Deep Cover (The Trigger Man Book 2), page 11
Nodding, he and Valeriya returned their gaze to her monitor to check how her last trace program had fared.
They had a hit on Irina.
“She’s CIA.” Her voice again at normal volume, Valeriya’s fingers now raced across her keyboard. Now that the symbol was no longer a topic of conversation, she had relaxed.
“How do you know?”
“See that marker.” She pointed to a line of code moving across the screen. “Only the CIA use that.”
Pierce felt hopeful. Finally, he was gathering intelligence he could use. “What can you tell me about her?”
With lightning speed, Valeriya pulled up files drawn straight from the CIA’s human resources database. “Rachel Zang. Twenty-seven. Born in New York City. Chinese father and American mother with Asian ancestry.”
Pierce noticed she had taken her mother’s name. One file said Zang’s mother had died many years back, but gave no cause for her passing.
Valeriya sat taller. “Oh, that’s interesting.”
“What’s that?” Pierce scanned the files she was pulling up, but he couldn’t read as fast as Valeriya did.
“Her parents’ address. It’s in a wealthy part of New York. Her family must have money. I mean real money, the kind that doesn’t require you to take a shit government job to get by.”
He nodded. “What else can you tell me about this… Rachel Zang? What happened to her mother, for example?”
“Even with our skills,” Yebin yelled from the kitchen, betraying that he could hear them, “we can’t reach every database in every intelligence agency.”
Valeriya stiffened but remained focused on her work. She yelled, “Lover! Where are you with that camp bed?”
“Getting there, my love. Arkady knows we don’t have full access to all networks. Only files that aren’t as tightly locked down as they should be.”
“Thank you for making that crystal clear, lover!” Valeriya said in a raised voice, then forcing a smile, flitted through several more files until a photograph of Zang in a US Air Force dress uniform appeared. The insignia on her uniform was that of a second lieutenant.
She was Irina. There was no mistaking that in Pierce’s mind.
“Zang resigned her commission with the Air Force three years ago. Then…”
“Then… what?”
Valeriya shrugged. “Not one hundred per cent clear, but it seems the CIA recruited her. Provided her specialist training. Look.” Valeriya pointed to a line in her file. “That would be why. Other than English, she speaks fluent Mandarin and Russian. With her military training, she’d make a perfect paramilitary operations officer.”
“CIA paramilitary training?” Pierce asked.
Valeriya tucked a loose strand of her raven hair behind an ear. “Can’t tell which outfit. Did you stand her up, Arkady? An enemy agent you seduced on a covert mission?”
Pierce shook his head, remembering that to Valeriya, he was a former and very much disgraced SVR operative. “Actually, she stood me up.”
“You were pumping her for information?”
He laughed. “Not like that.”
“She’s hunting you?”
Pierce nodded, not sure what he should reveal about his current situation. During his time with Zang, Pierce almost believed the woman was who she claimed to be, a tragic Russian prostitute named Irina. The success of her deceit was testament to her skills in creating and maintaining a believable legend. He’d admired her spirit, a tough exterior but with a sensitive side buried deep beneath the fear she projected. Pierce asked himself how much of her personality had she invented, and what of her true self had she revealed to him?
Zang intrigued him.
“Your expression tells me you think about her a lot.”
“Maybe,” answered Pierce, surprised by his transparent emotions. “But she is not my friend.”
“Do you have a girlfriend, Arkady?”
“No.” He turned and caught her stare.
Valeriya shrugged, the barbwire tattoos twisting on her pale skin. “You always look sad, Arkady, even when you smile. I would be sad too if I didn’t have my lover boy. We complete each other.”
Pierce blinked, not sure what to say.
She looked away. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you, Arkady.”
He shook his head. “You didn’t, Valeriya. But can we get back to work?”
Valeriya returned her attention to the monitor and sighed. “I’ll keep digging. See if I can find recent missions. That might reveal more about this mysterious woman who has you blushing.”
