Everything In Time
Chapter 11
AN1: The continuation of our story is contributed to by our own fictionalmike. Upon my request he invented our new main villain, "The Facilitator".
AN2: According to Radiorox CB has been sketching lately. The challenge was that Mac is also drawing and is quite good & Harm catches her at it. My treatment is in the middle of the chapter.
Brief history lesson:
During the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechnya declared independence. In 1992, Chechen and Ingush leaders signed an agreement splitting the joint Chechen–Ingush republic in two, with Ingushetia joining the Russian Federation and Chechnya remaining independent.
The First Chechen War took place from 1994 to 1996, when Russian forces attempted to regain control over Chechnya, which had declared independence in November 1991. Despite overwhelming numerical superiority in men, weaponry, and air support, the Russian forces were unable to establish effective permanent control over the mountainous area due to numerous successful full-scale battles and insurgency raids. The Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis in 1995 shocked the Russian public and led to international condemnation of the Chechen rebels.
In April 1996 the first democratically elected president of Chechnya, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was killed by Russian forces using a booby trap bomb and a missile fired from a warplane after he was located by triangulating the position of a satellite phone he was using.
The widespread demoralization of the Russian forces in the area and a successful offensive to re-take Grozny by Chechen rebel's forces led by Aslan Maskhadov prompted Russian President Boris Yeltsin to declare a ceasefire in 1996, and sign a peace treaty a year later that saw a withdrawal of Russian forces.
After the war, parliamentary and presidential elections took place in January 1997 in Chechnya and brought to power new President Aslan Maskhadov, chief of staff and prime minister in the Chechen coalition government, for a five-year term. Maskhadov sought to maintain Chechen sovereignty while pressing the Russian government to help rebuild the republic, whose formal economy and infrastructure were virtually destroyed. Russia continued to send money for the rehabilitation of the republic; it also provided pensions and funds for schools and hospitals. Most of these funds were taken by Chechen authorities and divided between favored warlords. Nearly half a million people (40% of Chechnya's prewar population) had been internally displaced and lived-in refugee camps or overcrowded villages. There was an economic downturn. Two Russian brigades were permanently stationed in Chechnya.
End of history lesson.
In the summer of 1994, a late-teenage female fighter emerged from the rubble of Grosny. She had been an orphan from the age of 13, attaching herself to groups of waifs wandering the war-torn street, sleeping any in hovel or shelter that she could find. She was always one step ahead of the police and under the radar of the lackadaisical Russian social services that halfheartedly tried to keep track of the wayward children. As a result, she was bereft of any moral compass, depending only on the credo of "doing whatever she had to", to survive.
As she grew and blossomed into womanhood, she became a fighter in the Chechen side of the rebellion. As such she established a formidable reputation during the first six months of the war, perfecting her "honeytrap" technique of dispatching Russian officers. Wearing relatively little make-up, the 17-year-old Chechen fighter could pass herself off as a woman in her early twenties; which was the average age of the Russian female soldiers whom she stalked and routinely killed as her way into the Russian sites. She quickly perfected her art, using a garrote as her weapon of choice to kill the females whom she would then take the place of.
Her record was just over one minute from first strike until the headless corpse, dripping its remaining blood downhill, had been stripped of boots, skirt, holster and belt, dog-tags, blouse, jacket and cap. Often, her facsimile of a female Russian officer was striding towards the barracks before the stripped corpse had finished rolling down the hill to the river or valley where wild animals would quickly dispose of the evidence.
Soon she was no stranger to a life in uniform, often taking and wearing the uniforms of female Soviet officers whom she had captured and slain, to penetrate Russian sites and entice her chosen target to his death – usually by means of a stiletto knife to the base of the skull as they romped in her bed.
However, within seven months in January of 1995 the FSB (successor to the KGB) and the GRU(Military Intelligence) mounted a joint operation looking for the "serial killer" of their female and male army officers. Army officers found dead in their beds with the same knife wound at the base of their skulls were always reported and a couple of female bodies had not been completely "consumed" by the wild animals and had been found by regular patrols. The FSR and GRU were actually rather good at their investigation and her face had become known via sketches made by witnesses who recalled the strange female face that was seen one day and gone the next.
