The Catalina Cabal

by Bill Thesken

  “Mind if I sit down?” The man motioned on the other end of the bench.

  “Not at all, please do.”

  They did not look at each other again. The Chinese man kept reading his paper, while the stout man studied the park and all the activity.

  Then they began speaking in Mandarin in low tones to each other with the Chinese man speaking first.

  “You lost a package on the last mission.”

  “Yes. It was our first loss.”

  “The organizers are not happy. The girl was on her way to an arranged marriage with a very important man.”

  “We can’t undo what has happened.”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  “Will they be able to find a replacement bride?”

  “Perhaps, everything is replaceable.”

  The implication was direct.

  “Do we still have your confidence?”

  “Mine, yes. The organizers, maybe not.”

  “So what now?”

  “They need to make up for their loss.”

  “How?”

  “They wish to include some packages that cannot speak.”

  “You know we can’t do that.”

  “You have an arrangement within your team that will not allow it.”

  “You know that is true.”

  “Then re-arrange your team.”

  “You also know it’s not that simple.”

  “Nothing is easy. Remember when we first met? You were an attaché with the US Army in Beijing. And I was your exact opposite in the Chinese Red Army.”

  “Yes, that was a long time ago.”

  “You managed to re-arrange your position, to what you are today. And I have done the same. Anything is possible.”

  “Some things are more possible than others. Changing someone’s moral position is sometimes impossible, if they are set in their ways. Our team-mate is set in his convictions and we need him on our team. We cannot transport drugs. Only people.”

  “Maybe he’ll decide to leave the team.”

  “It’s possible, but only if it’s his choice, and not forced upon him. I won’t have it any other way. I’ll try to convince him to accept your offer. But I can’t make any guarantees.”

  “You know him well.”

  “Since we were in diapers.”

  “Please keep trying. Their patience is wearing thin, and we may have to find a new route. Some things are out of my control.”

  “I understand. When is our next shipment?”

  “Soon, I will let you know well in advance.”

  “There’s something else.”

  “What.”

  “The man who found the body came to the house asking questions.”

  “So?”

  “I’m not sure. Something about him doesn’t seem right. He must have seen the address on her driver’s license and either memorized it, or wrote it down. When I told him no Chinese girl had ever lived in the house, and he probably made a mistake with the street name, he agreed too quickly, and left immediately after. We did some research and found out where he lives, in Dana Point on his boat. He runs a personal security firm. I have no doubt that he’s ex-military.”

  “Do you want us to take care of the situation?”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “Remember,” said the Chinese man. “The strongest and most expensive robe in the world can unravel with a single loose thread.” Then he folded the front page of the paper he was reading into the main bulk of the newspaper and set it on the bench between them, rose to his feet, and walked off.

  The stout man waited a few minutes, seemingly enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, then picked up the paper and walked in the other direction. He could feel the stack of money in the middle of the paper, and smiled as he walked.

  8.

  I rode the chopper back to the harbor, taking my time in the slow lane, passing through the sprawling beachside towns of Huntington, Newport, and Laguna. I revved the engine at pretty girls and kids, getting worried looks from half the people who saw me and all the old ladies, except for one, an old ex-biker chick that looked like she was in her late seventies. She was mostly skin and bones, weathered tattoos and attitude, wearing a leather jacket with the sleeves cut off, smoking a cigarette while sitting on the stone wall next to the basketball courts in Laguna.

  She flipped me the bird as she saw me coming down the highway, with a big toothless grin and then put her thumb high in the air to try and hitch a ride.

  “Good for her,” I thought, but I shook my head and revved the engine a little louder for her as I passed by. I could see the glint in her eyes and I knew that fifty years ago she wouldn’t have needed to hitchhike and beg for a ride, she probably would have had them lined up and down the road just begging for her to hop on the back. That’s the way of the world. The older you got the less opportunities were afforded to you and the harder life was.

  My Dad had a saying, he’d pull it out of his endless stockpile of advice and tell it to me once in a while when he could sense that I getting lazy, taking things for granted, not trying with all my might.

  “Son,” he’d say, “we’re not going to be here forever, that we should know without the shadow of a doubt. But we’re here right now, so we might as well make the most of it while we can.”

  And if you thought about it, that old dried up ex-biker chick sitting on the wall trying to hitch a ride and re-capture a bit of her youth was like a poster child for that statement. We’re here now, so never give up.

  I headed up and over the hill past the million dollar suburbia that stretched to the south of Laguna, then stopped along the cliff that led down to Dana Point to watch the beginnings of the sunset in the west.

  The sky was just starting to show a bit of red and orange on the edges and the old wives tale of “red sky at night sailors delight” came to mind. It actually did look like it would be a good day for sailing tomorrow, with moderate winds and calm seas. Red sky at night be damned.

