Black Flagged Redux

Chapter 4





8:22 AM

FSB (Federal Security Services of the Russian Federation) Headquarters

Lubyanka Square, Moscow





Alexei Kaparov slammed his right fist down onto a stack of papers that littered his desk and extinguished his cigarette into a crowded ashtray with his other hand. He lifted the report, which had been unceremoniously tossed into his daily slush pile, and squinted at its contents. Not even a simple folder, or anything. The single most important piece of information he'd seen in months had been unceremoniously added to the never-ending shit pile of papers on his desk. It might as well have been thrown in the trash. What about a priority flagged email? How long have they had email? Important shit like this still ended up travelling ungodly distances, only to be buried under a rubble pile. It really wasn't his team's fault, but he was pissed at the entire system.

If any of Kaparov's subordinates could have heard his frustrated internal dialogue, they would have agreed with him on several of his points, especially the part about the rubble. The deputy counter-terrorism director's office was a disaster, with loose stacks of paperwork scattered everywhere, sitting on top of boxes of paperwork that needed to be filed. Despite the appearance of chaos, Kaparov could find anything he needed and reviewed every single document that found its way into the room…as long as the paperwork was placed on top of his desk. He made a point of clearing through the desk every day, and then refilling it with new documents, or old ones he had decided to resurrect.

Daily, he scoured field reports from hundreds of FSB and Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) agents, looking for any clues, signs or trigger words that might indicate a potential chemical or biological act of terrorism on Russian soil. When he came across the four-page Southern District FSB intelligence summary of a recent counter-insurgency raid in Dagestan, he settled in for some interesting reading. Raids into Dagestan were rare, and the report piqued his interest. He could have just as easily dismissed the report. Threats limited to the volatile Caucasus Region were analyzed by another deputy director, leaving Kaparov's crew of analysts with the rest of Russia.

On page three of the report, he nearly had a heart attack. He felt a tightening in his chest and glanced down at the top drawer of his desk, which ironically held both a package of Troika cigarettes and a small plastic bottle of nitroglycerine pills. Right there, buried nonchalantly in the report, was a dangerous name. The fact that the name had been discovered among documents recovered from an Al Qaeda stronghold in Dagestan was even more disturbing. He chuckled at the thought of dying from a heart attack in his office. Maybe someone had slipped the name in the report just to trigger his death. They would probably take a look around at the mess, eyeball the ashtray, and shrug their shoulders.

At 57, Alexei Kaparov wasn't exactly a picture of good health. Slightly rotund and stuffed into a dark brown suit, his skin was devoid of color and almost matched his similarly dull gray, yellow-tinged hair. Only a hawkish, blood-vessel-riddled nose gave his face any contrast and also served as a beacon for his unhealthy habits, cigarettes being only one of many bad choices Kaparov made on a daily basis. Seeing the contents of the report not only turned his nose a few shades darker, but also ignited a craving for one of his other bad choices. Fortunately, he no longer kept a bottle of cheap vodka in his lower desk drawer. Those days in the Lubyanka were long gone for all of them. He was lucky to still have his cigarettes.

He stormed to the door of his office and opened it abruptly, which turned several heads in his direction.

"Someone find Prerovsky immediately! Goddamn it, I want this shit filed electronically," he said, waving the report at nobody in particular. "We're living in the f*cking dark ages here, and we're missing shit left and right!"

Now everyone was looking in his direction, at a very atypical burst of emotion from their director. Several analysts broke from their seats, to either look for Agent Prerovsky or just get out of the way.

"He's over in another section. Caucasus Division," a female agent replied, who didn't appear to be moving from her computer workstation.

"Well? What exactly are you waiting for? A personal invitation to get off your ass and find him? For a bunch of analysts, you seem to have trouble connecting the dots. I need Prerovsky here immediately! I don't pay him to work in the Caucasus Division! He works here, and if you value your job in my division you'll f*cking find him immediately!" he said, and retreated into his office, leaving everyone to scramble.

The door slammed shut, and he listened to the beehive of activity on the other side of the flimsy gray door. That went well. A little fire under their asses worked miracles from time to time. Kaparov was careful not to verbally explode on them too regularly, like many of the other directors and mid-level managers within Headquarters. It served no purpose other than to alienate, though every once in a while, he felt the need to show them that they weren't working on easy street. Granted, his division wasn't the busiest, but it was no less important than any other division, and on a day like today, it might be more important than anyone would care to admit. Just as he sat down to look at the report again, he heard a knock at the door.

"Come in," he barked, and Yuri Prerovsky opened the door, stepping in tentatively.

"Shut the door. We have a problem," he said.

Agent Yuri Prerovsky, second in command of the Bioweapons/Chemical Threat Assessment Division, shut the door and walked over to a crude folding chair opened next to his boss's desk. "What's all the commotion?"

