“I said strong, not nuclear,” Caitlin complained. As she started to get up Chase held up a hand to halt her and she sat back down. He took off the lid and scooped out one spoonful, reassembled the basket and plugged it in.
“Why are you here Chase?” Caitlin asked. “How did you find me?”
The percolator let out a loud death moan, and he looked at it doubtfully.
Caitlin smiled at his expression. “I know it sounds awful, and I’ve replaced it three times but the coffee isn’t as good in the new pots. So, I keep dragging it back out and using it.”
“How old is that thing?”
“I don’t know. I got it at a yard sale for a dollar. It’s probably about forty or fifty years old. It’s still working and makes great coffee, even if it does sound like it’s on its death bed.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Chase said, and he walked across the kitchen, pulled her to him and kissed her. “How have you been Caitlin? Taken down any crime syndicates lately?”
She stepped back and gave him a calculating stare. “You better start giving me some answers, or I might decide to shoot you after all.”
Chase pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. “The same goes for you. I’ve owed your ass a spanking for six months. I’ve known you were here for the past four months, so you’re on borrowed time.”
Caitlin took the chair across from him, knowing her threat was empty. If past history was an indication, his threat wasn’t. “How?”
“Research. I couldn’t give it up. At first, it was because I was totally pissed off. You might make a note, Caitlin. Never to make me that angry again. Ever.” Chase said evenly.
Caitlin swallowed and looked away. She could feel her buttocks cringe involuntarily.
Chase continued. “Second, because I went home to Henryville, Texas. I bought some cattle, and although I like ranching, I was bored and had a lot of time on my hands. I was also still pissed. I spent a great deal of time researching you. There’s not a lot out there on the real you, but with a little help I found the key to finding you.” He smiled and got up to pour two mugs of coffee, handing one to her first. He tipped his cup to indicate that she should drink first.
Amused, Caitlin took a long swallow. “Okay, I’ll bite, what was the key?”
Chase waited thirty seconds before he swallowed half a cup, topped off the mug again and went to sit across from her at the table. “It was your programming skills. When you were only twenty years old, you sold a video game for 1.2 million dollars and were considered a major whiz kid in the industry. The following year, you added to that by selling software updates to the program. One morning you were out jogging, and you witnessed a murder. Five months later, you entered the WITSEC program. You may have been earning minimal wage, but you didn’t stop creating gaming software. You’d been planning a break from WITSEC a good year and a half before you actually did it. You’d already amassed a hell of a lot of money under two different aliases by selling software. Damn good aliases too. You paid taxes, SSI, and health insurance. You made sure there wasn’t anything that would raise an IRS red flag. I’ve studied the programming. Its way over my head, but I had help. My nephew Wyatt is like you. He thinks in programming code. He’s only fifteen, so I can only hope that he turns out to be as successful at it as you are. I tracked you through your gaming software, the similarities in the games and the programming. Wyatt says every programmer has a style peculiar only to him or her. A very trusted friend, another programming genius from the agency did the actual work for me, and he was very impressed.
I didn’t want Wyatt involved past a certain point. I also didn’t want him taken to the woodshed by his Dad for hacking, which has happened quite regularly since he was eleven. It took a lot of very ingenious hacking, and I was told that it was better if I didn’t know the details. It paid off because my guy found the similarities based on Wyatt’s guesses of what names you might be using. He found the programming connection to Infinitius. The last game you sold was to AmeruGam, Japan, for a hell of a lot of money. They had an offshore bank listed and from the account number we got the alias you were using. I was told you have a very complicated and ingenious method of transferring money from offshore accounts, channeling it through corporate entities that are only figurehead businesses in order to pay yourself for your work. From there it was a matter of crosschecking real estate transactions. That is a mistake you make consistently. You purchase property and therefore you leave a trail. It got tricky when you crossed the border, but my guy found you. You don’t need to worry about the guy I used. We trust him. We have this guy because we want him out of circulation. He has the skills to topple nations, not that I don’t think you’re capable of doing that too, but in your case I don’t think that’s your idea of fun.”
