Liquid Gold

by James Phelan

  Special Agent Jake Duhamel nodded to the man on his left and they charged through the door with well-practised skill, their vision sharp down the sights of their silenced H&K UMP submachine guns, firing .45 ACP rounds at hostile targets and changing clips so fast they’d put a Ferrari pit crew to shame. The .45 round was about one thing: stopping power, and these men liked knowing that one shot would do the job.

  Just over three minutes later the two men exited the rear of the building and the exercise was over. Anything under four minutes, with all hostiles down and friendlies unharmed, was a perfect score; five minutes was par for members of the FBI’s Enhanced SWAT Teams. Hogan’s Alley was the name of the mocked-up training town at Quantico where the FBI’s special agents could hone their trade, their ‘Practical Applications.’ Often actors or training agents would play the roles of hostages, bystanders, criminals and terrorists, and usually paintball guns were used to simulate live-fire weapons.

  Quantico was also home to several divisions of active and support units of the FBI. For Jake Duhamel and his Hostage Rescue Team—HRT being the pointy-end element of the Tactical Support Branch of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group—it was home sweet home, a place from where they rapid-deployed to any emergency situation with one goal in mind: to save lives. The mocked-up buildings were constantly being shot to shit and then rebuilt, only to be shot up again as agents practised live-fire forced entries until, like Duhamel and his team, it was second nature. HRT didn’t do things by halves—their dedicated live-fire urban combat section, sandbagged off to prevent stray rounds escaping, kept several local carpenters in jobs.

  Jake Duhamel removed his clear goggles and cleared his two firearms: the H&K UMP45 that succeeded the venerable MP5, with slower fire rate but lighter and carrying much more punch of the .45 over the 9 mm, and his H&K .45 UCP pistol. Like all elite units, members of the HRT knew the practicality of keeping their firearms in interchangeable calibres.

  As Duhamel and Brick walked with their cleared weapons back to the support building, one of the HRT’s matt-black Bell choppers buzzed overhead.

  “They paged you?” Brick asked his team leader. “We’re going out?”

  “Nup, I reckon it’s a maintenance flight.” Duhamel shrugged—their team wasn’t on active use, but any deployment of the ‘go team’ would be communicated to them ASAP. They took the path double-time and entered their support building. Through the windows they saw that the chopper had landed, and they watched two suits disembark.

  Duhamel handed his firearms to his team’s most junior agent, whose duty it was to quartermaster the team’s gear and weaponry, and went over to the Special Agent in Charge, who was watching the new arrivals approach. Brick soon followed, munching on a power bar.

  “What’s with the suits, boss?”

  “Just ferried them in from Dulles,” he said. “Cops. One from Italy, one from Russia. Can’t tell which is which from here.”

  Duhamel looked to Brick and then back to his SAC. “And?”

  “And Jake my boy, you’re taking them through their paces until fourteen hundred this afternoon. Full tactical rundown of a high-risk arrest.”

  “What?” Duhamel was pissed off. “Who the fuck are they?”

  “Interpol, Europol, take your pick. They’re lawmen.”

  “Define lawmen.”

  The SAC raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s—” Duhamel took a sharp breath. “I’m not babysitting some amateur mo’s through live fire—they’ll probably shoot me trying to load their hammers.”

  The SAC cracked a smile and slapped a hand on Duhamel’s shoulder. “This comes from up high, you and Brick requested specifically. No details yet but these guys need to be ready for a live situation; something big’s in the works. We don’t know who the target is or where they’ll need to go get him, but you’ll put these guys through their paces and then fall in back here for a briefing by fourteen-thirty.” He moved to leave.

  “Boss? What’s this about?”

  “If I knew more, I’d tell you more,” he replied. “And if you knew more, you’d probably not want to turn up for the meeting. But you will, since I asked you to so nice.”

  As the SAC left the building, Brick flipped him the double bird, short and sharp, there and gone again.

