Serpents in the City (Mac Ambrose Book 3)

by HN Wake

  “HQ. Also I’d run a systems check on all outlier buildings in case the intruder wanted a second try.”

  Mac stood and walked the kitchen’s perimeter.

  Joyce stood up and poured herself a new coffee. “So what part of their network isn’t protected or encrypted or whatever?”

  Isaac said, “What about the Patriot’s owner, Emmerie Kugal?”

  Mac stopped. “What about her?”

  “I wonder about her systems. She may have access.”

  Joyce sat down and typed in an internet search and read from her screen. “Emmerie Kugal. Daughter of energy mogul Herman Kugal. #10 on Forbes wealthy list. Estimated net worth in the billions. She diversified away from energy and into media. Two years ago, she bought Patriot as a small time cable network. Hired Warrick.” She turned her laptop toward Isaac and Mac. “Check her out. She looks pretty old.”

  Emmerie Kugal had grey hair pulled back in a bun, owl glasses, and a dark Mao suit. She looked small and frail.

  Joyce turned the laptop back and kept searching. “She’s apparently a full fledged libertarian. Doesn’t believe in government interference.”

  Isaac snorted. “You wouldn’t want government interference if you were a billionaire either.”

  The room fell into silence.

  “She spends a lot of time on Martha’s Vineyard.” Joyce said, showing them an image of a mansion on a rise looking out over the ocean. “Kugal’s estate is over 10,000 square feet overlooking Katama Bay. It is surrounded completely by conservation land. Built in 1990 with an unobstructed water view. Nine bedrooms, 10 baths. Pool, wine cellar, four car garage—“

  Isaac interrupted, “We got it. She’s rich.”

  “Like bonkers rich.”

  “Like #10 rich,” Isaac responded.

  “Bonkers.”

  These two had the rapport of a long-playing professional sports team. Mac stilled as she realized she was leading a team that she had trusted since the moment she walked into this house. It was a pleasant shock.

  Joyce was back to researching Emmerie Kugal. “She spends most of her time on Martha’s Vineyard. Flies into New York City about once a month to meet with her various holdings and companies, including Patriot News…says here in this Esquire article that she ‘likes to be briefed by Warrick about once a week on politics. That she trusts his political acumen—”

  Mac interrupted her, “Wait, if Warrick briefs her weekly, does he fly to her?”

  Isaac perked up.

  “Hold on.” Joyce clicked around. “Yes. I’m looking at a picture of Fenton Warrick climbing into a jet at Teterboro airport in New Jersey.” She clicked on more sites, then read more. “Looks like he flies every Saturday afternoon to Martha’s Vineyard. If that’s true, he’ll be flying tomorrow.”

  Mac looked over at Isaac and raised her eyebrows. He immediately started tapping on his keyboard.

  Joyce watched the two, perplexed. “What? What?”

  Isaac spoke first. “We might be able to crack the network from inside the private jet.”

  “Oh my god. That’s it!”

  “Yes,” Isaac said. “Kugal’s private jet is scheduled tomorrow at 5 pm from Teterboro. From what I can tell it has remote access to the Patriot network. You can download the virus on their plane!”

  Joyce shook her fist. “Yes.”

  “I’ve got one problem,” Mac said solemnly. “I can’t distract Warrick on my own.”

  Joyce’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. “You need one of us to go with you?”

  “A woman will be less threatening to Warrick. He’s old school, traditional.” Mac directed her gaze at the excitable woman. “I need you to go with me.”

  Isaac bolted from his chair. “Absolutely no way.”

  Joyce jumped up. “Absolutely yes way, I’m in!”

  Mac sure liked this woman. She had serious chutzpah.

  “Mac,” Isaac gaped. “What are you doing?”

  Mac shrugged.

  Isaac insisted, “You don’t even know Joyce.”

  “I know you trust her. And I’ve worked with you for years. That’s enough for me.”

  Joyce’s head bobbed in agreement.

  Isaac ranted, “No way.”

  Joyce’s body started trembling. “We’re going operational!”

