Poison Wind (Jackson Chase Novella Book 3) Read online

  Unbeknownst to Vatchenko, the oversized deckhand he’d hired was my colleague, a tier one shooter himself. U.S. Navy Chief Joe Sterba was a SEAL, on secondment to the DNI as I was. Joe is a fair-haired golden boy from Florida. He’s quick to give a smile, and has an aw-shucks demeanor that can disarm just about anyone. Those very few he can’t win over should look out, though, because he’s a brilliant strategist and absolutely lethal behind a gunsight.

  Joe secured Vatchenko’s wrists and rolled him onto his side. He edged his chin up slightly, getting him into a recovery position so his airway would be clear when he came to.

  One could argue that it was far better treatment than he deserved.

  Vatchenko had grown up in St. Petersburg when it was still Leningrad. He’d been raised by an abusive father after his mother mysteriously disappeared when he was only ten. He was large as a child, and had inherited his dad’s nasty streak. And as a result, fought his way through much of his youth, using his size and anger to bring home food and any spare money he could find in the pockets of his victims.

  By the time he was seventeen, Vatchenko had made his way south to Moscow. His size and strength were ideal for the construction industry, where he moved from job to job before taking over the business of one of his employers after another mysterious disappearance.

  The business grew as the years went by to such a point that when the Sochi Olympics were announced, he’d positioned himself perfectly to be front and center for a good-sized portion of the billions of dollars that would go into developing the town. Through all of the corruption that befell the buildup, Vatchenko amassed a small fortune. But still, he had a thirst for more, diversifying himself into real estate development, and eventually various other forms of investments. He rode people into the ground to climb higher, through the energy sector, into commodities, and then more traditional investments. Tens of millions became hundreds of millions, and still his desire for more grew.

  He watched traditional investors predict and follow market fluctuations in search of opportunities. But Vatchenko wanted to make—to control—his destiny. And he saw terrorism as the ultimate tool with which to do so.

  He experimented at first, funding a small terrorist attack and analyzing how markets reacted. He studied how composites and specific sectors dropped instantly and were ripe for shorting. He studied the spikes in defense, materials, and construction, and built models to quantify the timing of these increases. With every attack, his analytical models grew in strength and accuracy.

  His entire investment machine turned terrorism into a business. He became a terrorist who never got his hands dirty. A terrorist not loyal to a region or religion, only to money. He had no boundaries, only greed. And while he didn’t pull the triggers himself, his actions had directly led to hundreds and hundreds of deaths.

  The connection between Vatchenko and terrorism came to light following a mission in Africa. We traced him to the South of France, where we decided to use his yacht as a way to get ears and eyes on him. Rather than let the authorities build a case and send him away, we used him as a conduit into networks around Europe and the Middle East. We pursued his contacts relentlessly for months. Accounts were seized, terrorist cells were taken down, leaders and connections identified. Our tunnels into his computer and phones had been an intelligence coup of legend, allowing us to stop attacks that would have caught the world off guard many times over.

  Until suddenly, the intelligence stopped.

  We knew it was only a matter of time before he found out. Before his contacts suddenly went missing. Before his investment schemes flatlined. Before he suspected someone was watching.

  He became paranoid. Assistants, analysts, and traders were fired. Two disappeared without a trace. He shut down his Paris office, and destroyed every computer, phone, and electronic device before moving out of the building. But what hurt our operation more than anything was when he moved to heavy encryption and biometric security on his personal devices. We’d been locked out completely. Even the technical muscle of the NSA couldn’t break through.

  It was time to shut down the operation and bring him in. Of all the missions we’d taken on since we began tracking him, this one looked as if it would be the easiest. Vatchenko still knew me as the head of Waiata Yachts, and he’d asked a couple of times if I would join him for the Loro Piana, or at least help tune the boat and crew. We decided that I would accept his offer and take advantage of his isolation on the boat to nab him discreetly. Once we took him down, we’d use him to crack the security on the laptop, harvest the remaining data, and then hand him off to the CIA.

