Murder in Mongolia

by Fritz Galt

  It was hard to watch.

  “Did she die because of me?” Amber whispered to Jake.

  He sat her down at the table. “No. She died saving her country.”

  Amber was shivering all over.

  “How did you survive in that cold shed?” he asked.

  “I had a stove and a pile of coal,” she said, her teeth chattering. “I tried to conserve coal, but I was afraid the flame would die out. After three days, I ran out of coal. The last day was horrible.”

  Jake put an arm around her. It was up to him to keep her warm.

  At last the doctor turned to the other victim, who lay cursing in bed in front of his kneeling son and brother.

  “A bullet penetrated his left iliac region,” Nils explained, one doctor to another. “He temporarily lost consciousness and aspirated toxic fluids.”

  The Mongolian medic got to work. He had no idea who the patient was, and if he did, it didn’t matter. To a doctor, a human being was a human being.

  Jake didn’t know if the lobbyist would live, but he didn’t care. All he cared about now was the precious desert jewel shivering at the table beside him.

  Amber had been welcomed by her fellow countrymen, and Nicole gave her the only food in the place, wine and cheese.

  “How ritzy,” she said in a low tone.

  “Only the best for our American citizens,” Matt said, ever the diplomat.

  Amber took a long swig of wine. “Ah, nothing like alcohol on an empty stomach.”

  “You’ll metabolize it quickly,” Courtney said, and handed her the cheese.

  “No thanks,” Amber said. “I’ve tried that already.”

  Jake nodded. She was less tactful than him, but he wouldn’t make her eat it.

  “Do you think you have frostbite?” he asked.

  She held her hands out to the stove. “The only frost that bites is that one.” She indicated Cal Frost writhing under the care of the Mongolian and Swedish doctors.

  For several minutes, the search for bullet fragments and the stitching took all their attention. Hank and Bill watched with horrified expressions.

  And all the while, the real victim lay dead across the ger.

  “Has someone called her father?” Jake asked.

  Matt nodded. “She’ll get a proper burial. Full national honors. What a trouper.”

  The others didn’t know what Jake knew. The valiant young woman had saved his life. She had saved a nation. And she had brought him Amber.

  Shaking uncontrollably and entering later stages of hypothermia, Amber locked her alert, dark eyes on him. “What took you so long? I thought you FBI guys were fast.”

  “Only on TV.”

  “I mean, how hard could it have been to find me?”

  He reflected on how he had met a diplomat in Ulaanbaatar who drove them to a Peace Corps volunteer in the desert who called up another Peace Corps volunteer who introduced them to her host grandfather who drove them to a park ranger whose daughter drove him to the mine to a doctor who pointed out where to find Amber. “It wasn’t hard at all.”

  “Tell me who won the election?” she said, clearly striving to maintain consciousness.

  “Election?” Only then did Jake realize that he had missed the American election.

  “The election was on Tuesday,” she said, her teeth chattering. “Today is Thursday.”

  “I wasn’t keeping track. I have no idea who won. I didn’t even remember to vote.”

  “Didn’t even remember? I sent you a text.”

  “I didn’t get a text.”

  “It’s the last thing I tried to send from here.”

  And he had thought it was a distress call.

  “You aren’t a very patriotic American,” she said.

  “I can’t wait to face the firing squad in DC.”

  An hour later, the stove was producing several gers’ worth of heat, Cal was cranky as his condition deteriorated, and Bill Frost was editing his footage.

  The heat had become painful for Amber as she recovered feeling in her fingers and toes. Nils recommended that they put her in a spare bed, then they piled blankets on top of her.

  “You must sleep,” Jake whispered to her.

  She nodded, but her shivering prevented her from responding.

  “You’re in good hands,” he said.

  She attempted a smile and closed her eyes.

  It would be her first good sleep in days.

  Jake tucked her blankets in firmly, then came and stood over the dying lobbyist. He wondered if others didn’t see the irony of green sludge killing the avid proponent of green tech.

