CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
MONDAY, 9:03 A.M. EST
The Bear,” Jessica Ryker announced. On a large screen behind her flashed a grainy photo of a beefy man with a thick beard and long, wispy hair, his eyes covered by wraparound sunglasses. “This is our target,” she explained.
Jessica’s team had been reassembled for this project at the behest of the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Unofficially, of course, since Purple Cell didn’t exist. That was the whole point.
The windowless chamber in the third-level basement where Jessica was sitting was blandly labeled Conference Room B3-204/Logistics Assessments. Her most trusted member of Purple Cell, an analyst named Sunday whose day job was inside the CIA Africa Issue team six floors up, sat at the laptop and ran the slides. The rest of the unit appeared only on screens, each of their faces beamed live via digital encryption from safe locations in Marrakesh, Jakarta, Shenzhen, Nairobi, Tikrit, Caracas, and Moscow. None of the Purple Cell members could see each other. In fact, none of them even knew about the others, only that they were part of something special, something exclusive.
Strict compartmentalization was one of the features that allowed Purple Cell to work anywhere, anytime, and to avoid detection. Purple Cell functioned completely black, off the books, with total deniability. Each operative reported only to Jessica, who in turn was accountable only to the Deputy Director. That was one of the benefits of Purple Cell. That was a big reason the Deputy Director had come to rely so heavily on Jessica Ryker and her team for his most sensitive assignments.
“The Bear operates a vast criminal syndicate from his base in St. Petersburg that extends around the world. His network has been linked to extortion, trafficking, sabotage, cybercrime, and terrorism.”
While Purple Cell was a favorite of the Deputy Director’s, few other of the CIA’s senior management even knew about it. For the Deputy Director, it was his secret weapon. For Jessica, Purple Cell was a high-wire act without a safety net. Her team was a ghost. Jessica was a shadow. If things ever went wrong, she was on her own.
“The Bear is running guns in Mexico, drugs out of Pakistan, and human organs in India,” she continued. “He financed Somali pirates to capture Saudi oil tankers in the Gulf of Aden. He was behind the theft of smallpox from the Russian Zagorsk Laboratory and the attempted sale of the virus to an extremist group in western China. His empire operates a pipeline that kidnaps thousands of young women in Romania and sells them into the sex trade in Western Europe, the Persian Gulf, and even on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.”
Sunday flipped the slide to a cargo ship. “This is the Ocean Constellation in the Port of Baltimore last year,” Jessica continued. The slide changed again to show a news file photo of an open shipping container lined with the bodies of dead girls. “Forty-four women suffocated to death. All at the hands of the Bear.”
Jessica paused for a moment to let the photo sink in.
“The Bear is a monster. A savage. And he’s becoming increasingly bold, expanding his reach into the United States,” Jessica continued. “The Defense Intelligence Agency believes his hacker network was responsible for the breach of the Pentagon’s personnel system last year. And last week the FBI traced a series of blackmail attempts against members of Congress back to a hacker group in St. Petersburg that’s almost certainly working for the Bear.”
Sunday clicked the slide to a photo of an old white man in a dapper business suit sitting in a chair, eyes wide, a bloody hole through the middle of his forehead.
“The Agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center now believes that the Bear’s expanding further by taking out other mob bosses and appropriating their businesses. This is James Wilbur-Wilcox, who ran heroin and crystal meth throughout southern England. Until last month, when one of the Bear’s hit men did this. Now the Wilcox network works for the Bear.”
Jessica faced her team. “The CNC says that this is a common pattern. Criminal organizations use the same tactics, the same network, the same facilitators, regardless of the commodity they’re moving. Guns, drugs, uranium, girls. It doesn’t matter. It’s the network that matters. The only thing unique about the Bear is the scale of his operation. He’s gotten bigger than anyone else, faster than anyone else. He must have help. High-level friends. But we don’t know yet who.”
The screen clicked back to the grainy photo of the bearded burly man. “We know what he’s into. We know what he’s capable of. But we don’t yet know who he is. This was taken from a nightclub security camera in Istanbul.” Sunday zoomed in, but the amplification didn’t help make the face any more recognizable. “It’s the best we have right now,” Jessica said. “The Bear is clever. Every one of his businesses is run like an intelligence operation. His network is strictly compartmentalized. He uses multiple layers of shell companies and even other criminal organizations to provide cover.”
Jessica cleared her throat. “He uses special contract assassins that report only to him. It’s one way he maintains control of the empire.”
Just like Purple Cell, Jessica thought, unsure of what Judd knew about Purple Cell—and what he did not
“As we speak,” she continued, “there are multiple covert operations under way by a range of U.S. agencies to get underneath the Bear’s skin. To figure out his network, identify him, and to take him down.”
“What’s our mission, boss?” asked one of the screens, her voice scrambled to protect her identity.
“Most Russian mob are linked to ex-KGB. We don’t know yet about the Bear. He could be ex-KGB, he could be current FSB, he could be all on his own. We don’t know if he’s operating strictly for profit or with the collusion of someone high-ranking inside the Russian government. Our mission, for now, is to find out whatever you can about him and his dealings. You are each in a known location of his operations. Find the threads.”
Jessica put her hands on her hips.
“Find the threads,” she repeated, gritting her teeth. “And pull.”