by Jon McGoran
Her eyebrow twitched at that last bit.
“What is it you’ve found?”
“I’ve been playing with different permutations of that distorted fingerprint you brought back from Turkey, and I finally got a hit.”
“You did? Who is it?”
“Michael Hoagland. The former head of Hoagland Services.”
“I thought he was supposed to be dead.”
“He is supposed to be dead. But I think he’s alive. I think he’s the Ringleader.”
Chapter 57
Navabi grabbed Aram by the wrist and dragged him back to Cooper’s office. She didn’t knock, she just opened the door and walked in, pulling him in with her.
Cooper looked up, annoyed, but he did a double take when he saw it was Navabi. Instead of waving them out he held up a finger.
“Well, you’d better straighten it out. Because I will not have CIA endangering this operation.”
He put down his phone and exhaled loudly.
“Sir—” Navabi began, but Cooper cut her off.
“Did I see Reddington here?”
“Yes,” Aram replied.
“Where is he?”
“He’s in there talking to the CIA agents.”
Cooper’s eye twitched. “He what?” He launched himself out of his chair and stormed out of his office.
Navabi’s eyes met Aram’s for a moment, then they dashed off after him. By the time they caught up he was approaching Ressler.
“Is Reddington in there?” Cooper demanded.
“Yes, sir,” Ressler replied, with a slight hesitation, like he was wondering if maybe he had screwed up.
Cooper moved past him and opened the door.
Inside, Reddington was sitting on the edge of the teacher’s desk. Percival, Thomas and Beckoff were zip-tied to their desks at the ankle, but their hands were free. They were eating bread and cheese and pate. They were drinking wine. They were laughing.
“Harold,” Reddington said with a smile. “So glad you could join us. I was just saying to Agent Percival here how sorry I was about your little misunderstanding, and how sure I was that we could all work together toward our common goal.”
Cooper’s rage was undermined by a trace of uncertainty.
“Reddington, a word outside please.”
Navabi and Aram backed out into the hallway to stay out of Cooper’s way.
“Director Cooper,” Aram said, but Cooper held up a finger.
“Not now, Aram.”
When Reddington came out and closed the door behind him, Cooper turned to him. “I don’t like you talking to them in there without me,” he said.
“I’m not sure you would have wanted to hear everything that was said in there.”
“Washington is saying CIA has jurisdiction. If they’re asserting national security then they can take over this operation.”
Reddington smiled. “Well, you see there? That’s not going to happen.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because of our little talk. They are going to concede jurisdiction to us, in exchange for a very small concession.”
“Which is?”
“When we put our Trojan horse into the video feed, they want us to include one of theirs as well.”
Cooper paused for a moment thinking about it. He turned to Aram. “Would that pose a problem?”
Aram took a step back, then shook his head. “It shouldn’t.”
“I guess that’s okay,” Cooper said, “as long as there’s no technical problems.”
“Good.”
Cooper and Reddington both turned to go back into the classroom.
Navabi said, “Director Cooper? Aram has something important to tell you.”
“Yes, Aram, what is it?” he snapped.
“I think I know who the Ringleader is.”
Chapter 58
Keen’s face was a mask of stone on the bus ride back to the campground. Boden and Dudayev both made comments trying to get a rise out of her, trying to upset her, but she kept her face blank and her eyes empty, and they eventually left her alone and even gave her some distance.
She didn’t look at Okoye or speak to him.
Some of the other ringers were animated, celebrating their survival, but most of them, even some of the roughest, were quiet like her, nursing their injuries, both physical and psychic.
As they approached the campground, Corson stood at the front of the bus and told them the next round of the contest would begin at daybreak the following morning. They were to report to the main square. Even he seemed subdued.
When they got off the bus, Keen looked around for Yancy and spotted him already halfway back to his cabin, flanked by a pair of PMCs. She hurried after him as best she could despite the muscles tightening up in her side. She didn’t dare run after him for fear of drawing any more suspicion onto herself, not after the incident with Flynn.
She was still twenty yards away from Yancy when he entered his cabin.
She slowed a step after that and headed to her own cabin. As she did, images from the morning came back to her. First, she saw Flynn pounding the earth with his fist, screaming unintelligibly, indifferent to Yancy and his rifle because he knew he was already dead, and that the bullet was just a technicality. She saw the man about to stab Okoye, the one she shot in the throat. She saw Boden aiming the assault rifle into the crowd of ringers and heard their screams as he fired into their midst.
The images came faster after that: the dead and the dying, the killers and the killing. All of it exploded out of her subconscious, bombarding the backs of her eyes and the inside of her skull. Each image screamed at her to be acknowledged and processed and dealt with in a way that she hadn’t allowed herself to, because she couldn’t. She needed to be hard and cold—a sociopath or psychopath, just like the rest of them. Only she wasn’t, she was just pretending. It was a façade. A façade that was cracking, and she couldn’t afford to let it. Not out there; not in front of anyone else. She needed to get inside.
She made it to her cabin and as she fumbled for her key, from the corner of her eye, she saw Okoye watching her.
