by Andrew Mayne
Actual DIA agents like Birkett have access to a wider amount of information through an intelligence portal, but even that comes with restrictions and safeguards. Anything she looks up is logged. If she decided to see if an ex-boyfriend had been using another cell phone—information that is probably stored on some server in a basement in Virginia—it would raise red flags and possibly tag her with a felony, assuming anyone wanted to make the case.
But even work-related research can be challenging. I’ve asked her multiple times to get a piece of intel, only to be told that higher-ups deemed it nonessential, or worse, to discover that the info’s flat-out wrong or outdated.
While I’m convinced that we need to be vigilant to protect our secrets, there’s some solace in realizing that most of what the government knows about you is buried under miles of bureaucracy. There’s a reason that, so many times after something bad happens, we learn that some other intelligence agency had been sitting on a report and did nothing about it. They never even knew what they had.
Increasingly, one of the most reliable sources of intelligence for the DIA—and one I have no trouble getting access to—is private intelligence sold to corporations and investment firms.
If I contacted the CIA and asked if the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group was building a new J-20 fighter in a defunct industrial park five hundred miles west of Sichuan, I’d get a terse rebuke about classified intelligence.
However, if I log on to the Strategic Developments Awareness portal—a private company in Albany, New York—and type in a query about fighter-aircraft production, I’ll get a satellite map showing how much energy is being consumed in an “abandoned industrial zone” and images that show a recently built highway that is unusually long and would make a great runway.
If you’re Boeing or Lockheed, this information is extremely helpful in preparing your bids to the Indian and Saudi governments for an upcoming contract—if you’ve suddenly been made aware that generals in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force might be whispering in their ears.
While the SDA portal won’t tell me if the Russian attaché in New Zealand is actually a Putin inner-circle spy, a related portal called Global Connect serves as a kind of LinkedIn for rating the degrees of connection between various business and government figures. I can type in the attaché’s name and find out that sending requests through him that have a net positive outcome on Putin’s personal assets tends to have a higher degree of success than a Russian attaché to Australia.
It’s not hard to work your way through the system and figure out who the “inside sources” are that talk to the Washington Post and which Mexican politicians have more business connections than political ones to Bolivians involved in cocaine export.
This information is almost all gathered through perfectly legal means. And it’s actually encouraged by the US government, because while it would be a trade violation for the CIA to tell Boeing what their spies have discovered inside Chinese factories, it’s presumably beneficial to the United States’ trade deficit if Boeing had the same kind of information that Beijing is actively stealing from American computers and briefing their businesses about on a regular basis.
So, while it would be wonderful for me to put the image I have of the Toy Man into one of the DIA, CIA, or NSA portals and get back possible matches complete with life histories and dental records, I don’t have that kind of access. Technically, my security clearance is on par with the person who answers the telephone at the front desk in DIA headquarters. But I can use the private portals like Global Connect or Face Tracer to track down possible leads.
Like the other portals, Face Tracer data is most accurate when money is on the line. If the Toy Man is a card counter who has been kicked out of casinos or spotted in Antwerp selling conflict diamonds, there’s a good chance I’ll get a reliable match. If not, he’s just one of seven billion other people who have a few thousand other folks who kind of, sort of look like them.
I once found six guys in Indiana alone who looked like me. So Face Tracer isn’t the most promising place to start. Plus, there’s the somewhat controversial problem that most facial-detection algorithms are tested on white or Asian faces, due to a combination of how skin reflects light and inherent researcher bias. This means that Face Tracer will probably produce quite a number of false positives, but I’m prepared for that now.
I upload the images, including the original ones from the reflection and my reconstructed shots, and let the system start sorting through them.
First it tries to create its own data points: distance between pupils and nostrils, eyebrow shape and others, especially ears—your ears are almost like a fingerprint.
Next the system sorts through a database of billions of images. Some of them are taken from social-media websites, others from newspaper accounts and a thousand other sources.
And boom, Face Tracker has given me seven results. Fewer than I was expecting, which makes me concerned he might not be in there.
I discount three immediately because their profile doesn’t fit. Two others are only images with partial data.
The last two, one with a 96 percent probability and the other with 98 percent, appear to be the same man.
But according to Face Tracker, they’re not. And when I put their names into Global Connect, I’m given two different biographies.
One is named Oyo Diallo, who served as an aide to a Nigerian warlord before going missing after a conflict with Boko Haram.
The other is a Pentecostal preacher named John Christian.
I flip between the images. It’s uncanny that two men could look so much alike yet be so different.
Then I read the biographies and everything starts to make sense.
Fuck.
They’re the same man.
How does the leader of an African death squad become a Christian minister in the South? It’s a chilling question, and one I’ll need to have some solid answers to before I take my claim to the FBI or whatever authority I need to get involved.
On the surface, it sounds outrageous, but after checking a few news items and clarifying some historical precedents lingering in the back of my mind, the connection becomes even more plausible.
