Deep Cover (The Trigger Man Book 2), page 9
Then it occurred to Pierce that she might have led him into a trap, where other operatives from her organisation waited and now descended upon him, to kill or capture.
Pierce turned and marched to the next platform, stepped onto a train headed in the opposite direction to build as much distance between himself and the agent code-named “Irina”. He changed trains several times, walked up and down stairs and doubled back multiple times until he felt certain no one was about to make an immediate move on him.
He headed for the surface.
What the operative formerly known as “Irina” didn’t know was that Pierce had her photograph saved on the SD card he’d snatched earlier.
16
Back on the Baku streets again, Pierce first checked himself for obvious bugs and, finding none, then ran a lengthier and more thorough surveillance detection route. He walked, jogged, took taxis, and caught further rides on the Metro. He stopped often, turned and doubled back, spent minutes in shops pretending to browse, but at all times he kept his eyes and ears open, ready for any sign he was under surveillance. While he concentrated on people, he also watched for surveillance cameras — which he avoided to the best of his abilities — and drones, of which he saw none.
He passed Turkish baths, traversed wide parks dominated by olive and palm trees, walked beside medieval walls with old turrets and fortified battlements, and disappeared under the shadows of utilitarian skyscrapers and ugly apartment blocks.
Three hours later, Pierce was sure no one was following him.
The only conclusion that made sense to Pierce now was that Irina, or whatever her actual name was, had tricked him into believing they were under surveillance so she could escape from him.
He found an internet café, used up more of his cash from the wallet he had pickpocketed earlier, and bought an hour of screen time. He selected a monitor positioned towards the back, but close to a group of about ten-year-old boys immersed in a multiplayer first-person shooter game who had no interest in anything Pierce might browse, and their energetic antics kept other adults from sitting too close.
After downloading a reliable encryption program, and then hacking the operating system with codes and passwords taught to him by CIA cyber-threat experts, Pierce felt comfortable that his digital trail was better hidden than it had any right to be.
He took the paper from his pocket with the Australians’ bank accounts and passwords he had recalled on the Caspian Sea, then used them to log on to the bank’s website.
Pierce was surprised to find a numbered account with almost four million US dollars.
Stunned, Pierce leaned back and took a deep breath. This was unexpected.
In five seconds, he had a plan.
First, he transferred two and a half million dollars into one of his holding accounts. Although “Hemsworth” and “Jackman’s” password was complex, the men should have changed it more often. Stealing the money seemed too easy.
Once the money was in an account Pierce controlled, he broke the sum into three separate amounts and transferred them to three more accounts. There was, unfortunately, nothing in any of the accounts that provided names or other details about Idris Walsh and his Australian accomplices except for an email address comprising random numbers and letters, which Pierce copied into a temporary text file.
He next downloaded a CSV, comma separated values, file of all the torturers’ bank account transactions — essentially a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, but with all the fancy coding and graphics stripped out. The CSV file contained thousands of debit and credit entries, with account and bank numbers, and a host of other financial information. He knew he’d scored a mother lode of intel on his enemy’s operations, but what should he do with this information?
He’d worry about that later.
Pierce returned to his four intact bank accounts, broke the sums into smaller quantities and, leaving small values, transferred the funds again.
It would be difficult to trace the money, as his were also numbered accounts, established through fake shell companies operating in half a dozen tax havens across the globe, and each account had a long alphanumeric password. Even if someone traced the transfers, recovering the money would be nearly impossible and would likely draw attention to the “Hemsworth” account, which Walsh and the Australians wouldn’t want anyone to examine too closely considering their scheme in play involving nuclear waste.
Pierce left close to one and a half million in the “Hemsworth” account because he had a plan on how to use it against his torturers.
He then logged into the Dark Web and searched through assassination services until he found the one professional killer he was looking for. The deactivated account of an assassin Pierce had fabricated during his missions with the CIA in Yemen, one that Idris Walsh should know nothing about, as he had had nothing to do with Yemen, nor did he have clearance to access any of Pierce’s mission profiles during that time. The fake assassin went by the name of Gulzar Zam, whom Pierce had used to make contact with actual jihadists and insurgents active in the country while Pierce served there.
Pierce sent Gulzar Zam a message, using the Australian’s email address as his username:
WISH TO RETAIN YOUR SERVICES. THREE MILLION FEE. ONE MILLION DOWN PAYMENT. TARGET TO BE ADVISED.
The Zam account wouldn’t reply because the account was unmonitored and, as far as the CIA were concerned, deactivated.
Pierce still had access to the account and, with Zam’s IP address masked, logged on, then responded to his own query. By doing so, if the CIA found this account and hacked it, they would see a message trail requesting an assassination connected to “Hemsworth” and “Jackman’s” bank account and email address. This information could also get back to Walsh, sowing the seeds of distrust between the CIA spymaster and his underlings. It was a long shot, but took little effort to set in motion, so Pierce considered it worthwhile.
But there was another reason he’d created the correspondence, which he would come to later.
He typed:
WHO IS THE TARGET?
Pierce responded using the Australian’s email identifier.
