The Traffickers

by W. E. B Griffin

  Then he said, “Okay. Thanks. Keep me posted.”

  Byrth looked at Payne and said, “Remember that kid running drugs I told you we nabbed in College Station?”

  “Shoney?”

  “Close,” Byrth said. “Ramos Manuel Chacón. Good memory, though.”

  He turned to Harris and brought him up to speed on Ramos Manuel Chacón.

  “What about him?” Payne then said.

  “When they booked him, they didn’t really get anything beyond the phone numbers on his cell phone. But then they went through his car with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. In addition to the drug residue—he’d already delivered the drugs to his vendors—there was all kinds of trash. And, apparently, there were a few bills that had not been mailed, including a City of Dallas water bill.”

  Payne and Harris were nodding.

  “Water bills have service street addresses,” Payne said.

  “Right,” Byrth said. “So they called Company B in Garland; that’s the Texas Rangers office in DFW. And Sergeant Kenny Kasper—really good guy—gets the address and drives by in his personal vehicle. Doesn’t see anything of interest. So he gets an idea. He drives over to Dallas City Hall. Craziest damn place; the building looks like a triangle turned on its head. That I. M. Pei designer did it. Anyway, he pulls some strings. Now he’s wearing a water meter reader’s outfit and he’s got a city vehicle with all the appropriate stickers on the doors.”

  Payne snorted. “Pretty good trick.”

  Byrth nodded and said mock-seriously, “That’s why we’re Texas Rangers.”

  He went on: “So then Kenny drove over to the house and banged on the front door, prepared to say he’s there to turn on the water. No one answered, but he thought he could hear muffled moans. He went around to the backyard. But all the windows and the back door were covered. He banged on that door and—you know what?—the damnedest thing happened. It swung wide open.”

  Payne chuckled. “That’s called a Size 10 Steel-Toe Universal Key.”

  After a moment’s thought, Byrth went on: “What he found wasn’t pretty. But it could’ve been worse if he hadn’t taken the door.”

  “What?” Harris and Payne said at almost the exact same time.

  “It’s a stash house in a struggling neighborhood near downtown. And inside he found eighteen undocumented immigrants, mostly women, all but the two toddlers chained and locked up. Everyone had duct tape on their mouths, toddlers included. Kasper said he’s pretty sure some of the young girls had been raped.”

  “My God!” Harris exclaimed.

  Byrth nodded. “And there was drug-manufacturing paraphernalia. Empty packets of Queso Azul scattered all over the dining room. They don’t know how long the bad guys had been gone, but it appeared that they just missed them. And judging by the way things were thrown around, they’re not going back to the house.”

  “They just left those people to die?” Payne said, shaking his head.

  “Happens all the time in the desert,” Byrth said. “Doesn’t make it right, of course.”

  They were all quiet, lost in thought.

  “Then this El Gato is back in Dallas?” Payne said.

  Byrth shrugged. “No one knows. None of the immigrants are talking. At least, not saying anything of help. Forensics is going through the scene, but that’ll take forever to process. There’re eighteen sets of prints from the immigrants alone. Lord knows how many from the bad guys. And even then who knows if we get a match to any.”

  After a long moment, Payne suddenly said: “The Hispanic girl who got beheaded!”

  “What about her?” Tony Harris said.

  “That’s the story we seed in the Bulletin. It may not get this Death. Before. Honor guy, but it might help us locate El Gato or someone who knows him.”

  “You sure, Matt?” Byrth said. “Seems like a long shot. One based on a lot of ifs. Beginning with (a) if this guy even reads a newspaper, and (b) if he has a computer, and (c) if he reads an online newspaper, and (d) if it’s the Bulletin. And putting that story out, well, it’s a whole lot easier letting the cat out of the bag than it is putting it back.”

  Payne shrugged. “True. But it costs nothing to try. And the deputy commissioner’s let the cat out already. Even though last night at the Union League was supposed to be off the record, no one keeps secrets. This will get us looking under the rock that’s under the rock. We find nothing there, we move on to another rock.”

