by Nick Thacker
It didn’t mean much in most situations, but Gareth realized while he was sitting in the room with the two men that those words fit the situation perfectly. The two men weren’t withholding information because he was the enemy, but because they needed his help. It was a sensitive matter, one they couldn’t just openly discuss, but they wanted him in.
He’d agreed to take the flight.
Whoever they wanted taken out was a bad person. He’d confirm that suspicion and make doubly sure he was on the right side before he disembarked the airplane.
The plane had taken off and flown north, but other than that, he didn’t know where they’d drop him off.
Only one way to find out, he thought. He drained the last drop of scotch, looked for the flight attendant, and waved him over.
“Bourbon, please,” he said.
The gentleman leaned down a bit closer, frowning. “Burr bone?” he asked in broken English.
Gareth sighed. “What else do you have, besides scotch?”
The man smiled. “We have great collection of fine liquor. I will bring you a menu.”
He disappeared to the back of the empty jet and returned momentarily, holding out a humongous laminated sheet.
“Woah,” Gareth said. “Quite a few options here. Where you from, anyway?”
The flight attendant seemed confused by the question at first, but then leaned in again and spoke directly into Gareth’s ear. “Uzbekistan.”
“Right. Okay,” Gareth said. “Well, I’m assuming you’re a long way from home?”
The man opened his mouth, almost spoke, then stopped himself.
Gareth smiled. “Come on, bud, you can give me something, right?”
The man seemed be slightly angered at Gareth’s attempts to make him reveal the apparently sensitive information. He looked down at Gareth and finally spoke. “Everything will be made apparent.”
Gareth nodded slowly. “Right. Okay. Well, in that case, I’d better get on the phone. Oh — and how about a Crown and Coke?”
He wasn’t much for Crown Royal, but the lighter taste and feel it had, he thought, paired well with Coke. It also had little effect on him. He was technically working, so he didn’t want to overdo it.
The flight attendant returned a few seconds later — again, Gareth was the only person in the plane, yet it easily could have held another forty people. It was a smaller jet than a commercial airliner, but to Gareth, the only passenger, it was downright massive.
All this expense, he thought. Certainly not military. But definitely impressive.
He wondered again about the men who’d put him up to this. Meeting him in a very non-discreet location, yet sending for him and now sending him somewhere else on fancy private jets.
They had money, but they were careful to use it only when it wouldn’t cause attention.
Satisfied with his drink, his situation, and his mind somewhat at ease, he pulled out the phone they’d given him and prepared to call the number that had been saved on it.
He looked once more at the front of the plane, seeing that the flight attendant was busy cleaning something, and dialed the number.
6
“MR. RED,” THE WOMAN ON the other end of the phone said. That was the first surprise Gareth had — the person orchestrating all of this was a woman. He wasn’t at all sexist, but it still took him by surprise.
“Uh, yes,” he said. “Hello.”
“Have you been treated well? Comfortably, I hope?”
“Y — yes,” he said again. “I’ve been treated very comfortably.”
The woman laughed quickly, a sharp, staccato thing that freaked him out more than put him at ease. At least she’s trying, he thought.
“Good. Well, I assume you’ve been briefed?”
“I got… a little. From your boys back in town. Not much, I must say. The whole thing is a bit confusing.”
The woman paused for a moment, or there was a delay on the connection, but she eventually spoke again. “Yes, well, I apologize. Our intent was never to cause confusion. You see, we don’t exactly know what we’re dealing with here. We’re a bit confused ourselves.”
“You want me to find someone, I presume?”
“We do, yes.” He could almost hear her nodding.
“But you don’t know who it is.”
“Again, correct.”
“Well — that’s going to make this job a bit difficult.”
“You’ve been told that we expect it is someone in the banking industry.”
“Why’s that?” Gareth asked.
“Well, the people who have been showing up dead — all very discreetly, I might add — have had a few things in common.”
“Like… they’re all dead?”
“That’s the first thing, yes. Specifically, these are people who had no reason to die. They weren’t sick, they weren’t dangerous, and we had no idea they were in danger.”
“Okay, what else?” Gareth asked, as he took a sip of the drink.
“The second thing they have in common is that they were all extremely wealthy. Ranging from net worths in the high tens-of-millions to billions.”
“Wow,” Gareth said. He considered throwing in a joke about his own pay, but thought better of the it. The woman on the other end of the call didn’t seem to be much for humor.
“Correct,” she said, with no sense of emotion in her voice. “Finally, they all liquidated the majority of their assets just before their death.”
Ah, Gareth thought. Makes sense now. It’s a money grab. Trick the rich folks, kill the rich folks, take the rich folks’ money.
He thought about that for a moment as he looked out the window. It was so obvious, so… trite. He’d even had the option to watch a movie about such a heist when he’d boarded the plane.
