until she began releasing hard, irrefutable facts that backed up her seemingly implausible conspiracy theories: emails, voice recordings, financial records, and her personal involvement as a witness. What began as a corrupt attempt to monetize a drug that promised to block the effects of PTSD resulted in one of the deadliest events in U.S. special operations history. Buranek’s award-winning coverage of the events destroyed the administration’s version of them and ultimately took down a sitting president. She appeared to be the female version of Woodward and Bernstein. During an exclusive interview with Margaret Hoover on Firing Line, she gave a gripping account of being kidnapped and eventually rescued by the former navy commando.
Was she now the closest thing to a family Reece had left?
Grey considered having Katie killed and then hitting the funeral with a team of bratva killers on the assumption that Reece would be in attendance, but that was messy, and Reece might anticipate the move. And if he didn’t show, he’d be alive to still use all of his ample skills and resources to hunt Grey to the ends of the earth. No, Grey needed to hit Reece on home soil, when he least expected it.
Grey was beginning to lose faith in his own analytical abilities when Svetlana shuffled into his office and slid his pay envelope across his desk. He stared at it for a long moment, then leapt to his feet in an uncharacteristic show of emotion.
“That’s it! I know how to find him!”
“Of course, you do, my dear.” She didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about but, after watching him work obsessively for so many weeks, she was happy to see him so excited. “I’ll go get you some tea so you can work.”
Knowing Reece’s employer was the key. Employees, even contractors, had to be paid. Getting paid meant bank accounts, direct deposits, wire transfers, Automated Clearing Houses. It meant a trail. Even if those payments were going to an alias, Grey could narrow it down to where Reece would be on the CIA pay scale. It was a start.
Luckily for Grey, Russia was the home base to an inordinate number of computer experts: hackers. He could pass along a simple request and, within minutes, have a dozen or more freelance hackers working on it. It was like having his own personal NSA. He never encountered any of these individuals firsthand, as they all worked remotely from who knows where; all of their anonymous interactions took place via the Dark Web. He used two computers as he worked, a network desktop for all of his internet searches and email and a sterile laptop with no modem for all of his sensitive work. With no link to the outside world, it would be nearly impossible for an intelligence agency or freelance hacker to access his computer without physically taking possession of it. Each night before he left the building, he locked it in a secure safe in his office.
As a former CIA employee, Grey had an important piece of the puzzle already in hand; he knew the bank routing and account numbers used by the Agency to pay their employees. His request was simple: the location of every bank account where CIA employees and contractors were receiving payment. While the Agency’s firewalls were a significant barrier, those of most financial institutions were not. Stealing the info from the receiving end of these transactions was a relatively simple process for the team of hackers. Within days, Grey had a printed list of accounts, organized by geography.
He culled the vast majority of accounts dotted across the greater Washington, D.C., area. He’d studied his target and knew that Reece wouldn’t live in a large metro area: D.C., New York, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles. His next assumption was that Reece would set up his bank account in the name of an LLC or corporation in order to hide his identity. He separated those from the list, narrowing it down to a few hundred individual accounts. Most of these were clustered around traditional hubs of special operations activity, places like Fayetteville, Pinehurst, Niceville, Columbus, San Diego, and Virginia Beach. The former locations would all be home to ex-army operators, with the latter two being popular spots for frogmen such as Reece. Still, he figured those cities would be too on-the-grid for a guy who had spent some time as “Public Enemy Number One.”
He dug deeper on the more remote locations: Kettle Falls, Bear Valley, Tombstone, Hamilton, Boone,