Late-K Lunacy

by Ted Bernard

  She suddenly pounded her fist on the table. Nobody but Nick and I had been paying attention to her. The others looked warily her way. Her voice came forth in a lower register than one would expect of a young woman. As if her remarks had been shot from a crossbow aimed straight at Lara’s heart, she said, “Your supervisor’s advice is the best you’ll ever get, girl. You’ve got to escape this fiasco before it spins out of control and wastes your five years here, not to mention your future. Leave these naïve amateurs masquerading as the NSA to their madness. They soon will find themselves expelled from the university and facing prison sentences. Bail the fuck out, Lara. Bail the fuck out!”

  Lara’s aqua eyes tasered back toward Adrienne with fervor nobody in this room had witnessed. She spat out a tight-lipped command, “Leave these people out of this, Adrienne. I am capable of making my own decisions without your lewd input.”

  All the excitement and intrigue of the past hour was sucked into the black hole of their exchange. There was a collective gasp. Muffled conversations at the bar faded into faint white noise. Time stopped. We looked first at Adrienne, then at Lara, then back to Adrienne. Jason, shifting restlessly, spoke directly to Lara, his flat tone a soothing counterpoint. “Lara, from where I sit, I would fully go along with your decision to withdraw. This could put your PhD at risk and you’ve got your future to think about. But if you decide to hang with us, you have my support to continue as one of our most informed and passionate members. I cannot predict how this will pan out. No one here can. But whatever happens, whatever you decide, I’ve got your back.”

  “Thank you, Jason,” Lara replied, clearing her throat softly afterwards.

  Before anyone else could speak, Adrienne rose. With contempt aimed broadly, she swept her eyes across the table. She gathered her shoulder bag and aimed toward the door, her shoes squeaking across the bar room tiles. A couple of drinkers at the bar watched her and whispered to one another. As if she had dragged an evil force field on her heels, everyone slumped in relief. What was that all about?

  With urgency gushing up from someplace deep, a place I could not name, I spoke. “Lara, you have a difficult decision,” a quiver in my voice. “Like Jason, I will be here for you, no matter what. As for the rest of us, what we know so far might alone be enough to halt the drilling under Blackwood Forest. We cannot simply walk away, but I don’t think we can do much more tonight. One more thing I do want to know is whether you spies picked up any kind of timeline. Does this plot, or whatever it is, have a deadline?”

  Astrid responded. “No, no specific dates. Morse did say that he wanted to ‘fast track this thing’, whatever that means. My guess is that nothing is going to go down in the next few days.”

  Lara regained her bearings. “I agree. The permits from the state have not been issued. Until then, Morse can do nothing.”

  “Let’s give our spooks a few more days to nail down more details,” Katherine suggested.

  “Sounds right,” said Lara. The others agreed. A solidarity was coalescing out of the gravity of Astrid’s revelations and the tension of the past moments. A few minutes later, coming out of the restroom, I almost bumped into Lara and Jason. They seemed a bit furtive, like teenagers caught out after curfew, but Lara said brightly, “Oh, hey Hannah. Off we all go into the wild blue yonder.”

  5

  Wearing a balaclava, leather gloves, a long-sleeved black nylon top, black jeans, and dark-colored fitness shoes, the cyclist known as Puma, cruised to a stop, dismounted, leaned the bicycle against the chain link fence, grabbed a small waist pack and headlamp from the saddle bag, and strapped them on. Puma halted momentarily to review the plan. Should the bicycle be locked to the fence? No. Since the neighborhood was pitch black at this hour, the likelihood of theft was small and the plan could be derailed by the slightest delay.

  The small bungalow on the other side of the fence was dark and silent. Puma opened the gate and, keeping to the shadows of a locust tree, crept toward the house. Beneath a flower pot was the back-door key. Puma deftly inserted it into the lock. A chance October wind caught a low branch of the locust. The branch rasped against a gutter. Puma froze and listened for sounds inside. Nothing. Nimble as Baryshnikov, the Ninja leaned forward, softly shouldered open the door, snapped on the headlamp, and slipped into the kitchen.