  “I hear you, Bricko,” Duhamel said, looking over to his junior agent. Brick had heard most of the conversation and barely needed the nod Duhamel gave him to head off to organise additional training firearms from the armoury.

  “Fucking suits.”

  15

  NEW YORK CITY

  While Fox headed up to see the GSR director, Gammaldi checked his cubbyhole office, down the hall from Fox’s, and packed a few final items into his backpack: Kevlar vest, handheld GPS, satellite phone, a couple of good maps of the areas they were headed to.

  Tucked into a room on the eastern side of the building, on the same floor as the research and editorial teams, was the GSR flight office. As Gammaldi approached he saw that the admin assistant was talking on a phone that had a couple of lines blinking. She was like many of the junior assistants here: twenty-something, well educated, hungry for a career in the media.

  Gammaldi smiled as he squeezed past her and leaned over the vacant self-booking desk. Tapping away at the keyboard, he checked the booking schedule of GSR aircraft: the Gulfstream 650 was available, so he typed in the times and locations he would need. The staff here or at their terminal at JFK would then make arrangements for landing clearances, refuelling, and customs for all crew and passengers.

  Gammaldi never ceased to be amazed by the resources at GSR’s disposal. For a pilot, GSR was a sweet gig with good pay, use of all GSR’s leased aircraft—a few intercontinental jets and a couple of choppers—and he had quickly grown to love New York. The admin girl was still on the phone; she smiled at him and motioned that she wouldn’t be long. Gammaldi was a favourite with the office girls; the class clown who hammed it up, but also with the seniority within the company—both as a pilot and as Fox’s ‘wing-man’ when they had to chase a story—to get away with pranks. Today, however, there was no joking. He waited for her to finish her call, demolishing the sweets she kept in a bowl on her desk until she moved them out of his reach.

  She finally hung up and turned to him, ignoring her phone, which continued to buzz quietly with incoming calls. Gammaldi pointed to the projection on the wall that showed the shared flight schedule.

  “The other 650 hasn’t landed?”

  She shook her head and checked her computer. “They were delayed a couple of hours while refuelling at Heathrow,” she said as she typed, bringing up details. “ETA touchdown at JFK … momentarily, but there’s a delay pattern in the air, maybe up to an hour. Do you want me to contact them?”

  Gammaldi checked his watch. “Nah, it’s good, thanks.”

  “A Libyan engineer? What information has he got that’s worth killing for?”

  “He worked on the project in northern Pakistan, part of this underground water network … What he’s got is what I’ve got to find out—this must be bigger than what I’ve already reported, bigger than we thought.”

  “No story is big enough to die for,” said the GSR chief of staff, Faith Williams. She was dressed in her usual fashion-runway meets-corporate wear, stunning and perfectly put together: crisp white Donna Karan shirt, navy pinstripe Ralph Lauren pencil skirt, and Jimmy Choos in a red that rivalled her flame-coloured hair, which was pulled back into a tight ponytail. “I want you to stay here under FBI protection until this blows over.”

  “Faith—”

  “You should be protected, hidden—”

  “I’m not going to be bubble-wrapped—”

  “Lachlan, I won’t have you—or any other staff member of mine, for that matter—killed chasing a story. Period.” She paused. “Dr Wallace, back me up here.”

  The room was pin-drop silent. Tasman Wallace was a fatherly figure to
GSR staff, particularly so to this young Australian employee who’d risen to bureau chief in record time. Sure, he knew that Fox had a knack for getting himself entangled in hot spots around the globe, but the stories were syndicated as a result of his tenacity and were something that reminded the fifty-six-year-old director of his own time as a young reporter, long before the empire of GSR grew to be what it was today. He smiled and leaned back in his Humanscale chair.

  “Lachlan, can’t you delegate this one from here? Use our local contacts in the region? The Feds can protect you here, it’s the safest place.”

  Fox looked from the director to the chief of staff and back again. “Tas, what are you saying?”

  The older man held up his hand. This kind of story, Fox knew, was the kind of thing that drove Wallace, was the reason he set up GSR in the first place. He wasn’t one to look the other way, nor to be told to leave something alone.

