Liquid Gold

by James Phelan

  Hutchinson would have preferred to have his whole team in on the briefing, a show of force that the Bureau was serious about breaking the back of this counter-espionage case. Since last year’s terrorist attacks at the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port and the White House, Hutchinson’s staff had gone from twelve to thirty-two—some ex-CIA agents had been involved, and some current members may be compromised. His Originals—as he liked to think of the first Special Agents who’d come on board—were all seasoned Bureau vets who’d worked mob cases. For over a year now they had compiled intel on Umbra that was up 3000 per cent on what the FBI and CIA had gathered over the past decade and a half. Their investigation was codenamed UMBRA after the founding of the corporation had revealed that most of its senior staff were ex-KGB and FSB officers of interest to international agencies. The US and UK joint taskforce at the time had labelled the group thus and it had stuck.

  Michael Rollins, an investigative journalist for GSR who’d managed to infiltrate Umbra by working undercover, had been working a major investigative story from the inside while posing as one of them. So convincing had he been, he’d flagged security and had been taken by a CIA rendition team to Afghanistan. While the erroneous nature of his rendition was being worked out by GSR, he’d been busted out of prison by the very group of men who he sought to take down: Umbra. It was a pity he hadn’t lived long enough to finish his investigation, but what little he did leave behind was something to add to the case, at least. And that was just the half of it.

  Hutchinson walked into a glass-walled meeting room purpose-built in the centre of a large open-plan room; the meeting room was soundproofed with anti-eavesdropping technology. The senior CIA agent who ran the desk on Umbra, Ryan Kavanaugh, and his deputy, James Riley, were both talking rapid-fire on landline phones. McCorkell shut the door behind him, took a seat at the conference table and poured a coffee.

  Riley was regarded as a real up and comer in the Agency and had a reputation as a hothead with a good analytical pedigree. He was dressed in a stockbroker shirt and suit reminiscent of Gordon Gekko, complete with short, dark hair neatly parted in a Mark Wahlberg hip kind of way. Like Kavanaugh, he was some kind of cyber geek.

  Red-haired Kavanaugh dressed more like Hutchinson, complete with crumpled dress shirt, collar undone and tie loosened from the neck by a finger or two. He’d started out as a Manhattan lawyer and then entered government service for patriotic reasons. He’d since been around the block at the Agency, including hands-on door-kicking work in the War on Terror, but word was he’d lifted his foot off the gas of his stellar career trajectory when he turned down a couple of station-chief posts.

  Riley and Kavanaugh reported to the Director of the National Clandestine Service. The NCS was the new-look Directorate of Operations; they were the agents on the ground, the field spooks, those at embassies around the world under official diplomatic cover. Those guys and girls with Non Official Covers, usually posing as journalists, members of non-governmental organisations or business executives, were very small in number, less than ten per cent of the Agency’s twenty-five thousand workforce of human intelligence officers. There were two training grounds for these agents: The Farm on the York River in Virginia, and The Point in North Carolina. The Farm grew ’em, the Point sharpened ’em. Hutchinson had trained at both, a rarity for a Bureau man, necessitated by his specialist skill in knowing America’s spooks better than anyone. He’d met Kavanaugh at The Farm, back when they were both fresh business-school grad students, although Hutchinson already had three years at the Bureau under his belt.

  Riley hung up his phone, didn’t bother extending a hand. “Andy, how you doing?” he said.

  “Been better,” Hutchinson replied.

  “How’s the Hanssen case going for you guys?”

  “Great, thanks for asking,” he replied with a mock smile, sipped his coffee. The phone next to Riley rang again. He picked it up, spoke, listened intently. Hutchinson checked his cell phone—no signal; this room was a virtual vault for anything transmitted, nothing in and nothing out.

  Robert Philip Hanssen, a veteran FBI counter-intelligence agent, was arrested by the FBI in 2001 and charged with espionage. Hanssen was caught clandestinely placing a package containing highly classified information at a pre-arranged dead-drop site for pick-up by his Russian handlers. Hutchinson had watched the arrest from afar, his anger too palpable to be in the immediate vicinity of a guy who had undermined so much of his work. Traitors like Hanssen were what kept Hutchinson going forward, and it kept Agency men around him on guard; maybe they were thinking what he did at times: Why did it take so long for the FBI to catch a mole who had operated with impunity within its ranks for so long?

