by Jim Riley
The next day I got a FedEx package from the Lubbock P.D. I took it to my office and opened it up. Bell’s report was in there, along with the DNA stuff like he’d said. He also had copied all of the bank and phone records he’d gotten. There was a note telling me to read the part of his report about the desktop computer that had been in Mr. Gittleson’s home office. On the note it stated that the office had been completely cleaned out. No one would have ever recognized it as once being an attorney’s office, or that he’d even ever lived there. I flipped over to the page of the report that described the computer lab’s analysis of Gittleson’s computer. It was short and to the point. The hard drive had been wiped. I’m not anywhere literate in computers, so it was a good thing they spelled it out. The difference between information on a hard drive being deleted or even reformatted is that it can almost always be, at a minimum, partially retrieved. Sometimes they could get it all back. When a hard drive is wiped, every bit is written over and any information that was once there previously is gone forever. Son of a bitch.
I sent the packet over to Kelly. I knew she’d be busy for another few weeks comparing the new information with what she already had. It was a time-consuming job, but sometimes it paid off. I reminded her that luck was usually the result of hard work. She told me to bite her. She really was becoming a seasoned cop. I told her I’d send the DNA information to CBI for her, and she took back the comment.
The JTTF meeting was informative, but I felt a little out of place since Coop wasn’t there. He was the only one I knew on the task force. I sat in the back and listened to Special-Agent-something-or-another brief us with information pertaining to domestic and international terrorism. He started out telling about the world situation and the latest intelligence that folks with our limited clearance could listen to. Most of it I’d already heard on Fox News. Then he moved into domestic terrorism. It seemed that there was some new aggression with the Animal Rights Extremists and some rhetoric about taking it to the next level. A few questions were asked, but that part went pretty quick. The agent spent quite a bit of time on the domestic Eco-Terrorism, mainly the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF. I’d done some boning up on the material that Coop had sent me so I could at least understand what was going on. As hard as I tried, though, I had the hardest time getting into the whole “Mother Earth Extremist” thing. I just couldn’t get my mind around what the big deal was. I mean, I’m into the beautiful mountains and streams and such, but to burn down lodges or SUVs for the sake of making the world a cleaner place just doesn’t compute. There are so many things in the world that piss so many people off, you’d think they could find a better cause. Oh well, whatever blows your skirt up, I guess. I listened but didn’t comment on ELF, even though a lot of the other members did. Like I said, it was the biggest problem we had as far as terrorism goes on the western slope. Next came Constitutionalists and the like. We have a few of those as well, but the whole movement seems to be kind of dying off. The agent’s opinion was that it has always cycled up and down, and we were just in a downturn at the moment for those extremists. I didn’t know enough about the whole issue to argue with him, so I filed it away to ask Coop about his opinion later.
Right at the end of the meeting, the guy mentioned White Supremacists and the new Neo-Nazi group rising up. There were still no known members in our area or any recruiting going on, so it was a very short presentation. It was what I was most interested in and I would have liked to ask a few questions, but everyone seemed ready to get the meeting over with. I didn’t want to rock the boat, being new and all, so I let it go.
The next week Coop called. He said he’d been to more meetings in those eight days than he had in the last six months. I asked him if it had been productive, and he said there was no way to tell. I believe his exact words were, “Productive and meeting should never be used in the same sentence when Washington is concerned.” He did ask me if I’d ever thought anymore about working in the counter-terrorism field. I told him I was happy where I was. But I had to admit, the thought of putting on that helmet and holding that M28 again did send a surge of adrenaline through my veins. He told me that Colonel Rodriguez sent his regards. I’m too old for that shit, I reminded myself.
Chapter Fourteen
“Dell, I found something.” I could hear the excitement in her voice and knew she’d found her first clue.
“Don’t toy with me. Tell me.” I was excited too, but encouraging her was maybe even more important.
“In the stuff that Bell sent us there were phone records from the Gittlesons’ home phone. One of the numbers is 806-555-7294. It comes up on the phone records quite a bit. It’s a cell phone from the Lubbock area. He called it the night before he died.”
I wasn’t following. So he called the number down there and from up here. “And?”
She sighed out of exasperation, then probably realized she hadn’t completely made sense. “Bell had a note in here that he thought it may have been the boyfriend’s number, since he had determined that the calls from the house to the cell phone increased on days when the husband was out of town.”
Now it made more sense, but just as quickly it didn’t. “So the wife calls the number when hubbie’s out of town, and then the day before Mr. Gittleson dies, someone from the house up here calls the number?” I wasn’t sure I had it right.
“Yep.” She sounded like she had it figured out. Turns out she did.
“How did the wife call him from the house up here after she’d left?”
“She didn’t.”
I knew she was trying to tell me something but I wasn’t getting it so I told her. “I’m not getting it.”
“I went back to D’Angelo’s and talked to the waitress again and asked her about ‘brown’ and ‘blond.’” She stopped for a pregnant pause. I was beginning to get annoyed.
“Just tell me, Kelly.”