  He started to stand up.

  “Shall we go to the ECC?”

  On the way upstairs, Payne tried to discreetly type a text message.

  Byrth and Harris exchanged glances and shook their heads.

  Payne shrugged sheepishly, but grinned as he continued thumbing the message:got your number from amy.

  thatʹs great news!

  why the change of heart? not that i’m complaining.

  can i buy you lunch?? dinner??

  a vine-covered cottage on the side of the road??

  Then he hit the SEND button.

  [FOUR]

  Philadelphia Police Headquarters Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia Thursday, September 10, 8:45 A.M.

  Corporal Kerry Rapier was waiting in the Executive Command Center when Matt Payne, Tony Harris, and Jim Byrth entered. He was with a young man who had skin as dark as the Black Buddha’s. The young man was sitting in a motorized power chair.

  The kid in that fancy wheelchair doesn’t look like he’s old enough to be in college, Payne thought.

  He felt his phone vibrate. He read the screen:609-555-6221

  Lunch? Dinner? Vine-covered cottage?

  Methinks you might be getting a little ahead of the game, Romeo . . .

  But . . . do I have to pick just one? (wink) -A

  He grinned, and sent:all three . . . might even throw in a white picket fence . . .

  Payne hit SEND, then grinned again as he reread her message.

  He realized he could feel his heart rate beating faster.

  He slipped the phone back into his pocket as Corporal Rapier called to them, “Gentlemen, this is Andy Radcliffe.”

  Radcliffe had a round kind face with gentle coal-black eyes. His full head of dark hair was evenly shorn almost to his scalp. He wore blue jeans that had an ironed crease and a white cotton button-down dress shirt that looked a size or so too large. The shirt also had been carefully ironed. His navy blazer was a little big for his narrow frame, and he had on athletic shoes.

  Rapier went on: “Andy’s in his second year at La Salle, and he’s been interning here at the department. He and I have worked on projects this summer. He’s really good—”

  Did Radcliffe just blush at the praise? Payne thought.

  “—and, even more important,” Rapier said smiling, “he’s all that’s available right now from ISD.”

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to make do,” Payne said solemnly.

  Radcliffe turned quickly to look at Payne, who calmed his fears by smiling.

  Payne introduced the others, then said, “That’s one helluva wheelchair, Andy. It looks like a high-dollar office chair on a space-age rocket pod.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s pretty much as you describe. Watch.”

  Using the joystick on the right armrest, he maneuvered the chair around the command center. It made a soft humming sound as he showed off, the joystick controlling speed and direction. With six wheels—four small ones in each corner and two larger ones directly below each armrest—the power chair could spin in its own space. And Andy had it do exactly that.

  “Impressive,” Harris said.

  Payne said, “Mind if I ask the rude question . . . ?”

  Andy shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me. I got robbed three years ago. Was walking home—we live in North Philly—from work. I was bringing my mom and little brother dinner. I couldn’t outrun them. They got my wallet. I got a knife in the back. It nicked my spinal cord. So now I’m a sophomore at La Salle, doing a double major in computer science and
criminal justice.”

  Nice kid, Payne thought, genuinely impressed. He projects nothing but a positive outlook.

  Not sure I could do that if I were in his shoes.

  “Good for you, Andy.”

  He shrugged again.

  “What are my alternatives?” he said logically. “Sit in a corner and wither while I complain bitterly about the cards I’ve been dealt?”

  Payne didn’t trust his voice to speak. He squeezed Andy’s shoulder and nodded softly.

  After a moment, Payne turned to Byrth and said, “La Salle University is just west of Broad Street, a few miles north of Temple University Hospital where the shooting took place.”

  Andy Radcliffe’s face lit up at the mention of that.

  “We were watching that video loop,” he said, nodding at the flat-screen TVs. “That was one pretty cool foot chase, Sergeant Payne.”

  Now Payne felt a little embarrassed by the praise. He nodded his thanks.