  So far, so good, I thought, looking down at Vatchenko.

  Hans came up from below and met us on the wide deck just forward of the helms. “Still out?” he asked, pointing.

  “Yes,” I said. “He’ll come around soon. Probably won’t be too happy.”

  “His bodyguard is awake now. The restraints are holding, but he’s not too happy either,” he said. Before Vatchenko and I had gone to the mast, Joe had made his way belowdecks to secure the bodyguard.

  “How’s the girl?” I asked.

  “Relieved at first,” Hans replied. “She saw you slam Mr. Vatchenko’s head into the mast from one of the skylights. I couldn’t follow all of her swearing in Russian, but it was enough to gather she hated the bastard.”

  “Let’s see if we have a visual on the agency’s boat.”

  I grabbed a pair of binoculars from a locker, and the three of us went forward. The real deckhand, Dario, had the helm, and had kept us on starboard heading northeast. Standing on the lee rail, I scanned the horizon. A small shape was beginning to take form.

  “Let’s hold this course for now. When they’re a few hundred meters out, we’ll heave to and let them tie up on the port rail,” I said.

  “Where will Mr. Vatchenko and his man be taken?” Hans asked.

  “Can’t say, honestly,” I replied.

  “Some place where they won’t be found for a long time,” Joe said.

  Hans looked across the horizon. He was quiet, and I knew why. After a moment, he turned and said, “I’ll grab some fenders and lines.”

  He headed aft. Joe watched him and said, “They’re good people.”

  I nodded, because I understood that to us, capturing Vatchenko was a mission. To Hans and his wife, and even Dario the deckhand, our mission had a lot of fallout. Their jobs. Where they’d live. Even, quite simply, what they’d do tomorrow.

  3

  “How ya doin’, sailors?” Haley said with a smile as she climbed up from the boat now tied to our starboard side.

  “Happy to see you,” Joe said, grabbing her hand and helping her onto the deck.

  “And happy to have this character tied up,” I added, pointing to Vatchenko’s prone form on the deck.

  Lieutenant Commander Haley Chen was the third member of the team. She’d been the intelligence officer aboard the Stennis when we were thrown into our first mission together, a technical genius who had joined the Navy as a way of preventing herself from using her hacking skills for no good. I often felt that her intellect was the keystone the DNI needed when he set up our little band of troubleshooters.

  “You have the computer?” she asked.

  “Yes, biometric lock, just like you suspected. It wants a retina scan first.”

  “Let’s get to work, then.”

  Joe handed her the computer, which she opened and found it was powered up but in a locked mode. She knelt down with it and inserted a thumb drive.

  “If we can get in, this will copy the data. Let’s get his hands out front in case we need a fingerprint, too,” she said, pointing to the fingerprint scanner next to the keyboard.

  Taking a knife from his pocket, Joe cut the restraints that held Vatchenko’s hands behind his back. He propped the Russian up against the mast, and then re-secured his hands in the front with a fresh pair of Flexicuffs.

  “We’ll need his eyes open,” Haley said. Pointi
ng to a set of small lenses in the top of the laptop’s lid, she continued, “These are infrared cameras, designed specifically for retinal scans.”

  Joe used a thumb to raise one of Vatchenko’s eyelids. His eye had rolled back enough that the camera wouldn’t be able to get a good image. He slapped Vatchenko on the cheek a few times.

  “Wakey, wakey, Ivan!”

  It took a few more tries, but Vatchenko eventually came around. His eyes opened and he was dazed for a split second before reality hit. Instantly, he whipped his bound hands upwards towards Joe’s face. Joe twisted his head just in time, and with equal speed, slammed Vatchenko’s hands back down and used a knee to hold them. Vatchenko gave a grunt, and said, “Yob tvuoy!” Let’s just say this wasn’t a term of endearment.

  “Good afternoon to you, too, Ivan,” Joe replied.