In 2016, a disturbing story began making the rounds on the news. A security guard working at Dulles International Airport was exposed as a former Somali strongman accused of being a war criminal. He had allegedly committed such atrocities as dragging people to death behind jeeps, burning villages, and ordering mass executions.
While these allegations were only being addressed in civil courts—the United States had no jurisdiction over those actions—people were still stunned to find out that he had passed FBI and TSA background checks. This was despite the fact that his wife’s own visa status came into question after it was found out she claimed to be a refugee of the conflict her husband had helped create.
Some quick research reveals that human-rights groups claim there are at least one thousand accused war criminals living in the United States, a number of them alleged to have committed crimes as bad as John Christian / Oyo Diallo’s.
While our own natural-born citizenry isn’t lacking in individuals who have gone off to other countries and committed wartime atrocities—and despite the fact that our government has historically made more than a few exemptions for persons of value, such as the German rocket scientists we brought over at the end of World War II—the idea that a man like Oyo could be walking around freely makes my skin crawl. What poor refugee didn’t get asylum here because Oyo knew how to play the system or some government official was asleep at the switch?
It takes me a few minutes to find an exact image match. While that’s not admissible by itself, the time line syncs up perfectly: a year after Oyo goes missing, John Christian shows up. Both have Pentecostal backgrounds—a faith not uncommon in West Africa. Both have the same scar over the eye.
Even more convincing—at least to my newly cynical worldview, having spent the last year in anti
terrorism efforts—is that John Christian’s missionary work would be the ideal front for a gunrunner sending arms to war-torn regions.
On paper it’s a strong case, but I need to get more evidence so I don’t look like a conspiracy-theory crackpot when I try to point out that not only was the real Toy Man not killed a few days ago in a Brazilian prison before he could be extradited, he’s actually a war criminal living as a minister in Georgia.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
TRACKER
A day later, I have three addresses I can tie to John Christian.
The first is a small home on the outskirts of Atlanta. When I drove by, it seemed obvious that, unless it has an expansive basement, this is not his killing ground.
For starters, it’s in a tightly packed neighborhood with almost no fences. His home is a two-bedroom, single-story house with a small backyard that’s visible from the street, and his living room has a wide window revealing a spartan interior with a rather large cross mounted to the wall.
It’s where you’d expect to find a simple man of God, not a dangerous predator who likes his privacy. The home is the complete opposite of the one at Wimbledon—which reinforces my suspicion that he has multiple homes for different parts of his life. There’s John Christian’s home, and then there are the Toy Man’s lairs.
I saw no car when I drove by, so I got out, took a few pictures, and kept going.
The second piece of property attached to him is his church. About ten miles away from his house, the church is a distressed, white-painted metal structure sitting on a half acre of land with a few other buildings.
There, in the middle of the parking lot next to five other cars, is the white Cadillac from Artice’s nightmare.
It’s like seeing the cresting waters around a shark’s fin in the ocean. It’s something you’ve known exists—but until now it’s been lurking deep beneath the waves.
Now it’s in my world.
My plan is simple: I think Oyo has other property that I can’t find through records: a place he doesn’t want anyone to know about. When the new moon comes three days from now, that’s where he’ll commit his act. In order to stop him, I have to know where that place is.
I’m not a skilled surveillance operator—and even they work in teams. In order to catch him, I’ll have to resort to something a little more straightforward and risky. It involves me pulling up next to his car for about a minute and praying that he doesn’t come walking out and see me.
It’s also illegal, but I’m far beyond caring about that. Somewhere there’s a young boy whose life depends on me.
Turning the wheel into the parking lot feels like trying to push the rudder of a massive sailing vessel. Ignoring the looming Oyo storm would be so much easier.
I drive down the small asphalt road and take the spot next to Oyo’s Cadillac, which appears to be only a few years old and still has California plates. I suspect that he leases them or buys a new one every few years, not for the sake of vanity, but because it makes finding hair and fibers from previous crimes impossible.
At the height of their suspicion, police literally sat across the street from Ted Bundy, waiting for a search warrant while he washed his Volkswagen Beetle, scrubbing away the forensic evidence they were desperately seeking.
I take a breath and then pull out the map I’m using as a cover for my actions. It’s a bit of an anachronism, but still plausible. I’ve already prepared a touristy question I can ask the first person who spots me, if necessary.
With the map on the steering wheel, I take out my little device and make sure everything is working.
Because I don’t have access to the wafer-thin devices the DIA uses in its operations, I have to improvise with the hope that Oyo isn’t paranoid enough to sweep his car for trackers. My gadget is a simple, off-the-shelf cell phone I bought at a Walmart, plugged into a USB battery brick, and packed into a small black hobby box I got at RadioShack. Glued to the box is the largest neodymium magnet I could find on short notice.
I check to make sure nobody is coming, open my door, and lower my body to the ground.
If I’m spotted in this awkward position, I’ve already got my own phone in my other hand so I can stand up with that, pretending to have dropped it.
As I squat and nervously try to stick my tracker on the undercarriage of his car, repeatedly popping my head up over the door like a nervous gopher, I’m keenly aware that I’m not cut out for fieldwork.