  Radcliffe pushed the joystick so that the power chair spun, then moved with that soft humming sound to the command center’s control panel. Radcliffe popped the black-and-white surveillance video up on the main bank of sixteen sixty-four-inch flat-screen TVs.

  “We’ve already seen Marshal Earp’s chase,” Jim Byrth said.

  Andy Radcliffe grinned at the nickname.

  He said, “I can’t watch it enough. You know, before I got robbed and all, I never thought twice about cops. Except to avoid them on the street. But the patrolman—Will Parkman? They call him ‘Pretty Boy’—the cop who got my case?”

  Payne shook his head. “Don’t know him.”

  “I do,” Rapier said. “Because of Andy, of course. Really good guy. Ex-Marine. Did some amazing things in Southeast Asia. Not just ’Nam.”

  Payne nodded appreciatively.

  “Anyway,” Andy said, “Pretty Boy—he’s not really pretty at all, you know, more like kinda dumpy, which is why they call him that—he kept coming around the hospital to check on me. Then he came by the house, made sure my mama and baby brother were . . .”

  He looked away for a moment. He cleared his throat. When he looked back at Payne, Matt could see the boy’s eyes were glistening.

  Tears. He’s holding them back.

  “So, this Parkman, you’re saying, didn’t have to do what he did,” Payne said. “That he was a pretty good guy?”

  “Yeah,” Radcliffe said. “Is. He’s helping out with my tuition at La Salle till I get on with the department here. He’s what some call an M&M.”

  “How’s that?” Payne said.

  “Like the candy. Hard shell on the outside. All sweet and soft inside.”

  Payne grinned and nodded.

  Obviously a damn good guy.

  I should look into starting a scholarship fund for guys like Andy.

  I’m embarrassed that this Pretty Boy Parkman’s already thought of it before me.

  “Okay, Matt, what’s going on?” Rapier said. “What do we need to do?”

  Payne explained.

  Then Harris handed them the printouts from Stanley Dowbrowski.

  “The Bulletin?” Andy Radcliffe then said.

  “Yeah.”

  At the main keyboard, he began typing. After a moment, the main bank of sixteen TVs showed an unusual Internet browser window. Then that window filled with the front page of the online edition of The Philadelphia Bulletin.

  “A school buddy of mine works in the paper’s ISD. He’s also interning over at the FBI,” he said, and pointed his thumb back over his shoulder.

  The FBI’s William J. Green Jr. Building was a couple blocks away, over at Sixth and Arch.

  Andy Radcliffe then pulled out his cell phone and hit a speed-dial key. When his buddy came on the line, he explained what they were trying to do.

  “Can I access it remotely?” Andy Radcliffe said.

  Then he tilted his head to hold the phone to his ear. With both hands on the keyboard, his fingers flew. The Internet browser window with the image of the newspaper then shrank to fit on only the left eight TVs. A new browser window opened on the right eight flat-screens.

  The new window was mostly blank. There was a single box in the middle. He moved the cursor to it.

  “Okay, I got it,” Radcliffe said, and began typing as he said “uh-huh, uh-huh.”

  In the box a string of asterisks appeared, clearly obscuring the password’s string of letters and numbers.

  Radcliffe hit RETURN and the box went away. Another flashed ENTRY SUCCESSFUL, then it went away and a new page appeared in the window. It was a tree of coded hyperlinks, the blue-colored links a series of alphanumeric file names.

  “I’m in,” Radcliffe then said into the cellular phone. “I’ll call you back.”

  He broke off the call. Then he typed some more, and the second browser window shrank to fit only the top right four sixty-four-inch flat-screens. Another new window opened on the four panels beneath it.

  “What sort of browser is that?” Payne said. “I’ve never seen one quite like it.”

  Radcliffe looked at Kerry Rapier, then at Payne. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

  Byrth and Harris chuckled.

  Payne looked at Andy and saw he was grinning ear to ear.

  “It’s a custom-built browser,” Radcliffe then said. “Comes from a skunk works at MIT. The code was written basically to strip out all the commerce parts you find on junk like Explorer and instead concentrates on making the program super-secure.”

