Extreme Faction (13 page)

Ricardo Garcia was in a back room with the Cypriot, asking questions and trying to soften him for what he knew would be an interesting interrogation. At least from what he had heard about Nelsen in a few days. It didn't take long for rumors to spread.

Two former DEA agents, who now worked in the criminal intervention department of the CIA, and also two former FBI special agents, working in that same department, stood around the periphery of the main room, their guns hanging prominently from leather holsters under their arms. In the old days, it would have been cooperation by three agencies that none of them had seen before. Now all six of the men were part of the CIA. Nelsen didn't like it one bit, even though he was in charge.

The three young seamen had been separated and interrogated. They spoke very little English, and only one of the CIA officers, Nelsen, could understand the Turkish. Nelsen spoke Turkish, Arabic, Spanish and Italian. None of the seamen knew a thing, Nelsen was sure. Answers from them had come easy, with only a few initial smacks across the head. They had been hired in Famagusta, Cyprus late one night after getting drunk with the captain, who had continued to buy them drinks. The next morning they had found themselves below decks on the fishing boat, pitching heavily, as they steamed through the Mediterranean. They had all come to fear the captain, and knew they were stuck. He would have knocked them over the head and thrown them to the sharks if they had rebelled. They were unanimous on that point.

Garcia pulled the Cypriot captain into the room, and strapped him to a wooden chair with leather belts. The remaining agents surrounded him to intimidate him. Nelsen was sure the captain knew something. Nelsen's men had found an abandoned skiff five miles up the coast from Novillero. There were four sets of footprints in the sand leading to truck tracks. Someone had carried something heavy, since their footprints were so deep, and their steps shifted sideways at short intervals.

Nelsen had asked Langley to run the captain's name through the Agency database. Just a few minutes ago he received a fax with the information. He sat across the small room now reading the curled pages.

The captain was really Atik Aziz. The name he had given was one of many aliases. He was fifty-two. Had been a captain in the Turkish marines when he took part in the invasion of Northern Cyprus in 1974. He had continued to fight there, helping set up an independent state through brutal suppression of anyone who opposed him. When the independent Turkish Cypriot government became more moderate over ten years ago, Aziz set out on his own to make his fortune. But by then he had left behind more bodies than any of his peers. Old habits were hard to break, Nelsen noticed in the report. Aziz was used by the highest bidder to ferry terrorists from Lebanon to strike the Israeli coast. He ran arms for the Palestinians from Syria. Aziz was a new-age pirate, and he looked the part with long, disheveled black hair, streaked with gray, and his scruffy face. His jeans and cotton jacket were frazzled, and his deck boots scuffed beyond repair. But more than the external was wrong with this man. He seemed to have this knowing radiance that emerged from a turned up smirk that exposed crooked yellow teeth. Nelsen would soon wipe that from him.

Nelsen rose from the wooden chair across the room and ripped off his jacket. His thick muscles rippled through his T-shirt as he adjusted his pants on his hips and checked for his 9mm under his left arm. He slowly approached the Cypriot, his eyes centered directly on the pirate's ugly scowl. He knew how to play the game. Intimidation. Make the guy feel like his next breath depended on him.

Stopping a few feet from the Cypriot, Nelsen stretched his six-four frame, and then cracked his knuckles. He was a tall, imposing figure.

Rain smashed against the roof overhead.

“Where's the weapon, Aziz?” Nelsen asked with a deep snarl. He wasn't only big, but he could act with the best of them. Not even agents who knew him could tell if he was really pissed off, or simply playing the game.

The Cypriot gave him a bewildered look, as if he didn't understand English.

Nelsen looked at his partner, Garcia, who shrugged. Nelsen grabbed the man's hair, raising him and the chair from the ground, the leather straps cinched tightly across his chest. The man screamed. Nelsen dropped him and then pinched and twisted his left ear.

“Listen you fucking little terrorist,” Nelsen said in Turkish. “I'll start ripping pieces from your body if you don't start talking. I want to know who hired you? Who has the weapon? Where's the weapon now? And what these men plan on doing with the weapon.”

