“I have to ask, because it’s going to come up somewhere at some point, and I’m going to be held accountable. Where the hell did this intel come from, guys?”
The question was directed to Daniel, but Rangel’s eyes bore into Avery.
“Sources and methods,” Daniel said, providing the vague, offhanded explanation often thrown about by CIA.
But Rangel wouldn’t have any of that. Rangel was fuming.
“I suppose it’s just coincidence that overnight, without explanation, you two are suddenly unavailable and then this morning we receive reports from National Police sources that Cesar Rivero’s mutilated body was discovered in a warehouse, along with a goddamned child and four dead Black Eagles? Police called it a blood bath, and that says a lot coming from Medellin cops. And why should this particular incident come across my desk? Because people are afraid this means that the Black Eagles will consider breaking the ceasefire. I’ll tell you right now, if anyone from the Agency was involved, it will not go well for them. The State Department will be making inquiries amongst prison authorities about how and when Rivero was removed from Bellavista.”
Avery knew that Rangel didn’t give a damn about Rivero’s human rights, and he certainly didn’t care about a dead kid. People like Rangel never did. He was worried about word of Rivero’s torture reaching the ambassador’s office or the Seventh Floor, and creating a new scandal for CIA in Latin America under his watch. He was willing to keep the matter quiet, long as the Colombian police were able to do so, or some reporter or human rights activist didn’t pick up on the incident and publicize it.
“If anyone in this room knows anything about what went down in Medellin overnight, now’s the time to say something,” Rangel said, still staring down Avery.
Avery stared right back at the station chief with unblinking eyes, daring Rangel to threaten him. After what he saw in Medellin, there wasn’t anything Rangel could say or do to affect him. Even now, the scenes from inside the warehouse replayed in his mind. The screams and terror of the girls were clear as the moment it happened, less than twelve hours ago. He knew this shit was going to stay with him for a long time.
“Whatever took place in Medellin is clearly a mystery,” Daniel said, “but I have full faith in the National Police to find those responsible. Now, perhaps we can move on to the topic at hand. We have a name: Sean Nolan, a member of the Viper’s inner circle.”
“I know that name,” Slayton said. “Nolan’s popped up before in past DEA investigations. He’s a big player in the cocaine market, and the British want him for terrorism charges.”
“The Bunker’s databases confirm that Nolan is known to operate out of Cali, facilitating drug deals and arms shipments, and acting as a go-between for various gangs,” Abigail Benning said. “He’s also known to have worked for FARC in the past, but we were never aware of any connections between him and Moreno.”
Abigail Benning was thirty-one years old and of medium height and slight build with pale complexion. Unmarried, socially awkward, with black-framed glasses, her hair tied back, and no cosmetics applied to her long, angular face, she looked like a stereotypical chronic videogamer or outcast who rarely saw the light of day. Most men gave her little attention, and she wouldn’t have had time for them anyway. She kept mute and timid until the subject of SIGINT, metadata, cell phone towers, and Internet networks came up. Then she became suddenly animated and excitedly relayed technical information, putting it into comprehensible layman’s terms for the others.
Avery found her to be one of the more curious inhabitants of the Bunker.
Many JSOC kills and drone strikes came about as a result of people like Benning. Often, the NSA spooks that did the tracking had no idea where their intelligence went, and were unaware that their efforts would directly lead to someone’s death. But Benning was fully aware of the end she was working toward, and she had no qualms about it. In fact, she was rather pleased to finally have something to do. Now she had a name and a general location, and that was all her team of hackers and trackers needed.
ANIC kept a sparse file on Sean Nolan, and it offered little insight as to where to find him. Known contacts and friends were either dead or had dropped off the grid, likely in the US or Canada under aliases or in Ireland. Most of the Colombians’ information was several years old and came secondhand from the British embassy’s intelligence station.
Nolan spent seventeen of his forty-three years as a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), eventually heading up an active service unit in Belfast. He was known to be particularly adept with an RPG and homemade mortars, and he’d received training at Gadaffi’s terrorist camps. He survived numerous attempts by MI5 and 14th Intelligence Company, the British army’s undercover surveillance unit in Northern Ireland, to capture or kill him, becoming one of the most elusive targets for the British services.
Nolan rejected the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the subsequent ceasefire. He was also believed to have planned the Omagh bombing that killed twenty-nine people the same year. Later, Nolan tortured and killed an undercover MI5 agent and two Irish police officers in County Tyrone.
He fled to Colombia by way of Cuba and went to work as a mercenary for FARC and the cartels. MI5 had intelligence that Nolan was sending money and drugs back home to the Real IRA, a group that recently threatened renewed violence in Northern Ireland and followed through by ambushing a police Land Rover with a roadside bomb.
The file photos provided by MI5 depicted a tall, lanky, clean-shaven Irishman with a soft, pale complexion, crooked posture, youthful features, and wavy reddish-blond hair. Most distinctive, a hairline scar ran vertically above his left eyebrow, the result of a bar fight in Derry several years ago. Recent reports, however, indicated that Nolan may have undergone plastic surgery in Brazil to alter his appearance.
Colombian police originally made finding and extraditing Nolan to the United Kingdom a top priority, but the years passed with no leads and no results. These days, Nolan was believed to do business for the North Valley cartel, the drug gang that rose to power after Colombian police dismantled the Cali cartel several years back. Colombian sources didn’t know any of Nolan’s current aliases and had no current photos of him.
After the meeting in the Bunker, Daniel and Slayton tasked their agents and informants in Cali with keeping their eyes and ears open for any sighting or word of the PIRA renegade. Within thirty-two hours, a DEA agent reported that a man vaguely but not quite matching Nolan’s description, with a subdued south Belfast accent and sporting Nolan’s trademark scar, was spotted in the coastal city of Buenaventura meeting with a North Valley cartel facilitator the previous week.
Abigail Benning then started her hunt by tasking the NSA section at the embassy with targeting all calls in Buenaventura and in the greater Valle del Cauca department. There wouldn’t be many Irish accents in western Colombia. The vast majority of Buenaventura’s population of 400,000 was of African descent, with only fifteen percent of the population coming from Spanish or European descent.
The HUMINT acquired by DEA was critical.
Frequently in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen, NSA tracked unconfirmed targets by metadata collection and by tracking cell-phone activity for JSOC interdiction or drone-launched Hellfire missile strikes, sometimes resulting in the deaths of misidentified or unknown civilians around the target. Rarely does human intelligence play a role in eliminating the names on the Disposition Matrix, the official, innocuous-sounding term for the White House’s kill list. Cognizant of NSA’s methods, the Taliban have taken to randomly re-distributing their SIM cards to villagers to trick the Americans into killing civilians.