The concept was simple, really, and for good reason — simple plans usually worked best, because the simple plans usually had the fewest moving pieces. Find a rich person or persons, trick them by — on the lower end of the scale — selling them something seemingly low-key and commonplace, like insurance or a bank deposit box, or, on the higher end, a plane or a mansion, or anything else.
Then, when the trust had been built up enough on both sides, the ‘switch’ would happen. The crook would somehow extract enough information from the victims, slowly bleeding them of more money, or information, or simply stealing their identity, the modern version of bank robbery. They’d have everything they needed to slowly and methodically expunge the assets from the victim’s portfolio, and — when they were really good — they could even stay in contact with the victim while it was happening and play the role of morale-giver, removing the idea entirely from the victim’s mind that they were being duped.
Gareth had heard of plenty of similar scenarios, but he had to admit this was a big one. Millionaires and billionaires, all agreeing to dump their assets into an account, just like that?
It did seem unlikely, but that wasn’t even the most surprising part. The person doing all of this was killing them after.
If you wanted to get someone’s money, why kill them and call more attention to yourself? Why not leave them alive, bleed them dry slowly over time? It would be a way to guarantee an income stream for yourself for the rest of your life.
Gareth shuddered. He hated that he could understand easily the criminal’s mind. He had never considered things like this before he’d joined the military, but being trained to think like a soldier meant he’d been trained to think like a man trying to get the best edge over another man. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was usually effective.
So he understood the gist of the game, but he still couldn’t understand the motive. That put him back at square one — if you couldn’t understand the motive, you didn’t understand the game.
So he didn’t understand the game. Why take everyone’s money if you’re not actually going to take it? And why kill them afterwards, only calling more attention to yourself?
He had a feeling he was
about to find out.
7
“IT’S NOT A PLOY TO take their money,” the woman said. “As we originally thought.”
Gareth stopped. This was a twist. She felt like the motive was not money?
“It’s not? But that’s a lot of money,” he said.
“Correct. Yet the money is still in an account, and our government — the US government, I should clarify — has full access to the account.”
“Wait, really?”
“They do. They’ve frozen the assets from each of the victims, until they have a better understanding of what’s going on. The IRS and the CIA are jointly examining the multinational aspect of this case, as most of the victims were not US citizens. But the account is a US-based account, so we’ve moved ahead with the investigation until further notice, when the United Nations stops dragging its feet.”
Gareth thought through the woman’s last statement. “So you’re CIA? Is that who I’m working for?”
“The CIA has its own operatives, Mr. Red.”
True. Of course. He knew that was true, and the CIA would already have people on the ground all over the world, trying to figure this thing out. He was confident he wasn’t currently being contracted by the IRS, and the woman herself had all but denied a good working relationship with the UN.”
“So…” he wanted to phrase this question properly. “Who am I working for?”
Eh, whatever. Good enough.
“That is confidential, Mr. Red. I apologize for our cryptic way of dealing with you and this situation, but you must understand and trust the significant pressure we’re all under here.”
“I bet,” he said. “Probably getting an earful from your boss, huh?”
Again, the shrill, cackling three-note laugh. He had to pull the phone away from his ear.
“Regardless, Mr. Red, we cannot disclose any more information about ourselves. I apologize. I hope you understand.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “But you gotta give me a bit more than that — I can’t just walk around and ask people on the streets if they’ve recently dumped their assets into an offshore bank account.”
“No, you certainly cannot,” the woman said. “What did the men you spoke with tell you?”
He thought back to the conversation. One of the men had been surprised that he hadn’t yet been briefed, while the other seemed to have been playing dumb the whole time.
“Well, let’s see. They said I need to find someone for you, and they’ll pay me a lot of money.”
“That’s correct.”
“But then they said they weren’t sure who I was supposed to find.”
“I see.”
“So they told me to talk to you — that you would tell me who. And I’ve deduced that it’s not just about finding someone, is it? You want this person off the map.”
She paused. “Yes. I see. But we don’t know exactly who it is we would like to remove from the situation.”
She said the words like ‘removing’ was somehow better, more humane, than the more grotesque ‘killing.’
“Okay, fine,” Gareth said. “You don’t know exactly who you want to remove. Do you at least have a list of possible candidates?”
“No.”
“Do you have a list of characteristics, then? Maybe what their hair looks like, or eye color. Hell, even what shoes they wear would be more helpful.”
“We have the names of the people who have been killed.”
“Well then,” Gareth said. “That’s a fine place to start. See who they’ve come into contact with lately, who might be around all their lives to warrant their wanting to liquidate assets into a big ‘ol liquidation bucket?”
“That won’t work, I’m afraid.”
Gareth took a huge sip of the Crown and Coke, feeling it singe the back of his throat just before it turned and went down, a smooth, cool refreshing feeling. He suddenly wished he’d ordered two. He figured the flight attendant guy with no sense of humor was probably working for this same woman he was speaking with, but he didn’t want to take the chance and reveal any sensitive information.
Not like he revealed anything to me, he thought.
