I wasn’t planning to just descend on Mr. Lawson and Doyle. I knew I was too compromised for that. But I at least expected to be able to borrow some money from the pair, enough to keep me going until I could figure out what to do.
The thing about a journey by rail is that you’ve got plenty of time to think. In fact, that’s about all you can do when you’ve gotten on the train with just what you have on you when you start to run. In my case, I shut off that cell phone, so I couldn’t be tracked. I had my purse and I had my notes. That got me to thinking about what had transpired.
Why had I started going to Boston? After all the years of monitoring the activities in Hambleport, there was a change in plans. I was told to take my fanny into Boston. I wasn’t given a specific location. I wasn’t given a target to watch. I was merely turned loose and told to find what I could find. That meant the FBI didn’t need a warrant, because I wasn’t targeting individuals. I was merely observing certain areas and noting possible criminal activities.
It didn’t take me long to figure out the pattern, although I must say the discovery of their means of communicating a telephone number was a real shocker for me tonight. Was it that I had sat there, night after night, watching, waiting, growing more and more curious about the odd traffic patterns? No, it was more than that. It was the fact that there were actually uniformed cops in patrol cars riding along side the drug shipments. The Intelligence Unit should have put a halt to that. This wasn’t really a case for Internal Affairs until after the cops were corrupted. And we weren’t talking about a cop or two. We were talking about systemic corruption within the police department. That meant the guys at the top knew and approved it. And that was very similar to the situation with the Hambleport Police Department, which was equally entangled in the drug trafficking activities. Did that mean there was a connection between police departments? And if so, what was it?
I sat there in my lounge chair on the train, lulled by the constant rocking of the train over the tracks. Two police departments -- connect the dots. No, wait. Two police departments and at least one FBI agent. What’s the common thread? Maybe it was less about the drugs and more about the guns.
That’s when I remembered something Dix said to me about six months ago. This case was so sensitive, it might never see the light of day.
I still could recall that day. We were sitting in the living room on a Saturday night, just the two of us, sprawled in each other’s arms after a passionate afternoon of making love. I made us some linguini with white clam sauce, with crusty bread we dipped into every drop of that wine and butter sauce.
Dix was quiet that night, more so than usual. Never a chatty man, he was particularly subdued that night.
“You know, Riley, the trouble with this job is things can change in a heartbeat, and you don’t always see the bad news coming.”
“As long as I have you, I’ll get by.”
“But I just want you to know that if anything were to happen to me, you would always be safe. You have angels looking out for you. Remember that.”
“My heavens, Dixon, are you expecting trouble?”
“No, not particularly. But sometimes trouble finds you anyway. Just remember that wherever you go, there’s at least one angel on your shoulder.”
“Okay,” I laughed. “I have a guardian angel.”
“Even when you can’t see them, they’re there, love. Trust in them.”
“Sure, Dix.”
The funny thing was my husband was never really a particularly religious man. It wasn’t like him to talk about angels. God, yes. Dix was a firm believer in a much higher power. But angels hovering about one’s shoulders? Not so much.
Looking back, we had that conversation right after Dix came back from DC. He’d had an emergency meeting at some remote location in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Whatever happened had upset him, but Dix refused to explain, saying it was too classified.
Soon after that, he began telling me what he’d like to do when we retired from this case. He’d like to find a quiet little town somewhere uncomplicated, far, far away from Hambleport and its corruption. He’d like to look out on water and be able to fish off his own dock, but he didn’t care if it was oceanfront or lakefront. Even if he had to take assignments away from home, that was fine as long as he knew he could return to me. Maybe we’d even get around to having those kids after all.
By the time the train went through New Haven, I was starting to realize how upset Dix was when I had to start going into Boston. He warned me repeatedly to stay alert, to not let my guard down. In all the years we had been working together, he’d never seemed so distant. His mind, if not his heart, was somewhere else.
And yet, I didn’t think he stopped loving me, any more than I thought he had betrayed me. But he had known something. As I let my mind wander over the conversations we had had over the last few months, as I thought about Dix’s long silences, I could see now he was trying to prepare me for the future. Only one problem. He never told me what that future would hold for us.
So, I sighed, stretching out on my lounge chair -- here I was on the run. In the morning, I would find myself in Union Station. Would I hop off the train and march myself into FBI Headquarters, demanding to see the deputy director? That seemed a bit dramatic. Still, there was the problem with Agent Cook. He was definitely involved with the organized crime in Boston, and that organized crime was involved with the Hambleport drug trafficking operations.
Even as I rehashed the facts I knew and speculated on those I didn’t, I found myself growing more and more alarmed. It was all about that building, the one they used to broadcast the phone numbers they were commandeering. In order to pull that kind of scheme off, they had to have control of that building, through the janitorial crew. Or maybe it was the maintenance crew. And not during the day, when the rightful tenants were occupying their offices. No, it all happened at night. So, I asked myself, why keep switching phone numbers? Why bounce from office to office to conduct criminal affairs? There was really only one logical explanation. They knew they were at risk of being wiretapped. Using telephone lines that belonged to legitimate businesses meant that any efforts to intercept the phone conversations were more rigorously evaluated by the courts because the business owners weren’t actual participants. Or was it a way to lay the blame on the business owners, if there was blowback?
