As he entered his office, it struck him. Levell! Was there a connection between his family’s abduction and Levell’s? Was that a coincidence, Christie wondered, or had it been staged by Levell to get himself off the radar screen? Unlike the Sleeping Dogs, Levell had tangible elements that could be associated with him. He had a home in Georgetown and paid frequent visits to that private hunting lodge in Virginia. And he had associations. There was his driver, the Korean man, and Marine General McCoy, as well as all those members of government and industry who spent time at that lodge. On the other hand, Christie had been instructed by his superiors in the Bureau not to pursue any of those leads. But now it was different. Now his wife and children were involved.
One by one, he considered possible actions. All of them involved violation of the investigative restraints he’d been placed under. He could have Levell’s house in Georgetown searched for any evidence that would shed light on the Sleeping Dogs and their whereabouts. He could raid the lodge near Fairview Beach. He could grill those who he knew had associations with Levell. He could question Levell’s driver in the hospital. He processed a lot of additional thoughts, but in the end, nearly suffocating with frustration, he realized that any of those actions probably would cost his badge. And access to the Bureau’s investigation into the abduction of his family.
And then he had another thought. He glanced at his watch. Three-thirty. It would be three hours earlier in California. He punched up the contacts list on his computer then dialed a number. The phone rang a few times before a calm, measured voice answered at the other end, “Hello”.
“Dr. Nishioki?”
“Yes?”
“This is Special Agent Mitch Christie with the FBI. I visited with you back in January. Do you remember me?”
“Ah, yes, of course I remember you, Mitch. How are you?”
Christie didn’t know how to answer that question. “I…I’m fine. Listen, the last time we spoke, I believe I told you that Brendan Whelan was alive.”
“Yes, you did tell me that.”
“Well, since then, we’ve learned that other members of the Sleeping Dogs unit also are alive. I believe they have been reunited for a specific purpose.”
“Indeed?”
“You knew those men, as well as the members of the team that created them, Levell, McCoy, and others. Do you have any idea what they might be up to today?”
There was a pause on the other end, then Nishioki said, “No, I would have no way of knowing. But, if they are planning to engage in some sort of action, and knowing Cliff Levell, I suspect it will be out of their concern for this nation.”
“Could it be some sort of terrorist action…assassinations, bombings, anything like that?”
Nishioki responded immediately. “No. These men are patriots. Over the years, each has sacrificed a great deal in the service of his country.”
“Then, some sort of vigilante justice against persons or entities they believe threaten America?”
“Perhaps, but…” There was the sound of movement on the other end. “Ah, I’m afraid I must go. My lunch guests have just arrived. I have enjoyed our chat, Mitch. I wish you well.” Nishioki hung up the phone.
Christie was replacing the receiver on the cradle when his cell phone rang. It was an unfamiliar number. He pressed the answer icon with his thumb and said, “Hello.”
“Hello, Agent Christie,” Whelan said. “I have someone here who’d like to speak with you.”
Christie lunged for a small black box on his desk next to his landline. He pressed a button on top of the box and it began immediately to monitor the cell phone call via Bluetooth. It also began transmitting it to the tech lab two floors below, where an attempt would be made to trace it.
“Whelan, you miserable son of a bitch,” Christie said.
“Calm down, Mitchel, everything is just fine,” his wife said.
“Deb?” he said in shock, realizing Whelan must have handed the phone to her when he was punching up the tracer. “Where are you? Are you alright?”
“I’m fine, Mitchel, everyone’s just fine.”
“Where are you? Do you have any idea?”
“Not really, but everyone is treating us beautifully. In fact, Brett’s outside right now playing soccer with three of the men who helped us.”
“Helped you? Dammit, Deb, they kidnapped you!”
There was a sound of exasperation in her voice. “Mitchel, they prevented another group of very nasty men, Ukrainian gangsters, from harming us yesterday. They have assured me, and I have no reason to doubt them, that they will return us safely to our home when we’re no longer in danger.”
“And when will that be?” Christie said. There was an edge of doubt in his voice.
“I don’t know, Mitch, I suppose as soon as they’ve dealt with the people who intended to harm us.” She paused. “I miss you. The kids miss you. When this is all over, let’s—”
“Sorry to interrupt the conversation,” Whelan said, “but it’s time to go. Mrs. Christie and the children will be back in touch later.” The phone line went dead.
Christie jogged from his office and down the stairwell two floors to the tech lab. “Who’s got the tracer on my cell phone?”
A middle-aged woman wearing tortoise shell glasses looked up and said, “I do, Agent Christie.”
He strode quickly to the table where she was monitoring a complex looking piece of electronic equipment and said, “Where did that call originate?”
The woman slowly removed her glasses and said, “Nairobi. It’s in Kenya. That’s in Africa.”
Christie stared at her for a long three seconds. “Goddammit, that’s impossible!” His voice was raised near shouting level.
The woman smiled thinly and said, “Personally, I don’t believe it actually did originate there. Whoever made the call must have some very sophisticated communications equipment.”
