Savage Truth

by Jack Hardin

  “Can you see who the owner of the file is?”

  “No. That’s heavily encrypted. And even if we could crack it, the client’s name would probably turn out to be an alphanumeric code that references the client’s actual identity located in a completely different system. If myself and a few other agents spent a week or two pouring over everything, we could probably narrow down the owner’s identity based on associations with the names of people in the file. But it may not be certain.”

  “How did the Reddicks get a hold of something like this? I thought top-level data centers were virtually unbreachable?”

  “In theory, yes,” Amy said. “But there are dozens of reasons the Reddicks could have found access to the system where all this was stored. The industry is always trying to keep up with new ways of preventing or minimizing hacking. But it happens.”

  “Okay, but how did the owner of his file find out who stole it? I thought when you used TOR your identity was anonymous.” TOR is a version of the Firefox web browser, modified to allow access into the dark web.

  “It is,” Amy said, “but it’s not foolproof. Part of my regular job is finding people on the dark web who are selling drugs or illegal services. They use all kinds of elaborate distraction techniques, but sometimes we can still find them. It’s not always easy, but it can be done. I promise you that whoever owns this file, when they heard that it had been breached, they threw everything they could at finding the thief. And it worked.”

  What Amy was saying made sense. What didn’t add up was why someone so powerful would send a couple of incompetent morons to retrieve the information. I found the servers in a box, sitting unsupervised in the driveway of a house in the ghetto.

  “So,” I said, “we can’t find out who owns all this information, so we’re SOL?”

  “No,” she said. “Almost… but not quite. You said that the Reddicks were asking for one hundred thousand dollars?”

  “According to Darren, yes.”

  “Well, they were communicating with someone about it. When they copied the file, they left behind a code leading to a private chatroom where the owner of the information could contact them to negotiate on price and receive payment details.” Amy’s smile was tinged with pride. “So… after a bit of technological gymnastics, I was able to follow the digital crumbs of the person on the other end of that chat.”

  “Wait, you found out where they are?”

  “Kind of. I could pinpoint the physical location, but not the actual IP address.” She set her hand on the mouse and clicked around. “This is where it was.”

  An image popped up—a mirrored skyscraper in a city I was unfamiliar with.

  “You’re saying the email was sent from this building?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great. There’s probably five thousand computers in there. You can’t pinpoint it down to an office or floor?”

  “No. The programs they were using to mask their identity cleaned up the exact origination point.”

  I sighed. “Thanks for trying. Where is that anyway?”

  “Rotterdam.”

  “The Netherlands?”

  “Yes, and I’m not finished.” She gave me a wily smile and continued. “Their communication took place five days ago, over the course of twenty minutes. The person on the other end asked for one week once Mike became insistent about posting all the information online if the price wasn’t paid. Mike griped about it but finally agreed. Four days later he was murdered.” Amy turned from me and back to the screen. She leaned forward and started minimizing windows and opening new programs. “So on a long shot, I decided to dig into the Homeland database and pull up every person you’ve arrested over the last twelve months. Then I had another agent work up a list of anyone associated with those people—family members, friends, known accomplices–and fed their mug shots or photos into a search program.” She turned to me with that knowing smile again. “You ready for this?”

  “Fire away.”

  “I’ve got a contact in Interpol who lives in Paris. Lucky for me she was still awake—it’s after midnight there. And she got me security footage from the Maastoren—the skyscraper in Rotterdam.”

  I could see where she was going with this. “Amy, you might have outdone Spam on this one.”

  “Thank you,” she said perkily, and then started a video program. The feed showed the inside front entrance to the Maastoren’s lobby and was running at high speed. Security guards, receptionists, and business professionals moved by at a rapid, unnatural pace, each of their faces couched in a thin square frame as the computer searched their facial contours against those names and images Amy had fed in, the network of people connected to me in some way.

  After several seconds the video froze, and the square around an individual’s face blinked red. It was a man, and he was passing the security desk on his way to the front doors. The image blinked several times and then expanded to a full size. It was fuzzy and the image unrecognizable.

  “Wait for it...” Amy said.

  Pixel by pixel, the image grew clearer. Finally, the individual's face cleared up enough for my memory to recall dozens of mental images of its own. I stared at the screen, unblinking.

  “Ryan?”

  I pinched at the bridge of my nose. “Amy, give me a minute.” I stepped away from the table and brought out my phone. I called Kathleen and felt a sudden surge of adrenaline as the phone rang.

  “Ryan,” Kathleen answered. “Any answers?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, you might say so. Amy Jensen found out who’s behind Mike and Darren’s murder. And who wants me dead.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Kathleen, it’s Joel Fagan.”

  The other end of the phone went silent. I waited.

  “I’m at home,” she finally said. “Come on over. Let’s talk.”