21
Pierce watched Valeriya work, the muscles in her bare limbs tensing each time she struck the keyboard. He looked again for the dual circle tattoo, but without the ultraviolet light shining on her, it left no mark. He asked, “Do you worry, Valeriya, that the SVR or the FSB might find you here?”
The hacker shuddered. “Yebin and I will never let them take us. After we last saw you, we made a pact. If the Russians find us and there is no escape, we will take our own lives. We have the means. You already know how they tortured us when you saved us from those unspeakable horrors, but I will never let that happen again.”
Pierce remembered back to the incident Valeriya referred to, and felt a pang of guilt, even though it was a situation not of his making.
Yebin returned, halting Pierce from pondering further. “The camp bed is ready when you need to sleep, Arkady.” He kissed Valeriya on the lips, then slouched into the desk chair next to her and checked his progress on the audio file analysis. Half a minute later he turned from the monitor and said, “Mark Pierce? Is that another code name?”
He nodded. Hemsworth had used his name during their brief phone conversation, so there was no hiding it. Now there was a link between his old life and his new one. “Another name I’ll ask you to forget, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.” Like his girlfriend’s, Yebin’s fingers flitted like ghosts over the keyboards as he loaded data files faster than Pierce could absorb the information. “Looks like we have a hit here too.” He pulled up a photograph of two grinning Australian Special Air Service Regiment soldiers standing in what looked to be an Afghani desert. Each man was muscular with a thick beard and sun-weathered skin. “The one on the left,” Yebin pointed to the ginger-haired soldier. “His name is Alex Trager. Former SASR sergeant.”
Pierce studied the eyes.
The same eyes as his torturer in Central Africa.
The same man who had hunted him in Spain and captured him in Italy.
“Hemsworth”.
“That’s him.” Pierce’s gaze moved to the second soldier. He recognised those eyes too, for this man was “Jackman”, and pointed to his photograph. “What about him?”
Yebin flipped through several files. “He’s Javor Terzic. A former corporal from the same outfit. Looks like the SASR dishonourably discharged them both. They spent four years together in a Kabul prison for smuggling heroin on military flights into Australia, incarcerated with two more Australian soldiers from the same regiment.” Yebin pulled up the files on the last two soldiers.
Pierce recognised the last two as members of Walsh’s team who’d hunted Pierce in Morocco seven months earlier. Pierce had eliminated them both. This explained Trager’s and Terzic’s personal investment in Pierce’s suffering, as he had killed their mates while they had tried to kidnap him. Trager and Terzic had been more successful in Italy, capturing and subduing Pierce there before drugging him and moving him to the Central African Republic warlord camp.
Yebin said, “Looks like Trager trained with Navy SEALs before he turned dirty. Jungle warfare unit.”
Pierce grabbed a chair and sat between the lovers as an idea formed. “Valeriya, Yebin, your work is impressive. Thank you.”
Yebin chuckled. “The trick is to look, but not touch. If we change nothing in the networks we hack, no one knows we were there. Isn’t that right, my love?”
She leaned over and kissed him. “Except in your case, touching is acceptable.”
He giggled, and they laughed together.
Pierce crossed his arms and leaned back. “I’m presuming Trager and Terzic are no longer in Afghanistan?”
“No, they aren’t,” said Yebin. “Let me investigate where they are now. Might take a while.”
Pierce scratched his chin. “While you’re at it, Yebin, see if you can find connections between Zang, Trager, Terzic and nuclear weaponry.”
The hackers looked to each other and then to him.
“Nuclear weaponry?” Valeriya asked. “You must be in a world of trouble, Arkady?”
He didn’t answer, and that told them everything they needed to know.
Their online searches continued for another hour while Pierce drank his coffee and tried to keep his eyes open. Exhaustion was catching up with him, and if Valeriya and Yebin didn’t come up with actionable intelligence in the next five minutes, he’d excuse himself and get some sleep. Learn what they had discovered in the morning.
