“What do you have for me?” the boss asked, unlocking his office door and going in.
“Something very interesting,” Popov said. “How important it is I am not certain. You can better judge that than I can.”
“Okay, let’s see it.” He sat down and turned in his swivel chair to flip on his office coffee machine.
Popov went to the far wall, and slid back the panel that covered the electronics equipment in the woodwork. He retrieved the remote control and keyed up the large-screen TV and VCR. Then he inserted a videocassette.
“This is the news coverage of Bern,” he told his employer. The tape only ran for thirty seconds before he stopped it, ejected the cassette, and inserted another. “Vienna,” he said then, hitting the PLAY button. Another segment, which ran less than a minute. This he also ejected. “Last night at the park in Spain.” This one he also played. This segment lasted just over a minute before he stopped it.
“Yes?” the man said, when it was all over.
“What did you see, sir?”
“Some guys smoking – the same guy, you’re saying”
“Correct. In all three incidents, the same man, or so it would appear.”
“Go on,” his employer told Popov.
“The same special-operations group responded to and terminated all three incidents. That is very interesting.”
“Why?”
Popov took a patient breath. This man may have been a genius in some areas, but in others he was a babe in the woods. “Sir, the same team responded to incidents in three separate countries, with three separate national police forces, and in all three cases, this special team in all three cases, this special team took over from those three separate national police agencies and dealt with the situation. In other words, there is now some special internationally credited team of special-operations troops-I would expect them to be military rather than policemen currently operating in Europe. Such a group has never been admitted to in the open press. It is, therefore, a `black’ group, highly secret. I can speculate that it is a NATO team of some sort, but that is only speculation. Now,” Popov went on, “I have some questions for you.”
“Okay.” The boss nodded.
“Did you know of this team? Did you know they existed?”
A shake of the head. “No.” Then he turned to pour a cup of coffee.
“Is it possible for you to find out some things about them?”
A shrug. “Maybe. Why is it important?”
“That depends on another question-why are you paying me to incite terrorists to do things?” Popov asked.
“You do not have a need to know that, Dmitriy.”
“Yes, sir, I do have such a need. One cannot stage operations against sophisticated opposition without having some idea of the overall objective. It simply cannot be done, sir. Moreover, you have applied significant assets to these operations. There must be a point. I need to know what it is.” The unspoken part, which got through the words, was that he wanted to know, and in due course, he might well figure it out, whether he was told or not.
It also occurred to his employer that his existence was somewhat in pawn to this Russian ex-spook. He could deny everything the man might say in an open public forum, and he even had the ability to make the man disappear, an option less attractive than it appeared outside of a movie script, since Popov might well have told others, or even left a written record.
The bank accounts from which Popov had drawn the funds he’d distributed were thoroughly laundered, of course, but there was a trail of sorts that a very clever and thorough investigator might be able to trace back closely enough to him to cause some minor concern. The problem with electronic banking was that there was always a trail of electrons, and bank records were both time stamped and amount-specific, enough to make some connection appear to exist. That could be an embarrassment of large or small order. Worse, it wasn’t something he could easily afford, but a hindrance to the larger mission now under way in places as diverse as New York, Kansas, and Brazil. And Australia, of course, which was the whole point of what he was doing.
“Dmitriy, will you let me think about that?”
“Yes, sir. Of course. I merely say that if you want me to do my job effectively, I need to know more. Surely you have other people in your confidence. Show these tapes to those people and see if they think the information is significant.” Popov stood. “Call me when you need me, sir.”
“Thanks for the information.” He waited for the door to close, then dialed a number from memory. The phone rang four times before it was answered:
“Hi,” a voice said in the earpiece. “You’ve reached the home of Bill Henriksen.Sorry, I can’t make it to the phone right now. Why don’t you try my office.”
“Damn,” the executive said. Then he had an idea, and picked up the remote for his TV. CBS, no, NBC, no.. .
“But to kill a sick child,” the host said on ABC’s Good Morning, America.
“Charlie, a long time ago, a guy named Lenin said that the purpose of terrorism was to terrorize. That’s who they are, and that’s what they do. It’s still a dangerous world out there, maybe even more so today that there are no nation-states who, though they used to support terrorists, actually imposed some restraints on their behavior. Those restraints are gone now,” Henriksen said. “This group reportedly wanted their old friend Carlos the Jackal released from prison. Well, it didn’t work, but it’s worth noting that they cared enough to try a classic terrorist mission, to secure the release of one of their own. Fortunately, the mission failed, thanks to the Spanish police.”
“How would you evaluate the police performance?”
“Pretty good. They all train out of the same playbook, of course, and the best of them cross-train at Fort Bragg or at Herefordin England, and other places, Germany and Israel, for example.”
“But one hostage was murdered.”
“Charlie, you can’t stop them all,” the expert said sadly. “You can be ten feet away with a loaded weapon in your hands, and sometimes you can’t take action, because to do so would only get more hostages killed. I’m as sickened by that murder as you are, my friend, but these people won’t be doing any more of that.”
“Well, thanks for coming in. Bill Henriksen, president of Global Security and a consultant to ABC on terrorism. It’s forty-six minutes after the hour.” Cut to commercial.
In his desk he had Bill’s beeper number. This he called, keying in his private line. Four minutes later, the phone rang.
“Yeah, John, what is it?” There was street noise on the cellular phone. Henriksen must have been outside the ABC studio, just off Central Park West, probably walking to his car.
“Bill, I need to see you in my office ASAP. Can you come right down?”
“Sure. Give me twenty minutes.”
Henriksen had a clicker to get into the building’s garage, and access to one of the reserved spaces. He walked into the office eighteen minutes after the call.
“What gives?”
“Caught you on TV this morning.”
“They always call me in on this stuff,” Henriksen said. “Great job taking the bastards down, least from what the TV footage showed. I’ll get the rest of it.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I have the right contacts. The video they released was edited down quite a bit. My people’ll get all the tapes from the Spanish-it isn’t classified in any way-for analysis.”
“Watch this,” John told him, flipping his office TV to the VCR and running the released tape of Worldpark. Then he had to rise and switch to the cassette of Vienna. Thirty seconds of that and then Bern. “So, what do you think?”
“The same team on all three?” Henriksen wondered aloud. “Sure does look like it-but who the hell are they?”
“You know who Popov is, right?”
Bill nodded. “Yeah, the KGB guy you found. Is he the guy who twigged to this?”
“Yep.” A nod. “Less than an hour ago, he was in here to show me these tapes. It worries him. Does it worry you?”
The former FBI agent grimaced. “Not sure. I’d want to know more about them first.”
“Can you find out?”
This time he shrugged. “I can talk to some contacts, rattle a few bushes. Thing is, if there is a really black special-ops team out there, I should have known about it already. I mean, I’ve got the contacts throughout the business. What about you?”
“I can probably try a few things, quietly. Probably mask it as plain curiosity.”
“Okay, I can check around. What else did Popov say to you?”
“He wants to know why I’m having him do the things.”
“That’s the problem with spooks. They like to know things. I mean, he’s thinking, what if he starts a mission and one of the subjects gets taken alive. Very often they sing like fucking canaries once they’re in custody, John. If one fingers him, he could be in the shitter. Unlikely, I admit, but possible, and spooks are trained to be cautious.”