by Margaret Kay
“I think straightened, but we can have Ops pull surveillance footage.” Madison said. “I can’t believe you don’t remember how my hair was styled. That was our first kiss.”
Cooper laughed. “It was to keep our cover. Our first real kiss was later that night.”
Madison laughed out loud. “Oh, okay. Sorry, I considered the first time your lips touched mine as our first kiss.”
Cooper laughed again. “Blondie, it doesn’t matter when it was. It does matter though, how your hair was styled and if Mendoza will possibly remember you. Of course, if Vargas is right, Mendoza has had eyes on us since Sienna stepped back into her life.”
“Excuse me, I haven’t agreed to anything yet,” Sienna said softly. “And wouldn’t you know if this Mendoza was watching us?”
“Call him Valle only. Don’t say his real name, so you don’t slip up when you are with him,” Madison said. “And we may not know that we are being watched. We know there are no cameras or listening devices in your house that we didn’t put there, so at least when we are in the house, we know that.”
“Yeah, there’s no telling what he could have planted in your school or any place else you frequent, or who could be loitering around watching. There hasn’t been anyone identified near your house,” Cooper added.
“So, you really believed Vargas?” She asked.
“I did,” Cooper confirmed.
“But he shot at me.”
“He missed you on purpose. He probably thought you’d stop running and freeze when he fired those rounds at you,” Cooper said.
“So, who tried to get us in that warehouse?” Sienna asked.
“My guess is the cartel, Mendoza’s people, and I believe they were after you,” Garcia said.
“How’d they know where I was?”
“We made you first through facial recognition software. It’s not impossible that someone else in the biker group took a picture of you and sent it off to identify you. There are many others in that group with known links to the cartel. We know Jorge Lopez is paranoid. He could have had someone in the group watching you the whole time, Garcia,” Madison said.
They pulled into her driveway and hustled into the house. Garcia was surprised to feel her hands shaking. He held both. “It’s okay, you’re safe now.”
“When I saw Angel and baby Sammy’s face on that picture, I panicked. I would have done anything anyone told me to keep them safe,” she confessed.
Through their comms, they heard Jackson’s voice. “Video call into Ops, Alpha.”
Garcia opened his laptop and dialed in. Jackson’s face displayed. “What’s up?”
“Put Charity in front of the laptop,” Jackson said.
“Hi,” she said with a small smile. “I’m so sorry your family was put in danger.”
“Charity, I want you to listen to me. Angel and Sammy will be here at HQ until this is over. No one will be able to get to them. No matter what, if anything happens again, do not put yourself in danger to protect them. I’ve got them.”
“I’m so sorry they were threatened.”
“You did nothing to apologize for,” Jackson said.
“And I’m sorry they can’t go home because of me,” Sienna said.
“They’ve stayed at the office before and I’m sure they will again many times in the future. They’re both fine and so are you. That’s all that matters. Just don’t put yourself into any other bad situation,” Jackson said. His hazel green eyes were intently gazing at her.
She nodded. “Okay.”
Jackson smiled. “Garcia, are you still nearby?”
“The whole team is, minus Doc,” Garcia replied. He sat beside Sienna. He turned the laptop towards himself, and he came back into the camera range displaying in the small corner capture.
“Are you going to decode rest of that file? Big Bear wants to be dialed in for that.”
“Yes, we’re going to do that right away.”
“Share your desktop with me while you work on recovering it so I can broadcast it to Big Bear too.”
“Roger that,” Garcia said. He clicked on several keys, enabling the secure sharing protocol.
“Got it, thanks,” Jackson said. A few seconds later, he spoke again. “Big Bear is dialed in.”
“Are you online, Shepherd?” Cooper asked.
“I am, both dialed in to the conversation and viewing the desktop.”
Garcia brought the encrypted file up. “So, it is your standard shared-secret encryption cipher. Vargas and his team tried to guess on the first question, locking it at three wrong answers. I won’t even try to see if we can override it now that we know the correct answer, until we have unlocked the rest and copied it. Vargas unlocked the second questioned with Sienna’s help, by the looks of it.” She nodded. He made several more keystrokes. “Okay, Sienna, the next question is what was the date you met.”
“It was October seventeenth two-thousand-eight.”
Garcia entered it in, and an error flashed. “It doesn’t like it in the format I entered it. How would Greg have entered it?”
“Did you enter it as 17 Oct 08, standard military format?”
The corner of Garcia’s lip ticked up. “Habit. How should it be entered?”
Sienna chuckled. “We had an ongoing disagreement about that, and he finally relented and communicated dates to me in my preferred way, two-digit month, two-digit day, two-digit year.”
Garcia entered it in, and another section of text displayed. He smiled. “Yep, that worked.”
