Page 42 of Nash Falls

“I’m saying that I believe there is a reasonable likelihood that three people who worked at companies affiliated with Sybaritic may have been murdered. So perhaps my doubts about there really being criminal activity are probably now less than they were. However, I can’t make a decision to work with you unless you tell me what this is all about. It’s like you want me to argue a case before the Supreme Court without my having gone to law school first.”

Duvall sat back and let his arms dangle freely off the sides of the chair. To Nash, he looked like a chubby marionette whose puppet master had cut all its support lines.

“An apt analogy,” Duvall replied. He nodded at Morris.

The FBI agent promptly said, “The org we’re targeting is run by Victoria Steers.”

“Never heard of her.”

Morris snarled, “You wanted to get briefed on what this is about? Well, I’m telling you, so listen up.”

Nash, sensing the man needed to save some face with his boss, said, “Go ahead.”

“Her father, Joseph Steers, was in the British navy, but then gotout and settled in Japan. There, he married Steers’s mother, and they had quite a brood. Victoria was the youngest. She’s also the only surviving sibling.”

“What happened to the others?” asked Nash.

“We believe that Victoria killed them, or had them killed,” said Morris.

“Excuse me?” exclaimed a shocked Nash.

“Joseph Steers was pretty much a nothing burger who seemed to lead a quiet life. However, his wife, Masuyo, had very different plans.”

“Masuyo, translated from Japanese, can mean ‘to make the world your own,’” noted Duvall. “And Masuyo Steers did just that, and taught her youngest to do the same.”

“Is Masuyo still alive?” asked Nash. “And her husband?”

“We don’t know the answers to that,” conceded Morris. “They have not been seen in public for years. But we know that the empire the Steers family built up over the last five-plus decades is now run solely by Victoria. She is smart, nimble, tough, cruel as they come, and a master manipulator. She came up through the school of hard knocks and survived.” He gave Nash a probing look. “Sort of like you did.”

“But I never killed anyone to get to where I am,” pointed out Nash. “Tell me more about her operation.”

Duvall said, “She controls dozens of carefully constructed companies with subsidiaries and interlocking corporate relationships and partnerships, labyrinths of legalese spread all over the world that the lawyers at Justice have not even made a dent in despite grinding away for years. It’s all seemingly legitimate.”

Morris said, “The important point to understand is that we have recently come to learn that Steers’s mother is not Japanese. She is actuallyChinese. And as a young woman she was planted in Japan as a Communist Party agent to undermine democracy in that country. Her subsequent marriage to Joseph Steers was apparently partof that cover. But then Masuyo went rogue and began creating the behemoth that their daughter Victoria now runs. And Victoria, we believe, has thrown in her lot with Beijing.”

“Thrown in her lot to do what, exactly?” said Nash.

“To bring this country to its knees,” answered Duvall.

CHAPTER

20

HOW?” NASH ASKED. “HOW WILLthey bring us to our knees?”

Morris picked up the story after another nod from Duvall. “We’re averaging nearly a hundred thousand opioid deaths a year. This country has no real strategy to fix that problem, and it is seeding civic unrest, Mr. Nash. We at the FBI see that clearly every day in innumerable ways as people feel they have been forgotten.”

“But China?” prompted Nash.

Morris said, “Steers’s drug operations alone are responsible, we believe, for a huge percentage of those overdose deaths, because they are lacing every pill out there with fatal doses of not just fentanyl but other, more recently created, synthetic opioids. Mexican and other cartels have tried pushing back against this because they, reasonably enough, don’t want to kill off their customer base. But the Chinese want to do exactly that.”

Agent Braxton interjected, “And it’s incredibly profitable. Currently a kilo of fentanyl costs around three grand wholesale. You can make a half million pills from it and sell them at thirty dollars a pill. You can see the profit margins, Mr. Nash.”

“A five thousand percent return on investment. They must be rolling in cash.”

Duvall said, “Illicit drug trafficking revenue is estimated at around forty billion dollars annually, and control of that is closely held in the hands of a few, like Steers.”

Braxton added, “The street dealers market the pills online, mostly on Snapchat, because the communications automatically disappear within twenty-four hours. Still, I’ve had friends in local lawenforcement rushing to break the passcode of a dead kid’s iPhone to get their Snapchat screens before they disappear. And Snapchat has unique features like My Eyes Only, which lets them hide and store client info, as well as a back-end deletion function.”