Caitlin looked at him with speculation and picked up her cup casually. “You have Termite. I wondered what happened to him.”
Chase frowned, took another drink of coffee and frowned again. “How? No, I don’t want to know.”
“Programmers have our own private social media. We talk online. We don’t give away our secrets, but we recognize skill and code as easily as you do faces and voices. Termite got caught playing maliciously a couple years ago and – poof! - he vanished. We wondered if he’d gone corporate or government. He’s become another drone.”
“Thank you,” Chase said sourly, knowing that he’d been insulted, although he wasn’t sure what the insult meant. “Anyway, we’ve got him, and he’s not going to get loose from the agency anytime soon unless he wants to spend some time behind bars. Actually, he’s turned out to be very cool guy, and we trust him. By we, I mean Hank, Blake and me. If something goes down with him, all three of us will go down with him.
“You went to a lot of trouble for nothing. I’m settled here. I like it here,” Caitlin said.
Chase gave her a long look and got up to refill his coffee. “You probably do, but if I read you correctly, there’s a suitcase in your closet or the garage or maybe even offsite - packed and ready to go.”
“That’s always a possibility,” she admitted with a nod to her head.
“I was very angry when you took off again. I was angry because you outfoxed me - twice. That was my male ego being bruised. What I couldn’t get was why after sitting back and living quietly for two years under the radar of the Rigoltees and us, why you suddenly went public.”
“Doing the segment on the Sanctuary was a major miscalculation on my part,” Caitlin admitted. “Although with national coverage the foundation did net over $230,000 in donations. That was a good result but I didn’t plan to be on television. A situation came up and I was talked into it. I have my stupid moments like everyone, Chase. I’m human. The segment was only supposed to run in the Reno area, but when it went nationwide, I didn’t have any choice but to relocate and fast. If that piece hadn’t aired nationally, I would have gone right on living in Kayhill. I liked it there, and contrary to your research, I didn’t buy there, I was renting.
My plan from the beginning was to sabotage the Rigoltees in secret and get all the dirty work done before they had any idea that they were about to be torpedoed. That was the beauty of the plan. By the time they caught on to what was happening. It would be too late. My plan was carried out quite successfully, even if the Rigoltees were alerted that I was still around. As soon as I set the dogs on them, they were too busy trying to duck and cover themselves. They didn’t have the time or resources to come after me. You were a complication I couldn’t afford, or risk.”
“You were an idiot,” Chase said seriously. “If you’d explained what you were planning, I would have helped!”
“If it hadn’t worked, you would have been involved and lost your job, and maybe your life,” Caitlin fired back, equally serious. “Risking my life is my choice, risking yours wasn’t an option.”
“Damn it,” Chase swore.
“There goes that double standard again,” Caitlin said evenly. “You swear, but thin
k I shouldn’t!”
He glared at her and stood up suddenly, and she could feel the anger radiating off him. “You took down the Rigoltee syndicate single-handedly. Then for a bonus, you took down Clifford Stevens, hotshot ex-District Attorney and rising politician, with one partial term in the Senate under his belt. As amazing as that was, it was still a stupid thing to do on your own! Once we got wind of what was going on, we had a pretty good idea who was behind it, but all we could do was sit back, watch and let it play out. It played out beautifully. Well done.”
Caitlin’s eyebrows went up. “What? No incriminations about taking the law into my own hands?”
“Not from me,” Chase growled.
“Who else has figured it out that I was involved?” Caitlin demanded.
“Hank and Blake, and that’s only because of our close involvement with you when you originally went into the WITSEC. We are only guessing, and we have no proof. You made sure of that. We’re not going to take it up the chain of command. The higher ups are taking the whole gang-versus-syndicate war for what it played out to be. I’m assuming you’ve covered your tracks?”
