From Filth & Mud (8 page)

As expected, Jacob was called into the XPS main office in Fairfax, Virginia, a few weeks after his conversation with John. Jacob entered the lobby of the mostly empty office building that housed XPS headquarters. The building was indistinguishable from almost every other building in the county. Its utilitarian architecture, standard, cookie-cutter fair was designed by its architects to meet the requirements of the government contracts that funded it. The building sat low amongst the surrounding oaks and pines, a humble three stories. Its few windows provided no natural lighting for its inhabitants. Its concrete walls absorbed the dim sunlight of the brisk October morning. The sole source of light that emanated from the edifice shone through the lobby’s sliding glass double-doors. XPS had recently purchased the building for a song when a certain infamous private security firm had decided that government work was no longer as hospitable as they were accustomed and high-tailed it out of the country, or so he’d heard from John. XPS corporate leadership was smart. Clients never saw this building, which unlike the K-street office, revealed how frugally XPS was run. XPS catered to its clients in its regional offices, mostly short-term, leased suites in high-rise buildings in Boston, New York, D.C., L.A., and they were about to open up another one in Chicago. There was even talk about an expansion to London and possibly Hong Kong.

Jacob checked in with Mary, the receptionist. He had a meeting with Jack Stanton, the Director of the Special Services Division. John had informed him that Stanton was a hard-ass who ran the division as a military unit. He was told to play the part. Jacob sat rigidly against the low-backed, modern, office-style, black leather couch. He was a perfect picture of what a few months at Parris Island could do to a person’s posture even years removed.

Another receptionist emerged from behind a doorway, carrying a serving tray with coffee. She smiled politely and handed him a steaming mug.

“Black, just how you like it.”

Jacob paused, his eyes betrayed his surprise.

“Oh, Mr. Baez informed us that you were coming.”

Jacob smirked back, “Is there any string that man can’t pull?”

“I take it he’s a good friend, an old Marine Corps friend?”

“Yes we go back quite a while.”

Jacob introduced himself extending his hand. The receptionist’s grip was unexpectedly firm.

“Hello Mr. Harrington. I’m Jacqueline Stanton. You can call me Jak.”

Jacob’s eyes again betrayed his surprise.

“It’s okay, Mr. Harrington; I get that all the time. Follow me and bring your coffee too! We have plenty to discuss.”

Jak extended her right arm showing Jacob the way, her left arm almost imperceptibly secured the small of his back. There was nothing about Jak that did not exude steady, steely power. Jacob had noticed how her neck was only slightly smaller than her rather squared-off, powerful lower jaw. Her neck based out onto broad, thick, muscular, bronzed shoulders that were framed by a demi-cut black dress that V’d down to an undoubtedly, equally rock-hard midsection. Her torso flared out to a powerful set of glutes, built by thousands of deep, heavy-weighted squats. Jak’s thighs and calves would have given Serena Williams a fit of jealousy. Her powerful body, however imposing, and beautiful as it was, paled in comparison to her bottomless, midnight-shaded eyes that held his gaze long after it was appropriate.

The pair marched down the hallway from where she had emerged and continued down a long, unadorned corridor. Jak stopped in front of a bank of elevators and waved her palm in front of a scanner. The doors of the elevator in front of them swooshed open, and Jak invited Jacob aboard.

“My office is a couple of floors up.”

“Cool Jedi trick.” Jacob probed.

“You won’t believe how cool it actually is! It’s an extremely sensitive camera that tracks all of the biometric features in my palm, from my fingerprints on down to my palm print, and the unique blood flow pattern in the capillaries at the surface of my skin.” Jak raised her palm to demonstrate.

“Seems like overkill, no?”

“We take our security incredibly seriously in my division.” Her stern face left no doubts about her veracity.

“You missed the other part, Mr. Harrington. The camera above the door simultaneously tracks my face and processes it against its database. Most facial recognition software track 20 to 30 nodal points, or unique features, on a person’s face. Our system tracks up to 80 nodal points. Both the hand and the face scans are instantly coded as a unique data set, and a computer insures that this data set matches our database for people who are allowed access to this section of the building and other more sensitive sections. Both datasets must match simultaneously to gain entry.”

They disembarked on the third floor and headed down a series of small corridors toward the outer part of the building. They walked past a slew of empty cubicles and blacked-out computer monitors on their way.

“Here we are.”

Jak waved her palm at another scanning device located outside of her office door. It opened with the audible chirp of an alarm and the heavy thump of an electronic deadbolt.

“Nice security, but I don’t see many people around to secure it from.” His attempt at levity went unappreciated.