  “Tip of the iceberg, that traitor,” Riley said with a big shit-eating grin. “A betrayal by a man sworn to protect our nation’s security … Man, that must be a killer.”

  Hutchinson forced himself to smile at the barb. He could have retorted with the arrest of CIA agent Harold Nicholson, a former station chief, the highest-ranking CIA official ever to be charged with espionage; he had been caught selling information to Russian intelligence … but Hutchinson wasn’t much liked in the CIA, and he needed to get on with these men here today.

  “Shit, is Rare Breed ever going to get off the phone?” Hutchinson asked. Kavanaugh signalled that he was winding up the call. “I’ve got a tight schedule. We don’t try and run down Uncle Sam’s clock like you boys.”

  “Yeah,” Riley said, “plenty of counter-espionage work you got to get back to doing, I’m sure. Forget looking after the country, you just concentrate on making life harder for your own.”

  “What, you don’t think we’re doing this good work to free up the agencies for national defence work?” Hutchinson said with a smile of his own and checked his watch in a way that got the message to Kavanaugh, who finally hung up the phone. “Anyway, this is a policing matter.”

  “Yeah, well, justice delayed…” Riley said. He flicked a switch on the table and the glass walls of the room went opaque—they couldn’t see out, no one could see in. On a projector running from his laptop he brought up a file sheet of the Umbra case, complete with a photo of Babich as the head of a family tree—side bars ran to Russian politicians and several other oligarchs. Babich was connected; on the surface it looked legit.

  Hutchinson pulled out the file on Fox he had brought, passed it over the table and watched as Riley skimmed it.

  “This is the guy on the hit list?” Riley asked.

  “Yep.”

  “And he’s en route to Spain right now?”

  Hutchinson held back on looking surprised.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, haven’t we been introduced?” Riley said. “We’re with the CIA.”

  “Andy, you know we’re all over this Umbra stuff … you looking at this?” Kavanaugh asked, pointing with a laser pointer at Umbra’s company listings on the screen.

  “Yeah, I’m looking,” Hutchinson said, scanning the branches that led off to the company’s water, gas and oil, arms, telco and media divisions. “Good job, looks pretty, but you got anything new in there?”

  “It’s a work in progress,” Kavanaugh replied. He put the pointer down. “So, where’d you get the intel for this hit list?”

  “I’ll have details sent through to your office,” Hutchinson replied, knowing that no real detail on the sources would make it to Kavanaugh’s desk.

  “And they already took out some targets?”

  “Yep.”

  “You know who’s hunting?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Any chance we can sit back and see who comes for him, this Fox guy?”

  Hutchinson cringed. “I’ve got him working on this,” he said. “Fox has been digging at Babich, as deep into Umbra’s dirty deeds as any assets we or our allies have.”

  “Big call.”

  “He’s got skills that’ll be useful.”

  “And you’re trusting him,” Riley said
with a sideways look at his colleague. “Just like that, you bring him into the fold? He’s going to do what we couldn’t do in all these years?”

  “Sorry about that, didn’t realise the Agency wanted Umbra picked apart,” Hutchinson said, saving his most condescending tone for: “Shit, if that was your goal all along, why aren’t you doing it already?”

  Riley’s neck flushed with anger.

  “The Umbra list,” Hutchinson said, pointing to the ‘family’ tree. “You got anyone in there you wanna tell me about? Any assets that can help us?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Riley said. He leaned forward, spoke right at Hutchinson. “Maybe go fuck yourselves.”

  “I’ll be sure to pass that on to my director.”

  “If he can get his dick out of the ass of your Exec AD of the National Security Branch.”

  “Nice picture, thanks.”

  “Babich—his money’s in a lot of dark holes,” Kavanaugh said. Riley laughed. “He’s got guys in his private security division paying for weapons that could be used against the US, certainly in situations that pose a clear and present danger against NATO and our allies.”