  Avoiding a small table and chairs, Puma moved swiftly to the living room at the front of the house. To the left was a hallway leading to the bedrooms. Deep breathing and an occasional snore bolstered the interloper’s confidence. Quickly gathering cushions from the couch and chairs, Puma stacked them in the arched entry to the hallway. Two woven throw rugs, lace curtains from the front and side windows, and oil-soaked fabric strands from the waist pack were added to the stack. From the same pack, two water bottles were extracted, the caps removed, the contents splashed over the stack. Finally, a fuse-cord, long enough to reach from the amassed stack to the kitchen, was taken from the pack. With a pocket knife, Puma slashed a pillow and inserted the fat end of the cord into its feathery stuffing. A length of twelve-gauge stainless steel wire secured the cord to the upholstery’s ribbing. Puma then climbed onto the couch, removed a picture from the wall, and with a spray can of black acrylic paint, on the wall, in large letters, wrote:

  CALL OFF YOUR MINIONS

  OR BEWAIL MY NEXT VISIT

  Unwinding the cord, Puma tiptoed back to the kitchen and from a hip pocket took out a lighter, flicked it to life, ignited the wick on the kitchen floor, and silently studied its progress. Fizzling softly, sparks raced toward the target. Quickly retreating across the kitchen, Puma stopped at the circuit panel on the back wall, opened it, switched off the main breaker, and crept silently outside.

  The door was closed and locked, the key returned to its place. As the unheeded figure in black scrambled across the yard to the bicycle, then unhurriedly nosed it down the broken bricks of the alley, the shrill pitch of a smoke alarm could be heard.

  6

  Astrid flicked back and forth, screen to screen, trying to make sense of Morse’s offshore operations. A notebook to her right was filled with flow charts with boxes and circles, laced with arrows, scribbled notes, and numerals; question marks on every page. She had been staring at screens for eight hours. It was 5:00 AM. In a couple of hours, Sunday would dawn and she would walk four steps to her unmade bed and fall victim to the manic sleep of a hacker so obsessed that she had neglected to eat, had completed none of her class work. After a few hours, she would wake to spend more time at her computer trying to scour her way through fog thick enough to obscure government regulators and the FBI. Astrid, known to some online as Havoc, felt confident that with her collaborators and her own intuitive and technical legerdemain she would accomplish what seemed to have baffled the real spooks.

  Weary beyond reason, flipping again through her marked-up notebook pages, Astrid wondered which of the dozens of her diagrammed scenarios matched reality. She was confident that she had left no stone unturned. But she could not yet name the relative roles nor rank the importance of the pieces of Morse’s intricate puzzle, and still could not say how, in fact, they fit together. She had encountered too many firewalls, too many inscrutable laws protecting offshore investments, too many uncertainties. Despite penetrating Morse Valley Energy’s email system and invading Morse’s personal computer, she had not discovered the source of the ungodly cash flow that fed his empire. Astrid and her collaborators at Sans Visage (SV) had so far been unable to uncover even the vaguest clue. Sans Visage was the notorious global commune of black-hat hackers, some whom were also trying to disassemble Morse’s project.

  Her original estimate of a dozen accounts had exploded exponentially. And these accounts were only one part of the organism. The vast proportion of the funds were in shadowy corporate entities, so-called post-office-box companies, all allegedly in the energy business and located not only in the Caymans but also in Cyprus, Lichtenstein, and Macau. It entailed a global empire under an umbrella called Gruppo
Crogiolo, a limited liability corporation registered in Larnaca. Cyprus. Crogiolo, in Italian, translates as crucible or melting pot. Did Morse have Mob associates? Apart from the name, Astrid could discover no other Italian connection either in the U.S. or offshore. Was there significance to this name? She could not say.