Cooper and Madison came around and huddled in close behind him to look over his shoulder at the file. Only two words out of eight were displayed in readable text, not nearly enough to figure anything out.
“Question four, five-year-old from hell?”
Sienna laughed hard. “Oh my God. The worse child I ever had in my class. I referred to him as the five-year-old from hell. I know that’s terrible, but this kid set my bulletin board on fire with a lighter he took from home, was used to light up his parent’s pot, I assumed. Billy Randall, with two L’s in both names.”
Garcia smiled as he typed that in, and more words displayed. He looked over the new words. The word Enterprises was now displayed. He pointed to the screen. “I bet the two words before it are New and Mountain.”
Cooper and Madison both agreed.
“Next question,” he paused looking puzzled. Whatever was written on the screen wasn’t in English or any language he knew. “Here, I think you need to see it for yourself.” He turned the laptop so she could see the screen.
Madison, who could speak and read four foreign languages, leaned over Sienna’s shoulder. The letters spelling out what she figured were words meant nothing to her either. She gazed at Garcia and Cooper and shook her head that she couldn’t make it out.
“It’s a made-up kindergarten language I’ve used to teach the kids the alphabet. You write a word the right way and then change each letter to the next letter in the alphabet. So, DOG becomes EPH. To decode the word EPH, you have to know or say the alphabet to figure out D comes before E, O comes before P, and G comes before H. The kids loved solving the puzzles and learned the alphabet very well this way.”
Garcia turned the laptop back to face him and decoded the three words there. The message turned out to be, Please Forgive Me. He typed the words on the three lines but before he hit enter, he turned the laptop so she could view it. Tears filled her eyes. She turned it back towards him. Madison laid a hand to her shoulder and patted it. Sienna breathed out a heavy breath.
“Question six, Kentucky Lake?”
She smiled. “Skiing underwater sucks.”
Garcia shook his head. “I won’t even ask.”
Now she chuckled, remembering when Greg tried to teach her to water ski. She couldn’t get up on top of the water and she didn’t let go of the tow rope either, so she was in fact skiing underwater. When she finally quit, she told him that she was done trying because skiing underwater sucks. That was a l
ine they used as a catch-all as the reason for quitting anything.
When her eyes met Garcia’s, her fond smile was quickly replaced with a frown. This had to be a hard trip down memory lane for him, having it shoved down his throat that she and Greg shared this past. She knew she wouldn’t like having any of his past relationships thrown in her face.
“That did it,” he said.
They all looked closely at the text revealed. There were only two more questions, but less than half the text was readable. Cooper shook his head. He wasn’t sure they would get enough to figure the rest out. “Big Bear, are you already running this through logic predictors?”
Shepherd laughed. “You know me well. And even with three separate programs, I’ve got nothing yet.”
Cooper nodded to Garcia.
“Next question, turn the page?”
She looked at him blankly. “I’m not sure where he was going with that question.”
Garcia repeated the question. “Sienna, everything else he questioned you knew right away.”
Sienna shook her head. “I’m drawing a blank. Does anyone have any ideas what it could mean?”
“The only time I’ve heard those words is in the Bob Seager song,” Garcia said.
Sienna sung the chorus to jog her memory, and then the first few lines, coming upon the answer. When her eyes met Garcia’s, he was smiling. He loved the sound of her beautiful voice.
“East of Omaha,” she said and then repeated it in the sing-song voice.
That was a joke she and Greg shared, that went back nearly eight years when they had been driving cross-country on I-80 straight-through from California and were exhausted. After they had passed Omaha, whenever Sienna would wake from a nap and ask Greg where they were now, he’d reply east of Omaha. For several years after that, whenever either of them asked the other where some place was located, they would jokingly reply east of Omaha. She knew the words of that song would stay in her thoughts the rest of the day as well as that trip. They were young and in love then, so young and hopeful for their future together.
Garcia entered it into the cipher and another section of text displayed. Before Enterprises, Mountain did appear along with some numbers. “We only have one more question.”
“I’m still running the logic,” Shepherd said. “I’m betting he has longitude and latitude designations. And I’ll bet that first one is to that facility in Colorado. 40.7054 degrees runs through the northwestern portion of Colorado. The other one in the next section, 41.881832, runs through Chicago. I sure hope Greg Andrews found us the facility here in Chicago.”
“Yeah, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but we already know about New Mountain Enterprises. It would be nice to have a second target,” Cooper added.
“Okay, Sienna, the last question.” He turned the laptop to her again.
She felt her cheeks heat. She appreciated that he hadn’t read it aloud. She was also mortified that he had read it. “Can I just enter the answer in?”
Madison still stood over her shoulder. She snickered. “Only if I can watch.”
