Soul of the Assassin - [First Team 04]

by Larry Bond

  When had he told him that?

  Just before Moscow, where the Frenchman had screwed him, and Kiska had saved his life.

  “There is something on your mind?” Imperiati asked.

  “Yeah. Just before the bomb went off, I saw someone with a cell phone.”

  “A cell phone was used for a trigger.” Imperiati knew this not because of any great forensic discovery but from simple police work— one of the first officers on the scene had found a portion of the bomb in a nearby yard.

  Ferguson nodded as if he’d known, rather than merely suspected, this. The jammer in the art building wasn’t strong enough to affect the block where the bombing took place.

  “Can you describe the person with the phone?” said Imperiati.

  “I can do better than that. I know who she is: Kiska Babev. She works for the Russian FSB.”

  “Is that your T Rex?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure why she would kill Rostislawitch.”

  Imperiati clapped his hands together. “But of course it makes sense. The MI6 agent, Harrison, follows an Iranian who meets with him. The Russians must be following, too—they want to eliminate him.”

  “Why wouldn’t they get the Iranian then? Or just arrest our guy? Killing him means they can’t question him, find out who might be helping him, that sort of thing. Plus it can be messy. Collateral damage, as we’ve seen.”

  “He is in Italy. They cannot arrest him here.”

  “True. But we think T Rex is a freelancer,” said Ferguson. He was still trying to work it out himself.

  “You are sure about that? You told me—che cosa hai detto?—you said that you did not know who he might be. He could be anyone. Even yourself.”

  “I think we can rule me out.” Ferguson rose. “If I get you information on Kiska Babev, background, aliases, can you find out where she is?”

  “I would definitely appreciate the information,” said Imperiati. “As far as finding her, I cannot guarantee. Of course we will want to find her, if she was there as you say. A witness if nothing else.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I assume you’re hoping I will share.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  The SISDE officer nodded. “We will do what we can.”

  “You’ll have the information in ten minutes. At your e-mail address.”

  ~ * ~

  6

  CIA BUILDING 24-442

  Thomas Ciello lowered his head toward his computer, determined to ignore Debra Wu, though he knew she was standing in the doorway a few feet behind him.

  “Thomas, I’m not going away,” said Wu.

  “I’m busy.”

  “Do you have the information Corrigan needs or not?” She turned her right hand over, glancing at her fingernails, which she’d just had done in a rose shade to match her lipstick.

  “I’m getting it. Information doesn’t just appear by magic, you know. I can’t just blink my eyes and get it.”

  “Thomas, no one’s going to blame you for getting it wrong,” said Wu. “You have to just relax and move on.”

  “I didn’t get it wrong!” Ciello jumped up from his machine. “I didn’t say it was going to be a gas attack. I said possibility. Pos-si-bil-i-ty. Maybe. Could be. Not definite.”

  “Do you have the information on Kiska or not? Corrigan has to give it to the Italians now.”

  “I’m getting it.”

  “Cripes. All you have to do is pull it from the library.”

  “There’s a lot more involved in intelligence analysis than calling up a file, Debra.” Ciello flailed his arms. “I don’t just pluck things out of the air.”

  “One of your little green men can’t whisper it in your ear?”

  Ciello sharpened his stare into a death gaze. The world was filled with skeptics, people so narrow-minded they couldn’t see past their own lacquered fingernails.

  “Just forward it to his queue, OK?” said Wu. “In five minutes.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” said Ciello, though she’d already swept out of the office.

  The analyst turned back to his computer. He actually had the information that Corrigan needed, a simple outline of who Kiska Babev was—he’d gotten that when Ferguson’s first text message came in. But Ciello knew that what the team really wanted was information proving or disproving that she was T Rex. And this was considerably more elusive.

  Literally within minutes of the explosion that had sent Rostislawitch to the hospital, Ciello had begun looking for evidence that connected it to T Rex. The style precisely matched two previous T Rex assassinations, one in 2003 and the other barely twelve months ago. Details of those bombs were forwarded to the Italian investigators; several parallels had already been discovered, including the same detonation system, with the same wiring technique for the battery. At the same time, Ciello had noted that there was a distinct lack of parallels between bombings by “real” terrorists—most important, no uptick in monitored communications before the strike. The Italian investigators would have to collect considerably more information, of course, and would have several false leads-—two separate groups had taken responsibility for the attack—but Ciello was reasonably certain that the bomb had been the work of T Rex.

  What was much more difficult, however, was discovering T Rex’s identity. Ferguson’s information about seeing Kiska Babev using a cell phone just before the bomb exploded was tantalizing, especially since the Italians had quickly concluded that the bomb was set off by phone. But as far as Ciello was concerned, it was merely a hint about a possible direction his work should take.

