Page 12 of Quiet Protector
“If I were to believe the paper trail, he donated to Vladimir’s retirement fund a decade before he had reached retirement age,” I disclose, gloating.
Phillipa looks as surprised as I did when Megan’s bank records had me unlocking the very first match in the mail-order-bride conglomerate Dimitri hypothetically told me about weeks ago. If she hadn’t used the same checking account her father utilized to purchase her mother, I’d still be picking at a massive ball of twine, seeking a thread.
Megan’s mother, just like Isabelle, was sold when she was a child. She was just shy of her eighteenth birthday when Megan’s father purchased her with the compensation payout he was awarded after a workplace injury. Her sale had me wondering why the payment was directed to the Popovs instead of the crew who specialized in those trades during their heydays.
It took several hours of trawling the dark web before I stumbled upon my answer. The Popovs have been running the ultimate pyramid scheme for the past forty-plus years. They find a lucrative product, mark it up by twenty-five percent, then sell it under their ‘quality’ brand. The training, sales, and shipment of goods all occur in-house. The Popovs just handle the currency side of things.
That’s what happened with Megan’s mother. She was groomed in a small town on the outskirts of Hopeton, sold at auction before being delivered to Carlyle Shroud, a once twenty-nine-year-old factory foreman.
He hasn’t worked in almost thirty years after a stack of pallets fell on him, shattering multiple vertebrae in his back. Although he can still walk, the pain associated with his sloth-like steps deem him unemployable. Even with a perfectly groomed wife, I doubt he’s enjoying life right now. His bank records the past decade show a majority of his support payments are spent on alcohol.
Although I feel sorry for Carlyle, his miserable existence is the thread Tobias was seeking for decades before his death. His lonesome fifty-eight-thousand-dollar payment twenty-nine years ago helped me link an incalculable number of wire transfers between the Petrettis, Castros, and Popovs the past three decades.
Three wire transfer receipts took me almost a week to work out. The one cited on the slip of paper found in the Greggs’ file is included in that group. “All the unmatched wire transfers were for identical amounts. They were deposited in the Popovs’ account within days of each other and dispersed at the same time, but no matter how deeply I scoured the records, I couldn’t link the payments to the sales of property, guns, drugs, or people, leading me to believe they were for services.”
“Services?” Phillipa jumps in, her brow cocking. “What possible services could the Popovs offer that they weren’t already giving?”
I slap the wad of invoices in my hand against Henry Gottle, Sr.’s picture at the top of my criminal wish list. “The Petrettis, Popovs, and Castros were powerful, wealthy, and feared in their own right, but one man still reigned supreme. Henry Gottle.”
The pieces click into place for Phillipa when I move to the far wall in my bedroom. “Henry had the biggest chunk of the pie, making him the ideal target if those beneath him decided to band together.”
“Exactly.” I point to a timeline of events that occurred the same weekend as the Greggs’ home invasion, which happens to be exactly one month after the payments were distributed. “Going off the dates of the Greggs’ home invasion, I discovered that several key members of the Gottle crew were hit consecutively one weekend. From the reports I found buried beneath a heap of bureaucratic tape, I unearthed that those targets were high-up associates of the Gottle cartel or direct relatives of Henry’s. Details are sketchy, but it appears as if he lost five associates, two sisters, and a brother in one night.” I twist to face Phillipa. “They also killed his mother during a failed attempt to force him to step down from his command. He lost almost his entire family within days of each other. There was only one brother unaccounted for. Rumors are that he was being sheltered by the CIA officer who had recruited him in his final year of college.”
“Was?” Phillipa asks, her tone high.
“Was.” I nudge my head to Mr. Gregg’s profile picture tacked beside Henry’s. When you see them side by side, some similarities are noticeable—most notably their strong facial structure. “Melody isn’t Henry’s daughter. She’s his niece.” I hand Phillipa a heavily redacted CIA file. “Two months before the birth of Henry’s son, the Gottle compound was attacked in a similar fashion as the Greggs’ home invasion years later. Henry’s father was killed along with many members of their association. The men responsible believed they’d scare Henry into folding his operation. He was only seventeen and about to become a father, so the last thing he’d want is to enter a gangland war.” I point to a picture of a young Katarina Rouse glancing down at her rounded stomach a baby-faced Henry is caressing. “Their plan backfired. Henry wanted revenge, he was just smart enough to know he couldn’t place his family in the firing line to get it.”
