Echo Platoon (25 page)

I went through the rest of the office, but found nothing of interest. Finally, I rifled the credenza, a nice, eighteenth-century, French burled walnut piece. Not a lot there, either. I found half a dozen notes scrawled in Russkie and stuffed ’em in my pocket. And another computer disk, which I also took, and a bunch of Sirzhik Foundation letterhead—thick, expensive stuff from Cartier in Paris. But basically, this office was a showplace, not a working area. There were no files; no business correspondence; no nothing. I even tried tapping the walls but could discover no secret compartments.

Well, in the intelligence business, sometimes what you don’t find is as important as what you do find. And in this instance, I’d learned that Steve Sarkesian either kept all his work with him at another location, or didn’t do much work at all in this office.

Except . . . I had this nagging feeling that I was overlooking something significant. Just like outside the door, I was tunneling. I sat on the edge of the desk and let my mind wander.

That was when I realized what I’d missed, and missed, and missed. I reached into the kneehole under Steve Sarkesian’s desk. There, where I’d seen it without seeing it, was his thin, black leather attaché case. I retrieved it, put it on the desk, and examined it, running my fingers over the mottled surface of the leather. Geezus—the fucking thing was made of crocodile. I flicked at the combination locks with my thumbs, but
they didn’t open. Well, time was getting short, and I wasn’t in the mood to screw around, and so I took the letter opener, pried the brass flanges from the frame of the case, and flipped the lid up.

Inside lay four bundles of papers. I looked at the top sheaf, and saw it was a photocopy of an official U.S. government document. The cover sheet bore the seal of the National Security Council, and the stamped notation TOP SECRET.

That got my attention fast enough. I leafed through the ten-page report. It didn’t take long to figure out that what I was looking at was a draft briefing paper detailing our negotiating positions about the oil pipeline that the United States wanted to build between Baku and Turkey, and outlining our public and private stances toward Iran, Russia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

The paper provided an inside look at how we would proceed; it summarized potential fallback positions; it was undiplomatically direct in its political assessments of the region, and the regional players. Obviously, it hadn’t been put together by the folks at State, because the prose wasn’t sufficiently wishy-washy.

Judging from the date on the cover page, it was an early draft. But early or not, it had no business being in Steve Sarkesian’s briefcase, unless he was a fucking NSC staffer, which we all know he wasn’t.

I flipped through the other three documents. One was a draft of a long memo from Ambassador Madison to the secretary of state, suggesting ways in which the Sirzhik Foundation could be used to help further American goals in the region. Here is the bad news: the memo hadn’t been written by the ambassador; it was
on the Foundation’s letterhead. Here is the good news: there was a Post-it note attached to the last page. It read:

Okay, so the fact that Ambassador Madison could separate her personal life and her professional life gave her a check in the “plus” column of the ledger I carry in my head. That—and a buck-and-a-half token—would get her on the subway in New York. Quickly, I examined the rest of the papers. There was a long, detailed document handwritten in a language I couldn’t decipher, and there was a final report of some kind, twelve pages in all, written in Cyrillic, with what had to be TOP SECRET stamps on the top and bottom of each page.

I speed-read the ten pages of the NSC draft. Shit—the fucking thing had enough raw intelligence data in it to point toward some of the United States’ holy of intel holies, its sources and its methods. And having that kind of document in one’s possession, my friends, is a no-no. In fact, it is fucking illegal, because disclosure of top secret material (and this is the official definition), “could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.”

And when exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States takes place, then I get the green light to shoot and loot and take no fucking prisoners whatsoever.

Now, let’s look at what’s happened in the past couple of days. A bunch of folks have been murdered. A bunch of no-goodniks working for Stephan Sarkesian have tried to kill
moi
. And now, I discover that this self-same Sarkesian not only has a couple of world-class killers (e.g., Oleg Lapinov and Ali Sherafi) as his honored guests here at the Sirzhik Foundation, but he is also in possession of a document that would get him locked up if he were back in the U.S. of A. and the FBI knew what he had.

00:05:59. Shit—how time flies when you’re having fun. Quickly, I folded the reports and thrust ’em into my jacket pocket. I went through the case to be sure he wasn’t hiding any more classified material. He wasn’t—but I removed the rest of the letters and memos and Post-it notes, which were in English and French and Cyrillic and Azeri and Armenian and what looked like Farsi—just to be on the safe side.

I closed the now-empty briefcase and slipped it back under the desk. If what I’d just done didn’t rattle the Sarkesian teacup, nothing would. Nobody likes to be burgled. Especially folks like Steve-o. Especially when what’s been purloined is valuable information that he probably had a hard time obtaining in the first place.

But, just to make sure he knew who’d done the deed, I took a sheet of that thick Cartier letterhead from the credenza, grabbed a pen, and scrawled, “Yo, Sirzhik, FYVM,” and left it dead center on his desktop. I hoped he’d find some significance in the “dead” part of the positioning.

00:06:34: I eased the door shut and replaced the hinge pins, snuck back down the hallway, went out onto the balcony, down the ivy, back into the head, and emerged from the head at 00:07:24. To be honest, it wasn’t as good a time as I could have managed ten years ago, but it was still pretty fuckin’ respectable for a guy with as many dings, nicks, dents, and dimples as I have on my fenders.

Avi’s, Mikki’s, and Ashley’s eyes all went wide as I crossed the crowded room toward them, the crowd parting for me as I proceeded. Maybe it was the blood, egg, and caviar on my shirtfront; maybe it was the knee-shredded, grass-stained trousers. Maybe it was—well, it didn’t matter. I draped one arm around Avi’s shoulder, and the other around Ashley’s, and whispered a nutshell sit-rep.

