OMEGA: A Black Flagged Thriller (The Black Flagged Series Book 5)

by Steven Konkoly

“How much higher?” said Jackson.

  “To the tune of three hundred thousand higher.”

  Jackson whistled. “Not many people at Brown River making that kind of money. Not anymore.”

  “Then maybe you’ll recognize him,” said Munoz, nodding toward Jessica.

  She pulled the hood off, tossing it to the floor, pushing the man forward.

  “Jack Wellins?” said Jackson. “He ran Brown River’s Direct Action Group, a kind of off-the-books special missions roster. Left close to two years ago for another security firm. Ajax Global.”

  Berg noted the timing. Another link supporting a wild theory he was starting to believe more and more by the minute.

  “Then Brown River has made a continuous and costly payroll error,” said Graves. “He’s received a monthly paycheck from them for the past seven years, uninterrupted, plus a three-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus six months ago.”

  “Damn, Jack! You hit the jackpot! Care to explain this peculiar discrepancy?” said Jackson. “Or maybe why you were waiting around a coffee shop to murder a senior CIA director.”

  “Good to see you again, Darryl,” said Wellins.

  “Wish I could say the same. Let’s get a closer look.”

  Jessica manhandled him around one of the couches until he stood on the edge of the group, in easy view of everyone. He came across more defiant than intimidated.

  “You look a little smug for your predicament,” Berg noted.

  “I know exactly what’s going to happen here,” said Wellins. “Why dwell on it?”

  “Then why not sit down in a comfortable chair,” Berg offered, motioning to an empty seat. “And enjoy a rare Scotch from the den while filling in the blanks for us. Beats the alternative.”

  Wellins swallowed hard, looking around the room; his defiant facade tempered. “You know that’s not gonna happen. Hard to scare a dead man.”

  Daniel Petrovich started laughing, followed by Sayar. When Munoz and Melendez joined in, Berg looked around to see what was so funny. Most of them were focused on Wellins, shaking their heads.

  “What’s so funny?” said Wellins.

  “I can’t speak for anyone else in the room, but I’m not here to scare you,” said Daniel. “I’m here to make you talk, by any means necessary. We’ll skip the beatings and move right into the cutting, of course. Seems like an appropriate place to start given what your team did to Mr. Berg. Then we’ll move on to far more creative methods. If all that fails, a few of us will make the drive down to your house in Midlothian and set up an interactive teleconference with your wife and kids. Interactive in a ‘you tell me what I want to know, and I don’t poke a kid’s eye’ out kind of way.”

  Wellins struggled, held tightly in check by Jessica’s forearm and the knife pressed against his neck.

  “You will not touch my family,” snarled Wellins. “They’re off-limits.”

  “I don’t have any limits,” said Daniel.

  “You can’t let them do that,” said Wellins, looking to Bauer. “We follow unwritten rulebooks governing these things. You know that.”

  “Maybe if I knew who you were working for, I could convince them to observe those rules,” said Bauer. “Brown River doesn’t count.”

  “They’re off-limits,” repeated Wellins. “You know that.”

  “I’m not the one you need to convince,” said Audra.

  The man’s glance shifted to Berg.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Berg. “I have seventy-six painful reminders why I don’t give a fuck what they do to you or your family.”

  Chapter 44

  Vienna, Virginia

  Darryl Jackson strolled into the great room, sipping his coffee more out of habit than necessity at this point in the morning. The effects of caffeine long ago quit having any measurable impact on his system. Just a little longer, and he’d settle in for a long nap. His wife was on the road, headed up to Princeton to get their daughter Liz and disappear until this mess cleared up. If it cleared up. Their other daughter, Emily, would be a little harder to safeguard. She was in her first year of law school at the University of California at Berkeley, thousands of miles away. Convincing a first-year law student to ditch classes and “disappear” would take some finesse. He’d let his wife handle that one, backed by a sizable emergency nest egg. Whatever it took for them to disappear.