  Ciello had retrieved all of the Agency’s information about Kiska Babev, trying to find evidence that she was T Rex. He’d begun by looking at what might be called the Agency’s resume on her, a brief dossier about where she’d gone to school, where her family was, and what her specialties seemed to be as a member of the FSB.

  The information in these resumes tended to be somewhat sketchy and at times unreliable, depending on the individual. The Agency did not have access to most FSB officers’ real resumes, and the information infrastructure in Russia—school and birth records, for example—was nowhere near as complete as in the West. Beyond that, the FSB, like the CIA and other intelligence agencies, often took steps to confuse anyone who happened to be watching, announcing divisions that didn’t exist and purposely confusing work assignments and job titles. So Ciello’s next job had been to assess how accurate this dossier was likely to be, and where the gaps were. He’d decided that it was at least in the ballpark; Babev appeared to be a colonel, relatively high up in the FSB structure, with an assignment that allowed her to travel despite her being based, apparently, in Moscow.

  Besides the résumé, the Agency had a number of contact reports, mission briefings, and other documents containing information on different foreign agents. Only rarely did the reports directly contain anything useful about the subject—Ferguson’s, for example, were typically as terse as classified ads—but considerable information could be teased from them. Where the contact had been made, to take a simple example, not only revealed where the agent was assigned but often what part of the FSB he or she worked for and how high up the ranks he or she was. If there were enough reports, a pattern emerged showing the agent’s specialties. And the lack of certain types of reports—nothing showing attempts at recruitment, to again give a simplistic example— could reveal a lot about an agent’s function as well.

  The portrait of Kiska Babev that had emerged was of a thirty-something overachiever—Ciello had three different sources for her birth date, all different—persevering against the traditionally male-dominated Russian intelligence structure. She seemed to have a specialty in science and had possibly started in the FSB’s Science and Technical Service. Seven years before she had worked in what was charitably known as industrial espionage, with a cover as an administrative assistant to Aeroflot, the Russian airline company. After that, she had been in Chechnya, then Georg
ia; at some point she switched from recruiting scientists to spy to helping track down terrorists. Her face had been identified in a photo of onlookers at a thwarted Chechnyan terrorist attack on a Russian school in 2004; she seemed to be working undercover there, and had not received any notice in the admittedly brief write-ups about the incident.

  It was in her anti-terror role that she had met Ferguson in Moscow. Ferguson was working undercover on a project to stop the clandestine flow of items that could be used for nuclear bombs and “dirty” radiological weapons. His exact reasons for being in Moscow were not included in his report, nor did he say much about Kiska Babev. But he had clearly had some interaction with her, since he not only listed her name but also made a notation that indicated she had assisted him.

  Having studied everything the CIA knew about Kiska Babev, Ciello had then tried to find a match between her dossier and what was known about T Rex. The Agency had generic profiles for the different sorts of miscreants one might encounter in intelligence work; Kiska’s background and personality did not mesh with what one would supposedly expect from an assassin. While Ciello considered the profiles little more than pop psychology, he nonetheless noted that there was no indication that Kiska had had any serious weapons or demolitions training. She had, however, been in Chechnya; one of T Rex’s favorite methods of killing people involved car bombs, a technique employed there against the Russians.

  Hard evidence of a connection was even more difficult to find. Ciello tried to place her at or near the scene of the assassinations, trying to match her description with the descriptions of possible suspects or even witnesses, trying to find any connection, no matter how thin, between her and the deaths.

  The police reports on the murders contained very little useful information, beyond the evidence that the assassin was extremely thorough and professional. At first glance, there was little to connect any of the crimes to each other. The victims ranged from political figures, to businessmen with Mafia connections, to the CIA agent. It was the CIA, not a police agency, that had made the link, tracing wire transfers that moved through an Austrian account before and after each murder. Those transfers were used to identify several other murders, and a rough pattern had emerged. From there, they had found the advance person, and the message using T Rex as a name.

  The accounts the money had passed through had been closed long ago. Apparently T Rex had developed a better way of getting his pay, because there had been at least one assassination connected with the advance person where the transfer wasn’t detected. Most likely, said one of the analysts who had worked up the T Rex profile, he had adopted a system of multiple accounts and smaller transfers, but the efforts to discover them had not yielded any results.

  Ciello had to go through channels to look for accounts in Kiska’s name at the banks that had been used for the transfers—a request that, even for a high-priority operation like Special Demands, took some time to process and involved considerable paperwork and bureaucratic maneuvering, even with the banks that the agency had a “special relationship” with. Results would take several hours, if not days.

