“You’re making me paranoid.”
“Good. Paranoia is highly underrated. It’s an attribute you generally only hear people ascribe to the living.”
“You’ll get back to me?”
“Check your email. Let me see what else I can dig up on my end and I’ll call you back. In the meantime, like I said, be careful. I can feel the pressure building; it’s only a matter of time before the storm breaks.” There was a loud whine that sounded like landing gear being lowered. “Follow the money, Mace. It’s always about the money.”
Gunnar terminated the call.
Mason leaned back in the driver’s seat of his Grand Cherokee and watched the headlights of the cars speeding down the highway flicker through the branches of the trees. Exhaustion was setting in once more. He needed to reestablish forward momentum, so he sat up straight and opened his in-box. As promised, Gunnar had sent him an email with attachments.
The first was in black and white and focused primarily on a street. He could read the license plate number on the fender of an older-model Camry. The picture had obviously been taken by a traffic cam mounted above an intersection. On the right side of the image was the telltale facade of a 7-Eleven. There were three pay phones at the end of the brick wall. The woman stood with her back to the camera, as deep into the shadows as she could get. She wore a baseball cap with either long hair tucked up into it or short hair concealed by it, and a jacket that disguised her figure. Were it not for her slender legs and the fact that he’d heard her voice, he might have mistaken her silhouette for a man’s. He could see just the headlights and bumper of a car idling on the other side of the Dumpster.
The second picture was from the viewpoint of an indoor ATM. Its reflection was on the plate-glass window behind a skinny Hispanic kid, who wore the expression of someone who was nervous about something. Maybe the mere thought of walking out the door with a wad of cash in that neighborhood. Mason didn’t care. It was what he saw over the kid’s left shoulder—across the street—that caught his attention. The storefront was dark, but he was able to make out a portion of the hand-painted sign. FLORISTERÍA. The front windows were painted with blooming vines and tropical fish. He’d seen that building before. A combination flower and pet store. Low rent. Bad area. There was a pay phone around the side. The same silhouette stood beside it, one hand pressed to the person’s ear. The car parked beside the figure faced the camera, its headlights washing out the license plate number and any other potentially useful details.
It was truly frightening how quickly Gunnar—a private citizen, as far as Mason knew—had accessed this kind of information. Scarier still that he’d been able to zoom in on just the figure, clean up the noise, enhance and sharpen the resolution, and send those images to him, as well, while carrying on a conversation.
Mason still wouldn’t be able to pick the woman out of a crowd, but at least now he had something to go on. She was somewhere between five four and five six, at the most. Maybe 110 pounds soaking wet.
Try as he might, though, he couldn’t figure out where she fit in. He was dealing with a young Hispanic woman in her twenties, early thirties at the most, presumably an immigrant. She’d been here long enough, however, that she’d been able to learn the English language, if not such intricacies as contractions. Her fingerprints weren’t in the NGI. She’d been at the motel the day his wife died, or at least wanted him to think so. She was scared of someone she feared could find her anywhere she went, and she claimed to need Mason’s help. His help, specifically, because of his relationship to Angie. Or because of hers?
He needed to find out who she was and, more important, what she knew about his wife’s death, and apparently Fairacre Ranch Surplus and Auction was the key.
27
Mason spent the remainder of the night going through the files on Angie’s laptop. It was perhaps the only time in his life that he wished she’d brought more of her work home with her. The IRS had already terminated her remote access, so he wasn’t able to get into her case files. The only saved files even remotely related to finances were their own, which Mason had been more than willing to let her handle.
All her contacts were of a personal nature, and he knew each and every one of the names. There was nothing out of the ordinary in her email in-box, sent files, or list of deleted items. The files in her word processor program were innocuous. Mostly letters. A novel he had no idea she’d started to write. Her Facebook and Instagram accounts were easy enough to crack, but there was nothing that struck him as even remotely out of the ordinary.
He went through her folder of photographs with tears on his cheeks and the kind of soul-deep sorrow that he equated with physical pain. There was their vacation in Maui. Their trip to Disney World. Their wedding and reception. Their first Thanksgiving. Their first Christmas. So many firsts. So many lasts. So many memories they would never have the opportunity to make together. She was so beautiful, so full of happiness and life. And he could see toward the end how his actions had begun to wear on her.
The rising sun bled the sky red to the east. It reflected from his rearview mirror in stark contrast to the darkness that still lurked over the Rockies. He’d seen pictures of Denver from the turn of the last century, from back when its population was a mere 100,000 or so and there were fewer than two billion people on the planet. There was a part of him that wished he could go back to that simpler time, when bad guys wore black and carried their weapons out in the open. And even then, shooting—actually taking someone else’s life—was considered the last resort. He supposed it was inevitable that as the world population soared to eight billion, any one life became devalued.
The only thing resembling an actual clue was buried in Angie’s browsing history, and even that was a far cry from the kind of monumental lead that was going to bring everything into focus. Hidden among the sites she frequented—the bookstores and blogs and social-networking sites—nearly lost in the banks of her Google history, was a search for a single item he didn’t recognize. An address. One lone address he didn’t recognize in an area of town that neither he nor his wife would ever have had any reason to go.
