by Ed Kovacs
“Good. Very good.”
CHAPTER 16
The L-shaped shopping center in El Monte, in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, had seen better days, but not by much. There had never been a well-known grocery or drugstore “anchor,” and half of the storefronts now stood empty. Double Lucky Donuts and Saigon 88 Noodles suggested changing demographics in the previously Caucasian, then Hispanic, city. The Vietnamese-owned noodle joint and the Cambodian-owned donut shop were the closest shopping center tenants to Commercial-Industrial Applications, which was the end unit.
Almost no one paid attention to the initials of Commercial-Industrial Applications. And almost no one actually ever entered the locked premises, whose windows were tinted too dark to see through. But this early spring evening, with a scent of night-blooming jasmine floating in the cool air, the secret safe house had plenty of activity.
Kit Bennings, Angel Perez, and Yulana Petkova stood by at the rear entrance as Buzz Van Wyke entered a ten-digit code on a keypad. A click sounded, and then a steel panel slid open revealing biometric security devices. Buzz leaned forward and looked into an eyepiece where his iris was scanned for a match. Lastly, he slid his index finger into a narrow glass trough about four inches long.
“Finger vein scan?” asked Kit.
Buzz nodded. “The CIA has more safe houses around the country than you can shake a stick at. This one is seldom used but gets checked every week. We’re good to squat here for a few days.”
“How did you get the entry code and your data into the system?” asked Bennings.
“If I told you, you’d become party to a federal crime.”
“I think I already am,” said Bennings with a smile as the group entered.
The first order of business was to give Yulana food and drink and lock her in an interrogation room. A cot, chair, and some magazines had been placed in the room. It was the perfect place to keep her for now.
Good-byes were said and thanks offered to Buzz’s son Randy and the other SEALs, who had to get back to Coronado, pronto.
So the men settled in. Buzz took Kit into a small communications room to show him all of the sophisticated comms, but more important, he briefed him on the closed-circuit TV coverage and alarm systems that kept the safe house secure. The entire facility was heavily reinforced, and Kit immediately felt better.
As they stood in the communications room, a video monitor showed a taxi pulling around to the back door.
“That should be Jen,” said Kit.
They watched the video feed as Jen Huffman got out of the cab holding a suitcase and backpack.
“I’ll let her in,” said Angel, moving toward the rear door. Earlier, Jen had been dropped off at a hotel, where she checked out all of Yulana’s belongings for bugs and trackers and disabled the two that she found. One was hidden in a makeup compact, the other in the lining of the suitcase.
After Jen squared away her gear, Angel grabbed four beers from the big fridge in the large, well-stocked kitchen, and he and Buzz gave the nickel tour to Jen and Kit. Jen hadn’t seen the place yet, because she’d flown in to LAX from D.C. shortly before Kit and Yulana had arrived.
The safe house was pretty impressive. A bunk room comfortably slept eight. There were two soundproof interrogation rooms, the small communications room, a phony reception room with desk and chairs, a conference room with a table that sat ten, and a common room with sofas, a TV, and, Kit noted, an old acoustic guitar leaning in a corner. The place had toilets and showers, discreet parking in the back, steel-reinforced walls and doors. A gun room had a gun safe with weapons and ammo the SEALs had loaned to Buzz. A cache of orange-colored Czech-made Semtex plastic explosives sat in a corner—something the CIA must have forgotten about. Other goodies and gadgets were stashed in the conference room.
“Here’s the coolest thing,” said Angel, leading Kit, Buzz, and Jen through a gray steel door into a storage room. “I want to make one of these for my house.”
Angel pressed a hidden switch, and a section of the suspended ceiling opened up as a ladder dropped down. “Escape hatch to the roof. If you stay low, you’re out of sight, and it’s an easy run on the roof all the way to the other end of the shopping center, where they have a rope ladder rolled up.”
“Your black-budget tax dollars hard at work,” joked Jen.
“I don’t think we’ll be needing it, but anything’s better than a tunnel,” said Kit. The others looked at him for clarification. “Never mind.”