  Vatchenko continued to struggle. Joe adjusted his position, getting a forearm under his chin and pinning him to the mast to keep him still.

  Joe gave a nod to Haley, who held the laptop up in front of Vatchenko. The Russian knew exactly what she was trying to do, and squeezed his eyes shut. Through a string of curses, he tried to twist his head, doing everything possible to avoid the camera seeing his eyes.

  I moved in behind Haley and grabbed a fistful of Vatchenko’s thinning hair to hold his head still. With my other hand, I palmed his forehead and used two fingers to lift his eyelids. Haley held the laptop up amidst a string of Russian insults until the computer finally gave a little ping.

  She pulled the laptop away and looked at the screen. “Looks like we need a fingerprint now.”

  Using a knee to pin his shoulder, I grabbed his right wrist and held the hand out. Vatchenko appeared to let off slightly. His shouting drifted down to a simple, “Yob. Yob. Yob,” and he extended his middle finger.

  “Must use his middle finger for the ID. How charming,” Haley said. Thinking about this, she added, “Not sure why he’d use two biometrics. It’s better to combine a bio with a password.”

  Shrugging off the thought, she placed the extended finger onto the sensor. After a second, the screen unlocked and a green light on the thumb drive illuminated.

  Suddenly, something on the screen startled her. “Oh, no!” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  She was in the command prompt, frantically typing.

  “He set that fingerprint to wipe the disk! It’s going now. Trying to stop it and grab what I can!”

  Vatchenko knew he had won. Clearly, he’d set the scanner to read one fingerprint to unlock the device, and another to erase it for just this sort of situation. He began laughing. A deep, throaty smoker’s laugh. Joe pushed harder into his neck, and after a cough, he went silent.

  I looked back to the computer just as the screen went blank.

  “No,” Haley said again. Only this time, much more quietly.

  An hour later we remained hove to in the Mediterranean northeast of Sardinia. The CIA men who had brought Haley to Trance had left, taking Vatchenko and his bodyguard with them. To where, I wasn’t sure. I only knew he was facing weeks of unpleasant interrogation, and that would be just for starters. And being very gentle with Anika, they took her as well, assuring us that she would be well taken care of.

  Joe and I went to the couch just forward of the helms where Haley sat hunched over her computer.

  “Anything usable?” I asked.

  “Almost nothing,” she said. “Just this. A snippet in the buffer from a messaging app he had open.” She turned her laptop in our direction and stood up, lowered her head and ran her hands through her hair, frustrated.

  I looked at the screen to see only a few lines of text. Random characters and some numbers. A few recognizable words.

  “What are we looking at?” I asked.

  “I stripped out the machine code. This is what’s left.”

  “Haley, you know we have no idea what this is,” said Joe.

  “Let me clean it up.” Her hands moved over the keyboard and certain sections of the text highlighted. She pointed to those sections. “It’s essentially the key logging of the last three messages he sent from his computer to a phone somewhere. He’s terrible at typing, so you have to dig through and ignore the corrections. They were using English, and Vatchenko’s wasn’t perfect.”

  “Can you remove the corrections to get something intelligible?”

  “Yes. Try this.” She pressed a three-key combination, and the snippet shortened to a single line. They agreed 750k | Will send 250 more. Same account | Do you have a date?

  “In the breaks, there was a response from the recipient, but it wasn’t written to the hardware. We only have one end of the conversation.”

  “Do you have the recipient’s number?”

  She nodded, and pointed to a string of numbers beginning with +970. I looked up, not knowing that country code, and raised my eyebrows.

  “Gaza,” she said.

  “OK, so the baddie in Gaza he was sending money to this time around had some issues with whatever he was buying,” I said.

  “Yes. And I went back into the bank records we’ve been tracking and the last transfer he made was for $250,000. It went to the same account $1,250,000 went to three weeks ago.”

  “Whose?”