Sienna flashed her eyes to Madison, an outraged look on her face. “Seriously, a little privacy please.”
Madison laughed again. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “It’s just the question was so unexpected.”
Didn’t Sienna know it. The man who had cut off all sexual contact with her because he slept with whores in Colombia to keep his cover, makes the last question of the key about their favorite sex toy from when they used to have sex. It was a slap to her face…or was it? Could it have been that Greg was trying to tell her he still thought of her that way, even after all these years? Anthony had been sure Greg thought he was protecting her by not having sexual contact. Surely, if she was decoding this, Greg would have to have thought he’d be dead. This was his last chance to tell her what he hadn’t said in life. And, the answer to that one clue had been, Please Forgive Me. Tears flooded her eyes with that thought. Greg knew he would be dead if she was decoding this. He knew how much danger he was in. Now that sadness turned to anger.
“Sienna, are you going to enter it?” Garcia asked after several long moments.
She glanced over her shoulder expectantly at Madison and watched her step away. She entered the name of the item and hit enter. More text displayed. The clue and answer disappeared from the screen. Only then did she turn it back to Anthony.
Cooper and Madison both peered over Garcia’s shoulder. Near the number that they assumed to be a longitude the word Tires was now readable. Unfortunately, the corresponding latitudes had not been revealed. There were not enough words in the page-long report revealed to make out enough of the document.
“Jackson, if I write a program that will search for businesses with the word Tires in it at that longitude, that would be big enough to be a distribution warehouse, can you have all shifts in Ops run it?” Garcia asked.
“We can do that, but wouldn’t it make more sense to spend your time trying to unlock that first question now that we know the answer?”
“Yeah, I sure wish Vargas and his team hadn’t locked question one,” Cooper said.
“I’ve copied what’s there over to the logic programs, see what you can do to recover the ability to reenter question one,” Shepherd ordered.
“I’ll work on that next,” Garcia confirmed. “It won’t take that long to program the search for the business with the word Tires in it with a square footage to meet the needs of the distribution center. We’re talking a substantial amount of space, that will rule ninety percent of the businesses out, I’m sure.”
“We’ll send Charlie Team out to check out any locations that flag,” Jackson said.
“Stay dialed in, Alpha, I am going to bring Lambchop online to bring him up to speed on your developments,” Shepherd said.
“Shepherd, should Charity leave?” Garcia asked.
“She can stay,” Shepherd answered, much to Garcia’s surprise.
Lambchop’s face displayed on the split screen that also broadcast Shepherd and Jackson. “Hi Alpha,” he greeted. “As I told Shepherd, all is quiet here.”
“Recap your report,” Shepherd ordered.
“We’ve done extensive exterior recon. Haven’t breached the building yet. No one has come or gone in the time we’ve been here. The drone surveillance shows no heat signatures within the structure. We installed cameras and a motion detection system a mile down where the driveway for this facility splits from the main road so we will know if anyone approaches.”
“The parking lot looks large enough to accommodate a small chopper,” Cooper interjected. “Jackson, is Ops monitoring the airspace around the target building?”
“Affirmative,” Jackson replied. “We have eyes on the approach twenty-four seven.”
“We also installed sensors in the wooded area surrounding the building.
“When do you plan to go in and take a looksee?” Cooper asked.
“I’m going to send the Birdman in as a drunken homeless guy. He’ll poke around the outside, close to the building first, then eventually penetrate the interior and do more recon. We’ll have a camera on him.”
“Make sure I’m online when that happens,” Shepherd ordered. “Cooper, your turn.”
“We’ve had significant developments here,” Cooper said. Cooper gave the report on all that transpired, all they learned, and the many questions this knowledge brought. Garcia shared the recon photos that Greg Andrews took at the New Mountain building.
“I’ll be damned. Our old friend was at the target facility,” Lambchop said.
“It gets even better. His daughter is in Charity’s class,”
Garcia then shared the photos of her and Mendoza that the CIA had taken and narrated the exchange that took place in the subbasement of the Dearborne Energy building. “There was more going on than Vargas copped to,” he said.
“Now all the pieces are coming together,” Lambchop said. “Except this target facility is a bit too legit to
be a major distribution warehouse. It’s nothing like that warehouse in Compton we raided last fall.”
“Speaking of which, I have an update on our other friend, Juan Carlos,” Shepherd informed them. “His tracker moved from the hole in LA he was in. He travelled to Juarez, Mexico and we alerted the DEA. They got a photo of him going into a known Juarez Cartel bar.”
“What? Juarez?” Garcia exclaimed.
“He made his trip right after Razor and Saucedo disappeared.”
“Sonofabitch! I was so sure he was pulling away from the organization,” Garcia said. He wasn’t sure how he could have read that so wrong.