She got the key into the lock and turned it, opened the door and slipped inside.
Slamming the door shut, she leaned against it with one arm wrapped around her bruised side. She closed her eyes and slid to the floor, processing the carnage she had witnessed that day.
After a few minutes, she got up, splashed some water on her face and tried to pull herself together. She took a deep breath and felt the icy calm descend over her.
Then she heard a soft tapping at her door.
She took another deep breath and summoned an even greater level of control, considering her next move. She had no idea who was out there or why. The doors did not have peepholes, and the cabin’s three windows were on the back and the sides and they were bolted shut.
She took a deep breath and opened the door.
It was Okoye.
“What do you want?” she said flatly.
His eye was twitching again, worse than before. “We need to talk.”
“Where?”
“That is up to you. Somewhere private.”
She cast her eyes toward the cabin. “Do you think they’re bugged?”
He shrugged.
“Let’s take a walk.”
He nodded.
They walked silently past the cabins, to the far side of the square. They leaned against the fence that surrounded the entire complex, and they looked back at the cabins.
The sun was high, baking them along with the earth under their feet. But they were alone out there.
Still, when they started to talk, they kept their voices down to avoid being heard, and their heads down so their lips couldn’t be read.
“You are not Le Chat, whoever that is, but I will keep calling you that,” Okoye said. It was a simple statement of fact. It didn’t require a response, so she didn’t give him one. “I don’t think anyone else knows, but it’s obvio
us to me you’re not a contestant. You’re an agent of some sort, Interpol, maybe, or FBI, whatever. infiltrating this game, trying to shut it down.”
She remained silent for the time being, let him keep talking.
“My name is Jakob,” he told her. He paused as his face was wracked with spasms, but he shook them off, and when they subsided, he continued. “My brother Daniel was a good man. Not like me. Both our parents died when we were young and we were orphaned together. Daniel took care of me when I was little. He got me into an orphanage, got me into a school. I didn’t turn out so good, but he gave me every chance to do so. Seven years ago, Daniel and his wife were killed in a fire on a ferry in Senegal, leaving three boys behind.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t care for their children. I didn’t know how. I’m not that kind of man. I am not my brother. I am a mercenary and I know how to kill. Luckily, I found a place I could take them, an orphanage run by Miss Badri. She took in my nephews and she gave them a life. Later, I learned Miss Badri’s family had been on the ferry as well. They all died. She was left widowed and childless. Instead of giving in to despair, Miss Badri started an orphanage for the children who lost their parents in that fire. She saved my nephews’ lives. But she didn’t do it alone. Her husband worked for a man named Reddington.” He looked at her. “Do you know him?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
He smiled. “No, probably not. He is a criminal. But he is a good man, as bad men go. Reddington and Mustafa Badri were friends, of a sort. After Mustafa’s death, when Miss Badri started the orphanage, Reddington sent her money to support her work. I learned about this when my nephews went there. When they were too old for the orphanage, they had no place to go, no school to move on to. Miss Badri saw this. She saw other children who also needed a school. So she started one: the Akaba School, for the older children who had left her orphanage.”
He went quiet again, putting a hand over his eye as it convulsed in a spasm of twitches. When he looked back at her, his eye was almost normal. “I am a fighter, a killer. It is the thing I know how to do. But so is Mr. Reddington. I looked to his example, at the good he has done with his support for Miss Badri’s orphanage. I decided I would give back as well. For the last five years I have been sending my money to the Akaba School, watching it save lives and produce fine young men and women who are already making the world better in small ways, and sometimes large ways.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I’ve done terrible things with my life—that’s what I am good at. But with the Akaba School, I am doing something good as well.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“I am dying.”
“What?”
“I am dying. I have a tumor in my brain…” His eye began to twitch again and he put a hand over it. “I don’t think it will be so long.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I know this thing is evil, the Dead Ring. I know it more than anyone, but it was also my last chance to provide for the Akaba School, to leave something behind for them.” He lowered his voice to the barest whisper. “I know you are trying to shut this thing down, and that is good. It was never likely that I would win the money, but as I am now, it’s impossible. I will have no winnings to bequeath to the Akaba School. So instead I will help you, and do whatever I can to make sure the Dead Ring does not create any more orphans.”
Chapter 59
“Sure, we want to shut this Dead Ring thing down,” Percival said, having regained most of his insufferable self-assurance. Red was half inclined to mention his copper export scam again, just to remind him of the dynamic here, but he realized ultimately it would be counterproductive. “But mostly, we want the information we can get from the computers of the people betting on this thing, which you are going to hack into. And we also need to get information out of the Ringleader, once we get our hands on him. We want to bring him to justice, sure, but the information is important, too.”
He sat back, smugly.
“We have an entire operation in place, and a considerable amount of intelligence gathered,” Cooper said stiffly. “What do you bring to the table other than your druthers?”