  “I’m not going to stop you,” he said. “It’s your call, Lach, but I’m with Faith on this—only because I don’t want to lose you. If we have to we can get the story some other way.”

  “Some other way? Tas…” Fox looked at the man, spoke softly. “This is my story. I’ve got to do it, I’ve got to see where it goes. This is going to be something, really something. For the first time I know what it feels like to pull together a big story that’s world-changing.”

  “Is this is an ego thing?” Faith asked. Fox looked at her with disbelief, and after a moment she blushed—she knew him, probably better than anyone in the company except for Gammaldi.

  “No,” Fox said calmly. “It isn’t about me or my reports; it’s about Babich and Umbra Corp trying to cover up their shady operations. They want to silence me because I’m getting close to some other side to the water business. Something bigger than Pakistan being able to get a stranglehold on the water situation in Kashmir. But I won’t know what that something is until I go back and start asking more questions.”

  “As far as I can see, this boils down to one country stealing another’s water,” Faith said. “It doesn’t explain the threat against you and Al, the deaths of—”

  “Yes, but it’s the scale of this thing that puts it into—”

  “But why, if this is already out there in the public domain through your investigations,” Faith interrupted, “would Umbra want you and those connected to the water project dead? What will that achieve?”

  “That’s what I was wondering,” Wallace said. “Is it a reprisal for shining a light into this dark corner? If anything, such actions would legitimise your accusations of wrongdoing.”

  “Maybe two reasons,” Fox said. “First, killing reporters in Russia is commonplace, so maybe it’s just Babich’s natural reflex. And second, the reason it’s done isn’t simply for retribution. It’s to silence them, to stop them digging any further.”

  The intercom buzzed on Wallace’s desk. He pressed a button and the voice of his executive secretary, Emily, resounded in the room.

  “Mr Wallace, Alister Gammaldi just phoned to let Lachlan know their plane is being readied, and they need to leave in fifteen minutes.”

  “Thank you, Emily,” said Wallace and pressed the same button to end the call. He leaned forward and looked directly at Fox.

  “Lachlan, you don’t have to go out there.”

  “I know, Tas, I know,” Fox replied. “But there’s more to this than we’ve uncovered, and when I get back there I know I can get to the bottom of it. Whatever it is, it’s damning—damning enough to kill a lot of people for; damning enough to put an end to Babich for good.”

  “FBI agent Hutchinson is behind you on this?” Faith asked. “He can protect you?”

  “Let’s call him,” Fox said. “Hear it from him, then I go.”

  16

  PAKISTAN

  Kolesnik knew that helicopters were often tempting targets in these lawless regions, which is why he was driving between objectives. His chartered flight had landed earlier today in Muzaffarabad, Azad Kashmir, northern Pakistan, and from there he had hired a vehicle. It was slower, but safer this way. He had dropped off the cash payment to the agreed location, from where the cell would collect it and set to work on eliminating the GPS target while he took care of the surgical tasks. He had included the sum he instructed them to deliver to the aid building yesterday, with a small bonus, as promised, for their effort. He doubted very briefly that the money got through to the aid worker—but of course it would have. If there was something he knew about these people, it was that they were men of honour. They operated by a code not dissimilar to his own.

  Ambreen Butt and Sardar Yusufzai had been soft targets; Yusufzai’s body was likely to go unfound for some time. Govind been harder to track down, but that was done now, too. He’d had to change his clothes after that one, stuffed his old set into a garbage furnace on the side of the road. He tapped the steering wheel to the thumping beat that played through the Nissan Patrol’s sound system. Now he would cross back over the border, into India, and fix the engineer, Kneeshaw. He had hidden his pistol under the air-filter housing as a precaution, although he doubted the border guys would inspect his vehicle.

  Kolesnik tore through the desert, the middle of fucking nowhere. The part of the border he wanted to cross was still an hour’s drive away. He slowed only for the checkpoints, where underpaid soldiers sat and smoked and occasionally stopped him for a small bribe.

