Dead fall, p.18
Dead Fall, page 18
On his sixteenth birthday, his mother died by suicide.
His father blamed him. He said that his mother had always felt inadequate and that having a child had only made her insecurities worse. She had developed what the doctors call postpartum depression and had never fully recovered.
Having a son who received terrible marks and showed so little promise had been an immense burden on her. According to his father, he was an embarrassment to their family. They couldn’t show their faces anywhere. In constant trouble at school and with the police, he made them ashamed. His mother had taken her life to finally be rid of the indignity of it all.
He knew his father had been lying. That it was his drinking and the subsequent beatings his mother had to endure that had worsened any depression she may have had, and that finally drove her to take her own life. His father was a horrific human being and even worse when drunk. He was also very large—too large for a boy of only sixteen to deal with. Until one night, when he had passed out on the toilet after consuming two bottles of vodka, which happened a couple of times a year, and the opportunity presented itself.
The decision had not been hard. He had been fantasizing about murdering his father for as long as he could remember. The question was not what to do, but what not to do.
He had wanted to pick up a hammer and to take out every ounce of his rage. He had wanted to make the man pay for all the pain he and his mother had suffered.
But even at sixteen, he had been smart enough to know that if it looked like a murder, especially a violent act of passion, all suspicion would fall on him. Therefore, it had to look like an accident.
The benefit of spending years fantasizing about killing your father was that you tried countless scenarios on for size in your mind. He had done his homework and knew which kinds of murders the police solved, which went unsolved, and what types they didn’t even bother investigating. His plan was to have his father’s death fall into the very last category. Knowing that the man was dead and that he had caused it would be incredibly unsatisfying, but it would have to be enough.
Not knowing how long his father would remain passed out, he had needed to act quickly.
He had a friend whose family had a food packaging facility. Often, they would sneak into the warehouse and steal blocks of dry ice to use to make fog at parties. He knew how to get inside, exactly where it was kept, and how to get precisely the right amount back to his apartment without anyone knowing.
After placing it in the bathroom sink, he sealed the air vent and the bathroom door. When he returned to check on his father two hours later, the man was dead.
Technically, he had died from hypercapnia—a buildup of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream that pushes out the oxygen—brought about by the gas given off as the dry ice melted.
The police had chalked it up to a fat guy who’d had too much to drink and ended up choking himself to death after he had passed out. No obvious signs of foul play meant no investigation. The boy was sent to live with an aunt in another city.
His problems at school and with the police only continued to grow. He was a bully, which extended well beyond the schoolyard.
A growth spurt had kicked in. He had inherited his father’s large frame, though not yet the man’s paunch. Not satisfied with simply terrorizing his schoolmates, he had begun strong-arming shop owners, taking things and refusing to pay. The police delivered his aunt an ultimatum—either the young thug cleaned up his act, or they planned to send him off to a youth detention facility.
A month later, he had run away from his aunt’s home and, falsifying his age, had joined the Russian military.
For a time, the Army felt like the perfect place for him. He was a brute who even intimidated some of his superiors. His aggression and coldheartedness were encouraged. He built his body to an impressive size through weight lifting and by injecting himself with steroids and human growth hormone.
He fought in underground, no-holds-barred fight competitions on the weekends and was unstoppable.
But as his body and his impressive list of wins continued to grow, so too did his ego. He had believed himself untouchable. Right up until the extremely toxic relationship he was in crossed over into abhorrent physical abuse.
The young woman had been keeping the relationship secret from her parents, especially her father—the base commander. When her nose and jaw were broken there were no more secrets.
Her father had had the boyfriend beaten with bats and lead pipes. He was kept in solitary confinement and given the bare minimum of medical care until he could walk. Then, in the middle of winter, he was dishonorably discharged and thrown off the base in only his underwear—no money, no ID, no jacket, no shoes, no socks, nothing.
Between his still incompletely healed injuries and a crippling case of hypothermia, he had almost died. But for an old farmer who had seen him collapse into a snowbank along the road, he would have.
Unable to lift the man, the farmer had used his tractor to drag him back to his barn, where he and his wife had tended to him. It took a full two months to recover.
When he was ready to leave, he did so in the middle of the night, having helped himself to the old couple’s car, a firearm, and a tea tin in which they had hidden their emergency savings. He never said good-bye. He never thanked them. They were disposable to him.
He spent a year beating around, working odd jobs, fighting in bouts when he could find them, drinking, abusing women, and being an all-around asshole, until he started hearing rumors about a new, clandestine paramilitary organization called the Wagner Group.
Wagner was looking for men with prior military experience. Even better, they were not averse to accepting men who had been dishonorably discharged.
Making his way to St. Petersburg, he identified and then mercilessly harassed a recruiter until he received an interview. As it turned out, the recruiter had also done some no-holds-barred fighting and put in a good word. Within a week, he had been hired.