“Kit, I want to park one of the vans at the other end of the mall, in case we do need to use it,” said Angel.
“You’re joking.”
“I agree with Angel,” said Buzz, nodding. “As long as the Russian woman is with us, I want to take every precaution.”
“Okay, Angel, do it.”
Kit held out his can of beer, and they all touched cans.
* * *
Kit, Angel, and Jen sat with pens, papers, and laptops at the conference table as Buzz drew four circles on a whiteboard while holding his pipe.
“According to my contact at the FBI’s Organized Crime Unit, Viktor Popov is one of maybe forty Russian mob bosses in the United States. He’s considered small potatoes, so the Bureau, which has had very limited resources directed at gangsters since the war on terror ramped up in 2001, never went after him. Besides, Popov still has friends in D.C. who remember all the good intelligence he gave them back in the late 1990s. Rumor is he’s still giving them the occasional intel nugget.
“The big Russian outfit here in L.A. is an offshoot of the Odessa Mafia. Popov demurs to them and pays them a percentage of his action. And since he does things they don’t do, mainly high-end hacking, he’s not stepping on their toes, although his guys did knock off an armored truck once for twelve million.”
“Where’s his headquarters?” asked Jen as she used a small can of compressed air to blow dust off her laptop screens.
“Good question,” responded Buzz. “Nobody knows.”
“He doesn’t own a restaurant or nightclub … maybe hang out in a social club?” asked Angel.
“No, nothing like that at all. He owns several legitimate businesses and possibly launders money through them: a moving company, a construction outfit, heavy-equipment rental company, some electronics stores. But I say ‘possibly’ because he’s not really a cash criminal.”
“A what?” asked Angel as he twirled his green-handled screwdriver.
“Drugs, prostitution, gambling, and extortion generate cash, but Popov doesn’t do any of that. All the high-tech rip-offs his people do? The money is just electronically transferred overseas and disappears into an unending series of shell companies. And that’s only if he steals money. As you all know, after I retired as a marine aviator and before I became a contract employee of the CIA, I was, among other things, an investigator for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. It can take months just to trace one transaction. And by the time you do, the money is gone.”
“So Popov is…” began Jen without completing the thought.
“Popov is first and foremost an information broker. He steals data, blueprints, technological secrets and sells them on the open market.”
“Kind of like a freelance industrial spy,” said Jen.
“Yes, but he’ll hack the bank accounts of private citizens, too, as long as there’s money to be gotten.”
“I guess my account is safe then,” joked Angel.
“Popov falls in the cracks between being a spy and a thief,” said Kit, who was already aware of most, but not all, of the background information Buzz had been presenting.
“Exactly. Very few people in his organization even know they work for him. He uses six-person cells of hackers, and it’s rumored they move from location to location every few months. He also uses highly trained analysts, former Russian intelligence people, to sift through all the stolen information and rate its value on the open market. The analysts work out of lar
ge RVs, those big ones the size of a bus.”
“So his operation is very decentralized.”
“Very.” Buzz touched his pipe stem to a circle on the whiteboard. “In this circle are the hackers and analysts.” Buzz wrote WORKERS in the circle with a black marker. “They are the worker bees, the desk jockeys. They don’t know anyone else in Popov’s outfit except members of the security team—which is this circle.” Buzz indicated a circle and wrote SECURITY/SOLDIERS.
“So Popov has thugs protecting his hackers and analysts. And spying on them, too, I would imagine,” said Kit.
“Yes, and he has many of what I just call ‘soldiers,’ otherwise some other mob could easily move in and take over. Those soldiers fall into the security circle.”
“What’s the next circle?” asked Jen, who used a cleaning wipe to finish tidying up her laptops.
“Special operations.” Buzz wrote SPEC OPS inside the circle. “An example of that would be the crew that took down the armored truck. They do specialized, high-value crimes, and they are very, very good. But again, they’re insulated from the rest of the organization.”
“And the last circle has to be Popov and his upper management. So who is his top person in Los Angeles?” asked Kit.