Christie looked at her with a mix of confusion and anger. “Hold on. I thought we had the best equipment in the world.”
“That’s what we thought. But it appears that someone may have one-upped us.”
“But who would have that kind of technology?”
“The Russians? Maybe the Chinese? Certainly the Israelis.”
Christie instinctively placed his right hand on his abdomen and gently rubbed it. The pain was building fiercely in his stomach. “So what do we do now? They’ll call back and I absolutely must be able to trace the call.”
The woman put her glasses back on and said, “We can put a live tracer on your cell phone number.”
“What does that mean?”
“It will monitor your phone twenty-four hours a day and automatically begin tracing any calls made to it. If your mother calls to remind you to wear clean underwear, we’ll know it.” She smiled pleasantly.
“If that’s your idea of humor, it’s real funny. Do that thing with the cell phone and, just for the hell of it, keep a tracer on my desk phone too.”
Christy took the elevator back to his office. When he got there, he rummaged through the drawer of his desk and found the bottle of antacid. He took a big swig and was just replacing the cap on the bottle when his desk phone rang. “This is Christie.”
A voice with faint traces of an Eastern European accent said, “Agent Christie, my name is Maksym. I am in possession of your family. If you want to see them again, you will do exactly what I am telling you. I will call back later.” The line went dead.
56 Fredericksburg, Virginia
Whelan stuffed the phone he had let Deborah Christie use to speak with her husband in a front pocket of his jeans. “Sorry to have to terminate the call, but its purpose was achieved.”
Deborah looked worried. “Is Mitch in danger from the same people who tried to harm us?”
Whelan thought for moment before answering. “I don’t think so, Mrs. Christie. I believe their plan was to use you to coerce him to do something. Now, that’s no longer possible. Also, he’s a federal agent. Harmi
ng him could loose the hounds of hell on the perpetrators. The bad guys are up to something and don’t want the kind of scrutiny that would bring.”
“But doesn’t that same thing apply to the abduction of a federal agent’s family?”
“To a lesser extent, unfortunately. But we have better resources for mitigating the risk than your would-be kidnappers do.”
She had strolled over to a window and was looking down at the lawn, where her son had teamed up with Quentin Thomas in a soccer match against Larsen and Kirkland. “You seem like a very decent man. And most of your associates, too.”
“Most?”
“Well, the one you call Stensen, who has such strange eyes, and the… ah…countrified one.”
“Rafe.”
“Yes.”
“They each have their virtues, but they’re harder to find in some of them.”
“Some of you must be married. Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Children?”
“Yes.”
“It must be terribly difficult for them. Do you miss them?”
“Second by second.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “When this…business is over, will you be able to return to a normal life with them?”
“I hope so.”
Whelan felt his phone vibrate from an incoming call. He fished the device out of his pocket and thumbed the receive button. “Whelan,” he said.
“It’s McCoy. We’ve had a communication regarding Cliff.”
“Give me a minute, I’m not in a secure area.” He nodded at Deborah Christie and said, “Please excuse me.”
As he walked quickly out the door into the hallway, he heard her say, “Please come back when you can. I like talking with you.” There was something in her voice, a pleading. She was lonely. It made him think of Caitlin.
At the end of the hallway, there was a set of French doors that opened onto a small balcony. Whelan stepped out onto the balcony and closed the doors behind him. The spirited soccer game was being played about one hundred yards away on the lush green lawn. It was far enough away that the players were out of earshot.
“Okay, General, what’s the news on Cliff?” Whelan said into the phone.
“Here’s one we didn’t see coming,” McCoy said on the other end of the line.
Whelan didn’t like the sound of this. “What is it?”
“The bad guys called me a short while ago.”
“Did you run a tracer on the call?”
“Hell yes, I ran a tracer.” McCoy sounded angry that Whelan would even ask the question.
“And?” Whelan persisted.
“Stolen cell phone. Belonged to some college kid at GWU. Had it stolen in a Starbucks.”
“Yeah, but the Bureau can locate cell phones through GPS even when they’re not in use.”
“I know that, smartass. Our friends in the Agency and the Bureau tell me it went completely dead after the call was terminated. We assume it was destroyed.”
“What did they want?”
There was a pause at McCoy’s end of the line. “Seems they want to swap Cliff in exchange for services.”
“Services?”
“Yeah, they weren’t specific about the nature of the services, but they were real clear about who was to perform them.”
“The Sleeping Dogs.”
“Bingo.”
“Must be wet work. And something that makes their side look good and ours look bad.”
“You’re a regular fucking psychic, aren’t you?”
“Not hard to figure out,” Whelan said, ignoring McCoy’s sarcasm. “How does the Society want to proceed?”
“It’s a tough decision to make because we all love Cliff, but there really are no options. We can’t send the six of you on an operation that enhances the enemy’s power and destroys all that we’ve been working for. Not to mention getting you guys killed.”
“So we’re just going to throw Cliff to the wolves.”
There was genuine sadness and remorse in McCoy’s voice. “It’s a helluva thing for a man to have to do, sacrifice his best friend, but Cliff knew…hell, we all know the risks involved.”
