Chapter 23
Perry had retreated to the side of a
massive logjam that had accumulated from many flash floods, the bare limbs
twisted like oversized pretzels against the embankment. He gazed down at
Drake’s shattered skull a few feet away, the man’s limp figure splayed out on
the sand. The yellowjackets that had been gathered at the mud puddle a few feet
away swarmed over the bone splinters and gray matter.
Perry retrieved his cellphone and called
Nelson Ritter.
“Mr. Kovac, I hope this call brings good
news.”
“Afraid not—Sanchez got away. She had help
from a federal agent.”
“You said this would be a quick
snatch-and-grab operation.”
“Don’t worry, they can’t get too far but
we should delay the operation.”
“Not an option. There are too many dominos
that have already begun to fall. The shipment of assault weapons and explosives
is arriving shortly.”
The situation is too volatile until we
have Sanchez in our hands.”
“You’re not hearing me—the funds have
already been moved to the key players. These are not the type of people you
request a refund from.” There was a long pause, Nelson’s increased exhalations
the only sign that he was still on the phone until he barked into Perry’s ear,
“Get to Anaheim, handle the exchange or you’re dead. Is that clear enough for
you?”
Perry grimaced and then sighed. “Crystal.”
“In the meantime, what needs to be done to
hunt down Sanchez and this agent she’s with?”
“If she has the files you indicated, what
will she need to decode them?”
Ritter was silent for a moment. “The only
place to decrypt those is here at Aeneid. Our software is proprietary and our
files accessible only through our company mainframe.”
“Then just shut those portals down until
after the attack is launched. She’ll be crippled. They’ll just be two fugitives
on the run that will get picked up a few weeks from now at some restaurant in
Denver.”
“Impossible to do something on that scale
without affecting all of our other internal networks which will only cause
delays in the upcoming operation. However, we can make it easy for them to
enter the facility, luring them inside, and then disposing of them after.”
Perry thought about Mitch as he felt the
searing pain in his cheek from the earlier splinters of rock shards that
lacerated his face. “That should work. Just leave the FBI agent to me. And one
more thing—your head brute is without a head. He was taken out by the fugitives
along with seven other guys.”
There was a muffled sigh from Nelson.
“He’s off the books and won’t show up in any databases. Pity, he was years in
the making.”
Perry cleared his throat as he kicked dirt
onto Drake’s chest. “I’ll be there as soon as I make sure things are covered
with my bureau chief.”
“My jet will be waiting for you in
Phoenix. And Perry—this had better go without any further glitches. I want the
files, the woman, and these loose ends tied up by nightfall.”
Perry grunted into the phone then hung up
and shouted back to the remaining six men who were concealed amongst the
bushes, their weapons still fixed on the canyon. “Strip ape-man of all his gear.”
He started retreating back down their
approach route to the disabled vehicles. “You men disperse and make your way
back to Phoenix. I need to retrace my steps and emerge a few miles to the
southwest. After that, I’ll be in touch about the next leg of this mission.”
Chapter 24
His name was Fareed Mahmoud. His life
growing up in the foothills of Iran had given him fortitude. His commitment to
the Koran had provided a roadmap for devotion which his twisted mind had bent
to match his own desires, and four years at the University of California in Los
Angeles had stoked the raging fires of discontent against the infidel. His
chatroom conversations in Persian with other discontented students and a later
visit to a training camp in Yemen were what made Nelson Ritter smile.
Religion was of little use in Ritter’s own
thinking. He had long ago shucked off his formal Catholic upbringing. He
surmised that one’s destiny was shaped by an iron-clad will, timing, cunning,
and destroying your competitors. But he did recognize religious zealotry as a
powerful business tool for galvanizing his causes.