A rogue officer in a rogue unit in the FSR was involved in the investigation and got to her first. Thinking he had a way to get back at the Americans, who supported the Russian government, advised her to, "As the Americans say, 'Get out of Dodge!'. I'm sending you to "your" Uncle Yevgeny Kozyreva in the USA. Years ago, during the Cold War, the KGB set Yevgeny and his wife Elena Dudayev up in America. Yevgeny and Elena have lived a lawful American life and Yevgeny has gained American citizenship. We set up Elena on paper as a natural born American citizen. By sheer coincidence Elena is of Chechen-Ingush extraction. Now she works as a math teacher at the local high school."
Thus, it was that Karolina Rasmenovic immigrated to the USA, sponsored by her uncle Yevgeny Kozyreva and Elena Dudayev under the handling of Major Nikolai Sachakov. {More on him later.}
Upon meeting Karolina in the flesh, Elena realized that she was a near doppelganger for an American high school student named Caroline Ravensclaw from her math tutoring; which she desperately needed at the time. That was because Caroline was planning to join the US Navy and had been accepted for Annapolis.
"We can get you deep into the American military establishment," Elena explained.
The Chechens' plan was breathtakingly simple in its audacity and implementation. If everything went as they planned, a different woman would be walking into Annapolis the following fall to start her studies. Elena put Karolina through a crash course in US Naval studies; and with bogus Chechen nursing credentials, Karolina volunteered with the local Visiting Nurse Service who provided nursing care to several elderly local citizens.
One of the 85-years-old was the grandmother of the USNA candidate Caroline. Caroline's mother had gotten pregnant out of wedlock at 20 and had died in childbirth. Seeing that he was not going to get support to care for his bastard child, the father walked away from his responsibilities. As a result, Caroline had been brought up by her maternal grandmother.
The weeks Karolina spent visiting grandma had been a great source of intelligence, which had given her a staggeringly-rich compendium of knowledge about not only grandma, but also the granddaughter - of whom grandma was very proud.
The Chechen's plan was put into motion the evening of the real Caroline Ravensclaw's farewell party. She left the party and made it home and entered through the garage beneath her grandmother's house where she was suddenly grabbed from behind, overpowered and killed with a garrote. An hour earlier, her ailing grandmother had succumbed to a massive overdose of Insulin, courtesy of the Visiting Nurse Service nurse with her neatly bound hair and spectacles.
Karolina quickly stripped off all her and Caroline Ravensclaw's clothing and re-dressed herself in Caroline's party clothes, right down to the underpinnings. She removed the locket from the dead woman's neck and placed it around her own neck. Then she easily got the dead Caroline's now nude body and her old clothes into a large clear plastic tube used to "sausage" garbage out from trash compactors. She zip-tied both ends closed and wrapped black gorilla tape around the tube at the ankles, knees, stomach and shoulders. This was how the dead American girl would be transported to and disposed of at Uncle Yevgeny's meat-processing plant just over the county line.
When Uncle Yevgeny showed up, he backed his station wagon into the garage. When he got out and closed the garage door, Karolina reported with a snappy impression of a military salute, "Dead orphan downstairs, dead grandmother upstairs; new US Navy midshipman ready to join up next week."
Yevgeny watched as Karolina removed her plain-glass spectacles, which she had habitually worn during her disguise, and freed her hair from its customary tight bun and stood alongside Caroline Ravensclaw's corpse, as it was propped up in the clear plastic tube.
"My god, not even her mother would know" exclaimed uncle Yevgeny. Karolina smiled.
While Yevgeny placed the wrapped Caroline's corpse into the station wagon under a plastic tarp, Karolina dialed 911. She tearfully reported that she came home to find her grandmother dead in bed. She successfully ran interference when the overloaded Sherriff turned up as she identified herself with Caroline's Driver's License and escorted the Sherriff's deputy up to grandmother's bedroom. He gave a cursory look around the room. The deputy then agreed with the M.E. that "natural causes" was reasonable for an ailing 85-year-old.
He didn't even look in the garage, where Yevgeny quietly waited for the police to leave and the real Caroline had met her fate.