  As soon as he could break free from this mess, he’d meet up with his wife and figure out a way to get Emily. Unfortunately, he couldn’t give his wife a timeline for his departure. The more information they dug out of Wellins, which had been surprisingly scant so far, the stranger things sounded.

  Audra Bauer walked into the great room and collapsed on the couch next to him. Karl Berg jarred awake and glanced over at them from the lounge chair. He’d been here all night, in and out of sleep based on the acquisition of new information.

  “Well?” Berg prompted.

  “I think the well is dry,” said Bauer. “He mumbled Ajax a few more times then passed out.”

  “That’s it?” asked Jackson.

  “He’s barely recognizable,” she replied with a tired, vacant look. “I can’t imagine they’ll get anything else out of him. He’s wrecked far beyond what they did to you, and I’m not letting them pay a visit to the man’s family. That’s nonnegotiable. I’ll turn myself in before I let that happen.”

  Berg shook his head. “Sanderson’s cyber team hasn’t made any headway with Ajax. It doesn’t exist.”

  “We scoured every possible public and government record for a company matching that name, involved in the same line of work,” said Graves. “Nothing remotely related came to our attention.”

  “Well, you missed something,” said Jackson, turning toward Graves. “No offense.”

  “I’m used to it,” said Graves. “But we didn’t miss anything.”

  “Your head was on the desk a few minutes ago,” said Jackson.

  “We’re all tired.”

  “I distinctly recall a few managers and executives jumping ship for Ajax around the same time as Wellins. I checked out their website. Pretty slick compared to ours. I remember bringing that up with HR,” said Jackson. “The place is real. Somewhere just outside of Petersburg, Virginia.”

  “Have you actually seen it?” asked Berg.

  “You ever actually see Brown River?” Jackson shot back, slightly agitated.

  “We’re not questioning the existence of Brown River,” said Berg.

  “Fine. No, I’ve never seen the Ajax facility.”

  “Maybe we’re not defining Ajax correctly? We know Wellins never technically left Brown River, right? He can say Ajax all day until he’s blue in the face,” said Berg. “But he’s a Brown River employee. Same with Harper, which brings up another issue. Brown River has done a lot of hiring over the past six months, according to payroll. What was the total, Graves?”

  “Three thousand six hundred and forty-three new hires, all former military or law enforcement. Pay scales are divided into three distinct categories. Three thousand and forty-two at seventy-five thousand dollars annually, plus a single one-hundred-thousand-dollar lump sum payment. Then it jumps to five hundred and fifty employees at the same level as Harper. All salaried. That leaves fifty-one coming in at the very generous Wellins level.”

  “This is all news to me. I was told we’re in replace-only mode for hiring,” said Jackson. “How much does all of this represent?”

  “For fiscal year 2009, we’re talking seven hundred and thirty-six million dollars, rounded up. Fixed salary costs moving forward will be three hundred and thirty-four million dollars. This isn’t counting guys like Wellins, who joined Ajax beyond that six-month window.”

  “That’s one hell of a capital expenditure,” said Bauer.

  “Like they’re building an army,” said Berg. “Called Ajax.”

  Jackson was stunned by the numbers. Nearly a billion in salary expenses alone for this year? He worked on the global operations side of the house, a
nd their budgets had shrunk consistently over the past three years. Maybe Ajax was paying Brown River to piggyback on their payroll department? He knew that didn’t make sense, but he had to ask.

  “Any way Ajax is using Brown River’s payroll division to process their own payroll?”

  “Brown River is claiming these employees for tax purposes,” said Graves. “And that would be one hell of an employee expansion for a company that doesn’t exist.”

  “I don’t know what to say or do at this point,” said Jackson. “Seriously. We can’t go to the FBI or CIA, and we might have a four-thousand-man death squad operating on U.S. soil, half of which is probably driving the streets, looking for us right now.”

  “Looking for us,” Berg corrected. “Not you.”

  “I don’t like the way that sounded,” said Jackson. “It sounded an awful lot like I’m about to be asked to do something that scares the shit out of me.”

