Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2) (12 page)

The only potential lead they’d ever had on Yuri “
Grey Wolf” Shcherbakov was a picture found on a security camera at the home of Willke Ommen.  Facial analysis matched it with the face of a man seen entering Aldo Daalder’s wine warehouse a week before the tragedy that befell that man and his whole family.  Before the two Amsterdam reporters vanished from the face of the earth, they said they thought they had a name to put to the face, though they never said where they got it: reporters protecting their sources, and all.

“So what did you find at Sadarghat Port?” asked Ambassador Metveyev presently.  Rideau thought he sounded a bit impatient, like he had a thousand better places he could be.

On the computer screen, Mitchell said, “We collaborated with authorities in Bangladesh, and they told us the shipments were coming here, to India.  We checked them out.  They did come here.  We’ve already identified the serial numbers of those containers and passed them out to CBI.”  Mitchell and Desh had been stationed together in India for almost two years now, and had been working closely with the CBI.  “We’ve actually located one of the girls, and she’s been shown this picture.  She confirmed that Shcherbakov was at the docks when she and a few other girls were handed over to about a dozen Indian thugs.  Thugs she hasn’t seen since.”

“It was a sale?”

“It was a sale, clearly.  She says that neither she nor the girls came willingly, they weren’t trying to sneak into the country, and they weren’t buying their way to new identities or citizenship,” said Mitchell.

“Can you be sure she’s not lying?”

Beside Mitchell, Agent Desh put in, “If you’d seen the conditions she was in when we found her, you wouldn’t ask.”

Rideau looked at the ambassador.  That seemed to satisfy him, yet it also seemed to bore him.  He sighed, “All righ
t.  Send me all you’ve got.  I’ll talk to my people at FSB, and as long as you keep the SB and CBI buttered up, we ought to move along with this at a good pace.”

Rideau thought that was a very optimistic assessment.  The SB, or Special Branch, was the primary intelligence agency of Bangladesh, and were just as
intransigent and careful with their secrets as the Russian FSB.  Another problem that Interpol frequently found itself dealing with was the constant wait-and-see-who-divulges-secrets-first game.  Both SB and CBI would want to see what FSB knew about the Grey Wolf, and if they were hiding anything, like maybe he was a government-trained assassin and not really Mafia-related.  And FSB would want to wait on divulging all
they
knew until they had an idea of just how much SB
already
knew; it could sometimes be embarrassing to let someone know how long you’d suspected a man of such heinous killings, and yet hadn’t been able to do much about it.  It made an agency look impotent, and FSB could not afford to look impotent, not with the whole world watching Russia these days for some of its questionable changes.

Still, if Metveyev thought he could work his magic,
Rideau figured why not let him run with it.  That was, after all, what he’d been brought in to do: facilitate and liaise.

“Fine then,” Rideau said to the ambassador.  “You work your angles, and Mitchell and Desh, you boys keep searching for more of the girls.  I want every single one of them found and free
d as soon as possible, and I want to know what they know about their pimps and their abductors.”

Metveyev sighed and put his hands on his knees, grunting as he stood.  “I will make the calls right away.”

“There’s something else you should hear before you go,” she said.  “Mitchell, tell him the other thing.”

“There’s another thing?”

Mitchell nodded.  “We need you to talk to your people at FSB about something else.  Something’s just come through the pipeline from a buddy of mine working with Moscow police.  It’s not confirmed yet, he just got it in an e-mail.”

“What is it?”

“The name Spencer Pelletier ring a bell?”

The ambassador made a face.  It was strange to see stone wrinkle.  “It’s somewhat familiar.  Where do I know
it from?”

“
He occasionally pops up on our most wanted lists,” Rideau supplied.  “Atlanta.  Six, seven months ago?  The—”

“Ah, yes, yes, t
he Rainbow Room,
da
.  What about him?”

