Critical Intelligence

All of those would seem like the high jinks of a naughty PTA president in comparison if the full scope of Stony Man’s operation ever came to light.

The list was endless: extrajudicial killings of foreign nationals and American citizens; violations of federal, state and local laws and statues by the truckload; operations conceived, designed and executed in full and complete violation of the Posse Commitatus Act; war crimes as defined by the Geneva Convention and Uniformed Code of Military Justice. The list stretched out and led up the chain of command all the way to the Oval Office.

Theoretically at least, in several ways the Stony Man operation was many a U.S. lawmaker’s and citizen’s ultimate big brother nightmare. In practicality it was the best defense the nation had ever instituted.

In theory, Price thought wryly of the old axiom, theory and practice were the same. In practice they never are.

She dialed down the Kindle DX screen, scrolling through the digital display of the after-action report CIA interrogators at a black site camp on the island of Diego Garcia had sent back. It continued the results of the interrogation of the North Korean, Sin-Bok.

Most of the information was unspectacular. The agent hadn’t been taken as an investigation tool but rather as a behind-the-scenes warning to Kim Jong-il to not play his brand of lunatic hardball in the Western Hemisphere.

However, something odd had caught Price’s eye. While under a modest dose of sodium thiopenal and slight measures of the euphoric agent lysergic acid diethylamide, the North Korean had babbled merrily on but his answers had been incoherent, often shifting from language to language and even into the random, including rattling off simple mathematical problems.

“‘Three plus four. I’m three plus four,’” Price quoted to herself.

It was abnormal even for a person tripping on LSD. She leaned back in her chair and smelled the fresh air of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She picked up her Montblanc pen, a gift from Hal Brognola, and tapped her chin in a reflexive motion.

On a whim she typed “three plus four” into the search option on A-Space. Found nothing. She shrugged. It had been a wild shot anyway. Perhaps Hunt or Akira could…

“Stupid!” She laughed suddenly.

Leaning forward, she put her pen down with a click next to her ceramic mug of coffee. The keys on the PowerBook tapped rapidly as she typed in the word and hit Enter: “Seven.”

CHAPTER SIX

Kiev, Ukraine

Klegg sat. He didn’t offer to shake hands. Milosevic regarded him with a reptile stare, eyes bloodshot. He watched as the American set the attaché case carefully between them.

Milosevic cocked an eyebrow in question. Klegg smiled slightly and held his hands out in a welcoming gesture. Beside him on the couch Svetlana was completely ignoring him now that her job was done.

She giggled madly as another girl in a brilliant couture dress pulled out a water bong of thin-cut crystal and splashed vodka from a bottle out of an ice bucket into the main chamber. The entourage around them chattered in Russian under the watchful eyes of Milosevic’s bodyguards.

Kiev made Klegg think of what Dodge City had been like during the cattle days or San Francisco during the gold rush; a wide-open frontier town where the law didn’t apply to anyone with money.

Beside him another loose pile of cocaine was casually split across the table as a laughing twentysomething with dragon tattoos on his scrawny arms and a diamond stud in his nose opened a velvet drawstring pouch and dropped buds of deep green colored marijuana into the mix.

“I’m supposed to ask what you want, I know,” Milosevic said in English. “But I don’t like playing twenty questions.”

“Twenty-two pounds,” Klegg supplied for him.

“Twenty-two pounds?”

“Twenty-two pounds,” Klegg confirmed.

“For what?”

“Call it earnest money, for a conversation.”

“Which conversation?”

“The one we’re about to have.”

“Why would you bring me twenty-two pounds to have a conversation? This conversation—” Milosevic leaned forward “—which is starting to become ludicrous.”

Twenty-two pounds was the exact weight of one million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills.

Beside Klegg, Svetlana had taken a fat, sticky bud and coated it liberally with powdered cocaine and then thumbed it into the bowl of the vodka-filled bong. The giggling mad man with the nose diamond provided a pocket lighter that seemed closer to a butane torch, and the coven huddled around the implement.

“There’s nothing ludicrous here,” Klegg assured him, not without a sense of irony. “I’m giving you that money to listen to my proposal. To consider it seriously. If you say no to what I’m suggesting, fine—you take the money and we part on good terms. But I’m not here to talk real estate or banking or oil futures out of Chechnya.”

Milosevic snapped his fingers and settled back in his lounge chair. The music in the club was deafening but the ballistic plastic surrounding the deck landing muted the sound to a tolerable level.

A muscle-heavy thug with a crew cut and fifty-five-inch chest bent down and picked up Klegg’s briefcase. Beside him Svetlana coughed and a cloud of cocaine-laced marijuana smoke rolled out like smog from a chimney. Immediately, Klegg felt light-headed and he instantly wondered if that wasn’t part of Milosevic’s plan.

“Talk,” the ex-KGB operative said. “You have purchased five minutes in which to interest me.” He lit a cigar. “Frankly, I don’t expect you to succeed.”

“I came here on certain assumptions.”

“Dangerous.”

“It can be,” Klegg conceded. “But risk preempts reward. For example…six plus one equals seven.”

The Russian made a face. If he was surprised he didn’t show it. “Just as five plus two equals seven,” he replied.

“Even my assumptions are grounded in certain…continuities,” Klegg smiled.

Milosevic waved his free hand in a “come on” gesture. Svetlana passed the bong to the girl in the red couture dress.

“The first assumption,” Klegg continued, “is that you retained your contacts from your time in a KGB station house in eastern Africa. That you could, if properly motivated, reach out and reactivate stringers, cells and networks across the region.”

“You must have these kinds of contacts among your own community,” Milosevic countered. “Why come to Ukraine to get what you could get in London or New York?”

On the couches the entourage exploded into laughter and applause as Svetlana and the girl in the red dress began making out.

“Because,” Klegg said slowly, “I need contractors and operatives who don’t mind pulling down on Westerners. I want businessmen, not ideology. For that, it was come here or go to Palermo.”

“Rio, Caracas,” the Russian offered. “Even Uruguay.”

“I go to the cartels, I might as well go to the fucking monkey house at the zoo.” Klegg paused. “Though for what I have in mind, an outer circle of cannon fodder might be appropriate, given an inner cadre capable of dealing with them afterward.”

“A fixer who exercises total unit closure on his field talent tends to have an abbreviated career,” Milosevic countered.

“You’ll land on your feet, I’m sure.”

Milosevic released cigar smoke in a huge plume and settled back comfortably in his chair. His eyes cut over to where Svetlana was making out with the girl from his entourage. The Russian oligarch looked back at Klegg.

“You start tying up loose ends, it can sometimes be hard to know when to stop.”