The Yellowstone Brief

by Larry LaVoie

  Trick raised his cup of tea. “Everything? That could take all night.”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t wait to get back to that smelly motel room? You’ll hurt my feelings.”

  “You want me to spend the night?”

  “I said I want to know more about you. If that takes all night…” She let her words trail off. “I guess we’ll have to see if we have time for sleep.”

  Trick set his cup on the coffee table and moved closer to Tanya. “I was born in a small town in Oregon….”

  Trick tried to move his arm without disturbing Tanya, but her head was buried in his chest and every time he moved, she gave out a whimper like a puppy longing for her mother. He wondered where Tanya’s mother was. They had talked until nearly dawn before they both drifted off. It seemed the hurt from his failed marriage, the pain he’d felt when he found out his three-year old daughter had terminal cancer, and the emptiness when she had died, were distant memories. In the end, his vow to give up women and become a hermit in the wilderness no longer seemed like a good idea. Trick was falling in love and the last thing he wanted to do was return to the snow covered mountain to study the trembling earth off the coast of Alaska.

  Chapter 5

  August 9th, Washington D.C.

  Joshua Stone looked around the deserted office. The computer banks were quiet, but cast a soft bluish hue to the otherwise dark room. Only an hour earlier, the room had over a hundred people scurrying around like a chicken pen that had just been invaded by a fox. Organized chaos, he called it. It was a necessary evil in the world of sit-ins, street demonstrations, marches and calculated civil lawsuits to right the wrongs of a government completely out of control. He marveled at how the innocent attempt at earning a living by organizing demonstrations paid for by the rich and powerful had turned into an enterprise. As successful as he was, there were people and forces within his organization he could not control. He had never considered himself a murderer, but had seen the demonstrations of late turn violent, and some had died. He tried to convince himself it was collateral damage. Some people had to die for the greater good; it was the only way change had ever come about in the world.

  Like the many volunteers who would soon be sitting in front of the computers, Joshua had started his life as a permanent demonstrator in a room similar to the one he was in at this moment. A college drop-out at the age of 23, Joshua, with plenty of time on his hands and no money in his pockets, started demonstrating full-time for pay. He soon found out there were those in power who would pay for demonstrations, if they thought it would advance their agenda. It wasn’t long before he discovered the power of the Internet, smart phones, and flash mobs. Joshua made a career as a full-time organizer and dissenter. There was big money in opposing everything from oil pipelines to immigration reform. Washington, D.C. was the place to be if you were a full-time demonstrator. Joshua had a downtown headquarter’s office with a sign in large gold letters GREEN KEEPERS, protectors of the environment. Joshua was living his dream. There was big money in dissent and he was cashing in on it, but lately people were dying and he was struggling to come to grips with it.

  “Got a minute, boss?” The young girl looked to be still in her teens and he knew she was. Stacey was only 16, a runaway he’d picked up on the streets only two weeks earlier.

  “What’s on your mind, Stacey?”

  “I was wondering if we had enough demonstrators for the Supreme Court demonstration tomorrow?”

  “I think the number is nearly 5,000, why?”

  “I was talking with one of my online friends and he said he could get 2,000 high school kids to skip school tomorrow, if we offered them a free lunch.”

  “This must be something you care deeply about,” Joshua said, putting his hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  “Voting rights? I won’t be able to vote for least two years. These kids could care less, they just want to have a party. I thought you cared about it.”

  Joshua curled his lower lip, but his eyes lit up and he shrugged. “Why not, the more the merrier. Let’s have a party.”

  “Thanks, boss. I’ll make it happen.”

  As Stacey left the room, Joshua remembered the first demonstration he was in. It was organized by his high school history teacher, Mort Johnson. They were protesting the size of the classes in Martin Luther King High. He remembered the kids just wanting an excuse to skip classes. “Exercise your right to protest,” his teacher had said. “Any cause you feel strongly about is good reason for orderly dissent.”

  He smiled. I have a million reasons I feel strongly about. I love money and protesting is as good as gold.