“My guy in Moscow said he got an e-mail from the police in Chelyabinsk,” said Mitchell.  “He said there’s a camera in Chelyabinsk Airport that took a picture of
a man moving through Customs, ran it through facial-recognition software.  Chelyabinsk is one of the cities Interpol and Moscow have been working with to test out some upgrades to our global security net—”

Metveyev waved a dismissive hand.  “I know, I know, I was a part of the committee that gave the go-ahead. 
What did they find?”

“It looks like Pelletier.”

“They’ve confirmed it, then?  Pelletier is there?  Have they formed a net?”

“Not yet, Moscow just got confirmation from Interpol, and they’ve just informed Chelyabinsk police.
  Facial-recognition picked it up at a seventy-eight-point nodal match.”  The highest nodal match for current facial recognition software was 80.  This was substantial.

The ambassador nodded.
  “That’s good.  But what does the Rainbow Room have to do with the Grey Wolf or the
vory
?”

Rideau cleared her throat.  “The girl that Desh and Mitchell found in India, the woman that got sold and smuggled in one of those containers, she’s Russian.  She speaks the language, and overheard the people selling her talking to the buyers.  Mitchell showed her a picture of Shcherbakov, and she said that he said a lot of things about stops he has to make next.  He said he was in a hurry to complete the transaction, that he had to get to Chelyabinsk fairly quickly.”

“Chelyabinsk, eh?”  Metveyev nodded thoughtfully.  “I see.  It could be a coincidence.”

“Both are
believed to be involved in human trafficking, and I think it’s a pretty big coincidence that this man Pelletier, who the FBI is fairly confident had a big part in the Rainbow Room’s operations—which puts him in bed with the
vory v zakone
—is in Chelyabinsk at the same time as the Grey Wolf.”

On the computer screen, Agent Desh put in, “And we’ve been looking at the Chelyabinsk region a lot recently
, especially the ports around the Miass River.  We’ve just…well, we’ve met resistance from FSB and Chelyabinsk Police in getting search warrants for those docks.”

Rideau knew that the ambassador hadn’t missed that much.  The Miass River flowed out from the Ural Mountains, to join the Iset River, which continued northeast to join with the To
bol River, which led directly to the Ob River and eventually to the Arctic Ocean, an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean.  In those frozen waters, very few government-sanctioned security vessels sailed.  It was considered a desperate ploy by traffickers to go that far out of the way to move their cargos, human and otherwise, but as Interpol and all other police agencies were pushing towards greater high-tech advancements, some syndicates were moving into a decidedly
low
-tech philosophy; a sort of “roughing it” approach to their operations.  The scary part was how well it often worked.  It had taken ten years to find Osama bin Laden, who had remained quite off the grid, and it was equally difficult to spot lone, undocumented tankers moving across the oceans.

“I think this is worth looking into,” she said.  “I’m going to Chelyabinsk, and I’m going to meet with some of the officers
working these cases, as well as those that have been looking into At-ta Biral.”

The ambassador finally showed a degree of surprise at this
, and puzzlement.  “At-ta Biral?  That’s a Bangladeshi problem, not anything to do with Chelyabinsk.”

“International rings
are trading secrets, trading people, trading
skills
,” Rideau emphasized.  “You know that more than anybody.  Remember the girl that Desh and Mitchell helped the CBI find and rescue was sold from Sadarghat Port, the major port in Bangladesh.  She also said that the people that sold her to the Indian pimps were
solely
Bangladeshi, and that while she was their prisoner, she saw them maiming children.”  She added, “Forced begging.”

That always went to the heart of anyone working in Interpol.  Of all the atrocities currently happening on planet Earth, there were few that could possibly touch the abominable practice of forced begging.

All across Bangladesh, the epidemic was growing.  Children taken from their parents, or else orphans left on the streets with nowhere else to go, and put on street corners and forced to beg for change.  But that wasn’t where the tragedy ended.  Oh no, far from it.  The Bangladeshi gangs were known far and wide for a uniquely vicious level of forced begging.  They removed parts of the children’s bodies—the eyes, the hands, perhaps the feet or whole legs—because maimed children got more pity from passersby, and pitied children earned more in handouts.

