02 Avalanche Pass (21 page)

“What have you got, Trus?” he asked quietly. Emery looked up, realized that the others were still sitting around the conference table, waiting for him, and stopped packing his notes away. Benjamin glanced meaningfully around the room.

“Perhaps we should—” He began, jerking his head toward the door. The others all nodded assent. There wasn’t a meeting room in the White House that wasn’t wired for sound, as everyone who could remember the Nixon era knew all too well. Only Truscott Emery stood his ground.

“It doesn’t bother me who’s eavesdropping on this,” he said, with a definite note of acidity in his tone. “After all, it may well be the only way to get an idea heard at the top levels these days.”

Benjamin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The sarcasm in Emery’s voice would be picked up by the tapes, he was sure. Also, most of them made a polite pretense of not knowing that tapes were running everywhere in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days. Then he shrugged. If it didn’t bother Emery, why should it bother him?

He looked at the others. Tildeman and Barrett both shrugged in return. Janet Haddenrich, he realized, was smiling approvingly at the plump ex-Harvard man.

“Okay, Truscott, why not?” he said.

Emery busied himself with removing the notes from his briefcase once more. He’d stuffed them in angrily, creasing several of the sheets, and now he took his time smoothing them out. He cleared his throat, glanced quickly at his first page summary and began.

“Are any of you familiar with Operation Powderburn?” he asked. He glanced up at them and saw the blank looks on all their faces. He nodded briefly and continued.

“I thought maybe not. It was before all our times, of course. It was a clandestine operation in the early 1990s. But it made use of air force resources and I thought maybe General Barrett may have heard rumor of it?”

The burly ex-fighter pilot shook his head, his face blank. “Name means nothing to me,” he said. “Powderburn?” he repeated. “It doesn’t sound like the sort of operation name we’d use. Most of them are computer-generated these days—just random words.”

Truscott Emery smiled. “That’s true. Unless of course we’re talking important, self-serving names that include words like Freedom and Liberation and so on. Part of the reason for using computer-generated codenames is that there’s always the risk of someone choosing a name that gives a hint about the purpose of the operation. The concept of a computer doing that with a randomly generated name is pretty thin. However, in this case the operation name was intentionally chosen to do just that.”

General Barrett shook his head in disbelief. “That’s contrary to all good planning policy.”

Emery nodded his agreement. “That’s true, General. Unless…” He let the word hang for a moment or two, until he was sure he had
their attention. “Unless you want the enemy to get some idea of the purpose of the operation.”

Janet Haddenrich frowned at the benign, smooth-cheeked face. “Why would anyone in their right mind want to do that?” she asked. Emery favored her with a nod, as if he were talking to one of his brighter pupils back at Harvard.

“Exactly, Mrs. Haddenrich,” he replied, and she smiled at his acknowledgment of her married status. “The only logical reason one would do that would be if one were intending to send a message.”

Benjamin and Tildeman exchanged quick glances. “In this case,” Emery was already continuing, “the message was to a Colombian drug lord named Juan Carlo Estevez. He was an independent, operating outside the Medellin cartel.”

Haddenrich shook her head. “Dangerous thing to do,” she said, and Emery glanced at her.

“True. But he was big enough not to worry about them. He’d built himself a virtual fortress in the mountains. His men were well armed and trained and he could afford the latest equipment. He controlled access into the mountains where he was based and he was planning a large-scale operation. He was preparing for a major blitz aimed at San Francisco. This was his plan. He was going to hit one city at a time and dominate it. Then, once he had that market tied up, he’d move onto other major cities. He’d built up a stockpile of cocaine, buying up supplies from the smaller independents, whether they were willing to sell to him or not. He had ten million dollars’ worth of it piled up in a warehouse in the mountains. He’d invested all his available cash in the venture.”

He paused, then elaborated. “That ten million dollar figure, of course, was his cost price. It would have been closer to fifty million on the street, even given the fact that he planned to undercut the cartel’s price.”