From that point forward, he saw action in multiple civil wars, including Mali, Libya, Syria, and the Central African Republic.
As a member of Peshkov’s private army, or the “little green men,” as they became known, he’d also spent a lot of time waging war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Once Peshkov had decided that his annexation of the east wasn’t enough and that he intended to take the entire country, the man—now an incredibly seasoned mercenary—had been called to battle yet again.
The Colonel, as his men called him, had learned to love war. He loved it more than anything he had ever loved in his life. The power. The destruction. The pain. The pleasures. It was lived at full volume, in full vivid color, at its most brutal and intense. One was never as alive as when one was at war.
This most recent war, however, had taken a heavy toll. In his decades of combat, he had never seen anything like it. For every Ukrainian that was killed, the Ukrainians killed two Russians. Both the Russian Army and Wagner had run out of fresh recruits, which was why the Colonel had come up with the idea for his unit of Ravens.
The way Wagner had chosen to use the men had angered him. Instead of taking the time and expense to properly train and equip them so that they could strategically maneuver and leverage opportunities on the battlefield, they were thrown at fortified Ukrainian positions in high-attrition human waves.
He understood that because they had come from the worst prisons and mental asylums, Wagner had considered them to be expendable and nothing more than cannon fodder. But that wasn’t how you won wars. That was how you lost them. Eventually there’d be no more meat to feed into the grinder.
The writing was on the wall. No matter what happened, the policy wasn’t going to change. The elites back in Moscow and St. Petersburg had their minds made up. With that being the case, the Colonel knew that he needed to make his mind up, too.
It wasn’t easy. After losing his boyhood home, he had gone on to lose his home in the Russian Army. Now he was weighing whether or not to leave Wagner, which had been his home longer than anything else. But then the opportunity of a lifetime had dropped into his lap.
He and his Ravens had been involved in a ferocious, three-day battle with Ukrainian forces. They had no food or water and were almost out of ammunition.
Moving to a more defensible position, they had come across a small, extremely well-equipped detachment of Russian Army soldiers. Certainly they could share some of their supplies to help his beleaguered Ravens achieve their objective and secure the entire sector.
But the soldiers were rude and arrogant. They claimed to be on a much more important assignment. Not one ration nor one bottle of water would be shared with the Wagner mercenaries.
There was something odd about these men. They were not down-and-dirty soldiers. From their uniforms to their hands, they were too clean; several of them too soft.
Many of the Ravens were, by nature, unstable. Under even the best of situations, they could be difficult to control. The tone and posture of the recalcitrant soldiers pissed them off. Things got very heated, very quickly.
For his part, the Colonel liked what he was seeing. His men were asserting their dominance. The Russian Army soldiers had been given a chance to be cooperative and they had chosen not to be. Now the Ravens were no longer asking for help. They were going to take what they needed. And once the violence switch had been flipped, things escalated exponentially. The bloodbath happened so fast, the soldiers didn’t even know what had hit them.
By the time the gunfire had subsided, the Colonel was already sitting on the hood and helping himself to food and water from one of the officers’ vehicles. There would be some work to do, dressing up the scene to look like an ambush by the Ukrainians, but he was confident that it could all be taken care of, and they could be on their way within the hour.
He was taking a long pull of water when one of his closest subordinates approached.
“You should see this,” the man said, holding out an accordion file he had removed from one of the other vehicles.
“What is it?”
“The details of their assignment.”
Setting down the water bottle, he motioned for the man to hand him the file. The first thing he pulled out was a map. More specifically, it was a map of the Kharkiv region. On it, different locations had been numbered and marked. None of it made any sense until, in another pocket, he found a list, complete with descriptions that corresponded to the numbers. These men weren’t soldiers after all.
They were looters. Professional looters. In fact, they were treasure hunters sent by the Kremlin to scoop up some of Ukraine’s most valuable and culturally significant pieces of art.
In his hands, the Colonel was holding a treasure map. He knew nothing about art, but that didn’t bother him. He knew people who knew people. If he could get his hands on any of the items on the list, much less all of them, the battle would be half won. He could find buyers or, at the very least, someone to act as a middleman, a seller.
It was an incredible stroke of good fortune. Something that came along very seldom, especially during war. He had heard of Wagner mercenaries who had gotten rich looting and smuggling antiquities out of Libya and Syria. A bounty of this proportion could be worth millions of dollars, maybe even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Remaining with the Wagner Group was no longer a question. His mind was made up. He and his men would carve their own path. They were done taking orders from the elites. From that moment forward, they were the masters of their own destiny.
That was what had brought them to a small, shuttered winery outside yet another tiny village and set amid rows of wild, untended vines.
According to his map, there was a treasure hidden here. No matter what symbolic resistance the occupants might put up, he was going to find it. He and his war dogs always found what they came looking for. Torturing people in the process only made the experience more enjoyable.
As he heard the howls from his men inside, he knew that they had found something.