He followed the link to the search, zoomed in on the map as far as he could go, and then clicked to enlarge the street-level view. The ranch-style house at 6900 Market Street had red bricks, a green roof, and a concrete porch with weeds growing from the cracked steps. The lawn was patchy and yellow. A juniper hedge obscured the only window on the front of the house. It was an anonymous and invisible house in an anonymous and invisible neighborhood.
There was no telling whether the picture had been uploaded yesterday or five years ago. All he knew was that if it somehow pertained to her work, Angie wouldn’t have even thought about it at home unless her curiosity had gotten the better of her.
And if he wanted to figure out why she’d searched for it, there was only one way to do so.
28
Commerce City was an industrial sprawl north of downtown Denver. It squatted at the intersection all the major interstate shipping lanes, from border to border, coast to coast, and everything in between. There were FedEx and UPS hubs and trucking companies of all shapes and sizes. Semis rumbled through, day and night. There wasn’t a single point where you were more than a five-minute walk from the kind of truck stop you could see from space.
While it might have been a suburb in the most literal sense, few locals viewed it as such. It was a commercial district that lingered beneath an omnipresent cloud of industrial fumes and exhaust, and alternately smelled of burned rubber, flatus, or animal by-products, depending upon which way the wind decided to blow.
In recent years, however, superstores and factory outlets had crept in among the warehouses and wholesalers, bringing with them restaurants and hotels and affordable housing developments. And lost in the thick of it all, or perhaps deliberately forgotten, were the older homes that long ago had been built for the factory workers who kept the industrial lifeblood pumping. They were solid houses
built during the post–World War II glory years, when men returned home to find job opportunities galore and launched the baby boom that led to a doubling of the world’s population during the span of half a century. Where once opportunity blossomed, it now slunk off to die. Most of the houses had fallen into disrepair. Some had boarded windows. The majority had sunburned lawns and skeletal shrubs, tar-paper roofs and peeling paint. Some homeowners had erected fifteen-foot chain-link fences around their properties, and yet their front doors were still covered with graffiti.
Mason found the street for which his wife had searched a couple of blocks behind a Flying J truck stop and so close to the convergence of highways that he could hear the constant buzz of traffic even with his windows rolled up. He could just see the distant crown of skyscrapers in his rearview mirror as he drove down the street, watching the house numbers steadily increase. The people on their porches scrutinized his car with open hostility. As it turned out, he didn’t even need to see the address to the pick out the right house.
A few green tufts had grown from the scorched black lawn, but the house itself wasn’t putting forth the same kind of effort. The bricks appeared to be the only things holding the framework together. The bush from the picture was gone, as was the majority of the roof, over which the soot-coated chimney lorded like a tombstone. The front door had been eaten by flames, but not fully consumed, and somehow it managed to remain closed behind a long string of yellow police tape that fluttered on the breeze.
He pulled to the curb in front of the house and stared at the charcoaled ruins for a few minutes before he finally parked and got out. The neighbors made a show of going back into their houses as he walked across the lawn and ascended the steps to the porch. He nudged the door open with his shoe and covered his mouth and nose to avoid the ash and soot that billowed out. While he didn’t know a whole lot about the nature of fire damage, it was obvious that this hadn’t happened within the last few days. Either the owner or the insurance company had written it off as a lost cause. Maybe both. No effort at all had been invested in its renovation or even in cleaning up the mess. There were standing puddles of water on floors that had been burned to the bare concrete and floorboards in spots. The interior walls merely provided a framework upon which the remaining roof could decompose. There was no furniture, at least none that had survived the blaze. Only what looked like the charred remnants of a small desk. That was all. No entertainment center. No bookcases. No dining room table. There wasn’t a single appliance in the kitchen. Just the one desk, if that was even what it had once been.
Mason stood in the center of the living room and turned in a circle. He was missing something, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out what. Everything had been cleared out either prior to the fire or sometime afterward, which didn’t make any sense, considering the house itself had been left to rot. Burned wood crunched underfoot. He heard the sound of water dripping somewhere below him. A quick stomp on the floor produced a hollow thump.
The doorway to the basement was off the kitchen. He clicked on the mini LED Maglite he kept on his key chain and stared down into the darkness. There was little left of the stairs, most of which formed a charred heap directly beneath the abrupt ledge. He smelled the faintest hint of a petrochemical accelerant beneath the overpowering stench of what he guessed to be a stew of mildew and sewer water.
The fire had been started down there, but why?
It was a good ten feet straight down. He knelt, swung his legs over the edge, and lowered himself until he was barely above the rubble, then let go.
Mason shined his light around the basement to get his bearings. The walls were bare concrete and stained with rust and water. Pipes ran up and down them and crossed beneath the floorboards overhead. There were two windows, both of them caked with soot and barely large enough to slither through on his belly, if he were even able to jump high enough. The standing water all around him had to be a good foot deep. Droplets dripped from above with a metronomic plinking sound.
