"Part of the reconstituted list?"
Since the Black Flag file had been stolen in its entirety by Colonel Farrington, and the late Harris McKie had been parsimonious in the dissemination of its contents to the FBI during his short stint as gatekeeper in the Sanctum, Sharpe had less than half of the list of living Black Flag operatives. His reassigned and significantly reduced task force spent the first six months creating the missing list. They started with missing persons reports filed within a block of time extending two months before and after May 26, 2005. Specifically, they categorized male adults, aged thirty years or older, and started to compile a surprisingly large list of missing males. They eliminated any reports filed by direct family members, since the families of known east coast and Midwest operatives had either disappeared with the operative, or had gone to live with relatives in protest.
The only home they found occupied had contained Jessica Petrovich, and there had apparently been a good reason for that. The FBI's database had been hacked shortly after Edwards temporarily vanished from the grid. The cyber-attack appeared to be a simple probe, using Edward's computer and intranet password. Probably designed to confirm the information released by McKie to the FBI and view any key FBI assumptions that might hinder their vanishing act.
Once O'Reilly's team of data analysts compiled a list of missing males that fit the general demographic pattern, they further narrowed the field by discarding any profiles without prior military service. Known operatives to that point had been one hundred percent connected by military service, and this assumption whittled the list down to a manageable number. Examination of known operative military and personal backgrounds yielded no discernible pattern for further breakdown of their list. Black Flag operatives came from every branch of service, often from specialties not directly tied to combat, and examining personal history data offered a vastly diverse picture with no connections. At that point they started the real work, creating a database alert system linked to friends, relatives, work contacts…hundreds of variables that might trigger a possible contact event with one of the ninety-eight contacts on their list.
Their hard work produced tangible results on February 8th of this year, when the system alerted Special Agent O'Reilly to the fact that Victor Almadez's grandfather, living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, had passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack. Based on the alert, Sharpe issued the highest level priority terrorist alert for Victor Almadez, providing enough imaging data for both TSA and Customs to effectively utilize their new facial recognition software systems.
Three days later, customs agents at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport seized Manuel Delreyo after debarking an American Airlines flight that originated in Buenos Aires and made a stop in Santiago, Chile. Almadez/Delreyo proved to be as difficult to read as the escape artist Jeffrey Munoz, and Sharpe couldn't shake the feeling that they were being played again.
He had been so badly burned by Sanderson's Munoz play that he felt tinges of paranoia as soon as he received the phone call from Customs. Two months later, they still had Almadez in custody, held under some very tenuous Homeland Security Act provisions that wouldn't hold up if put under any public scrutiny. Unfortunately for Almadez, he was a nameless prisoner stuffed away in an obscure detention facility designed and administered by the Hallister Corporation. Sharpe wasn't worried about Almadez.
"The capture kept me from being fired and resulted in my transfer to Domestic. The last nod from Director Shelby I can expect. Unfortunately, Almadez hasn't said anything substantive, other than a promise to 'take this personally' if he doesn't see a lawyer by the end of June."
"He's willing to wait four months?"
"He said, 'I'm a patient man, and I understand your predicament…I'm willing to wait four months,' and that was it," Sharpe said.
"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
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.