  That evening outside the gate to his office away from work, a large brick house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., he checked his mailbox. The manila envelop barely fit into the box. It was rolled into a tube and a few other pieces of mail were filling the center. What the hell, I didn’t order anything. He checked the return address. A P.O. Box. No name. He proceeded through the security gate and entered the house. He stopped at the bar, and fixed a Scotch on the rocks. He entered the hidden room to his office and dropped the mail on his desk. Leaning back in his leather chair, he kicked off his shoes and put his feet on the coffee table. He took a drink of Scotch and studied the manila envelope, testing its weight and thickness. Probably an unsolicited catalog, or it could be a letter bomb? He laughed, but still examined the package again before pulling the tab to rip it open. The blue cover of the report had the seal of Homeland Security on the front and Top Secret written in large bold print across the face. He didn’t know what to think of it. He opened the cover to see if there was any correspondence with it. What he saw on the first page was The Yellowstone Brief. He finished his Scotch as he read, rattling the ice around to get the last drops. I’ve got to show this to Andy, he thought, reaching for his cell phone.

  Chapter 6

  August 9th, J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C.

  Heather Martin looked at the stack of work on her desk. What happened to a paperless society? she asked herself. The job had turned into something she no longer looked forward to. When she was approached as a graduate student at The Wharton School of Business, the job with the FBI promised to be an exciting life, tracking down white collar crime members, investigating Wall Street boiler room fraud, and putting white collar criminals behind bars. At the time, Marty Bancroft had been all over the news with his billion dollar Ponzi scheme. He had bilked over a hundred hard-working Americans out of their pensions. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of taking down a crook who robbed widows and orphans of their hard-earned savings? Heather was smitten with the well-dressed young man who wined and dined her the better part of a week until she finally agreed to fill out an application. The infatuation never went any farther, but she was immediately granted an interview and a week after graduation was entering the intensive training program offered special agents in the White Collar Crime Division of the FBI. Now, 18 months later, Heather saw white collar crime for what it was: a stack of folders a mile high and endless hours of boring balance sheets and bank statements. Tracking down the scammers and rip-off artists was tedious, tortuous, and mostly boring work. She longed for a way out.

  Rex Thorne, Heather’s red-haired, red-faced boss, knocked on the post of her cubicle. “Heather, my office in ten minutes.” He snapped his suspenders, turned and was gone.

  Heather looked up from her desk and whisked a blond lock of hair from her eyes. She nodded to the empty space. What did I do now? she wondered, as she reached in her drawer for her notebook. The last time she was in her boss’ office was to defend a report she’d made of an operation that had bilked millions of dollars from credit card holders by hacking their cards at ATM stations across the country. After what seemed like a grilling at Guantanamo, her boss had dismissed her with, “Good job, Martin.” She smiled at the thought and made a quick trip to the ladies’ room before knocking on Rex Thorne’s door.

  “Come in, Agent Martin,” Rex greeted
her. She looked around the room and saw two men she didn’t recognize. One of the men looked like a vagrant, the other, a twenty-something with pierced lips, eyebrow, and ears. Please don’t show me what else you have poked holes through, she thought.

  “Take a seat, Agent Martin. I want you to meet Special Agents Walton and Green.”

  Walton reached out a hand and Martin declined the handshake, unconsciously wiping her hand on her slacks. “I’m okay. I’d hate to pass along my cold to you.” She nodded at Green and Walton. “By the look of your clothes, I’d guess white collar crime pays more than street crime.”

  Green smiled. “She’s got a mouth on her. I’m not sure she’ll do.”

  “Do? Do for what? I feel like I missed the train...no the station. Where’s this going?” She looked at her boss and raised an eyebrow.

  Thorne rose from his desk and used a remote to turn on the flat screen TV attached to the wall opposite his desk. He highlighted a figure in a demonstration outside the Supreme Court. “This is Joshua Stone.” He froze the picture and zoomed in on the highlighted figure. “He’s been on the FBI radar for the past two years. Agents Walton and Green have been trying to get close to him for the past year, but they don’t have enough to bring him down. We suspect he is financing these demonstrations with illegal funds, but haven’t been able to track the money. His demonstrations are too large and too well organized for the funding we’ve been able to track. In short, Stone is a pain in the side and needs to be brought down.”