  Muse’s Take a Bow skipped a beat as he hit a big pothole, so he dialled down his speed to 120 km/h. Ahead, a low wall ringed a couple of farms, and a few signs advertised the wares for sale in the small speck of a town. He slowed, falling in behind a truck as the road narrowed, and then pulled into what appeared to be the dusty main street—not much more than a gas station, a few goat pens, a baker and general store, some kind of smoke house and a few date groves that were little more than stalactite holders in the cold.

  Kolesnik paid the guy at the gas station US$10 to top up his SUV’s tanks with diesel, and, with his backpack slung over his shoulder, went to take a piss in the abysmal lean-to toilet next to the concrete block hut. Walking back to the car, he didn’t like the look the guy gave him, but he brushed it off and tore out of town. He left the road and headed up to a ridge that had good sight-lines and access; he let the car idle and left the heater on as he plugged his laptop and satellite dish into the Nissan’s twin 12-volt outlets and logged onto the WoW site.

  The web connection was slow but serviceable, and a mail symbol soon popped up on his screen. He ran his avatar to the mailbox: three new messages.

  The first was from his Pakistani cell, known as Darkforcer: “Location will be taken care of within 24 hours…”

  “Report when it’s done,” he typed, knowing that gamers around the world sent messages just like these in this environment, with very different consequences.

  He clicked to open his next message, from Shadowserpent: “Done.”

  Simple, efficient work by the former Spetsnaz paratrooper who’d made a name for himself as a highly paid Special Forces consultant to several caucus armies before vanishing into obscurity somewhere in Greece. Omar Hasif was no more. Kolesnik knew he could rely on a compatriot.

  The third message took a while to open, and he popped a Dr Pepper while he waited, absently tapping to the beat on the dashboard. Two large, overflowing Pakistani Army trucks rumbled along the road below him, headed towards the little town.

  The final message popped up, from Darkshadow: “Targets leaving location, destination unknown, will update ASAP. May need to outsource.”

  Kolesnik grimaced. He would have enjoyed killing Fox and Gammaldi himself. Whatever, the job would get done. He shut down and packed away his laptop, then put the car into gear and sped off.

  17

  NEW YORK CITY

  “And you haven’t been able to contact Omar Hasif?” Tas Wallace asked.

  “No, nothing,” Fox said. The director of GSR always seemed
to age a little when news like this came to him—his Scottish skin went a little paler, his white hair a little whiter—and Fox was conscious that he was the only bureau chief of GSR who continually had to break information like this to the boss.

  “And Agent Hutchinson,” Wallace said into his speakerphone, “you’re saying you can’t find Omar Hasif right now either?”

  “That’s right,” Hutchinson said from onboard the C38, a government-owned Gulfstream G100 that belonged to the Department of Homeland Security fleet. “We’ve got the State Department tracking him down; his last known location is with his family.”

  “When was that?”

  “In country two days ago, from Pakistan.”

  “Do you need more eyes looking for him?” Faith Williams asked. As Wallace’s chief of staff she had thousands of names she could call on, scattered around the globe. “I can get a contract security team in the field.”

  “We’ll find him; we’ve got local support assisting us.”

  Fox wondered how good that support would be in Libya. He leaned forward and spoke into the phone. “Might not hurt to have some extra eyes.”

  “It won’t matter,” Hutchinson replied, “we’ll turn him up ASAP.”

  “Then what?” asked Wallace.

  “We can only help him if he wants our help,” Hutchinson said. “This imminent threat is cause for granting asylum, so it’s there if he wants it.”

  “What if he’s heard about the hit?” Fox said. “Maybe he’s gone underground.”

  “Then there ain’t much we can do.”

  “That’s a good point, though,” Faith said. “Maybe he can hide himself and his family better than you can hide him?”

  “Ms Williams,” Hutchinson said, “we’re pretty good at hiding people.”

  “What kind of support can you give our guys?” Wallace asked.