  “The cyber team has put together something they hope you can deliver to Brown River,” said Bauer.

  “Waltzing into Brown River with this discovery doesn’t sound like a healthy idea right now. Or ever.”

  “Hear us out,” said Berg.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have left the two of you alone earlier,” Jackson grumbled.

  “Graves wants you to log into your computer from a hardwire connection at your desk and insert a flash drive. Follow the directions on the screen, and the virus will take care of the rest. They think the Ajax information is on a network compartmentalized from the rest of Brown River’s visible network, but might be able to find a way to access it internally.”

  “It’s highly probable that someone ‘officially’ working at Brown River has full knowledge of Ajax. Possibly several or more. It’s just too damn big of an operation to exist in a vacuum, and the fact that they’re piggybacking it on the Brown River payroll suggests collusion. I’m guessing these are highly placed executives and managers, who would require access to the Ajax network.”

  “It’s a long shot, Darryl, but that’s all we have at this point. We need to keep pulling at threads until this unravels,” said Bauer.

  “All right. I’ll do this, but after I deliver the virus and you guys confirm it’s working, I need to take care of my family. Cheryl’s on her way up to Princeton to get Liz, and I have no idea what’s going on with my daughter in California.”

  “Does the timing work?” asked Berg. “I don’t want to put you in danger. You’ve done enough already.”

  “I’m due back from my conference tomorrow, but it won’t raise any eyebrows if I roll in later this morning. I’ve been known to bail on conferences early.”

  “Thank you, Darryl. If you sense anything is wrong at Brown River, you walk away. Promise me that.”

  “You can bet your ass on it.”

  And he wasn’t kidding. One sign of trouble and Darryl Jackson was gone.

  Chapter 45

  FBI Headquarters

  Washington, D.C.

  Ryan Sharpe took the call, despite it originating from a satellite phone, as indicated by its prefix. He had news for Karl Berg and had previously left a message asking him to get in touch.

  “Karl, this is Sharpe,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. I have some information to pass related to the favor you requested.”

  Berg sounded flustered. “Yes. Sorry about that. My phone was stolen a few days ago. I was required to remotely deactivate it, for obvious reasons. You’ve found Sokolov?”

  “I wouldn’t say we found him, but a report out of Libreville fits the bill.”

  “As in Gabon? Africa?”

  “Of all places, right?”

  “Actually, it’s not surprising, if this is him,” said Berg.

  “Here’s what we have. A local organized crime informant reported the purchase of small arms with ammunition, a few sets of body armor, and an expensive four-wheel-drive vehicle by two Russians that flew into an airport on the outskirts of the city.”

  “This is unusual in Libreville?”

  “Russians aren’t uncommon in Libreville, but filthy ones flying into sketchy airports and liaising with Gabonese crime syndicates in the middle of the night are apparently very unusual. Enough for the informant to file a report.”

  “Filthy?”

  “The two men smelled and looked like they had walked out of the jungle,” said Sharpe. “That’s right out of the report.”

  “Like they’ve been on the run.”

  “And headed somewhere in a hurry,” said Sharpe. “I hope this helps.”

  “It does. Thank you,” said Berg. “Is there any way for me to get more detailed information? Perhaps a place to start an investigation if we were to put some discreet assets in Libreville?”

  “The Saint De Marquis market west of the city.”

  “Perfect. Thank you,” said Berg, a long pause ensuing.

  Sharpe could sense something else brewing and wasn’t surprised at all when Berg continued.

  “I stumbled onto something that…let’s just say I have no idea how to present this without coming across as paranoid.”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “I know. Not exactly the best hook, so I’m just going to be blunt,” said Berg. “Have you ever heard of a company called Ajax Global?”

  “Sure,” said Sharpe. “We’ve lost a number of agents to them over the past few years. They become law enforcement consultants, whatever that means. Same thing used to happen with Brown River, but that slowed down. Pretty much stopped, actually.”

  “Interesting. That fits what I uncovered.”