“A young guy named Mikhail Travkin.” Buzz wrote POPOV/TRAVKIN in the final circle. “He’s Popov’s nephew. Has graduate degrees from both Stanford and MIT, paid for by Uncle Viktor.”
“Mobsters with business degrees and Ph.D.s in physics and engineering—that’s the Russians for you,” said Kit.
“I heard that Russian mob guys will shoot you just to see if their gun works,” said Angel, with his usual rat-a-tat-tat delivery.
“They are smart, ruthless, and have a business sense that puts them in a class by themselves,” said Kit. “But everyone has a weakness. Maybe we can locate the nephew. He could lead us to Popov.” Bennings ran his fingers through his coarse hair and scratched his head, as he often did when lost in thought. After a moment, he looked up. “Thanks, Buzz, that was good information. We’ll just have to develop more details, like locations, on our own.”
“Popov has been seen occasionally in West Hollywood, where thousands of Russian immigrants live, but his people are under orders to avoid places frequented by their fellow Russians.”
“West Hollywood has dozens and dozens of places where Russian immigrants hang out,” said Kit. “We’d need an army to put every location under surveillance.”
“Good luck keeping a Russian away from a steam bath,” cracked Angel.
“It’s funny, Angel,” said Buzz. “Popov himself is old school, but his entire organization is very young. They don’t care about the old ways. They have assimilated into the American Dream.”
“Yeah, except they’re not earning their piece of the American Dream, they’re stealing it,” carped Jen.
“The Russians are the hardest-working crooks you’ll find,” cracked Angel.
“If we can find them. Popov told me himself he has multiple passports under different names, so he could be anywhere in L.A. Meaning Staci could be anywhere.” Kit rubbed his eyes. “Jen, when Popov calls me on this cell,” Kit held up the cell phone the thug had tossed to him in Moscow, “can we track his location?”
“Maybe. I’ll need about an hour to set up.” Jen took the phone and left the room.
Buzz looked directly at Kit. “We need to talk about your Russian bride.”
“My loving wife?” Kit joked sarcastically.
“Why don’t we just blindfold her, drive her to the beach, and turn her loose?” asked Angel.
“If we do that, how will we find out what her role is?” asked Kit.
“I think the two tracking devices explained what her role is.”
“It’s possible she’s being blackmailed, similar to myself.”
“For what purpose?” asked Buzz.
“I don’t know that anymore than I know what my purpose is in this whole thing,” said Kit, feeling frustrated. “Believe me, it’s driving me crazy.”
“Smells like you’re being set up as a patsy … maybe her too,” said Angel.
Kit nodded. “I’ve considered that. The bottom line is, we know a lot about Popov, but we know squat about what his plans are.” Worry lines etched themselves across his forehead as he fingered the key he wore on a thick silver necklace.
“We don’t have time for some masterful interrogation, so let’s just waterboard her.”
Kit and Buzz raised their eyebrows.
Angel continued, “Some say it’s torture, some say it’s not. To me, torture is what those Islamist terrorists did in that Kenya shopping mall attack; they pulled the fingers off of hostages with pliers, they gouged out people’s eyes, and ripped off their noses and ears. They castrated men and dismembered women. That’s torture. Waterboarding won’t kill your Russian wife, it doesn’t do permanent physical damage, but it’s damn uncomfortable—intolerable. That’s why people talk, because they want it to stop.”
“But Angel, we don’t have much of a baseline of truth. She could lie through her teeth and we wouldn’t know.”
“She’s expendable, or she wouldn’t have been sent with you,” said Buzz. “So I seriously doubt she knows what Popov’s plans are. That suggests there’s little of real value she could give us, so waterboarding or any other interrogation technique would be a waste of time.”
“Okay,” said Angel quickly, “then maybe she’s a disinformation agent. She as much as admitted she had two tracking devices, but so what, we were about to find them, anyway. She might even be an assassin playing a role, just waiting to deliver a killer line.”
