s this?” Bishop asked, looking in the direction of a man, stripped to the waist, tied to a post planted deep in the ground. Bishop wrinkled his nose at a sharply acrid smell in the air.
“This is a talker,” Trask had replied, grinning, “or at least he will be a talker once we get a little further into it.”
Bishop just frowned in response, then quickly stepped back as Trask startled him by rushing forward with a combat knife toward the prisoner, nicking the prisoner in the chest. The man screamed in pain, which prompted Bishop to walk behind Trask to get a better angle of view. The prisoner’s chest was a mass of welts and slices.
The scream of pain wound down into whimpering. As Bishop stood watching, Trask stepped in again with a small plastic spray bottle and squeezed twice, directing a stream of liquid at the open cuts. The main screamed again, once, then seemed to pass out.
Bishop suddenly knew where the acrid smell came from.
“Is that ammonia?” he asked, disbelief in his voice plainly evident.
“Diluted slightly, but yes,” Trask replied absently. “It’s an effective tongue loosener.” Trask was focused on the prisoner, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth as he waited for the tortured man to regain consciousness. “This one will come around again shortly.”
Bishop scanned the inside of the tent. There were four contractors present, detached looks on their faces, obviously used to the brutal interrogation method. They stared coldly back at Bishop.
“Tear yourself away for a moment,” Bishop said, deliberately showing complete lack of concern for the prisoner. “Something has come up.”
When he was outside the tent with Trask and safely out of earshot of the team members, he told Trask about the concerns that the local leaders had brought up.
“You need to leave the locals alone,” Bishop said as he wrapped up. “If they clam up or refuse to offer local support, we might as well pack it all up and go home empty handed.”
“You’ve got to be messing with me,” Trask said flatly, staring through narrowed, suspicious eyes at Bishop. “Nobody's complaining about my intel. I’m making real progress here.”
“No you’re not, Trask. You’re fucking this up. Who is that guy in the tent? Nobody? Somebody? The relative of someone we need?”
“Who the fuck cares who he is? I’m in control here. The locals are more afraid of me than they are of the Talis and Da’esh. That’s what matters.”
“Forget about it,” Bishop said sharply. “You’re off-mission. Provi
de security, not extracted intel from questionable sources. It won’t stand up for a second and you don’t have the resources to check any of it. You’re supposed to be providing operational security, and I just saw four of your guys inside the tent, watching the entertainment, who were either supposed to be out on patrol or getting some sack time. We’re going to interdict at oh-three thirty tomorrow, in shitty terrain, and you’re fucking around with this right now when you and your guys should be getting rest?”
“S’matter Bishop?” Trask laughed and he led the way back into the tent, “stomach bothering you, or are you just squeamish about hard field work?”
Bishop just stared back, waiting for Trask to say something else stupid.
Trask didn’t say a word though. He walked back into the tent and over to the folding table near the prisoner. Bishop followed him inside. The restrained man’s eyes were wild, and he groaned at the pain as he attempted to shrink away from Trask. Still silent, Trask picked up the knife he’d been using, walked over to stand less than half a meter from the prisoner, and with a single, accurate and very fast thrust, plunged the knife upward and into the man’s throat.
The man gurgled and choked briefly, then died as Bishop watched impassively and silently too.
“If we have to get our rest,” Trask said, smiling, “I guess we don’t have any more time for this one. Happy now, Bishop?” Two of Trask’s operators laughed out loud as they stepped forward to untie the dead man and get rid of the body.
Bishop was too smart to react. He just thanked Trask for getting back on-mission and prepping for the interdiction.
Bishop had gotten on a secure line and reported the events to the mission commander in Baghdad before he was halfway back to Choman.
The interdiction had been successful less than twelve hours later. The following day, after they’d packed prisoners and seized RPGs into heavy trucks and gotten them off to real interrogation teams in the south, Bishop took a call from the deputy director still in-country. It was an order to kill Trask and bury him deeply.
“He’s one of us,” Bishop had said initially, “or at least he was. I’ll need something more than a quick phone call to make this happen.”
“He is not one of us, Bishop,” the AD had replied, “and he never really was. We trained him, we put him in the field, we gave him more and more responsibility, and when he was tasked to move on to other things he couldn’t. We lost control some time ago. It’s just accidental that he’s working with us again. The situation is not good. We’re losing control of our relationships every day this guy is still breathing.”
A day later, Bishop had received explicit orders. Two weeks later, at a busy open air market on Mohibban Road in Karachi, he missed his chance. Wounded but far from dead, Trask had disappeared. Until now.
The porter was waving impatiently at him. Bishop picked up his bag and headed over to the taxi rank.
***
The late lunch at the JFK Food Shuttle was not bad at all. There was a demanding, hungry, busy crowd. Most of them were airport employees. They did everything from baggage handling and marshaling to cleaning and aircraft service. There was also a stream of truck drivers who moved goods in and out of the massive, town-size maze of cargo warehouses. It all meant that the food had to be good, fresh and fast. Bishop ate a large plate full of all-day breakfast, and washed down the last of the pancakes and bacon with the last couple of ounces of coffee in a large mug.
Bishop momentarily looked around for his bag, then remembered that he’d sent it on to the hotel with the taxi driver clutching a hundred dollar bill just to make sure it got directly to the hotel. He had everything he needed on him already, but he needed to brush his teeth in the worst way. He lucked out at the cashier’s desk. There was all sorts of point-of-sale junk on racks that included a row of travel toothbrushes with a tiny toothpaste tube included. He hit the men’s room to freshen up, brush up and re-set his brain for what might possibly turn out to be another long night.
