A Conspiracy of Ravens

by Terrence McCauley

  A Faculty Member in France wanted to blackmail a trade minister looking to cut a deal with Somali insurgents looking to purchase weapons. A Faculty Member in Manila was tracking a non-government organization in the Philippines attempting to import guns for Muslim rebels rather than food for the needy. A Faculty Member in London had discovered a financier who was hiding cash for the Taliban. Another Faculty Member in Ankara believed an opium dealer was trying to influence a member of the Turkish parliament.

  All of it was too much information for one individual to track on his own, which was why Jason served as his Dutchman. In addition to handling all of the dozens of minor details that sprang up in the course of a day, he also compressed all of it into a single report twice a day for Hicks’s review and comment.

  Most of the information they tracked and logged into OMNI might be trivial at first, but it often led to something more important further down the road. Every detail of every case had become important now that the Vanguard was on their radar screen.

  And if the men he had killed on the highway were working for the Vanguard, then Hicks was on the Vanguard’s radar screen, too.

  Before he could find out how they had found him, he had to figure out who they were. Since the initial searches on the dead men had come up empty, he’d need a lot of help fighting the Vanguard. Help that Demerest could provide.

  Jabbar’s evidence showed that the Vanguard mirrored the University in many ways. The group didn’t have a central location, preferring to operate out of various scattered mobile areas throughout Russia and Asia. The Vanguard also used laptop computers and burner phones and carefully encrypted messages back and forth between their operatives and “straw men” tied indirectly to their organization. Most of their business was done through third-party personnel, many of whom didn’t seem to know who they were really working for.

  OMNI hadn’t been able to detect any active devices on any networks, but communications systems grew more difficult to crack the further east they extended.

  Jabbar’s evidence showed Bajjah’s plot had been financed by several withdrawals and deposits made in a small bank in central Berlin. Bank records and security cameras could only tell so much of the story.

  That was why Hicks had sent a Faculty Member to the city; the one man he knew who could prowl the shadows of Berlin, digging up information through rumor, innuendo, and vice. Someone who could mine the underground of Europe for more information than even OMNI could.

  An alert window popped up on his screen, reminding him of his scheduled video conference call with his man in Berlin. He clicked on OMNI’s secure videoconference application and opened the connection. A new window opened, showing a disheveled Roger Cobb coming into frame.

  The University’s chief interrogator was wearing a spiked orange wig and a matching lightning-bolt stripe painted over the right side of his face. Muted techno music thudded in the background.

  “Sorry, boss,” Roger said as he struggled to pull the headphones and mouthpiece over his wig. “The club is doing a Bowie tribute tonight and I opted for the Ziggy phase. I should’ve gone for a more muted look because everyone in the place showed up in an orange wig and face paint. You know how much I hate to blend in. Unimaginative krauts. No wonder they lost the fucking war.”

  There were about a dozen or so Faculty Members who Hicks could have sent to Berlin, but Roger was the perfect choice to establish an intelligence beachhead in the city. His Jolly Roger Club on the west side of Manhattan was one of the best-known vice dens in the world, catering to the carnal, forbidden vices of wealthy clients from all over the world. They paid a high price to satisfy their dark desires with complete discretion day or night, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  Roger drew the line at pedophilia and bestiality, but as he liked to say, “Everything from cocaine and the profane are my métier.”

  His clients’ indulgences at The Jolly Roger Club came at a higher cost than the price of admission. Every sex act committed and every drug used was done under the watchful eye of dozens of OMNI cameras strategically placed throughout the building. The resulting extortion, when necessary, was often the most effective way to persuade some of Roger’s influential patrons to act on behalf of the University without knowing the institution existed. After all, sharing secrets on a business deal or a murder plot or allowing a friend of Roger’s to use your house on Lake Como for a month seemed a small price to pay to avoid your wife or investors seeing footage of you getting spanked by a sex worker.