  Isaac pointed his finger at her. “No way! Joyce, you are not doing this!”

  “Wait,” Joyce stilled, “How are you planning on getting on the plane?”

  Mac clicked her cheek. “Senate Bill 1111.”

  They both gawked at her.

  “Senator Gillis was on air today. Talking about Senate Bill 1111. They’ll need input from the private sector.” She snapped her fingers. “Who is the co-author on the bill?”

  “Senator Barnes,” Joyce said. “He’s a Democrat from Kansas.”

  “We will impersonate staff from Barnes office for Warrick’s input on Senate Bill 1111.”

  Joyce started nodding her head. “Totally.”

  Mac shrugged. “Worth a shot, right?”

  Joyce bit her front teeth against her lip like a sports man and pumped her thumbs like fake triggers on a gun. “Fire in the hole!”

  Isaac’s computer pinged and he glanced at the screen. His curiosity won over his momentary anger and he scanned an email. “I paid off a security guard at Patriot--”

  “Oh my god,” Joyce said. “You do that kind of stuff?”

  “Had to be done,” he answered. “When the networks are high security, go low tech.” He assured Mac, “I did it all online. He’s got no idea who I am. But he’s $1,000 richer as of an hour ago. He just delivered Patriot’s internal security video from Control Room 3. From when the blackmail email was originally sent.” Isaac clicked open the huge video file

  “Hell yes, my little deviant,” Joyce grinned. “And?”

  Mac and Joyce moved behind his chair.

  Isaac’s hands flew over his keyboard. He found the time frame, slowed the video and played it in real time.

  All three leaned in closer to his screen.

  Mac recognized the control room. It was empty. A few computer lights blinked in the darkness. A patch of light broke into the gloom as a door was opened. A black male took the seat at the computer station by the door. According to the video’s time stamp, he spent ten minutes clicking on the mouse and occasionally typing something. He stood, exited the control room.

  Next a heavy-set woman in a dark suit sat and worked the computer station. The video time stamp glowed against the dark background. The woman was at the station for thirty minutes before standing and leaving the control room.

  The third person to use the computer was a tall lanky young man with wiry, bushy hair. He was at the station for only five minutes.

  Isaac paused the video. “We’ve seen an hour before and an hour after the blackmail email was sent. No Warrick. It had to be one of those three.”

  Joyce whispered, “Maybe one of those three was his flunky?”

  Something tickled the back of Mac’s mind. She asked Isaac to rewind and zoom in on the lanky young man with wiry hair. It was a bit of an Afro actually.

  She froze. Yes. She recognized the hair. It wasn’t a man. It was a woman.

  Everything changed. All the assumptions they had made to this point were false.

  The wiry haired person on the screen was Senator Gillis’ assistant.

  Senator Gillis had sent the blackmail email to herself.

  SATURDAY

  I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.

  - Walter Isaacson

  If you have something to say, you develop a means, a structure by which to unfold.

  - Louise Nevelson, “Do Your Work” in “Eight Artists Reply: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Artnews, Retrospective, June 2015.

  42

  New York, NY

  The elevator door o
pened on a huge empty floor that ended at floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the throbbing, electric pulse of Times Square. The large space had been stripped to the studs in preparation for the next tenant, the grey commercial carpet had been slashed in large square pieces to expose skeins of wiring, as if a surgeon had been searching for tendons. The air was still and warm. The miles of aluminum piping worming through the building’s structure led to the air conditioning unit on the roof which must have been silent and still. Since it wasn’t making money, this space didn’t deserve air. The city was all about commerce.

  The building was owned by an old real estate family, friends with the district attorney, who let their empty properties be used for stake-outs. There may be territorial issues and piss fighting between the law enforcement agencies, but when FBI’s Counterterrorism needed space for surveillance, help was only a call away.

  By the windows, a plywood table on two saw horses held top-of-the-line surveillance equipment: battery packs, microphones, walkie-talkies. The audio guy—a tiny black guy with pursed lips, nicknamed Pharaoh, was attaching a hidden microphone to Otis Reddenbacker’s jaundiced, flabby chest. On the other end of the table, the visual tech guy, Jeff, who looked like he belonged in an 80s metal band, was positioning a high-powered video camera toward Times Square.