Two days later, with the whole grieving community knowing that "Caroline" was about to travel east to Annapolis, the local courts agreed to an expedited funeral. Grandma Ravensclaw was quickly processed in the local crematorium, with her Cherokee ancestry captured in a few early photographs at her wake. Even close examination of the photographs would show her grand-daughter Caroline kneeling alongside her bed, with the locket on display.
In July 1995, "Caroline Ravensclaw" left her sleepy mid-western town and headed to Annapolis to join the USNA Annapolis as a Midshipman. She had her USNA acceptance letter and all the sponsorship paperwork, her passport and all necessary ID paperwork when she arrived at the main gate of USNA Annapolis to start her
Caroline Ravensclaw went through the required four years from July 1995 to June of 1999. She studied with distinction, but not *too* distinctive. Upon graduation she served her required post-graduation cruise on the nuclear carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), nicknamed Big Ike. After the cruise she was recruited into Cryptographic school before being picked up by US Naval Intelligence, where Caroline Ravensclaw, actually born Karolina Rasmenovic, would become a highly-placed Chechen sleeper within ONI, ready to do the bidding of her Russian handlers.
Her previous conscience-free slaughtering of Russian officers and female soldiers back in Chechnya stood her in good stead for her coming role as the implacable "Black Widow" whom Khalid Fahd would rely upon, calling her "The Facilitator" when he slithered into the USA to carry out his mission of revenge against the Rabb-Mackenzie household.
Major Nikolai Sachakov was a 19-year-old Chechen conscripted into the Russian Army from his home in Grosny, Chechnya in 1979. He served in the army when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1980 and rose up into leadership by way of clandestinely undermining his superiors, providing the KGB with reports and photos of their sexual and allegedly illegal financial dalliances into the ever-present Black Market, which had exploded in the collapse of Soviet Russia. His advancement was also facilitated by his friendship with his immediate superior in the KGB, one Colonel Mikhail "Misha" Parlovsky. Misha treated Nikolai like a son and mentored him all the way through his military career and into the KGB. Misha kept a blind eye as he conveniently looked the other way from Nikolai's extracurricular financial activities with the Russian Black Market.
One of his partners in crime in the Black Market was an arms dealer named Vladimir Kadashev. Kadashev was also Sachakov's paternal-side uncle. He had been rounded up in the sweep of those involved in the deal of selling nuclear tipped missiles to the Russian mafia that was thwarted in September 1998.
Nikolai had become very angry at his uncle's arrest, as well as when Misha had been killed by the two Americans that cooperated with Sokol to thwart the missile deal under the guise of searching for one's father.
Besides Marc Sokol, he remembered the names of the Americans very well, Rabb & Marshall.
Friday April 14, 2006
0900 Zulu Time
Apartment of Lt. Cmdr. Caroline Ravensclaw / Karolina Rasmenovic
Shortly after she was stationed to ONI, Caroline had been lucky to find an apartment in the newly revitalized and gentrifying DC Southwest Waterfront. Her rent was at a great rate due to her military service. It was a short 20-minute ride to her office in local traffic in Arnold Heights, MD.
Now she was on her very private encrypted computer, cyber-chatting in Cyrillic with her handler, Nikolai, who was also on his own much encrypted private computer.
C-Our friend Khalid and his Chechen friends have been apprehended as they tried to get the teenager.
N-No worries. The Chechens will not be traced to you as they used their own resources to come into the country and rent their dwellings. You communicated with them by 'dead drop'. Khalid is another matter. He was careless in his use of computers and the World Wide Web by putting himself out as Sadiq's successor.
C-How do I deal with him?
N-Not at all. He never knew your name and you never spoke personally with him, correct?
C-Correct. He got his information through 3rd parties I used, who relayed the Marshall and Rabb family information to him while he was in Yemen.
N-Good. Keep your usual low profile at ONI and be so much as solicitous even empathetic toward Adm. Marshall and his extended family. Does he consider you friendly enough to share his family information with you?