Major Evans was undiplomatically direct: “Holy shit,” she said, drawing a stare or two.

Avi Ben Gal betrayed nothing. He looked up at me, and mouthed, “Can you let me have the non-American documents?”

I thought about it. Here is the Rogue’s most basic rule of intelligence gathering:
NEVER GIVE UP AN ORIGINAL DOCUMENT, EVEN TO YOUR BEST FRIEND.
Especially if it is the only copy. “What about I make you some Xeroxes tomorrow?”

“No problem.” The Israeli shrugged. “But the sooner the better.” He paused, then put his hand in the small of his wife’s back and nudged her toward the door.
“Yalla,
Mikki, let’s go home.
Hava na-mova.”

Avi and Mikki took point. Ashley and I followed. Across the room, Steve Sarkesian stood, his mannequinlike wife draped on his arm, deep in conversation with Ali Sherafi. Still, he took note of us—and of
the way I was comporting myself, which is to say, normally. It was immediately apparent by the look on his face that he realized he’d been had once again—good—and it was a look that told me he didn’t like being had. Didn’t like it at all.

I guess I was in one of my stop-me-before-I-kill-again moods, because as I passed in front of him, I couldn’t resist demurely tapping atop the inside breast pocket of my messy blazer, where the slight bulge of papers gave me a Roguishly D-cup appearance. Then I discreetly pointed toward the ceiling with my gnarled index finger, indicating where I’d just been playing. Then I tossed him the bird, just so he’d know he was number one with me.

The color drained from his face. His expression turned absolutely homicidal. There’s no other way to describe it. Believe me, I know homicidal, and there was murder in Steve Sarkesian’s eyes. He took two steps in our direction. But there was nothing he could do, not with this crowd of whoses and vhatses milling around. Not without betraying the real Steve Sarkesian. The asshole who hangs out with tangos and stone killers. And he was too much of a pro for that. I could see him trying to stabilize: to steady and brace himself so he would remain outwardly cool. It took a lot of effort, but he finally brought himself under control. Still, the look he gave me as we went through the door told me that this episode wasn’t over. Not yet. And not by a long shot.

T
HAT LONG SHOT CAME AT
0840
THE FOLLOWING
morning. I heard it—a dull explosion that reverbed the window of my hotel room as I was using the secure satellite phone and scrambler fax to transmit both a report of my activities and the top secret documents I’d taken from Steve Sarkesian’s briefcase back to General Crocker. As soon as I’d gotten in after Ashley’d dropped me off, I’d called him at Quarters Six back in Washington to tell him what I had discovered. Fortunately, he was more pissed at my news about finding the big DIQ
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than he was upset with me for causing what Ambassador Madison had already called his office to describe as a damaging diplomatic incident involving a drunken and out-of-control U.S. Naval officer, i.e.,
moi.

The Chairman groaned. Yes, friends, he actually groaned. Then he sighed. I’d never heard him do either before. “You really took the documents?” he asked, as if he wanted to hear a different answer.

I told him once again that I had—and that I had ’em in my possession.

My voice was followed by a long and uncomfortable period of silence. Then General Crocker instructed me to give him a full report on the situation. He wanted my read on the situation regarding the relationship between Ali Sherafi, Oleg Lapinov, and Stephen Sarkesian. He wanted the full details about what I’d done, and precisely how I’d done it. “I want the whole damn nine yards, and not a detail spared” is the way he put it to me. When I’d finished, I was to roll my big DIQ, the Russkie document, the handwritten memo, the Sirzhik Foundation draft, and my report into the fax machine and send ’em directly to the secure comms shack in his office, where he’d see them first thing in the morning.

It had taken me the rest of the night to accomplish what the Chairman had asked for. I looked away from the fax at the sound of the dull thud. Even with the air-conditioning going, I knew I was listening to the impact of a sizable chunk of high explosive. Five seconds later, the hotel building itself shuddered slightly from the aftershock. I went to the window and peered out. It was a great view—looking southwest, with the center of the city fanned out in front of me. The room was on the ninth floor—high enough to see much of the skyline. In the hazy distance, was the light blue water of the Caspian.

Off to my left, at about ten thirty, I saw a thick plume of dirty black rising into the morning sky, coming from the part of old Baku that houses many of the city’s diplomatic compounds and residences. The nasty color of the smoke confirmed for me that what I’d just heard was high explosive. The pattern and distribution—after all, this was Baku and there was no wind, just heat—was similar to the initial aftermath of car bombs I’ve
seen in Lebanon, Northern Ireland, and Turkey, to name a few of the sites where Mister Murphy has steered me to the wrong place, at the wrong time.

As an aside, let me state for the record that I detest fucking car bombs. They’re too goddam random. Oh, there are occasions when I’ve used ’em, like the time I was able to vaporize Islamic Jihad’s master bomb-maker in the late 1980s as he made his way north on a little street called Farid Trad, just past the old UNESCO compound in Beirut. Sometimes, they’re the only way to hit a target and make it look like it was a local job, not a U.S. Navy SEAL hit. But the problem with car bombs is that they cause a lot of what the Pentagon likes to call collateral damage, i.e., innocent (or at least not guilty) civilians. In Beirut, for example, I killed my intended target. But in the process, sixteen other folks were vaporized, too—a real nasty case of wp/wt.
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But then, war itself is a messy business. It’s not precise. You can’t wage war by taking polls, or worrying about “collateral damage,” because if you do, you will end up getting a lot more of your own people killed—and making fewer of the enemy into corpses. You have to make the moral choice in war that killing some enemy civilians, or bystanders, or poor folks who are in the wrong place at the wrong time is a lesser evil, because you have decimated your target and saved a lot of other lives in doing so. Perfect? Far from it. But it is a moral choice I, for one, can—and do—live with.