Patriot Act

by James Phelan

  “Our ride?” Secher said, unzipping his flight suit as he walked.

  “That’s her,” the captain affirmed. “She’ll go up in about thirty minutes, as soon as it’s dark. Not that you can see them, but we have a New Zealand frigate and an Australian sub to our south.”

  “Will they be a problem?”

  “Non, the frigate is not Aegis equipped,” the captain said with a smile.

  “Aegis?” Secher asked.

  “An American radar tracking system—it’s good, believe me,” the captain said. “I’m going to put everything we have into the air and conduct live-fire exercises to cover your flight path. They will have so many targets to track, your flight will go undetected.”

  “Excellent.”

  Three hours later the Panther slowed its full-speed wave-skimming flight and hovered. Secher and his two-man DGSE operations team were dropped into the ocean, wetsuits and flippers keeping them buoyant. Each man was tethered to their own assault bags with their own flotation devices.

  Secher pushed the button on his backlit GPS locator strapped to his arm. They were on time, on location. He motioned with hand gestures to his team to hang tight, and the three of them came together and linked arms in the calm swell. The moonless night was green from within their night-vision world as they trod water for five minutes.

  At a squeeze on his arm from a team-mate, Secher turned his head to see the submarine break the surface a hundred metres away. It was massive, the black prow foaming the sea as it levelled out before them.

  The team swam the distance, and by the time they reached it they were greeted on the anechoic-tiled deck by a wetsuited sailor.

  “Welcome aboard, my wet spy friends,” he shouted over the sound of the sub exchanging air. He pulled the three of them up with knotted rope. “Next stop, sunny New Zealand.”

  24

  NEW YORK CITY

  Fox sat at his office desk after the morning meeting, typing an email to the research department two floors below. His MacBook computer took up the only space on the desk that was not covered with files and articles on the groups and the slain men.

  Gammaldi sat at the coffee table with his own laptop computer. Two trolleys of files delivered from the research department were parked next to him.

  “How you getting on over there?” Fox asked after sending the email. “Making a dint in it?”

  “You serious?” Gammaldi said, not looking up from his computer. “There’s no way that we are going to be able to get through all these papers.”

  “We’ve got to,” Fox replied, opening a fresh stack of folders in front of him. “Welcome to the true world of investigative journalism. About as exciting as being an analyst at an intelligence agency. Or a detective. Or a PhD candidate.”

  “Or a proctologist,” Gammaldi added.

  Fox smiled at him.

  “Somewhere buried in the papers in this office will be a piece of information that matters,” Fox said. “Something that will make a connection. A break in the investigation.”

  “Well, Sherlock, when I’m done compiling all attendees of the Bilderberg and LeCercle meetings of the past fifty-something years, I’ll get right into this first trolley,” Gammaldi said, shaking the trolley with a bit of anger. “By then I’ll be ready to break into a case of bourbon.”

  “Good man, Watson, that’s the spirit,” Fox said, chewing on his pen.

  “Hey, the attendee list of Bilderberg really is a who’s who,” Gammaldi said. “Thatcher, Blair, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rockefeller, Clinton…”

  “That’s great, Al. Just keep searching.”

  “Says here that Clinton’s real dad is Winthrop Rockefeller,” Gammaldi said.

  “What crazy website are you on?”

  Emily McDonald, Wallace’s executive secretary, came into the room with a tray of coffee and breakfast. Her appearance, with bobbed hair and checked one-button suit with matching skirt, gave her a Jackie O look.

  “You boys look like you could do with a feed,” she said, winking at Gammaldi. Easily passing for mid-thirties, Emily was closer to fifty and had been with GSR since its inception as a small club of investigative journalists.

  “Thanks, Em, don’t know if fatso here quite needs it,” Fox said, taking a croissant.

  “Wha—?” Gammaldi said, already half through a bacon and egg roll. His short but stocky Italian frame had softened around the edges in the year they’d spent in New York.

  “Just give me a call if you need anything else,” Emily said, closing the door behind her, leaving Fox and Gammaldi alone with their veritable mountain of paperwork.

  “Dude, how about you start reading through those LeCercle files, huh?” Fox said, pointing to Gammaldi’s trolley.

  Gammaldi closed his computer with a bang and pulled a handful of files from the trolley, opening them onto the coffee table.

  “Sianne Cassel, Deputy Leader—now Leader—of France’s National Front Party and the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty group in the EU, born…”

  “Al, read them in your head, okay?” Fox interrupted, flipping through pages of his own.

  “What is it we’re looking for exactly?”

  “You’ll know when you see it. A pattern, some coincidence, something that doesn’t add up. Something in someone’s past or something they’ve done. There’s gotta be a connection between members of the group that will point to a motive to kill these guys,” Fox said, holding up the seven files of the murdered attendees. “These are the files on the attendees of the last LeCercle conference, who were also Bilderberg members.”

  “Whaddya doin’ with ’em?”

  “Ha, listen to you, gone all New Yorker on me,” Fox said. “What would your mama say?”

  Gammaldi turned his attention back to his open file in protest of his much-missed mother being brought up in conversation.

