by Richard Fox
Shannon, wearing a black-and-white business ensemble that was conservative and loose, pulled a pearl ring off her finger, then lifted her hair off the back of her neck. The gold chain of her ostentatious necklace was exposed.
“Unclasp me,” she said.
Natalie did as requested, and Shannon palmed the necklace.
Shannon turned and smiled at Natalie.
“Any jewelry? Cell phone? Electronic devices?” she asked.
“No, you said—”
“Just checking. Remember, no Russian,” Shannon turned around and flipped her hair with the back of her hand. Natalie was forbidden from using her hard earned language skills, the rationale being that the Russians might let something slip around Shannon’s assistant. Recording devices were forbidden from this meeting, but Natalie’s ears and memory weren’t suspect.
The elevator chimed, and the doors opened to reveal two men so broad Natalie wasn’t sure whether they could both fit inside the elevator.
“Sergei, Dmitri, so nice to see you,” Shannon said as she strode from the elevator. Natalie couldn’t believe her eyes as Shannon put wiggle and curves into her step.
“Hello, Miss Shannon. You know rules,” the giant on the right said. He held a gray plastic box in one hand, and Shannon put her jewelry into it before holding her arms at her side. The giant waved a metal detector wand over Shannon’s body, making an extra pass over her chest and rear end.
“Who this?” the large man on the left said. He had a goatee, which was the only way Natalie could tell them apart.
“My new assistant. Natalie, say hello to the best Russian muscle a girl can find in Vienna,” Shannon said, her voice sultry.
“Hello,” Natalie squeaked.
“Is prettier than other one.” The Russian with the box held it toward at Natalie, who shook her head.
“Eric’s out of town. I’ll tell him you said hello,” Shannon said as the wand went over Natalie with less gusto.
“No, bring this one back. Bronislava will call for you. Wait at bar,” the one with the box said. He pushed open a leather-clad door.
Beyond the door was an art deco bar, hardwood moldings over pale-yellow lights. A single barman in a white shirt and black vest stood over a formation of snifter glasses lined up for battle at a later happy hour.
A handful of men lounged in the leather chairs before the bar. Most kept their noses buried in newspapers—almost an anachronism, by Natalie’s standards. Staring at a smartphone screen had long since replaced staring at a newspaper to avoid human contact. Given the security, the men with newspapers had come prepared.
Everyone looked like a lawyer or accountant except for one man at the bar. He wore light-green golf pants and a matching shirt with a white collar and cuffs. His gut lapped over the front of his belt.
“Shannon, come have a drink with me,” the golfer said.
“Ari Mizrahi, I thought Bronislava blacklisted you for nonpayment,” Shannon said as she walked toward the bar, Natalie in tow.
“A minor glitch in accounting.” The corner of Ari’s mouth tugged at a sneer. Shannon had hit a nerve. “I got back on her good side right before my tee time. You’d think I’d miss an auction like this?”
“I think Tel Aviv would have you on the next plane home if you missed this auction, flying coach,” Shannon said.
Natalie promised herself that she’d thank Shannon for the exposition later. By tossing in details about Ari into the conversation, she was bringing Natalie up to speed on another player in the international arms market with subtlety.
Ari swirled a highball glass and took a sip of what looked like a rum and Coke.
“I need some M59 grenades for a client in Irbil,” he said. “Have any?”
“Now now, Ari. You know how Bronislava feels about side business.” Shannon wagged a finger at the Israeli.
“Fine, we’ll talk pleasure instead. Who is this?” Ari said. Natalie started to feel like she was a new puppy instead of a person.
A door at the far end of the bar opened, and a tall black man with a shaved head and pin-striped suit walked into the room. He strode past the bar, giving Shannon and Natalie a cursory glance as he passed by on his way out.
“He’s new,” Shannon said.
“An executive from Armscor, the South African weapons company. Times have changed, eh?” Ari laughed at his own joke. During apartheid, no black African would have ever been a senior leader in the state-owned company.
A Slavic man in a black suit with a white wire leading into his ear approached the bar and cleared his throat.