TO BE ADVISED. DO YOU WANT THE $3M OR NOT?
The fictious assassin responded with:
VERY WELL. PAY INTO THE ACCOUNT FOUND IN THE FOLLOWING LINK.
Pierce transferred the one million dollars, leaving just over four hundred and seventy thousand US dollars as change in “Hemsworth’s” account. A fully rounded number would look suspicious, so this random number made it look like the balance after normal transactions. He messaged back.
I’LL BE IN TOUCH. WHEN TARGET IDENTIFIED, I’LL SEND DETAILS. CODE WORD “HEMSWORTH”.
Pierce changed the password of the drained account to “hemsworth81”, then logged out. Then using the email address connected to Gulzar Zam, he emailed a confirmation email to “Hemsworth’s” and “Jackman’s” accounts, certain that when his adversaries received it, they would realise they had been framed for setting up an assassination attempt unauthorised by Walsh, which would hopefully create distrust among the three, giving Pierce time to locate his adversaries while they bickered.
He deleted his browser history, then set the encryption software to copy useless data across the entire hard drive multiple times. The machine would require rebuilding when the software completed its task, but Pierce would be long gone before anyone noticed.
He ran another surveillance detection route as he walked the streets.
When convinced he was still alone, he found an ATM. Using one of his newly topped-up accounts, which only required keying in an account number and PIN code — a set-up for situations where intelligence officers and covert operators like himself were without a bank card in a foreign and hostile environment — and withdrew ten thousand Azerbaijani manats, the equivalent of just under six thousand American dollars.
At a convenience store, he purchased an international phone card for Nigeria.
Then, at a telephone box, he dialled a number he hadn’t called in five years.
While the number diverted through the Nigerian telephone system, it linked to a VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol, system, transferred his call across a dozen cities around the planet, then back to Baku.
“Speak,” said a voice, modulated, so it revealed nothing of the caller’s identity, including their gender.
“Grey rabbit. Sad owl,” he replied in the same language. Russian.
There was a pause. “Arkady?”
Pierce grimaced at the use of an old cover identity. “Yes.”
“I thought you were dead?”
“I still am, but this ghost needs a favour.”
“That’s… How can I help?”
“I’m local. I need to meet.”
“You mean…? Here…? In this city?”
“Yes.”
Another pause. “Okay. Tomorrow we can meet. There is a flower shop.” The modulated voice provided an address. “The proprietor will tell you where to go next. No tech. That’s non-negotiable. Nothing that can track you.”
“I have a SIM card and an SD card I need analysed.”
“Okay, but not the devices themselves. Arkady, I can’t believe you are alive.”
Because of the modulation, Pierce couldn’t gauge the responder’s emotions. He or she could have felt elated, terrified, or angry. Pierce would only know the answer to that tomorrow. “We’ll talk soon.”
“We will.”
Pierce hung up, then hurried on.
He had money and intel. That put him in a far preferable position than he’d been in a week ago, so now he would use that advantage.
17
Tbilisi, Georgia
Her name wasn’t Irina. It never had been.
Irina was a legend, a false persona created in an instant when Rachel Zang realised Mark Pierce had killed the four Kazakh criminals and would kill her next.
Zang was the opposite of Irina in every way. She was an American, educated, confident, a proficient paramilitary operations officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, and her career was going places, or had been until this botched operation. Her mission in Kazakhstan had been to find and apprehend Pierce, then return him to the United States for interrogation and incarceration as a nuclear terrorist.
But the day before she met Pierce, the Kazakh criminals had stormed their operating base, killed the rest of her CIA team and took her hostage. The men dragged her away, and when she came around and discovered she was naked, Zang had believed Pierce was the mastermind behind the attack.
Now that Zang was free of Pierce, she reflected on the last five days with the disgraced CIA paramilitary operations officer who’d turned nuclear terrorist, and now questioned her earlier supposition.
She had expected Pierce to see through her ruse at any moment and then kill her as coldly as he had murdered her friends and colleagues. Zang had worried that when she had silently dispatched the two Kazakh soldiers snooping around their Skoda while Pierce confronted Drossanov in Beyneu, and then hidden their bodies in a nearby and open drain, that Pierce might have found them and exposed her subterfuge then. She had also experienced concern that Pierce might be a superior soldier to her, and that, despite her many skills, she would not be able to defeat him in close combat if it came to a direct confrontation, so she pretended to be an innocent until she could escape from him through trickery instead.
Pierce had been busy since his fall from grace, with sightings in Algeria, Belarus, Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq. The body count he’d left behind would have been impressive if the killings didn’t sicken Zang to her core. Nuclear scientists, arms dealers, fundamentalist Islamist terrorists, and many of their families slaughtered with them. The photographs of the children Pierce had butchered frightened her the most.
After escaping Pierce in Baku, she’d hid in the back of a semi-trailer truck as it drove west. The border crossing between Azerbaijan and Georgia had been a formality, and the guards on both sides failed to check the crates that concealed her.
