‘We followed the same pattern and set up surveillance. Agents carpeted the school and its surroundings. Result was the same. Jackshit.
‘By now tempers were flaring, and a lot of fingers were being pointed at me and my management of the 5JTF. Remember, we’re the FBI, and we always get our guy. This was making us smell worse than rotten food and dirty laundry. Worse, it was making the NYPD look bad. Any task force is also a political body, and the usual political shitstorm you would expect in such circumstances was raging, and boy, was it raging hard! And then we had the third deal.’
Isakson’s voice had gone hoarse from talking. He poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher and offered one silently to Broker, who shook his head.
‘I suspected that the mole might be in the NYPD, even though the previous duds were just with the FBI, so I decided to withhold intel from the NYPD and go to a bust without them. That was the next exchange.
‘This one came to us through another snitch, and it was a month away. We threw everything at filtering the intel. We got agents shadowing the top gangbangers in the chapter, bugged them, used parabolic mics, email intercepts, mobile intercepts… everything. And all that we gathered pointed to a huge motherfucking deal going down in an industrial warehouse at night in Harlem. We then got together and corroborated it and picked holes in it. Squeezed the snitch. Threatened to shoot his balls off, send him to Gitmo, all that shit. The story held. You know how these things are. There is no foolproof intel. But this was as good as it got. And we ran the paranoid test to see if we were being played. The analysts came back and said it smelt of roses.
‘So then we planned the operation, and come the night, we had eyes on the warehouse from all possible locations, SWAT on standby… everything in place to hit the bastards.
‘The deal didn’t happen. Déjà vu. The warehouse was cleaner than a newborn baby ward in a hospital. And this time, the heat on me was nuclear. We went back to the drawing board and relooked at the intelligence, and we didn’t think we were being played. We got the experts to analyze all the taps to see if they could detect lies, and they couldn’t. Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes, right?
‘We had a mole. All this just confirmed it. Of course, this conclusion wasn’t public knowledge. I discussed it with the Director and a few others… not more than five others in the agency were privy to this.’
‘That’s it? That’s all you have to go on? Fuck, man, there could be a million reasons why all those deals never happened. You’re dealing with gangs here, not exactly the most rational guys on the planet. I can’t believe I’m wasting my time listening to this shit from you about some mole based on this crap!’ Broker growled and made a move to get up.
Isakson held a hand up. ‘That warehouse had graffiti all across it, like it was a museum for street art. You know how it is with graffiti — there’s so much of it, you stop paying attention to it. But in all that spray painting, one stood out. Not because it was exceptional or anything like that. It was just a smiley face, two eyes, a curve, that kind of thing. Nothing that would worry Picasso, if he were alive, or that Zephyr guy. You’d forget it, thinking it was the work of just another frustrated street artist.
‘Except for this.’
He removed a file from a filing cabinet, removed a sheet of paper, and handed it over to Broker.
Broker saw what Isakson meant by the crude image. Two large eyes and grinning teeth were what identified the shape to be a face. Underneath, circled, presumably by the FBI, was the inscription, ‘Better luck next time. 5Clubs.’ The spelling left a lot to be desired, but the message was clear.
He looked up at Isakson and handed back the sheet.
‘Remember, I had held back this deal from the NYPD and the 5JTF… the SAC and I were the first to the scene, the first to see this.’
There was a long silence as the two of them mulled it over.
‘Of course we put our best forensic team on that, and they said the image had been drawn about eight hours earlier. We had started our surveillance of the warehouse about four hours before the deal. The spray used was a very common variety, and we didn’t get very far with that.’
He returned the file back to the cabinet, leaned back, and looked at Broker.
‘You know there was supposed to be two hundred Ks of crack to change hands that day… we did see an increased supply in Harlem and the Bronx for a few months after that, so we know the exchange took place. We went hard on our snitches and even collared a few gang members, but we got clean and innocent from them, and we had to let them go. Their sneering faces… I still remember them.
‘I went back to the auto shop and all the other sites and tore them apart. All the locations over the thirty months had graffiti, and all of them had this smiley or traces of it. Enough traces left to fill the gaps.
‘I ran a search for all such graffiti in drug deals or any deals of any kind, especially where the deals had gone sour… and I noticed that over the last two years, many of the “turkey deals” had such gang graffiti affiliated to some gang or the other left at the sites. Get this — not a single NYPD bust where they acted alone had such images. Only our busts had.
‘That time window is important. I studied all our reports, photographs, and even those that came to us from the NYPD and JOCTF, and before that window, the success rate of the FBI and the NYPD was much higher than what it was. We took drugs off the street, put badasses behind bars… with 5Clubs, we got small fry, and they walked soon, but we got their drugs. In those thirty months, the success ratio just dropped, the number of no-shows rocketed.’
Isakson swallowed his bitterness and continued.
‘We quietly disbanded the 5JTF, saying that it was redundant since the JOCTF was already doing the same thing. We, the FBI, still did the things we were supposed to do, arrest, busts and all that, and we still ended up holding nothing. Then another drug bust went wrong.
‘This time we walked into a trap, a booby-trapped warehouse. Lost two agents. Good guys, with families, the kind of agents the FBI is built on. The gang just blew them away with a dirty bomb, no smileys, no messages this time. The bomb was message enough.
‘I was pulled off my normal duties by the Director and tasked with working with our Internal Investigations Section, IIS, to find the rat. By then, everyone knew something was off, but were too scared to vocalize it. We had been through this before. We had Hanssen, who spied for the Russians for twenty years, and whenever there was an Ames or John Walker at other agencies, we went through extensive procedural upheaval, making sure we were secure. We became a paranoid organization for some time during such periods, suspecting everything and everyone, and no one wanted those days back. But they were here.
‘The Director said I would be reviewing our processes and security systems, but those in the know were aware that the IIS and I were on this mission. I became Mr. Unpopular — the guy tasked with investigating agents. You know what we found in one year of investigation? A big fat zero. We went through hundreds of agent files, grilled them, aggressive interrogation, went through case files, tapped agents’ phones, followed agents. Nothing. No clue, no hint, nothing. Everyone came clean.’
Isakson rubbed his face wearily with both hands, but when he removed them, his eyes were bright and hard. ‘The Director declared that everything was good with us, and I was back on active duty. Investigation closed. Morale improved almost immediately after we spread that message, and today we’re in a much better position than we were a few years back.