The Russian Crisis

by G. R. Daniels

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Barbara Schumacher, a receptionist in the CEO’s office suite at JPI and Petrenko’s mole in the company, was in a stall of the washroom serving the top executive floor. She was making a phone call as she sat on the toilet. The news conference going on at the same time far below was, figuratively, well over her head.

  Barbara’s call went to one of Petrenko’s three cellphones but these phones were now in the possession of Vasily Grigoryevich Zaytsev, the GRU captain who was now in his suite at The Four Seasons Hotel. He answered with a simple “Da.”

  “Is that Mr. Petrenko?” The woman was whispering and Zaytsev had to hold the phone tightly to his ear to understand her.

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Barbara. At JPI. You know. I have something for you.”

  “Go ahead,” Zaytsev said, with an encouraging tone.

  “We just got a call from a hospital. Toronto Western. You know… where they took Mr. Blax. Uh… well…”

  “Please. Don’t be nervous. Just tell me”

  “Okay. Well, it was a nurse. She didn’t know who to call. Mr. Blax didn’t list any next-of-kin. They just had his office number. So, she said the tests on his head have come in. They showed no concussion or fractures. That’s good, I guess.” The woman paused.

  “Is that all she said?

  “No. She asked if we had any information about his treatment. Uh, for the tumour…”

  “What tumour? Barbara, what are you talking about.” Zaytsev was frustrated and growing angry.

  “I don’t know any more. The nurse said she couldn’t tell us any more because of confidentiality. Probably said too much as it was,” Barbara was conversational now but Zaytsev simply grunted into his phone.

  “She asked me to find someone who could call and discuss the patient with the doctors. I said I would and that was all.”

  Zaytsev bit his tongue. “That’s good information. You have done well, Barbara. Now…” The GRU captain wanted to get off the call but Barbara broke in once more.

  “Can I get my birthday card today? I have something to do…”

  “Yes, yes. The card. Okay. I will arrange it.” Zaytsev broke the connection.

  He placed another call on his own phone. “Ernesto. Ask Petrenko about a ‘Barbara’. Ask him what she means by getting her card. Get back right away. Ah. Did you set that guy’s arm?”

  The Cuban snorted. “Si. He screamed like stuck pig. These Jamaicans. They are weak. Cubans are strong. I keep our friends good. I sing to them.” Ernesto laughed. “Good thing Cubans have good medicine. Like Canadians. All free. Even for Jamaicans.” He chortled again.

  “Just get back fast,” Zaytsev told him.

  Five minutes later, the Cuban called with the information about Barbara’s card. Zaytsev called in one of his men who had been lounging in a bedroom of the suite. “Get a birthday card. Stick this in it and deliver it to a woman named Barbara.” Zaytsev told the man how to do that. From his well-stocked wallet, he handed his man a hundred-dollar bill and another ten dollars for a card.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Late in the afternoon, a few hours after the news conference and debriefings, Jackson found his way to JPI’s extensive internal security section to thank Bill Brownley and his group for provision of security for the lobby conference. He slipped off his tie, folded it and stuffed it into a suit jacket pocket. It was time to get casual, even if he was still dressed in a pricy suit and Hugo Boss shirt.

  Bill Brownley was dressed, as usual, in light tan trousers, white shirt and blue plaid sports jacket. He looked harried. “Hi, Jackson. Come along. Got things to show you.” He turned and led the way. The two arrived at a door marked A/V UNIT / PRIVATE DOMAIN / LEONA & DAVID.

  Seeing Phillips glance at the sign, Brownley smiled and said, “Leona and David are my audio and video operators. They’re a little … uh … innovative and they like their privacy. Brownley rapped on the door and opened it slowly. “Hey guys, it’s just us,” he announced

  Brownley introduced Leona and David who were seated several feet apart at a huge and intimidating control panel. The panel was full of levers, keypads, backlit buttons and a mouse or two for each operator. Jackson remembered the layout. He and Brownley took their seats on a large leather sofa set along one side of the studio. The opposite wall in front of the control panel was covered with screens. Some were blank, some displayed JPI logos and some showed street scenes.