  As he neared the table, Ernest realized there was no accompanying sound track from the blinking, chaotic neon scene past the windows. The space was eerily silent. If you closed your eyes, you could be anywhere. You could even be in Loyal, Oklahoma, staring out over the prairie beyond the football field, the rolling clouds delivering an evening storm.

  Just as Ernest reached the table, his cell phone vibrated.

  Lester was already in mid-sentence “…looking through your documents.”

  “And?”

  “Somebody big is financing this. These files wouldn’t have come cheap. I’m thinking organized hackers. Russia, maybe China. This smells like big money.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Here’s the thing. You’ve got half of these files that are on big names. Like heavy hitters down in Washington, heads of agencies, whatnot. And then you’ve got like twenty no-names. I mean, small potatoes. These are kids here. Their forms aren’t even that long because they’re so young. I mean, why go to all the trouble to get big names and then add in some inconsequential ones? I don’t get it. There’s no logic here.” He sighed, “How’s your lead?”

  Ernest glanced at Reddenbacker’s rheumy eyes twitching against the chaos through the window, his hands clenching and unclenching in a sporadic tempo, and his large paunch and saggy chest covered in grey, wiry hair. That tape was gonna sting when they ripped off the microphone later. “Right where he should be.”

  “Okay, let me know what you get.”

  By the camera, Jeff gave Ernest a thumbs up. “Ready to go here.”

  “He’ll be good to go in about two minutes,” said Pharaoh.

  Ernest leaned his back against the window, crossed his arms, stared down at Reddenbacker. “You clear, Otis?” he asked. “I need evidence we can prosecute with.”

  Reddenbacker stared back with a hint of defiance mixed with anxiety. “I’m clear on what you all want.” The thick southern accent held a hint of a sneer. “I’m not clear on how I’m gonna get it. This Fox ain’t no dummy.”

  “Repeat it back to me.”

  “You need him to admit he put those dang files on that computer. You need an admission.”

  Ernest nodded. “And?”

  “That he paid me.”

  That was right. They needed both.

  Reddenbacker shook his head, “I’m tellin’ ya, as I’ve been tellin’ these here gentlemen, that this is a folly chase. Fox is gonna see I’ve set him up.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “Well, there. I think it may be your problem. What if he won’t sing?”

  Ernest shrugged. “Then your story falls apart. As far as we know, you loaded up the laptop yourself. All that good background info on hard-working government employees you bought…for reasons as yet unknown.”

  Pharaoh pulled out a final strip of duct tape—a long strip. He slapped it across the microphone on Reddenbacker’s chest and pressed it hard into the soft doughy flab and hair.

  Reddenbacker bristled. “Easy there, young fellow.”

  Ernest felt his lips twitch. It was easy to run an op when the lines of good and bad were clear.

  Reddenbacker glared at Ernest, tried one last ditch. “We made a deal. I meet Fox, I get immunity.”

  “The second to last paragraph of that deal said you have to get an admission. That’s the deal.”

  Reddenbacker huffed. “Deal my ass. Ain’t no gentlemen round here. We do business a whole lot different where I come from.” He pulled his shirt down over the wires. “I’m telling you, this Fox ain’t no dummy.”

  “Maybe you tell Fox you’ve figured it out. That you know what those files are. That you want more money.”

  Reddenbacker thought about this for a moment.

  “But don’t script it,” Ernest cautioned. “See where the moment takes you.”

  Reddenbacker stood.

  “You come back here when it’s over. Got it? Here. Immediately. They’ll take off your wires. I won’t be here when you get back.”

  Reddenbacker jutted out his thick chin, “I get it. I’m your bait. You’re gonna follow Fox.”

  Ernest ignored him, turned toward the pulsing landscape beyond the window.

  It was exactly what he was going to do.