It takes me an eternity to find a spot for the magnet, and once I do, it makes such a loud metallic clang I’m afraid folks will hear it all the way in the church. But nobody comes running out. I give the jury-rigged tracker box a firm tug. Good. At least it won’t be coming off by itself.
I pull myself back into my driver’s seat, adrenaline still pumping. I give one more check to make sure I’m not being watched and start to back out of my parking spot.
I pull away from the church and turn in to a gas station across the street and down half a block.
As I fill my rental car’s tank, I keep an eye on Oyo’s car, waiting to see if he comes running out to see what the mysterious man was doing to his vehicle. He doesn’t.
After topping up, I debate if I should wait to see what he does next, but decide that my skills aren’t quite up to that task. I need to stick to data points and not this hands-on shit. As I’ve proven repeatedly, it’s not my best talent.
Next up is for me to check the third piece of property I found linked to the Toy Man and his church. It’s raised a number of red flags in my mind, but it seems a little too brazen. I can’t imagine that Oyo would do his crimes somewhere that it would be easy for the police to get a search warrant—but who knows? Maybe he’s perfectly at home in his John Christian persona.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
RETREAT
In my research into John Christian / Oyo Diallo’s ministry, I found out that they have a small parcel of property west of Atlanta near Sweetwater Creek State Park. Called Children’s Christian Camp, it’s two acres of land with three buildings, a small pool, a rather uneven soccer field, and a fire pit—according to Google Earth.
The website says it’s a Christian retreat for poor and underprivileged children. While this sounds like a child-killer’s delight, the camp itself isn’t exactly what you’d find in a Friday the 13th movie. There are no fences and the buildings lie largely in the open, with plenty of neighbors. Like Oyo’s house in the suburbs, this isn’t where a murderer would feel comfortable chasing buck naked after children.
However, the camp itself seems like the ideal place to spot and groom potential victims.
While Oyo is away, I decide to drive over to the currently empty camp—according to the schedule, at least—and look around.
I park my car and walk around the buildings. They’re all older wooden structures painted white with dusty windows.
Peering through them, I spot a cafeteria and an activity room where the shelves are filled with board games. The other buildings include four stand-alone bunkhouses with ten bunk beds in each, as well as a freestanding shower and bathroom structure like you see at campgrounds.
In the pictures on the camp’s website, the kids spend a lot of time in tents and doing activities in the field. There’s no lake and none of the amenities of a regular summer camp, but for a kid from a poor family, it doesn’t seem like the worst place in the world … other than the fact that it’s run by child killer …
At the far end of the property is a state forest. To the west side lies a compound with a high fence—to keep the children’s noise out, I suspect. On the Internet, the neighboring property was listed as McGentry Nursery, but there’s no signage visible from the camp side of the property. What growth I can see over the fence looks a little overrun.
I walk around the camp again, making sure I didn’t miss anything like a fallout shelter or some kind of underground bunker. While I’m not sure that I would know it if I stood over one, I’m reasonably sure the Toy Man’s
lair isn’t buried beneath his Children’s Christian Camp.
Although this could be a killing ground, and while the kill house at Wimbledon was also where he buried some of his victims, it seem fairly unlikely someone as intelligent as Oyo would be willing to risk a bunch of hyperactive kids playing a game of dodgeball over a trove of poorly concealed bodies. He has better hygiene than that. Most serial killers don’t.
There have been numerous instances when police have shown up on a serial killer’s doorstep while victims were screaming for their lives just a few feet away in muffled crawl spaces or locked inside hidden rooms. They found twenty-six of John Wayne Gacy’s victims buried under his home. What was left of Jeffrey Dahmer’s was in his refrigerator and in almost every part of his home.
I walk over to a ring of logs surrounding a fire pit. Using the toe of my shoe, I kick around the ashes, just in case there’s something that shouldn’t be there.
Despite containing some melted plastic and foil, it doesn’t appear to be a cremation pit. Everything about the camp is what you would expect. Whereas simply glancing at the house on Wimbledon gave me anxiety.
I return to my car to head back to my hotel so I can take a look at Oyo’s location data and build a map of the places he’s driven to in the last few hours. I hope at least one of them is his secret place. Finding that now could literally be a matter of life and death.
As I reach for my rental-car key fob, my phone rings, startling me.
“Hello?” I reply as I take a seat.
“WHAT THE FUCK, THEO? WHAT THE FUCK?”
“Birkett?” It sounds like the angriest version of her I’ve ever heard.
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean?” I nervously glance around, expecting police sirens and helicopters. “Los Angeles? That thing?”
“That thing? Jesus. No. I’m not talking about your weirdo hobby. I’m talking about how I’m trying to smooth things over with Park so he doesn’t make your life difficult, and how I’m talking to a friend who handles contractor internal affairs for the DIA. I ask to see what Park may have said after your, uh, disagreement with him, and she mentions someone pulled your RA jacket.”