  “These folders are everything research could dig up on the group,” Fox said. “Currently I’ve got them contacting the families, friends, colleagues, everyone possible, to see what the seven dead guys were about. Full profile, top to bottom.”

  “I don’t care much for her bottom,” Gammaldi said, holding up a picture of Cassel for Fox to see. She was dressed in bike shorts and singlet, riding along with the masses following the Tour de France.

  “Please don’t show me that kind of shit, I sleep badly enough as it is,” Fox said, and the pair of them went about laughing their way through hundreds of thick folders.

  25

  COOK STRAIT

  The wetsuited Secher climbed into the airlock and his two-man team followed. They each wore thick rubber wetsuits, flippers, and re-breathers for the short journey to the surface, where they would inflate their zodiac deployed from one of the submarine’s vertical launch tubes. Secher tightened the front straps on his waterproof backpack filled with various field gear.

  “First time in New Zealand?” the junior member asked, the small talk to settle his own nerves on being on an assignment with two of the most decorated agents of DGSE. Both Secher and his long-time lieutenant on such missions laughed.

  “Not quite. We were here in 1985, when we were about your age.” The young agent’s eyes went wide in recognition of that earlier mission. It was infamous in DGSE after all, and put the French intelligence agency in the unwanted position of being in the eye of the world’s media.

  “Fuck’n’ Greenpeace sons of bitches,” Secher said. He faced his lieutenant. “You should have used twice the explosives.”

  The hatch beneath them hissed closed, and the flooding light blinked.

  “Let’s go.” The three masked up as the water foamed in around their ankles.

  26

  NEW YORK CITY

  “Now this is interesting,” Fox said, standing by the window in his office with an open file in his hand.

  “Ex Italian Prime Minister desperately wants to resume power. He’s under covert
surveillance as the state brings corruption cases against him. They have him photographed meeting with Cassel senior three times in the past year. Since the latter’s assassination, he’s met with your girlfriend in the spandex, Sianne Cassel, twice—the last meeting in southern France, left for there as early as … yesterday.”

  “Girlfriend, thanks, that’s a nice touch,” Gammaldi said. He rummaged through the stack of files he’d already read. “I’ve got three more people who have had recent known meetings with Joseph Cassel.”

  Fox gazed at the file in his hand, not focusing on the information in front of him but the words of Gammaldi ringing in his ears. Meetings with Joseph Cassel.

  He turned to his desk, flipping through the stack of forty or so targets that he’d read through already.

  “Here,” Fox said, separating a file onto his chair. “Here, here, here,” he went on until he had filtered seventeen files into a pile on the high-backed leather chair.

  “All these are members of the LeCercle group—all foreign nationals to France—who have been aided to their positions of power through the financial clout of the National Front Party and the influence of LeCercle. And most are members of the European Parliament’s Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty group.”

  “NFP is the party Daddy Cassel co-founded,” Gammaldi said. He scanned his own notes. “Co-founded with Pierre Lopin.”

  Fox looked at his list. Some threads were coming together, a pattern emerging, but it still wasn’t clear enough.

  “Keep piling these separately, and any that have no clear reference we’ll take down to the research department to dig a little deeper. I think we’ve found our connection, I think we’ve found the current president of LeCercle.”

  “The person who may well have answers on the Bilderberg slayings,” Gammaldi added.

  “At the very least an insider’s insight, Scooby.”

  Two hours later, Fox dialled McCorkell’s number at the White House.

  “The National Front Party in France is the biggest member of the EU’s Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty political group. Together they’ve been channelling funds through to sympathetic European political parties,” Fox said.

  “That’s old news,” McCorkell replied over the line. “The whole concept of the EU’s ITS group is to support their sympathisers and to have a disproportionate say on the European Parliament floor. Where they are getting their funds from, however, is information that our State Department would thank you for.”

  “Who knows. Many of these guys are minted, though, heads of big businesses mixing with politicians, you know how it works,” Fox said, reading through several cross-checked files. “And it’s on a grand scale. Cassel senior had the European Parliament halt a long-running investigation into our UKUSA Treaty and Echelon program three years ago, as it was starting to dig too deeply into the capabilities and activities of France’s own intercept program run by the DGSE.”

  “France is the only other power with a global network to rival the UKUSA alliance,” McCorkell said. “With all their foreign territories, it’s easy for France to go it alone and still manage to eavesdrop on most of the world. You’re sure it was Cassel that halted that investigation?”

  “Absolutely. It’s the ‘why’ that I need to find out. Sure, he was patriotic as hell, I get that much. I need to know how this French system works,” Fox said. “If I’m right and they’re using their version as a right-wing fundraiser, I need to know what makes it tick, and who’s on the inside of the DGSE who might be a sympathiser with these Euro hawks. It’s treasonous if the government’s offices are kicking back to political parties and foreign nationals, so there’s got to be a pretty big motivation for this.”

  “Ira Dunn will know their capabilities as well as anyone,” McCorkell said.

  “He’ll tell me what I want to know?” Fox asked.