  Companies in Gruppo Crogiolo spanned the energy sector: petro credit and investment, accounting, legal services, industrial gas, power tools, mining and drilling equipment, fabricators, pipelines, asphalt manufacturing, nuclear engineering, uranium enrichment, coal exporting, and others. Their ownerships were impossibly entangled and, so far as Astrid could discern, not one entity was a bona fide enterprise with real employees, actual buildings, company kitchens, restrooms, computer systems. None of that: nothing but post-office boxes and bank and investment accounts where assets moved back and forth using loans; options; securities, hedge funds, currency trading; bonds; apparently fake payrolls and elaborate invoices; and dozens of other intricate strategies. But where was the head of this hydra? Was someone in partnership with Morse? When she searched for an address in Larnaca, where Gruppo Crogiolo had been registered, all she could find was another post office box.

  This was not simply a shell game to provide cover for fixed accounts. It was a dynamic, cancerously expanding organism. Between its earliest appearance in 2003 and the present, Astrid estimated that Gruppo’s assets had grown by a factor of one-hundred fifty — from three-and-a-half million to more than five hundred million dollars, an astronomical rate of increase for any times and especially those spanning the Great Recession.

  Her mind turned to other unresolved questions. If Morse has more money than God, why would he be taking a stand over the relatively meager amount of oil and gas under Blackwood? Could anyone else possibly know what I know? What had been discovered by the U.S. Senate Committee on offshore tax dodging? What about the Morse Valley Energy mine safety violations? Why were charges of conspiring to subvert mine safety standards dropped in 2006? Might the Bureau of Mines, the FBI, the CIA, and Europol be poised to nail the bastard?

  She opened her fifth Red Bull of the night and began to build a new head of steam. Thinking there might be clues about his offshore holdings within Morse’s legitimate business, she resolved to revisit the facts on Morse Valley Energy. She also needed fresh eyes on the players in this drama. She went back to her laptop.

  As the first rays of dawn began to creep across her room, Astrid’s buzz had worn thin. The lobes of her brain were cascading toward omega. On the expectation of further word from SV, she did not turn off her computer. She arose from her cluttered desk, lowered the blinds, and flopped, fully clothed, into bed.

  7

  Lara and Jason knocked on Nick’s door. After their smoky awakening two nights earlier, Lara was on the brink of bailing out of the Blackwood campaign. At one moment, she was convinced that Marilyn’s and Adrienne’s advice could not be ignored; at the next, fueled by the violation of her apartment, her history of independence, and her noblesse oblige, she believed that Blackwood’s future and that of the warblers depended on her. While cleaning up her place, she and Jason endlessly tossed around her options. Now they needed a clear-headed third party to listen and advise.

  Nick opened the door and welcomed them into a tiny sitting room with a ‘seventies plaid couch, an overstuffed chair with a serious case of mange, a blistered Naugahyde lounger, and a scratched coffee table atop a faded oriental rug. The room seemed to shrink as Nick crossed it and his immensity enveloped the lounger. He introduced his girlfriend, Amanda. As she gathered her backpack and bike headgear, she apologized for running off. It was Monday evening. A class of psych undergraduates awaited her.

  On the couch, sitting next to Jason, Lara recounted the events of early Sunday morning: the shrill alarm, the acrid smoke, the mad rushing to quell smoldering cushions with a fire extinguisher, the jittery 911 call, and later, just as firemen and police arrived, the discovery of the message on the wall.

  Nick jotted some notes in a small notebook.

  She continued, saying that apart from smoke and the charred cushions, rugs, and curtains, there was little damage to the apartment. Police detectives and fire inspectors arrived after dawn, collected their evidence, interviewed them, and by noon, left them alone. She admitted she was unable to expunge the message from her mind. The word, bewail, had drilled deeply into her unconscious, fueling nightmares. Wearily, she described Jason as a saint. He cleaned up the dry powder from the extinguisher and repainted the living room. It took three coats to cover the words.

  Nick rhythmically rocked his head back and forth, shoulder to shoulder. A troubled look swam into the pools of his eyes. “I’m sure the police asked this, but do you have any idea who might have broken into your place?”

  “Not for certain. I’m not even sure, and the police could not yet say whether it was one or more interlopers. They actually didn’t break in. They — or he or she — entered the house by unlocking one of the doors. Nothing had been jimmied, no windows broken.”

  Nick asked about the word minions on the living room wall.

