Black Flagged (The Black Flagged Technothriller Series) (15 page)

Berg remembered reading the transcript of Kavich's testimony with a strange sense of detachment. He had finally uncovered Nicole Erak's fate and the name of the man who had brutally killed her, but he felt no closure. Hadzic was eventually convicted of Lujic's murder, but no formal charges were filed against Hadzic pertaining to the brutal murder of Zorana Zekulic. The Hague issued a warrant and summons for Marko Resja, adding another name to the already impossibly long list of thugs and murderers associated with the paramilitary groups that flourished under Slobodan Milosevic's regime. Nobody cared about finding Marko Resja except the CIA, and Berg knew that even the CIA's interest had a limited half-life.

Agency attempts to locate information regarding Marko Resja led nowhere. Berg and other members of the CIA wanted to find Resja and make him pay horribly for Nicole's death, but Resja had indeed disappeared shortly after Nicole's murder. Belgrade in the spring of 1999 had a way of eating people up and spitting them out.

The memory of Nicole Erak's murder faded quickly at Langley. One year after Berg read Kavich's testimony, a star was added to The Memorial Wall in the Original Headquarters Building in honor of Nicole's sacrifice, but no name was added to the Book of Honor below it. The nature and fact of Nicole Erak's service to the United States would remain a guarded secret for eternity. Berg had attended the ceremony, which always drew a smaller crowd when the name was unknown. He shared a few knowing glances and returned to his office to move on. With the War on Terror in full swing throughout the Middle East, turmoil in the Balkans was the least of the CIA's worries. The Counterterrorism Center demanded his full attention, which he'd delivered uninterrupted, until about five minutes ago.

Reading the name Marko Resja on Keller's report hit Berg like a sledgehammer, bringing him right back to the moment he read Kavich's testimony. His mind flashed to the details of Nicole's mutilation and murder, and he jumped into action, immediately deciding that if Resja's face matched one of the operatives listed on the Black Flag roster, he wouldn't stop until Resja was dead.

Berg tapped a few more keys, and a new screen replaced Resja's file. He entered a separate access code and found himself staring at a new file matrix. He searched the list for Nicole's code name, Seraph, and opened the file. The words "deceased" filled the top of the screen, just above a searchable image gallery. He stared at the images displayed by the system.

The first picture was taken by CIA interviewers outside of Loyola University in Chicago and showed a classically beautiful young woman. She had soft, light brown eyes and jet black hair. Typical of mixed Balkan descent, her skin carried an olive complexion, giving her a unique exotic quality among descendants of northern Serbs, but not enough to draw the wrong kind of nationalist attention in Belgrade. She wore an optimistic, yet guarded smile in the picture, appropriate for a sharp, observant young woman being photographed by complete strangers in a rented apartment on the north side of Chicago.

The second picture was taken during an early phase of CIA training and showed much less of the idealistic young college graduate. Taken in one of the classrooms at headquarters, it showed a close-up of Nicole seated behind a desk, staring skeptically at one of the instructors. By this point, she probably understood that she was not being trained to sit behind a desk in McLean, Virginia. Lying to family and friends about the nature of her employment had become second nature, and she might have strongly suspected, by the intensity and subject matter of her training, that her role within the National Clandestine Service would be atypical. She wasn't receiving the same diplomatic role-play training given to field agents assigned to cover positions at U.S. embassies around the world.

The third image barely resembled the young woman who had reported to Langley a mere two years earlier. Several close-up shots had been snapped by an embassy "employee" in Belgrade and caught her exiting a popular café on Knez Mihailova Street, near the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art. She wore a gray turtleneck sweater under a tight black leather jacket. Black, knee-high leather boots rose up to meet a tight, dark maroon half skirt, leaving several inches of skin along her legs exposed to the cold Balkan winter. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun, accentuating her exotic face. From a distance, she looked like any well-dressed, cosmopolitan woman on the streets of Manhattan, but the next image showed a different story.