Tildeman whistled softly. “A sale like that would have caused the cartel quite a headache.”

“That was the idea. But apparently, we got word of his plans. I’ll let you imagine who it came from.”

“The cartel?” Barrett asked and Emery nodded.

“Exactly. We might not have wanted Señor Estevez peddling his product on our streets but they wanted it even less. The upshot was, those in power decided to send a message to Estevez—and to any others who might have similar ideas in the future. Hence Operation Powderburn.”

He leaned back, steepling his fingers. He had no further need to refer to his notes. He knew the details by heart from here on in. He glanced quickly around the table to make sure he had their attention, then continued.

“There was a top secret black operations group formed in the early 1990s for precisely this sort of purpose. It was an inter-service group with a team of Special Forces troops under its command, along with Navy SEALs and small boat forces. There were also several air force pilots seconded to it, along with two F-117 Nighthawks and their support crews. Stealth fighters,” he added, in case anyone around the table didn’t recognize the name. Several heads nodded. “They could have been purpose-designed for the Group. That’s all it was known as, by the way, the Group.

“The command structure of the Group was, to put it one way, convoluted. People kind of knew it existed but nobody needed to admit to it. But the CIA, FBI or the DEA could let it be known, by various devious routes, that they wanted a certain result and it would be carried out. On occasions, the ‘suggestion’ came from the White House itself. In all cases, operations were totally clandestine, totally deniable. No permanent records were to be kept by anyone.”

“One moment, Mr. Emery,” Tildeman interrupted. “If this… Group… was so top secret and nothing was put on paper, how did you come to know all this?”

Emery smiled at him. The chubby face and the smooth pink cheeks gave him an expression of almost cherubic innocence, Janet Haddenrich thought.

“There’s always a paper trail, Director. I said it was forbidden to keep any permanent records but we all know that people don’t always obey orders like that. The compulsion to cover your ass is an all-powerful one in this city.”

There were a few glances exchanged around the table. All of
those present knew that at different times in their careers, they had kept records that technically should have been destroyed. Then General Barrett spoke for all of those present as he gestured for Emery to continue.

“Okay. Point taken. Go ahead,” he said. Emery met his gaze and nodded once or twice. Then he resumed his narrative.

“The decision was taken to destroy Estevez’s stockpile. He had his mountain headquarters protected by radar and surface to air missiles so the F-117 was the logical choice for the job. A two-man special forces team was parachuted into the area. They didn’t need to penetrate his perimeter at all. They simply occupied an adjoining hilltop and acted as designators for the Nighthawk.”

Barrett ran his hand through his close-cropped hair.

“We’re talking Colombia, right? That means the F-117, if it had launched from Florida, must have crossed into the airspace of at least three countries?”

“Exactly, General. As I said, that’s why the operation was so perfectly suited to the Nighthawk. It simply flew through borders as if they didn’t exist. As if it didn’t exist, in fact. And to all intents and purposes, it didn’t.”

Barrett nodded understanding. He was pragmatic enough to accept that violating another country’s airspace was a fair practice—so long as you didn’t get caught doing it. Emery continued.

“Once the ground team targeted the warehouse with a laser, it was a simple matter for the F-117 to release two laser-guided bombs. The first was a standard five-hundred pound explosive device. The second, following a few seconds later, was a napalm bomb. Bomb number one opened up the roof of the warehouse. Bomb number two fried the cocaine stored there. It took less than a minute to put Estevez out of business.”

“I should imagine the Medellin cartel were delighted,” Tildeman said heavily.

Emery nodded agreement. “Of course they were. But from our point of view, at least we continued to face the devil we knew—not some newcomer who might provide us with some unpleasant surprises down the track. We sent a message to Estevez and to anyone
else who might plan to follow his example: Don’t consider it. No matter where you are or how big or well protected you may be, we can reach you and put you out of business.”

Emery had leaned forward again as he told his story. Now he sat back, looking around at the assembled faces, waiting for the obvious question. As he had expected, it came from Haddenrich.