C-No. As per his position, he tends to be somewhat guarded. He only lets the greater office personnel in on momentous family events in passing to explain his personal time away from his office. He has many photos of his family on his desk. So, whenever I was in his office, it was easy to see who and how many they are.
N-What of your sleeper agent Allen in Rabb's LSO?
C-So far, he is undetected and secure in his position.
N-That is good. As long as he keeps his usual low profile and communicate with our still at large operatives by 'dead drop', he will be fine. Good-bye for now. Communicate with me at the usual time next week. Dobroy nochi {good night} Karolinashka; be well.
C- Dobroy nochi to you as well Nikoshka.
With that they both signed off and shut down their computers.
They both thought that they were secure in their use of encrypted computers. What they didn't know was that in America the NSA was always listening on the web for cyber communications in Arabic, Russian and Cyrillic. They couldn't trace the IP addresses yet, but with time, they would.
Over in Russia, the Russian cyber security people in the FSB were always listening to all their military personnel, keeping track of them and their communications. What Sachakov didn't know was that someone in the FSB had always kept extra close tabs on him. Tonight Sachakov, in his false sense of cyber invincibility, had been careless using the term of affection, Karolinashka, before he signed off. That had been a signal that the FSB had prompted their listening programs to hear.
Shortly after Karolina and Nikolai had signed off, one of the cyber listeners brought the transcript of the cyber chat to his superior.
"Sir, we just heard this conversation."
"Give it to me and you're dismissed."
After he read it, he said aloud to the empty office in his native-born Texas slang, "I wonder what Rabb and Marshall did to Sachakov to get a burr under his saddle?"
Then Mark Sokol sat back to ponder that question.
Saturday, April 15 2006
1500 Local Time
Marshall Residence
Florida Ave., DC, NW
Sarah was sitting at her favorite place on the couch in the living room. She had her sketching materials out and was drawing her husband as he sat watching the baseball game on TV with Patrick & David on his lap. She loved to do this whenever she felt the urge, so John made sure she was supplied with the material she needed between home and her apartment in Annapolis.
She was so intent in her task; she barely heard the back door of the house open and the sound of running feet through the kitchen and dining room. Her concentration was broken when 6 & ½ Caroline came up behind her and wrapped her arms around her and gave her a kiss. Sarah put her drawing down to properly greet her daughter and her cousins
As Les, Samantha and Natalie greeted John and the boys, Sarah asked her daughter, "Hi baby. Did you have a good time on your sleep-over and flying with Carrie, Les and Uncle Harm?"
"Yeah Mom, it was all great. I love being with Sam, Les and Natalie. We slept in the blanket fort Aunt Diane let us build in the living room. The flying was great to. It's so much better than flying in an airliner. You can see everything. Uncle Harm even let me take the controls." Caroline said before she went over to greet her father and brothers.
Just as Sarah was about to protest, Harm came up behind her, kissed her offered cheek and whispered in her ear, "My hands never left the stick and her legs couldn't reach the pedals."
"Oh, that's reassuring," Sarah replied dryly. She bent to continue her drawing.
Harm looked over her shoulder and said, "Say, that's really good. I didn't know you drew."
"Oh, I've always been able to draw since I was a child. I drew a lot during my time drying out at Red Rock and especially during my chemo time. It was very therapeutic. I stored a lot of my sketchbooks with my drawings away in the file cabinet in the home office downstairs."
"You should go through them and show mom. She'd put them up in her gallery."
"I already showed her. She caught me drawing during her times here helping with my care. She took some of my flower and landscape drawings home with her and showed them in the gallery. Some of them were sold."
Harm nodded in admiration as he asked, "John mind if I get a beer?"
"Yeah ace, you're always welcome to it. Get me one will you please. Hey boys, why don't you go watch the game in the playroom downstairs with Les and Caroline."
Harm watched the children go to the kitchen and on the way down the stairs before he went back into the living room.
When he returned and gave John his beer, Sarah asked, "How did Mattie do with the 'protective driving' course with the Secret Service?"
"Fine, Diane said she had a ball."
"Speaking of protection, what are we going to do about PO1 Mike Allen or Mikhail Alhanov?" Harm asked.
