Читать книгу Critical Intelligence - Don Pendleton - Страница 14

“What did you find?” Price asked.

The Annex was a flurry of activity. Akira Tokaido’s desk area looked as if a bomb had gone off. Red Bull cans and Snickers candy bar wrappers lay cast around like spillover from a landfill. His fingers hammered his keyboards while the Smiths cranked out of the earbuds of his iPod.

“I found more cases of Seven,” Delahunt said. “Bear is setting up the display right now.”

Across the room Kurtzman was plugging a flash drive into a media presentation station connected to a large flat-screen monitor set on the wall. The screen saver showed the actor Mel Gibson in his costume from the Road Warrior.

“How recent?” Price asked.

“I found some interesting links to both our old MERGE and TRIO operations, but that’s old, though it does raise all sorts of questions.”

MERGE had been a criminal network consisting of elements from the Mexican mafia, Corsican crime families and Colombian cartels. TRIO had proved to be an Asian counterpart to MERGE, formed by Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian organizations.

“Seven was behind both those unifications?” Price sounded incredulous. “That kind of global influence is insane.”

“It’s not definitive,” Delahunt admitted. “But now that I know what to look for, I’m linking things together that have no business being connected. It’s like a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream.”

“Ready,” Kurtzman announced.

The women turned toward the display screen.

A line of bodies lay in sequence on a green tarp. The corpses were bullet riddled and all black male adults. Standing around them were five Caucasian men in desert camouflage stripped of rank and identification, all holding American weapons.

Price didn’t recognize the men but she saw one was holding a Stoner M-63 light machine gun. “SEALs?” she asked.

“Yep, DevGru,” Kurtzman replied, using the shorthand for the unit that had replaced the legendary SEAL Team 6. “In Somalia, last year. Tag-and-bag mission of al Qaeda in Africa. Major communication node and his team of bodyguards.”

“What am I looking for?”

“There,” Delahunt said. “On the one with gray hair, the leader. Bear, blow up his left clavicle.”

Kurtzman grunted and worked the control pad on his automated wheelchair. A mouse drew a box around the indicated area, then blew up the resolution. A series of stars about the size of a dime were tattooed in blue ink.