Black Flagged Redux (8 page)

"You're going to let him go, right?"

"Not with the Navarre link. I'm going to start poking around down south. Argentina and Bolivia."

"You gonna bring the CIA in on this?"

"No. I don't trust the CIA after the Black Flag debacle. Too many aspects of that day didn't add up in the end. Jeremy Cummings is paid nearly two hundred thousand dollars to assemble an off the books team to kill Petrovich. All we get from the CIA is the suggestion that this might be a revenge play by Serbian nationalists. A little too convenient that they stumbled upon the same connection regarding Petrovich and Resja so quickly. The CIA liaison, Randy Keller, vanishes from the face of the planet after walking into a Georgetown residence that literally explodes minutes later. And the payment to Cummings came from an extremely sanitized money trail leading nowhere, deposited into his account after he was killed. The director himself told me to keep the CIA out of it. I'm going directly to our counterparts in Argentina and Bolivia. We have a good working relationship with Argentine Federal Police."

"Argentina's a big country…let me know how I can help. We're still shaking down the Navarre/Al Qaeda connection, but it doesn't appear to have any meat. Even a scumbag like Navarre kept his distance from that group."

"Thanks, Frank. Always a pleasure. We should grab a drink soon. My treat," Sharpe said.

"Damn straight. Good luck with this. It would be nice to nail Sanderson to the wall. He set the domestic Al Qaeda investigation back two years with his stunt," Mendoza said.

"I'm keeping my fingers crossed on this one. Catch you later, Frank."

"You too," he said and closed the door as he left.

Sharpe had enough confirmation to contact the FBI legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, but he'd have to be careful. The embassy crawled with spooks, and the wrong conversation, at the wrong time, could bring the CIA into the fold. He desperately wanted to avoid this and needed to do a little more research into Dan Bailey and Susan Castaneda, resident legal attachés in Argentina.

Chapter 7

2:24 PM

Monchegorsk Water Treatment Plant (A District)

Monchegorsk, Murmansk Oblast, Russia

Anatoly Reznikov was both surprised and relieved to find the water treatment plant nearly deserted. Construction on the modern, mostly automated facility had been completed two years ago, ushering in a new era of clean drinking water for the residents of Monchegorsk. Three decades too late in his view. The previous plant, which had stood guard over the city water supply for as long as anyone could remember, relied upon a disinfection process to purify the water, but did little to prevent the flow of heavy metals into the citizens' blood streams, including his own.

The Norval Nickel plant had been the main source of industry in Monchegorsk since the early 1930s, resulting in an ever-growing population boom that served the needs of Norval Nickel, further expanding the company's lucrative nickel and copper mining enterprise. For all that the residents of Monchegorsk did for Norval Nickel, the multinational corporation gave little in return, aside from poor wages and a harsh work environment that would have made Joseph Stalin cringe. More than seventy percent of Monchegorsk's population worked in some capacity for Norval, with the vast majority performing hazardous mining jobs or unregulated, unskilled jobs in the processing plants. Reznikov's uncle worked the mines, and when Anatoly joined the family in late 1978, not much had changed in terms of work conditions from the early days of Norval Nickel.

The corporation had invested little money in the city's infrastructure, despite the efforts of environmental activists and the few citizens that dared to defy Norval's stranglehold on both the city and the local communist party. The effects of the smelting plant's pollution on the population's health was no secret, but asking the wrong questions in the wrong place came with serious risks.

The best case scenario involved employment termination and immediate eviction from company subsidized housing, which could put a family on the streets in the middle of the night in harsh winter conditions. The worst case scenario varied by level of activism. A one-way train ride to Siberia was reserved for persistent, unorganized agitators. Sometimes these were family trips, which added to the deterrence factor. Organizers or nosy environmentalists either disappeared suddenly or slowly bobbed to the surface in the polluted Moncha Lake, which fed into the ineffective water treatment plant. Despite the growing voice of concern about the effects of heavy metal poisoning, the Norval Corporation continued to deny the mounting body of evidence, and instead produced more dead bodies. Norval was finally called to task by the Russian government in 2001, on behalf of Norway, Sweden and Finland, who had been the unwilling recipients of several million tons of sulfur dioxide (acid rain) over the past several decades. Permission was "granted" for NEFCO (Nordic Environmental Finance Corporation) to provide regional loans that would be used to improve several offending industrial plants near the Kola Peninsula and provide funding for localized environmental improvement projects.

The Monchegorsk water treatment plant made the top of the list, which was probably influenced by the fact that senior Norval officials held influential positions on the Murmansk Oblast's Natural Resources Agency executive board. The Natural Resources Agency had replaced the State Committee for Environment Protection in 2000, when President Vladimir Putin abolished the organization, which resembled the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Natural Resources Agency was the organization responsible for managing the commercialization of Russia's natural resources, and the move was seen as a direct measure to ensure that most environmental decisions favored the major corporations. Due to the overwhelming international pressure of the Kola Peninsula's pollution problem, Putin's government decided on a work-around. They leaned on Norval Nickel to accept NEFCO's low interest loans to clean up Monchegorsk.

By that time, the Monchegorsk plant had launched nearly one million tons of heavy metals into the air each year, including nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, selenium, platinum and palladium. The ground concentrations of platinum and palladium in the soil near the plant were so severe that mining of surface soil for these metals had become economically feasible in the past five years. Add decades of concentrated acid rain to the mix, and the health effects on the Monchegorsk population were devastating.

Anatoly grew up in a poverty level neighborhood wracked with stunted growth, pediatric and early adult cancers, severe mental disabilities among adults and children, neurological disorders resembling early onset of Alzheimer’s, and frequent unexplained seizures. The local hospital was owned and administered by Norval Nickel, which only served to compartmentalize and minimize the problem.