Think, Riley, think. No electronic communications could be intercepted if they used someone else’s equipment, even on a temporary basis. The logistics of proving that multiple businesses were defrauded was enormous. No emails to come back and bite them in the ass, not if they were creating their own accounts at other people’s businesses. It’s all about protocols and IP addresses, right? It was better than a spoof. They created legitimate communications without holding the legal rights to the communications.
Then again, I asked myself, what if this multi-storied building was the equivalent of the industrial park in Hambleport? What if the offices were fronting for this end of the drug trade? That would mean the legitimate businesses were cover for the illicit drug trafficking.
What if this whole tie-in to Boston was about the money end of things, and the Hambleport end was about getting the drugs off-loaded, made into LCD displays, and then shipped to the various “recycling” centers for processing?
Think harder, Riley. Why go to all that trouble? Why not just send the drugs in the same condition as they arrive on American shores? Why so much cover? Maybe it was because there were so many prominent people who could lose everything if they did have that protection. Just one whiff of an allegation that anyone in that moneyed crowd was involved with drug trafficking and the whole High Street crowd would be at risk of discovery. All for one, one for all. The proud families with all those famous ancestors dating back to the American Revolution couldn’t afford to sully their own reputations that way. Theirs was a proud heritage. You don’t get into the Hambleport smuggling business by moving to town. Ares Papadopoulos f
ound that out the hard way. You have to be born into it. You have to have the bona fides, the genealogy, the right family connections. That’s why they got away with it so long. That’s also why they created the fictional history for Hambleport, and now they were stuck maintaining it, right down to the phony information on the Underground Railroad.
Then again, maybe someone from Hambleport was also running the Boston end of things. Maybe that’s why I was sent in, to spot the familiar face. And maybe I was spotted first. Is that why Agent Cook appeared so unexpectedly? Was he told to chase me away?
Tristan Dunlop started stalking me when I worked on the historical reports on the Underground Railroad and discovered there was no real connection to the town. That led to the question of the tunnels running under the city. What were they used for?
And what about the Boston Ed truck? What were those utility workers really doing on that street corner? What was so special about the vehicle? Or the workers? Or the open manhole cover? What if the tunnels allowed people to travel underground, unseen, whether for meetings or to move about from one spot to another?
Chapter Eight --
And then I thought about that old joke, with the Mexican crossing the border into Texas every day, pushing the wheelbarrow full of straw. Every day the border guards would inspect the wheelbarrow’s contents and find nothing. They suspected the Mexican was up to something, but they could never discover the evidence of his crime. They assumed the straw was important and that was their mistake, because the man was smuggling wheelbarrows.
These days, surveillance cameras are everywhere. Businesses use them for security. Public buildings use them for security. It’s hard not to show up on someone’s surveillance camera. But who pays attention to the guys wearing utility uniforms? Don’t they all pretty much look alike? Don’t they look like they belong there?
If there were underground tunnels, it was unlikely anyone would want to hang out down there for long. But if you were a major drug kingpin, and you wanted to avoid scrutiny while meeting with your distributors, getting into the building by tunnel might come in very handy if you had legitimate law enforcement breathing down your neck.
So, what were the wheelbarrows in Boston? Maybe those cars in the caravan. They seemed to be creating a diversion for when the trucks came through. What if those trucks we were so focused on were carrying just a small percentage of the drugs being moved through the Boston area? What if the real stuff was in that crazy cavalcade of cars, the ones constantly circling the block? What if they had the chutzpah to fill every one of those cars? Law enforcement would be looking for that one big moving truck to haul the stuff, and instead, they would be constantly moving the product in small batches. Just like the industrial park in Hambleport was filled with small businesses that wouldn’t attract a lot of unnecessary attention.
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. We were all so busy looking for the occasional shipment of drugs in the big truck, we stopped paying attention to the little guys running interference for the operation. We thought their only duty was to create action on the street to divert attention away from the important traffic. And maybe that utility truck was also a diversion. Maybe it wasn’t that the truck was set up on that corner that mattered. Maybe it was that the men in the truck needed to look like utility workers in order to blend into the area. Maybe Cook showed up because folks were afraid I would recognize one of those utility workers.
Maybe even more importantly, it wasn’t just drugs coming into the city in those cars, but weapons going out. Maybe some of those corrupt cops weren’t turning in the guns they confiscated on the streets. They were turning them over to organized crime.
But I still didn’t understand the spy thing, until I thought about the fall of the Soviet Union. If Hambleport had a former Soviet intelligence officer or two helping to run the drug operation, maybe the same spy or pair of spies was also handling the Boston end of things. That would mean that the corrupted cops had to hide their activities from their fellow legitimate cops. Could it be that all the diversions were a professional job, a slight of hand to confuse and frustrate the good guys?