“About time.” Ari set his drink down, but the man held up a hand.
“Shannon,” he said, “and girl.”
“Wonderful. Shall we?” Shannon said to Natalie. Natalie stayed two steps behind Shannon as they were led to the door the South African had come from.
They went into a ballroom, the dance floor covered in round tables blanketed with in white tablecloths. Their guide closed the door behind them and pointed to the one occupied table in the whole room.
A thick woman with a mushroom top of short white hair stood up from her table. She wore a monochromic blue business tunic and knee-length skirt, like she was appropriating the fashion style of Germany’s Angela Merkel. At six foot five, the woman might have been mistaken for a bear if she’d worn a different color.
“Shannon. I let you skip the line to get you away from that awful Ari,” the woman said with impeccable English.
“Thank you, Bronislava. I owe you one,” Shannon said as she and Bronislava traded kisses on the cheeks.
“This is my assistant, Natalie,” Shannon said.
Bronislava held out a hand, and Natalie shook it. A reflexive smile half formed on her face before she banished it. Russian culture had a healthy mistrust for smiling strangers. The woman examined Natalie with critical eyes, as if some flaw would come to the fore.
“Natalie.” Bronislava said her name slowly and with emphasis.
“Her uncle handles finances for our Far East operations. She’s on loan until she learns the business,” Shannon said.
“This might not be the best way for her to get started. The piece I’m offering is very unique. Not the usual crap from a Siberian arms depot. Perhaps she should wait outside?” Bronislava let Natalie’s hand go.
“I’m not going to learn a damn thing sitting at that bar while Ari tries to peek up my skirt,” Natalie said. If her father was a player in the business, then a bit of spoiled brat might be just the thing for the situation.
“She checks out,” Shannon said.
“If she doesn’t…” Bronislava pointed a carrot-like finger at Shannon and sat at the table. She wiped a finger against the mouse pad on a laptop, and the screen turned on.
“Come look what I have. First time this has ever been on the market, I guarantee.” The Russian woman pushed a chair toward Shannon with an unladylike shove from her foot.
Shannon and Natalie sat down. A cargo container was on the screen.
“No, it can’t be,” Shannon said. Natalie was confused; a metal cargo container was one of the more ubiquitous things on planet Earth.
Bronislava tapped a knuckle against the mouse pad. The roof of the cargo container hinged open at a short end and was elevated. A single metal tube, nearly the length of the container, rose to a forty-five-degree angle. A second later a missile launched from the tube. The screen zoomed out, and an icon for the missile arched out and impacted on a grid field.
“3M-14 Klub cruise missile—the Americans call this system the Club K. Nine-hundred-kilometer range, four-hundred-fifty-kilogram explosive warhead, but it can be replaced with something else if you have it. Launch codes and manual included in the sale. Delivery to the port of your choice once payment is accepted,” Bronislava said with pride.
“I’d hear rumors, but I didn’t know it was operational,” Shannon said.
“Yes, a marvel of Russian engineering. I may get more on the market, but that
depends on the sale price for this unit,” the arms dealer said.
Natalie was looking at an intelligence nightmare. A cruise missile that could be hidden…almost anywhere. On a ship, a train, hauled by an 18-wheeler. Trying to find this weapon would be nearly impossible.
“How quick can you make delivery?” Shannon asked.
“It is already on the ocean. Only the purchaser will know which ship. The English lost an auction and yanked the insurance on the cargo ship, making a delivery of Hinds to Malaysia. Sore losers. I won’t let them screw up another deal.” Bronislava pulled a vodka bottle and three shot glasses from beneath the tablecloth.
“You are interested, yes?” She put shots of vodka in front of Shannon and Natalie. Warnings about drinking on the job from her training went off in her head. Alcohol was to be avoided at all costs. The loss of motor function, the downgrading of mental acuity, and the possibility of poisoning had been harped on on a weekly basis.
“Yes, what’s the starting price?” Shannon said. She handed a glass of vodka to Natalie and gave her a quick nod.
