As the Senate and House finally settled into a functionally cooperative state by late spring of 2009, the intelligence community’s leadership was gutted, replaced by the men and women who had sold their souls at some point over the past few years to True America. Within days of Richard Sanford’s appointment as director of the CIA, anyone with past connections to Zulu virus operations or General Sanderson’s Black Flag team was demoted. Realigned was the corporate euphemism used to describe the changes.
Manning and Bauer were dropped into the Counterproliferation Division, as director and deputy director, still in solid leadership positions commensurate with their experience level, but the message was clear: their careers would go no further. Both of them had embraced their new assignment with enthusiasm, not that they really had a choice. As rising stars within the CIA, they were younger than most of their peers and still had several years to go until they reached the minimum retirement age of fifty-five. Neither was in a position to leave, unlike Berg, who could have elected to take his retirement package and walked out of headquarters on the same day. He had more than enough vacation days saved to bridge the gap between notification and out-processing.
Instead of skipping out overnight, Berg decided that the wiser — and safer — course of action was to stick around long enough to convince his new overlords that he didn’t pose a threat, but more importantly, to ascertain the danger to his own safety. Such a cleverly engineered political coup left Berg skeptical of the FBI’s supposed efforts to pry deeper into the connection between Greely and Harding’s fanatics and the scheming cabal of political operatives calling the shots behind True America’s red, white, and blue façade.
He wasn’t the only person stranded outside of True America’s juggernaut with information that could call into question their truly miraculous ascension to power. If the wrong people started dying of heart attacks during their daily jogs, he would vanish into thin air. Maybe he’d take Sanderson up on the offer to put his services to use in a sunnier climate. The idea didn’t sound half bad, even without the specter of a threat against him.
Reassigned within NCIS to a generic staff operations officer position with nobody reporting to him, he hadn’t handled anything overly significant or controversial since sitting behind his new desk in a godforsaken cubicle. He hadn’t been part of the cubicle culture at headquarters in sixteen years. Berg had been effectively retired by the new power brokers at the CIA, both marginalized and demeaned, in the obvious hope that he’d take his retirement and leave.
Berg had no intention of caving to these pressures or going anywhere until it suited him. It could be tomorrow if Sanderson was willing to import a whirlpool hot tub and a few other luxuries to the forest compound in Argentina, or it could be two years from now. That call was his alone to make.
He reached for the computer mouse on his desk with the intention of shutting down his workstation, but decided to give his email inbox another scan. Not because he thought an exciting case had been delivered late in the day, but more out of habit. The second email from the top, sent fifteen minutes ago, instantly piqued his attention. The message was a notification that he had a TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION (TS/SCI) classified message waiting on a separate, secured message system.
Interesting.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had received one of those. Whatever waited for him was guaranteed to be anything but low profile.
His finger hesitated over the mouse, ready to click the link provided in the email. It really had been a while. If his memory served correctly, he had been required to access the classified server through a completely separate program on his desktop. The link didn’t feel right, but he hadn’t received a message like this in a long time, and so much of the CIA’s technology had changed over the past few years. He thought about asking someone, but he hated to draw any attention to himself. The email inbox was intranet based. The email in question couldn’t have originated outside of the secure CIA server.
Berg had convinced himself of this by the time the link launched the secure message interface he recognized from the past. After typing a string of personalized alphanumeric codes and the twenty-six-key passcode provided in the notification email, the system granted him access to the message.
The subject line read SERAPH/AUTOMATED.
Now that was more than just interesting. SERAPH had been Nicole Erak’s codename.
Nicole Erak, a name that always resurfaced bittersweet memories. She was also known as Zorana Zekulic while operating undercover throughout Europe. She was presently known as Jessica Petrovich, the woman who had pulled off the disappearing act of a lifetime, fooling everyone.
In 2005, after learning that SERAPH was still alive, he’d set several automated search patterns to scan online and paper news outlets for keywords related to all of her known aliases and relatives, along with the names of various people she’d likely pissed off in Serbia prior to vanishing, and that list was long. He’d done this as an off-the-books favor at her request, in case any of the ugly men or women on that list decided to travel to the United States for revenge. If one of her nieces or her mother suddenly disappeared, Nicole… Jessica would get some advance notice. What she might do with that notice was never explored.
Berg was glad he’d checked his email, until he read past the subject line. Now he needed a stiff drink. Jessica’s mother had been admitted to hospice care at Palos Hills Community Hospital. The message contained no additional links or references that might explain how Vesna Erak ended up there. He clicked the only link provided, finding a screenshot of the story published in the digital version of a local newspaper. He found few details about her illness in the piece. The author was far more interested in describing “the decade-long cloud of tragedy that hung over the Erak family.” Berg knew the story all too well. He’d monitored the parents’ situation closely after handlers in Serbia reported her missing in late April 1999.
Vesna filed for a divorce a few months after their daughter’s unexplained disappearance in Europe. As far as either of her parents knew, Nicole Erak had vanished outside of Prague during a planned two-week backpacking trip across Czechoslovakia. Amidst resurfaced whispers of past sexual abuse against his daughter and wife, Dejan Erak, family patriarch and prominent member of the Serbian community, blew his brains out before the divorce proceedings and rumors gained critical momentum. Vesna had a nervous breakdown shortly after the suicide, spending the next year in and out of psychiatric hospitals.
The article described the awful matter in excruciating detail, which didn’t sit well with Berg. Yet it wasn’t the content that raised his hackles. It was the fact that the article had been written in the first place. The article felt personal, like someone with a real grudge against the Eraks had either written or encouraged the story. Or — Palos Hills was a boring-as-shit suburb, and the Eraks’ continued string of misfortunes was big news. The story of a lifetime for a jaded, part-time journalist at the local paper.
Berg took a deep breath, releasing it slowly. The safest course of action was to delete the message and pretend he’d never seen it, on the off chance that the article had been designed to lure her out of hiding and she actually decided to visit her estranged mother. The individual odds against either of these scenarios were long. The probability of both scenarios combining to enable an attack on Jessica had to be nearly nonexistent, especially given Srecko Hadzic’s untimely death earlier in the year. He’d been the most likely and capable prime mover of revenge against the Petroviches prior to his spectacular demise.