Chapter Twenty-One #2
“Two different days? Two different men. Two different FBI special agents?” Hinton tossed his pen hard. It bounced off the table and sailed through the air.
Hinton stood and, throwing a “Thanks” over his shoulder, he left.
Gabriel watched the door shut, then turned to the others.
“I hope the witness making these videos is lying low. The Prokhorov Family do not like snitches,” Rowan said, “and they do not like when we discover what they’re up to.”
“What game are they in?” Gabriel asked.
“They’re the usual international crime family,” Rowan said. “They do gambling and shakedowns, trafficking of women, and to a lesser extent some drugs and weaponry. It depends on where they’re working. They find a niche they can call their own and set up shop.”
“So how is it that they grabbed these guys?” Gabriel asked. Normally, Gabriel was strictly need-to-know. But this might well be two special agents, and Gabriel was all in on getting them safe. But three months? Three months for the first guy didn’t seem survivable at the hands of a crime family.
“One of the Prokhorovs’ main rivals—rivals is not the right word, more like frenemies,” Prescott said. “There was a competing family called the Zorics.”
Gabriel interrupted, “There was a Zoric family that was on the news a few months ago where the entire family died in the boating accident. Are they associated with the crime family?”
“That was the boat that took down the family, where the innermost circle—the ones that drove the different schemes—were traveling,” Rowan said.
“So are the schemes done and finished?” Gabriel asked. “Someone cut off the head of the chicken?”
“We actually have some Zoric family members in our federal prison system,” Rowan said.
“The Prokhorovs have been looking around to see if they could absorb some of the side players in the Zoric dynasty, the players that didn’t die in that event because they weren’t in the direct family line of Medved Zoric—”
“He was the head of family,” Prescott explained.
“During that time,” Rowan continued, “the Prokhorovs discovered that Zoric partners had infiltrated the Prokhorovs business and had been acting as informants and saboteurs.”
“We have a working theory that as the Prokhorovs routed out the Zoric infiltrators, they discovered the FBI was also in the mix. The trial this coming Tuesday where you’re going to testify against Igor—”
Gabriel interrupted, “I’m not testifying against anyone. I’m testifying about how I’m given a photograph or a video and how I apply my geolocation skills. I’ll walk the jury through the process that led the special agents to that spot.” He looked between them.
“His prison sentence would be short,” Prescott said.
“Long, you mean?” Gabriel asked. He didn’t know what the crime was. He had his piece of the puzzle, and that was it.
“Short,” Prescott corrected. “He’ll be in prison. The right rumor will spread – child predators, what have you—and very soon someone would make sure the man never sees a parole panel. We can’t keep someone in solitary more than a specified number of days even if it is for their own protection.”
“So we have a different video for you of our agents,” Finley said.
Gabriel looked toward the closed door. “Hinton’s not looped in? You already knew they weren’t the same men?”
“Hinton’s not looped in,” Finley said. “We’ve known the man, singular, that Hinton’s been tracking was, in reality, two different men. It’s the Peter principal at play: Hinton was promoted to his level of incompetence, and there he will stay until retirement, angry at the men who then surpass him.”
“In the video you’re going to give me, are the agents alive?” Gabriel
“At the time, they were. Four of them. They all had signs of physical trauma.” Finley bent to pull a computer from his messenger bag.
“But you think they were killed and dumped?” Gabriel asked, reaching out to accept it.
“That’s the best-case scenario, to be honest,” Finley said.
“They’re not torturing the men for shits and giggles. They’d kill them if it were about testifying.” Gabriel tested a theory. “They have the men to discover who we have involved and what we know?”
“That’s right,” Prescott said. “This newest video came in this morning. It came to us instead of Hinton. Hinton isn’t aware this exists, nor do we want him to.
We checked in with Hinton to see if he’d made any progress with the videos of that address you discovered.
He had not. But when he was up here, he heard us talking about you.
And he said we should show you the garage video. ”
“Should I have played dumb?” Gabriel asked. “Will he complicate your investigation?”
“I don’t think he’ll step on our toes. As to this new video, it’s the same kind of deal.
Someone stripped any data and emailed it from a burner email.
A different email than the one Hinton is working on.
” Prescott turned to catch Rowan’s eyes.
“It’s almost like people are getting on AI and asking how to secretly send information to the FBI. ”
“Which is exactly how this is playing out,” Rowan said. “Gabriel, we need to know the location of the van at the time of the picture, so we know where to start looking.”
“ASAP,” Finley set his jaw, making his face look battle-ready.
“Yesterday would have been better than today,” Rowan said.
“I know people hand you things when the case is hot, but these are our brothers, and we need to get to them. The Prokhorovs know what they’re doing.
They’ll push to the edge, back off, let them rest, then go in and try again.
One of the ways they like to do that is to put their hostages in a remote cabin with a chain.
Then the team goes off and continues with business, then they go back with food and water. It’s part of the prisoner training.”
“We’re hoping to approach during one of these times when the hostages are abandoned,” Prescott said.
“Let’s say I figure out where they were last videoed alive; what then? That’s not going to be the site the men are being held.”
“We send out search and rescue,” Finley said.
“I worked a search and rescue mission with Whiskey.”
“I saw you in the paper.” Rowan gave him a nod of approval. “You saved those kids.”
“Whiskey did,” Gabriel corrected. “I lit a fire and let them rub Whiskey’s ears.
My role wasn’t heroic. What I was going to say about search and rescue is that they’re all volunteers.
Sure, there were some with a police background, but when we were looking for the siblings, they had civilian hiking clubs running up and down the trails while those who went through training took the grids in between.
These were good-hearted people, but they can’t go after mafia types. ”
“We wouldn’t send them out there to do that,” Prescott said. “But we can put people in the field. This is national security. Emergency services can trade people around.”
“We don’t want any innocent people wandering in on a scene like this.
” Finley leaned forward and tapped the computer.
“The video I’m handing you on this computer is to go to no other computer.
I will wipe it clean once you’ve done what you can with it.
You’ll forget you saw it. There won’t be a shadow of this file anywhere.
The person who took this and sent it—I’m assuming kids—did the right thing.
But if anyone knows about this, some shithead prosecutor might call them in to testify. ”
“They’re not going to testify to what they saw?” Gabriel asked.
“Under no circumstances would we ruin their lives like that for no good reason,” Finley said.
“The Prokhorov family doesn’t care that none of their faces were seen.
They would care that someone would know, from the court record, that a witness lived to testify.
For crime families, that can never happen.
Everyone needs to be afraid of carrying a tale. ”