  Amber was working a double shift at the hospital and would only be wanting sleep and quiet time after clocking out tomorrow morning, so there was no sense in me getting in the way. Plus I needed to research the problem at hand, and my computer set-up on the Spice was the best money could buy.

  In essence, a basic internet connection could get you just about all the intel you needed to get by in life, but I needed an extra dose of semi-secret inside info with software that was housed on my computer.

  Now that I was a one man operation in charge of every aspect of the business, I needed to cover all the bases for protecting the client. I made a business decision right off the bat that if I was going to put my life on the line to protect someone, even if it was only for a couple of hours, I was going to know everything about that person, good bad happy or sad, every tiny scrap of detail that might get us both killed, or save us.

  With my data mining software I could pull up all the dirty details on anyone, from the King of Arabia to the guy picking up the trash at four in the morning. Any lawsuit, traffic ticket, parking fine, returned check, social media smack talking confrontations, even their medical and dental and school records all the way back to pre-school and the hospital they were born in.

  I would get a snapshot of their lives in an easy to read, two-page, seven hundred word synopsis. Within twenty minutes I would know more about someone than their spouse or parent. I would know more about them than they knew about themselves. After all, who has access to their school records or has even seen what is hidden in the principal’s files? I would know things they wanted to forget and maybe in fact had forgotten on purpose.

  If someone was out to get my client and my client didn’t want to tell me about it, there could be a problem, so I absolutely did not want to leave it up to the client to inform me. My motto is: trust no one, ever.

  Except Amber. She was the one person in this whole world that I trusted completely. It was funny how I was lucky enough to find a girl like her. Smart, beauti
ful, could make a nice meal, and could set a broken bone or sew up a knife wound in a snap.

  I fired up the chopper, continued down to the harbor, turned in at the entrance, and motored past lines and lines of tethered boats towards my two moorings. The Spice was sitting solid and upright at her berth, but the Sugar was listing, the mast tilting at a seventy degree angle towards the sunset. I gunned the engine to get there quick.

  Two people were standing on the dock looking at the sailboat, one of them looked like he was getting ready to jump aboard her when he heard the sound of the motorcycle, and looked towards me, and waited. It was Tom, the harbor master. I slammed on the brakes next to the boat and jumped off the bike.

  “Looks like she’s taking on water,” shouted the harbor master. “Your neighbor here called me and I came right over.”

  It was listing away from the dock and the port side was lifted up. There was an eight-foot gap between the dock and the deck. I jumped up onto the side of the boat, grabbed the railing, pulled myself up, and climbed aboard. I pulled a small flashlight out of my pocket and pointed it down into the hatch that was busted open. Water was up to the bunk beds and three-feet deep on the floor.

  I yelled to the dock.

  “Get a portable pump right away, I’m going to try to get the bilge pump started!”

  I didn’t wait to see their response. I jumped down in the cockpit, crawled into the cabin, and was instantly waste deep in the water.

  There’s an alarm on the bilge pump and if water is entering the hull it automatically turns itself on and pumps it out. It also sets off a loud alarm that can heard miles away. It has obviously malfunctioned and if I didn’t act fast, the boat would list farther on its side, water would gush into the open cockpit, and she will sink like a rock.

  I opened a side panel and took out a snorkel, mask, and a large waterproof flashlight, then moved forward into the dark cabin. I turned on the flashlight and put on the diving mask, then I reached down into the water and pulled the hatch cover that led to the interior of the hull.

  The submersible bilge pump was located right on the bottom of the hull, and is about the size of large toaster, and I would see through the water that the power switch is off. Somehow the water was entering the hull. I swung the beam of light along the surface. There was an intake valve on the hull attached to a pipe system that brings water in to the toilet flushing system. The pipe had been broken off and water must have been gushing through that hole.

  Lucky thing I’ve also trained for this scenario.

  Every boat should have a couple of tins of emergency leak sealant, and mine was stowed right underneath the bunk in case I need to grab it in the middle of the night mid channel.

  It’s like a putty, sticky and gooey and would have come in handy for the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike. I molded a baseball-sized bunch in my hand, took a deep breath and dove to the bottom of the hull. I pushed it into the hole, jamming it in with the palm of my hand until I was certain it was snug on all sides.

  It was an epoxy-type material and the water was the catalyst, setting off a chemical chain reaction and firming the material within minutes.

  While I was down there I pushed the button on the side of the bilge pump and could hear it whirring to life. I rose back to the surface, inhaled and exhaled a couple of times, then took another deep breath and went back down to investigate.

  I shone the light on the intake valve, there were markings like the teeth from a pair of pliers. Someone must have climbed down here, turned off the bilge pump, and ripped the intake valve off with a pair of pliers. They tried to sink the Sugar.

  I rose back to the surface, hopped on the deck, and looked over the side where I could see water gushing from of the out-take valve high on the hull, halfway down the boat.

  The bilge pump had a flow rate of five hundred gallons an hour which seemed like a lot but was only a little over eight gallons per minute. There was probably a thousand gallons down in the hull.