John replied, "While you were flying with the kids and Mattie was driving with the Secret Service, Diane and I did a phone meeting this morning from the secure phone downstairs. She has Paris Summerskill's team looking into Alhanov and his movements. He knows Boren by sight and she would be spotted following him. Also, Diane told me that her people initially found it hard to track the source of Khalid and his Chechen cohorts' identity papers. So, I have our Asst. Director of Field Operatives looking into almost their near-perfect fake pedigrees. Harm you may know her. You defended her."
"Oh really, who?"
"Commander Mary Grace Fields, but you knew her as Ensign Beth Lane. We, as in Meg, Kate & I, call her Gracie."
Harm flipped through the index card file of memories as he thought of all his cases. Finally, he remembered saying, "Oh, yeah. Back in 1997 I defended her for killing a Turkish colonel in self-defense in her apartment. According to ONI at the time, I wasn't supposed to win that case. I found that out after I did win it. How good a lawyer was I huh?"
John and Sarah just rolled their eyes at his bravado as John continued, "Well she's going to begin searching through the paper trail of Khalid and the others' IDs to see who may have created it"
"Well, I hope Gracie finds something. I don't want to go through again what we went through with Khalid's brother," Sarah commented.
"Amen to that Sarah," Harm said in total agreement.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
1920 Local Time
ONI Field Office
Suitland Federal Center, Bldg. # 3
Arnold Heights, MD
Working from her office in the Pentagon, Commander Mary Fields' investigation began tracking through the cyber trail focusing on the lists of ONI-created ID materials. She began to spot a pattern of pedigrees with names that she did not recognize from her cross-checked roster of operatives. The unknown ONI pedigrees were being created from a computer server with the IP address in the ONI Field Office in Arnold Heights, MD, just outside the DC border, but still inside the "495 Beltway".
"I finally got something," she mused out loud.
After doing some more verification, she got up without signing off her computer and left the Pentagon to go to the field office to work off that server to find the offending office computer.
Gracie was so intent on making headway that, unfortunately for her, she didn't tell anyone of her work. Her activities had set off the usual set of cyber "trapdoor alerts" that are activated when someone comes inquiring about an operative's pedigree. Unfortunately for Gracie it was Caroline /Karolina's job to monitor those alerts. So, Caroline knew that Gracie was closing in and accordingly she took steps to protect her tracks – in the usual manner.
Upon entering the ONI field office lobby, Gracie Fields was greeted by Lt. Cmdr. Caroline Ravensclaw, standing at attention in the lobby. "Good evening Commander, how might I assist a fellow member of ONI?"
Gracie was surprised in seeing someone greeting her in the lobby and was circumspect in replying, "Well, I am investigating a case which has been smoldering for some time. I found a number of pedigree profiles of operatives that I can't account for in our roster. They seem to be made from the computer server in this building."
"Okay, why don't we go up to my office and have a look."
Gesturing Mary ahead of her, Caroline guided Gracie towards the stairs. Unfortunately for Gracie, she was alone in the small building with Caroline at that time of the evening.
When they reached Caroline's desk, She said to Gracie, "Commander, this will take a bit of time as I run through the names – may I offer you a coffee as I was about to take a break when you arrived?"
"Sure, I can use a pick-me-up, I've been on the run all day."
Caroline smiled benevolently at Mary's weary movements, as she set about making two mugs of coffee and preparing to hand one to Mary – accompanied by a huge slug of Ketamine, a well-known horse-tranquilizer.
When Mary took the mug of coffee, Caroline sat down alongside her on the couch in the break room and folded her left calf over her right knee. Gracie didn't notice, in the low light of the break room, that Caroline's highly polished boots extended up to almost her knees beneath the military-issue khaki trousers of her naval uniform.
Caroline had adapted her boots, sewing a leather scabbard into the inside of each boot. Her boot scabbards each carried ceramic knives; undetectable by x-ray or metal detector. As she chatted to Mary, Caroline quietly unzipped her left boot and slid out one knife, just as Gracie began to succumb to the effects of the tranquilizer.
"Oh dear, I don't feel too good."
Caroline looked at Mary, concern written all over her face. "Well, let's get you into the ladies' room just in case; it's just across over there."