“This is interesting.” Valeriya pointed to a file on her screen. “An ASIS report from two years ago.”
Yebin glanced at Pierce. “ASIS is Australian Secret Intelligence Service.”
Valeriya playfully punched her boyfriend in the arm. “You need not explain, lover. Arkady is a smart man. He knows who ASIS is.” She turned to Pierce and winked.
“What does the file say, Valeriya?” Pierce asked.
“Let me see… When Trager and Terzic and two of their fellow Australian soldiers disappeared from their prison in Kabul, an ASIS team investigated how. These are their findings.” Valeriya read further before speaking. “It seems a CIA operator bribed the prison authorities to secure their release. No name for who that CIA visitor was, but descriptions are of a handsome man in his late fifties or early sixties. Blue eyes and grey hair. That’s not enough to run any identifier programs to determine who he might be.”
The description matched Idris Walsh, or how the spymaster had looked before Pierce’s altercation with him in Morocco. “That’s fine, Valeriya. Can you also check on any intel linking Alex Trager and Javor Terzic to the Central African Republic?”
“Sure. Why there?”
“Can you indulge me for the moment?”
22
Valeriya nodded to Pierce, and the couple went to work. Pierce sensed their competitive streaks in who could get the requested information first.
“Here we go!” Yebin exclaimed a minute later, then leaned back in his chair to stretch his arms over his head in a salute of victory. “Video footage from four months ago, taken from an American RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone. Flown from a secret US base outside of Kasese, Uganda. You want to watch?”
Pierce nodded.
“Of course you want to watch. Who wouldn’t? It’s very intimate watching someone who doesn’t know they are under observation.”
Yebin played the drone footage. The scene was a high-altitude view of thick jungle. Open cut mines broke the natural landscape where hundreds of thin men and boys dug for diamonds and gold, using shovels and picks or their hands. Other men in green uniforms armed with AK-47s watched over the workers. These were conflict-diamond mines, a few of the many thousands operational across much of war-torn Africa, including where he had been held captive. Pierce memorised the latitude and longitude coordinates from the drone data feeds and noted the location was somewhere near the Central African Republic border with the Republic of the Congo and Cameroon.
The same location Walsh, Trager and Terzic had held him prisoner.
As the drone footage played, facial-recognition software soon identified targets of interest, and a camera zoomed in on three men. Two of the figures armed with FN-FAL assault rifles wore military fatigues. Target designators identified them as Trager and Terzic. The other man in a grey suit and gumboots had no marker. The sneer on his soft face suggested living in the jungle was not a regular experience for him.
“Who controls that territory?” Pierce asked.
Yebin and Valeriya went to work, then soon pulled up a series of news articles from the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the Netherlands, and from Amnesty International and a series of other human rights groups.
Valeriya said, “Can’t be one hundred per cent certain, but a CAR warlord by the name of Captain Daniel Eloko operates in this general region.”
Pierce had heard the name but couldn’t recall any details. “Who is he?”
Yebin pulled up a photograph of a middle-aged man in green military fatigues and beret, who wasn’t much to look at, and wasn’t tall nor muscular nor good looking, but there was an unsettling aspect to his stare. He holstered a Beretta APX semi-automatic pistol secured in a leather holster on his hip, and an AK-74 assault rifle slung over his back.
A dozen bodyguards with older version AK-47 rifles and battered American M16A1 assault rifles stood in the background of the photo. Their uniforms, while green, were a mismatch of styles, and odd T-shirts of beach holiday destinations from across the globe, superhero characters, or Tintin comics adorned them. Where visible, each man wore gumboots instead of military lace-up boots to keep their feet dry in the muddy jungle.
Yebin said, “Eloko is the leader of an Anti-Balaka paramilitary terrorist group. That mean anything to you?”