“I don’t trust her, either, guys,” said Kit. “But for now, she’s not my priority. It doesn’t hurt us to keep her on ice until we have a bigger picture.”
The ringing of a cell phone sent them all to silence. Then Kit realized it was his old U.S. phone. He checked the number. “It’s Larry Bing. Angel, your stopwatch. Time one minute so the call can’t be traced.”
Angel nodded and engaged the stopwatch feature on his chronograph.
Kit pressed the green button and put the phone on speaker. “Colonel Bing, this is Major Bennings, on speakerphone.”
Colonel Larry Bing commanded the Activity. Like Bennings, he was rock hard, fair to a fault, and cared about his people; that generated a lot of loyalty in the ranks. Unlike Bennings, most of the battles he fought weren’t with the enemy but with the feckless, the small-minded, the yes-men and yes-women, the sycophants and the sellout bureaucrats and the general officers in and around D.C. who only cared about CYA—covering your ass—and not about kicking the ass of America’s foes.
“Damn it, Bennings, you are in a world of bull crap. I wanted this call to be about my condolences on the loss of your mother, but I just got my butt chewed out by Secretary of the Army Fitzgerald, who has a video of you taking a cash bribe to marry a Russian woman. And the suggestion is she’s a spy. A spy who you apparently brought with you to America.”
“Thank you for the condolences, sir.”
“Be quiet! The fact that I am getting called on the carpet and I’m not even your commanding officer anymore should impress upon you, Major, just how angry the army is right now.”
“I understand, sir.”
“So here is the message I was told to deliver if I got hold of you. You have two hours from right now to turn yourself in to Colonel Spano, the CID commander at Fort Irwin. You will stay put there until this can be sorted out. Two hours, or you will be declared AWOL, understand?”
“I’m on emergency leave, sir.”
“Your leave has been canceled. CID officers have been ordered to find and detain you, although you didn’t hear that from me.”
CID officers worked for the army’s Criminal Investigation Command. Some of those investigators were hard-nosed, top-flight snoops and were essentially cops for the DoD. Kit hadn’t expected them to come after him so fast.
Angel gave Kit the cutthroat
gesture.
“Yes, sir. Thank you and good-bye.”
“Kit!!” snapped Colonel Bing, who then softened his tone as he said, “Keep your head down and watch your six.”
“Will do, Colonel.”
Kit terminated the call, popped off the back cover, and pulled the battery and SIM card from the phone.
“Damn,” said Buzz.
“Popov leaked the video of me taking the money in Moscow. Probably as a response to our little escapade at LAX,” said Kit. “He didn’t expect me to do that, and so he’s countering. I take this as a good omen.”
“Good omen?!” asked Angel. “The secretary of the army wants your head on a platter.”
“The only time I ever beat Popov at chess was when I attacked wildly with my queen. He anticipated certain strategies, but I just winged it.”
“Well this ain’t chess, partner,” said Buzz.
Kit exhaled audibly, then closed his eyes for a moment. “You guys have a chance to check with the morgue?” he asked softly.
“Yes,” said Buzz. “Your sister was kidnapped before she could make funeral arrangements. So your mom’s body is still there.”
“I want to go see her.”
“What about Jen’s trace when Popov calls?” asked Angel.
“I doubt that he’ll call tonight. He turned up the heat by releasing the video of me taking the bribe, and now he wants me to sweat.”
“Let me call a funeral home, have them handle everything about your mom,” offered Buzz.
“Not yet. I just got an idea. Jen can hack the morgue’s security video and take it down. Then we’re all going to the morgue—you guys and Yulana too.”
“What!?”
“Kit, you have the Russian mob, the San Berdu cop-shop boys, CID investigators, and probably the FBI looking for you, and they all know that your mom is at the morgue.”
“I’m hoping it’s the Russians waiting for me. We’ll grab one and find out for ourselves just how decentralized the information in Popov’s organization really is.”
Buzz chewed on his pipe stem, then nodded. “It’s risky, but until we find Travkin, it’s one of the few moves we have.”