He threw the report down on the end of the desk closest to Yuri. "Have you seen this report?"

Yuri studied the first page and thumbed through it. "I haven't read it. I catalogued it and placed it on your desk two days ago. I think we received it by mistake. It should have been routed to the Caucasus Threat Division if anything…hold on," he said, studying the document, "actually, it was routed to them as well."

"Read page three and you'll see why it was routed to us," he said and waited for Yuri's response.

"F*ck…how did Central Processing miss this?"

"They didn't. They got it to the right desk, but didn't bother to highlight Reznikov's name or put an alert in the computer! Anything to bring this to our attention. He's at the top of our list for f*ck's sake!" he yelled, instantly calming back down and holding his hand out for the report.

"Two days you say? Shit." Kaparov lit a cigarette from the pack of Troikas in his desk. "The raid occurred five days ago, and this is the speed at which we receive crucial information?" he said, deeply inhaling tobacco smoke.

"There isn't much here, and we’re not likely to dig the rest out of Alpha Branch. I'll try though," Yuri said.

Kaparov exhaled the smoke toward the ceiling and regarded Yuri. He was young and smart, part of the new generation of law enforcement agents that hadn't been trained under the KGB. He wasn't part of the paranoid, compartmentalized thinking that had served mother Russia so miserably for nearly fifty years. The fact that he had no hesitation to walk upstairs to the infamous branch that handled FSB Spetsnaz Operations was a testament to the new days.

Agents like Prerovksy gave him hope that the change was real. Two decades ago, walking up to the KGB Special Operations Branch without an invitation could easily end your career, and if you were on your way up there to ask the wrong kinds of questions, you could wake up the next morning in a Siberian detention camp. Times had fortunately changed, but old fears were hard to shake.

"It's worth a try, but the report entry doesn't indicate much more than a few scattered ledger entries regarding Reznikov's visit to the camp and a reference to recent activity in Kazakhstan. That's Reznikov's old stomping grounds. He was fired from the VECTOR bio-research facility in Novosibirsk, just a few hundred miles away from the Kazakhstan border. He supposedly disappeared en route to an interview at its sister institute, barely three hundred miles away in Stepnagorsk, Kazakhstan.

"Yuri, I have a bad feeling about this. Reznikov's been nosing around Al Qaeda for three years, with what I can only assume is one purpose: to strike some kind of funding deal to complete his research into weaponized encephalitis. Even during the heyday of the Soviet bioweapons program, that research was banned."

"But they still did it," Yuri said.

"Unfortunately, considerable research continued, and VECTOR was one of the primary sites that violated the Kremlin's decree. Of course, it stopped for good in 1978."

Yuri cocked his head and cast a curious look.

"Ah, the benefits of being a remnant of the old guard. Lots of loose lips back then, without any glue to keep them shut. Rumor has it that the entire scientific team associated with the project was executed by firing squad on the front lawn of the facility. Reznikov's father was supposedly among the group executed. Nobody really knows. There was no official record of the executions, as you can imagine. What we do know is that Reznikov's mother fatally shot herself on the same day, and Anatoly Reznikov went to live with the mother's sister somewhere south of Murmansk. The father just disappeared from record."

"No wonder Reznikov is a little off."

"A little? He was a vocal proponent of continuing his father's research. Can you imagine how well that was received at VECTOR? Within a month of being hired there in 2003, he suddenly started talking nonsense about how modifying encephalitis genomes could save the world. That f*cker went under surveillance within the hour, and emails from certain research staff hit my desk quicker than you can imagine. Whether the rumors about 1978 were true or not, nobody wanted to be summoned to attend an impromptu picnic on the front lawn. Know what I mean?"

"So, where do we go with this?" Yuri said.

"I'll walk this up to the Investigative Division. They'll need to start sending agents out to Kazakhstan and all potential laboratory sites in the area. Only God knows what's in this for Reznikov, but if he's aligned with Muslim extremists, we have a big problem. Al Qaeda won't be funding his research to improve their image on the scientific scene. This can only lead to one thing. Bioterrorism attacks on European and U.S. soil. Hell, if Chechen separatists are involved, which is a fair assumption given the Dagestan connection, then we're looking at possible attacks right here in Russia. We need to assume the worst. Let's get our team looking in the right places for any more information. I'll stop by Alpha Group on my way back from Investigative, unless you have a contact there."

"Well, I do have special access to a lady friend up there," he said, grinning.

"I don't even want to think about your concept of ‘special access,’ Yuri. If I don't have any luck with them this morning, I'll pay for you to take her out on the town tonight. And they said we were out of the spy business," Kaparov said, shaking his head.