  “We know Stone is handing out everything from money to drugs as payment to the demonstrators,” Green added. “We can bring him in on a hundred charges, but what’s of more interest to the Bureau is who is funding him? With the number of people he’s able to rally, he could form a small army and that could be too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Heather asked.

  “For the kids in the demonstrations,” Walton chipped in. “The demonstrations up to last month were mostly peaceful; kids marching with signs, blocking traffic, sitting in courthouses. Last month things took a turn. Ten kids were killed at one of Stone’s organized demonstrations. At first we checked the opposition thinking they were the ones with a grudge, but one of the survivors identified this guy as his attacker.” Walton walked up to the frozen screen and pointed to an image in the crowd. Thorne zoomed in on the image and then brought up a split screen image.

  “Meet Abdul Rahmani, aka Andy Rhane, a student from Iraq with family ties to Iran. He was captured as a teen in Iraq and released after the war because he had political ties in Iran. Eighteen months ago, he arrived in the United States with a student visa and a passport under the name Andy Rhane. The passport was issued in Pakistan, under a limited student visa program. After he arrived in the country, he was off the radar until the rally in D.C. last month. It took us this long to figure out who he was. Our terrorist watch list pinged when facial recognition software picked him out of the crowd. CIA contacts in Egypt have Abdul on a terrorist watch list. Mossad have confirmed he’s been engaged in terrorist activities linked to Al Qaeda. He’s a bad actor and we need to bring him down along with Joshua Stone.”

  “So why not arrest him for murder or bring him in, and hand him over to the Israelis?” Heather asked.

  Thorne cleared his throat. “We need to know where he’s getting his orders from. We lost track of him for the last year-and-a-half. If he’s been organizing sleeper cells in the United States this could be a lot bigger than the kids who lost their lives in a demonstration.”

  I can’t believe you said that, Heather thought.

  “If there are cells in this country we don’t know about,” Rex continued, “we could have a war on our hands that none of us wants. We need to find out what he’s been up to, where the funding is coming from, and shut him and his organization down. If Stone has been radicalized, we need to know that also. Unfortunately Stone is the only connection we’ve found to Abdul Rahmani.”

  “Where do I come in?” Heather asked.

  “We need someone on the inside that can follow a money trail. Find out where the money comes from, how it’s moved around, and if it’s distributed to other areas of the country. Follow the money and we’ll find the cells. You are the best we have available.”

  “You’re not going to tell me I’m the only one available,” Heather said, with a nervous laugh, glancing around the room.

  “The only one who fits the profile,” Green said.

  “What profile would that be?” Heather asked.

  “Pretty, blond, single, and young enough to interest Stone,” Green said. “We need for you to get close to Stone, and Abdul, if you can. Find out where the money is coming from.”

  Heather gave her boss a questioning look. “You want me to go undercover as a protester?”

  “Not exactly; we think we’ve got a way to get you introduced to Stone. It’ll be up to you to gain his trust. You’re bored with your job and have been considering applying for something in the field. I thought you’d jump at the opportunity.”

  Heather swallowed hard. She hadn’t mentioned her dissatisfaction with her job to anyone in the agency. She glanced at Green. “You’re not going to dress me like that, are you?”

  Thorne picked up a file from his desk and handed it to Heather. “This is your new identity. From here on out you’ll be known as Heather Smith, a disgruntled Wall Street Broker with an ax to grind. Study it and report to the address in the file tomorrow morning; that is if you want to do this.”

  Heather reached for the file, but her boss pulled it back. “These are dangerous people, Agent Martin. You need to know this.” He pushed the file her way again.

  Heather took the file. “I’d better head down to the firing range and brush up on target practice.”

  “You won’t be carrying a weapon on this assignment,” Green said. “We need to keep this real.”

  “Come on, a girl’s got to protect herself,” Heather protested.

  “I’ll walk you to the gym,” Walton said. “We can brush up on hand to hand combat.”