  The harbor masters truck came roaring up. and He jumped out and pulled a big pump from the back.

  He set it on the dock, fired up the gas engine, and threw the hose up to me. I snaked it first down into the cabin and then further through the hatch to the bottom of the hull.

  His pump was for serious situations, like raising a boat that was half sunk, mine was for little leaks, that were never supposed to get that far. And it wouldn’t have gotten that far if it was turned on, if it had turned on like it was designed.

  Someone tried to sink my boat. Now why in the hell would someone do that?

  It took a little over half an hour to suck all the water out. I mopped up the remaining puddles with a large sponge and a bucket, checked all the electrical circuits with a multimeter and re-hooked up the wiring to the bilge pump. Then I tested it again to make sure it was working.

  Tom coiled the hose from his pump, loaded it back on his truck, and hopped back aboard the Sugar.

  “That was close,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think it was deliberate?”

  “I do.”

  “I’ll put in a call to the police.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “I want to do some investigating on my own first, if that’s okay.”

  “I don’t know Badger, it’s pretty standard operating procedure that if a crime has been committed in a harbor, which is federal juris-diction, that we call in the coast guard and the police. I’ve got my job on the line.”

  “You have surveillance cameras right?”

  “Sure, there’s one at the entrance, and one above the harbor master’s office, but not one that covers the whole harbor and every boat in it, not yet anyways, it’s in the budget as a future expense.”

  “Can we take a look at the feed before you call anybody?”

  He thought about it for a minute, his face concerned, biting his lip, then relented.

  “Okay. We’ll do it your way.”

  We jumped in his truck and drove the short distance to the harbor master’s office, a one-story square building with his office on the end.

  At his desk he turned on his computer, rolled over an icon on the screen and clicked on it. A TV image came up that was right outside the office and looking down the ramp towards where the Sugar was berthed.

  “You see we can’t actually see your boat with this camera.”

  “What about the entrance to the harbor?”

  “Sure,” he said and clicked on another link. On this video we could see the gated entrance, with cars arriving and leaving.

  “Can you make it split screen so we see both at the same time?”

  “Yep, say you know how these systems work don’t you?”

  “I’ve been shopping around for one, I was supposed to get one for my boats, I guess kind of like the government, it’s in the budget as future expense. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  “So this is the live view.”

  “How long ago do you think the boat got the leak?”

  “I’m thinking half an hour before I got here, and it took half an hour to pump the water out, so let’s scroll back an hour and see what we find.”

  At the bottom of the screen was a play button and an arrow at the end of a line. Tom clicked on the arrow and dragged it backwards, the scene on the screen turning crazy as people and cars moved in reverse.

  Quite a few people walked down to the area where the Sugar was berthed, but one character in particular caught our attention.

  “Check this guy out with the hoodie. He heads down towards the Sugar, and about five minutes later he heads back this way. But check out his face.”

  “Yeah we can’t see it.” The guy had the hoodie bunched tight and tied off, covering his forehead, cheeks, and chin, and he was wearing dark sunglasses.

  “Looks like a pretty big guy, don’t you think?”

  “Tough to say with that bulky sweatshirt, but yeah he seems to fill i
t out pretty good. Take a look at that big, wide nose of his. Those don’t fit on skinny guys.”

  “What was he driving when he came in?”

  Tom kept moving the footage forward and he pointed to the screen that showed the entrance. “There he is, walking up and out. He didn’t drive in.”

  There were cars parked up and down the street outside the entrance.

  “Keep it rolling.”

  “If that’s our guy, then he’s pretty smart and knows the lay-out of the harbor, knows not to drive in and out so we can see his license plate number.”

  The guy kept walking across the street then took a left turn, walked a few cars down and got into the driver’s side of a vehicle parked on the other side of the road.

  “Stop the footage right here, and zoom in.”

  “You can’t see what kind of car it is with the chain link fence in the way.”

  Tom zoomed in until the outline of the top of a truck showed through the chain-link. The picture was fuzzy, but they got an idea of what it was.

  “Looks like a white or a silver truck. Big one.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Know the guy?”

  “I got a hunch. Go ahead and call the cops or the Coast Guard, Tom. Do whatever you have to do. I’m gonna take a ride.”

  “This isn’t much to go on Badger. We can’t tell if the guy went to your boat or not, we can’t see his face, and we can’t tell what kind of truck he got into. He looks like a suspicious dude though.”

  I jumped on the bike, fired it up, and gunned through Dana Point to the freeway on-ramp and into the fast lane. I got my speed up to a steady seventy-five sometimes eighty miles an hour, and within thirty minutes I was back at Belmont Shores with my spyglass trained on my new best friends’ house.

  The garage door was closed, but the large silver truck was on the outside. The engine was running, I could see a small stream of white exhaust leaving the tailpipe, and wisping into the air.