Pierce nodded, as he recalled situation reports that he had occasionally read during his time with the CIA regarding the CAR. Landlocked with a population of five and a half million people, Central Africa was a tropical, impoverished and highly underdeveloped nation located just north of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In 2012, a predominantly Muslim rebel coalition from the northeast, Seleka, marched on CAR’s capital Bangui, supported by thousands of Chadian and Sudanese mercenaries, who overthrew the then president without facing much resistance, and then launched a transition phase but failed to keep its fighters under control. Faced with the rebels’ brutality, local populations formed self-defence militias, known as Anti-Balaka groups, mostly comprising Christians that targeted Muslim communities. This soon blew out to fighting across the country, turning Christians against Muslims, and resulted in widespread killings, pillaging, rapes, and enslavement of captured prisoners, and the rise of the already systemic use of child soldiers on both sides. International forces deployed into the CAR had worked to secure the country to some success, while Rwandan and Russian soldiers and mercenaries such as the Wagner Group had also embroiled themselves in the conflict, causing more harm than good. The country was a mess, for the war had already resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands and had displaced hundreds of thousands more, and there was no end in sight.
Currently, the Seleka Muslims controlled the central north of the country, while the Christian Anti-Balaka controlled the west and south. But that was a simplistic understanding of the situation, for there were many other groups also at war with each other in this failed nation, and Pierce couldn’t recall all their names, allegiances, and ideologies at this moment. Not that it mattered; all he needed to know right now was that Captain Eloko was Christian Anti-Balaka, and where he was located, for he felt certain this man was involved somehow regardless of never having seen him during Pierce’s incarceration in the warlord camp.
Yebin skimmed an article sourced from the International Criminal Court. “Says here Captain Eloko is wanted for a very long list of war crimes, which includes genocide, murder, terrorism, use of child soldiers, slavery, and smuggling. The latter predominately involving ivory and gold, but in the majority, diamond smuggling.”
Pierce felt he had missed something, then remembered what was on his mind. “Pull up the drone feed of Trager, Terzic and the other man again, please?”
“Sure.”
“What’s that?” Pierce asked as he pointed to a blurred bulldozer in the background. It looked out of place in a warlord camp.
“I’ll see if I can clean the image.” Yebin ran a program, and soon a logo appeared out of the haze. A stylised diamond with the word Polytope in a bold serif font.
“Polytope?” Pierce asked.
Valeriya already had the company website up on her browser. “Polytope Diamonds. Mining company founded in 1961 by British entrepreneur Martin Ponsonby. Now managed by his children, Rupert and Clementine Ponsonby.” She loaded all three executives’ bios from the company’s website. “Ha! Would you believe the man talking to Trager and Terzic in the drone footage we looked at earlier is Rupert Ponsonby?”
Pierce sat straighter. “This just gets more and more interesting.”
Yebin laughed. “I would ask what have you got yourself involved in, Arkady, but perhaps I shouldn’t ask.”
“Don’t ask,” Pierce said, meaning it. He’d got the two hackers more involved than he should have. If he’d had other options, he would have left Valeriya and Yebin well alone and ignorant to him still being alive. It would have been safer for all of them if he had.
More information on Polytope Diamonds came up as the hackers found several related articles on mining industry news sites concerning Polytope. After reading a few, they learned that the private British company had made its money in mines in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia in Southern Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, but most of those mines were now depleted and decommissioned, or coming to the end of their productive lives.
There were, however, two new Polytope mines that Rupert Ponsonby oversaw. An operational site extracting marine diamonds from the seabed off the coast of Angola, and another that was in the development phase, with infrastructure and processing equipment still to be constructed on site, and that second one was in the Central African Republic. The same location that Pierce had been held captive for those seven horrific months of his life.
Yebin smirked, crossed his arms, and leaned back in his chair. “Did you notice, Arkady, that in all the Polytype news articles, the father and the daughter always appear together, and only they give the statements and quotes, looking important, while poor old Rupert is not in any of them?”