  “You’ll recognize a lot of this,” said Brownley. “Hell, you had it installed when you were CEO. Unfortunately, Mr. Blax threw a monkey wrench into it a few months ago when he banned us from, as he called it, ‘intruding on the privacy of JPI employees and our visitors.’ He told us to stop use of audio and video in and out of the building. We had it watching the streets within a block of the building all sides and a block of Blax’s own condo on Yonge Street. And he told us to stop using voice and facial recognition technology as well. He really hamstrung this operation.”

  Jackson was stunned at Blax’s actions since given the reins at JPI. Jackson had not intended the security technology to be invasive unless circumstances warranted. But, for a technology company like JPI totally invested in confidentiality, it was hard to justify eschewing your own capabilities to protect the company and all its employees.

  “Nobody told us to get rid of the equipment or stop the recordings … just not to use them.” Brownley underlined the word ‘use.’ As acting CEO, do you give us permission to do so now - if we have to?” Brownley’s face was turned toward Jackson and there was a broad smile on it.

  “I give permission for limited purpose,” said Jackson formally. “If it helps us to figure out what the hell is going on here, it’s worth a bit of intrusion.”

  “Run it, David” Brownley said. A street scene replaced a JPI logo on a large screen directly in front of the male operator. “Zoom in on her.”

  Jackson watched carefully as the video zoomed in on the scene that had been captured by one of JPI’s cameras mounted on a building next to the JPI headquarters. The scene was of the wide sidewalk of Queen’s Quay with its bicycle path and busy road on one side and a row of buildings on the other. A woman was walking slowly along the sidewalk and was in the centre of the zoomed shot.

  “Barbara Schumacher. She’s a receptionist. Works in the anteroom to Blax’s office but isn’t privy to anything really confidential. Maybe his visitor’s list…. Anyway, watch this.”

  “Who is that?” asked Jackson. A man had entered the frame. He was walking toward Barbara and seemed to recognize her as he approached.

  “That’s Roman Petrenko, our Ukrainian pal with GRU connections,” Brownley told Jackson. “We scanned all our video from the past month looking for anything suspicious. One of a lot of things we’ve been doing. Petrenko popped up in a facial recognition scan of everyone who has passed near H.Q. in that time. He’s in there because CSIS has him as an associate of the GRU and we have a lot of CSIS military personnel images in our system.”

  “I made that deal with my old employer,” remarked Jackson, leaning forward. “He’s one ugly guy.”

  “But a generous one,” David commented as he kept his hand over a lever control on his panel. Petrenko took an envelope out of his pocket as he reached Barbara. The two stopped on the sidewalk for a moment. Petrenko handed the envelope to Barbara. His lips moved. Then, he moved past Barbara and disappeared from the video. Barbara opened the envelope as she stood with people passing by on both sides. She pulled out the corner of something and looked at it. David zoomed in even more until the envelope all but filled the frame. It was some kind of card. Jackson caught sight of a portion of a balloon on the card.

  “Leona,” Brownley called. The woman operator hit something on her part of the panel as David backed up his recording and replayed video to match the audio that Leona had added.

  “Happy birthday, Barbara,” Petrenko told the woman in their brief sidewalk encounter.

  The video played
with traffic and random voices heard in the background. It showed Barbara smiling slightly and putting the envelope into her shoulder purse.

  “Interesting,” Jackson said. “When was that shot?”

  “Lunchtime, the day someone tried to kill Payne and me on the road from your cottage.”

  “Wow,” Jackson said.

  “I remember talking with Payne right in front of her desk the day before, so it’s on me,” said Brownley with an abashed look. “We were talking about the drive.”

  “Don’t let it eat you up, Bill. You saved your lives with smart driving. This woman will pay for it. I guarantee that.” Jackson was grim as he looked at the freeze frame on the monitor.

  “That’s not all,” said Brownley. “Run the next one, David.”

  Again, the operator did his tricks and the video again showed Barbara Schumacher wandering down the same sidewalk. She was approached again, in the same way, but this time it was by a different man.