“So you can’t figure out anything else about the killer? You just know the victims super well?”
The woman didn’t respond.
“I thought you guys were supposed to know everything about us. NSA, right? Those guys have data and voice recordings and everything, don’t they? So you’re not them? You’re telling me you’re —”
He stopped, suddenly realizing.
Of course.
It all makes perfect sense now.
They weren’t government at all. They had nothing to do with the CIA investigation. They weren’t the NSA, or the IRS, or any other acronym. They weren’t in the public sector.
They were private.
It made so much sense it practically screamed at him. She knew it, too, he realized. She wanted him to know, but she couldn’t tell him.
This was the bank.
The bank that had discovered that their clients were being killed, one at a time, just after they’d deposited a massive amount of money in the bank’s records.
The bank knew the clients, and they knew the amounts of money. They were the ones who would be suspicious, naturally, since they were the only party privy to all that information.
The United States government agencies, this early in the game, would only have fragmented information. They wouldn’t know everything yet — they might not ever know everything.
The bank was the common denominator here, and since it was on US soil had a lot at stake, trying to make sure it would stay out of the limelight, out of any media coverage that could be bad for business.
There might even be some sense of humane justice here, Gareth thought.
The IRS and the CIA, aided by whatever the UN would eventually give them, would be tracking the deaths alone — they would be weeks, possibly months behind any sense that the deaths were all connected. They could be individual murders as far as they were concerned. Murders happened all the time, and unless the killer publicly stated that the folks they killed all stuck a bunch of their money into one solitary bank account, they’d have no idea how it all tied together.
So the woman he was talking to, the men who’d ‘briefed’ him, the flight attendant and flight crew — they were all working for the bank.
It all made sense now.
“You work for the bank.”
No response.
“I know you can’t admit it, because it could endanger you and the folks you work for. I get that. Can you at least tell me what bank it is…” he shifted the question. “… that the people deposited their assets into?”
No answer again.
He sighed. “Fine. Fair enough, I get it. You got anything else?”
This time there was no pause whatsoever. The woman, almost excitedly, spoke again. “We have a location.”
“Oh?” He’d suspected as much — the Feds would take a bit to get this information, but if the woman he was speaking with was in fact with the bank all these dead people had deposited their assets into, they would surely know at least the locations of some of the dead people.
“Yes. We believe we know the location of one of the suspected victims. One of the larger deposit amounts, as well. And this victim seems to be someone of ‘suspect’ quality, at least according to the list I’m looking at.”
“Great,” Gareth said. This is where I’m currently heading. “So I guess this is where I’m supposed to start my chase, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Great. See, we’re getting somewhere now. And what is this location?”
The woman seemed to sigh, or at least pull the phone away from her ear for a moment. Then, when she came back on, her voice was calmer, quieter.
“You’re going to Yakutsk, and then on to Oymyakon, Russia. It’s a two-day drive from Yakutsk, and it’s too cold to fly directly into Oymyakon.”
8
THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT SUSPICIOUSLY ARRIVED immediately after Gareth’s call with the woman from the bank. He delivered another Crown and Coke, this time alongside a small, flat wooden board filled with cheeses, sliced meats, and bread.
“Charcuterie, sir?” the man asked, setting the board down on Gareth’s tray table.
“Little step up from the peanuts and pretzels I usually get,” Gareth said.
“We want to make sure you’re comfortable.”
“And yet you’re sending me to Yakutsk.”
“As I said, we want to make sure you are comfortable,” the flight attendant said. “For that reason, you will find all of the overhead bins full of the equipment you might need — winter parkas, weapons, and navigation and survival equipment.”
Gareth cocked an eye open a bit. “You don’t say?”
The man frowned.
“Figure of speech, buddy. Sorry. Anyway, that sounds great. When will we be landing?”
“First thing tomorrow morning,” he responded. “I recommend trying on the clothing and gear, testing it for fit. We have sized you up, but there are a few different options to try.”
Gareth nodded. “Seems like you’ve thought of everything, then.”
The flight attendant began to walk away, but Gareth grabbed his arm. “Hold on, uh… sir.”
“Roderick,” the man answered.
“Right… Roderick. Why — why me?”
Roderick looked out the tiny plane window, watching the clouds rolling by, a few mountain tops poking through as they passed within miles of them. He thought about it a moment, then looked back down at Gareth.
“Well, Mr. Red, it seems someone who has been keeping a close eye on you believes you are a perfect fit for this sort of expedition.”
Gareth wasn’t sure what that meant. Am I a good fit because I’m actually good at this sort of thing? He hadn’t been on many live-fire missions, and he certainly hadn’t played Navy Seal-out-to-find-a-bad-guy before. Or is it because I’m expendable?
He wondered if it could have been a combination of both. He had a loud mouth, a characteristic that wasn’t exactly rewarded in the military, but he never imagined it was bad enough that it had caused him to draw the short straw.
