'A' for Argonaut (12 page)

Sergei and Maran had become friendly over cocktails and cheap caviar at an embassy reception in Belgrade in 1989. Maran was on TDY, Temporary Duty, at the U.S. Embassy, covertly attached to the Defense Intelligence Agency to uncover the source of Semtex, a plastic explosive being used in countless Islamist terrorist bombings. He and Sergei quickly came to the assumption that they were on secret assignments from competitive teams, but by that time, such embassy engagements amounted to little more than tailgate parties.

Maran figured Sergei was on a cyberwarfare contract with the Space Center. The former spies’ old employers, like the DOD, FBI, and CIA were hiring them back on mission-specific projects. One of those cases, he had been told, was to discover how one leading peanut butter manufacturer had achieved superior flavor by supplying Georgia peanut farmers with technology that assured a steady supply of pH-controlled water to the crops. In return, they were locking up exclusive rights to the enhanced, more flavorful peanuts.

Maran knew Sergei would be perfect for the job he had for him. Everyone Sergei had ever known in his days with the Soviets jockeyed for position and booby-trapped one another, but the end of the Cold War gave rise to a new profession in the corporate world: competitive intelligence. In the tough new world of aggressive pricing and battles for market share and favorable financing, companies were hiring former CIA and FBI agents to help them keep up with foreign competitors supported by their own governments’ spies. Ex-spies from Cold War agencies around the world pulled every trick they knew in competing for the most lucrative jobs: risk assessments of foreign countries, governments, and regions, without which U.S. insurers would not take on new clients from the world’s less stable spots. Sergei had made such risk assessments his specialty. He had just the package of skills Maran needed: espionage, sabotage, and cyber warfare.

Maran decided to get in touch. He outlined his plan to Sergei in an encrypted message. It didn’t take Sergei long to call back on a secure phone.

“You’re still crazy, Mack,” Sergei laughed.

Three days later, he was knocking on the door of Maran’s hotel room in New York City.

“You’re setting up a corporate intelligence company as a cover to investigate diamond smuggling in West Africa?” Sergei asked, incredulous.

He thought for a moment.

“I get it,” Sergei said. “As a business ‘consultant’ in corporate intelligence, and I assume you actually mean to include illegal espionage or you wouldn’t have called me, you have the perfect cover to go into the field to flush out the bad guys.”

“And kill them,” Maran said.

“It may sound insane, but it
will
work, patriot,” Maran added, laying out his plan.

“BANG! Inc.”

“A bizintel agency to cover a killing machine?”

Maran had done his homework on the Internet. He already had plan in mind.

“BANG! Inc. Business Analysis Network Group.”

“I’ll bite.”

Maran pulled out a black leather wallet. He handed Sergei his new calling card in the name of “Walter Q.R. Jackson, investigator: corporate intelligence.”

“But before I can give it a legitimate front, I need a client,” Maran continued. I thought of you because I have a feeling there is a massive plot in the air. I can’t put my finger on it. But it has to involve trafficking, arms for diamonds‌—‌American arms. That’s the only way they could be getting them.”

“How can I help?”

“I have to move fast.”

“How fast?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Whoa! I’m just winding up a project. I need a week.”

“This operation is tailor-made for Sergei Karakazov. Besides, whatever you’re doing for P&G or Kellogg’s‌—‌”

“It’s for the Rocket Center, asshole.” Sergei took jobs from corporate as well as government clients; Maran knew that already.

“…or whatever it is you’re working on, it will never threaten your life‌—‌give you the blast you’ll get with BANG! Don’t shit me. You need this.”

“Long as you put it that way.”

“Thanks, patriot. I won’t forget it,” Maran said.

Twelve

Doaktown, New Brunswick, Canada

I
t took Sergei two days to pass his project off to his partner in Huntsville and fly up to join Maran at the cabin in Doaktown, a site popular with the “sports” who came to fish for Atlantic Salmon on New Brunswick’s Miramichi River. The cabin, at the end of a long dirt road ending at the riverbank, offered the mask that Maran wanted to put his team together.

The other team members followed closely behind Sergei.

Al Ray Goodwin had come in from Kansas City to join the team. He had shared honors with Maran in Operation Acid Gambit when both men were awarded the Silver Star. Goodwin’s last job with the Army had been running Predators over Angola and the Congos. He spoke fluent Lebanese, Levantine Arabic, and passable Swahili.

Kurt Tracha was born dirt poor on welfare in the economically depressed hollows of south central West Virginia’s coal country. At the age of six, he had been adopted by a heartfelt social worker working to rescue the most needy children from the cycle of poverty. She was the only daughter in a Lebanese-American banking family on Manhattan’s upper West Side which was giving up hope of having grandchildren. He had battled alongside Maran in Operation Guardian Retrieval, a rescue mission of two downed Blackhawk pilots. For a while after that, Tracha ran his own detective agency that was hired by the Pentagon to probe a multi-billion-dollar vending machine scandal of kickbacks to non-commissioned officers at Post Exchanges around the world. Tracha’s probe uncovered a link between the non-coms and a world-wide Japanese video game company. The project was so profitable, even though it never led to any civilian convictions, Tracha had cashed out and sold the business. He had free time now.

He jumped in.

They intended to set up a powerful electronic surveillance network to scan the world for communications regarding the import and sale of diamonds.

“We have until sunset tomorrow to collect, organize all there is about diamonds, legal or otherwise,” Maran stressed.

“We’ll set it up in French and Lingala. Add Arabic and Persian. Put in a link translator for any others that come across it. If the bad guys are there, they might use any of those languages.

