Blood Play

Thinking back to his last conversation with Orson, Colt remembered the inventor mentioning that he would be leaving Taos for Albuquerque once he finished packing the things he planned to bring to the New Military Technologies Expo. Colt couldn’t be certain, but he felt there was a good chance he was looking the boxes that contained those items.

Lying on the cold floor, Colt tried to piece it together. What did it all mean? What had he gotten himself into?

Moments later, Colt heard the front door open. A cold draft swept its way toward him, carrying the pungent stench of javelinas. Franklin’s stomach clenched and he retched, bringing up little more than saliva mixed with more blood from his cracked lip. Out in the living room, the front door slammed shut and there was renewed arguing among his captors. Soon a fourth man strode into Colt’s view, wearing a knee-length black leather trench coat over his well-tailored suit. He was bald, thick-chested and carried himself with an air of authority.

If there had been any doubt that his abduction was linked to what was going on at the reservation, those doubts quickly vanished, for Colt found himself staring at the Roaming Bison Casino’s Director of Operations, Freddy McHale. When McHale glanced his way and the two men shared a look of mutual recognition, Colt realized as well that there was no way he would be allowed to live now that he knew who was behind his abduction.

CHAPTER NINE

The Roaming Bison Casino was not Frederik “the Butcher” Mikhaylov’s first foray into the wagering industry.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, gambling establishments had sprung up in nearly every major city throughout Russia, and, as was the case in many of America’s early casino ventures, organized crime had been quick to latch on to the phenomenon and turn it into one of its primary cash cows. Mikhaylov had been a thirty-year-old low-level goon for freelance mobsters in the suburb of Dolgoprudniy when the first casinos opened down the road in Moscow. His reputation as a brutal enforcer for loan sharks made him a natural choice when several small, competing mobs merged into the dreaded Dolgoprudnenskaya and muscled its way into the capital city’s more upscale gaming halls. Over the next dozen years, Mikhaylov specialized in “negotiating” the payment of gambling debts incurred by high rollers, and in those rare cases when physical assault and torture failed to produce desired results, the one-time slaughterhouse employee had no qualms about putting his butchering skills to good use, killing debtors in ways gruesome enough to earn press coverage that helped serve as a deterrent to anyone thinking they could welsh on monies owed the mob without dire consequence. By his own count, during his years as an enforcer, the Butcher settled over sixty million dollars’ worth of gambling debts and executed at least fifty individuals who were either unable or unwilling to honor their markers.

There came a point, however, at which Mikhaylov tired of what, for him, had become mere drudgery. He yearned for advancement within the ranks and a chance to set foot in the casinos for reasons other than targeting his next victim. He liked the idea of wearing a well-tailored suit and consorting with Moscow’s upper crust at the tables instead of in dark, back alleys, and in 2000 he carried out the vicious execution of a rival gang lord in exchange for an opportunity to become pit boss at Dolgoprudnenskaya’s crown jewel, the Regal Splendor Casino, located only a few blocks from the Kremlin. He flourished in the position, quickly becoming fluent in five languages and developing a personalized sense of savoir faire that combined a newfound cosmopolitan sensibility with the rakish charm that drew on his lower-middle-class upbringing. On the side, Mikhaylov ran a high-price escort service that allowed him to freely indulge in the sexual favors of some of Moscow’s most comely women. As his stature rose, the Russian forsook his modest apartment in Dolgoprudniy for a lavish penthouse suite at the Regal and began to dine regularly at the casino’s five-star restaurant, Nostrovia, where he would often use a private booth to entertain valued guests and conduct the sort of business negotiations that couldn’t be discussed out on the gambling floor. With a personal tailor at his disposal and no less than five customized luxury vehicles stored at a private garage adjacent to the casino, Mikhaylov, on the whole, had enjoyed an extravagant, privileged lifestyle that he couldn’t have even imagined in his youth.

Of course, part of Mikhaylov’s job at the tables required that he continue to deal with gamblers prone to wagering beyond their means, but the Russian had an uncanny knack for judging people and, unlike his predecessors, he routinely made a point not to extend credit in cases where he felt it would become necessary to execute the debtor and write off his or her debt. Yes, there had still been the frequent need for back alley “persuasion,” but Mikhaylov was now in a position to delegate the dirty work to others. He trained his own crew of goons, including Petenka Tramelik and Viktor Cherkow, and he trained them well. Over the next eight years, there were barely a dozen instances in which torture or blackmail failed and his men were forced to commit murder.