  Chapter Eight

  I had been to Kathleen’s house once before. Not long after I began my new role with the FID, she hosted a retirement party for one of her agents. Jerry Kurtz had served alongside her for several years during their time at the CIA. When she made the switch to Homeland and they set her up in Key Largo, Jerry decided to join her as an investigator. No one could blame him for a choice like that. At the time he was in his early sixties, just a couple of years from hanging it all up. You couldn’t find a better person to work for than Kathleen. She was a lot like an aunt that you loved and respected but could quickly find yourself a little afraid of if you really screwed something up. She also cared about her agents and worked long hours and late nights to make sure they had everything they needed to fulfill their missions and bring their investigations to a satisfying conclusion.

  Her two-story house was nestled on the back of four acres on the western edge of Homestead, half an hour north of Key Largo. The home’s gray stucco exterior was accented with dark wooden shutters and a flagstone apron that ran the length of the front. Palm trees and flower beds graced the front, along with several majestic oaks.

  I parked at the front of the small circular driveway and took the flagstone steps to the porch. The porch was wide; three white rocking chairs sat among a number of potted plants. A wind chime made soft music in a stir of air. I rang the doorbell.

  The front door swung open. Kathleen was wearing jeans and a purple blouse, nothing on her feet. Her chestnut brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail.

  “Ryan. Come in.”

  She escorted me from the foyer into the living room. Whites, grays, and browns gave the interior a clean modern feel. She motioned toward a white leather couch. “Have a seat. I’ll be right back.”

  Kathleen disappeared around the corner and into the kitchen. I heard the hiss of a metal cap being torn from a bottle. She returned with a glass of wine in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. She handed me the beer and then sat into one of the brown leather chairs on the other side of the glass coffee table.

  “Thanks,” I said. I took a long pull and studied her over the end
of the bottle.

  Kathleen never failed to maintain a professional veneer, one that she kept her personal life neatly tucked behind. You never found her in her office brooding over a personal problem or distracting her agents with issues not relevant to the work at hand.

  Tonight, though, she seemed especially ruminative. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was because she was in her own home, but she seemed different: relaxed, but apparently unnerved.

  Something was troubling her.

  “I’m going to tell you something,” she finally said. “I don’t want it to leave here with you. Not even to Brad.”

  I nodded. “Understood. Is this about Fagan?”

  She looked past me and through the wide casement windows that looked onto the front of her property. “I met Joel on my very first assignment, right after graduating from The Farm. They sent me to Romania, to get dirt on a double agent working for the Securitate, their secret police. We were stuck in a second-story flat together for weeks, conducting mindless surveillance on the asset. We ended up having a fling, nothing more. After we completed our assignment, we were reassigned to different field offices. I didn’t see him again for over a decade, when we were both assigned to a post in Paris. A year later, we were engaged.”

  She took another sip of her wine and continued. “Joel was self-confident, polite, and tactful. He had this self-deprecating sense of humor and was absolutely brilliant. I don’t think I would be over-speaking if I said he was a genius. He’s smart, and he knows he’s smart.”

  She paused and stared thoughtfully into her glass.

  I gave her some time, and when she didn’t continue, I said, “And then what?”

  She blinked and looked toward me again, although her gaze didn’t really settle on me. She was lingering in a past two decades in her rearview. “And then I was assigned to Serbia to flip an asset in Slobodan Milošević’s administration. The Agency had it on good authority that the asset had worthy information on Arkan—Zeljko Raznatovic if you recall.”

  I did recall. Arkan’s hooligan militia had not only been Milošević’s spearhead, it had been the entire shaft—Milošević’s personal murder squad. Arkan’s death squads killed, raped, and looted their way through the Balkans in the 1990s, committing virulent hostilities, including full-on ethnic cleansing, actions that would lead to him becoming one of the most wanted men in Europe. Arkan was finally indicted as a suspected war criminal by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague. But before he could get to trial, Raznatovic was murdered in a scene fit for the big screen—in a storm of submachine gunfire while drinking with friends and bodyguards in Belgrade's Intercontinental Hotel.

  Live by the sword, die by the sword.

  “Arkan,” Kathleen continued, “according to my asset, was acquiring mass numbers of weapons from the Russians. Some of those he provided to his militia, and some, because of the keen and greedy businessman that he was, he sold off for personal profit, providing them to Muslim warlords in North Africa at a very deep profit to himself.” Kathleen pulled her feet off the floor and tucked them beneath her, settling farther into the plush cushion. “My asset offered me direct knowledge on a deal that was being brokered by a middleman operating between Arkan’s people and the Muslims.”

  I was fairly certain that I could see where this was going.

  “So I went to Istanbul,” Kathleen continued, “following a lead. I was on a stakeout one night. And that’s when my whole world fell apart.”

  “Fagan,” I said.