Jak pushed the door open and revealed a nicely sized office within. The room was a good 500 square feet or so, one of the only rooms in the building with a window. It was neatly adorned with a simple yet chic desk and a few display monitors sat against the far wall. There were a couple of mostly bare shelves. A diploma from USC hung above one.

“History and English,” she interrupted his wandering eye.

“I was just admiring…a Trojan. I’m a Terrapin myself.”

“What’s that?”

“A sort of sea-turtle, never mind.”

“So Mr. Harrington, John was very persistent. He called a few times requesting that we give you a shot in Special Services Division.”

“Yes. I was intrigue
d
—
”

“Let me stop you there,” Jak interjected with a raised palm. She was the controlling type, never letting her guard down, maintaining her power status at all times.

“I know Personnel Security can be boring. Let’s cut to the chase. You want to see a little more excitement? Well you’ll find it here.”

“I just want a change of scenery once in a while.”

“That, I can do. We deal with our clients’ most sensitive assets. We provide security from the minute we get a call until the minute we receive confirmation of successful delivery. We break the assignment up into four stages, the preparation reconnaissance stage, the reception stage, the transportation stage, and the delivery. We run a professional operation here. Everyone on the team is prior military. I like it that way. All the guys are familiar with the chain of command. Orders are given and followed. I am sure that you are okay with that.” Her eyes searched Jacob’s for the slightest bit of hesitation. There was none.

Jak continued, “We require our teams to undergo field evaluations prior to sending them out on assignment. You will be assigned to a team. The team just lost a member due to a long overdue retirement. The team members are relatively new to the company so we are looking for a person who can step up and become team lead.” Her eyes explored his again.

“Ms. Stanton, I am only interested in picking up a job here or there and trying it out. I like my schedule quiet like it is now.”

“We do require a time commitment and full separation from the Personnel Division,” she softened her tone ever so slightly and leaned in as if to share a secret. She was also a master manipulator. Jacob obliged and leaned in as well. “But something tells me that you are going to enjoy your new line of work, Jacob.” She smiled and in that smile he was reminded of John.

Jak moved toward her desk, waved her palm over another scanning device that chirped in approval. A recessed wall panel behind the desk hummed in response and revealed a small armory. Jak pulled a pistol off of a display hook, removed its magazine, and cycled through its operation with expert skill.

“There are some perks that come with this assignment Jacob,” she said as she admired the matte-black, semi-automatic H&K Tactical, .45ACP pistol. “XPS will issue you with your choice of sidearm, rifle or something bigger if required. If we don’t have it in the arsenal you can expense your purchase. You’ll just have to bring your purchase into our facility to have our armorers retrofit it. But believe me Jacob we have quite an extensive arsenal you will be hard-pressed to want something that we don’t already have.”

“Retrofit it? What do you mean by that?”

“Our company is very particular about keeping tabs on all of its contractors and property, which include firearms and ammunition, tax considerations, of course. We also like to add another layer of safety when it comes to our operations. Each firearm is retrofitted with a small chip and interlock mechanism that does not allow the firearm to be fired by anybody other than the designated contractor. Are you familiar with those personal fitness bracelets that are all the craze?” Jak pointed toward a small black band that was tightly clasped around her wrist.

“This little bracelet tracks all of your biometric activity, including heart rate, blood pressure, GPS location to within a centimeter, speed, body and atmospheric temperature, rate of sweat, and the amount of electrolytes that you are losing through your skin. It also acts as the safety for this particular pistol.” She suddenly took aim at Jacob and pulled the trigger. The hammer of the large pistol slapped home with an audible click as Jacob recoiled.

Jak walked back to the display, removed the magazine from the pistol, and stored it and the pistol in a sleek metallic black case. “Here you go Jacob. Everyone gets one of these as standard issue. Are you familiar with its operation? If not, you will be able to train with it amply in our Roanoke facility, or you can exchange it there for whatever you prefer. When can you report down there for training? We would prefer as soon as possible given our current high operational tempo.”

Jacob accepted the case and responded that he would need a week to prepare his affairs. He walked out of the building with his decision made. Now all he had to do was convince Sarah that he was not making the biggest mistake of his life. He wondered how much he would tell her. He would surely leave out the part about his new boss’ twisted sense of humor.

Alexi Filipovic waited in the chilling cold, burying his mouth and nose into the neck of his red, tracksuit jacket. His frostbitten lips scraped against the fabric, sending agony along the crack that split his lip. He could not take this crap anymore. He was thirty-five years old, and he should have earned himself a warm, dry desk by now, but such was his life. This was Kiev. He was on assignment. He was PRYAMO.