You know, one of the things spies do best is smoke and mirrors. They send out the smoke to convince people there’s a fire where no fire exists. They use the mirrors to misdirect attention, to craft whatever illusion they’re selling. Maybe, just maybe, we were getting too close to the real spies in the case.
Paul Darlington died because he made Ares Papadopoulos angry. The Greek pizza man wanted to use his own people on his smuggling operation, for the drugs he was importing. The Darlington family has long, deep roots in the smuggling business. That’s how they made their fortune. And yet, we never saw the killer caught or punished.
Apollo Pizza. Still in business all these years later, but with one important difference. Ares Papadopoulos sold the business to Georgie and Elena Zotos. It happened a short time after Paul Darlington was murdered. The surly pizza man decided to get out of the business and closed the deal two weeks later. The word around town was that he found himself a bride back in his native village. At the time, I was just so relieved he didn’t come after me, I put it out of my mind. Why? By that time, Tristan had stepped up his stalking activities. Again, deflection. What if Papadopoulos was chased out of the country for killing Darlington, but the Hambleport cartel didn’t want to attract a lot of law enforcement attention, so they didn’t take him out or even punish him? That would suggest the amount of money they were bringing in was worth more than justice for Paul Darlington.
Tristan Dunlop broke into my apartment with surveillance equipment, under the guise of wanting to have a relationship with me. And his girlfriend tried to claim that I was stalking him. Again, deflection from the truth. So, why was Tristan in there? What was he really after on the day he died?
That brought me back to North Shore Technologies, the manufacturer of the LCD displays, which sold for much more than their competitors’ products. What if the company operated as a manufacturing business in order to pay taxes on its profits from the drug business, so that it stayed off the IRS radar? A company with too high a profit margin would attract almost as much attention as one that didn’t pay enough.
And what about Tristan’s security software company? After he died, his brother, Dalton, took over and became CEO. He even inherited his brother’s fiancé, Lana Kropov. But the Kropov family had been in Hambleport for three generations. They had even helped to arrange for the 1988 Peace Exchange that sent a delegation of Hambleport residents to the Soviet Union and hosted a delegation of Soviets in town. Mayor Mike Matthias got a lot of press about that. In fact, it launched his political star and landed him in Washington, DC, as the assistant secretary of state for cultural affairs.
What if the Kropovs were spies who still needed cover? What if they were so entangled with Hambleport’s drug business that the whole thing could unravel into a national security disaster if it all came to light?
Maybe it was best that I was heading down to see Mr. Lawson. Maybe he would be more forthcoming in sharing information away from the dangers of Hambleport. He had grown up in town. He knew the families and their connections. Most of all, he knew the scandals.
I set my phone alarm for six, pulled the window shade down, and let myself drift off into a restless sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about Dix. He had changed in the last month. I knew he was unhappy. I still didn’t think it was a matter of the heart. His lovemaking had been every bit as intense as always -- if anything, perhaps even more than normal.
About two-thirty, I found myself bolting upright out of a sound sleep. Paul Darlington’s cousin, Liam Dooley, was a United States Congressman from Massachusetts. He was, in fact, the man who sponsored that Peace Exchange with Mayor Matthias --that program was paid for by one of the Darlington family’s charitable organizations. That was before the end of the Soviet Union, while those KGB and GRU officers were still gainfully employed by the Soviet government. In which case, ma
ybe the Soviets were facilitating the drugs being brought in by the Hambleport gang. As in Afghan opium and cocaine from Nicaragua.
And then I was struck by a terrible thought. I could only come up with one reason why Dixon Wolders would be so miserable. He knew the FBI was pulling the plug on the Hambleport investigation, not because we had been so inept in our unearthing of information, but because we got too close to the truth, and that truth reached out and touched a powerful congressman and an assistant secretary of state, two men who curried favor with the current administration in the White House. Maybe the congressman was tipped off that the FBI was interested. Or maybe it was someone in the State Department. Or the FBI had a leak. Agent Cook could have been on the take all those years ago, when Paul Darlington was beaten to a bloody pulp and stuffed into the Dumpster. The case had never been solved. Maybe any investigation of Darlington Trust, North Shore Technologies, and Dunlop Threat Tech would come back to embarrass the local politicos made good and their powerful allies, especially if that greater rise to power was enabled by a couple of Soviet spies who infiltrated during that Peace Exchange. If this was a national security case, Hambleport had a lot to lose if those carefully woven threads began to unravel. But if the FBI couldn’t prove the case without appearing to skew the political landscape, if the evidence wasn’t hard enough, if the identifications of the players weren’t solid enough, the damage would be enormous. Spy cases were iffy at best. The American public often perceived a bully mentality when it came to espionage cases. That’s because of all the propaganda and disinformation that intelligence services manufactured were designed to discredit the government’s prosecution of the real spies.
Run for Your Life, Riley Horton!: A Page 6