  Hank and Matt came over to stand by Jake’s side, respectful but also ready to prevent Jake from strangling the patient.

  “Take your lobbying pretty seriously, don’t you,” Jake said, unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

  “Do you really think I’m in it for the money?” Cal said, his voice weak. “I’m out here dying for my country.”

  “Then who do you work for?” Jake shot back.

  “The government,” he croaked. “The CIA.”

  Jake was caught off guard. He hadn’t seen that coming.

  Hank spoke up for his father. “Don’t you understand? If the world doesn’t have access to rare earths, all our communications systems, advanced weapons, and renewable energy would die. This is a national security issue like no other.”

  Jake stared at the bald man who lay before him. There was no gunshot wound to his scalp. Like everything else in his life, that was a cover, too. Cal’s hair had been a toupee, blown off by the Chinese. Suddenly it all made sense.

  Jake remembered Cal pulling a hair from his head to hand over as sample DNA to help identify his brother. He knew the DNA wouldn’t match, because the toupee wasn’t his own hair. But Hank Frost had also been there and witnessed his father’s deception. He didn’t tell Jake that Cal was giving him misleading evidence. Then Jake reflected on how Hank probably worked for the CIA.

  It was a father-son CIA team. Was the son running the father? In any event, Cal and the CIA had been trying to throw the FBI off the trail from the start.

  It was only because of his sheer obstinacy that he had stuck to the case and not let the deception throw him.

  “But what is the deal with green technology?”

  “It’s vital to the economic system,” Hank said, “to keep the smartphones, tablets, on up to the National Security Agency going. So much of the world has invested in technology that we literally can’t live without it. The good news is that it’s green.”

  Matt added his two cents. “Electric cars are beginning to dominate in Asia and Europe and may soon catch on in America. Fortunately under specific conditions, electric cars, telecommunications, computing, and renewable energy are green technologies.”

  “What conditions?” Jake said.

  “Well, electric vehicles need to be plugged in. As long as the power grid is based on clean, renewable sources, and as long as you drive the car over 60,000 miles. And as long as the manufacturers don’t double the carbon footprint in order to make them of lighter material to compensate for the weight of the battery. As long as you take care of all that, you’ve got a green advantage over your gas or diesel cars.”

  “How about the impact of computers on the environment?” Jake asked.

  “Well, there are conflict minerals that go into the manufacture of these devices. People are paying for their armies with the gold their slaves extract. Then you’ve got the problem of e-waste. Someone has to dismantle all the small components of those devices and prevent them from destroying the soil and water.”

  “And solar power? Wind power?” Jake asked. “What are the dangers there?”

  “Toxic materials and chemicals go into making photovoltaic cells and modern wind turbines. Then once in place, the renewables exacerbate economic inequality. Finally you’ve got dead bats and dead birds,” Matt said. “There’s always some bad that comes with the good. The trick i
s to maintain a positive direction for the environment.”

  Jake turned to Saran’s stiff form under the blanket. “Dead Mongolians is not a positive direction.”

  Hank shrugged. “Every advancement comes at a cost. Like everything else in the world, technology has its up side and its down side. But it isn’t a zero-sum game. In the long run, the CIA is backing green technology. Period.”

  “Just so it keeps the NSA up and running, monitoring all communications in the world?”

  The bitter accusation went unanswered.

  Jake stared at Cal. “Couldn’t you have told me all this instead of running me off the road?”

  “I thought the Cabinet had come to an agreement,” Cal answered cryptically.

  Hank explained. “The Director of the Agency and the Secretary of State spoke with the FBI Director about this. But somehow, you didn’t get the message.”

  Jake thought about Werner Hoffkeit’s role in the past two weeks. The President of the United States could demand that Hoffkeit lay off Bill Frost’s death, but that wouldn’t stop the nation’s top investigator from getting to the bottom of things.

  “Was the State Department putting pressure on the FBI, too?” Jake asked.

  Matt nodded. “We had quite the knock-down, drag-out fight over this at the embassy.”