The walk to warehouse 122 took a good thirty minutes. Alexei hadn’t been kidding when he described the cargo area of JFK as town-size. The unused hut was just where it was supposed to be too, so Bishop did a walk-by. When he was completely out of sight of the front of the warehouse, he doubled back but took a service alley route instead of the main road. It wouldn’t do for a pedestrian to seen doing anything but walking to a destination. In an area primarily traversed by tractor-trailers, box trucks and delivery vans, a pedestrian walking back and forth would raise eyebrows. Besides that, Bishop had to approach the hut in a way that nobody could see.
At the last moment, Bishop changed his mind. He was running a couple of ancient Latin phrases through his mental filters. Fortuna audaces luvat and qui audet adipiscitur. Fortune Helps The Bold and Who Dares Wins. The Marine Corps and the SAS really do have some of the best mottos, he thought. What’s the CIA motto again? Oh yeah… “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Why do so many government agencies have to throw Bible verse into it? Bunch of nonsense. Latin sounds grander and less like bullshit all at the same time.
Why skulk around when he had a perfectly valid ID provided by Customs & Border Protection directly? He was here on legitimate business to all outward appearances. Checking shipments, checking manifests. He could review and inspect anything he wanted. All he had to do was not inspect the crate in which he was most interested.
The truckway in front of 122 was jammed with at least eight tractor-trailers, while a yard engine shuttled sealed container trailers from one warehouse yard to another. It was noisy with diesels idling loudly, drivers out of their cabs shouting to each other over the engine noise. The visitor and staff parking area in front of the Eurocath office entrance was full, which was a good thing. Safety in numbers, irritated staff because a CBP officer just showed up, and he’d be apologetic for showing up at this apparently very busy moment, but insistent nonetheless. He put on his best game face as he walked squarely and quickly up to the door.
Bishop got a blast of heated, pressurized air full in the face. It made his eyes tear up momentarily, so he had to take off his right glove to wipe his eyes.
He blinked a couple of times to help clear his vision, then looked over toward the people lined up in front of the business counter less than three meters from him and straight into the eyes of ex-army, ex-CIA, and ex-private contractor David Trask.
A moment passed between the two men that in their own minds could be said to have lasted minutes. To the others around them—Trask’s two assistants likely there to handle the crate into one of the vans parked in the lot outside, two countermen, two office staff sitting in front of computers, several truck drivers waiting their turns—it was only the blink of an eye.
“Avida…” Bishop spoke first, using Trask’s alias, “How nice to see you in the warehouse district.” Bishop dropped his ungloved right hand down and back inside his unzipped jacket toward the holster in the small of his back.
“Michael,” Trask replied, calmly, “it’s been some time.” As soon as he’d cleared away his own reaction, Trask had instantly moved to draw a 9mm Sig Sauer from the shoulder holster concealed beneath his outer jacket. Too late, he noticed that Bishop was already in position to draw first. They’d both made their moves faster than the eye could track. They were looking blandly at each other, giving nothing away.
“So it has,” Bishop said, right hand partially drawing his Glock 30. “What brings you out here? Picking up or dropping off?”
“Favor for a friend,” was all Trask said in reply, moving his right hand down and into a side pocket.
“Coincidence then,” Bishop said with a smirk, as he watched Trask’s movement. “I’m also here to do someone a favor. Small world.”
“Sure it is,” Trask said, turning back to the counter to one of the men calling for his attention.
“Here you go, Mr. Karst,” the man said as he slid a release document toward Trask. “Sign here, here and here. The co
de at the bottom of your copy of the release has to be punched into the pad at the gate. See the shift manager over there,” he pointed toward a small podium just inside the cavernous warehouse. “He’ll have the forklift operator load your van when you back it into one of the spots to the right of the trailer dock.”
Trask signed the release form ‘A. Karst’ then nodded his thanks to the counterman as he left with the two helpers. Bishop turned and watched Trask exit the office. He turned back and flashed his ID at the counterman, who recognized it immediately.
“Something serious?” the counterman asked Bishop.
“Not necessarily,” Bishop replied. “Someplace we can talk privately?”
“Sure. Come on around. Hey, Larry,” the counterman called over his shoulder. “Fill in here please.”
Bishop and the counterman walked into the main warehouse toward a small, inner office that appeared empty through the upper part of its wall which was all windows.
“Are you an employee of Eurocath?” Bishop asked as soon as the counterman closed the office door.
“Uh, no. Not really. I work for one of the airlines.”
That caught Bishop off-guard, but it was actually good news.
“You’re not an employee of Eurocath but you’re clearing shipments for release? Seems different.”
“I’m not really clearing anything. There’s a Customs agent in the warehouse who’s releasing some bonded shipments. Any time the airline carries bonded shipments, an airline rep—that’s me—has to verify the point of origin, the point of entry, the carriage, and the actual crates or pallets or boxes when they arrive here. DHS and CBP require this. You’re CBP, right? Don’t you know this?”
“I just want to confirm that you’ve got no connection to Eurocath.”
“No. None. I don’t really know anybody here well at all. I work for the airline.”
“Okay. That’s good. I’m going to make a call now. You’re going to wait until I’m done.”
All The Big Ones Are Dead Page 23
