Sleepers All Around (eBook)

Jeffrey Dorfman (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
298 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-6221-8 (ISBN)

Infos

The FBI, assisted by members of other federal agencies, is in a desperate search for a team of Russian sleeper agents who have lain dormant since the Cold War. But when they are activated by some person or nation unknown, the nation reels. Julie Delaney Long (JD) is the only wheelchair-using FBI special agent, and the FBI, the President, and the country now rely on her to solve the case and stop the terrorists.

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The FBI, assisted by members of other federal agencies, is in a desperate search for a team of Russian sleeper agents who have lain dormant since the Cold War. But when they are activated by some person or nation unknown, the nation reels. Julie Delaney Long (JD) is the only wheelchair-using FBI special agent, and the FBI, the President, and the country must rely on her. Acts of terrorism pock the nation as JD leads her team in the pursuit of these nefarious sleeper agents. While initial evidence points toward the Russian president, it is up to JD to determine the true power behind the attacks and solve the case before more damage is done to the country.

Textauszug

1

Dmitry Pyotrovich Shepishev was ready to retire. He had completed a fine career in his country’s intelligence services, first the KGB and then its successor the SVR. Yet, of everything he had done, of all the professional successes he had enjoyed, the operation that he spent the most time reflecting on was Operation Snowball. Dmitry had managed to slip thirty-five sleeper agents into the United States without a single one being caught. For twenty years, not a single sleeper agent had been activated. That was about to change.

Shepishev’s career had been a good one, several of his Western European agents had delivered valuable business secrets over the past several decades, enabling Russian oligarchs to make fortunes and the Russian president to take a hefty share of those fortunes for himself. The President, as befitting a former member of the KGB and SVR, had been good to the SVR. Its budget and manpower had expanded and its power, at least internally, had been mostly restored. In exchange for that beneficence, the SVR’s skills were frequently employed not on matters of national security but on matters of economic enrichment for the country’s rulers and oligarchs. Under this president, the line between the private sector and the government was a very blurry line indeed. However, Dmitry Pyotrovich had never been particularly good at personal enrichment.

While Dmitry was not destitute, he didn’t have the financial resources he would like to truly enjoy his retirement. He was due a generous state pension, but the generosity was measured by the typically parsimonious standards of the Russian government. He had managed to salt away about ten million rubles, but sadly that amounted to only about $150,000. This was simply not enough money to enjoy his golden years. He had never married, choosing to dedicate his life to his country. Now he wanted some reward, some recompense for that dedication and singlemindedness.

Luckily, Dmitry had a plan for fully funding his retirement. He suspected that most, if not all, of his sleeper agents were still in place, still monitoring their designated newspapers for secret, coded messages. They were a valuable resource, waiting to be deployed, and Dmitry had decided it was long past time for them to be put to productive uses.

For thirty years, not a single sleeper agent had been activated. That was about to change.

***

During his years of loyal service to Mother Russia, Shepishev had on occasion cooperated with the Soviet Union’s fraternal intelligence organizations. Mostly, this involved liaising with the secret police of the Soviet Union’s puppet republics surrounding their country, and that liaising mostly meant giving orders. However, a few times he had worked hand-in-hand with his Chinese counterparts, both on the national security and the commercial espionage side. His plan depended on one of his two most trusted contacts still having entrée to the highest level of government in China.

Dmitry was old, but he had not let the world pass him by. Even though for the past decade, he had been in charge of dozens of agents to do his bidding, he had made sure that he stayed up to date on technology. He knew how to use burner phones and anonymous email accounts accessed only through virtual private networks or anonymized secure browsers with messages sent only through an anonymous email service using a dummy account.

Dmitry had several burner phones, purchased by agents under him three years earlier in Finland. He had long ago taken the occasional opportunity to store things like that for future contingencies. Using a device purchased long ago made tracing the purchase orders of magnitude more difficult. He also had an untraceable laptop, seized from a foreign tourist who the SVR caught in a compromising situation several years earlier. The useful business intelligence had long since been removed and used to Russia’s advantage, while the laptop was reformatted by the SVR’s technical wizards with a few added security features. To use the laptop, Shepishev drove to an internet café, then used the TOR browser to access the internet. TOR would bounce his network traffic all over the internet making it impossible to trace back to him, although even if it was traced back it would only be to an internet café, not any real estate address that was linked to him. Finally, he used an email account he had set up just for this operation on ProtonMail, an anonymous emailer that was specially designed to be compatible with TOR. The combination made him invisible and untraceable.