Reznikov had been lucky to join his aunt and uncle well past his early developmental years. He had been spared eight years of toxic exposure, and the results were dramatic. In the ten years he spent with his new family, he watched everyone in the filthy, cramped apartment suffer from Norval Nickel's irresponsibility. His aunt died of pancreatic cancer five years after he arrived, and he experienced the daily sadness and brutality of his uncle slowly losing all semblance of mental function. Less than one year after his aunt's death, his uncle had been banished to a local mental hospital.

His three cousins, two boys and one girl, all younger than him by a few years, never grew at the same rate as Anatoly and barely progressed in school past a fifth grade level. They had all been remanded to state care when his uncle had been institutionalized. When Anatoly graduated from secondary school and left for Moscow University, his cousins resembled drones: void of personality, intelligence and drive. Ten years earlier, they had been drastically different, similar to him in so many ways. He had painfully watched them suffer under Norval Nickel's reign of terror in Monchegorsk, transformed into empty shells, unfit for employment outside of Norval Nickel's mines.

That was the cruel irony of life in Monchegorsk. They had been placed into the custody of mother Russia to live in a state sponsored orphanage, but the orphanage was funded by Norval Nickel, and the children were funneled back into the very jobs that put them there in the first place. Anatoly's case had been different. He showed strong academic promise in science and math, so he was awarded a place at Moscow University to study biological engineering and chemistry, compliments of Norval Nickel, with the understanding that he would return to the corporation to work as an engineer. Reznikov never fulfilled his obligation, though he was seconds away from observing a promise he had silently made to his cousins and his own parents.

By honoring his father's legacy, Anatoly Reznikov had discovered the perfect way to exact revenge upon a corporation that had slowly destroyed his adopted family and a government that had brutally murdered his parents. He would also make a fortune. If everything went according to plan, his payment from Al Qaeda would look insignificant compared to the series of increasingly larger payments he could demand for his services or his product.

He walked briskly across the long, grated catwalk toward a sizable brick building on the other side of a vast sea of light green, flattened metal domes. The domes capped immense underground tanks, which housed the disinfectant side of the Monchegorsk plant's treatment process. The other side, located uphill, utilized a rapid sand filtration system, combined with a state of the art membrane filter. The combination of the two ensured the removal of any suspended particulate matter, including heavy metals, before the water was finally transferred to the field of tanks he now crossed, for the final step of the treatment process.

From these tanks, the clean water was pumped to the city's reservoirs through a massive pump station, which could be accessed from the building he rapidly approached. He glanced around furtively as the building loomed closer, painfully aware that there was no way to soften the loud clanging of his boots on the metal grating. Maybe the sound didn't matter. He had breached the treatment plant's fence line where it ambled too close to the edge of one of the city's forest preserves. Wearing a suit and a long winter jacket that showcased fake city credentials, he had approached the complex's buildings from an angle that would conceal his approach until he could find a way to access the pump station building.

He had watched the station for a full day, noting the number of personnel and their patterns. For the most part, there hadn't been any. The automated facility was monitored by a control station toward the front of the complex, which he would avoid altogether, though he didn't think he could completely dodge all of the cameras. He just needed to get into the pump station, where he could effectively and quietly deal with anyone that came to investigate his presence. He assumed that an alarm would sound when he broke into the pump station and had prepared accordingly.

He walked up to the door at the end of the catwalk and stared at the covered button pad to the right of the door. Not a problem. He had anticipated the possibility that every door at the new facility would utilize new technology and had researched methods to breach similar systems. Several black market electronic devices had been available, but each device was specific to certain systems, and he didn't have room in his backpack to bring along one of each device. Even if he had, there was no guarantee that any of them would work on this door. A better solution had been offered by his black market contact. A compact circular saw, specially designed to cut through door locks. The saw featured a five inch metal cutting saw blade, which would give the blade enough depth to cut through dead bolts or locking mechanisms when placed flush against the crack between the door and frame.

He slipped the nylon backpack off his shoulders and kneeled in front of the door to open it. A few seconds later, he wrestled the gray saw out of the backpack and attached the power cord to a customized battery that had been guaranteed to provide fifteen minutes of continuous operation. He examined the door again and decided to start with the most logical point near the door handle. He inserted the thin blade into the door crack a few inches above the handle, and felt no resistance as he placed the saw flush against the door and frame. He depressed the black trigger and the saw roared to life, emitting a high pitched squeal that made him nervous.
No way to turn back now
, he thought and moved the saw slowly down the crack.

The blade met with brief resistance at handle level, but continued to move effortlessly with Anatoly's hand. He felt no resistance a few inches past the handle and stopped the blade. Could it have been that easy? He pulled the saw blade out of the crack and placed it on the grate before standing up. He grasped the handle and pulled, surprised when the door gave no resistance and swung open. He examined the door for a few seconds and determined that the blade had done no obvious damage to the door, besides cutting the locking bolt. When closed, he doubted anyone would be able to tell it had been cut. Anyone approaching the door would punch in their code and open the door, unaware that it would have opened regardless of the numbers punched into the keypad. Not wanting to waste another moment, he dragged everything through the doorway and closed the door, noting the time on his watch.

The first thing he noticed was the industrial grade humming sound of the pump. He had expected the noise inside to be louder. The pump station descended one additional story below the entrance level and housed two massive centrifugal pumps, one of which pumped water to the city's storage sites at any given moment. The other served as a backup, in case of a maintenance issue. The active pump was rotated weekly, to increase the longevity of the incredibly expensive system. He would need to identify the active pump and then locate the water sample collection/testing node, located somewhere forward of the pump.