PRYAMO was the elite, some would say fundamentalist, soviet-light remnant of the KGB, which had been kept alive and controlled by hardline holdovers of the old-guard KGB. Its members did not
officially
work for PRYAMO because it did not
officially
exist. No one had heard of it outside of the membership. But for a few high-level officials at the Kremlin, no one was aware of its existence, and even then, most of what was known was deliberate misinformation. Internet conspiracy theorists tied them to all manner of covert operations such as the apartment building bombings that occurred in Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999. Others tied them to 9/11. Some believed them to be the personal hit squad of the Russian President, himself a former KGB operative. The stories made for good entertainment, and he and his comrades would sometimes troll the conspiracy websites for laughs.

Alexi was convinced that the American and European intelligence services were not aware of PRYAMO’s existence either, since they were preoccupied with fighting Arab terrorists. The terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, London, and Paris had forced the West to turn their attention to the Middle East and that is where they had concentrated their intelligence efforts. The West had become overly reliant on signals intelligence and technology. The NSA, CIA, FBI, MI6, and MI5 were given near infinite budgets. The Americans had spent the most, hundreds of billions of dollars, on satellites, computers, networks, software, but very few dollars on what mattered most: trained operatives. Operatives were the kind of people who could gather real intelligence, say over a conversation and a drink, or facilitated by the fists of the right man, or the ass of the right woman.

PRYAMO was old-fashioned this way. It was less novi-ruski and more Sovietski. It knew how to be effective while operating from the shadows. It recruited wisely. PRYAMO did not bother with graduates from the most prestigious military schools or universities. People like that were primadonas, too interested in attaining political and financial power. They were also easily turned by western intelligence agencies. The FSB had recently been forced into a rash of house-cleaning events as it began to suspect that some of its elite officers and agents had been leaking information to the West. Beijing had also been infiltrated. Needless to say PRYAMO could not afford to make the same mistakes. PRYAMO relied on the talents of hard-nosed Russian youths who had grown up on the streets of poor, tough neighborhoods, which is why many were orphans. These were kids who listened to hip hop, drank too much, smoked weed regularly, dabbled in harder, illicit drugs, partied, and lived lifestyles not typical of your usual successful novi-ruski. They would never attend university and their only chance for a modicum of success would be to make it in the Krasnya Army, or if they wanted to play it less straight, the Troika syndicates were always hiring.

Alexi waited, withering in the cold wind which whipped up the icy chips of snow that had fallen a few hours before. He glanced at his watch. Dima was late. Sasha would be arriving in a few minutes, and he had to make sure to make the rendezvous. Sasha was too heavy to carry alone, and the cold had cramped his muscles to the point where he was unsure if he had the strength to make the swift kill if he needed to do it out in the open. Alexi rarely doubted his ability to finish a man. He had won the bronze medal in the 90kg Russian Army Sambo Championships when he was twenty-four, and he was proficient at throwing his opponents on their heads. Today, accounting for the biting cold, the layers that constricted his movement, and the layers that Sasha would likely be wearing, he just

did not want to take any chances.
 

“Dima, you son of a bitch,” he muttered into his gloved hands as he blew warmth into them. Alexi had been circling the park for the last couple of hours, on foot, looking for his partner, Dima, a young twenty-something agent, who like Alexi a decade earlier was now working his way into the field. Alexi regarded him as a younger brother. Alexi had lost his younger brother, Semyon, to the streets of Moscow when he was just about Dima’s age. Semyon and Dima shared similar personalities. Both were quiet, reserved, hated attention, and loved to drink. The problem was that Semyon had a schizophrenic personality disorder that combined with hard-liquor and methamphetamines made for terribly volatile experiences. Alexi had not seen or heard from Semyon, since the start of the Russian winter, which worried him greatly when he allowed himself to think about it. Moscow was not a particularly hospitable place to be if you happened to be a homeless drunk, let alone a mentally ill one.

Alexi pushed the thought into its place and looked at his watch again. It was almost 5 p.m. The cold was increasingly unbearable. The sky darkened with gray, snow-thickened clouds. Alexi walked back toward a stone archway that stood near the far entrance of the park. He hoped that it would provide some shelter from the howling wind and the coming snow. As he approached the archway, he could see two figures entering the archway from the opposite direction. The first figure was quite corpulent and walked with a lumbering gate, the second much smaller with chopped strides. It had to be Dima and Sasha. Finally!

The archway would be a good place to question Sasha and dispatch him if need be. Alexi walked with stiffened resolve as he closed the distance with the two figures, his muscles and sinews warmed by the flow of adrenaline. His eyes were fixated on the figures, now about a couple of hundred meters away. They disappeared in the shadow of the tunneled archway. As he broke the threshold of the archway, Alexi saw the small figure drop out of sight behind the larger figure. A sudden scream echoed in the archway and shrilled above the howling wind. Alexi broke into a full sprint. The waning daylight did not pierce into the pitch black tunnel but he ran headlong toward the screams anyway.