He hoped that it was a fresh, attractive young woman. The one that they had taken from the orphanage and were keeping back at their outpost was on her last legs.
He was looking forward to killing her himself. But not until they had found a replacement.
This close to the front, however, replacements were few and far between. They might be stuck with the one they had for a little longer. The question was, could she hang on? Hearing his men howl once more, he decided to go inside and see what they had found.
As he walked, he smiled. He knew the American woman wasn’t going to survive, but prolonging her life might very well make for an exquisitely painful and entertaining game.
CHAPTER 18
BOSTON
Greg Wilson was nervous. The last thing he wanted to do was to speak to the FBI before he had spoken with his handler. Should he have a lawyer present for the interview? Would they believe his story about why he and Burman were having dinner at the yacht club? What if they didn’t? What if they pressed for more information? He needed answers and until he got them, he planned to stay out of D.C. and to give the FBI the widest berth possible.
That’s why his handler had suggested Boston. It was an hour-and-twenty-minute flight for both of them. Halfway between Hancock County–Bar Harbor Airport in Maine and Reagan National in D.C. They settled on Come A Casa, a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant off Prince Street in the city’s Little Italy neighborhood, known to locals as the North End.
The handler had suggested that Wilson take the ferry from Logan International Airport across the bay to the Hyatt and catch a cab to a small bookstore a few blocks down from the restaurant.
Upon his recruitment, the former Senator had been taught the basics about tradecraft. It was important that he knew how to move, meet, and communicate without tipping off U.S. Intelligence. While many American politicians weren’t very bright and were about as deep as a puddle, Wilson was different. He showed promise.
But to hear him speak, Wilson believed his value was limited, that he had a very short “shelf life.”
The scandal that had engulfed him had been humiliating. He had been outed for having had multiple extramarital affairs. One had been with his pastor’s wife, another with a porn actress, and the third with a staffer in his Senate office.
All of the relationships had been consensual. None of the women had accused him of forcing himself on them. The one considered the most potentially damaging had been the affair with his staffer and she had gone public claiming that she had pursued him and not vice versa.
The timing of the revelations couldn’t have been worse. They had come, drip, drip, drip—one after another—in the closing days of a bruising primary battle. There was no time to knock them all down, to get his rebuttals properly circulating. His constituents saw him as a liar and a hypocrite.
They had no idea how dirty the laundry was that hung in every congressional office closet on Capitol Hill. Nor were they aware of the forest of skeletons you had to battle through just to get to it.
He wasn’t a “dirty” politician. He was merely a weak man who had succumbed to his passions. Power was the ultimate aphrodisiac and he had been unable to say no to the women who had wanted to bask in it.
He had known it was wrong. He knew he should have shown character and stopped things before they went too far, but he didn’t. The fact that he could have these women was as far as his thought process had gone. Character, and all the other virtues, had left the building. And because of his weakness, he had been made to suffer.
In addition to losing his primary, he had lost his wife—the only woman to ever love him for who he really was. She had loved him before he had ever dreamed of running for office and would have stayed with him long after he had decided to retire from politics.
As a wise person, most probably a woman, once said, God gave men two heads, and they often do their most important thinking with the wrong one. That was Greg Wilson in a nutshell.
But instead of allowing the experience to humble him and forge a better man, Wilson blamed everyone else and allowed his heart to be hardened.
He blamed the pastor’s wife, who couldn’t keep her guilt-ridden mouth shut and confessed the affair to her husband. He blamed the money-grubbing porn star, who wanted to make a quick buck and was shopping her story to the tabloids. He blamed the staffer in his office, who was dumb enough to admit the relationship to a gossipy friend, who in turn hinted at it over lunch with a reporter from the Washington Post.
Finally, he blamed his opponent, his opponent’s campaign manager, and their opposition research person. None of these stories had yet seen the full light of day. Someone had toiled in the shadows to source and secure them before perfectly orchestrating their release. It had taken a lot of skill, a lot of money, or both to make that happen and it had ruined Greg Wilson’s political career.
The only saving grace had been that while voters wanted nothing further to do with him, his former colleagues were more than happy to take meetings with him as long as it furthered their interests. It wasn’t lost on a single one of them that, but for the grace of God, the same thing could have happened to them. Because of this, Wilson was able to remain among the powerful in D.C. and earn a lucrative living.
That living, however, was not lucrative enough. He had a target in mind—$10 million. Enough to disappear and be comfortable on.
His constituents and, in his opinion, his country had not only turned their backs on him, but they also never deserved him in the first place. They could all go screw themselves. As soon as he had amassed his ten million, he would be gone.
There was a small Caribbean nation that, in exchange for making a large deposit in their national bank, would fast-track him to citizenship. Their passport was accepted worldwide by all the countries he would ever want to visit. The country also didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.
While that hadn’t been something he was originally looking for, it did become an added benefit once he went to work for the Russians.