At-ta Biral was the leading gang in Dakha, th
e capital city of Bangladesh.  It was a gang that originated out of a single man named Manna Rahman, a devout Muslim who had once had considerable ties to major terrorist organizations, including al-Queda.

One day, as the story went, Manna Rahman
took his eight sons to a pet store and bought a kitten for each of them.  He taught them to love the kittens, raise them, feed them, and treat them like brothers.  After a year, he ordered all of his sons to kill their cats.  He told them he would only consider the ones that could kill their precious pets to be strong enough to lead once he was dead.  All eight of his sons killed their cats, and so, after he died, they all fought bloody feuds for years in the streets, each brother vying for control over the others’ territories, until finally a middle child, Shakib, made peace between all of them, combined their considerable resources once more, and the At-ta Biral became more powerful and brutal than ever.

Presently, Metveyev sucked on the mint in his mouth thoughtfully.  “So,” he said, “you think that At-ta Biral has a presence in Chelyabinsk now.  And you think
the Grey Wolf and this Pelletier are tied up into it?”

“It’s possible,” Rideau said with a shrug.  “
There have been some stories of forced begging cropping up in both Moscow and Chelyabinsk.  And right now, Chelyabinsk Police are working with a woman named Vasilisa Rubashkin, a young model who says she’s seen girls disappearing after visiting certain modeling agencies, some of which we’ve known are tied up to the pimps and dealers.  And a year ago, we had a report about a lieutenant to Shakib Rahman that visited Chelyabinsk with interest in looking for refuge for both himself and Rahman, since Bangladeshi police are starting to root him out of his hiding holes.”  Rideau looked at the Russian liaison.  “Rahman is looking for a new home.  He’s taken a hint from the Russian and Italian Mafias, and he’s starting to conduct business in his country while living
outside
of his country.”

Metveyev nodded slowly, sucked on his mint. 
“I see,” he said at length.

“
To be clear, I’ll not be looking too deeply into Pelletier.  We’ve got word that quality investigators are already searching for him.  The Grey Wolf and At-ta Biral
will
have my attention, however.  As will this,” she said, opening her briefcase and pulling out a report in a manila envelope.

“What is this?” the Russian asked, accepting it.

“We ran a search merger and back-checked all transactions that have been happening with accounts known to high-ranking
vory
, even those currently in prison.  You’ll find the totals and the bank destination of each in the last column.”  Rideau gave him a moment to glance over these.  Metveyev produced a pair of bifocals, scanned them quickly, then removed them, looking as unimpressed as he had before reading the numbers.  “Those are major bank accounts at the National Chelyabinsk Bank, Ambassador.  Lots of money has been moving through that region, through those accounts.  A lot of this activity is clearly laundering.”

“You seem to have found a convergence in Chelyabinsk,” he said.  Around the Interpol offices,
convergence
was a hot word, and a highly-coveted one.  “Still, I would talk to the Director first, if I were you, before you go off on this little quest.”

“I already have.  My flight leaves in an hour.”
  Metveyev’s face was the very essence of a statue.  “And yes, I do feel that this shows clear signs of convergence, and the Director agrees with me that we have actionable intelligence on the table here, which is why these separate investigations in Chelyabinsk have been upgraded to priority one.”  A convergence was just shy of Holy Grail-status in the intelligence-gathering community.  Long ago, intel analysts had learned that such convergences were rarely coincidences, and Interpol had developed the system of immediately upgrading an investigation to “priority one” should such a confluence of data, sightings, and investigations emerge.

Of course,
Interpol’s agents could do nothing about the apprehension and arresting of those guilty.  That part was left up to local authorities.  Interpol was not an agency in the business of arresting.  Rather, they investigated, collated data from various agencies, and collaborated with them.  Then, if necessary, and if the local authorities wished it, Interpol coordinated operations across regions, timing the execution of various operations simultaneously around the world, nabbing various criminals involved in organized syndicates at once so that they had no time to communicate with one another, or learn of the others’ arrests on the television or Internet.  Interpol agents didn’t even carry guns, no matter which country they were deployed to.