  Hicks had sent Roger to Berlin under the guise of possibly opening a branch of The Jolly Roger Club. As Roger was often fond of saying, “Vice is the true international language; the common bond that unites us all.” A nightclub in Berlin allowed him to be in residence as he got the feel for the German nightclub scene. It was perfect cover for his investigative work.

  It wasn’t the most orthodox way of gathering information, but it was as good as anything Hicks could come up with to crack the enigma of the Vanguard.

  “Looks like your cover is holding up,” Hicks said, “even if your makeup isn’t.”

  Roger straightened his wig. “Don’t let this get-up fool you, honey. Partying with Euro-trash every night isn’t as much fun as it sounds. They all drink like fish and get nasty when they do. But the dirt I’m digging up on some people could prove very profitable later on. These boys love their parties, and—”

  “Skip it.” Hicks knew Roger would dish dirt for hours if he let him. He had more pressing business. “Did you get my message about what happened to me last night?”

  “That highway thing? Yes, I saw it. That’s part of the reason I scheduled this call. I’ve run into a lot of people here who I thought might be linked to the Vanguard, but your incident made me cull the list down quite a bit. There’s one gentleman in particular I think we should focus on.”

  For all his eccentricities and oddities, Roger Cobb was still one of the best operatives Hicks had ever worked with. If he said he had something, it was solid. “Tell me.”

  “Quite a few people are excited about the possibility of a Jolly Roger Club opening here in Berlin. I’ve been approached by several unsavory characters about investing in the enterprise. I’ll sift through OMNI’s override of the club’s security cameras and send you some images to go along with the names in my report. But, in light of your run-in on the highway last night, I think we should focus on one character in particular. Calls himself Boris, but I’m almost sure that’s a lie.”

  A Russian named Boris. “Go on.”

  “He’s like a lot of the other goons who come in here. A big Cro-Magnon Russian bastard with a penchant for expensive leather jackets and bathes himself in obnoxious cologne. He makes a point of wearing a different Rolex every night and wears more jewelry than an Arab whore. Drives a white BMW with all the bells and whistles, too. Loves Asian women, which makes him unique. His type usually goes for the blondes.”

  “Wow,” Hicks said. “You’ve found a gaudy Russian hood named Boris. Hope you got pictures. No one will ever believe it. Biggest thing since Bigfoot.”

  Roger didn’t laugh. “Well, this particular gaudy Russian hood, you sarcastic bastard, happens to be sporting a Spetsnaz tattoo. And not just any Spetsnaz tattoo, either. His is from the Forty-Fifth Guards.”

  Hicks’s interest ticked up a notch. The Spetsnaz were Russia’s Special Forces, and the Forty-Fifth Guards were their airborne unit. Men with that level of skill usually made better money as mercenaries, not common street thugs.

  “What makes him interesting besides the ink?”

  “He’s taken something of an interest in me,” Roger said. “Not sexually, unfortunately, but a business interest. He says he wants to be a silent partner in opening a Jolly Roger Club here in Berlin and maybe Moscow. I didn’t pay him much attention until I got your email.”

  Hicks’s interest ticked up another notch. “Who does he work for?”

  “That’s what makes him so interesting,”
Roger explained. “He said he wants to be my exclusive partner in the club. He’s adamant that no one else can be involved or know he’s my silent partner. He said he’ll give me complete control over the operation and he’s willing to pay all in cash up front. All he wants is to profit from the deal. And he wants to get started as soon as possible. The sooner the better.”

  That was odd. Many people had approached Roger about being partners in his club over the years. Most of them had been serving as a front man for someone else, claiming they represented important clients. Boris wasn’t claiming access to capital. He had the capital. “Why is he so concerned about secrecy? And why the hurry?”

  “I decided to prod him a little when he showed up at the club tonight. He said he’s been saving his money for years and wants to get in on the ground floor of something profitable, fast. He said his boss disapproves of his lifestyle and has ordered him to cut back. He also said his boss is beginning to branch out into some operations our friend doesn’t like.”

  “What kind of operations?”