  “We’ll never know. It was in Liechtenstein. Aside from the account being shut down immediately after the second transfer, it was a shell within a shell within a shell. Nothing but paper companies with meaningless names.”

  “Any way to see the date he asked for?”

  “No, we only have his side of the conversation.”

  “How about the phone number?”

  “Nothing in our databases. I’ve had Landon query the Israelis since it’s a Gaza number, but there’s been no response.” She briskly snapped her computer shut.

  We’d come to be used to intelligence work not giving every answer, only painting part of a picture. Joe and I were perhaps more used to it, having worked operations in our former roles where we were sent into battle with unknowns. But it was hard for Haley. She was intelligent, and her skills so strong that reaching a dead end on an electronic trail was unusual for her. And therefore uncomfortable. It was simply frustrating to her to know there was an answer out there that she couldn’t get her hands on.

  I nodded to Joe. He had a beautiful big-brother relationship with her that always got her back on track, usually stronger than she was before. As he went to help her refocus, I moved to the starboard helm. There was a small locker there where Hans had last stored the boat’s satellite phone, and we needed to ring Landon.

  Landon Clark, formerly the CIA station chief in Bangkok, was our direct handler. He and the DNI were friends, having worked together on and off for decades. And with the DNI’s job running sixteen of America’s intelligence agencies, we weren’t always in direct contact. Landon had been reassigned to Langley where he’d been given some sort of foo-foo title, effectively to hide him in the bureaucracy. His sole focus now was supporting our operations.

  Once we were connected, I put the phone on speaker and returned. Haley had already sent the message she’d recovered and a brief update via her secure computer uplink, so we were ready to get straight to the point.

  “Anything on the phone number yet?” I asked.

  “Nothing. And given it’s a 970 country code, I immediately checked with the Israelis. No response.”

  “Don’t we have access to some of their databases?”

  “We do, but only what they want us to see. And there’s no record of this particular number.”

  The line went silent. The four of us had hoped for some form of intelligence windfall along the lines of what we’d had for so many months. The fact that we’d ended up with an unknown number and three little sentences was, to say the least, a complete let down.

  I offered a proposal. “OK. We can consider this op done and move on. We got a lot from Vatchenko already, and he’s locked up. The number from this snippet of intel has been p
assed on to the Israelis, so we could end the operation right here and now.”

  Even saying it, I felt the energy drain out of me. I knew it wasn’t what any of us wanted to do, but the option had to be presented.

  “Yes, that is one option.” The line went silent for a second before Landon continued. “But I know you three. You don’t want to leave a thread hanging without tugging it until you see the other end.”

  I looked out to the sea. It was a beautiful day without a cloud in sight. A break from the pace we’d been maintaining for the past few months would be welcome. But Landon was right. It wasn’t in any of our characters to leave the operation open ended.

  “Haley? Joe?” I asked.

  Joe looked at me and said, “We started this.”

  “So we finish it,” Haley added, completing his thought.

  I looked at my watch and scanned the horizon. “I don’t want to head back to Porto Cervo. Too many questions would come up if we returned to port without Vatchenko.” Pointing north with my chin, I said, “But we could make Corsica in no time.”

  Haley typed on her computer, and then said, “There’s an airport on the north end of Corsica. Poretta, in Lucciana.”

  “Send a plane, Landon,” I said. “We’ll go to Tel Aviv and get them moving on it, or finish it ourselves.”

  “I’ll get a plane there.”

  Hans came up from belowdecks and sat down next to Joe, a questioning look on his face.

  “Landon, there’s one more thing I’d like you to take care of,” I said. I took the phone off speaker and walked aft, telling him what I needed done.

  By the time I ended the call, Hans and Dario had us underway. The wind was cooperating, and it looked like we’d be able to cruise north without incident. I went to the windward helm where Hans was standing and put the sat phone back in the locker. He gestured to the wheel, and I took it, savoring the chance to switch my focus from Vatchenko to the sea and wind.