Adam slumped down in a nearby chair.
“Okay, now what? If we’re to assume he never brought her there in the first place, and that she’s still alive, how do we find her? We don’t have any bargaining chips left. The deal’s dead in the water,” Adam reasoned.
“Not necessarily,” Tanisha announced. She had been quietly listening in the background.
Her comment caught both men off guard.
“We’re listening,” Gabriel said.
“We can create a new buyer. Bring the deal back to life. Diaz said his current buyers are no longer interested. But if there was a new buyer…”
“He’d need the package again,” Adam said.
“Exactly. All we have to do is find out how the buyers communicate with them,” Tanisha continued.
“I like it,” Gabriel announced. “But time isn’t our friend; now more than ever. If Diaz doesn’t have use for Carrie anymore, he’ll get rid of her.”
“Agreed. We’ve got our work cut out for us but at least we have a plan.”
Just then a knock at the door announced Lenny’s arrival.
“Great to see you’re alive, Lenny,” Adam welcomed him back cheerfully which invited a scornful look from Lenny.
“I wish I wasn’t,” he said. “And why are you so chipper, huh? Or was all that ‘Carrie and everyone in Turtle Cove mean so much to me’ blabber all fake? They killed her, man. They killed her right in front of me.” Lenny broke down and sobbed.
“We don’t know that Lenny,” Adam spoke gently.
“I was there, remember? She was there! I heard her.”
“But did you actually see her, physically?” Gabriel asked.
“No, but I heard their feet shuffling, and her body fall to the ground when they shot her,” he said sobbing again.
“Lenny, you need to stay positive. There’s no evidence that it was her. You didn’t see her. It could have been anyone. Diaz went there knowing the deal was dead. He didn’t intend doing any trading with you. It’s fair to say he was bluffing, intentionally wanting to torture you.”
Gabriel’s satphone bleeped.
“Thank you, lieutenant. Appreciate the urgency.”
The expectant look on Adam’s face had Lenny suddenly worried.
“What? Who was that?”
“That was CSI. They’ve done an analysis of the blood found at the scene. It was human.”
Lenny sobbed again.
Adam fell silent, waiting for Gabriel to speak the words he’d been praying not to hear.
“It was female.”
Chapter Twenty-One
For the next few minutes, the room was quiet. No one spoke. Lenny had taken to his bed and sat there clutching his knees to his chest, convinced his sister had been killed. Guilt for dragging her into his world was tearing him apart. He was an emotional mess and he let everyone in the room know it.
“I’ll whip up some of my famous fried chicken and corn grits,” Tanisha announced, then quickly slipped out the door. She wasn’t one to easily show emotion, they all knew that. But it was clear she had no idea how to handle the situation.
“Sounds good, thanks, Tanisha,” Adam said then went and took a seat on the foot of Lenny’s bed.
“Lenny, we should wait until the forensic test results come back. Let’s not assume that it was Carrie. We need to stay strong now and try to revive this deal while there’s still time.”
“How do you do it, huh, Preacher? You lost your wife and daughter to a maniac. Your entire life got ruined. How do you still sit there all positive and stuff?”
“How can I not? Losing them was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but afterward, after I grieved, I knew I had to make a choice. I could let the man who did that to them also consume and destroy my life, or I could choose to see all the good I still have in my life and trust that God will redirect his plan for me. I chose the latter.”
“Well, newsflash. There’s no good left in my life. I have no family, no real friends, I’m up to my eyeballs in debt with some seriously dangerous people, I have nothing. My life is an empty chasm. And as for your God, he doesn’t want anything to do with a lowlife scumbag like me.”
“Yeah, well, you see, that’s where you’re wrong, my friend. If not for Carrie’s kidnapping, we would’ve never become friends, and Gabriel here would’ve not had any new leads to hunt and take down one of the biggest crime syndicates this country has ever seen. Something the authorities have been working on for years. And… you would never have seen the opportunity God’s giving you now. All through the Bible, God chose people just like you to do his work for him. Even the disciples he chose were lowly fishermen from Galilee—a place that was considered to be on the wrong side of the tracks. He also chose Matthew, a tax collector who made it his profession to extort the needy. God isn’t picky, Lenny. So, how about we put our trust in his plan for your life and allow God to help us get Carrie back?”
“You really think she’s still alive?”
“I do.”
“Fine, then I’ll take your word for it since you and God are so close an’ all.”
“I’m only telling you what has been my experience, Lenny. If you look at your life carefully, you’ll see God working. And when you are ready, I’ll introduce you to him so you can experience his grace firsthand. But for now, we need to get Carrie back.”
“I’d love that, Preacher, but Diaz made it very clear he wants nothing to do with this package. And without the package we—”
Adam interrupted him.
“We have a plan. Actually, Tanisha came up with it. We’re going to create a new buyer, bring the deal back to life. And Diaz will have no choice but to come crawling back to you for the package. That’s how we’ll get Carrie back.”
Just then Tanisha entered with a trolley full of her famous southern cooking. She left it just inside the door and hurried over to where Gabriel still sat at the table. Anxious to get something off her chest, she dropped two piles of newspapers on Adam’s bed.