She supported an increasingly-unresponsive Commander Fields as she staggered towards the washrooms. As Mary's faculties shut down, she passed out, landing with her head resting in the shower stall. Looking down dispassionately at the older woman, Caroline's eyes were devoid of emotion as she prepared to end the other woman's life – to protect her secret. Caroline positioned Mary's exposed neck and throat across the ceramic lip of the shower-stall. Then she raised her leg, over the woman's neck.
Her boot-heel impacted onto the back of Mary's neck, crushing Mary's windpipe and mangling the spinal column just beneath the base of the skull extinguishing any chance of further conscious thought.
Pausing only to gather Gracie's pocketbook and briefcase to throw into the ladies' room as she exited, Caroline sprinted down to the Lobby reception area and closed up the building. As the site coordinator, she had arranged with Facilities to "delay" the implementation of the CCTV surveillance system. That delay meant that her actions were completely unrecorded, (as was Mary Grace Fields' arrival a half-hour earlier).
She strolled back up the stairs whistling gently and striped off her own clothes. Pulling Mary, the whole way into the shower, she stripped Mary's unconscious body. After, stripping off her own clothes Caroline stepped into the shower with Mary's corpse and turned on the shower. She stabbed her knife into the woman's chest to end her heartbeat and then stood Gracie's unconscious body up in the shower-stall and opened up the arteries and veins in the woman's legs before slitting her throat. As the flow of warm water instantly washed away the bright red evidence of her crime. Finally, she showered and washed herself and cleaned the ceramic knife - ready to hide it once more inside her boot.
Drying off and re-dressing in a jogging suit, she picked up her cell-phone and placed a call.
"Hello Uncle Yevgeny, it's the Facilitator; I need a clean-up at the ONI site in the Suitland Federal Center, Bldg. # 3. in Arnold Heights"
The call to Uncle Yevgeny produced a sanitation truck from his private sanitation service company within a half-hour. By that time Caroline's gloved hands had zip-tie closed the black compactor sausage bag from an unopened box in the trash-compactor room in the basement and wrapped tape around Gracie's body in the usual places. She attached another black garbage bag filled with Gracie's bags and clothing to, the dead woman's wrapped and bloodless corpse.
Being that she was alone in the building it was not a problem for Caroline to get the body and bag of possessions into a trash hauler, throw some paper waste over it and wheel the hauler down to the trash compactor room and through to the adjacent loading dock, where the disposal truck was backed onto. There she and Uncle Yevgeny unceremoniously dumped Mary Grace Fields' body and possessions into the refuse truck.
Uncle Yevgeny left immediately after that and drove to his company's incinerator. Commander Mary Grace Fields would never be seen alive again. If all went as planned, an additional 130lbs of material would be incinerated at the closest incinerator at Lorton, Virginia during the night shift, 25 miles and 45 minutes' drive away from Arnold Heights.
Caroline Ravensclaw had slid back into the Russian-slaughtering mind-set of her 1995 teenage time in Chechnya which enabled her to carry out the murder of Commander Fields with barely a thought. The mission of "The Facilitator" was all-important.
Half-an-hour after the uncle left, Lt. Cmdr. Caroline Ravensclaw changed back into her USN khaki uniform, locked up and set the alarm on the building. She climbed into her Explorer and headed for home. As far as she was concerned, nothing "seemed" out of place.
What she failed to notice or take into consideration two things,
1-Her Uncle Yevgeny's private garbage hauler truck was not from the company that usually serviced that building. The Federal Government's 'Government Service Office (GSO) doled out service contracts to a set number of private 'trash hauling' companies for their various buildings. Uncle Yevgeny's company was not one of those companies.
So, just as he left his "niece's" building with his morbid cargo, the regular private trash company truck was just turning onto the block on its way to service that particular building and saw the different company's truck pulling away. Being that the authorized company was a "labor union" shop, the crew in the correct truck made note of the unauthorized truck's company name and reported it to their dispatcher who ran it up the flag pole to their government liaison. That liaison filed a complaint with the Government Service Office overseeing their contract. That would cause a cascade of events that would result in revealing certain things that certain parties wished would not be revealed.
