“You authorized that?”
“Of course not. She acted on her own.”
“Explain to Lily that I’m unhappy with what she did. Very unhappy. So she’s out of any operational role and demoted to babysitting the woman for the duration of the deceptions. And no one is to touch the Bennings girl unless I say so. Is that completely clear, Mikhail?”
Mikhail nodded. “Yes, Uncle.”
“Bennings doesn’t know enough to hurt us yet, and the upside to using him is very considerable. I just need to remind him how weak his position really is. Release the tape to the big shot in Washington, D.C.”
Mikhail pulled out his tablet phone and sent a one-character message. “Secretary of the Army Fitzgerald will have the tape within minutes.”
“I imagine that will cause quite a disturbance in Washington. Now what about Dennis?” asked Viktor.
“He’s ready in Wyoming. The area has small earthquakes almost daily. When the right seismic activity registers, he’ll blow the charge.”
“Good. Very good.”
CHAPTER 16
The L-shaped shopping center in El Monte, in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles County, had seen better days, but not by much. There had never been a well-known grocery or drugstore “anchor,” and half of the storefronts now stood empty. Double Lucky Donuts and Saigon 88 Noodles suggested changing demographics in the previously Caucasian, then Hispanic, city. The Vietnamese-owned noodle joint and the Cambodian-owned donut shop were the closest shopping center tenants to Commercial-Industrial Applications, which was the end unit.
Almost no one paid attention to the initials of Commercial-Industrial Applications. And almost no one actually ever entered the locked premises, whose windows were tinted too dark to see through. But this early spring evening, with a scent of night-blooming jasmine floating in the cool air, the secret safe house had plenty of activity.
Kit Bennings, Angel Perez, and Yulana Petkova stood by at the rear entrance as Buzz Van Wyke entered a ten-digit code on a keypad. A click sounded, and then a steel panel slid open revealing biometric security devices. Buzz leaned forward and looked into an eyepiece where his iris was scanned for a match. Lastly, he slid his index finger into a narrow glass trough about four inches long.
“Finger vein scan?” asked Kit.
Buzz nodded. “The CIA has more safe houses around the country than you can shake a stick at. This one is seldom used but gets checked every week. We’re good to squat here for a few days.”
“How did you get the entry code and your data into the system?” asked Bennings.
“If I told you, you’d become party to a federal crime.”
“I think I already am,” said Bennings with a smile as the group entered.
The first order of business was to give Yulana food and drink and lock her in an interrogation room. A cot, chair, and some magazines had been placed in the room. It was the perfect place to keep her for now.
Good-byes were said and thanks offered to Buzz’s son Randy and the other SEALs, who had to get back to Coronado, pronto.
So the men settled in. Buzz took Kit into a small communications room to show him all of the sophisticated comms, but more important, he briefed him on the closed-circuit TV coverage and alarm systems that kept the safe house secure. The entire facility was heavily reinforced, and Kit immediately felt better.
As they stood in the communications room, a video monitor showed a taxi pulling around to the back door.
“That should be Jen,” said Kit.
They watched the video feed as Jen Huffman got out of the cab holding a suitcase and backpack.
“I’ll let her in,” said Angel, moving toward the rear door. Earlier, Jen had been dropped off at a hotel, where she checked out all of Yulana’s belongings for bugs and trackers and disabled the two that she found. One was hidden in a makeup compact, the other in the lining of the suitcase.
After Jen squared away her gear, Angel grabbed four beers from the big fridge in the large, well-stocked kitchen, and he and Buzz gave the nickel tour to Jen and Kit. Jen hadn’t seen the place yet, because she’d flown in to LAX from D.C. shortly before Kit and Yulana had arrived.
The safe house was pretty impressive. A bunk room comfortably slept eight. There were two soundproof interrogation rooms, the small communications room, a phony reception room with desk and chairs, a conference room with a table that sat ten, and a common room with sofas, a TV, and, Kit noted, an old acoustic guitar leaning in a corner. The place had toilets and showers, discreet parking in the back, steel-reinforced walls and doors. A gun room had a gun safe with weapons and ammo the SEALs had loaned to Buzz. A cache of orange-colored Czech-made Semtex plastic explosives sat in a corner—something the CIA must have forgotten about. Other goodies and gadgets were stashed in the conference room.
“Here’s the coolest thing,” said Angel, leading Kit, Buzz, and Jen through a gray steel door into a storage room. “I want to make one of these for my house.”
Angel pressed a hidden switch, and a section of the suspended ceiling opened up as a ladder dropped down. “Escape hatch to the roof. If you stay low, you’re out of sight, and it’s an easy run on the roof all the way to the other end of the shopping center, where they have a rope ladder rolled up.”
“Your black-budget tax dollars hard at work,” joked Jen.
“I don’t think we’ll be needing it, but anything’s better than a tunnel,” said Kit. The others looked at him for clarification. “Never mind.”
“Kit, I want to park one of the vans at the other end of the mall, in case we do need to use it,” said Angel.
“You’re joking.”
“I agree with Angel,” said Buzz, nodding. “As long as the Russian woman is with us, I want to take every precaution.”
“Okay, Angel, do it.”
Kit held out his can of beer, and they all touched cans.
Kit, Angel, and Jen sat with pens, papers, and laptops at the conference table as Buzz drew four circles on a whiteboard while holding his pipe.
“According to my contact at the FBI’s Organized Crime Unit, Viktor Popov is one of maybe forty Russian mob bosses in the United States. He’s considered small potatoes, so the Bureau, which has had very limited resources directed at gangsters since the war on terror ramped up in 2001, never went after him. Besides, Popov still has friends in D.C. who remember all the good intelligence he gave them back in the late 1990s. Rumor is he’s still giving them the occasional intel nugget.
“The big Russian outfit here in L.A. is an offshoot of the Odessa Mafia. Popov demurs to them and pays them a percentage of his action. And since he does things they don’t do, mainly high-end hacking, he’s not stepping on their toes, although his guys did knock off an armored truck once for twelve million.”
“Where’s his headquarters?” asked Jen as she used a small can of compressed air to blow dust off her laptop screens.
“Good question,” responded Buzz. “Nobody knows.”
“He doesn’t own a restaurant or nightclub… maybe hang out in a social club?” asked Angel.
“No, nothing like that at all. He owns several legitimate businesses and possibly launders money through them: a moving company, a construction outfit, heavy-equipment rental company, some electronics stores. But I say ‘possibly’ because he’s not really a cash criminal.”
“A what?” asked Angel as he twirled his green-handled screwdriver.
“Drugs, prostitution, gambling, and extortion generate cash, but Popov doesn’t do any of that. All the high-tech rip-offs his people do? The money is just electronically transferred overseas and disappears into an unending series of shell companies. And that’s only if he steals money. As you all know, after I retired as a marine aviator and before I became a contract employee of the CIA, I was, among other things, an investigator for the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. It can take months just to trace one transaction. And by the time you do, the money is gone.”