There was pain on the Cypriot's face as sweat appeared on his forehead. “I don't know what you're talking about,” the man answered in broken English.

Nelsen tightened his jaw. “So, the briefing was right. You do speak English.”

“Who are you?” the man asked.

Nelsen let the man's ear go, and then slapped him across the head. “I ask the questions, fuckhead.” He paused to let Aziz feel the pain. “Now. Which question do you want to take first? How about, where's the weapon?”

The man shook his head. “I don't know.”

Nelsen smacked him again. “Wrong answer. Try again.”

The man looked at Nelsen sideways with his eyes, as if to say that he'd kill him if he got the chance. “I was never told that. That was not my job.”

“And what was your job, exactly?”

“Delivery,” the Cypriot said softly.

“I believe that,” Nelsen said. “You've done such a good job for the Syrians in the past. Did the Syrians hire you?”

The man shook his head swiftly. “I don't know.”

“Bullshit! You don't know who wired a hundred thousand dollars into two separate Swiss accounts?”

This riled Aziz. He shifted his eyes away quickly. Then, realizing he'd opened himself up, he slowly turned his gaze back to the American. “I never ask names. Deals are worked through middle men.”

“So you simply take the money and do as you're told.” Nelsen went to hit the man, and pulled up short. The man flinched backward. Nelsen smiled inside. He had been trained to intimidate through psychology, and his size had given him a great advantage.

The other officers in the room had been silent, their faces grave with concern. It was a carefully planned game, and they all knew the rules.

Nelsen pulled a pair of pliers from his back pocket. They were shiny and new with sharp teeth. He clamped them open and closed a few times to make sure they worked fine, then he slowly lowered them toward the man's crotch. He stopped for a moment six inches away from his penis, and imagined how it must have been shrinking to hide between the man's legs.

“I suppose you'd like to keep that one piece of equipment,” Nelsen said smiling.

The Cypriot shifted his eyes downward, the sweat on his forehead bubbling out. “Please, I don't know anything else,” he pleaded desperately.

Nelsen moved the pliers closer. “Give me the names of the men you picked up at Johnston Atoll.”

“I don't know them.”

“Bullshit! You spent seven days on the Pacific with those men, and you never caught their names?”

The man thought hard, keeping an eye on the pliers. “They only used single names,” he forced out.

“First or last names would be nice.”

Although there was a tape covering the entire interrogation, one of the former FBI agents pulled out a notebook and prepared to write.

“Go ahead,” Nelsen said.

The man shifted in his chair and looked around the room. “They'll kill me, you know.”

Nelsen knew that was a possibility, and didn't really give a shit. The man helped terrorists escape with over a hundred nerve gas bomblets. Maybe he deserved to die. “Let's hear the names.”

“Mahabad,” the man said slowly, deliberately, as if the words themselves would kill him. “Ragga. Baskale. Ruwanduz.”

Nelsen looked at the officer taking down the names, and he indicated he had them written down. Something wasn't right with the names. “What nationality? Are they Turks?”

The man didn't answer.

Nelsen clamped down on Aziz's trousers and started pulling upward. “Answer.”

“Various,” the man screeched in a higher pitch. “I didn't understand their language.”

He didn't understand, but he knew. Nelsen was sure. “Who were they?”

The man refused to answer.

Nelsen reached down deeper into the man's crotch, grabbed something soft, and clamped down lightly.

Aziz screamed. “They were Kurds. They were Kurds.”

Nelsen let up. “Kurds?” He thought for a moment. What in the hell were Kurds doing in the North Pacific? And now in Mexico? What did they want with the nerve gas? He had a feeling Aziz, the Cypriot, would remember a little more than he was telling, but it would take time to get the answers. Nelsen knew he had one advantage. He had softened him. Opened him up. Answers always came easier after that.

ODESSA, UKRAINE

Jake and Quinn had no problem finding the apartment where they suspected Petra Kovarik was staying. It was a tiny place off of Sverdlova Street, not far from the train station.