“So he gave them up instead,” Phillipa fills in as an understanding glimmer ignites in her eyes.
I nod. “Except it wasn’t just Katarina and his unborn son he removed from his memory. He wiped the entire slate clean. He moved Liam and his mother out of the family’s brownstone in Manhattan, scaled down his crew to three men he trusted with the life of his only love and unborn son, then rebuilt his empire from the ground up.”
“It worked.” Phillipa arches a brow as shock floods her face. “A majority of his wealth was amassed in the five years following his father’s death.” Her throat works hard to swallow. “As was his death count.”
What she’s saying is true. I scoured the reports myself. Even with age not on his side, Henry won the war, but his victory came at a cost. “Katarina couldn’t forget what he had done, and neither could Liam. They wanted nothing to do with Henry. Liam’s opinion only changed when Melody was born, but their contact was still sporadic at best. Katarina still hasn’t come around.”
Phillipa stares at me in shock for several long seconds, only speaking when her inquisitiveness gets the better of her. “How did you unearth all of this so quickly? This is a year’s worth of work, Brandon, and you did it in a week.”
She scoffs when I say, “It isn’t hard to unravel an entire outfit when you find a sturdy thread.” I place the invoices onto my dining table before moving toward a third set of timelines. “Do you recall back in 2009 when the government was left reeling from a year-long intelligence failure that compromised its internet-based covert communication system?”
Her face reveals her confusion, but she answers my question, nonetheless. “I was in my third year of college, but I remember my father saying the compromise left CIA informants vulnerable to an attack.”
I nod again, agreeing with her father’s assessment. “Although a lot of effort was put forward to undo their error, intelligence sources revealed the damage was so severe, it would never be wholly undone. The exposure had already occurred. Even with CIA scrambling to secure their informants, they dropped like flies.”
Phillipa’s head slants as her brows join. “Do you think that glitch had something to do with the Greggs’ accident? Although Liam wasn’t an informant, he could have been before he was recruited.”
I halfheartedly shrug before shaking my head, still uneased by my objective today. I’m usually the guy who coerces people off the ledge. I don’t tiptoe them toward it. “I had considered that, but I couldn’t work out why there was a stretch in timelines between his home invasion and their murders. So instead, I focused my efforts on the CIA’s compromised system. I discovered this.”
When I hand Phillipa Melody’s birth certificate that undoubtedly proves her parents were named Liam and Wren, her eyes bulge out of her head. It isn’t confirmation that Melody isn’t Henry’s daughter that has her shocked, it’s the fact Liam used the last name of Gottle on Melody’s birth certificate.
“Unlike me, Liam didn’t change his name when he was recruited. He wasn’t ashamed of it and had no issues discouraging people who believed he should have been. In some ways, it worked in his favor—”
“The Gottle name would have opened previously closed doors,” Phillipa interrupts, smiling.
I lift my chin. “But regrettably, it also kept his family under the spotlight Henry tried to shelter them from almost a decade earlier.” I exhale out a big breath before laying all my cards on the table. “I don’t believe the donation Col made to the Popovs was out of the goodness of his heart. I believe it was his cut to fund the second attempted Gottle takedown.” Phillipa looks shocked but remains as quiet as a church mouse. “The exact amount Col donated was transferred into a Russian operative’s account precisely one month before the Greggs’ home invasion. It was forwarded with two identical payment amounts… the Castros and Popovs share of the fee.”
“If this is true, how are they still in operation? Henry’s track record proves he doesn’t sit on his hands when threatened. If he had an inkling toanyof this, the FBI’s wish list would have been sliced in half two decades ago.”
“That’s the issue. Henry doesn’t know about anything I’ve unearthed.” I stop before correcting myself. “Well, he didn’t.” Realizing I need to finish flipping one stone before moving onto a new one, I say, “When the takeover bid failed, the individual groups who orchestrated it folded rather quickly by pretending the Russian group they’d hired to do the hits had acted alone. Henry then responded with the notoriety he’s famous for. He steamrolled them.”