“Professor,” she said slowly. “You said the ransom amount was significant—nine point seven million dollars. Where’s the connection?”

Emery smiled. “It was the odd amount that first set me looking. Nine point seven million dollars. As the president said, why not nine point five? Or ten million? It seemed such a strange amount. So we began a search to see if anything turned up a similar figure.” He nodded his thanks to the FBI director. “Director Benjamin was kind enough to lend me some staff and facilities. I even considered the president’s rather simplistic suggestion that it might be a figure converted from a round number in some other currency, but nothing matched.”

Several people around the table, conscious of the ever-present recorders, winced at the phrase “the president’s simplistic suggestion” but Emery seemed not to notice.

“What we found, eventually, was Operation Powderburn. Estevez had ten million dollars’ worth of cocaine in the storehouse. But a small proportion had been moved to a second room. It was protected from the initial blast and from the napalm. Our Intelligence told us later that he was able to recover a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cocaine. Three hundred thousand, to be precise.”

“Leaving a loss of nine point seven million,” Linus Benjamin said softly.

“Exactly.” Emery smiled at him. He was always delighted when other people reached the same conclusion he had.

“So you’re telling us that because we burned his cocaine stockpile in 1993, Estevez is behind this attempt to extort money from us?” Benjamin asked. Emery shrugged.

“It’s a theory, Director Benjamin, nothing more, nothing less. I’m saying it’s a possibility, that’s all.”

“But why not go for the street value he lost—fifty million dollars?”
Tildeman asked, and the professor inclined his head thoughtfully.

“Aaah, that’s the whole point, you see. We set out to send a message to Estevez and his like. Now he’s doing the same thing right back.”

“You mean he wants us to know it’s him?” Haddenrich asked and Emery shook his head.

“That’s the beauty of it. This way we’ll know it’s him but we’ll never be able to prove it. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, the Arabs—Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or one of the other militant groups—will be behind this. We could never convince them that it’s a grubby Colombian drug baron.”

Morris Tildeman shook his head wearily. It was a bizarre idea, he thought. But his years in public office had taught him that bizarre ideas were all too often correct.

“I still think it’s odd that he didn’t ask for the full amount,” he said.

Haddenrich shook her head in disagreement. “If Professor Truscott is right, the amount of nine point seven million is significant. Fifty million is a round sum—we might never see the connection.”

“So who cares about the connection? Fifty million is a lot of money.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want his money back,” she said. “Maybe he wants revenge. And he wants us to know he’s taking it.”

T
ina Bowden shoved the kitchen door open and reached to the side to turn on the rows of overhead lights. As the fluorescents flickered to life, she glanced quickly at the big rinsing sink and felt her pulse rate increase slightly. The two coffee mugs that she’d left there that morning after preparing the breakfast were turned upside down.

Casually, she walked past them and turned them right side up again. It was an unimportant movement and the armed guard who had accompanied them took no notice. She thought that for once, the normally efficient Mr. Kormann had made a small mistake—small but significant. It seemed logical to assign the same guard to her and Ralph each time they came to the kitchen to prepare a meal. But by doing so, Kormann had allowed a situation to develop where a familiar routine was established—and with familiarity came a certain lack of attention.

This was the third time the same man had accompanied them. He was used to them now, accustomed to their moving around the kitchen, fetching ingredients from the pantry. Now he was beginning to take such actions for granted, where a less familiar sentry might have questioned their every move and even supervised their trips to the storeroom.

As usual, Ralph had been assigned to cook for the kidnappers, Kormann having ordered a meal of veal valdostana from the suggestions that Ralph had put forward. It seemed that the leader of the kidnappers enjoyed toying with the chef’s sensibilities, making him suggest meals and then insisting that, no matter what they might
be, they should be accompanied by French fries. Tina had noticed that Kormann rarely ate more than one or two of the fries. He was fucking with Ralph’s mind, she knew, making sure the chef was constantly reminded of who was in charge.