  “The kind that made him get out of the army in the first place,” Roger said. “He looked scared when he told me this, James, and when you see what Boris looks like, you’ll see he’s not the type who scares easily. Look.”

  The screen changed to a shot from one of the Berlin club’s security cameras showing a man well over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, with only a hint of belly flab beneath his leather coat. He had a diamond earring in his left ear and a large Byzantine cross on a thick gold chain around his neck. He had a buzzed haircut and a broad, sloping forehead above deep-set eyes.

  He looked like a Russian mafia hood straight out of central casting, but if Roger said there was more to him than that, Hicks had no choice but to believe him. “If this clown has enough money to blow on BMWs and Rolexes, he can buy a plane ticket to Costa Rica and disappear.”

  “That’s exactly what I told him,” Roger said. “But he’s convinced there’s no place on earth he could go where his boss couldn’t find him. And when he did find him, he’d make an example of him. That’s why he wants to get something started now. He wants to disappear. Fast.”

  Hicks’s interest in Boris was growing by the minute. If Boris’s employer was getting involved in something that made a Spetsnaz veteran anxious, there might be a connection with the Vanguard. Maybe. Or maybe his employer’s activities might lead to the Vanguard somehow. The long and winding road of intelligence work was rarely quick and never a straight line. “Have you tried to ID this guy through OMNI yet?”

  “No,” Roger admitted. “I’d written him off as another one of the desperate hoods who’ve rolled up on me since I got here. But your email made him stand out. I think we need to dig into him further, James. If he turns out to be a dead end, I’ll keep looking.”

  Hicks wasn’t ready to do any cartwheels yet, but it was the first promising lead Roger had gotten on the Vanguard since he’d been in Berlin. “I’ll run him through OMNI and let you know what I find. In the meantime, I want you to go old school on Boris. Get him drunk and get him talking. Have someone get his license plate number and see if you can’t get someone to follow him when he leaves the club tonight. Let’s find out where he goes and who he knows, and maybe we can see if he’s worth our time.”

  The screen switched back to Roger’s crooked wig and ruined makeup. “I’m way ahead of you. I’ve already hired an ex-cop from Bonn to babysit Boris when he leaves the club tonight. He’s working for next to nothing, so don’t worry about him asking any awkward questions.”

  Hicks didn’t like the idea of using non-University personnel on something like this, but he didn’t have much of a choice. If Boris turned out to be tied to a key player, he could always send Stephens or someone else to do the heavier work. “Keep me posted on what you turn up.” He decided he couldn’t end the call without at least one dig at Roger Cobb’s vanity. “And you really do look beautiful tonight, Roger.”

  His friend gave him the middle finger from over four thousand miles away. “Fuck you, darling. Talk to you tomorrow.” Roger killed the connection from his end.

  Hicks smiled at the blank screen. Fucking Roger.

  HICKS CLOSED his eyes and dropped his head in his hands. The events of the past several hours finally settled on him. The Carousel of Concern was spinning full tilt in his mind.

  Demerest. The Vanguard. Roger’s lead: Boris. The dead men on the highway. Tali in Berlin. The baby she may be carrying.

  Not to mention all the dozens of other concerns he had as Dean of the University.

  He hadn’t taken a break in over twelve hours, and decided to take one now. It would be easy to allow everything to blend into a single overwhelming wave, but he couldn’t let that happen. So, he removed the Ruger from his holster, took his cleaning kit from the armory, and began cleaning the weapon. It was the most mindless activity he could do while actually getting something done. His daily yoga routine would have to wait.

  He hoped Jabbar’s evidence would be enough to convince Demerest to work with the University. He could use their resources now more than ever to help fight the Vanguard. The University’s limited resources could only do so much. The more eyes and ears looking out for the Vanguard, the better.

  The Carousel in his mind began to slow as he cleaned the barrel, stopping on Boris. It was a slim lead, one more likely to lead to a brick wall than to the Vanguard, but it was a starting point. He wished he’d had the time to check the dead men on the highway for tattoos or other markings, but the sirens had been too close. Did they have Spetsnaz tattoos like Boris?