2-Caroline didn't take into consideration how Gracie arrived at the building. Gracie's Navy issue Crown Victoria was still in the outer most region of the massive parking lot that surrounded the Suitland Federal Center complex of office buildings. It was hidden in plain sight among other similar government issued Crown Victorias.
The next morning, the early-shift cleaners didn't notice anything out of the ordinary and cleaned the upper-floor ladies' room without any realization that a murder had taken place there during the previous evening.
Caroline was at her desk by 08:00hrs, sitting down the hall from where she perpetrated a murder the night before.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
1100 Local Time
Office of Naval Intelligence
Pentagon, Arlington, VA
Captain Meghan Pike was worried. She was expecting Mary Grace Fields to report to her on her progress of tracing the false pedigrees of the Chechens involved with Mattie's attempted abduction and the Falls Church spy, Mikail Alhanov.
The problem was that Gracie had not yet reported in for duty for the regular work day; which was highly unusual. Calls to her home and cellphone proved fruitless.
'Something is definitely wrong! Gracie is usually the first one into her office every morning,' Meg mused.
She was brought out her reverie when her phone rang with a call from her yeoman.
She snatched up the receiver to answer with, "Captain Pike?"
"Captain, Cmdrs. Paget and Pike here to see you ma'am."
"Send them in."
Meg got up to greet her visitors.
"Carolyn, it's been a while. How's your Joshua?"
"Oh, he's growing like a weed. He's three years old and enjoying day care. He's had a few play dates with the Rabb & Marshall kids."
"Good to hear. Anyway, what brings you here today?"
"Paris Summerskill and her team had the person Sergei identified as Mikail Alhanov under surveillance. Yesterday they saw him do a dead drop. After he left the drop area they went and found that he left a thumb drive behind. When they checked it, it had a detail of Harm Rabb's trip last Saturday to Manassas Airport with his young kids and Caroline Marshall as well as his other movements. Based on that Paris brought him in for questioning."
"What did they get out of him?"
"He spilled everything. Saying that he was brought here in 2002 to the US by someone he calls 'The Facilitator'. He doesn't know the name or what gender. He only received his pedigree from a Chechen intelligence agent before they shipped him over here to join our Navy. He was instructed to keep tabs on the Rabb family, through his post at the Falls Church LSO."
"Does that Chechen have a name?"
"Major Nikolai Sachakov."
"Do we have information on him?" Meg asked.
"No, but Director Rabb was speaking with Admiral Marshall about reaching out to one of our friends in Russia to see if he has any information." Carolyn reported.
"That's progress at least. We have another problem, possibly related to that," Meg announced.
"What's that," Kate asked.
"Gracie is missing…" was all Meg got out before Kate exclaimed, "Oh no! What happened?"
"We don't know. The last thing I know that she was checking on the origins of any false pedigrees, like Alhanov's and so forth. She was last seen by the building's surveillance cameras leaving here and driving away in one of our Crown Vics last night about 1920 hours. When she didn't come here for work this morning, I called her home and cellphone. The home phone goes to her answering machine and the cellphone goes right to voicemail. I put a BOLO out for her car with NCIS and their teams."
"Did they report on any progress?" Kate asked.
"No, at least not to me or anyone else in the office."
"What about her computer?" Kate asked.
"I haven't gone that far yet. I was just going to call you, our resident computer nerd, with authorization to unlock it. Let's say we go to her office and give it a try."
"Yeah, let's." Kate said with a smile at being called a nerd.
When the trio arrived at Mary Grace's office, they found that her computer was in the automatic "rest and lock out" mode, meaning that she didn't sign off before she left. Using her authorization codes, Kate had no trouble getting into the computer. When the screen opened up, they saw immediately what Gracie was working on."
Kate announced, "Gracie left this search program running. It shows that she traced some pedigrees to a server in our outlier building in the Suitland Federal Center in Arnold Heights. Maybe she went there to check it out."
"We have to check it out. Carolyn, care to take a ride?" Meg asked.
"Yeah, let's go. We may find out something."