Quinn parked Tully's Volga against the curb, shut down the sputtering engine, and hesitated for a moment, looking up at the five-story brick building.

It was a hundred-year-old building that hadn't seen many improvements since it first opened. Jake guessed it might have been a decent address at one time, but time had decayed it like acid slowly dripping on metal.

Jake thought of similarities this building had to Petra's own apartment building. This time he hoped he had gotten there first. He had been beaten to Tvchenko's place, almost paying with his life, and someone had gotten to Petra's place first also. Both times he had been directed to the apartments by Tully O'Neill, and the timing couldn't have been worse. Well, that wasn't true. Someone could have set off the bomb at Tvchenko's a minute earlier.

Jake got out and headed up the stairs, with Quinn right behind him.

On the ride from the Odessa Polyklinik, Quinn had explained that Petra might be staying with Helena Yurichenko, a violinist with the Odessa Symphony Orchestra. She and Petra had been best friends while growing up in a small town outside of Kiev. Petra had gone on to the university to study bio-chemistry, and Helena had studied at the conservatory as a musician. Helena Yurichenko had lived in Odessa for nearly nine years. At first she had lived like a queen with the support of the great Soviet Union, but then came the split, and the money became more scarce. She was barely making it now, Jake could tell.

The inside of the building was in worse disrepair than the outside. Plaster was chipped from the walls in the corridor and the stairwell. The wooden railing needed varnish. It wouldn't take too much, but the place definitely needed a sprucing up.

Jake grabbed Quinn's arm, stopping him. “Hang on, Quinn. Let's take it easy. It seems like every apartment I've entered in Odessa, someone's tried to cut my stay short.”

“I don't think anyone knows about Helena,” Quinn said.

“If we do, someone else might.”

Quinn was thinking it over.

“By the way, how did you find out about Helena?”

Quinn started up the stairs, but Jake pulled him to a halt. “I want an answer,” Jake said.

“That's right. You're in charge.”

“You got a problem with that?”

“I read the message.”

“And?”

“It's bullshit. You're not even with the Agency.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Is that an order?” He whispered loudly.

“I think maybe I kicked you too hard yesterday,” Jake said. Or maybe not hard enough, he thought.

They stared each other down for a moment in the subdued light of the stairway.

“I finally remembered,” Quinn said. He let out a deep breath and shook his head. “I was such an idiot. A month ago, just after Petra came down from Kiev, I went to the symphony. Rimsky-Korsakov. The Russian Easter Overture. Anyway, I met Petra there. Just happened to sit next to her. She pointed out Helena to me. Said she knew her and had been friends with her since they were kids. She only told me her first name, and I didn't even remember that until this morning. I had to track down her address through the locals. I've got a few contacts.”

Jake considered this. “Great. Let's see what she knows.”

Jake stepped past Quinn up the stairs.

As they rounded the stairs from the second to the third floors, the sound of a violin echoed down to them. Getting closer, Jake felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle from the beauty of a soft Vivaldi concerto. The sound became louder as they reached room 302.

Quinn looked at Jake, as if wondering whether he should knock on the door and disturb such a luscious, dynamic tone. Jake couldn't imagine any neighbor complaining about the noise, for it was such a mesmerizing and overpowering sound.

When she stopped playing, Jake quickly knocked. He couldn't hear if someone had moved to answer the door, so he started to knock again, when the door opened a few inches, bared by a metal security stop.

Peering through the opening was a set of wide blue eyes against a pale face. Long straight hair swept down as far as Jake could see. She was staring at Jake, uncertain what to think of him. She held her violin bow in her right hand like a sword.

“What can I do for you?” she asked in Ukrainian. Her voice seemed to resonate and flow much like her violin.

“I'm Jake Adams, and this is Quinn Armstrong,” Jake said in Ukrainian. “We'd like to speak with Petra.”

She started to close the door.

“Wait,” Quinn jumped in. “Tell her Quinn is here. We are friends.”

She looked at Quinn now, as if she recognized the name finally. Her eyes switched back and forth nervously. “She is not well,” she said in English.