“Something struck me as very odd while I was cooking, the dates on the newspapers. Look.”
She spread out about a dozen newspapers on the bed.
“Take a look at these over here. These are the copies in which you found the other ciphers. See the print dates? They’re spaced out. Evenly spaced out.”
“Precisely two days apart,” Adam commented.
“Yes exactly. Now this pile over here is from the dates in between those days. They didn’t have the same ciphers in them.”
“But those might be the papers in which the buyers answered them with a different cipher,” Adam finished her thought.
“That’s what I was thinking, yes. We just need to look for it,” Tanisha said as she strolled over to the food trolley and started dishing up plates for everyone.
“Great job, Tanisha,” Gabriel said. “Shall we split these up between us? Adam, any idea what we might be looking for?”
He was already busy with one of the papers.
“Look for anything out of the ordinary first. An upside-down ad, a missing word, anything that looks out of place.”
Adam looked at his wristwatch.
“Yeah, I know, I’m already on it,” Gabriel announced.
“What? Am I missing something again?” Lenny asked feeling slightly lost in the events.
“If we find a cipher, we’d have to find a way of getting it printed in tomorrow’s newspaper. It’s just gone midnight. The paper will be out in three hours,” Adam explained while scanning through the prints.
“Oh, we can’t wait another day, Adam. If there’s a chance my sister is still alive there’s no telling what Diaz might do to her now that he doesn’t need her. What are we going to do?” Lenny’s voice escalated into a panic.
“Already taken care of,” Gabriel said as he ended a call. “I just got off the phone with the editor in chief. We have two hours before they go to print.”
“And we can trust him?” Tanisha queried.
“We have no choice but to. But I guess if word gets out then we know that Diaz has him in his pocket.”
* * *
The small team continued scanning through each of the papers. Forty minutes later, it was Lenny who spoke first.
“I might be seeing double but I’ve been around enough crossword puzzles to know this doesn’t look right. I have my mother to thank for that.”
He pointed at the row of letters that was printed upside down just below the daily crossword puzzle.
“See, usually they print the answers upside down, but this is just a jumble of letters. Not even the spaces in between the letters are even.”
Adam leaned in over Lenny’s shoulder then hurriedly opened his paper to the same page.
“I have one too,” he announced
“Me too,” Tanisha announced.
“So that’s another cipher. I don’t recognize it though,” Gabriel said.
“Why are you searching through the for-sale papers?” Lenny questioned Adam when he suddenly started opening the cipher pile’s newspapers.
“If they’re in these papers too then we might be wrong. But if they’re not—”
“Then we’ve found our communication trail,” Gabriel finished.
It didn’t take them long to establish that the cipher pile’s papers didn’t have the jumbled upside-down sentences beneath their crossword puzzles.
“Well, Lenny, it seems you have an eye for detail. Well spotted, buddy,” Adam said as he started transferring the letter sequences to his legal pad.
“Any idea what we’re looking at? We’re shaving it a bit thin. We have less than an hour to get this to the editor,” Gabriel announced from where he was working through the ciphers alongside Adam.
“Not yet, but I don’t believe it’s a transposition cipher, plus there are numbers added into the mix.”
“Agreed. Doesn’t look like a substitution either.”
“Perhaps some sort of a lexicon cipher, or a combination of more than one?”
Adam and Gabriel went back and forth trying to crack the code. Silence prevailed for several more minutes.
“Uh, I don’t want to add pressure but we’re running out of time.” Lenny spoke from across the room.
He got no response from either of them.
A moment later Gabriel and Adam spoke simultaneously.
“It’s a scytale cipher!”
The moments that followed were a mad flurry as the men worked their way through the newspapers. Then they rummaged through every drawer and cupboard before they finally regrouped around the table. Yes, their adrenaline was pumping because they were running out of time, but more than that, they looked like two excited kids on Christmas morning.
Lenny and Tanisha watched as they tore the letter sequences from the newspapers and wrapped them around every cylindrical object they could find.
“Nope, too thin,” Adam announced.
“This one doesn’t work either,” Gabriel answered.
“Got it!” Adam announced when he had neatly coiled the ribbon of paper around a drinking straw from one of their soda cans.
“Okay, I can’t hold it back any longer,” Lenny exclaimed. “What the heck are you guys doing?”
“It’s a scytale code,” Adam answered briefly, deep in concentration while he wrote down the first three messages.
“You said that yes. Still means nothing.”
“It’s another ancient Greek code. Back then the cipher text was written on parchment and wound around a baton. Without the cylinder, it’s just oddly spaced letters. But when you coil it around an object similar in dimensions, the letters line up to spell out the message.”
“There’s a pattern here, Adam. This is definitely how the buyers make their requests known. Look, this is the one Wu intercepted. Seek MC two. Hot ten. Diaz then answered the following day with the address and time to meet.”
He glanced at the time.
“We have ten minutes.”
Adam ripped a piece of paper from his legal pad, coiled it around the drinking straw, and configured the cipher. He used the identical code sequence then handed it to Gabriel to send off to the editor.
“Now what?” Lenny said when it was done.