  “He’s in it up to his neck,” Riley said. “Look at South Ossetia, Georgia, Russia’s own caucuses, Chechnya and such. No qualms about arming others too—Poland, the Ukraine. He’s not letting his lieutenants run shit for him without knowing about it. He arms militias and extremists and he kicks up trouble—that sort of instability affects his energy side of things, his gas pipelines and such, driving prices up—and Umbra has always made big profits out of conflicts, in every area that they operate in.”

  “Some deals we know are on the down-low from a Russian press POV—usually Babich is a media whore; selling military gear to the Ukrainians certainly isn’t something he lets out to become public knowledge.” Kavanaugh said. “The Russian politicos know he’s doing it, and he’s put a lot of them in power, so they’re not going to give up their meal ticket.”

  “He must have pissed off someone in there, surely,” Hutchinson said. “Someone who gives a shit about what he’s doing?”

  “No one who’ll stick their neck out for you. Babich has made the right men rich, you know the drill. Conflict, like South Ossetia and that pipeline, means big money; disaster and destruction mean dollars or euros or gold, whatever the fuck he trades in.”

  “What about water?”

  “He pulls the strings of the Russian water minister,” Riley said. “The guy used to be his VP for Russian press affairs, so he’s sewn that up. Provides water for most of the big Russian cities, building desalination plants in the Persian Gulf and Africa, making his empire bigger, but there’s a few other biggies in Russia who’ve got their fingers in the energy industry too, bigger players.”

  “He tried to buy into the Nigerian coup last year,” Kavanaugh said. “Would have seen him becoming a serious player in world crude but that fell through. I think he sees water as being less of a hot topic, less risk all round, less complicated, so he’s all in.”

  “He set up an ex-FSB guy as a pro-Russia President of Chechnya two years ago,” Riley added. “That didn’t work out so well either; so, he gambles big and it doesn’t always pay, but he’s good enough to appear cleaner than most.”

  “Yeah, well, anyway, an FYI?” Hutchinson said. “Fox will end up making contact with these guys, try to press Babich to the table.”

  “What’s he want from us, a medal?”

  “I just want you in the loop—we’re acting on this: Europol, Interpol. It’s coming to a head. We’re bringing him in.”

  The Agency men exchanged looks.

  “You sure you want some soft-hearted Aussie reporter going after this?” Riley asked. “These are dangerous people.”

  “He’s got skills.”

  “Yeah, ex Australian Navy,” Riley said, reading over the file. “A bunch of real tough nuts I’m sure. Fuckin’ Navy queers.”

  “Riley has an interesting personality,” Kavanaugh said. “Forgive him.”

  “It’s a Boston thing,” Hutchinson said. “I’m well used to it.”

  “Roxbury?”

  “South End.”

  “Yeah, well, your man Lachlan Fox,” Kavanaugh said. “If these cats want him dead it’s just a matter of time.”

  “Short money’s on a car bomb,” said Riley. “Me, I’d put a bill against a close-in pistol shot, point blank, dead of night.”

  Hutchinson shook his head.

  “Anyhow,” Riley went on, “I’m sure he’ll start a nuclear fuckin’ war between Pakistan and India in the meantime, do the Russians’ work for them. So fuckin’ smart he gets himself killed as collateral.”

  “What’s this?” Kavanaugh said, tapping at a note in Fox’s file. It was a Bureau numbered code.

  “I can’t talk about that,” Hutchinson said. The two agents looked at him hard. “Really, I can’t.”

  24

  FBI, QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

  Duhamel gave them nicknames—Ivan and Luigi. They took it in their stride, happy to be part of the club. Nothing like a bit of sweat and shooting to bind men. One of the Hostage Rescue Team’s specialties was high-risk arrests—and with the nationalities of these two agents, it was a no-brainer as to where they’d be involved. But there were still variables, plenty of them, and these two guys seemed to know only as much as he did—or they were holding back. Duhamel was going to put them through a two-hour physical training session this afternoon, so that might loosen their tongues. But first, some fireworks.

