We ate a leisurely breakfast and walked into Dan's office shortly after 9:00 and were quickly shown into a conference room where we were met by Dan and David Collins, the assistant director of our former agency. There was coffee and sweet rolls and fruit on the table and we all shared greetings. Then Dan began.
When we left his office, both Natalie and I were shocked and a little bewildered by what we had learned but also pleased at what had occurred. We were also both significantly wealthier than we were when we entered.
Dan had begun by telling us that our part of this saga was over and that we were safe and then he explained that we had been involved in a much larger three pronged effort that had spun out of control. It had started with that pipsqueak satrap who envisioned himself as the second coming of Saladin or something like that. His problem was that he wasn't the likely heir to the throne of his country and couldn't put his plans for grandeur into action. So he had arranged the assassination of his brother two years ago using the leak of my report as an excuse. Then he had helped his father into an early grave with the aid of one of his mistresses. Once he gained control, he began to launch his well organized plan to become the regional kingpin. His big problem was that his country had few resources or wealth. That was the reason his father had insisted on maintaining friendship with the US. The young kid had other ideas about what he wanted to do to the US but needed to use us to get to where he wanted to go.
To start, he befriended a neighboring country that had a small oil reserve near their joint border. By drilling a slant hole and manipulating the test results, he claimed that he was sitting on top of a huge oil reserve. That caught the interest of some of the big oil companies and he was convincing enough to get them to put pressure on Congress to revise the Energy Policy to include his country as an acceptable partner and for them to invest billions in development of the oil field with himself as an equal partner. Part of the deal was that the project would be fully insured by the oil companies until the plant went into operation and then the joint company would take over the cost of everything. His plan had been to get the plant almost to the operational stage and then have his personal band of terrorists destroy it and collect the insurance settlement of which he would get half.
With that money, he would be able to fund his real mission of wreaking terrorist attacks on the US. His biggest strength was that he was charismatic in the local arena and garnered both popular but also financial support from the rich fundamentalists in various countries to fund his dream. His other plan was to not train the actual terrorists but to train the leaders and planners and then export them to the US and have them affiliate with local gangs and underworld groups to do the actual dirty work. The FBI had been afraid that someone would think of this someday because it had become obvious that the other major terrorist groups had been able to recruit plenty of people but that it was costly to train and then set them up over here in a country they didn't know or understand. They had lost many of their zealous recruits in training and botched actions in other countries so that the money people got tired of funding their activities and only losing their own children with nothing to show for it. So their money supply slowed down with a resulting slowdown in activities. This new leader had side stepped that with his plan to use domestic muscle to carry out his plans and only provide the brains. The FBI had been watching this trend closely for a number of years. When this oil deal began to emerge, they stepped up their activities overseas.
On the local front, they had noticed some odd coincidences especially after the furor surrounding my report. A number of strong incumbent congressmen retired and were replaced by fairly weak front men like the Senator we had watched that Sunday morning. They discovered that there had been some serious intimidation going on behind the scenes but they weren't sure who was behind it. There also seemed to be some leaks from within our agency, the FBI and inside Congress itself that was subtle but real.
In short, there was a lot going on behind the scenes on the day Natalie arrived at my door that we didn't know about and much of it had only a distant relationship with us. But then the shit hit the fan and fortunately, we escaped and went on the run. Dan said that the FBI was actively trying to catch up to us to protect us but also to try to get us to help them stop what was going on behind the scenes. The main man was a friend of the dictator who had lived here for a number of years. He was the one who hired the Washington gang to do the dirty work. He also hired the Alabama gang to do the more sophisticated things like the bugs and the helicopter work. The FBI closed these guys down quickly after the first week we were on the run. The problem was that the main guy had also contracted with the Chicago underworld for two hit men to take us and others out quickly and without too much publicity. The FBI had discovered this but didn't know who they were or how to track them down. Meanwhile everyone had lost our trail.