“The waitress said that if it had been a man and woman she was serving, she would have put “M” and “W” on the ticket to remember who ordered what, but since there were two men, she distinguished between them by their hair color.”
It still took a second for it to make sense. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me! The boyfriend and the husband had dinner?”
“Yep. After I asked her about the two men, it jogged her memory and she remembers the two of them having dinner. She described them as partners.”
“So was it his boyfriend or her’s?” I hadn’t had enough time to think the whole thing through and wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Both. I think, anyway.”
“So the pube in the bed is probably the boyfriend’s like we thought, we just don’t know which Gittleson he was doing at the time.”
“The semen, too.”
“Good work.” I meant it.
“Thanks.”
I could almost hear her smiling over the phone.
I hung up and dialed Bell’s number at his desk.
“This is Bell.”
“This is Moffat. You owe me. Actually, you owe Kelly.”
“I’d be happy to pay her, but what for?”
“The boyfriend was double-dipping at the well.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was doing the wife and the husband.”
There was silence. “Son of a bitch. That’s what’s going on.”
“What?”
“The forensic audit of their finances showed some unaccounted-for money. It was being hidden pretty well in cash withdrawals here and there, but we couldn’t find where it was going. It was regular, though, over the long run, and I figured she was paying the kid. Then all of a sudden it shows up on the books as well as in the background. Like two different people were getting paid off or something.”
“Not two different people getting paid off, but two different people doing the paying. When did the second one start?”
“Only about two months prior. It’s starting to make sense. He’s getting money from the old lady, and then he starts ge
tting the same deal from the hubby.”
“You think the husband knew?”
“The better question is, did the wife know? How’d you figure it out?”
“Kelly put it together. The guy’s cell phone number turned up on the phone records up here. She got a waitress to remember our vic being out to dinner with a young blond guy. Your vic.”
“Yeah. And the only one left standing is the wife.”
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“Yeah, and losing your young stud to your husband is probably enough to scorn you.”
“I know it’d scorn me. It going to give you enough for a warrant?” I doubted it but thought I’d ask.
“Probably not. Our DA is a lot more ballsy than yours, but it’s still pretty slim.”
“Yeah. I figured. You gonna make a run at her attorney? Maybe scare him into letting her cop to a lesser charge?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think on it. I hate to give it away, but I may never solve it otherwise.”
“Yeah. I know the feeling.”
Bell promised to call me if he came up with anything, and I told him I’d do the same. He also told me to tell Kelly thanks and he’d make it up to her when he came. I was sure he had visions of them in the hot tub.
Coop came to see me a couple days later. It always made my day when he came by. There was almost no one in my area that I liked talking shop with like I did with Coop. It always rejuvenated me. And after you’ve been doing cop work for a couple of decades, anything that rejuvenates you is important.
I brought him up to date on the homicide. He agreed that the wife probably did it and concurred I was close but may never prove it. We went and had lunch. He bought. The burritos were good, but the conversation was the juicy part.
“I saw you on the big screen while I was back east.”
I was clueless. “Huh?”
“A few dozen of us watched you do your thing at the Goldstein building.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Pretty impressive.”
I shrugged. False humility. It’s a SWAT operator thing.
“No, really. I mean it, Dell, it was impressive. I was proud of you.”
“You’re making me blush.”
“Anyway, you were the topic of conversation. At least parts of it.”
We’d never talked about what I’d done that day. I knew he knew, but since I had never been cleared to talk to anyone, he’d never asked. I didn’t know exactly how much he knew, but I assumed he knew a lot. He did.
“You turned out to be their guinea pig, you know? It was unexpected but perfect timing. You took DOD’s equipment and made their case for them. You actually lived out a scenario on the books almost to a tee. Well, except the scenario didn’t include using a novice.”
“Novice?”
“Sorry. Non-Special Ops.”
“Better. Acceptable anyway, I guess.”
“Anyway. It’s up and running.” He waited for my response.
“No shit. The NDA?”
He chuckled. “Well, as much as I pushed it, they didn’t go with your suggestion for the name. They’re calling it M28.”
“You’re kidding? After the weapon?”
“Either that or just to top Britain. You know, ours is bigger than yours. MI5 and M28.”
“Yeah, I get it. You really think?”
“Hell, I don’t know, I was just joking. But it wouldn’t surprise me. You wouldn’t believe what juvenile pricks the people at the top can be.”
“Sure, I can. Rodriguez going to run it?”
“No, but he’s a Deputy Director and over Operations. Some more-political type will more than likely get the top post. But it won’t be public any time in the near future. Fact is, it’s been operational for a little while. Unofficially, of course.”
“Do anything exciting?”
He grinned and sipped his coffee. I assumed he was thinking about what he wanted to tell me. Coop was as close a friend as I had, and I knew he thought the same of me, but business was business and he took his oath extremely seriously. I noticed he glanced at the reflection in the window across from him to see if anyone was behind him. “They took out a cell.”
“No kidding? Can you tell me about it?”
“Not everything, but I can tell you it had something to do with you.”
