The Judas Project

“Yes,” Wethers said. “Look at my notes.” He handed Price a clipboard. On a sheet of paper he had written each man’s particulars.

Price read the details. “Three ordinary American citizens killed by lethal injection? Why would anyone…wait a second. Why is the name Leon Grishnov written in brackets after Harry Jenks’s?”

“Nothing gets by Barbara Price,” Kurtzman said. “Go ahead, Hunt, you found it.”

“There was a recurring shred of evidence that came up on all three autopsy reports. Each dead man had characteristicly Slavic facial bone structure. Not second generation that might suggest the men had been born here from Russian parentage. So we dug a little deeper, went into ex-Soviet medical databases. Military as well as civilian. The next problem arose when I realized they were not as extensive as I expected. I kept coming up empty until I ran across some dental records and we got a match.”

“One lucky strike,” Tokaido said. “The X-rays taken by one of our coroners matched the Russian ones.”

“Harry Jenks is Leon Grishnov. Once we had that,” Wethers said, “I concentrated on the guy and hit lucky again. He was in the military, trained as an infiltration specialist and designated as Spetznaz. The last entry in his record has him reassigned to special duty. After that there are no more records of him. It was as if he vanished from the face of the earth.”

“We’re widening our searches,” Kurtzman said. “Might be we’ll pick something up on the other two vics. Akira spotted something and is looking into it.”

Tokaido tapped his keyboard and brought up an enlarged image. “I got this from the autopsy photographic records. From both cities where the deaths occurred. Had to do some cleaning up and sharpening.”

“Is that a tattoo?” Price asked.

“Yeah. Each guy had one on the left shoulder. It’s no larger than a quarter but very detailed. I had to focus in real close to make any sense out of it. Even when it was made clear, none of us could understand what it meant. So I sent them to one of our Russian contacts. I figured if the guys were Russian the tattoos might also have some Russian symbols.”

“That’s smart thinking.”

“Has the contact come up with anything yet?” Price asked.

Kurtzman shook his head. “Lena did report it looked vaguely familiar but she needs a little more time.” He turned his full attention on Price. “What do you think?”

“I worry when I hear KGB and Spetznaz. And especially what you found out about a Russian taking on the identity of a U.S. citizen.”

“Okay, we know the old KGB was disbanded and the FSB took its place,” Wethers said. “We also know that there are still ex-KGB around, some of them hard-liners in place in Lubyanka and who still have some influence. Right now we don’t have a line on what we might have stumbled on. My vote is we keep digging.”

“Could these men have been sleepers?” Price asked. “Put in place as part of some operation that might have been forgotten about?”

“That’s a possibility,” Kurtzman said. “Don’t dismiss the thought about a forgotten operation. Though, we know some sleepers have stayed in place for a lot of years before they got the signal to go ahead with their planned mission.”

“So why have they been killed? If the mission has been wiped, why terminate the operatives? That part doesn’t make sense to me,” Price stated.

“I have to admit I can’t figure that one myself,” Kurtzman admitted. “Unless someone has decided to clean house and remove all traces of a redundant operation.”

Price ran her gaze over Wethers’s notes again, then reached a decision. “Okay, let’s run with it, Aaron. Stay with day-to-day protocols, but see what you can figure out on these three dead people. I’ll update Hal when he gets back, and I think Mack should sit in on any meetings. We could be needing his special input.”

MACK BOLAN COMPLETED his reading of the file presented by Hal Brognola. He glanced around the War Room conference table.

“It points to something that needs checking out,” he said. “There are too many facts to be labeled coincidence.”

“It’s the way we all saw it,” Price said. “I was on board as soon as Aaron showed me the initial data he’d pulled together and got the team’s backup.”

Bolan tapped the file. “Priority is to assess what a possible operation might consist of. We have to work on the assumption that whatever was planned could still be online, just waiting for someone to issue the green light.”

“We’re digging deep trying to get a handle on it,” Kurtzman said. “One problem is, we have no idea how covert this might be. We don’t even have the luxury of a name for the damn thing.”

Akira Tokaido opened a folder. “I may have something for you on that,” he said, sliding photos of the tattoos found on the dead men.

“They tell you something?” Price asked.

Tokaido nodded. “The writing in the tattoo design turned out to be an obscure Cyrillic alphabet.” He picked up one of the remotes that controlled the wall-mounted monitors and clicked on a screen. “On the left are the original three tattoos. Worked into the entwined snakes-and-scorpions design are number and letter sequences. Two of the tattoos have the same number-letter sequence. The third is different. Two different sequences come from the dead men from Spokane. The remaining one is Grand Rapids. If you look on the right, here, I’ve laid out all three sequences, this time in English.”

They all studied the sequences. Even in English the lines didn’t make much sense.

“Computer codes?” Bolan asked.

“I don’t think so,” Kurtzman said. “Not the sort of configuration that makes any sense. We’ll run them but I can’t see them giving us much.”

“Maybe a number-letter code,” Delahunt said. “I can check them against the FBI code-breaker data, but they don’t seem to have anything I can get a hook on.”

“Lena Orlov did find something that might offer us a starting point,” Tokaido said. He highlighted a curving banner that sat over the main design. It was identical on each tattoo. “In English it means Black Judas.”

“Great work,” Brognola said. “We all understand Judas. The disciple who betrayed Jesus. Give anyone a thought?”

“Not immediately,” Delahunt admitted.

No one else had any flashes of inspiration, so they spent some time going over what they had, pushing theories back and forth.

“Did Akira’s suggestion about the three dead men being into computing go any further?” Bolan asked.

“Yes. He did find out they were all familiar with the latest technology. Systems. Security advances. They took every IT course they could log onto. These guys were heavily into it. You have an idea?”

“Pretty loose at the moment,” Bolan stated. “We have three dead men. It’s becoming more than likely they were foreign agents sent to the U.S. to assimilate into society and stay low. Each has a tattoo that appears to contain some number-letter sequence, meaning unknown at the moment. Our guys were all into finance-based employment and also heavily into computer knowledge, which in today’s climate isn’t suspect in itself, but could be.”

“Don’t forget Judas,” Tokaido prompted.

“My next piece of the puzzle. Judas walked with all the other disciples. Passed himself off as one of them, while all the time he was working against them. Just what a sleeper does. Then Judas broke his trust and betrayed those who saw him as a good guy.”

“Okay,” Price said. “The Judas analogy works fine. But where is the betrayal here? Were our sleepers here to betray someone? Set him up as an assassination target?”

“Think about that.”

“Why so many men?” Price asked. “An assassination wouldn’t need that many, would it?”

“Good point,” Bolan said. “And a hit against a current figure doesn’t gel with a sleeper put in place for a long period. People and situations change over the years. Your assassin is more likely to be inserted in the short term.”

“So no individual hit?”

Bolan shook his head. “Not someone. I’m thinking something. This looks like a complicated operation. A killing is a relatively simple matter. A target. A weapon. An operator. I believe these guys were going after something bigger, and not a bomb or a bioweapon.”

“Striker, even my head is starting to spin,” Brognola said. “Is there a payoff here?”

“Speculation at the moment. Theorizing. But I’m looking at the special interest in computers and the financial backgrounds all these guys had. And then Black Judas. I remember one of Katz’s favorite words when he was building scenarios—extrapolation, making an educated guess at a possible conclusion once facts were brought together. In this case I’m linking Black Judas to Black Monday. I think we all remember that day in ’87 when the stock market went haywire.”

“Okay,” Brognola said, pushing to his feet. He took a moment to consider what he was about to authorize. “I believe we have enough to initiate an initial probe.”