“Shit, that’s way better than the weak ass cover story I fell into.”
“Sometimes I wish location scouting was my real job,” Tess said. “I love what I do but wonder sometimes about what a normal life would feel like.”
I laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Sorry, I wasn’t laughing at what you said, just the idea that being on the road in the Hollywood movie industry seems normal in comparison to our real jobs and lives.”
“Wow, you’re right.”
“Can I ask you something?” I asked.
“You just did,” she replied.
I chuckled. “You’ve worked for the Company how long again?”
“Five years.”
“So, not that much longer than me.”
“That’s right.”
“How the fuck did you make GS-15 so fast?” She cocked her head. “Respectfully, but seriously how?”
“I was on Junebug.”
“Holy shit. Are you serious?”
Operation Junebug was carried out a little over a year ago and had already become the stuff of legends within the agency.
“Serious as my Uncle Donny’s next heart attack.”
“You guys were the ones who got El Glotón. Holy fuckin’ shit.”
Ramondo “El Glotón” Chavez was the most successful drug lord in the history of Ecuador. So successful that his empire rivaled that of neighboring Colombia. And he was as slippery as he was rich. Remaining elusive to the ATF, FBI, and Interpol. Evading capture and avoiding prosecution year after year. Finally, the Company was tasked with devising a plan to capture El Glotón and Operation Junebug was launched. An eight-person extraction team was sent into Ecuador and seventy-two hours later, El Glotón was in US custody.
“I was on theteamthat located and apprehended El Glotón,” Tess corrected me. “After that, I was bumped from a GS-12 to a 15 and given my pick of assignments.”
“And you chose Russia?”
“I chose to take down Ilya Petrakov before he becomes too powerful to take down,” Tess replied with a vulnerability in her voice I’d not heard until then. “Sasha Fedya is my door into the Petrakov palace.”
“Sounds personal to you.”
“Less than a year ago, my boss received intel from a well trusted Russian asset that Ilya Petrakov was shipping an unknown number of young women to the port of Los Angeles from Russia to be sold at auction, as sex workers. That was all our informant knew, but our officers were able to locate the ship they sailed on, the port they arrived at, and even which cargo container they were inside of, all in record time. We immediately dispatched officers to the harbor, who located and opened the container within an hour of reaching the scene, only to find the dead bodies of thirty-seven Russian and Ukrainian women. They ranged in age from twelve years old to their mid-twenties. They’d been dead for days.”
“Oh, my god.”
“At first, we thought they died as a result of an accidental oversight from Petrakov’s men. That maybe they hadn’t provided enough food and water to last the entire thirty-day voyage, but a closer inspection of the shipping container revealed something even worse.”
“What?” I asked.
“The container was equipped with a small canister of Hydrogen Sulfide which was rigged to a timer. The women inside had plenty to eat and drink and the container was well ventilated, but on day twenty of the voyage, the air vents were sealed and the toxic gas released, killing everyone inside within minutes.”
“Ilya Petrakov rigged the container to kill his own girls?” I growled. “Why would he do that?”
“He was sending a message to the auctioneer, a man named Terrence Zander, after what Petrakovperceived as an insult during their last business transaction. Zander is a British ex-pat who now resides in Montenegro, but ‘secretly’ runs his business out of Los Angeles. He has no idea that the Agency has been tracking him for three years.”