The commotion continued as screams now bellowed from a second, familiar voice, Dima’s.

“Die, you fat bastard,” Dima screamed as he struggled to hold onto his garrote, which was looped around the first figure’s neck. The large figure stood suddenly, silhouetted against the light entering from the far end of the tunnel, and ran backwards, carrying Dima on his back. It slammed and pinned Dima against the archway’s stone wall. Alexi heard a dull thud, and what sounded like the snap of a crisp carrot that was undoubtedly the sound of a human skull cracking. Dima went limp instantly. His body flopped like a ragdoll onto the cobblestone path.

Alexi growled in anger, closing the distance toward the large figure in a full sprint. Then violence erupted. He drove his shoulder into Sasha’s chest with all of his momentum as he left his feet in a flying tackle. The impact nearly concussed him and separated his right shoulder, but the fury of the force had done its job. Sasha folded into his chest and recoiled back with the grace of a three-hundred-pound tuna flopping onto the deck of a commercial fishing boat. The collision drove the pair onto the frozen cobblestones. He attempted to lift his right arm to deliver blows to his fallen foe, but the sharp pain of his separated shoulder immobilized his arm. The follow-on attack was unnecessary. Sasha wasn’t moving. Alexi cleared the stars out of his eyes, looked down at Sasha, and the bulging vertebrae pushing up against the skin of his neck. His dimmed eyes looked up toward nothingness.

Alexi turned his attention to Dima. He stumbled toward his partner who lay moaning a few feet away against the wall of the archway. He held Dima’s head in his hands as he instructed his still not fully conscious partner to stop moving.

“You idiot. Look what you’ve done. You’ve gone and almost killed yourself, almost knocked me out, and you’ve definitely killed Sasha,” he said as he pried free a loose icicle that was hanging between two arch stones and hurled it angrily at the fresh fallen corpse. “What the hell were you doing?”

Dima mumbled a few curses before he gave his reasoning. “I thought it was a good idea at the time!” The two of them chuckled momentarily before they winced in pain. This was sure to be a total nightmare of a report to write and their injuries would take a lot of vodka to forget. As he and Dima regained what was left of their faculties, they walked over to Sasha’s immense body, sprawled out on the stone pathway. He was too large to move in their compromised mental and physical state. Alexi pulled the loose garrote away from Sasha’s neck, checking it for any remaining ligature marks that would be a telltale sign of a homicide. Thankfully there were none. Alexi turned to Dima, and pushed the garrote into his chest.

“Next time make sure you loop it around the neck and not the fucking coat collar! At least your stupidity proved useful this time. He just looks like he came down here for an ill-advised stroll, slipped, fell, and broke his fat neck.” Dima nodded sheepishly while he pawed at the back of his skull. Alexi grabbed his partner’s head and spun him around for a quick diagnosis. There was some blood coming from his scalp but it was bright red and superficial, though he definitely required stitches. “I’ll put the stitches in when we get back.”

“Suka! Sukin syn,” Dima shouted as he whirled around and soccer-kicked Sasha’s head with his boots. The dead man’s head contorted at the successive impacts as the badly damaged vertebrae crunched from the force.

“Stop fucking around with the man and sit down before you slip on the ice. Okay, let’s take a thorough look around and make sure there is nothing that we are leaving behind. Check your pockets to see if you’ve lost anything. Remember, leave no trace that you were here. If you see something, even if you don’t think it’s yours, but it looks out of place here, just take it with you. It’s always better to clean unnecessary shit than it is to leave anything behind,” Alexi instructed. The pair spent a few minutes searching the vicinity of the archway and tunnel for anything that could lead back to them.

Alexi then searched Sasha’s body as Dima stood watch. “Make sure that you rummage through the wallet and take whatever cash is there. Throw the rest of the wallet away from the body in a visible place to ensure that it is found. Also take any jewelry or valuables. If he has a nice belt or shoes take those, too. Don’t leave anything of value behind. You want to make it look like either a brutal robbery occurred or that the body was scavenged by desperate homeless people. Either way, this will disrupt the integrity of the scene and will send the police chasing false leads.” Dima nodded. He was as quick a learner as he was reckless.

Satisfied with their work, Alexi and Dima departed in different directions, exiting the park in circuitous routes to ensure that no one had seen or followed them. Alexi hailed a taxicab at the park’s edge and headed toward his hotel. He would checkout as soon as he arrived and be at the Kiev International Airport an hour later. His flight to Minsk, Belarus would depart shortly thereafter. Once in Minsk, Alexi would board a small, private jet owned by PRYAMO and fly to Moscow, where he would be reunited with his partner.