All seemed right with Mikhaylov’s world when, in 2008, the Russian president decried the proliferation of gambling in Russia and pushed through legislation banning casinos from urban centers throughout the country. Over the next two years, the Regal Splendor, as well as its illustrious counterparts in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities were closed down, leaving the Russian populace with the daunting proposition of traveling to Siberia or some other godforsaken hinterland to indulge in any form of wagering other than the national lottery. Some crime syndicates rolled with the punch and reluctantly set up shop in these remote wastelands, but Mikhaylov was among those who decided to leave Russia in pursuit of greener pastures. With Tramelik and Cherkow in tow, the Butcher pulled stakes and moved to Bolivia, where Dolgoprudnenskaya, through a shadow company, had poured nearly three hundred million dollars into the Andean Splendor, a gambling mecca modeled after the Moscow casino where Mikhaylov had reinvented himself. The resort was slow to catch on, however, and felt too much like a step down in the world to leave him satisfied. He continued to go through the motions as a duteous pit boss, but all the while kept his eye open for other, better opportunities.

He didn’t have long to wait.

Fourteen months into his Bolivian tenure, by which time he’d been promoted to Chief Officer of Gaming Operations, Mikhaylov was approached by seventy-year-old Evgenii Danilov, whose global renown as an eccentric billionaire was little more than a well-orchestrated front for his allegiance to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, which in 1991 had replaced the notorious KGB. Danilov, with SVR’s blessing, had bought a stake in the Bolivian casino to help keep it afloat but he’d also chosen what he considered to be a more promising—and lucrative—gambling frontier to infiltrate: reservation casinos in the United States. Danilov’s various American enterprises were all affiliates of Global Holdings Corporation, which the elderly financier had painstakingly created as an Antwerp-based entity supposedly made up solely of investors from the European Union. GHC had recently won a bid to take over operations of the Roaming Bison as well as the nuclear waste facility located at Rosqui Pueblo. Mikhaylov was presented with an offer to come to America and help oversee the casino’s table action. It was, for Mikhaylov, the proverbial offer he couldn’t refuse. That offer was gilded even further when Danilov arranged for The Butcher, Tramelik and Cherkow to be sworn in as agents for SVR’s special operations force, Vympel.

Following several months of training and SVR debriefing at GHC’s Belgian headquarters, Mikhaylov and Tramelik were given forged identity papers along with extensively fabricated personal backstories and put on an international flight bound for the U.S., where, as Freddy McHale and Pete Trammell, both men spent the next two years slowly establishing themselves as an influential presence at both Roaming Bison and the nuclear waste facility. As much as the casino was a perennial moneymaker, for Danilov and SVR a stake in tribal gambling profits wasn’t an end in and of itself, but rather a means to help finance clandestine activity at the waste plant. The activity there served a long-standing agenda dating back more than fifty years to the height of the cold war, when Russia had squared off with the United States as the one country most capable of thwarting its aspirations for world domination. Part of that covert agenda was dependent upon securing access to a ready source of uranium beyond that contained in the nuclear fuel rods stored at the waste facility, hence Mikhaylov’s fervent lobbying with Taos Pueblo’s tribal leader Walter Upshaw and the decision to put Upshaw under increased surveillance when he balked at partnering with GHC. It was a bugged phone call carried out as part of that surveillance that had pinpointed Franklin Colt as the informant who’d aroused Upshaw’s suspicions about GHC’s ulterior motives for wanting to place the Taos reservation under its umbrella. Given what was at stake, the Butcher had made a point to be flown to Glorieta so that he could personally ensure that Colt would divulge the information he’d only alluded to in the cryptic phone message he’d left with Upshaw earlier in the day.

There was a second reason for Mikhaylov venturing this far from his duties at the casino, and it was the other matter the Russian chose to first deal with once he’d entered the modest five-room farmhouse that served as a base of operations for more than two dozen lower-tier SVR agents charged with dealings that fell beyond the scope of debt-collecting at the casino.

After confirming that Colt was still alive, Mikhaylov briefly chastised Viktor Cherkow and the other three SVR agents for having caused so much disruption in the course of abducting the security officer. Afterward he sent them to prepare for their next assignment, raiding Colt’s house to look for the evidence he’d collected against GHC. Once he and Tramelik were alone Mikhaylov told his red-haired colleague, “I hope you managed things a little better on your end.”

“Everything went smoothly,” Tramelik replied. “Upshaw and Orson are both dead, and it’ll be pinned on Upshaw’s kid. We took care of him, too. Vladik stayed behind to monitor things and keep an eye on the safe house.”