  “When the police asked about that, I obfuscated, trying to protect our group. Jason, who was interviewed separately, claimed he could not understand it. It is no secret I’ve been attending PCSA meetings and that I have facilitated a couple. It should also be clear to anyone spying on us that PCSA is an amorphous, non-hierarchical group. I do not understand why the intruder used the word.”

  “I need to ask you something you conceivably might not wish to answer. If so, I would understand.” Nick paused, giving Lara a chance to reply.

  She responded with a not-sure kind of shrug. “Don’t know what you have in mind. But since I need your help and you can’t provide it without the full story, you’re welcome to ask anything.”

  “Okay. On our walk back to campus the other night my friends and I wondered about the tirade of that woman who seemed to have lost it during our meeting at Meroni’s. What’s her name? Andrea?”

  “Adrienne”.

  “Okay, yeah, Adrienne. Do you have any idea why she went off like that?”

  Lara paused. “Well, maybe. As you can imagine, Jason and I have been speculating about Adrienne. This is between us, okay? At least for now.”

  “Sure.”

  Lara, running the fingers of her left hand nervously through her auburn hair, bit her lip and began. “Okay, Adrienne and I had a half-year fling, shall we call it. It went south about six weeks ago. At least on the surface she had been an interesting, mysterious, and, sure, somewhat intense friend. She was into martial arts and worked out incessantly. She could be sullen, dark really. I once asked her what was behind those moods. She said something like, ‘If you live close to a cemetery, you cannot cry.’ I never got closer to an answer than that. But she was never the psycho bitch you saw last week. After Jason and I began to see one another, she would appear from time to time, trying to seduce me, or that’s how it felt. I had no interest. I assumed she had reconciled to that. I had not seen her for about three weeks. And then she reappeared the other night.”

  Nick, as hetero a male as you’re likely to find, took a minute to wrap his head around Lara as a bisexual person. “No big deal,” he told me, though I’m not sure that’s how he really felt.

  “Did she know how to get into your apartment?”

  “Yes, there was a key stuck up into a planter on the back stoop.”

  “Did the police ask that question?”

  “Yes, of course. I lied. I said that Jason and I and the landlord had the only keys.”

  “Were you protecting Adrienne?”

  “Yeah, maybe. There was an underlying bit of fear. The breakup was rough. It had its origin in my own vanity, her unpredictable disposition, and my need for somebody more compassionate. She was pissed. Ignorance of who she really is, I suppose, makes me apprehensive.”

  Nick made more notes. “Might she be an arsonist?”

  “Not based on any experi
ence I had with her. This may not relate, but she seemed to have a furtive life of some sort, as if her black belt was needed in that life.”

  “Her life? What does she do? Is she a student?”

  “No, she is not a student, though I think she graduated from GUO, maybe six or seven years ago. At first, I couldn’t figure out how she supported herself. She has expensive tastes and toys. When I asked her about this, she played it down and said she was a ‘trustafarian’ .”

  “A what?”

  “That’s what I asked,” Jason said, yawning out loud.

  “Oh.” Lara replied. “You know, a person with wealthy parents who set up an account for their kid — a trust fund.”

  Nick found this humorous. He repeated the word, asked how to spell it, wrote it down. He tilted his head toward Lara, scrunched up his forehead, and smirked, as if this was too bizarre to be believed. “Did you believe her?”

  Lara swallowed. “I guess so. We had good times, mainly in bed — sorry, Jason. She always picked up the tab when we went out, and I had other things pressing me, like data to analyze, a dissertation to write, my dad.”

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah, he’s my single parent. My mom died when I was five. He raised me after that, to put it loosely. Now he’s alone and I worry about him. Growing up, my role was to strenuously push boundaries but also to kind of take care of him. He’s a doctor with a laboratory business.”

  Nick sized up Lara anew: something about her motherless childhood, her single-parent dad, her admitted obstinacy, her willfulness and strength. These qualities infused her with unyielding tenacity, amped up her charisma, and influenced the compelling ways she interacted with those around her. He realized he was not immune to the aura of the woman.

  He wanted to get back to Adrienne. “So Adrienne was gone from time to time and did not divulge the reason for her absence?”