  “You and Chad wanted Bill Frost’s death investigated?” Jake asked.

  Matt nodded. “But we lost the battle. The Russians were trying to take advantage of Bill’s ‘death’ in order to shine a spotlight on China’s predatory move into Central Asia. After all, China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative to create new markets and forge economic and transportation links across Asia was invading what Mother Russia still considered her turf. So they used the press and they used you, providing you with all the help you needed to undermine China’s efforts in Mongolia. In order to avoid an international incident, the ambassador asked the Secretary of State to pressure the FBI to end the investigation. I thought State had succeeded, by figuratively burying Bill Frost. But what I didn’t foresee was you. You went rogue on everybody.”

  It sounded like an accusation that couldn’t go unanswered.

  “If trying to save my own skin is going rogue…”

  The others smiled.

  “He’s gone.”

  They turned to the Mongolian doctor, and saw that the blood had completely drained from Cal Frost’s face. He died a victim of his own good intentions.

  Chapter 14

  Friday

  Jake and Amber took the first commercial flight back to Washington.

  All it took was a single phone call to his “ace up the sleeve” on the top floor of the Bureau to get his name taken off the No Fly List. But what awaited him on the ground was far less certain. It would take more than a simple phone call to clear his name and remove the warrant for his arrest.

  Leaving Ulaanbaatar, the pilot made a few adjustments. The brilliant afternoon sunlight formed a row of window shapes against Jake and Amber. That row slowly rose and painted the ceiling, then the white spots slowly crept forward as the plane turned, until the shape of every window had marched past their seats and walked out the front of the cabin.

  Amber’s hands were lightly bandaged, but she took out her laptop once the cockpit cleared the use of electronics.

  “So how about the story?” Jake asked. “Bill Frost may want you to run it, but clearly our nation’s spy agency doesn’t.”

  “National Public Radio will run with the story,” she said. “But first, I need to interview you. Are you willing to talk about this?”

  “You want me to leak this enormous espionage fiasco?”

  “Sorry to tell you,” she said, and pointed to Hank Frost, the CIA employee, sitting in handcuffs across the aisle. “You’ve already taken sides on that one,” she said.

  He nodded. “Fire away.”

  “On the record?”

  He thought about the ramifications of talking openly to the press. It was no longer about his career at the FBI, where he knew he was toast. As Edward Snowden had framed it in Moscow, sometimes the truth hurts. “On the record,” he said. “With attribution.”

  “Why did you defy your government and put your life on the line? You were selfish.”

  “No, I was standing on principle,” Jake said.

  “And what principle is that?”

  “It’s what makes us Americans and what we enshrined in our constitution and our criminal code. Everybody is equal, the rights of the individual, and the presumption of innocence.”

  “How about the needs of the many?”

  “I’m sorry, but Spock’s logic doesn’t always hold. ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,’ doesn’t work in every case. Specifically, if you don’t defend the individual, everyone loses. If Bill Frost was hung out to dry, then the Gobi would continue to be contaminated, the world’s last nomadic way of life would disappear, and humanity would suffer in the long run.”

  “That’s all very nice,” Amber said, “but I must say, I’m disappointed.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I thought you came here to rescue me.”

  “Er, that, too,” he said. He tried to reach out and embrace her.

  “Never mind,” she said, and tried to fend off his advances. “Too late.”

  “You should work in law enforcement,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You make a tough interrogator.”

  “Really? I try to be more pleasant than that.”

  “It was pleasant, in a dominatrix sort of way.”

  “Boy, that’s really weird.”

  “Yeah. Isn’t it?”

  Amber saved her story, complete with Jake’s manifesto, and sent it to her office.

  He could only imagine how that would go over in Washington.

  Epilogue

  A light evening snow was settling on Glover Park when Amber’s story aired on NPR.