“We can create bulletin board magnetism for diamond dealers in Cabinda, Kin, Antwerp, Brazzaville. Shake the apple tree. Dangle these diamonds in front of every eyeball on the net. I can handle the French and the Lingala sites. That will cover the DRC, Sierra Leone and Cote’ d’Voire,” Goodwin volunteered.

Maran lay on the
cabin cot after reading Sergei’s first brief. Through the window on the opposite wall, he could see the waters of the river slipping smoothly to rendezvous with the sea like all the other rivers Maran likened to his concept of a “Higher Power”‌—‌no beginning‌—‌no end: down from the sky, back up to the sky. He could see the claret sun slipping down like a lollipop behind the trees on the river banks overgrown with sweet-nectared trumpet honeysuckle. Tufts of billowing, dark fog were settling in. Soon he was asleep, dreaming. He had been there as a boy, a guest with other Boy Scouts of their Scoutmaster, to learn the arts of fly-fishing, using a 12-foot, two-handed Spey rod and an S-curved cast to reach far out with a big, smolt-patterned streamer fly over the roiling river. Maran relished the memory of the rustic cabin, with its aromas of thick coffee percolating in an old-fashioned spotted granite enameled pot and hand-cut hickory-cured-at-home baby-back bacon. Best of all were the huge goose eggs from Chuck’s Fowl Farm down the dirt road. One goose egg could take up whole plate. Red letter days.

Now, lying in bed even with the help of those savory memories, his over-tasked brain refused to rest. He tossed from side to side, anxious about the passing time. He was in a hurry.

Thirteen

South Boston

A
week after they pulled out of the fishing cabin, Maran’s team went to work at BANG!’s new headquarters on Liberty Wharf, a section of unrenovated and largely abandoned warehouses on South Boston’s Northern Avenue waterfront, now occupied mostly by artists, writers, musicians, and graphic designers.

Outside, the black of the moonless night blanketed Boston Harbor. The tiger team worked through the night. Across the small channel alongside the Boston Fish Pier, the docks and the utility boats were ablaze with sparkling red, blue, and yellow lights. The city wanted to make sure it was festive. Boston Common, a common cow pasture and gallows field from 1634 to the early 1800s and now a public park, was laid out in glittering lights that spread out at night from the center of town like Christmas decorations all the way down to the waterfront.

Sergei had put his pal, Bird Serkin, to work setting up the computer network communications and encryption systems. Serkin was another cyber-warfare wizard with even greater skills than Sergei’s. Reputed to be the top code-cracker at NBES, the National Bureau of Electronic Surveillance in Fort Meade, Maryland, “The Bird” had been fired when he was caught pulling off an electronic bank fraud scheme. The U.S. government never discovered the $225,000 he had siphoned off in .0009 cent bits. It was only when IBM rejected his employment application and he retaliated by raiding one of their corporate accounts that he got caught. Through a porn site he set up linked through IBM’s internal corporate network, he had duped a young clerk into clicking on a hypertext leading to a video titled “Young BABES in SEXTOYLAND.” The link contained a keylogging virus that gave him the passwords to IBM’s vendor payment bank accounts. Posing as an approved user, he sent millions of dollars to account dumps in dozens of private banks around the world; then he ordered theoretically untraceable cashier checks drawn on them sent to a post office box near his home. The FBI, armed with the new Open-Transparency-in-Banking law, followed the money trail through the private banks to The Bird. They never got a conviction, but it ended his career with the federal government. Soon afterward, Sergei took him into his Huntsville operation.

Sergei’s tiger team had been working around the clock. He had tasked them to monitor Internet chat rooms and bulletin boards; YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter; searching for clues to what was happening in the diamond market. He had assigned jobs for each of them, including keywords to search and monitor, but they needed stronger hacking tools like vulnerability port scanners, packet sniffers, spoofers, and rootkits.

With PHALANX, The Bird now had instant access to everything digital, all security, everywhere‌—‌all codes would open to his command.

Sergei’s first call had been to Olli Lehtinen. Olli had the keys to PHALANX.

The phone call was brief.

“You remember?”

“Of course. I told you. I’d never forget.”

It had been years since Sergei had seen the Finn, but they had stayed in touch by text messaging. Like most people who got to know Sergei even peripherally, Olli owed him and Sergei believed strongly in IOU’s. Keeping people indebted to him was his M.O. Years earlier, Sergei had helped Olli send his son abroad to university in Zurich. As a ranking intelligence officer, Sergei only had to make a couple of phone calls. One call was to a good friend at the Ministry of Telecommunications and Electronics in Moscow who got Olli a lucrative consulting contract there working on Russian telemetry programs for the Department of Agriculture. The other call was to Moscow University. It was a simple matter for another friend of Sergei’s, this one in charge of the school’s transfer programs, to arrange a scholarship to the University of Zurich for Olli’s son. The deal was struck on a transparent promise that the boy would attend graduate school in Moscow after he graduated. Predictably, the boy stayed in Zurich, beyond reach of Russian authorities.

Since his early years with the Soviet government, Olli had been working on encryption programs as a freelance consultant. Now one of his primary clients in electronic deception was CryptoCop, a cyber-security firm in Zurich, the world’s largest provider of encryption technology to governments as well as to businesses. CryptoCop had conducted a secret relationship with NBES for years. At Sergei’s request, Ollie used Sergei’s own personal Operations Security protocols, undetectable by NBES’ security systems, while on a client call at NBES’ Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, Headquarters of the U.S. Cyber Command, Olli e-mailed Sergei a masked and encrypted copy of the PHALANX code.