  “He’s been in the game since before you were born, he’ll know how their op works,” McCorkell replied. “At any rate, he’ll tell you what you need to know about them. Just don’t expect him to be so forthcoming on his own agency’s capabilities.”

  “Well I leave for DC in an hour, hopefully I’ll return with some answers,” Fox told him.

  “Lachlan, Dunn can be a bit cagey at times, NSA to the bone, old-school patriot,” McCorkell said. “I sold your meeting to him purely on the basis that you were there in St Petersburg and that I thought it would be a good idea for you to give him the run-down in person.”

  “Perfect,” Fox replied. “I’ll start with that.”

  “It’s my rep, so don’t go getting his nose out of joint with some line of questioning. And don’t forget he’s a deputy director. The National Security Agency is a tight ship, as secretive as things get around here.”

  “Hey, who do you think I am, Diane Sawyer?”

  “Ha,” McCorkell said. “Anyway, Dunn’s old-school American, ex-marine, so he’ll be keen to hear what you have to say about the French connection.”

  27

  NEW ZEALAND

  Secher sat at the prow of the black zodiac, using his night-vision goggles to guide them through the sandy fjord into the mouth of the Wairau River. Having been deployed into the Cook Strait between New Zealand’s North and South Islands, the calm waters of the river were a welcome respite from the surf.

  Constantly checking his GPS coordinates, it took them almost thirty minutes to reach the point where they pulled the craft up onto the overgrown eastern riverbank. In silence Secher left the two agents to cover the zodiac with foliage, while he walked up to a low fence. In the dark night’s sky, he could make out the long expanse of a vineyard, and just beyond that the tops of the giant white radomes of Waihopai Station. In the wine-making Marlborough Region, they stuck out like dogs’ balls.

  Secher chuckled to himself at the thought.

  His lieutenant came to his side, preceded by the long suppressor on his FAMAS assault rifle, ever scanning for threats. He pointed to the junior agent and motioned him to take point position.

  “Stick between the vines,” Secher said, tightening the head strap on his night-vision goggles. “You take the lead to the perimeter fence. Don’t engage any contacts.”

  28

  NSA HQ FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  “Well, thanks for taking the time to come here and let me know in person,” Dunn said, pouring another round of bourbon from the bottle he kept in his bottom drawer.

  “I’m just sorry I wasn’t through that door a minute earlier,” Fox said, taking the glass from the desk. It was surely against the rules, Fort Meade being military property and all, but the hour was well past the yardarm.

  “World’s full of lost minutes. Had my fair share,” Dunn said, raising his glass in Fox’s direction. “To John Cooper, yet another fallen comrade.”

  “Cheers to that,” Fox replied. He leaned over the desk and chinked glasses, then he looked up at the wall behind Dunn.

  “You started as a marine,” Fox said, motioning to the glass-encased Mameluke sword. Earned by all US marines on graduating officers’ school at MCB Quantico, it complemented their full dress uniform in a tradition dating back to 1825.

  “Six years, then naval intel, then got swallowed into NSA. Still rank as a colonel,” Dunn said, leaning back in his chair and sipping his bourbon. “You were Australian Navy?”

  “Yeah,” Fox said, standing up to inspect Dunn’s photo wall. “Started out in intelligence but stayed for only a couple of years before bugging out to a more hands-on role.”

  “What put you off intel?” Dunn asked.

  Fox thought about it for a moment. He looked over the photos of Dunn as a young officer, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other fresh-faced servicemen in combat zones, on beaches and at the desks of big ships. Everywhere, their expressions were hopeful, confident, assured.

  “I think it was the people more than anything else. No offence, Colonel,” Fox said.

  Dunn waved
it off.

  “I was consistently amazed at the type of people that came through the door,” Fox said. “They were recruiting the right thinkers, rather than free-thinkers. You know the type, they can’t see outside the square, give the politicians and brass the answers that they want to hear rather than the answers that they should hear. The convenient truth instead of an inconvenient truth. Back home, it really came to a head in the budget boosts following the start of this War on Terror age. They let anyone in to boost the bums on seats. Not the way an intelligence outfit should be staffed, if anyone asked me.”

  Fox had felt Dunn was measuring him, and the mood in the room shifted slightly as if the more experienced officer finally approved.

  “Your recent articles on Extraordinary Rendition really rattled some cages around here,” Dunn said. He had a big Cheshire Cat grin that Fox couldn’t figure out.

  “Oh?” Fox was intrigued. He’d co-authored a few Washington Post pieces on the process the CIA used to move terrorist suspects across borders into countries that turned a blind eye to torture. Places where the US administration didn’t have to worry about the laws of due process when concerned about the dubious grounds for holding and questioning captives. Transporting for torture. The same network of transport that Fox had used to bring Kate home from Eastern Europe.

  “Not here in NSA,” Dunn said. “Didn’t bother us any. But you could smell the shit-storm in Washington, our inherently nervous ugly step-sisters over at Langley were having kittens.”

  “Well, that transport network came in handy when I had to bug out of Russia in a hurry,” Fox said. “Thankfully the CIA guys in the field didn’t hold any grudges towards me.”