  He’d have to wait until OMNI was able to access the coroner’s reports to see if they had any distinguishing marks. But the report probably wouldn’t be available until the following morning at the earliest. Hicks didn’t want to wait that long. The dead men hadn’t decided to follow him on a whim. They’d shot at the cop because they had wanted to get away. Someone had ordered them to follow him. That someone undoubtedly knew their people were dead and were covering their tracks accordingly.

  Time, as always, was his enemy.

  But Roger had given him Boris, so Boris was where he would start.

  He finished cleaning the Ruger, reloaded it, and put the cleaning kit back in the armory. He went back to his computer and directed OMNI to run the image of Boris through databases all over the world. Since Roger thought he was Russian, Hicks knew getting a positive identification of facial recognition scans would be a long shot.

  A search that might take OMNI a few minutes to scan government systems in the West could take over an hour or more in the eastern part of the world.

  Hicks refused to sit in front of the computer like a teenager waiting for his girlfriend to text him back. OMNI would hack databases whether he was at the desk or not. He decided to do something useful instead, like make a fresh pot of coffee.

  He had just pushed himself away from his desk when he heard a familiar tone through his computer’s speakers. He was surprised to see that OMNI had already found one record that matched the Boris image.

  It was a mug shot from an arrest record from the previous decade on a police database in Bonn, Germany. Boris had been born Yulian Vasiliev in Moscow forty-three years before the date of his arrest, which put him at fifty-three now. Some mental math conversion from the metric system helped Hicks place Yulian at six feet four inches tall and two hundred and ten pounds. Judging by what he had seen of him in Roger’s footage, Yulian weighed closer to two fifty now.

  The arrest record showed a picture of the military tattoo on his left arm, which matched the Spetsnaz insignia Roger had described. The report also noted evidence of massive scarring on his body. That fit the profile of a Spetsnaz veteran. The Russians didn’t use those boys for parades or light gardening around the grounds of the Kremlin.

  Hicks’s German was good enough to translate Yulian’s arrest record. He had been arrested multiple times during his time in Bonn for assault, grand larceny, menacing, prom
otion of prostitution, armed robbery, attempted murder, and a variety of drug charges. German courts weren’t known for their leniency, so Hicks didn’t understand why Yulian wasn’t serving hard time in Stadelheim Prison.

  A few more clicks into Yulian’s record told Hicks part of the story. Each case brought against him had been ultimately dropped before trial, due to insufficient evidence.

  Yulian had friends in high places.

  Maybe friends like the boss he had told Roger he feared.

  A search of Yulian’s known associates turned up several felons with longer records than Yulian. None of the names or faces meant anything to Hicks, so he began clicking on the various names to get a sense of the kind of people Yulian knew. They were all either Russian or East German thugs who had been arrested for the same kinds of offenses as Yulian.

  The last name on the list turned out to be the most interesting. It was the only name linked to every one of the other known associates in Yulian’s file: Willus Tessmer, also known as Wilhelm Tessmer. Given his connection to the other hoods on the record, Hicks pegged him as the ringleader. But was he still Yulian’s boss?

  Tessmer’s arrest record might have been worthy of a crime boss, but he certainly didn’t look like one. He’d been arrested for the same variety of crimes as Yulian, with a few white-collar crimes thrown in. Money laundering, stock manipulation, drug trafficking, and the like.

  Tessmer’s mug shot showed a balding man with a crown of close-cropped dark hair. One set of pictures showed him with rounded spectacles while the other didn’t. He had blue eyes and a narrow face more befitting a banker than a felon, though the line between the two blurred more each day.

  His arrest record said he was five feet ten inches tall and one hundred and forty pounds. He had been born fifty-five years earlier in East Berlin under the old Soviet regime, putting him at around sixty-five now. Given Yulian’s claims that his boss hated the excesses of capitalism, maybe some of the old Soviet philosophies had stuck with him even after the Berlin Wall fell.