"Just before she left the room with Carolyn, Meg's cellphone rang. "Captain Pike! ~ Really? That is interesting. ~ Well we'll meet the forensics team at Suitland. Cmdr. Paget and I were just leaving to go the Suitland complex to check a computer lead. ~ Good we'll meet up there. By the time we get there do you think we'll know what was in the truck at the incinerator? ~ Okay I understand, they are just beginning the search. Thank you."
"Who was that?" Carolyn asked.
"Jethro Gibbs. It seems the GSO who runs our service company contracts got a report from our authorized trash disposal service of an unauthorized garbage truck pulling away from our building in Arnold Heights. It was from a company under surveillance of the FBI and the DC Police OCB (Organized Crime Bureau) for facilitating the disposal of various Russian Mafia gangsters that were whacked. It was stopped with a full load of garbage as it was queued up for dumping at the incinerator at Lorton, VA. They have the driver in custody and the truck is being searched as we speak. Also, they found Gracie's car in the Suitland Center parking lot."
"Who runs our Suitland building?" Carolyn asked.
"A Lt. Cmdr. Caroline Ravensclaw. She's been with us a few years, shortly after she completed Cryptology school. Her record is unblemished, so far."
"Why doesn't that surprise me that there is someone with a perfect record?"
"What say we go pay her a visit, Carolyn? She may know something about Gracie. First, let me go back to get my jacket and one other thing."
When Meg zipped her black lined jacket over her khaki blouse, Carolyn asked, "Do you think we may need that?"
"I don't know, but I don't want to take any chances. I've been shot in the head once. I don't want there to be a second time."
1220 Local Time
ONI Field Office
Suitland Federal Center, Bldg. # 3
Arnold Heights, MD
Meg pulled up to the area of the parking lot where she saw the NCIS MCRT Team working on Gracie's vehicle.
Getting out Meg walked up to Gibbs and asked, "Find anything interesting?"
"Nothing unusual. The only fingerprints we found are Cmdr. Fields'. We were just going to go into the office to speak with Lt. Cmdr. Ravensclaw."
"Fine, but Cmdr. Paget and I can do that. She may be innocent of everything and doesn't know anything of Cmdr. Fields."
"Well okay if you're going to do that, wear these," Gibbs said handing over a set or earwig speaker-earplugs.
"Do you think we need these? Meg asked.
"Call it a gut feeling. We checked Ravensclaw's position. As the person listed as the building manager, she had to have known about an unauthorized garbage truck coming into the loading dock. Those union garbage haulers don't play around with anyone messing with their jobs and definitely had the right to complain."
"Okay we can go with that," Meg said as she and Carolyn put on the earwigs.
The office index in the lobby showed that Ravensclaw's office was on the 3rd floor. They found it as it was marked by the wall plaque affixed to the wall in hallway. Meg politely knocked and went in on the usual reply of "Enter!"
Ravensclaw stood up to attention when she saw the two higher ranked officers enter and asked, "Captain, Commander. Good afternoon. What can I do for you today?"
"At ease commander and sit," Meg instructed as she and Carolyn followed suit. She began by asking, "One of our people was looking into some operative pedigrees that can't match up to our regular lists of operatives. She found some pedigree files on the server in this building."
Ravensclaw answered, "I don't know what Cmdr. Fields was working on."
Meg and Carolyn noticed the slip, but they're not quick to hide their reactions.
Ravensclaw saw that and reached and put her hand on the butt of the .380 automatic pistol in the slot under her desk and held it there.
Carolyn saw the movement of her hand and asked, "How did you know Cmdr. Fields was doing the search."
"Well, isn't she our Asst. Director of Field Operatives?"
"True, but her car is still in the parking lot outside. Can you explain that?"
At that point Ravensclaw knew that they were getting too close to exposing her secret. Upon realizing that, the next set of actions happened in an instant:
Ravensclaw pulled her weapon from under her desktop and snapped a shot at Carolyn.
Carolyn saw the gun clear the desk and shouted "NO!" as she was moving to her left to avoid being a stable target. Still, Carolyn cried out in pain and gripped her right upper arm with blood seeping from between her fingers.
As Ravensclaw stood and aimed to fire at Carolyn again, three shots were fired.