“You bet your sweet ass I have,” Caitlin, snorted. “Any traces will lead directly to the Soviet Syndicate, through the Chechen, Georgian or Azerbaijani connections. The U.S. government agencies tend to steer clear of them unless it’s a direct threat to national security. I placed self-destruct, dated and timed viruses in every system that I infiltrated for well over two years before I actually released the dogs. Even if they went to the off-line backups, my little time bombs would crash the systems as soon as they were reloaded. The Rigoltee syndicate was basically small potatoes and greedy. AP-13 wasn’t about to be outmaneuvered by them. The AP-13’s gang and drug cartel operations tie back to the soviets are far more dangerous and sophisticated. All I did was expose a trail of double-dealing with the drug cartels and the money laundering parts of the Rigoltees' business, with direct ties to foreign bank accounts that were already there. I didn’t create the double-dealing. I simply allowed what they were doing to be known. I exposed it to the people they were double-dealing.”
“AP-13 went after them and took them out, one by one,” Chase said with an admiring tone to his voice. “You took out a number of key players that the U.S. Attorney’s office has been trying to prosecute for years.
“I had nothing to do with those actions, and I’m not going to feel bad for what happened to those men. Every one of them has murdered, maimed and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives for their personal profit,” Caitlin said quietly. “They were destroyed by their greed. Once the war started between the two fractions I let it run its course, although I was personally vindicated when all three top players of the Rigoltee syndicate ceased to exist, and the syndicate collapsed.”
There was something in her voice that bothered Chase - a tone of regret. “Tell me you don’t feel guilty about it,” he said in a chastising manner.
Caitlin gave a sigh. “Overall, no. Maybe I was playing God, but I don’t regret doing it. I don’t know the details of their deaths and I don’t want to know. I didn’t kill them. Bad guys as bad or worse than they were did it. In some cases, ignorance is bliss. In the long run, all I did was shutdown one nasty operation temporarily. All those illegal activities were picked up by another syndicate soon enough, probably AP-13 since most of its key players are still in operation. The only difference is whoever picked them up won’t have any connection to me. AP-13 may have started as a gang and it’s still affiliated with the gangs, but it’s a full-blown syndicate now regardless of what the government tags it.”
“What about Clifford Stevens?” Chase asked.
“He was dirty. He built his career as a tough, honest District Attorney, and he went bad. He was making dirty deals with the criminals, and he got caught. He was such an amateur that anyone could have followed his trail of deceit, if they’d been looking. The problem is no one is looking anymore. Even if the rare investigative reporter does find something, the higher-up’s are covering up and protecting the bad guys. The days of Watergate type investigations are over. There’s too much corruption in the media and politics.”
“Clifford Stevens is the one that I think you do have to worry about,” Chase said. “He has a lot of political savvy and connections. I still haven’t figured out how you got the major newspapers to expose his dirty deeds.”
Caitlin laughed. “That’s the only part of this whole scheme that I enjoyed. Have you ever heard of Anonymous? Or Wikileaks?”
Chase raised an eyebrow. “You mean the vigilante hackers who obtain and leak information to the press that’s so airtight it can’t be ignored? They were in on this?”
“Not those specific groups,” Caitlin replied. “But those aren’t the only ones and I happen to think that the groups I worked through are as effective. It took a little longer than I would have liked for the papers to vet the information, but once they did the papers didn’t want to sit on the information for fear that the other papers would break it first.”
Chase chuckled at that.
“In the end, neither paper won. They apparently got confirmation at the same time and both broke the story the same day. It couldn’t have worked out better. By the second day every national network was on top of the story. Oh, and I know they talked to your agency about my stolen bank account. Since I have been compromised three times before, I’m really surprised that they didn’t release my name.”
“They can’t. Heads would never stop rolling if they released that information and it would compromise the entire program. You will be known in court as Victim X. You may have to give a deposition, but your voice would be altered to protect your identify. With the IRS collecting data on Stevens bank accounts and the new District Attorney reviewing all his cases, Clifford Stevens doesn’t stand a chance of getting away. There’s even been a Congressional Hearing called.”