  The CIA had a limited ability to track credit card transactions made by Russians in Europe. In theory it should have been easy to connect Kiska with a transaction in Bologna and then work backward from there. But scans of data from the Russian banks the Agency had access to, as well as Western banks known to be used by the FSB, failed to turn up transactions in Bologna.

  He next began looking through databases of airline tickets, extending back ten years. The rolls were the result of voluntary anti-terrorist projects, but the collection was useful for other purposes as well. Ciello, whose clearance gave him direct access to the databases, ran searches on Kiska Babev’s name and known aliases, and came up with a dozen different hits or matches. He’d been examining them when Wu came in.

  It took him a few moments to get past her interruption and remember precisely where he was: correlating the flights with possible return trips to see if there was an alias that he didn’t know about. His theory was that Kiska might use one name for inbound or outbound flights and another for the other leg of the trip. Finding a match between a pair of flights would give him another name for the financial queries. It was a complex search, however, with a wide range of potential variables, and after a few false matches—similar names that proved to belong to different people—Ciello had to concede that he wasn’t getting anywhere. He went back to the flights themselves, trying to coordinate them with anything known about the assassinations. He found only one, but it was provocative: a trip to France a week before the American CIA agent Michael Dalton had been killed. She’d used her real name, with payment arranged through a Russian travel bureau known to be used by the FSB.

  Tenuous, but definitely something. More than just the outline Wu had demanded.

  Ciello typed up a quick summary and sent it to down to Corri-

  ~ * ~

  C

  orrigan fought back a yawn as he queued up the segment from the surveillance bugs for Ferguson. It wasn’t that he was bored—the six-hour time difference between Italy and the States was killing him. He was in effect pulling two eight-hour shifts, with Lauren DiCapri filling the last. They needed another desk person, though finding someone with the proper training, clearances, and temperament—they had to get along with Ferguson—seemed impossible.

  “You ready, Ferg?” Corrigan asked.

  “Yeah, if I’m not keeping you awake.”

  “I’m sorry.” Corrigan hit the key to upload the video snippet to the satellite. From there it was downloaded to Ferguson’s secure laptop.

  “Yeah, that’s definitely Atha. How long was he in Rostislawitch’s room?”

  “Ten minutes. I have a little bit of audio, but it’s muffled. The maid must have been in the room downstairs running the vacuum.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  “I can send you a transcript.”

  “Fine, but let me hear it first.”

  The audio was completely indistinguishable; only with the aid of a high-tech sound scrubber had they been able to get anything from it. But of course, Ferguson being Ferguson, he wanted to hear that for himself.

  Corrigan sent the files, then put his hand over his mike and yawned again. As he did, his computer chirped, indicating he had something new in his priority e-mail queue.

  It was the Russian report from Ciello. Corrigan opened it.

  “So Atha goes into the room while Rostislawitch is away, probably to search it. He calls someone on the phone,” said Ferguson. “Can we get the phone number?”

  “Come on, Ferg. Be real.”

  “That’s a no?”

  “By the time we set something up with the NSA for that, forget it. He’ll have a new phone by then. You’d have a better chance using a scanner to intercept his calls.”

  “All right. Did you send that brief to Imperiati?”

  “I just got it now,” said Corrigan, opening the file Ciello had sent.

  “I asked for the brief hours ago.”

  “These things take time,” said Corrigan. “And it was only a half hour.”

  “I told you to get it together at least an hour before I met with Imperiati.”

  “It takes time,” said Corrigan. He skimmed through the summary, then saw that Ciello had done a lot more than put together a standard Agency report on an FSB officer.

  A lot more.

  “Hey, Ferg, Ciello has Kiska in France when Dalton gets killed.”

  Ferguson didn’t answer.

  “Did you hear that, Ferg? He has her in France. Shit. It’s the smoking gun. She’s got to be T Rex!”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “To Ciello?”

  “No, Dalton. I want to know what the weather’s like up there.”

  ~ * ~

  C

  iello was a master at teasing information out of the intelligence agency’s databases and files, but when it came to making a simple phone connection on
the in-house lines, he had a great deal of trouble. The procedure for using the encrypted line involved entering a department code as well as a personal code, which of course he could never remember without consulting the instruction manual he kept in his bottom desk drawer. This meant he had to find the key for the drawer; by the time he finally got Ferguson on the line, the op was beyond testy.

  “I almost hung up on you, Ciello. Where have you been?”

  “Um, here. I haven’t left the building since yesterday. I slept on the floor. Corrigan says it’s OK as long as I don’t tell Mr. Slott. It kinda helps my back.”

  “Listen, Corrigan tells me you can connect Kiska Babev to Michael Dalton’s murder.”