CHAPTER 74
CSTC Team Rhino Command Center
Team Rhino gathered for our daily intelligence update.
Meg stood behind the lectern and began. “We’ve made some outstanding progress on our do-outs. I’ll lead off and let Jimmy T. follow, then Stu will bat cleanup.”
Thanks to what Meg called “some crafty hacking” from inside the SCIF, she had analyzed several cutout companies before determining that the yacht belonged to Alexander Egorov, a seventy-seven-year-old Russian widower with forty-three-year-old twin sons, Pavel and Taras.
Word was, the elder Egorov had cut his teeth in the 1950s selling used AK-47s and hand grenades in Algeria. One deal led to another, one uprising to another, and one civil war to another, and within two decades Egorov had become the go-to guy for anyone wanting to start a revolution.
The twins had followed in their father’s arms-dealing path, building a book of business throughout Africa and some choice hot spots in the Middle East. Governments friendly to ours were decidedly not among their clientele.
Meg’s assessment: Alexander Egorov was Russia’s answer to our own John Gotti. He was Teflon. Nothing stuck, ever. He hid in plain sight. Though to his credit, and unlike his degenerate sons, he stayed well below the radar.
“I cannot confirm the elder Egorov’s current location.
He’s got places all over the world. However, it shouldn’t be too difficult to find the boys, who enjoy spending time at their father’s house in Palm Beach.
Looks like Pavel is the guy I kicked in the nuts aboard the yacht.
Pavel likes to run around Palm Beach in a pink Lamborghini Murciélago, I shit you not.
His brother Taras prefers to be seen in a purple Ferrari F430.
We should arrest them for that douchebaggery alone. ”
With that, Meg stood aside so that James Teagan could take her place at the lectern.
“So I talked to some people,” Jimmy T. announced.
By some people he meant he’d worked his family network: first cousins, second cousins, their families, and so on—basically the entire Boston Irish community, and probably some Italians too.
As Jimmy liked to say with a wink, his father and brothers were in no way even remotely connected to the Irish mob—but he was pretty sure his mother was.
He’d gotten a firm ID on the dead woman we’d found upstairs at Senator Harrison’s house.
She was a Harrison staffer—and the senator’s mistress.
Her name was Aimee Sullivan, and she’d grown up in someone’s cousin’s Boston neighborhood.
According to Jimmy’s people, she was well-known to be wicked smart, very attractive, and super ambitious.
But also far more eager to sleep her way to the top than to work hard to get there.
What Jimmy T. had also turned up was the news that some low-level Ukrainian toughies had recently been hired to break into her apartment and leave a bunch of cocaine behind.
He couldn’t find out who had paid for the drugs, but it sure as shit wasn’t Aimee Sullivan.
Total setup: Nobody breaks in to someone else’s place and drops off a kilo or so of coke for non-nefarious reasons.
Jimmy T. assured us that his dogs were on it.
One of Jimmy’s cousins, a bartender at a place near Fenway, asked one of his bartender buddies on Nantucket if he’d heard anything about Sullivan or her crew. The buddy said she’d seemed friendly enough. Looker. Came into the place once or twice a week. Good tipper.
Then one night a week or two ago, some self-important, obnoxious asshole—presumably Walt Fitzgerald—came in pissing and moaning all over his scotch.
Bartender chatted him up and the old Mick started bitching about some broad who was making his life miserable. Ever heard of Chappaquiddick? he’d asked the bartender menacingly. It wasn’t much, Jimmy conceded, but it was a pretty fucked-up thing to say.
Apart from the background on Sullivan and Fitzgerald, Jimmy hadn’t heard much else. There was a lot of chatter about who could have blown up the ferry, but nobody knew anything about who had actually done it. Seven out of ten informants theorized it was Al-Qaeda.
Last but not least, Jimmy’s crew said some high-level sit-downs with various bosses were said to be going down soon.
There was a lot of noise about whether the Russians or the Chinese had been involved in the hit.
Oh, and he had another cousin in the Boston Police Department sniffing around the organized-crime unit for more details; the cousin would let Jimmy know what she found out.
“That’s all I could get so far, Nat, but they’ll keep me posted.”
“Please thank your mom for me,” I laughed. “Next time see if your dad and brothers will get off the couch and give her a hand—it’ll speed things up.”
“Of course, Nat. My mom loves you. You know that.”
Jimmy gave me a wink as he sat down. I turned to Stu Arden. “Okay, Stu, what’s up?”
“Nerd version or what?”
“I’ll take Door Number Two—the less-nerdy version, if that’s at all possible.
” I loved Stu, but his briefs were unintelligible when he went into full-blown Nerd Mode.
Stu was in fact the humblest man I knew—shirt-off-his-back kind of guy, no question—and he was aces at commo, but he could put Adderall addicts to sleep when he got going on a technical discussion.
“Got it, Nat. I’ll try to keep it simple, but some of this shit is so complex that even I got confused.” He smiled at us, hoping we got his sarcasm. “I of course figured it out, but you guys are all screwed.”
Despite lacking the password to unlock even one of the phones we’d brought from Nantucket, Stu told us, he’d been able to rip the contents off every single device. Holy shit—we have that kind of capability?
“It was interesting to me that there were so many burner phones in the pile found in Elise Courville’s house.
Probably seven or eight, if I recall. Five hadn’t even been activated yet.
No prints on any of them. Could be the ambassador used them as an easy security protocol when his daughter was traveling, in case she had to call her old man to discuss something important.
I’ve heard the Speaker of the House does something similar with his kids, just to be on the safe side. ”
Stu’s briefing continued: “You also picked a burner off the dead sniper, and there was one more at Harrison’s house among all the rest of the shit.
While the numbers didn’t match for outgoing calls, the country code did: France.
Makes sense given the circumstances with Courville and her dad, but it’s not clear why the intruder—and someone else at Harrison’s—was in communication with somebody in France.
Could be coincidental … but I doubt it. Pretty clear that some bad guys here were talking to another bad guy in France.
“I’ve got a friend over at the NSA helping me work through some of the other protocols, and I’m pretty sure we can get more—just takes some time.
He’s got all the gear from the yacht, plus the bag of computers that Si picked up at Courville’s, so once we connect, I’m sure more details will come out. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start.”
We had a hell of a lot more info than we did before.