“What about Upshaw’s cell phone?”

“I got that, too,” Tramelik reported, “but there’s only one call between him and Colt and that was two weeks ago, before we visited him.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Mikhaylov said. “You said Colt called him while he was in his car just this morning.”

“I know,” Tremalik said. “He must have deleted the call afterward.”

“I’m not so sure,” the other Russian said. “Ilyin took Colt’s cell phone right after they grabbed him at the airport, and the only call to Upshaw was the same one from two weeks ago.”

Tramelik frowned. There seemed only one likely explanation. “They must’ve each gotten separate phones for when they called each other.”

“Smart move if that’s what they did,” Mikhaylov said. “Upshaw didn’t have a second phone on him?”

Tramelik shook his head. “It’s not like I had time to search through the whole car,” he said. “Besides, when I found the one phone I figured it was the one we were looking for.”

“You’ll need to get back to Barad and have him sniff around a little more,” Mikhaylov said. “If Colt and Upshaw were exchanging text messages or attachments, that other phone might have the proof we’re looking for.”

“The car will end up at the police impound yard,” Tramelik said. “If they haven’t gone through it, maybe Barad can beat them to it.”

“It’s worth a try,” Mikhaylov said. “And when Cherkow gets to Colt’s place he’ll need to look for his other phone, too.”

“What if Colt kept it in his car?” Tramelik suggested. “We should probably try to get to the impound yard in Albuquerque, too.”

“Let’s wait and see what Cherkow can come up with,” Mikhaylov said. “Now back to Orson. Did you get hold of his inventions?”

Tramelik gestured at the cardboard boxes on the nearby sofa. “We obviously couldn’t get to his helicopter, but we took everything from his workshop except his computer.”

“Why not the computer?” Mikhaylov asked. “There had to be something we could use on it.”

“I got all that.” Tramelik fished through his pocket and withdrew a key chain loaded with pinky-size flash drives. “I copied everything off the hard drive. I left the computer because I used it to make sure the kid gets blamed.”

Mikhaylov’s radar went up immediately. “You didn’t plant the heroin?”

“Yes, along with the kit and syringe, but—”

“The plan was to make it look like he stole the inventions to buy smack,” Mikhaylov reminded the other man. “You were supposed to shoot him up so everyone would think he went off on a rampage.”

“That’s still the way it’ll look,” Tramelik insisted. “I just figured it’d be better to underline everything in case the police there are idiots.”

“What exactly did you do?”

“Let’s go to the barn,” Tramelik said. “I’ll show you on the computer there.”

“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL him about the map?” Ivan Nesterov asked Viktar Cherkow as the two men headed past a large, walk-in freezer resting next to the barn and made their way to a small outbuilding twenty yards past the farmhouse. The building had once seen use as a milk shed but the SVR operatives had turned most of the structure into a makeshift weapons depot.

“Tell him it got left behind in the truck?” Cherkow snapped at the wheelman who’d driven the stolen vehicle they’d used to abduct Franklin Colt. “After the way he chewed us out? Are you crazy? He’d probably shoot us!”

“Good point,” Nesterov conceded, unlocking the door to the shed.

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Cherkow said. “Besides, we already know where we’re going. We don’t need a map!”

The men entered the shed, where a shelving unit lined the far wall, stocked top to bottom with an assortment of weapons and ammunition.

“I’m just concerned the police might find it and figure out what we’re up to,” Nesterov said.

“They don’t have jurisdiction on the reservation,” Cherkow reminded his colleague. “By the time they go through all the red tape to get the tribal police involved, we’ll have been there and left already.”

“I hope you’re right,” Nesterov said.

Cherkow detected the other man’s skepticism and gestured at the weapons cache. “Look, if you’re worried we can just load up more firepower and bring along a few more men.”

“I think that’d be a good idea.”

“Let’s do it, then,” Cherkow said. He grabbed a wheelbarrow next to the shelving unit and began to fill it with firearms and grenades. “I’ll take care of this. Go round up some more men and get the chopper started. If anybody gets in our way at Colt’s place, they won’t know what hit them.”

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

“BARBARA,” AARON “THE BEAR” Kurtzman said as Barbara Price strode into the Computer Room, “what’s Striker’s status?”

Striker was Mack Bolan’s in-house handle.

“He’s on his way to check on this Franklin Colt’s wife,” she replied.

“Sounds like he and the boys had a close call in that flood channel.”