  “In your dreams,” Heather said, incredulously.

  “You think I’m kidding? Be at the gym in ten minutes or kiss the assignment goodbye.”

  Heather gave Walton a look of distain. “You grope me and you’re a dead man.”

  Walton smiled. “Bring it on, little lady. Bring it on.”

  Chapter 7

  August 10th, Santa Rosalia, Baja California Sur

  Dr. David Wayne flopped on the bed in his hotel room, and checked the message on his smart phone. The picture on the screen brought on a brief smile that turned into a reflective gaze. Katrina and David Jr. were smiling back at him. He remembered the day he took the picture two years earlier at the playground in Florence, on the Oregon coast. He stared in reflection at the image. The sky was overcast and the American Flag in the background was unfurled. Summer wind was a given in the coastal town where temperatures seldom topped 70 degrees, even in the hottest summer months. The conversation with Katrina was still fresh in his mind. “You don’t get weather like this in England,” he had said.

  “Are you kidding me,” Katrina said. “This weather is just like home.”

  “You miss it, don’t you?”

  Katrina smiled. “David, Junior is two years old. Mum and Dad haven’t seen their grandson. You’re going to be gone at least a month. It’s a perfect time for me to visit them.”

  It was selfish of him to try and talk her out of the trip, yet every day since then he wished he had. If only he had waited another week to take the assignment in Argentina. With the early morning temperature in his hotel room pushing 100 degrees, and the noisy ceiling fan beating the air, he longed to be in the cool coastal town with them, an impossible dream. We love you. We’ll be home soon, Katrina’s message read. It was the last message he had ever received from his wife. Nine hours after Katrina’s message, he received a phone call from Katrina’s father. Katrina and Junior were dead, victims of a terrorist bo
mbing on a bus outside London. He wiped away tears, and promised himself he’d soon delete the picture. He wasn’t ready yet, but he would soon. The memory was too painful. He went on to the text message from Colonel Frost.

  A week had passed since he had given Colonel Frost a two-week window to complete his plan to tunnel into Tres Virgenes. He had agreed to make periodic visits to the site and had contracted with the local airport to rent a helicopter for traveling back and forth to the volcano for the duration of his stay. The craft was a tiny Sikorsky powered by a Textron-Lycoming piston engine with 190 hp. David had learned to fly helicopters at 15, a year before he was legal to drive in Oregon. During his high school years and until he was off to college, he’d worked on his father’s filbert farm. Filberts, sometimes referred to as hazelnuts, were the perfect crop for the mild, moist weather in the Coast Range Mountains of Oregon. A helicopter and a small Piper Cub were used for spraying insecticides and harvesting the nuts. During harvesting season he would bring the helicopter down, nearly setting on top of each tree, blowing the nuts to the ground in the process. Later he would pick up the nuts using a small tractor with a vacuum attachment. It was an efficient process, needing only a few extra hands during harvesting to manage over 50 acres of filbert trees.

  The opportunity to fly was a big part of his decision to make a career with the USGS. As a volcanologist, he was required to visit remote locations, and often a helicopter provided the best access. The fact that he had a license to fly was an added bonus for the USGS since the agency did not have to foot the added expense of a pilot.

  The USGS had recently embraced the latest drone technology, and he had received extensive training in use of a drone to get to the most dangerous locations around active volcanoes. From his hotel room, through the lens of the drone, the tunneling machine Colonel Frost was in charge of looked like a giant can of beer turned on its side. Other than its size, which was enormous, the tunneling machine was not impressive. As he checked the tiny screen of his laptop, he was surprised the machine was nowhere in sight. He saw nothing but a giant hole in the side of the cliff, large enough that several tanker trucks near the entrance looked like toys next to the dark opening. For nearly two weeks he had watched the activity through the eyes of his drone. Time to take the colonel up on his offer to visit the site, he thought. On his first meeting with Colonel Frost, he had been invited to see what was going on near the top of the volcano. Until now he wanted to stay as far away from the activity as possible. This was an unusual assignment, and he wasn’t at all sure he wanted it on his résumé.