“Now we get some rest and wait until Diaz gets the morning paper. If we’re right, and this fishing expedition of ours works, then you’ll be getting a call from Diaz before the sun is up,” Adam predicted.
“And the buyer?” Lenny asked, looking concerned.
“There is no buyer. We’ll have handed him the package in exchange for Carrie by the time he figures out there was no buyer to begin with. We’ll be a solid twenty-four hours ahead of him,” Adam explained.
“And since we’d have Carrie back safely, and you’d all be out of harm’s way, it makes for the perfect time to catch the guy redhanded and blow this entire syndicate out of the water. The moment we have your sister back, I’ll have the Corporate Crimes unit move in. Diaz will have someone to meet him the day after tomorrow, it just won’t be who he’ll be expecting,” Gabriel added with a twisted smile.
“And if our editor is dirty?” Tanisha interjected.
Gabriel didn’t have to answer her. His eyes said it all. If Diaz had the editor in chief of one of the biggest newspapers in the country in his pocket, their plan would be foiled.
And Carrie would be dead—if she were in fact still alive.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was in the early hours of the morning, just as the sun started rising, that the piercing sound of Lenny’s mobile phone echoed through the small room. Since they’d only got to bed a few hours earlier, neither Adam nor Lenny woke up the first time the phone signaled an incoming call. It was only when the phone rang for the second time, that Lenny reached for it, nearly knocking it off the side table in his sleepy state.
“Yes?” he said still half asleep, his voice groggy.
“It seems Lady Luck has dealt you a good hand today, Lenny.”
Lenny wiped his hand over his face in an attempt to wake up. The sudden realization of whose voice it was, had him alert and fully awake in a second.
“Diaz?”
But the voice that replied wasn’t that of Diaz. It was a female. One whose voice Lenny didn’t recognize at first.
“Leonard, it’s me, Carrie.”
The voice jerked Lenny to an upright position.
“Carrie? Is that you? You’re alive! Are you okay?” he rambled.
She didn’t answer. Instead, Diaz spoke again.
“If you want to see her again bring the package. And this time, Lenny, come alone or they will find her corpse next to yours.”
Diaz ended the call.
“Hello? Carrie, Diaz…” But the line was dead.
“You spoke to Carrie?” asked Adam, who was now also awake and sitting up in bed.
“Briefly, yes. She’s alive, Adam! She’s alive.”
“I am extremely relieved to hear that. So what time and where?”
“He didn’t say. I’m assuming it’s the usual spot under the bridge. He did say though to come alone this time.”
“So he knew he was being watched.”
“Yep, that’s possibly why he never properly came out of the shadows.”
“Or he watched from somewhere after he had left and saw the tactical unit arrive at the scene.”
Lenny was out of bed and already making his way to the bathroom.
“Either way, I can’t risk it. I have to go there on my own this time.”
“That’s too dangerous, Lenny. I’m sure Gabriel can instruct his team to be a bit more discreet this time round.”
“No, Adam! I’m not going to take any chances with this man. He said to come alone or he’ll kill us both. And as we have all seen he is quite capable of doing that. He would have no reason to kill us once he has the package. It’s just another transaction for him. But the very instant he sees the authorities, he’ll back out again.”
Adam pop
ped the small kettle on and prepared two coffees.
“I hate to say this, Lenny but you’re right. It’s too risky. We’re not there to catch him. We’re there to make sure Carrie comes home safely.”
* * *
As expected, Gabriel wasn’t in favor of Lenny going to meet Diaz on his own. But once he too realized that Carrie was Diaz’s only bargaining tool, he conceded. And since he was meeting him in broad daylight, it decreased further the element of risk. He did however make Lenny wear a bulletproof vest and a hidden camera and mic.
Once again Lenny took the pedestrian path down towards the bridge where Diaz would have his usual meetings at a set time with his runners. It was noon. As he neared the spot, he saw that Diaz wasn’t in his usual position. He checked the time on his watch. Pondered if perhaps the schedule had since changed. He’d wait a little longer. He turned around to inspect the area, but there was no sign of Diaz. In his earpiece Gabriel prompted for information but deciding it was too risky to speak in the event Diaz was watching him, Lenny made a guttural sound to indicate the opposite without moving his lips.
“Copy that,” Gabriel said. “Wait it out a bit longer. Chances are he’s scouting the surrounds to see if you’ve come alone.”
But twenty minutes later Diaz was still nowhere to be found. Holding his cover Lenny didn’t do anything to suggest that he wasn’t alone, but frustration and disappointment overwhelmed him. When another ten minutes had passed he decided to abort the mission and started making his way back up the path. And as his mind raced with prospective reasons as to why Diaz hadn’t turned up, he found himself asking God how all of this could be part of some divine plan. The thought caught him off guard since he’d never prayed before—or recognized God. Could Adam be right? Was the misery in his life all part of some greater scheme? Then if so, what was God waiting for?
He brushed the thought away as he neared the end of the footpath. All he could think about now was that their own plan had failed. Perhaps Tanisha’s gut instinct was right in that the editor was dirty. Perhaps Diaz had realized it was a trap.
Every Good Plan Page 12