The Devil's Handshake (20 page)

13

Cote d’Azur

Fitz Ernst had captained The Libertine since
it had been launched. It had been built at the famous Lurssen yard
in Bremen at the start of the millennium. The yacht was 330 feet in
length, had three decks, a helicopter pad plus four zero-speed
stabilizers with modifications, and was driven by two 5,500 horse
powered engines with a maximum speed of nineteen knots. It was
considered one of the most luxurious pleasure crafts in the world.
Costing over three hundred million U.S. dollars, to many she
represented the ultimate statement of total self-indulgence, but to
Fitz she was the goddess of the Ocean.

A throat cleared respectfully behind him.

“
Captain?” a voice
asked.

Fitz turned and found his Second Officer,
Daniel Hartmann, standing at attention before him.

“
Ja?” the captain asked
quietly in German.

“
Weather report is good,
sir,” Daniel replied also in German but with a Swiss
accent.

“
Clear skies all the way.
Sir Thomas will be arriving around eight tonight, and his guest
will be on board at five.”

“
Very good, Daniel, I will
inform Miss Gunara.”

Leaving the deck, the experienced Captain
made his way at a measured pace to the ready room at the back of
the yacht, which had its own deck. Entering the room he found his
employer, Nara, going through the menus for the weekend with the
Chef.

When Mikhail initially introduced her to him
she had taken his breath away. A sultry lightly tanned youthful
creature just out of her teens, oozing femininity and sensuality
from her every pore. He wasn’t surprised Sir Thomas had fallen for
her. She was beautiful, and she knew it, and she acted as if she
knew it!

“
Fitz!” the lady stated
warmly as she saw him approaching. He smiled back for her smile,
had always dazzled and tormented him at the same time. Today was no
different.

Over the years, he had seen her turn from an
exotic sexy child-woman into one of the world’s most beautiful
women and although he would never admit it to anybody else,
especially his wife, he was half in love with Nara.

Yet for all of her charms she was not without
her faults and could be a real bitch, often making everything all
the more difficult if the yacht were not just so, never more so
when Sir Thomas had business associates on board.

It was only when her family or Victoria was
on board she was more relaxed as if changing persona in the process
that he found her to be more approachable as she was now.

“
Your Lady,” Fitz said
inclining his head pleasantly knowing she always enjoyed the title
even though technically she wasn’t.

“
Isn’t it a beautiful day,
Fitz?” Nara breathed as she rose up giving him sight of her
exquisite breasts and her long jet-black hair draped over one of
them as she did so. They had moved so seductively that he worried
they would fall out of her top.

“
It is my Lady,” Fitz
replied as his eyes took in the sight of her.

“
The weather report has just
arrived,” he reported. “Clear skies and smooth waters ahead,” he
stated before continuing with the arrival times of the guests and
Thomas.

“
Do you have information on
who is accompanying the Minister yet?” she asked, referring to
Wasir Osman Hassan.

“
Yes, My Lady” he confirmed
nervously.

“
He will be traveling with
the President’s Economic Advisor, his own protection team of four,
plus two officers of the French Police and his companions,” he said
pausing on the last word of his statement.

For all of his private lustful thoughts with
regard to Nara, the Captain certainly didn’t like his yacht being
used as a whorehouse.

“
Thank you, Fitz,” Nara
answered, ignoring his pause on companions but privately agreeing
with him.

14

Langley, Virginia

The United States Department of Defense
defines a Covert Operation as “an operation that is so planned and
executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial
by the sponsor” while a Clandestine Operation as “an operation
where the emphasis is placed on concealment of identity of the
sponsor rather than on concealment of the operation.”

So when the Director received the
authorization from the President a week ago to enter into a new
phase in relations with Russia; Deputy Director Ali Mansoor wasn’t
surprised, for Young had made it his personal crusade ever since
the focus of the agency shifted to the catching of terrorists under
the Bush Administration. It wasn’t a secret, the whole of Langley
knew about it.

Ali, an American Pakistani whose family had
moved to New York in the seventies, had joined the Agency in the
mid-eighties after graduating from Georgetown University, via the
U.S. Marine Corps.

Blessed with his unique experience he had
gathered from serving with the Recon division he had quickly
progressed through the ranks at the Agency due to his special
abilities and middle-eastern looks in the fight against Islamic
terrorists initially, as a Non Cover Officer in Beirut, then
Baghdad, Kabul and finally Lahore. A devout Muslim, Ali absolutely
hated the Mullahs who turned the hearts and souls of the less
educated into the killers who perpetrated the 9/11 incident. He had
made the manhunt of Bin Laden his own personal “Jihad” for the
shame he had brought upon his faith. In the preceding years, he had
won an “Intelligence Star” and a “Distinguished Intelligence Cross”
for his actions in Afghanistan, when against great personal risk he
stopped an attack on Kazai, the President at the time. The actions
were deemed classified and to this day nobody outside the Agency
including his family knew about them for they remained locked up in
the Langley vaults, for Officers are never allowed to confirm that
they are even a recipient of them.

Age now having now caught up with him and
because he had missed his young children growing up, Ali requested
a posting to Langley whereby the former director by way of a thank
you and his service record had quickly promoted him to head up the
elite Special Activities Division known as SAD or in the accounts
and personnel files as a Political Affairs Office.

Over the last week, Ali’s team had built up
an impressive brief on Thomas Litchfield and the main players in
Adwalland to enable them to formulate a recommendation to place
Russia on the back foot by the creation of forward operating base
in Lughaya. He just needed an asset in the country to be his tool
to do it.