Fareed and his associates at UCLA were
perfect for Ritter’s small-scale attack on U.S. soil. He knew it didn’t have to
be spectacular, nor did there have to be a large body-count—there only had to
be enough attention drawn to Fareed’s Iranian heritage to rally support with outraged
corporate financiers who would pull out of their oil interests in the Caspian
Sea. Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan formed a pact on the
division of the Caspian Sea resources over a decade ago. Iran had been
disputing that claim line, which would grant them the lion’s share of 48
billion barrels of oil along trillions of cubic meters of natural gas.
Iran’s involvement in a homegrown
terrorist cell in the U.S. would thrust them onto the world stage, allowing
Ritter’s expansion efforts in neighboring Turkmenistan to proceed. With Iran
out of the way, the oil would flow unobstructed through the new pipeline to
Europe, placing Ritter and his colleagues into the realm of nearly unlimited power
in the region and with bank accounts to match.
Fareed was smart, idealistic, and charismatic.
His loose affiliations with extremist groups would serve as enough of a
catalyst for the American media to run with their own versions of fabricated
reality. Ritter knew that fact-checking had exited American journalism with the
advent of social media, which only needed embryonic half-stories to give birth
to what the masses felt like absorbing during that week’s news cycle.
The other disillusioned youths in Fareed’s
jihadist group were spread around the Los Angeles region, most still working
menial jobs to pay for their schooling. Every Wednesday evening they would meet
at an abandoned car stereo warehouse on Lamson Avenue, south of downtown
Anaheim. The building was owned by Fareed’s uncle, who had shuttered the
business with the recent economic downturn.
Each week, the group focused on a skill
set revolving around dry-fire practice drills with their firearms, room
clearing techniques, and studying small unit tactics that Fareed had learned
during his brief time in Yemen. Once a month, they also went out to the desert
around Joshua Tree and did endurance runs with their heavily laden backpacks to
simulate an evasion scenario. Though he prayed he would die in a hail of
bullets after expending his weapons in a fiery battle, Fareed had also become
intrigued with the survival mindset, which added another tool to his
pseudo-tactical mindset.
Unknown to the others in his group, Fareed
had stowed a few 10mm rocket boxes in the desert in case he was ever on the
run. He obtained these from a military surplus store in Riverside. These had
been buried in a GPS-marked site near Palm Springs at the base of a cliff. The
cache contained enough survival gear, rations, pistol magazines, ammunition,
and first-aid items for Fareed to be on the lam for a few days. His escape
route out of Los Angeles ran along the I-10 corridor skirting around Palm
Springs and he had sat up many long nights plotting out what an exciting escape
from justice would look like from the comfort of his laptop. After that he
wasn’t sure what he would do but he had read on various survival forums that an
evader should always have a three-day supply of goods to “Get Out of Dodge,”
whatever the hell that meant.
Ritter had followed Fareed’s whereabouts
for the past nine months, eventually sending one of his senior mercenaries of
Egyptian descent, Gamal, who feigned alliance with an Al Qaeda affiliate to
build a relationship of trust in their common interests. Through many
clandestine meetings, the plans for six lone-wolf attacks were made, the
resolve built, the men assembled, and the targets identified. Now all that was
needed was the might. Ritter was thrilled, his spine electric, when the call
finally came in from Gamal that the pieces had aligned.
He made the necessary calls to Assistant
Secretary of Defense Thomas Monroe and Agent Perry Kovac to ensure the incoming
shipment of weapons and demolition gear would arrive without incident, the
cargo plane’s manifest and customs requirements being reassigned to another
vessel. The AK-47s would then be meticulously stamped on the metal receiver
above the handguard with the symbol of the Iranian flag. Ritter saw to it that
his personal team of mercenaries handled the crates, planting enough evidence
to reveal the source was an extremist group led by Fareed with the sanction of
Iranian rebels.
Everything had come to pass as he, Monroe,
and Perry had painstakingly planned at Monroe’s private chalet in Tahoe nearly a
year ago. Ritter felt like he knew what it must be like to be an artist—the delicate
brushstrokes unfolding over months until the canvas emerged into a thing of
beauty that made you stand back and sigh.