  “It looks pretty bare-bones.”

  “Looks are deceiving.”

  “You might want to write that down, Sergeant Payne,” Byrth said with a big grin.

  “It’s one robust browser,” Radcliffe said, concentrating on his work.

  They watched the cursor move to the window with the newspaper articles. And then they saw that when he floated the cursor over a headline, one of the tree’s hyperlinks in the browser window on the upper right became a brighter blue.

  “The upper right browser shows the meat of the newspaper, all the files and such, stripped of the coding that makes the GUI so pretty.”

  “ ‘Gooey’?” Byrth said.

  “GUI, for graphical user interface. It basically means what makes a computer page look nice.”

  “So how’s it going to be possible to do the trace?” Payne said.

  “Yeah,” Ratcliffe said. “ICANN.”

  “You can what?” Payne said.

  “No, ICANN. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN.”

  “You’re making this up,” Payne said.

  Byrth put in, “I think you may be right, Marshal.”

  “I’m not making it up. Hey, can I call you ‘Marshal,’ too?”

  Payne didn’t respond.

  Radcliffe explained, “ICANN is a private nonprofit corporation out in Marina Del Rey, California. It was started in 1998, and tasked to assign and track every website, et cetera.”

  Radcliffe moved the cursor into the new browser window. He typed in a website address and hit ENTER.

  A pleasant blue page filled the browser. It had the ICANN logotype—it looked like a stylized pound symbol inside a circle meant to resemble a globe—and line after line of hyperlinks. Radcliff clicked on SITE MAP at the top of the page. And a new page appeared with an eye-crossing number of additional hyperlinks. He went immediately to the one he wanted and clicked.

  “Okay. A unique numerical identification, what’s called its logical address, is assigned to every device—every computer—so it can join the network and communicate with another computer. If IP addresses were not unique, there’d be all sorts of conflicts. It’d be chaos. Once we have the IP address, we go to ICANN and find out where the address is registered.”

  He moved the cursor to the left browser window.

  “Okay, now we go back to the newspaper and find those comments you’re hunting.”

  He flipped to the printout with the first comment. Then he cl
icked around in the left browser, working his way through the newspaper until he found the article. The others noticed that the blue hyperlinks in the upper right browser brightened and dimmed as he went through the various pages.

  “The two pages are connected,” Payne said aloud. “Interesting.”

  One blue hyperlink then stayed brightened.

  He moved the cursor over to it and clicked.

  Up popped a window. In it was:From Death.Before.Dishonor (9:52 a.m.):

  F**k you pendejos! Dudes sell drugs because people (are you paying attention?) because people want to buy them! Look at the ads on this page—booze, gambling (and where there’s gambling there’s hookers) . . . Something for everyone. What’s the difference with drugs? And you know what? Sometimes we even clean up the rats from the gutters—like those in this motel!

  Recommend [ 0 ] Click Here to Report Abuse

  “Well, I’ll be dammed!” Payne said. “There it is! The missing jewel.”

  At the top of the pop-up window was: IP ADDRESS X.173.57.92.234.

  “Now we take that”—he put the cursor over the address, copied it, then put the cursor in the bottom right browser window—“and feed it to ICANN.”

  He clicked.

  Another pop-up window appeared. It not only had a street address with city, state, and zip code, but there also was a small street map with an arrow pointing to the exact address.

  “Amazing!” Jim Byrth said.

  “Anchorage, Alaska?” Payne said. “The guy’s way the hell up there?”

  Andy Radcliffe shrugged.

  “Let’s check the other one,” he said.

  When it came up, Payne said, “Jesus Christ! That one says he’s in the Florida Keys.”

  Andy Radcliffe looked in deep thought. He clicked around and double-checked a couple links.

  “That’s just not possible,” he then said. “Both of those comments were typed in the same day—yesterday. No way someone could’ve traveled from Alaska to Florida. And there’s no way for two people to have the same screen name; the software that sets up the screen names only allows for unique ones. For obvious reasons.”