As was customary in the SAD, all briefings
took place within their Cube, a quiet room that could not be spied
on, within SAD’s own restricted entry office within Langley.

Taking his seat the director nodded for Ali
and his team to start.

“
As you’re aware, Litchfield
isn’t the usual Oligarch,” Ali said as his picture appeared on
screen.

“
We asked our friends at
Vauxhall Bridge for some background on him, and they advised us
that he is a former Special Forces Officer, fluent in seven
languages and has the ability to cross both the worlds of crime and
politics,” he started.

When Ali had first read Litchfield overview
he had thought immediately thought it had to be too much of a
coincidence.

“
Special Forces? It can’t
be!” he thought as his memory banks went back to that mission all
those years in the First Gulf War.

When he looked at his picture, the eyes of
Litchfield told him it was. He had heard that only one man had made
back from that mission. It appeared that man was Litchfield.

Ali mentally took his hat off to him.

“
Do I include it in the
briefing?” he had asked himself the night before. He decided it
against it for two reasons; firstly that it would mean giving
everybody involved in the planning of this operation security
clearance. Something despite the electronic age would have meant
Ali was going to have fill in at least twenty forms because it
involved a mission that the Director was part of it. Something he
hated! Secondly, because Young had never met him during that
mission it made no difference.

“
Better to let sleeping dogs
lie!” he had concluded, opting for the second option, instead as
Ali continued with his briefing he skipped over it.

“
Has a net worth of
approximately sixty-billion U.S. dollars with investments and
controlling interests in everything from Oil to Media,” Ali
continued while the next slide appeared which was Mikhail’s
photograph.

“
He also maintains a highly
trained close protection team all drawn from the Israeli Shabak.
When we checked with our counterparts at the Office for any
possible weaknesses that we could exploit they told us there
weren’t any,” he said using the term of the headquarters of
Mossad.

“
What, none!” Young answered
in disbelief as Ali took a sip of his coffee.

“
Yes, none!” Ali
said.

“
All Yural Diskin said was
that Pschenichikov was one of their best!” said Ali, referring to
the previous Head of the Shabak.

“
Diskin said that?” the
Director questioned, equally surprised that ex-head of Shabak had
personally vouched for the bodyguard because he didn’t usual bother
to make calls of that nature. That told him the man on the screen
must have been an exceptional operative before he joined
Litchfield’s organization.

“
All of his inner circle and
their families are treated as part of his family. All well paid and
rewarded,” Ali said continuing with his briefing.

“
This has enabled him to
develop a ‘Clan’ feeling amongst them to such an extent that their
loyalty is without question,” the psychologist offered in support
of his immediate superior, and was about to continue by providing
the Director with further support to his hypothesis with an
overview on his Homeric beliefs.

Young quickly interrupted him. “Okay, the
opportunity to get an asset inside is limited let’s move on,” said
the Director, not in the mood for a behavioral science love
fest.

Ignoring the disrespect towards his team, Ali
pressed on.

“
If a sanction is authorized
we recommend undertaking the operation in the UK or by drone if
overseas, as the chances of assault in a location where his
security team would be armed, success would be limited due to their
highly skilled individual abilities.”

He paused. “The risk of fatalities to our
assault team would be well over the thirty percent threshold,” he
stated making reference to a watermark figure a mathematician of
Langley had once calculated where the death of service personnel
was too vast to maintain the covert nature of the mission.

“
Not to mention the point
that the target is so high profile it wouldn’t remain covert in any
case,” added Young, dismissing a drone strike as an option. “And we
will piss off the Brits in the process!” he quickly added, ignoring
the use of the threshold as irrelevant and the fact that trying to
get a sanction approved by the oversight committee for an operation
in the UK would be virtually impossible.

“
Indeed sir,” answered Ali
already knowing what answer the Director would give.

“
Okay, let’s move on, we let
State decide,” Young answered, parking it. He recognized a hot
potato when he saw one.

“
We do though, have a plan
that we believe has a good chance of success of disabling the deal
on all fronts within the desired timeframe and at this time doesn’t
require additional authorization,” offered Ali as the next slide
came up on the screen.

Once the briefing was completed three
quarters of an hour later, Young got up and gave a singular nod to
Ali, satisfied with what had been presented to him.

“
Authorized,” was all he
said as he left the room.

Ten minutes later Ali made his way back to
his desk in his office.

He sat down. He switched on his desktop
computer and, then once it was up and running, entered the secured
assets area of the central server and typed in a name. Once in the
asset’s secure communication packet, he then typed a single
predefined message.

If any observer or foreign intelligence
agency reviewed it they would think the email was a request for a
meeting, to the agent it was a signal that his Controller needed to
speak to him.

Finished he picked up the phone and then made
a call to one of his most trusted officers who was currently on
leave to meet for breakfast.

For many in Dubai, the city-state of the
United Arab Emirates has been seen as a playground with every
conceivable high-end consumer product in the world available in the
Malls to cater for the whims of the socialites together with a duty
free zone to repackage and distribute the same commercial goods to
the rest of the Middle East, but to others it was a hell hole built
on nothing but credit, ecocide, suppression, and slavery.
Irrespective of these diverse views to the money-laundering
brethren of the world with Dubai’s limited regulation it was one of
their places of choice in which to deposit their money.

To twenty-nine-year-old Reza Namazi, an
American-Iranian with a degree from Columbia who had been recruited
by the CIA at an employment fair while he was still at college, it
was home.

Due to his unique experience in finance, his
controller at the Agency decided to put him in plain sight, a term
used to describe the most stressful form of assignment for many as
it meant agents have to operate under their true identities.