“With you folks?” Bulatt asked.
Smith shrugged as if to say he wasn’t taking the question seriously. “They worked a few assignments in Afghanistan — long range recon and as a four-man hunter-killer team — came close to nailing bin-Laden with a long-shot at least once, possibly twice, before they lost one of their team to a lucky Taliban ricochet; and then, in some manner that we still don’t fully understand, they tripped across Gregor the drug smuggler.”
“Are you talking about Gregor the infamous Chinese Medicinal smuggler?” Bulatt asked, his eyebrows rising in surprise.
“Among his many side operations,” Smith acknowledged. “Gregor was a highly-regarded specialist in the movement of merchandise across unfriendly borders with minimal losses, and at a reasonable cost.”
“Was?”
“His operation suffered a collective fatal accident,” Smith explained. “Every one of his associates died in a sudden and extremely violent aircraft explosion. And Gregor himself; well, let’s just say he died more slowly and painfully.”
“How do you know this, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“We had an asset on the plane,” Smith said matter-of-factly.
“Ah.” Bulatt was thoughtful for a moment. “You knew about Gregor, and probably used him to move things from ‘A’ to ‘B’ on occasion; so you couldn’t have been all that concerned about his other extracurricular activities.”
“Individuals or agencies who hired Gregor for a job would quite naturally assume he always had other irons in the fire,” Smith said obliquely.
Bulatt suddenly blinked in understanding.
“So your asset was actually looking for them — the three Australians, not Gregor and his men?”
Smith nodded silently.
“Stupid question, I’m sure, but I’ll ask it anyway. Why?”
“I assume you’re familiar with the means by which an internal affairs division keeps an eye on full-time permanent government employees?”
Bulatt nodded slowly. “I understand the basic process.”
“Then I’m sure you can also understand why — and how — a similar but substantively different division might be set up to deal with the hired help; which is to say, the extremely dangerous hired help?”
“Sounds like a tough way to make a living,” Bulatt commented.
“It can be… but there are two things you need to understand about these men, Agent Bulatt… excuse me, Ged,” Smith said. “The first being that we consider them to be terribly dangerous, because they are quite good at killing whoever or whatever gets in their way; which they will do without the slightest hesitation or emotional concern. Secondly, that in any civilized context, their leader would be categorized as a brilliant, ruthless and amazingly stable sociopath who also happens to care much more about his men than he does himself. That makes him — if possible and from our perspective — even more dangerous.”
Bulatt thought about the patrolling Rangers — led by Colonel Kulawnit’s son — who’d had the misfortune to run across these three professional killers, and shook his head sadly.
“And finally,” Smith finished, meeting Bulatt’s gaze squarely with his dark eyes, “you need to understand that you and your Interpol associates are in our way; and that’s not going to be acceptable.”
Bulatt thought about that for a few moments.
“I don’t doubt what you said is true: that these men are perfectly capable of hurting or killing a goodly number my Interpol friends and associates if we try to confront them; and that it makes perfect sense to have them hunted down by some of their peers,” he finally said. “I’m assuming, of course, that you have capable people available for such an assignment.”
Smith shrugged noncommittally.
“And I’ll admit I am tempted to just step aside and let your internal affairs team, or whatever you call it, move in and take over our job of bring them to justice. I’d do it in a heartbeat if I had any way of knowing for sure that justice — in terms of a very dear friend of mine — had been served. But the reality is, if I did step aside, I’d never know if you dealt with these malicious assholes in some appropriate manner; or simply brought them back into the fold, so to speak… would I?”
Smith’s silence provided Bulatt with his expected answer.
“More to the point,” Bulatt went on, “I’m not even convinced you’ve brought your ‘A’ team to the game; because your two clowns out in the parking lot lost their cool and blew your surveillance on this place — not to mention my cover — like a couple of rank amateurs.”
“Actually, those guys were walk-ons, auditioning for a full-time role, which they certainly aren’t going to get,” Smith acknowledged. “But what makes you think they blew anything at all, other than the way they dealt with you?”
“I’m guessing you weren’t using a new green truck rigged with an over-the-cab camper unit, parked across the street at an odd angle, and looking just a little out-of-place among the rest of the cars and trucks in the warehouse parking lot; mostly because your people seem to like the ‘new van’ look, and a camper-rig’s pretty much old school in terms of surveillance,” Bulatt said. “On the other hand, that upper bunk would make a real nice staging point for a team of extremely dangerous sociopaths who don’t mind taking medium-range shots at people who get in their way; such as nosey internal affairs teams.
“But I could be wrong,” Bulatt added as he watched Smith lunge up out of his chair, pull the cell phone out of his jacket pocket, and walk a few feet away before making a hurried call. “It could still be over there — green, parked at an odd angle — but I doubt it.”
Thirty seconds later, Smith cursed, snapped his cell phone shut, walked back to the chair, sat down and stared contemplatively at Bulatt.
“Gone?”
Smith nodded silently, still staring.
“You owe me something,” Bulatt said after a long moment. “Will you at least tell me their names?
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Even if I did, their real names wouldn’t give you anything to go on. You’d just be wasting your time. They stopped using them a long time ago.”
“What about their military or paramilitary records?”
“Don’t even think about going that route,” Smith advised. “Those files are out of reach, if they even still exist in the first place; too many cross-links to events that never happened.”
“What about our latent print hit? Can you tell me anything at all about that?” Bulatt pressed. “I’m guessing the fingerprint search engine our lab folks stumbled into had to have been yours. Who else would be looking for those guys with that kind of technology?”
Smith hesitated, and then said: “Look, you now know there are three individuals involved in all of this: the team leader, a second man who is basically a very talented hunter-killer and long-range shot, and a third who possesses certain technical skills useful to a hunter-killer team.”
“But who occasionally forgets to wear gloves when he’s changing the batteries in their remotes?” Bulatt guessed.
Smith nodded his head slowly. “We appreciated the latent submission. It was comforting to know these guys can actually screw up every now and then.”
“But, in any case, based on that latent print, you’re absolutely certain these men you described are our subjects? No chance we might be talking about a misidentified latent?”
Smith hesitated again, and then nodded. “We’re certain.”
“Can you give me anything else to go on?” Bulatt asked. “Anything else at all?”
“I can give you a piece of tangential information,” Smith said after a moment. “Before he was killed, our asset reported that Gregor was doing something with a group of Russians who immigrated to the U.S. several years ago; he didn’t know who, what or why.”