  “Who’s he?” asked Jackson again.

  “Don’t know,” Brownley replied, “but we’re checking with CSIS to see if they do. Looks military, doesn’t he?” Jackson nodded his head in agreement.

  The man stopped in front of Barbara. She looked surprised and tried to move around the man. He quickly reached into the inside pocket of his light jacket, pulled out an envelope and held it out to her. This time, audio was synced to the video and Jackson heard, “Happy birthday, Barbara.”

  She closed her mouth and carefully held out her hand to collect the envelope. The man moved quickly past her and vanished from the video. She repeated her act by pulling the corner of a card out of the envelope. She looked around and pulled the rest of the card out. She opened it and took out a hundred-dollar bill. It was indeed a birthday card. She walked to a trash bin on the sidewalk and threw the card and envelope into the bin. She shoved the bill into her purse and reversed course, heading back to the JPI building.

  “When was this shot?” Jackson asked Brownley.

  “Literally minutes ago.”

  “What!”

  “Yes. Brand new. We have a flag on her face so the system logged this with an alert right away.” Brownley grimaced. “We don’t know what she did for the hundred but I would bet it was connected in some way with some news we’ve just received about Max.”

  “Max? What the hell, Bill. Why didn’t you tell me…”

  Brownley spoke quickly. “Jackson, I didn’t want to get into a discussion about Max before you saw this. This…” he pointed at the bank of monitors “… keeps everything in context.”

  Bill Brownley took the next few minutes explaining part two of the incredible news to Phillips. Brownley had been contacted by Barbara Schumacher’s superior, Mrs. Laybourne. She had been in tears. Max had been seriously injured in the accident, as Brownley knew well, but, in assessing his head injuries, doctors at Toronto Western had discovered a brain tumour.

  Brownley called the hospital and spoke with a doctor who was seeking information to help his patient. Max must have had the tumour for several months, the doctor estimated. It was a fast-growing one and was now the size of a golf ball. The doctor who talked to Brownley said the prognosis was not promising. Max could be dead within the year. The doctor could find no evidence Max had been treated for the tumour but wanted to confirm this.

  “Did you get the impression the tumour could be the cause of Max’s erratic behaviour,” asked Jackson, his mind trying to deal with the news.

  “As a matter of fact, the doctor asked why we hadn’t realized Max was sick a while ago. He wasn’t thrilled about our ignorance,” said Brownley. “I asked him if a brain tumour could cause someone to turn from a good guy into a raging Nero-type. The doc said anything was possible and why didn’t that mood change tip us off.”

  “I called Max’s secretary back and she said Max had been complaining about a number of things like headaches and no appetite over the past few months but she thought it was a weight thing. Max was trying to exercise and he took some pain pills. She didn’t think it was serious and he didn’t confide in her.”

  Jackson took it all in. This could bring some sense into all the confusion of the past week. He needed time to process the information and figure out next steps. He and Brownley talked about details for a time but arrived at no conclusions. Agreeing to a later meeting, they parted company and Jackson headed for his condo. He would be better to think about this on his own before deciding how to move forward instead of sideways.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Captain Zaytsev was chatting with the two other Russians on his team as they knocked back ice-cold vodka.

  “I love The Four Seasons,” said Niki, one of the GRU operatives, lounging on a sofa. Zaytsev was seated in a leather wingchair. Andrei, another team member, leaned on the bar at the end of the room. He wolfed down cubes of cheese from a tray on the bar.

  Zaytsev laughed. “Poor Petrenko,” he told the others in Russian. “I think he believed we would kill him and his sad lot of damaged hoods. Ernesto tells me they were swearing and yelling when he brought out his medical bag. They thought he was going to cut them up.”

  His companions joined the laughter. The man at the bar, Andrei, sprayed the bar with cheese bits as he guffawed. His laughter was high, almost cartoonish. All had been in the Russian armed forces for years as members of Spetsnaz, the elite special forces controlled by the GRU. Now they were full time GRU agents or operatives. For the moment, the three along with Ernesto, the Cuban, were based at the Russian Federation Embassy in Ottawa but more as a convenience because of its proximity to the U.S. They went in and out of the States on missions.