He could have told me a lot of things, but I wasn’t prepared for that bit of information. “Come again?”
“Seems after you cleaned house in St. Louis, a one Ayyad Qadir Nadhir took it as a personal affront to Islam and swore an oath to get some payback on you. An informant tipped us off and M28 took care of business. It actually turned into something more than expected, because apparently Nadhir wasn’t just a pissed-off extremist, but a cell leader. When they did their surveillance on him to take him, they put it together. They took him and his cell.”
“I never heard anything on the news.”
“And you never will. It’s not like any of them will be going to trial.”
I nodded. I’d forgotten how that worked. Then I realized they’d never told me I was on the hit list. That pissed me off.
“You were covered. They were babysitting you.”
“What do you mean, they were babysitting me?”
“Sarge. You were with him.”
Then it made sense. I’d always wondered why Sarge had showed up at my door when I was at the bottom of the bottle. I’d always assumed he somehow heard about my troubles, or it was just coincidence. Turns out the timing had been the only coincidence. “What about Tish? What if they’d gone after her?”
“She was covered as well. One of the orderlies at the hospital, as well as one of her neighbors.”
“No kidding.” I was still a little peeved, but kind of impressed, too.
“So, what now?”
“You interested in getting on board?”
“Of M28, you mean?”
“Yep. You’re still kind of a poster child for them. And Rodriguez thinks you’re top notch. I don’t understand why, though.”
“Bite me.”
“Well. You interested?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. When do you need an answer?”
“No hurry. I volunteered to talk to you about it. I don’t think there’s any rush.”
“What do you think?”
“Good question. I’m sure it’d open some doors for you, and you’d probably have a good time.”
“You think it’s going to work or just be another government cluster fuck?”
“I don’t know for sure if it’s going to work or not, but I think it will. I know it’s the best option we have right now. It may ultimately turn into something else. Kind of like the OSS did with the CIA.”
“OSS?”
“Office of Strategic Services. Bill Donovan started it during the Second World War under FDR. It served its purpose but was ultimately changed some and renamed the CIA. Something like that may happen.”
“What about the FBI and CIA? Did they squeal like a stuck pig when it happened?”
“Yeah. The FBI thought they were going to get a small part. DOD cut them out in the final round and they didn’t like it. You’d have thought it was the last soup bone in a pack of dogs in Washington that week. Bottom line was the President did what he wanted to do and they’ll just have to get over it. The unit is autonomous, but DHS will control the budgetary strings, which is the fuel to keep it running. That way, they can hide the whole thing under DHS and keep some control over it as well, I assume. It’s good and bad since DHS can still gum up the works by messing with the money, but the President also set up their money as a special budget, which means it will get its own hearing in case DHS tries to play some kind of game with them. They’ll also have Senate Committee oversight. Sounds like there’ll be enough checks and balances to keep it honest, but hopefully not so many that it doesn’t get the job done.”
“What’s their mission?”
>
“Kind of like we had discussed. Mainly intelligence gathering and off-the-book missions here in the U.S. But they can work anywhere in the world they need to if necessary.”
“Outside of the Oversight Committee’s knowledge, you mean?”
“Oh, no. Everything like that will be done by a Presidential Finding, just like the CIA, and will be subject to an overview, but it won’t be public. CNN won’t be reporting on it.”
“You assume.”
“Well, it’ll be a small number of people who even know about it. And there’s a law on the books for leaking it to anyone. The penalty is pretty hefty prison time.”
I finished off the last of my chips while I thought about it. “Did you know there was a hit out on me?”
“No.”
“Would you have told me if you did?”
“No.”
On the drive back to the office, we talked about the New Millennium group. Coop said that the movement—he was not calling it an organization anymore—was still growing at a phenomenal rate. He hadn’t put in a lot of time investigating what it was about prior to now because he was tied up with the M28 thing. When he got to looking into it, he got a little concerned. The difference with this thing and past White Supremacist or Neo-Nazi organizations was that this had no tangible organizational facilities. There was no compound or office. There was no membership roster. There were no organized, or at least published, meetings. And there was no leadership figurehead. Those had historically been the vulnerabilities that were exploited.
The FBI had gotten very accomplished over the years at attacking such groups. They would infiltrate them, flip some informants, and usually know what was going to happen well before it ever jumped off. This was different. It was being modeled after the Eco and Animal Rights terrorist groups like ELF and ALF. Both were movements of people that shared a common concern or belief, but rarely if ever met other than with friends. Information was shared over the internet or clandestinely. Members, for want of a better word, were merely believers in the cause and acted according to a common belief and of their own accord. Sometimes there would be cells of a few people who acted together, but the profile was that they were semi- to well-educated and not average criminals. Their crimes were mission-specific and usually thought-out. The groups swear allegiance to one another and to the movement but aren’t motivated by the common factors of greed or personal gain. It’s a belief. A belief they are willing to break the law to further. A belief they are willing to make a sacrifice of maybe getting caught and suffering the consequences for. It makes catching them extremely difficult. Sometimes impossible.