  An important-sounding anchor for “All Things Considered” intoned the devastating news of the death and suffering in Mongolia. He related the scientific basis for the harm as revealed by Professor Tracy Woolman’s samples of animal saliva and lake water. He referred obliquely to the role of the CIA in promoting China’s mineral refining operations in Mongolia. And he ended with Jake Maguire, the hero who found and rescued Bill Frost, being welcomed back to the FBI with open arms. Bill Frost’s documentary called “Death in Mongolia” was a universal hit, upending both environmental and technological interests. Shoddy construction of all four of the huge tailings ponds at Altan Tolgoi had resulted in toxic chemicals seeping into the groundwater of the high plateau and spreading across vast areas of the country. And lastly, the Russian government expressed confidence that China would never interfere with Mongolian sovereignty again.

  “For more on this story,” the anchor concluded, “read the full report by Amber Jones at npr.org.”

  Jake turned off the radio. “It’s a good story,” he said. “But kind of skimpy on the CIA’s role in all this.”

  “You heard the man,” Amber said. “Read the full report.”

  He shooed away his cat who was warming herself on his laptop, and went straight to NPR’s online news. Amber had the byline on a bombshell report headlined “CIA Complicit in Chinese Chemical Poisoning.”

  The more he read her report, the more Jake was impressed by the level of detail.

  Cal Frost was an undercover operative for the CIA working for the green tech industry as a lobbyist. His main job, per CIA instructions, was to remove government pollution regulations around the world. When he learned of his brother’s death in Mongolia, Cal immediately suspected homicide, as Bill Frost was a belligerent activist for environmental causes.

  Not sure why his brother was in Mongolia, Cal may have initially suspected that Bill was pursuing a poaching or climate story. Then he learned from NPR that Bill Frost was looking into mining. So Cal called Kingston-Maes S.A. and asked them to remove any evidence
of China’s involvement in Mongolian mines from Bill’s home in Hurricane, Utah.

  It turned out that the mining company had already sent an employee named Tom Weaver to remove evidence of mining irregularities that his brother might have unearthed. Cal was informed that Weaver had ransacked the house and found no Mongolia file, but did remove mining files.

  Still concerned whether Weaver had removed evidence of China’s involvement, Cal called Weaver and ordered him back to Bill Frost’s home to remove the China file.

  Then Cal Frost flew to Utah to make sure the file was destroyed. Weaver successfully intruded again and removed the file, but this time the police captured his image on tape.

  Contrary to his sworn deposition, the intruder never burned the China file. Instead he had given it to Cal Frost, who was able to verify from the research that his brother was in Mongolia to look into China’s role in the Mongolian mining industry. Cal then tried to destroy the file, as the Hurricane police discovered, having found the China file in a recycling bin across the street from their station.

  But before leaving Utah, Cal Frost attempted to murder Jake, hoping to stop him from investigating what his brother was doing in Mongolia.

  Then Cal Frost learned on NPR that the body was not that of Bill Frost, his brother. So he flew to Mongolia to find his brother and prevent him from exposing the truth: the toxic chemical refinery in the Gobi that produced the rare earth minerals so valuable to global industries, and so detrimental to the people of Mongolia.

  When Cal headed to Mongolia looking for Bill Frost, he alerted the Chinese that they had a publicity problem on their hands. Two agents of their secret service were dispatched to find and threaten FBI Special Agent Jake Maguire, whom they had identified as a partner of the NPR journalist, Amber Jones. Their attempt to beat and possibly assassinate him in a seeming terrorist attack on Halloween had failed, and Maguire had successfully slipped out of the United States with the help of Russia. Aided by Edward Snowden, Maguire made his way to Mongolia to investigate the case.

  At the mine, Cal Frost had encountered NPR journalist Amber Jones who was there to investigate the story. She represented a threat to him not only for exposing the mining industry’s role in Bill Frost’s disappearance, but also because she was intimately related to Jake Maguire, the FBI special agent who was looking into the Bill Frost case. In his final act before being discovered by Maguire, Cal Frost assaulted and left Amber Jones to die by exposure to harsh winter conditions in a remote area of the Gobi. Only by finding and apprehending Cal Frost, was Jake Maguire able to locate and rescue the journalist whose life was in peril.