“Twenty-five million, American. Za zdorovie.” Bronislava made her toast and tossed the drink back.
“Za zdorovie” Natalie repeated.
The liquor burned Natalie’s throat, and she nearly coughed it up. Whether this reaction was because of shock due to the price or because of the lousy vodka, she wasn’t sure.
Bronislava’s eyes lingered on Natalie. Natalie felt a tinge of fear creep into her chest. Did the bear have her scent?
“Any sort of restrictions on the sale?” Shannon asked.
“No, sell it to the Taiwanese. Let them make a copy. I don’t care. Bids by six tomorrow night. Payment within twenty-four hours of the sale in bearer bonds. The usual,” the Russian said.
They traveled in silence back to the Eisen Meer office after their meeting with Bronislava. Shannon went straight back to her office with Natalie. Once inside her office, Shannon kicked off her heels and flopped into her swivel chair.
“Well?” she asked Natalie.
“Where the hell did that—that large person get a Club K? Won’t the Russian military—I don’t know—notice when it goes missing?” Natalie said.
“They might, but it won’t matter. The right people were paid off long before Bronislava got ahold of it. There are some at the data center who think she’s a front for Rosoboronexport,” Shannon said, looking hard at Natalie.
“The Russian government’s only weapon import/export company,” Shannon added.
“I-I didn’t know that. Thank you.” Natalie sat across from Shannon.
“Aren’t you concerned she’ll sell it to al-Qaeda, Hamas, or some bunch of dickheads?”
“What did you notice about all the prospective buyers?” Shannon leaned forward and rested her chin on a palm.
“They were all older men, very well dressed.” Natalie considered Ari and the South African. “And government?”
“That’s right. All representatives of state governments, legitimate or otherwise. The Russians aren’t stupid. They know if they sell something complex and with too much boom-boom to the wrong group, it’ll come back to bite them.” Shannon spun her chair around slowly.
“Wait. Then every country with a budget for this kind of thing knows about her and what she does? Everyone is just okay with it?”
“Natalie, my dear, every country knows, but then they also don’t know, officially. Governments have pragmatic needs to support insurgencies and procure arms off the books without some pain-in-the-ass do-gooder getting wind of it and causing a fuss. Bronislava is useful until she gets greedy and does something stupid like Viktor Bout.” Bout, the Russian arms dealer who’d made a fortune supplying civil wars in Africa, had been arrested in Thailand on behest of the American government following his alleged sale of antiaircraft missiles to rebels in Colombia.
“Ah, Viktor. I warned him not so sell in South America, but he didn’t listen,” Shannon said.
“Wait, you know that guy?” Natalie said and immediately felt stupid for asking the question. After their meeting with a different arms dealer, Natalie wouldn’t be surprised if there was a photo of Shannon and Vladimir Putin on a wall somewhere in the office.
“He’s slime, but he delivered on time.” Shannon waved her hand and dismissed the topic. “We have to win this auction. Eggheads at the National Ground Intelligence Center can dissect it and maybe come up with a countermeasure.”
“Where are we going to get that much money in the next twenty-four hours?” Natalie asked.
“Money isn’t an issue. Overpaying is.” Shannon hit a button on her phone. “Tony, get in here.” She turned back to Natalie. “You’re going back to that hotel tomorrow. Do you have a wig?”
Ritter, clad in business attire befitting an overpaid corporate snob, knocked on the open door of Tony’s lab. The room smelled of ozone and stale pizza as Ritter let himself in. Most technical intelligence analysts kept their workstations impeccably neat but not Tony, who seemed to thrive in the chaos of empty soda cans, cell phones, and computers splayed open in mid-dissection.
Despite the general filth and disorder of Tony’s lab, he had yet to misplace a thing of intelligence value or foul up an exploitation report.
Ritter found Tony behind a wall of computer monitors, headphones blaring some sort of Swedish rock opera. Tony hadn’t kept his New Year’s resolution to drop fifty pounds; a ring of exposed fat lapped over his sides and the bottom of his shirt. Ritter toyed with the idea of dropping a pencil into Tony’s exposed butt crack to teach him a lesson about respecting coworkers.