Percival looked around the table, smiling with supreme arrogance, until he came to Red. Then his smile went away and he cleared his throat, looking down at his hands as he continued. “Well, apart from the obvious concessions as far as letting you retain jurisdiction and lead status on this operation, we have intelligence of our own.” He smiled again, unable to stop himself. “We have reason to believe we have identified the Ringleader.”
This time, Thomas and Beckoff also smiled.
“And who is that?” Red asked.
Percival let a dramatic pause accumulate. “Edward Stannis.”
Cooper glanced at Red and at Aram, then back at Percival. “Why do you think so?”
“It’s obvious if you look at it from the right viewpoint. The timing and manner of his disappearance. The fact that he maximized his holdings, then liquidated all of his assets before he disappeared, suggests he was up to something nefarious. Less than a year later, we start hearing rumors of what we would later learn was the Dead Ring. The fact that the only two people we’ve been able to identify in this operation, Corson and Yancy, both worked for him at G78, and left the company when he disappeared.”
He spread his hands and sat back.
Cooper turned to Aram and nodded.
Aram cleared his throat. “We think it’s Michael Hoagland.”
Percival laughed. “Well, it could be. Except for the fact that Michael Hoagland died eight years ago.”
“I thought they never found his body,” Red said.
“They never found any of the bodies. They were blown to smithereens in Peru.”
“We think Stannis was in on the attack,” Cooper explained. “He was making a hostile bid for Hoagland’s company, a bid Hoagland had rebuffed. He may have also been having an affair with Hoagland’s wife, whom he married soon after Hoagland’s disappearance.”
“If he wanted the company so bad, why did he take out the entire leadership team?” Percival asked.
“Maybe he was really after their contracts,” Red replied. “And their market share.”
“I’ll buy that,” Percival said. “That’s part of our scenario, too. But I don’t see how you get from Stannis killing Hoagland to Hoagland being the Ringleader.”
“We think Hoagland survived the attack,” Cooper said. “And maybe Stannis and the widow didn’t live happily ever after. Maybe Hoagland survived and saw Stannis taking over his business, stealing his wife, taking his entire life. And maybe he decided to take it all back.”
“How?”
“Our thinking is that he gets hold of Dorothy, the woman who he sees as having betrayed him. Threatening her, he forces Stannis to do what he wants. Edward and Dorothy were last seen on April 5, as they were about to go on a short trip to their lake house. Everything they owned was liquidated over the next three days. And they were never seen again.”
Percival smiled. “Well, that would all be very compelling except he didn’t escape the attack. He’s dead.”
Cooper turned to Aram and nodded.
“We found his fingerprint,” Aram said. “At the Dead Ring site in Turkey.”
The room was quiet after that. Percival was no longer smug. Aram almost was, or as close to it as Red had ever seen.
“Well that’s fascinating,” Percival finally said. “I look forward to determining if that is actually the case. In the meantime, out of consideration to the amount of advance work your team has already done, and your willingness to accommodate our modest requirements, we will accede to your request to maintain lead status on this operation.”
He turned to Beckoff, who put a metallic blue thumb drive on the table.
“Here is our program,” Percival said. “It is encrypted and isolated. It will not interfere in any way with whatever code you are sending. Isn’t that right, Agent Beckoff?”
Beckoff
nodded.
Cooper turned to Aram and raised an eyebrow.
Aram shook his head. “I have no way of knowing, sir.”
“Well, I can guarantee it. It is highly sensitive and heavily encrypted. You will not be able to open it, but I need you to give me your word that once the program has been sent, you will destroy any copies of it in your system.”
Aram looked to Cooper, who said, “If this jeopardizes our investigation or our person on the inside, I will personally charge you with endangering our operation and the life of our agent.”
Percival again assured him it was safe and then slid the thumb drive across the desk to Aram. Once Cooper had nodded his agreement, Aram reached out and picked it up.
With that, Cooper stood up and gave Red a nod of unenthusiastic gratitude. “Okay, let’s get busy. We don’t know when the next round is set to start, and we’ve got work to do before it does.”
As Cooper pulled Aram aside, Red leaned toward Percival and said, “If any harm comes to Agent Keen because of your involvement in this operation, I’ll hold you personally responsible. You don’t want that to happen.”
Cooper put his hand on Aram’s shoulder and said, “I want you to work with Wall to make sure you get that code into the uplink feed along with ours, okay?”
“Absolutely,” Aram replied, and he hurried back to his workstation.
Percival seemed in a rush to get away from Red, almost crowding Cooper in his haste to leave the room.
Before he could, Aram reappeared in the doorway.
“It’s Wall,” he said. “He’s gone.”
Chapter 60
Reddington pulled Cooper aside, and said, “I take it Wall isn’t crazy about our new friends here. Can’t say I blame him. But I think if you guys show up with your guns out and bundle him into a black SUV, it might not strike the tone you’re looking for. I brought him in. He trusts me. I’ll go after him.”
“We’re relying on him now,” Cooper said. “We need him. I want to be as respectful as possible, but one way or another we have got to get him back here ASAP. I’ll give you a ten-minute head start to find him, and ten minutes from when you’ve found him. Then we’re bringing him back using whatever means necessary.”
