The Scrubbers (Fiction)
Part 1 of 9
‘When the hit man comes, he knows damn well he has been cheated.’ -Golden Earring, Twilight Zone
Hank Beveridge stood in the drizzling rain, waiting for the taxi to arrive. His head was reeling. He didn’t know for certain what he had been injected with, but it didn’t agree with him.
The rain was light but came steadily down, and his shirt and trousers were soon soaked through. He gripped his battered suitcase carefully, holding it slightly away from his body, as if frightened of it. The suitcase was of a cheap fabric, with a garish plaid pattern meant to approximate a Scottish tartan. The fabric soaked up the water, and the suitcase got heavier.
Inside the suitcase was another case, a businessman’s leather briefcase. Inside that was a nuclear device-a “dirty bomb.” Hank called it a device because he didn’t want to call it a bomb.
Bombs exploded, and there would be no explosions tonight.
Not on his watch.
Hank was standing on a hill overlooking the city of Vilnius. Behind Hank was a nearly completed Victorian home, one of several being built here-an entire neighborhood going up at once. The slick road had the dark sheen of fresh asphalt, and the new white concrete blocks of the sidewalk seemed to glow. The streetlights were slender black steel columns, crowned with filigreed spans that held round lights out over the street. They were not lit.
Inside the house were six dead bodies, all shot, all lying on a sheet of plastic laid down to protect the living room floor while the finish work was done. Two of the corpses were tied to chairs and had been executed, rather than shot down during the gunfight that had erupted over the suitcase Hank now held.
Hank thought about dialing the taxi service again but decided against it. The cold March rain fell steadily down.
Hank had never been to Lithuania before. As with so many things, Hank’s experience of Lithuania had come from books, files, or computer databases. Not that one couldn’t learn a great deal through study. Hank was an open-source intelligence analyst for the CIA, or, in Agency slang, a Scrubber, and his career was based upon what he could deduce from observations. His job was to collect data from everything from newspaper gossip columns to old-fashioned wiretaps to satellite surveillance and distill meaning from the chaotic and sometimes contradictory jumble of information.
Hank’s special focus was the Solntsevskaya Organization, an enormous criminal syndicate that controlled almost all the commerce in several large blocks of the Russian Federation. Hank ruled over a team of five scrubbers, and between them they kept oppressively close tabs on the Solntsevskayans for years, collecting and reviewing any intelligence the Agency gathered on them. Hank believed that he and his team did an excellent job. The CIA had ready access to the means, motives, and goals of the Solntsevskaya Organization, and, thanks to Hank’s brilliant understanding of his subjects, this intelligence was not limited just to what they had done or were suspected of doing, but what they were planning to do.
Hank’s concern was that in the past few months, all of this added up to little of real interest. The Solntsevskaya family was in decline, and Hank Beveridge was declining with them. Under Putin, strong rule of law had come to the former Soviet Union, and the Solntsevskayas’ ambitions, once so grand in the free-for-all ruckus of post-communism, were abating. They had already been pushed out of a number of operations by the Vladsislas group (watched over by another scrubber team), and this latest failure had taken something out of them. The Solntsevskayas rarely traded in weapons anymore and never traded in military secrets. Instead, they focused on small-time operations such as protection scams, money laundering, gambling, and prostitution. The Solntsevskayas were still a big organization, worth something close to three billion dollars, but were shrinking down to something beneath the notice of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
Hank saw the end coming. He had prepared the intelligence reports that described this decline, even as the CIA moved in a furious rush to shift resources away from the Russian Federation to the Middle East. By New Year’s 2006, Hank knew it was possible that his entire operation could be dissolved as early as spring. He realized that he would miss the Solntsevskayas.
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But something else happened. The CIA had learned that the Solntsevskayas were trying to sell a nuclear device, and Hank was suddenly on a plane for Vilnius, capital of Lithuania.
The device was supposed to be a fake, a con run by another Western intelligence service. Hank’s Control, Jim Kessler, had explained it all to him at the initial briefing.
“Now there is such a device in play in Russia,” Jim had said. “A small payload nuclear device-a ‘dirty bomb’-that is concealable in a briefcase-sized valise.”
Madness, thought Hank. You join the service, are trained, debriefed, sign a million forms about top secret and above, fully expecting to be told secrets like this, and then when they tell you your guts fall out.
“But we know where that device is. We’re capitalizing on the rumors to flush out other parties who may be interested in such a device. We intercepted a call that indicates the Solntsevskayas are trying to sell a nuclear device. This is clearly a bluff. We know that they don’t have one.
“The tip came from a man who had been hired as a go-between for the two organizations. After the war of 2005, the two families are having trouble trusting each other, but the Vladsislas group is about the only group that could afford what the Solntsevskayas are trying to sell.”
“Who is this man?” Hank asked.
“An American mercenary and sometime assassin. We call him Arkham. I’ll fill you in on him later. The Vladsislas hired him. They’ve used him before, but never for anything in-country.”
Hank began to realize the small scope of his own arena. Wheels were turning around the world, but he only tracked the rotation of the smaller cogs. Also, things were being kept from him-that much was clear. If the Solntsevskayas were involved in this, why was he only finding out now?
“But you don’t think that the Solntsevskayas really have the device to sell,” Hank said, putting his concern over the data he’d been denied aside for now.
“No, we don’t. But all of the info about the Solntsevskaya family checks out with what you have collected for us, so even if the bomb isn’t real, the exchange may be. If we can learn where the sale is being made, we want to try and grab a few of them and find out what they are really selling. You know them the best, so we want you there to help us ID who we pick up.”
Hank had never been in the field. Forty-three years old seemed too late to begin. “What about my work here?” he asked.
“Your team can watch all that while you’re gone,” Jim said, rather dismissively in Hank’s opinion. “As for the rest,” Kessler said in a tone that suggested he was trying to let Hank down easy, “I know what you were trained as an operative, but you’re no field man. You’re a scrubber. We’ll set you up in a safe house in Vilnius. When we need you, we’ll send for you, but for the most part, you’ll be doing what you do now, but at a field office. Besides,” he added, letting a little humor come into his voice. “We have so many agents on the streets in Lithuania already they’d start butting into each other if we added any more.”
Jim smiled, but Hank missed the joke. He was thinking about his dogs. Someone would have to feed them while he was away.
To be Continued Tuesday July 7th
Thank You for Reading
Originally published at https://gregoryadamsfiction.substack.com.