In Tbilisi, the Georgian capital that resembled a fairy-tale village with its narrow streets and small shops, she paid the truck driver with the rest of the cash she had stolen on the fishing trawlers, and walked off into its cool, sub-zero night streets.
Mountains surrounded Tbilisi, and a cityscape built on both sides of the meandering Mtkvari River gave Tbilisi a cosy, protected feel. Zang knew this was an illusion. She might have tricked Pierce in Baku and escaped him there, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t figured out where she had gone and wouldn’t come after her.
With her feet on the ground, Zang ran a surveillance detection route. When she felt confident no one was tracking her, she found the CIA’s Tbilisi resident safe house and knocked on the back door.
A man yelled abuse at her in Georgian.
“I’ve brought peppers and sauerkraut and good Russian brandy, as you ordered,” she yelled through the door in Russian.
The entrance sprang open. The old man, with white hair and a beard like Santa Claus, greeted her. Dressed only in pyjamas and a threadbare dressing gown, he let her inside without question. She’d remembered the correct code.
“Russian or English?” the resident operator asked in the first language.
Zang went to where a log fire burned and stood next to it, warming her hands. “I don’t mind. Whatever is easier for you.”
“English, then. I need to practice. Coffee? Tea? Hot milk?”
She smiled at his kindness. “Tea, please. Just black.”
“I’ll put some honey in it. You look like you need a sugar hit.”
Zang nodded and sat next to the fire. This was the first moment since the deaths of her colleagues Julie, Brad, and Yousef that she felt safe again.
She thought about Pierce. Had he told the truth about being incarcerated in an African paramilitary camp and also about being a prisoner of the Kazah criminals?
Pierce had said it was the CIA who had betrayed him, but Zang found this difficult to believe. The CIA — her people — had been desperate to find him since his disappearance in Morocco and had chased his ghost and a trail of dead bodies across North Africa, Europe, and Asia to achieve that end. To bolster efforts, Zang’s boss had transferred her to the team hunting him. Three months ago, they had almost caught Pierce in Montenegro, and she had been the mission lead on that failed effort.
Then again, until Kazakhstan, she had never actually laid eyes on Pierce.
No one had.
When Zang realised Pierce had killed the four criminals in the Aral Sea, she knew he would finish her next. Already free of her bonds, and without anything she could use as a weapon, she pretended to be the naked prostitute the Kazakh men had talked about. Zang hadn’t believed her ruse would hold up for long, but to her surprise, it had.
And Pierce had treated her with kindness, or was that a ruse too?
Nothing about the last five days made any sense to her.
The resident operator returned with her tea.
She took it and held it in her hands, warming them. “Thank you.”
“What else do you need?”
“Passport, with the right visas. Money. A secure phone I can call out on.”
The old man nodded. “I’ll take your photo first. I will arrange passport and papers through the CIA Station. Might take twelve, maybe twenty-four hours.”
“That’s fine,” she said, sipping the tea.
Once he’d photographed her head and shoulders against a clear background, he pointed to a door. “Through there is a phone where you can speak without interruption, or being overheard. There is a laptop too. I’m presuming you know passwords to log in?”
She nodded. “Please, if you are able, some food would be great too. I haven’t eaten all day.”
He nodded. “I have some khinkali. Steamed dumplings stuffed with meat and spices?”
“Sounds wonderful.”
When the resident operator disappeared, she asked herself, who should she call first?
18
Zang entered the secure room and fell into the chair by the desk. Exhaustion overcame her, but so too did a sense of relief. So many people had died around Mark Pierce, yet she had survived.
Zang knew she was a competent operator and skilled in tradecraft, subterfuge, and combat, and was able to handle most situations thrown at her, but she had also been lucky. Pierce was the “Trigger Man”, a code name applied by his CIA handlers before he had gone rogue and adopted a nomadic, terror-fuelled existence chasing nuclear weapons across the globe. But the code name seemed more appropriate now than when Pierce had been a trusted paramilitary operator. He had survived this long not because he was lucky, but because he was good at what he did. Pierce was at least her equal, and perhaps more so. It also bugged her that the CIA gave code names to male operators, but not female operators like herself. She was just “Zang”.
With the door closed, she took the secure satellite phone and dialled CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. She coded in and asked for the active-duty officer on the Trigger Man task force.
“Zang? You survived.”
It was Aaron Stone who answered. A former Navy SEAL special forces veteran with three tours in Afghanistan, one in Syria and four in Iraq. Now with the CIA’s Special Operations Group as a respected paramilitary operations officer, he operated under the code name Night Viper. Many considered Stone to be the CIA’s best and most successful tier one operator. He would be the man who would execute Pierce when they found him. The two men were the same.
Despite his reputation, Zang didn’t like Stone because he never treated her as an equal. He didn’t see any woman as being as competent as him and his other special forces buddies.
His bias was institutionalised too, for the CIA would never consider her tier one, and both internal and external prejudices had hindered her career. Tier one was a capability acknowledgement reserved only for ex-special forces types like Stone, and America’s Special Forces never recruited women, so that opportunity would forever be beyond her reach. She should have been born in Israel.