He clicked on a close-up of her face, and it showed signs of weariness. Heavy eye shadow outlined her eyes, but couldn't hide the exhaustion. A small diamond nose ring poked out of her left nostril. This had been recommended by members of Clandestine Branch responsible for creating her cover "legend," since it was a trend popular among women on the "professional" nightclub scene in Europe, especially Paris, where Zorana Zekulic had spent the last five years studying art and partying. Berg studied the photo closely. She looked hard. Attractive, sexy, an object to behold in Belgrade. But very little trace of Nicole broke through the icy exterior shell she had formed after a year in Belgrade.

He felt terrible for what had happened to her. She had spent six years in the company of some of the worst monsters in recent human history, spying on them, coaxing information out of them using methods he refused to contemplate. All to be murdered and only God knew what else at the very end of her assignment. The entire Milosevic regime had been about to collapse, and the CIA wanted her out of Belgrade before the NATO bombing started. All she had to do was drive over the border into Hungary or Romania. Less than a two-hour drive in either direction, and she could have put it all behind her.

She refused to leave. Her handler, another deep-cover operative assigned to Serbia, had stressed that she was no longer mentally stable enough to remain in place, and that she had begun to show signs of severe schizophrenia. According to his report, she believed she was Zorana Zekulic and had lost the ability to fully understand her reality. Based on his report and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Serbia, the CIA authorized a forced extraction. A plan was formed by special operators to kidnap her from the streets of Belgrade, but Nicole vanished before the plan could be executed.

A fourth picture showed Zorana Zekulic five years into her assignment. Every trace of Nicole Erak's essence had been erased. They had kept her in place too long, and it had killed her long before Marko Resja came along with Lujic's axe. He wondered if death hadn't been the best thing for her in the long run. Nicole had drawn some bad cards in life. She was raised by abusive parents, in a household that survived from week to week, never rising far above the poverty line. CIA psychological interviews and polygraph results suggested sexual abuse, which she successfully refuted on further polygraphs, but Berg never believed the results. He was convinced that she had either beaten the machine, or that the memories had been buried.

Winning a full scholarship to Loyola was one of the first good cards she pulled from the deck. Attracting the attention of a CIA recruiter was another ace, and by the time the CIA asked her to report to Langley, she held a royal flush. Unfortunately, she had to draw new cards at the CIA, and she drew the worst cards possible. The CIA was desperate to unravel the mess developing in the Balkans, and Nicole's skill sets made her the perfect match for the job.

Based on the inconsistencies with her psych profile, they should have known better than to send her at these men and then keep her there for six years. But what choice did the CIA have? Her situation was unique, and it provided the most useful information to come out of Serbia in decades. Nobody at Langley was willing to admit it, but they would have kept her there indefinitely if the situation hadn't imploded with NATO's involvement.

He closed Nicole's file, perfectly aware that opening it might have triggered an alert in someone's email box back in Langley. It didn't matter. He had no intention of using official channels to take care of things. Plenty of people owed Berg serious favors in this town, and he planned to cash in on a few of them. He navigated to the CIA's file on General Sanderson, scanning it for a piece of information he had come across earlier. He found the name, James Parker, quickly, and memorized several pieces of information that would give his friends a head start on finding Daniel Petrovich. He quickly closed down the computer, leaving the room as he found it.

Standing in the hallway, he pulled out his cell phone and placed a call to the National Security Agency. The call didn't last very long, but it set in motion a series of highly illegal surveillance protocols designed to find and track Parker. The second call would have to wait, but not for very long.

He had plans for Daniel Petrovich, or whoever he currently claimed to be. Berg would make sure he didn't live for very long. If possible, he'd be there to kill Resja himself. He had no idea how Petrovich had become Marko Resja, and he didn't really care. It had something to do with Black Flag, but that wasn't his problem. He had searched the CIA's files on Sanderson and found not a single mention of the general's secret program. He'd let the FBI decipher Black Flag, while he focused on Petrovich. Under the right circumstances, he might learn more about the clandestine program than Keller or the FBI combined. He was pretty sure the right circumstances would involve the purchase of a climbing axe from a sporting goods store in Bailey's Crossing, Virginia.