He stepped down into the frigid water and waded away from the stairs. It was black and soaked his pants all the way up to his knees. His flashlight beam couldn’t even break the surface. He had to shuffle his feet to keep from tripping on debris or slipping on the film that had settled onto the concrete floor. He was quickly losing the feeling in his toes, but not fast enough to prevent him from experiencing what felt like the outside three toes on his right foot snapping when he stumbled into something unforgiving. It was long and straight. He ran his shoe along its edge. Some kind of metal. He stepped over the rim and encountered more metal. Thinner, intersecting pieces in a gridlike pattern.
Mason marked the spot, sloshed back to the stairs, and returned with a broken length of wood. He wedged the thinner end of the board under the object and levered it upward. It was remarkably heavy, but it progressively became lighter as the water drained through its bottom surface. Once he had it high enough that he could get a grip on it, he dropped the wood and raised it with both hands. It stood several feet taller than he was when he finally had it upright and balanced. The metal was covered with a grungy paste and had begun to rust. He wiped away some of the crud and revealed a small hinged door. An ornate brass placard had been affixed to it. It read simply SUITE 304. He smeared away more of the muck. There were dozens of doors, all of them labeled by suite number. Each of them opened onto a deep slot that would have met with the wall if the unit were pushed up against it. He knew exactly what he was looking at, but it was so out of context in this flooded basement that he couldn’t fathom why it was here.
And then it hit him.
The interior of each individual partition was carbon-scored and corroded, as were both the inside and the outside of the doors. This large unit had been dragged down here and its contents used to ignite the blaze, which had gutted the entire house. Perhaps whoever set the fire expected the upper portion of the house to collapse onto the basement, but the fire department had arrived too quickly. Or maybe, with the surfaces purged of fingerprints, they simply didn’t care. After all, how many people would actually recognize the implications of what they were seeing?
The whole scenario had the unmistakable feel of a rush job. Whoever had dragged all the units down here to set them ablaze had definitely sensed he was about to be caught. The edges of even more units and their open doors broke the surface of the water around the corner. There had to be at least ten of them, maybe more.
Mason needed to verify what he’d found. If he was right, then he might finally have something he could actually work with.
He climbed up onto the remains of the stairs, jumped to catch the lip of the step above him, and hauled himself up. There had to be a section of the plaster that hadn’t burned. One small patch was all he needed. He found it on the southern wall in the living room. A mere swatch maybe two feet square, but it was enough. He could see the gridlike pattern of discoloration where the unit had been mounted against the wall for an extended period of time. He imagined every wall in the living room and the kitchen and the bedroom, from floor to ceiling, covered with those units. Rows and rows of post office boxes that served as physical suites for the businesses registered to them. Stacks of mail inside each, waiting to be bundled and shipped to the owners, wherever they lived. He imagined a woman sitting at the desk he’d first seen upon entering with a computer in front of her, a hands-free microphone near her mouth, and the telephone ringing nonstop. Pictured her answering every incoming line, pretending to be the secretary for each of the different businesses corresponding to the various suites, taking messages and routing calls all around the world. That was why Angie had been looking into this house, why she had broken her own rule about even thinking about work at home. It was a one-stop shop for criminal enterprises looking to acquire the appearance of legitimacy.
Suddenly, everything made sense. He knew exactly how this burned house connected his wife to the woman who’d called him on the phone last night.
He r
an out the front door, cleared the steps, and jumped into his car. Grabbed his laptop. Searched for Fairacre Ranch Surplus and Auction. He already knew what he would find. It was in the small print at the bottom of a home page that looked exactly how he would have expected a ranch auction site to look.
Commerce City had relaxed its regulations on corporations in hopes of luring out-of-state businesses and creating jobs, not to mention revenue. After all, corporations needed more than mere tax breaks, especially in this economic climate. They needed incentives. In addition to state and income taxes on a sliding scale and exemptions that afforded a large measure of bookkeeping creativity, the city had incentivized the act of incorporation itself. And what was a corporation if not an entity capable of serving as an imaginary storefront, behind which personal assets could be hidden? They could be owned by anyone, managed completely anonymously, and used to discreetly shuffle funds between accounts, just like those Angie had used to track the fifteen million dollars laundered south of the border.
Fairacre Ranch Surplus and Auction, LLC, listed the burned house beside him—6900 Market Street—as its corporate headquarters. Suite 416, in fact. The implication being that it was on the fourth floor of an office building in a city whose name alone validated its professionalism, when it was really nothing more than a PO box inside a decrepit house with hundreds of others.
All the suites belonged to shell companies.
Hidden not in the Cayman Islands, but inside an anonymous house in their own backyard, were hundreds of seemingly legitimate turnkey corporations that could be used to create the appearance of legitimacy for financial transactions, hide assets from lawyers and governments, and limit personal liability for the owner, all while concealing his true identity.
Angie had done precisely what Gunnar had just told Mason to do. She’d followed the money and made the connection between the missing fifteen million dollars, the woman who’d given him the tip about Fairacre, and the unidentified ninth trafficking organization he’d been hunting for the last year.
The Extinction Agenda Page 13