  The Cuban member of the team was attached, officially, as a trainee on an international exchange program. In reality, a black man had been needed for several tasks in the U.S. so Ernesto had been recruited from the Cuban army and placed on loan to Russia.

  As a soldier, Ernesto had medical training for battlefield injuries. He had reset the Jamaican’s broken arm, bandaged and splinted it and had dosed Petrenko’s man with pain killers. The Jamaican had been bewildered at the Cuban’s care since it had been the fellow black man who had broken his arm.

  The two Russians on Petrenko’s crew were totally cowed when told by the Cuban that his colleagues were Spetsnaz veterans. The unit had a fearsome reputation with all Russians. Besides, they were licking their own wounds from the encounter with Jackson near the airport. They had begged pain killers from the Cuban and were now groggy as they sat on the debris-strewn concrete floor in the abandoned building on Commissioner’s Street.

  Petrenko himself was sitting in a corner. He alternated between being outraged and thanking his stars that he wasn’t dead. He realized he was of little use to the GRU now that the pros had arrived in town. He didn’t deserve this, he whined to himself.

  Zaytsev, back in his hotel suite, wondered what he would do with Petrenko and his crew. They were a sad, redundant lot but they may have their uses, he reminded himself. At least, they could be blamed for anything that went wrong, blamed either by Zaytsev’s superiors back in Ottawa and Moscow or by JPI and the police if they became involved here in Toronto. The Ukrainian would keep.

  Niki had delivered payment to this Barbara, the JPI mole who had brought news of Maxim Blax’s brain tumour.

  ‘A hundred dollars? Moles came cheap these days,’ Zaytsev reflected. ‘But what did Barbara’s information mean?’ A cellphone rang. Zaytsev took the phone from several on a nearby table and waved at his two men to keep quiet.

  “Hello, Captain.” It was The Voice. Zaytsev began recording the call. “I have considered your offer. That I get you details on Version 3.0. And I also get another ten million dollars in U.S. funds. I agree to this. However, there has been a development…”

  Zaytsev interrupted. “Yes, I know. Maxim Blax has a brain tumour.”

  There was silence. It went on and Zaytsev thought The Voice had disconnected. Finally, the Voice returned. “How do you know this?�
�

  “A little bird,” said Zaytsev, getting impatient. “Look. Forget how I know things. I know almost everything and I’ll find out the rest. What does this brain problem mean to us? Tell me what you think.”

  “I have known about Mr. Blax’s tumour for quite a while. I made use of it. But, I admit I didn’t think Phillips would come back to run JPI. This could be very bad for our… our new partnership.”

  “How?”

  “Phillips is not Blax. Far from it. Phillips is brilliant; he built JPI. It will be very difficult to get the data you need about Version 3.0 if Jackson is running the place.” There was a break before The Voice continued. “Maybe ten million will not be enough…”

  Zaytsev had his own file on Jackson Phillips. Yes, with Phillips as CEO it would be harder for The Voice to steal 3.0 while it was being developed. But, Phillips’ presence as CEO would guarantee 3.0 would be completed on time and would be the best software possible. Which would be best, eliminate Phillips and solve The Voice’s problem or keep Phillips and make The Voice work harder. It was a problem Zaytsev was not ready to solve yet.

  “Come on, Mr. Voice, do something to earn the millions we have already paid to you. Deliver the code. We want it now. No more delays.” Zaytsev was speaking loudly. His two men exchanged looks across the room.

  “Okay. I will give you the code but we have to think what we can do about Phillips.”

  Zaytsev brought himself under control with difficulty. “Yes. Okay. In time. But, the code…”

  Apparently, The Voice no longer fretted about calls being traced or recorded as the two discussed arrangements for the transfer of source code from The Voice to the Russian GRU team.

  They also discussed the payment of the remaining ten million dollars to The Voice. The Russians would wire one million per month beginning in September to accounts specified by The Voice. Payments would continue as long as details on Version 3.0 development continued to be provided to Russia. The talk went on for many minutes.