He had been literally shocked when we walked in his door and laid our stories out on the table for him. It also triggered a plan that he couldn't put together until after we left. He had us followed to Boise and had people watching us there. He apologized and said that he had kind of used us as bait. The day he told us to move was the day before he actually informed the insiders that we had been in Cloudcroft and then Denver. An hour after we left Boise, he had a couple who were similar to us move a trailer into our spot and continue acting like we had been. Two days later, the hit men showed up. They were a middle aged couple who were just about as invisible as we were. Their modus was to try to befriend their target and get them to some remote location and take them out. Once he had them, they opened up and implicated several people in unsolved disappearances. From that moment on, there was no one looking for us and we were safe but he continued the scam to try to ferret out the inside leak in the FBI. That came about when the bogus message was posted in our message box. The only person who could have done that was a regional man who had come in to help with the cleanup.
As a result of everything, they had cleared up two violent gangs, gotten rid of two dangerous hit men, and had opened doors into some of Chicago's major crime bosses along with plugging a dangerous leak. When they finished cleaning out all of the gutters, they felt that a whole lot of problems would go away. Again he apologized for using us but that he tried to make sure that we were safe. He would have contacted us personally earlier except that the guy who was following us from Boise had a flat tire and lost track of us in an area where there was no cell phone service. When he finally got back on the road, we had left Spokane. They saw that we had tickets to Seattle but we never got off the train there. So he figured that we had gone into hiding and he would get to us in time. Then he thanked us again and said that he and his wife would be joining us for dinner that night with Tim and his wife. He didn't need to know the rest of the story that David Collins would be telling us and he left.
Shortly after that, his secretary delivered lunch for the three of us and David began filling us in on the inside part of the story.
"My story shouldn't take as long as Dan's but you might find it more interesting because of your direct involvement with the players involved, both of you. It starts about four years ago when a senior member of our staff became enamored with that small middle eastern country and the large sum of money they offered to protect their interests. The first sign of this was when your report came out, Jeff. He hated your report but the rest of us loved it and we voted to send it on the committees, which we did. However, our disgruntled member decided that he needed to do something to kill its importance. So he released it through a friend of his."
I asked, "That seems counterproductive. Why would someone release a report if he didn't like it?"
"That is the first fallacy of our friend who by the way was the Big Guy himself." Both Natalie and I looked stunned. "Even though we all know it to be true, he fell into the trap of thinking he could control events although he couldn't control how people would respond to these events and that was his downfall. In short, it wasn't anything that you wrote in that report that bothered him and his contacts. The problem was that if the Energy Bill came back to life which it appeared likely at the time, this little country would become more visible than before and you would be digging deeper into it. That is what they were afraid of; that you would find even more things that would be harmful to their interests. The country offered to have you removed but the Big Guy decided that getting you retired was a cleaner option and that is what he did. He made it so that you wouldn't be able to go back and dig deeper. The whole stink at the time was of course a smoke screen to get you to disappear as I am sure you figured out. And it worked just fine; they thought.
Unfortunately, a few people realized that something was wrong on the home front and they asked me to look into things with the eye toward an eventual reorganization. So that is what I have been doing for the past two years. I got involved too late to save you but it appeared that you landed on your feet ok. In any event, your projects were dispersed and this one was purposely given to John. Now John had many good qualities but brilliance wasn't one of them. He was an organizer and a manager but he never had the insight to be able to dig deeper like you would have done. But at the time, this appeared to be the safe thing to do."
"But things got complicated when Natalie picked up on your project. When she delivered her report to John and he passed it on up, the Big Guy panicked again. Once again, it wasn't what she said but what she would uncover in the next round that bothered them. So they decided to find a way to get her retired too. The truth is that they should have done what would have happened anyway which was to promote her to senior level and assign her to something else, but he didn't think of that."
Natalie gasped, "Me? I was being considered to become a senior analyst?"