With these precautions in place, Dmitry emailed the Chinese spy he thought most likely to be in a position to make a deal, Yu Liu. The last he had heard Yu was running a string of agents in the United States and Canada, collecting both military and government secrets. He provided only enough information to identify himself to Yu, based on shared experiences and tidbits only the two of them would recognize. Then he gave a brief and vague description of what he had for sale and asked if China would be interested in purchasing his sleeper network. If the deal were to move forward, he would provide the phone contact information, but not yet. Dmitry gave Yu forty-eight hours to respond.

Shepishev stayed off the internet for the entire forty-eight hours, flying to Saint Petersburg under the cover of visiting some former colleagues that morning and using an internet café there to access his email account this time. His relief would have been visible to anyone paying attention to him when he saw that he had a reply. No reply would have left him wondering if Yu had retired or, worse, informed Moscow of what he was up to. Opening the email, his emotions went from relief to elation, with his happiness increasing the farther down the email he read. Liu was not only interested in purchasing his network but wasn’t even haggling over the price. The Chinese Ministry for State Security was obviously flush with cash. Shepishev then smiled to himself with the thought that the Chinese were buying a network of sleeper agents in America using American dollars earned selling the Americans cheap imported goods, sometimes the result of corporate espionage, perhaps even operations he had helped take part in.

The important details were simple because true professionals knew simple was how you stayed secure. Liu provided a new, anonymous email account for all future correspondence. As soon as he received account information, Liu would wire $5 million to whatever account Shepishev instructed. Dmitry would then email Yu with the names and contact protocols for twenty-five of the thirty-five sleeper agents. Yu would then have three weeks to test if the contact procedures worked and the agents responded. If all went satisfactorily, Liu would transfer an additional $5 million to the same account. Once the rest of the money was received, Dmitry would email the information on the remaining ten sleepers. To ensure security, all the money would rapidly be transferred out of the first account into a different one that the Chinese would not know about and both old spies would eliminate the email accounts used for all their correspondence related to this deal. With all the precautions they were taking, there should be no trail left behind; even the American’s vaunted National Security Agency, the NSA, wouldn’t be able to track them down.

Dmitry decided that both some celebration and caution was in order. Instead of boarding his return flight to Moscow, he decided to head to Zurich. Swiss banks would be crucial to ensuring his retirement fund was fully secure and making the arrangements in person would actually leave less of a trail. Within 90 minutes of reading the email, Dmitry was on a plane headed to Zurich.

Upon arrival, he moved through the terminal with a hat and glasses, avoiding giving any security camera a clear view of his face almost instinctively. At this point in his life, it was as natural to him as breathing. He had booked a suite at the Dolder Grand using a burner phone and an alias that he had used during visits to Switzerland for decades, at the same time arranging for the hotel to send a car to pick him up at the airport. As soon as he cleared passport control, he carried his small, leather carry on bag to the limousine and settled in for the brief ride to the hotel. At the Dolder Grand, the assistant manager moved Herr Pyotr Lenilin through check in expeditiously and with typical Swiss efficiency, then rang for the bellboy to show him to his usual suite.

Dmitry spent about half an hour resting and freshening up, about five minutes finalizing his plans, and then left his room to head to a small, private bank that had always served him well and had no official or unofficial connections to the SVR or the Russian government. The Zurichsee Private Bank was named in honor of the lake that extended southeastward from the city and whose shores could be spied from many places in Zurich, not including the Zurichsee Private Bank. Upon presenting himself at the front door and being closely scrutinized by a security camera, he was admitted to the bank lobby. In the lobby, he asked to meet with Herr Baumman to open a new account. In keeping with the private and secretive nature of the bank, no identification was requested.

Herr Baumman met Dmitry at the door of his office, shaking his hand very formally, in keeping with the standard practice in Zurich. He already knew him as Pyotr Lenilin and, using the German he knew Mr. Lenilin spoke well, expressed how pleased he was to see him again.

“Thank you, Herr Baumman,” said Dmitry in his role as Pyotr Lenilin. “It is a pleasure to...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.3.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-6221-7 / 1098362217
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-6221-8 / 9781098362218