The OPCEN at present was a direct reflection of such a victory, if you could call it that—her staff was beginning to trickle in, arriving with thermoses of coffee as they replaced the early-morning shift of personnel who’d been on duty since midnight. Duchess herself had been at her desk for over an hour, not due to any pressing crisis but because of the opposite: she’d awoken early simply because she was unable to sleep any longer. Everyone was well rested, fully recovered from the long nights on the wrong end of a time cycle catering to target areas on the far side of the world. Normally a bustling center of activity, the OPCEN was now filled with the quiet murmurs of staff members working a normal humdrum of routine tasks, all the administrative minutiae of preparing a formal after-action report to submit upon the team’s safe return stateside.
All in all, the scene mirrored her experience with successful Agency operations—no back slapping and high fives, no calls from the president to congratulate them. When everything had gone as well as it could on some overseas venture, the reward was more often than not characterized simply by the lack of a crisis to deal with.
Now two cups of tea into her morning routine, Duchess considered that she should have felt far happier about the whole situation than she did. After all, all eleven hostages had been returned to US soil, and only one in a closed casket after being decapitated by Usman. Her ground team had come out of Gwoza alive less than 48 hours ago after killing not just their original target but also the other two released Boko Haram leaders. Now David and his men were safe in Abuja, awaiting only a final exfiltration that night in accordance with the administration’s directive to get all American forces out of Nigeria before some terrorist effort tarnished what had been an almost flawless resolution to the hostage crisis.
She continued scrolling across the overhead view of Africa from the west coast to the east, from Nigeria to Mozambique, considering the massive payouts from one Chukwuma Ndatsu Malu to, presumably, Erik Weisz and his compatriots.
Whoever they were.
But Mozambique wasn’t the real issue; it was merely a laundering point, and her real interest lay in where the money went afterwards. Until forensic accounting succeeded in tracing the destination, she wouldn’t know—and as she zoomed out until the map depicted half the world, she realized that she couldn’t narrow the possibilities down to a hemisphere, much less a single continent.
And while those answers would come eventually, she’d still be left with a black hole of information surrounding Malu. Someone, possibly Weisz himself, had contacted the powerful politician and set up a masterfully elaborate network between Venezuela, Gradsek, the Nigerian government, and Boko Haram, and had done so with seemingly no agenda beyond profiting from it. The intelligence concerning that initial contact with Malu, to say nothing of the communications required to sustain the arrangement, was the real key, one that, regrettably, fell so far outside the charter of Project Longwing that she was powerless to pursue it any further.
It wasn’t due to lack of effort, of course. Duchess had spent the better part of six hours yesterday trying to rally interest from other divisions within the CIA before reaching out to her contacts at the DIA, NSA, and even the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence to conjure up outside support for the inquiry. The answers had been uniformly predictable: everyone’s time and assets were too tied up with known terrorist networks to commit to pursuing an unknown one that may not even exist. They’d more or less agreed to take a look at the report once forensic accounting had returned hits on the Mozambique transfers, but to Duchess the lack of enthusiasm was palpable. There were simply too many bad guys in the world, and every facet of the US intelligence community was working around the clock already.
Now the best she could hope for was some continued surveillance over Malu, but if the ISA had come up dry on his communications over the events of the past five days, it was unlikely anyone would approve a protracted surveillance effort. The hostage crisis was over; everyone had gotten what they wanted, and Washington was more interested in taking that fact for a victory lap of self-congratulation than igniting some deeper probe into the illicit activities David’s team had uncovered.
Beside her, Jo Ann asked, “What’s wrong?”
Duchess looked over in alarm to see the Navy officer watching her, holding a cup of coffee by a hand bearing her glittering gold class ring.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Duchess said. “Why?”
Jo Ann raised her eyebrows skeptically, then took a sip of coffee before she replied, “You’ve been fiddling with that map for fifteen minutes.”
“So?”
“So there’s no reason to beat yourself up. The hostages have been recovered and the team will be on their way home tonight. Meanwhile, three terrorist leaders are dead. I’d call that a tactical victory on every possible level.”
“As would I,” Duchess replied, folding her arms. “But it’s a strategic failure any way we slice it.”
“How do you figure?”
Duchess felt a pang of irritation in her stomach. “How do you not? I’m talking about Venezuela, Gradsek, Malu, everything. The payouts to Mozambique are linked to Erik Weisz and we both know it.”
Jo Ann shrugged. “The Gradsek conspiracy with Venezuela will be shut down, in time.”
“And what about Malu?” Duchess shot back. “You’re honestly telling me he’s not the single most important piece of this? If we could take him down, we’d have it all: Weisz’s communications, how he links bad actors on an international scale, maybe even what else he’s running, to say nothing of what he’s planning next.”
Jo Ann set her coffee on the desk and turned to face Duchess.
“I’m not arguing that, Duchess. But there’s nothing else we could have done. I mean, think about it—if Bailey hadn’t been leading the ISA team, we might never have gotten the tip on Lagos. If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t have gotten Maiduguri, and without that ledger, Usman and those other two leaders would be free men right now. Try and look at the bright side.”
“The bright side,” Duchess repeated, her words sounding hollow. “Right, Jo Ann. I’ll try to consider that when—”
She stopped speaking as Jo Ann’s eyes flew to the front of the OPCEN. The central television screen had just come ablaze with a muted news feed.
The sight made Duchess feel nauseous and enraged at the same time.
It was an overhead view of a container ship at sea, surrounded by Nigerian Navy vessels as the cameraman aboard an orbiting helicopter zoomed in to show uniformed officials swarming over the deck.
The banner headline read INTERPOL SEIZES NARCOTICS DESTINED FOR VENEZUELA, while a subtitle beneath it continued, Russian oil company Gradsek implicated in international drug trafficking.
Duchess searched for someone to yell at, with her intelligence officer being the obvious choice, but Andolin Lucios, of course, had put the news feed on in the first place, and he was now jogging up the tiered levels of seating with his tablet in hand.
As she waited for his arrival, Duchess felt a flash of heat running down her chest, the onset of uncontrollable anger.
She’d provided that intel in good faith that her superiors would release it only to parties who knew better than to act before the time was right, had clearly specified that Gradsek not be persecuted until the Agency had more information on Malu’s financial activity. And now someone—God forbid she ever find out who—had moved too soon, eager to further their own agenda by leveraging the conspiracy.