  Ivan and Luigi turned out to be pretty decent, not your usual suits. They had spent the morning with Duhamel and Brick putting rounds down a range—and proved to be well above-par shooters, both with pistols and subs, which was all that would be required of them according to the brief. Both Duhamel and Brick felt confident that in a tight situation, both these ring-ins could be depended upon—and coming from HRT members, that was really saying something.

  Duhamel took them on a final assault to get them mission-ready. They rode in a golf cart to the joint-DoD MOUT—Military Operations in Urban Terrain—range: mock office complex, houses and shops made from rendered brick and concrete to resemble a Middle Eastern environment. The Israeli team had just cleared out, showing off their new assault rifles, which the Bureau was considering. Brick fielded a new awesome member of the HRT’s assault arsenal—a Gatecrasher.

  “Okay, the bad guys have booby-trapped all the doors and windows,” Duhamel said. They were hunkered down behind the corner of a building to the rear of their target. “So we’re going to cut our own way into the building.”

  “Think of this,” Brick said as he rapped his knuckles against the hard plastic sheet that was the Gatecrasher, “as a kind of portable door.”

  “We enter here,” Duhamel said, drew on the ground with a stick of chalk with quick motions. “I’m through first, then Brick, then you two, and we never stop moving.”

  “Don’t shoot me in the back,” Brick said to the two guys. They nodded, half smiles. “Seriously now: don’t shoot me.”

  “Scenario is there’s two hostages and the bad guys have issued an ultimatum and we have no choice but to go in,” Duhamel said, drawing on the plan with a few cross marks. “We clear in here, you hang back here, and Brick and I move upstairs. Only come in further if we call you in. Got it?”

  “Sì,” Luigi said. “Got it.”

  Duhamel looked to them, then Brick. “You guys think it’s a good plan?”

  Ivan looked at the little diagram, then peeked around the corner at the target building.

  “No,” he said. “By the time you go upstairs, hostages might be—taken out? Dead, I mean.”

  Duhamel smiled. Brick patted the Russian on the back.

  “Good work, Ivan,” Brick said. “That’s why we’ve got two of these.”

  He pulled another Gatecrasher from behind the other. The size and thickness of a battleship door, these black pla
stic ‘portable doors’ weighed just a few kilograms each when filled with water and could blast through almost two feet of brick or solid concrete, using water to direct a small amount of explosive to make a powerful cutting tool: you filled it up, put detonation cord or C4 or any plastique around the edge and … kaboom. On the water-protected side there was no blast back, meaning you can stand in close. Good for forced entry when door-breaching isn’t an option, perfect for urban combat mouse-holing—creating small passages between adjoining rooms or buildings by manually tunnelling through walls when you need to avoid open streets and sniper fire.

  “Ivan and I will take downstairs, Brick and Luigi will enter the building next door, hugging the wall in from the east, and blast a hole through the neighbour’s wall on the first floor,” Duhamel said, replacing his earlier chalk marks with new ones. “Call it in when you have the Gatecrasher set up, then we enter at the same time, wrap it up in the target house within a few seconds. Clear?”

  The two newbies nodded.

  “Remember, there are live people in there, so go easy where you point your blanks, just in case,” Brick said.

  They ran in their two teams to converge on the target house, keeping out of sight-lines of the windows, then signalled readiness.

  Brick ranged the wall with a depth reader, making sure they weren’t cutting into a cross wall behind. Thickness: twelve inches of concrete blocks; the three layers of detonation cord in the Gatecrasher would be more than enough. A thermal reading picked out the bodies in there—two figures, far wall to the front of the building, almost fifteen metres to their right.

  “Ready,” Brick called.

  “Call it on three,” Duhamel replied over their mics.

  Three seconds later the two teams went through neat man-sized holes cut through the wall—straight in, bad guys disoriented, pop pop.

  “Clear upstairs.”

  “Clear down.”

  Brick and Ivan were moving downstairs, the two ‘hostages’ between them. Job done, fist pumps. Ready as they’ll be in a day’s training.