Chapter Twenty-Three

5:25 p.m.

Brown River Security Corporation, Fredericksburg, Virginia

Darryl Jackson hung up the phone and contemplated his situation. He didn't like it, but he owed Karl Berg more than a weekend favor. He owed Berg his life. Four years earlier, Jackson and a small crew of Brown River paramilitary contractors found themselves fighting for their lives in a small wadi outside of Sorubi, Afghanistan, when Berg reached down from the sky to save him.

While conducting a site reconnaissance along highway A1, on behalf of the newly arrived U.S. Central Command forces, his convoy of two Land Rovers stumbled into a platoon-sized group of Taliban militants, who had just broken camp to move further south toward the safety of the Taliban-controlled mountains near Khowst. Within minutes, Jackson had lost both vehicles and half of his eight-man contingent. With his satellite phone destroyed in one of the mangled SUVs, Jackson was on his own until someone at Brown River's operations center back in Kabul declared them missing.

Jackson's team retreated to the cover of a dried up river bed and set up a perimeter to hold the Taliban at bay. Jackson's highly trained team had already inflicted serious casualties on the Taliban force, and he hoped that the Taliban leadership in the group would decide against suffering further unnecessary losses. Minutes later, a suicide attack on his position scrapped any hopes that the enraged hornet's nest of Muslim extremists would abandon their quarry.

The attack broke through his perimeter, killing one more member of his team, but the wave of militants suffered enough casualties to cause a temporary withdrawal to the cover of Jackson's disabled Land Rovers. He counted at least twenty Taliban in the vicinity of the trucks, who had now started an organized volley of rocket propelled grenades. A smaller group moved along Jackson's left flank. Everyone in his team was wounded at this point, and when he caught sight of the flanking movement, he knew they wouldn't last another five minutes. Then he heard a familiar buzzing sound.

He could barely lift his head high enough to scan the entire expanse of blue, as bullets snapped past his head. He heard a muffled scream and a curse, turning to see a member of his team grimace while pressing a blood-soaked hand down on his thigh. In his peripheral vision, Jackson caught a glimpse of something moving in the sky. The buzzing sound returned. A Predator drone. One of his men yelled something encouraging and pointed to the drone, but Jackson wasn't optimistic. To him, the Predator drone simply meant that a crew in Nevada would watch their deaths live on camera.

Jackson wasn't completely correct about the location of the crew. The RQ-1 Predator drone circling overhead was indeed controlled by an air force officer at an undisclosed location in Nevada, but the video feed had the undivided attention of CIA officers in the Counterterrorism Center at Langley, who had requisitioned the flight to assess reports of an Al Qaeda way station operating outside of Sorubi. Osama Bin Laden's location remained a mystery, though there was little doubt that he would seek refuge in the mountains near Khowst. Electronic intercepts suggested that he had not reached this destination, and the CIA was very interested in any possible points of refuge along his projected escape route.

Berg watched the attack unfold from the drone's cameras, and an argument developed within the operations center about whether to render assistance to the civilian team on the ground. The drone carried two Hellfire air-to-ground missiles, which could easily turn the tide against the militants, but several of the officers within the center wanted to save the missiles for high-value targets at the suspected Al Qaeda rest stop. Berg quickly ended the argument. As deputy assistant of the Counterterrorism Center, the Predator flight was under his control, and he had no intention of abandoning the men on the ground. He relayed orders to the controllers in Nevada.

Thousands of miles away, Jackson took a grazing hit to his right shoulder, which caused him to hug the ground at a time they couldn't afford. Three guns were barely keeping the Taliban from organizing another rush of the shallow wadi. Just as Jackson said a prayer and lifted his body up to continue firing, he was hit with a concussion that snapped his head backward and slid him down the side of the river bed. A second shockwave fired through his small group, rolling Jackson onto his back. Jackson still held his rifle tight and waited for bearded heads to appear over the riverbank's edge to finish them, but nothing materialized.