***
That night in his estate in northwest
Anaheim, Nelson Ritter sat on the second floor of his private office, the large
French doors that led out to the porch glistening with the last rays of
sunlight over the palm tree-lined pool below. The ten-thousand-square-foot
mansion had nine bathrooms and six bedrooms and sat perched above the valley in
a cul-de-sac, with Ritter owning the adjoining undeveloped parcels.
His office was designed to resemble that
of a Roman chancellor, the walls paneled with knotty walnut and gold etchings
of spear-toting men in chariots engaged in the Battle of Carthage. In the middle,
a chandelier made of elk antlers hung from the hand-carved ceiling which
revealed the Roman amphitheater in its former splendor. On each wall were
gold-framed photographs depicting Ritter with various dignitaries, politicians,
and dictators, the most notable from the latter being Surinam Presidente Eduarto
del Toro, whom he helped to install in power in the ’90s but then later had to have
assassinated once oil reserves in that country were depleted. While the entire
room fostered an electrical ambience, it had been designed by a safe-room
manufacturer with two-foot-thick steel walls, a floor with a pressure-plate
security system, along with bulletproof porch windows and a vault-like entrance
door. Nelson worked at home on Tuesday and Wednesday, handling Aeneid’s board
meetings via Skype for a few hours while several Latina women lounged in his
bedroom for his frequent respites throughout the day.
On his teak-lined desk, which seemed to
occupy a third of the room, was a picture of Ritter clad in soiled olive-drab
fatigues in the jungle bordered by two native guerrilla fighters. The youthful Ritter
was grinning while clutching an Ingram Mac-10 submachine gun with a suppressor.
Beside this oversized picture was a miniscule framed photograph of Ritter and
his fourth wife, a woman thirty years younger and of Panamanian descent. Isabella
divided her time between their villa in the Italian Alps and their Anaheim
estate, which was the arrangement Ritter preferred.
The 72-inch flattop computer screen
mounted to the wall across from his desk was voice activated, allowing him to
dictate while keeping his hands free to sift through black-and-white
reconnaissance photos of the Sangar Valley in Turkmenistan. That draconian nation
was perfect for his upcoming venture as it had the second most repressive
government in the world next to North Korea and was closed to independent
scrutiny and outside media.
As he sat back in his leather throne chair,
Ritter’s thoughts floated over his recent interactions with Perry. He was eagerly
awaiting a call from the man, hoping the woman had been plucked from her
whereabouts and would soon be back at Aeneid for
questioning
.
Ritter had done his homework on Perry
through his own surveillance work along with what he gleaned from the endless
arm-candy informants that he fed the man and the constant analysis of Perry’s
personal finances. When the opportunity arose to present Perry with a lucrative
offer for his insider services at the FBI, the two joined forces. Ritter had
always kept plenty of audio recordings of their interactions and was judicious
in his business meetings to provide deniability for himself while keeping just
enough rope for Perry to hang himself with if things ever went askew.
The phone rang, and Ritter clumsily grabbed
it in his haste to hear the news. His jaw sank when he heard a voice other than
Perry’s in his ear. It was Gamal, who was calling to inform him of the weapons shipment
for Fareed.
“Clear?”
“Yes, this line is secure,” said Gamal. “The
packages have arrived and are being safeguarded until the delivery.”
“Excellent. Transfer will take place
within the next 48 hours. I’m waiting on one issue to resolve itself.”
“Do we have a location?”
Ritter thought for a moment, his bony
fingers tapping on the edge of the desk. “Let’s plan on having Fareed select
the spot, as long as it’s safe. That’ll give him a sense of ownership in the
plan.”
“Very well, sir. I will make the
arrangements and wait for your call on the timing.”
Ritter hung up the phone and stood,
rubbing his sore neck. Then he walked over to a wooden cabinet and poured
himself a glass of vodka. He tried to wash away the tension, pensively staring
at his phone on the desk as if his searing gaze would cause it to ring.