Both men were silent for a few moments. Whelan spoke first. “Truth is, we don’t know whether Cliff is alive, or would be if we did perform the ‘services’.”
“There is that,” McCoy said.
“Then we should find out.”
57 J. Edgar Hoover Building
Christie sat in his desk chair struggling to put together the pieces of a baffling puzzle. What he did know was that it appeared his family was being well cared for. He knew also that Whelan and his men were protecting them, although he wasn’t sure what they were protecting them from. He knew there was some kind of Eastern European connection. Whelan had mentioned Ukrainians, and the caller, Maksym, had spoken with what sounded like a slight Eastern European accent. Christie didn’t know what the involvement of Ukrainians or other Eastern Europeans meant. And he had no idea who Maksym was or why he had lied about having Christie’s family as hostages.
He rose from his chair and walked back downstairs to the tech area. The middle-aged woman with the tortoise shell glasses was still there. As he approached her, he said, “When I was down here earlier, I asked about putting a tracer on my office line.”
The woman looked up, expressionless. “Yes, you did.”
“Has the tracer been activated?”
She continued to give him the blank look for a few moments. “You asked me to do that, and I did it.”
“I received a call a few minutes ago. Can you check to see if it picked up any information?” He was trying to be patient with her, knowing he had gotten off to a bad start earlier.
She turned away from him, her hands moving rapidly over the keyboard as she watched the monitor’s screen. About a minute later, she turned back to him and said, “There was a call to your number about nine and a half minutes ago.”
“Did you get any useful information?”
“Some, but it was a very brief call.” She slid the glasses part way down her nose and looked up at him over the top of the frame. “It was a cellular phone and moving rapidly, like in a vehicle. At the time of the call, it was on Interstate 95 heading south near Dumfries, Virginia. We weren’t able to identify the phone number, unfortunately. There simply wasn’t sufficient time.”
Christie sighed. “So that’s it. We don’t have anything very useful.”
The woman slid the glasses back up her nose and said, “That’s not exactly correct. Every mobile phone is manufactured with its own unique identification code embedded in it. We were able to capture the code.”
“So what does that mean in non-tech cop talk?”
The woman smiled thinly. “It means that I have entered that identification code into the software we use for these purposes. The next time that particular phone is used to call anyone, anywhere, the trace will pick it up immediately and we will begin monitoring it.”
It was Christie’s turn to smile. It was a smile filled with hope and optimism.
58 Off the East Coast of Florida
The three hundred and sixty foot super yacht Feral was twenty percent longer than an American football field. It had been custom made by one of the top shipyards in Germany for a billionaire Russian oligarch. The Russian had sold it for a reputed price of two hundred million dollars to Chaim Laski. Among all his worldly possessions, without question this was his favorite. The Feral had an aluminum superstructure atop a steel hull and was powered by twin MTU 20V 1163TB engines capable of generating almost nine thousand horsepower.
For his own comfort as well as that of his guests, Laski had installed an alternative propulsion technology utilizing an azimuth thruster, a configuration of propellers contained in pods that could be rotated in any horizontal direction in lieu of a rudder. An electric motor inside a pod connected directly to a propeller without the use of gears. The twin diesels produced the electricity. The benefits incl
uded better maneuverability, lower maintenance costs, more efficient use of space, and best of all, in Laski’s opinion, reduced noise and vibration. Together with the onboard wastewater management system, the Feral produced much less pollution than most other super yachts. Not that Laski cared; but he did enjoy impressing the largely leftwing green movement. In addition to its guests, the Feral could accommodate a crew of forty.
For the additional comfort of himself and his guests, Laski had anchor stabilizers installed, which provided increased shipboard stability whether in port or at sea. He also had an iPad app custom-made. It allowed his guests to use their touch-screens to control everything in their cabins from the entertainment and climate systems to blinds and lights. Each of the four VIP suites and six guest cabins was equipped with an iPad. Every unit featured onyx countertops, baths carved from limestone blocks, marble floors, and Swietenia mahogany grown on plantations in Fiji. In the master salon, Laski enjoyed a mahogany and Delft tiled wood-burning fireplace.
The opulence didn’t stop at the guest accommodations. Three glass elevators and an open glass spiraling staircase connected the several decks. Transparent flooring had been installed in a majority of the public areas of the ship. While there were a variety of pools, hot tubs, and sunbathing areas - many of them enclosed and air-conditioned, it was the infinity pool on the main deck with its waterfall cascading to the down-level decks that stole the show. Its high glass wall also served as a movie screen, enabling guests to watch a film while enjoying the pool at night.
The ship also featured an expansive wine cellar with a French limestone fireplace. It had a beauty salon and spa with massage room, a full gym, and full-size racquetball court. It also had an art collection exhibiting many of the priceless works Laski had collected. There was a glass-enclosed garden area filled with exotic plants from the far corners of the world. For tax purposes, Laski sometimes conducted business aboard the Feral. To accommodate these activities, there was a suite of fully equipped offices on board along with meeting and conference facilities.
Sleeping Dogs: The Awakening Page 30