Instead, Ritter pulled the shattered thumb drive he’d lifted off the mark in Aden and tossed the bloodstained device in a plastic dime bag onto Tony’s keyboard.
Tony froze, then looked up at Ritter with a curled lip.
“Really, Eric? You got to bring me something covered in hepatitis and AIDS?”
“For someone who smells like his mother’s basement and Cheetos, you got a funny set of standards when it comes to cleanliness.”
“No one ever caught Ebola in my office.” Tony picked up the baggie by a corner with his fingertips and inspected the device. “The SSD looks cracked. What did you do—throw the guy under a bus before you got this?”
“Kind of,” Ritter deadpanned.
Tony set the USB in front of his keyboard and pushed himself away from the desk. Tony had a superstition that anything found on a person when he or she died carried a part of the departed’s spirit.
“I don’t know, Eric. I’ve got all this stuff out of Mosul to exploit and—”
“The courier was with the Sayf network, and he had enough counter surveillance around him to catch the CIA officer the Sana’a station insisted on tagging along. The guy wasn’t a fighter, but he did his best to get away from me. Whatever he was involved with was in the kind-of-a-big-deal territory. Prioritize this, and I’ll bring you a pizza from Aviano, okay?”
The air force base outside Vicenza, Italy, had an American-style pizzeria, which was night and day different from what passed for pizza Austria. Despite having a security clearance so high that even the designation was classified, Tony was easy to bribe.
“First, I want bacon on it this time and some of those cheese-covered bread sticks. Second.” He poked at the baggie with a pen. “Eww.”
“Thanks, Tony. You’re my favorite nerd,” Ritter said as he turned to leave the office.
“Geek! Geek—thank you very much,” Tony said.
Ritter made his way down the halls toward Shannon’s office. He passed other “employees” without a word or a second glance. Working in a covert facility meant keeping the work environment unsociable. Conversations in the hallways were forbidden, as details of a compartmentalized operation might leak to uncleared ears. You could always spot the extroverts in the office, as they would look at other people’s shoes.
He knocked on Shannon’s door and looked up at the camera. A buzz and a sharp click told
him the door was open.
“The station chief in Sana’a just about had kittens when you left the country. I’ve been trying to smooth things over with the Middle East desk, who is just as angry as the station chief,” Shannon said to Ritter as he walked in.
“Sorry, was I supposed to hang around and get to know the finer aspects of the Yemeni prison system?”
Shannon rolled her eyes.
“They’re all pissed off that you didn’t share whatever you picked up. If it leads to something major, then they want their share of the kudos,” she said.
“Since when do they care about who gets the credit? They’re the national clandestine service.”
“Politics, Eric. The CIA is still a Washington, DC, organization, and that comes with plenty of backbiting over rice bowls and stovepipes or whatever buzzword they’re using for bureaucratic posturing.” Shannon sighed.
“I’ve never known you to care so much about their wants and desires,” Ritter said. As a covert arm of the CIA, the Caliban Program had a tenuous relationship with the rest of the American intelligence apparatus. Its actions were hidden from all but a few carefully screened and high-ranking members of the government. Like a black hole, information would flow into the Caliban Program, but nothing ever came out.
“We might need their assistance in the future. I’d rather get it with a polite smile than with twisting arms.” Shannon pressed a button on her keyboard, and the passport picture of the mark popped onto a screen behind Shannon.
The man’s name was Latif al-Kindah. A fact Ritter could have done without.
“Latif was a bagman for the Sayf network. They’re chalking his death up to an accident, which is convenient. There’s no chatter beyond this, which tells us what?” Shannon said, watching Ritter through the corner of her eye. Ritter wasn’t sure whether she’d asked Ritter this kind of question to test him or to confirm her own suspicions.
“His cash belt was empty. There’s no gnashing of teeth over his death. He made his payment and went to the Internet café to report the drop to his handler.”