Price nodded. “It could have been a lot worse.”

“I hear you.” Kurtzman shook his head wearily. “Two cops dead along with a civilian. And we still don’t know about Colt. Or this Orson guy, for that matter.”

“Let’s hope the crews come up with something,” Price said.

Inside the large dimly lit chamber, Kurtzman’s three associates were seated at their respective workstations, eyes fixed on their computer screens as they diligently combed through cyberspace for data that would allow them to lend support to Stony Man field teams. The older two—former FBI agent Carmen Delahunt and one-time Berkeley cybernetics professor Huntington Wethers—were so engrossed in their tasks they didn’t realize Price had entered the room. Akira Tokaido, a young computer hacker extraordinaire, glanced up from his keyboard, however, and nodded a greeting as he dislodged the earbud trailing down to his ever-running MP3 player.

“Orson’s still MIA,” he reported, “but I cobbled together a little more background on him so we can at least have a better idea who we’re dealing with.”

“Fire away.” Kurtzman eased into his workstation and set down his mug. There were other seats available throughout the large room but Price remained standing, preferring to pace off some of her nervous energy.

“Orson came out of Stanford with a Ph.D. in geophysics and tried his hand at think tanks for a few years,” Tokaido reported, glancing at the work file he’d cobbled together on his computer screen. “He tinkered with inventions on the side and registered a handful of minor patents, but nothing caught on. About four years ago he switched gears and signed on with an R & D outfit based out of Chicago. Must’ve been the jump start he needed because after a couple years he went freelance and wound up getting the Defense Department to cough up big-time for a couple of his inventions involving depleted uranium.”

“Like the tank armor,” Price interjected.

“That was the biggie all right,” Tokaido said, “but there were a couple others, and he’s got a booth at that expo in Albuquerque and is supposed to be showing off a new batch of gizmos.”

“Provided he shows up,” Kurtzman said. “What’s he been working on?”

Tokaido scrolled down his screen. “I don’t have a lot of details, but among other things he’s taken the armor thing a little further and adapted it for battle gear.”

“Some new generation flak jacket?” Kurtzman asked.

“That’d be my guess,” Tokaido said. “If it takes after the tank armor, we’re talking something lighter but stronger with some kind of embedded solar capacity.”

“Sounds like something out of one of those superhero movies,” Price commented.

“Sure does,” Tokaido said. “Anyway, along with that he’s built a prototype high-speed armored helicopter and is doing some kind of work with redox batteries.”

“Redox?”

Tokaido nodded. “I think it’s another uranium application. Something about a backup power source.”

Kurtzman mulled over the information as he took another sip of his coffee. “Cowboy’s right. That flak jacket sounds like something we could make use of. Maybe the chopper and battery, too.”

“Hold the fort, gang,” Carmen Delahunt suddenly called out.

“You got something?” Kurtzman said.

Delahunt ran a hand through her red hair as she glanced up from her computer screen.

“I’ve been running Orson’s name through the search engines and came across his blog,” she told the others. “Check out his last entry. Monitor three.”

Delahunt moved her cursor and moments later her computer-screen image was duplicated on one of the large flat-screen monitors mounted to the east wall. Kurtzman and the others turned their attention to the display and Price wandered toward the wall for a closer look.

Orson’s blog page featured his photograph along with a series of entries logged over the past week. Delahunt had highlighted one entered a few hours earlier.

I’ve been betrayed! the post read. I just came back from running errands and my workshop’s been cleaned out. Everything! My life’s work! Gone! It could only be one person. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and a chance at a new life, and this is how he repays me? By playing me for a fool? A word to the wise out there: never trust a drug addict, no matter how clean they claim to be.

“Whoa,” Tokaido muttered once he’d read the dispatch.

“This would certainly explain why he didn’t show up at the airport,” Huntington Wethers said.

“Maybe,” Kurtzman replied, his brow furrowed. “Maybe not.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Kurtzman said. “Something about it doesn’t smell right.”

“I skimmed a few of the earlier blogs,” Delahunt said. “If it’s the ranting that throws you, he’s gone off a few other times about other things.”

Kurtzman shook his head. “No, I don’t think it’s that. It all just seems a little too pat. And I’m not just talking about why the guy felt he had to go blabbing to the world about this. Me? Something like that happens, I’d skip the ‘press conference’ and just take care of business.”

“I’m thinking the same thing,” Price said. She turned to Delahunt and Tokaido. “Is there anything in either the blogs or background check that could give us an idea who this drug addict might be?”

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