  “Yes. I had him meeting with an insurgency group at the Port of Istanbul. I had a camera on him and I watched as he opened a shipping container, pried open a wooden crate, and presented an AK 107 variant to robed faction leaders from Libya. Needless to say, I was stupefied. I spent the next week doubting what I saw, even though there was clear evidence of what had transpired. I started to think it was a case of double standard—an undercover agent working both sides. Spooks do all the time. But then the next week, after recording him receiving a briefcase from the same insurgents, I then followed him to an Istanbul branch of Deutsche Bank. After calling in a favor to a stateside analyst, I was informed that a sizable deposit had been made that day, at that location, by a Hayden Galt. The analyst wasn’t able to find out exactly how much the deposit was for, but digital crumbs had shown it to be over five hundred thousand dollars. After more digging, I discovered that that depositor’s name was an alias of Joel’s, although not one sanctioned by the Agency.”

  “So Joel had a side hustle going on,” I said.

  She nodded. “Personally, it wrecked me, and I ended up faking an illness so the Agency would allow me to return to my station in Paris. My Istanbul asset was handed off to another case officer.” Kathleen went silent again and stared back into her wine. “Joel returned to France a few days later, and I confronted him, told him that I knew what he had done. At first, he tried to spin it as though he was on an undercover assignment. But then I told him I knew about the money and which bank he stashed it in. That sobered him up in a hurry.”

  “What did he do?” I asked.

  “He shed his skin, that’s what. It was like he unzipped himself from his head to his feet and stepped right out of it. His entire disposition changed, and within seconds I didn’t recognize the man I had fallen in love with, the man who I thought loved this country as much as I did. So…” she sighed, “he threatened me, I slapped him, he hit me, and I retaliated with a candlestick that had bumped off the table and landed beside me on the floor. He stumbled out of my flat with a hand held over a bloody face, cursing me. That was the last time I saw him. And that was the last time he saw anyone with two eyes.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You? You’re the reason he wears an eyepatch?”

  She nodded.

  “And I thought you were a badass before...” I said.

  “I’m not proud of anything surrounding those events,” she said. “I handed everything I learned about his dealings in Istanbul over to Langley.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  Her next words were entirely unexpected, words that I had been wanting to hear for the last three months, almost certain that I never would. “Because you finally have the go-ahead to go after Fagan.”

  I tried to hold back a smile but was unsuccessful. “You’re not joking?”

  “Just before you arrived, I hung up with Director Watts. I told him about the Reddicks, the attempt on your life, and what Amy Jensen found. The Director respects you a lot, after what you did for Reuben Peña in Cuba. I got him to clear you to get on the case. So, I decided to tell you about my history with Joel to give you context, so you’re not blindsided by anything.”

  It felt like my birthday. I had just been green-lighted to go after the man I hated most in this world.

  Dreams do come true.

  But now I wished that Brad were here to go after Fagan with me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “that Fagan ended up being a traitor.”

  She waved off my comment, but regret was still in her eyes. She drained the rest of her drink and projected a heaviness that I had never seen in her, as if she were sitting under a heavy blanket of guilt.

  I took a final pull on my beer and placed the empty bottle on the coffee table. “But since you’re my boss, won’t they see one of your agents going after your former fiancé as a conflict of interest?”

  She bit down thoughtfully on her bottom lip. “Ryan, a few months ago I asked you not to tell anyone my former relationship with Fagan because…” She hesitated. “Because no one else knows about it.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Our engagement—our entire relationship—was secret. It’s this way now, but especially back then, you had to be extremely careful at how you went about projecting your relationships—any relationship—but especially one with another officer. If you played your cards wrong, you might be ordered to end the relationship or might get completely reassigned. I knew a solid
officer on station in Rome who had her employment with the Agency terminated because of an affair with a senior officer. The male officer didn’t get the can, of course. But then I suppose that’s beside the point.

  “Things were different back then. And I was younger, brokenhearted, and confused. One week went by and I didn’t tell them, then a month. Joel still didn’t turn up anywhere. And then a year elapsed. And by then it was too late, the hole was too deep, too much time had gone by to ever try and attempt a justification at revealing it. But you’re right. If they find out about my past affair with Joel, then they won’t let you work the case. And Ryan, it should be you. And Brad too, of course, but it’s not my fault he decided to take a cruise on the other side of the world.”

  “You don’t think that Fagan won’t spill the beans after we nab him? I told him that you were my boss.”

  “He has no reason to think that I didn’t tell my superiors.”

  “It’s not my business,” I said, “but why didn’t you just come clean about it all when I arrested Fagan three months ago?”

  “You’re right. It’s not your business.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She shook her head. “I just wish I would have said something all those years ago.”

  “Kathleen, every last person who carries a badge is human. The only thing that separates us from the drug dealers, the counterfeiters, and the Joel Fagans of the world is a moral compass that’s grounded in justice and liberty for all. We’re not different because we don’t make mistakes, or because we always make the best decisions. It’s just that we’re not willing to take the easy path and hurt innocent people along the way. I’ve never expected that you were perfect. But your compass is pointing in the same direction as mine—true north. And I’d follow you anywhere.”

  Kathleen smiled. “I knew there was a reason you were my favorite agent.”