  Sharpe didn’t really have time for CIA conspiracy theories, but he had to admit that Berg had him intrigued. If anything, he might be able to pass something on to the Human Resources Branch that could help them stem the tide of departing agents.

  “What’s on your mind, Karl?”

  “Ajax doesn’t exist,” said Berg.

  “Of course it does,” said Sharpe.

  “Just hear me out. Ajax exists in name, but not in substance. I have evidence directly suggesting that employees who left Brown River for jobs at Ajax have continued to be paid by Brown River, for up to two years in some cases. On top of that, Brown River payroll indicates close to four thousand new hires in the past six months, but a senior Brown River executive swears they’ve been in a hiring downswing for three years. The payroll numbers add up to nearly a billion dollars for fiscal year 2009, a big number for a company that has never been valued at more than a billion dollars.”

  “Sounds like a Treasury issue to me. IRS?” said Sharpe.

  “I think they’re raising a small army under the radar,” said Berg. “Just look into this, discreetly, and get back to me if you want to hear the rest of the story.”

  “The rest of the story?”

  “Be very discreet. I can attribute two domestic kidnapping attempts to employees on this mysterious Brown River payroll.”

  “That’s sounding more like the FBI’s jurisdiction,” said Sharpe.

  “You have no idea. I’m going to email you a file with the payroll information, all packaged for your consumption.”

  “I’m sure there’s a federal warrant associated with the acquisition of that data.”

  “Sure. I’ll send that along later today,” said Berg. “Promise me you’ll do a little digging and get back to me.”

  “I’ll take a look,” said Sharpe. “Is this a good number for you?”

  “Let me give you a different number,” said Berg. “It’s a redirect. I’m serious about being discreet, Ryan.”

  “Understood.”

  “Be in touch shortly,” said Berg, ending the call.

  Sharpe stared at the phone. That was by far the most intriguing call he’d taken all year. He rubbed his chin. What to do with this one? Seriously. The side investigation into Sokolov hadn’t uncovered any earth-shattering reason to explain why Shelby and Berg were keen to find him, other than what they knew from the start. F
ormer Eastern Bloc commando turned mercenary. Dime a dozen, really. He’d turned up in an interesting location, but that was about the extent of it.

  Now Berg was talking about “off the books” domestic paramilitary groups on a kidnapping spree? Cooked books, perhaps, at one of the largest international security corporations in the world? Why not? It wouldn’t take Dana and her team long to substantiate enough of Berg’s claim to decide whether to look further.

  Sharpe got up from his desk and opened his office door, making his way toward Dana’s office. He knocked on the door frame and stepped into the opening.

  “Busy?”

  “You know I’m not,” she said. “Come in. What’s up?”

  He stepped inside, closing the door. “I just passed along the Sokolov news to Berg, and he hit me with something else.”

  “You were just talking to him?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Probably nothing, but remember when we tied Sanderson’s original Argentina location to various land holdings owned by Ernesto Galenden?”

  The memory of that exciting moment came with a bitter taste. He paused a little too long. Hesterman had originally discovered Sanderson’s headquarters.

  “Sorry. I didn’t even think of the connection,” she said, touching her scar. “I kind of wear a constant reminder of Eric.”

  “It’s not your fault. Sometimes it just hits me like a hammer,” said Sharpe. “Usually when I’m least expecting it. Galenden?”

  “Murdered yesterday in his Buenos Aires office.”

  “That’s big. How did you come across that?”

  “I activated every possible reporting protocol linked to Berg when you had me look into Sokolov. Same protocols that helped us narrow our search for Sanderson to Argentina, adding everything else we’ve ever connected to Sanderson. Came up in my feed this morning. I thought it might be something you’d want to pass on to Berg, to tell Sanderson. We know he played a major role in funding Sanderson at one point.”

  “Probably still does today. I’ll give Berg a call when I get back to my office. Any suspects?”

  “I didn’t dig any deeper,” she said. “I can call our liaison at the embassy.”