  43

  Teterboro, NJ

  The 1980 Dodge Ram had dark tinted windows and smelled of gasoline and mildewed carpet. They had gotten it off Isaac’s friend who owned a private investigator shop in DC. Behind the two bucket seats, the interior had been converted into a mobile surveillance unit. Waist-high counters ran along both sides and two stools had been bolted into the metal floor. Despite the appearance of a rust bucket, it had rumbled steadily through Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and now sat in the parking lot of the the Teterboro Private Airport in New Jersey.

  Isaac sat at his laptop at one of the counters. “The tower’s computers have Warrick’s plane scheduled to leave in twenty minutes.”

  Through the windshield they had a clear view over the tarmac of two private jets preparing for flight. Ten minutes ago, two men in pilot uniforms pulled small roller bags up to one of the planes and walked up the wheeled stairs. The plane’s lights had come on.

  Joyce stared as the engines were tested. “Totally admitting it, I’m nervous. As in tingly, stomach cramping, nervous. As in not the good kind of nervous.”

  Mac glanced at her. A sense of guilt had been building since Washington. She needed this woman, but what she was asking was putting her in harm’s way. It made Mac extremely uncomfortable.

  “You don’t have to do this Joyce.” Isaac said from the back.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Mac repeated softly.

  “I’m gonna do it.” She glanced over at an unrecognizable Mac who was wearing a short auburn wig, big glasses and a prosthetic nose. “It’s just that I wanted you all to be checked in with me. Know where I am. I’m feeling kinda queasy and not totally brave at the moment. Like a 2 green, Isaac.”

  Isaac leaned through the two front seats, looked Joyce in the eyes. “I’m telling you right now, you do not have to do this.”

  Joyce said, “I just need to get my ball sac up into my courage chest and I’ll be totally fine. We are going to do this.”

  Mac stared out the window. She considered the worst-case scenario: Fenton Warrick identified Mac as the one who broke into Patriot News. He wouldn’t call the cops. That wasn’t his style. He would call his security guy to meet them. Mac had a plan if that happened. No matter what happened, she would make sure Joyce was secure. Safe. She was confident she could protect her, but it still made her extremely uneasy.

  Joyce said, “Guys, I’m totally doing this. It’s not
up for debate. Remember, I was Agency. I wanted to do this kind of stuff.”

  Her attitude made Mac feel better. It was the correct amount of bravado Joyce would need. Now she just needed to turn that bravado into action, ignore her fears. Joyce needed to buck up—she needed some tough love. Mac’s voice was distant. “It’s just a job.”

  “Says the professional,” Joyce squinted around Isaac her. “How’s my nose?”

  Mac looked over at Joyce’s long prosthetic nose. “You’re good. Remember, it’s just a job. Ignore the nerves.”

  Joyce blew out her cheeks. “Ignore the nerves. Got it.”

  Mac stared through the windshield. “We don’t have room for your nerves.” It came out cruelly.

  Joyce blinked. She understood Mac’s intent. “Got it.” Her voice sounded more controlled already.

  She’s a quick learner, Mac thought. It made her feel better.

  The three sat in silence as the sun began to set.

  “I mean, can we just revisit the fact that Cruella De Vil Gillis manipulated us all?” Joyce’s voice sounded increasingly strong as she changed the subject. “That she had her assistant send that freaking email to herself. It’s diabolical. I mean, what must be on the video that is so dangerous she had to go to these lengths to get it back?”

  Mac said, “I don’t think it’s a sex tape.”

  “What?” asked Joyce.

  “It’s not a sex tape. If it were, she wouldn’t have needed to send a fake email to herself. That scenario doesn’t make sense.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I’m not sure. She set Laura up with the story of a sex tape, to lure me—or someone like me—in to retrieve it. There’s something else on that video.”

  The sun lowered out on the horizon. The three sat in their own worlds for a long moment.

  Isaac spoke first. “So listen, after take off, you’ve got probably 30 minutes. I’m guessing the system has some kind of ability to factor in anomalies in the network as the plane ascends—it should adjust for system noise during take off and landing. That’s the best I can guess.”