Caitlin rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’s good, a whole bunch of political dickheads protecting their dirty deals and hides.”
“You really do have a low opinion of our government processes don’t you?”
“Let’s just say, I’ve dealt with too much corruption to believe in truth, justice and the American way anymore,” Caitlin answered. “I’m thinking about becoming a Canadian permanently.”
“You’d go that far?” Chase asked.
“Why not? My government has screwed me,” Caitlin answered. “Why should I give them a chance to do it again? Your agency screwed me, Chase. Someone lost the files connecting Clifford Stevens with my frozen bank account. Someone compromised my safety three times to the Rigoltees. Those things didn’t happen by accident. Someone inside your agency took payoffs for those actions. I don’t see anyone coming to my rescue and trying to identify them.”
“Individuals are corrupt,” Chase agreed but he also disagreed. “The entire agency isn’t corrupt. There are a lot of good and decent people that believe in the system.”
“I’m not one of them,” Caitlin said softly. “Not anymore.”
“You’re too young to be that cynical,” Chase said standing up and pulling her up to him.
“Why are you here, Chase?”
“You know why.”
“It won’t work,” Caitlin said wearily.
“We haven’t tried yet.” Chase lowered his head and took possession of her mouth. He pulled her t-shirt out of her jeans and cupped her breasts in his hands.
Good sense took flight as sensation and lust took over her body. She couldn’t deny her need and didn’t want to try. Caitlin never said a word when he lifted her. Her legs went around his waist, as she was swamped by need. He carried her through the house until he found her bedroom, laid her down on the bed and removed her clothing with a few quick movements. It was the dance they both remembered, fast and desperate to satisfy. Then long and slow to enjoy.
* * * * *
Valerie Hannah answered her cell phone on the first ring with her sexiest purr. “Hi, baby, w
ant to come home and sink a hole in one.”
Blake chuckled. “One of these days, you’re going to answer the phone like that and it’s going to be either my mother or yours.”
Valerie laughed. “Not as long as I’m using a cell or caller ID. What does my baby want?”
“You know what I want, but since we’re six hundred miles apart it’s not going to happen.” Blake growled.
“We can try phone sex,” Valerie giggled.
“We can try you putting your butt in your car and coming to Salt Lake City,” Blake crooned. “Why aren’t you here? You were supposed to be here. What happened, Val?”
Valerie frowned and bit down on her lower lip. “I am coming baby, but I had a slight problem.”
“Val, you gave notice three weeks ago. You’re not under contract so don’t let them stall you,” Blake exclaimed. “We’ve already moved all your stuff up here to my house. Pack up what’s left in the car and come.”
“It’s not the job,” Valerie admitted hesitantly. “My last work day was two days ago. I have to wait until my last check is deposited and clears the bank. When it clears, I’m on my way, and I’ll be there permanently. We’ll be together, honey.”
Blake sat at his desk and drummed his fingers. “Val, are you overdrawn again?”
Valerie stuck one of her long fingernails in her mouth, chewed on the end of it and danced a little on her feet remembering the last discussion she and her Blake had about her finances. That one hadn’t worked out too well for her.
“Val!”
“Honey, I can explain,” Valerie exclaimed.
“Don’t bother,” Blake said ominously. “I’ll make an online transfer into your account. It should clear in about fifteen minutes. Get your butt in the car and start driving. Since you’re not going to get here until late, I’m going into work. We’ll finish this discussion when you get here.”
Valerie nodded and realized she needed to speak. “I’m on my way!” she promised. “I miss you!”
“I miss you too,” Blake said softly. “I’m also warning you honey. When I check your checking account purchases, if there’s one new charge from any of your favorite boutiques or mall stores, your ass is mine.”
Caitlin's Conspiracies Page 7