by Josh Karnes
Chapter 42
Isla Roca, Puerto Rico
Larry came up the walk to the helipad and saw Ortiz and two other men he assumed to be FBI agents talking with the Thermion security guard stationed there. Is he interviewing him? Larry thought. “Mr. Ortiz!” he shouted, hoping to interrupt whatever the guard was saying. Larry hadn't briefed the entire facility on how to handle the FBI.
“Mr. Duncan. I was wondering if you were going to make it,” Ortiz said as he followed the walkway to meet Duncan along the way Miller and Casas followed. “If I didn't know better, I'd think you were busy covering something up so I wouldn't find it.” Larry turned the other way back down the path and began to lead Ortiz and the other two FBI men on the long walk towards the dock.
“No offense, Mr. Ortiz,” Larry said in a measured tone. “I know you are just doing your job here. But we do have a legitimate reason to protect what we're doing here on this island. There is corporate espionage and also since we are working under a DoD contract, there are political enemies within our own government that I have to look out for.”
“You don't want to lose your funding, is that right?”
“Of course we don't. But we are working on a project that is in the interests of our national defense. Just because we have secrets, that doesn't make us the bad guys.”
“You're a patriot, then?”
“We're on the same team, or I assume we are. But just like you don't want me digging into your investigations, I'd prefer not to have others digging into what we are doing here. We don't have anything to hide, but we do have things to protect. Plus, it's a distraction for my staff to have investigators and reporters here. We are just trying to do a job.”
“What, exactly, is that job?”
“Mr. Ortiz, didn't we already have this conversation this morning? We are doing GPS research. Looking for how to correct for timing anomalies that might affect GPS accuracy.”
There it was, Ortiz thought. The GPS story again. Ray Ortiz decided to let this slide for the moment. “Sure thing. GPS. Just like before. Secret GPS technology that some cut-throat spy might want to come steal, or that if the wrong Senator found out about, they'd cut your funding or cancel the contract. I have to hand it to you, Larry. You're sticking to your guns on this one.”
“It's easy enough to do when it's true,” Larry said.
But Ortiz knew he would crack. This man was no professional liar. He was no politician, either. He was a scientist, clearly uncomfortable with this line he was telling. And Ortiz could see just ahead of him, another pair of scientists who looked even less capable of sustaining a cover story than their boss. And these guys have been worked over all day by Detective Vega and the relentless Grady family. If that family was as suspicious of these Thermion guys as they were of each other, then they probably had already cracked the case.
“Aaron, Carl,” Larry said as they approached. “This is Special Agent Ortiz of the FBI.”
Carl, who had already met Larry in the morning, just inclined his head. Aaron offered a handshake, and said his name. Ortiz acknowledged the Grady family and Alex Vega with eye contact alone.
“These are Special Agents Miller,” Ortiz said, looking back at his colleagues, “and Casas.” The newly arrived special agents kept quiet and inclined their heads, not wanting to dive into what was clearly an in-progress conversation that Ortiz had picked up where he left off earlier in the day.
Approaching the group on the dock were the same two Coast Guard men that had boarded Carl's Zodiac earlier. They immediately commanded the attention of Ortiz. He glanced at Vega, shooting him a look that said, “who are these guys?” and Vega responded with a slight shrug that Ortiz interpreted as “beats me”.
“Good evening gentlemen, my name is Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Gibson and this is Chief Petty Officer Tom Baker,” the taller of the two young men said as he approached.
“Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Ray Ortiz, FBI,” Ortiz said, flashing his credentials, which Gibson took in his hand briefly to have a closer look. “And Special Agents, Gabriel Casas and Greg Miller.” In turn, Casas and Miller each offered their credentials for inspection.
“And I'm Larry Duncan. I am the project manager of this facility.”
Before Larry could take over the situation, Ortiz jumped. “What is your involvement here, Mr. Gibson?”
“Sir, we received a call from our group commander of intel forwarded from DHS reporting a missing person at sea. Joseph Grady. Mr. and Mrs. Grady here have confirmed this report. Our patrol boat, the USCG Grenadier, has already commenced a search pattern to find Joseph Grady.”
“Who made this call? You said DHS?” Ortiz asked.
“Sir, I don't have that information. You would have to ask Lieutenant Fox on the Grenadier.”
“What are the parameters of your search?”
“Normally, we are going to cover a radius of about one nautical mile out from El Pliegue, which will include all of the coastline of this island.”
“Just your patrol boat?”
“No, sir. Chief Baker and I will continue searching the rocky coastline in the RHI while Lieutenant Fox runs his grid on the Grenadier. I expect Lieutenant Fox also will order air support.”
“A plane?”
“No, sir. HH-60 Jayhawk,” Gibson said. Seeing the puzzled looks on most of his audience, he clarified, “A helicopter, sir.”
“Okay,” Ray Ortiz said. “Is there anything else you need from me?”
“No, sir. But we would like to get a download of what you found on your search,” Gibson said, turning to James and his family.
“Me, too,” said Ortiz. “Stick around. Vega?”
Detective Vega stepped up to offer his report. “We were split up on two boats, one with Carl, and the other with Aaron. I was on the boat with Carl, along with James and Eli. We searched most of the coastline, and we didn't find anything. The other boat was going to El Pliegue with sonar.”
Mark picked up where Vega had left off. “We could never get the sonar to work. There was some kind of distortion. And then it was pulled into El Pliegue by something, so we didn't get any sonar results.”
“What do you mean, pulled in?” Ortiz asked.
Aaron replied, “Look. We were having some kind of error from the side-scan sonar.” He looked at Carl briefly, and then directly at Larry. “The echoes were not returning at the right time. We could not get any meaningful readings out of it. I tried everything short of reprogramming the firmware. We were just about to give up on it when the towfish must have gotten snagged on something and the side-scan was pulled overboard by the cable.”
“That is not what happened!” Melissa said. “The thing didn't get snagged. The whole boat was rocked by whatever was pulling the towfish thing and the sonar was violently yanked from the boat and pulled straight down into the sinkhole.”
Melissa's outburst was met with stunned silence and raised eyebrows all around. Miller and Casas looked at each other silently communicating something like, “what have we gotten into?” But nobody disputed Melissa's assessment.
“You saw this?” Larry asked Mark.
“Yeah. It happened just like my mom said. The boat rocked, it felt like it might tip over, and then we noticed the cable from the towfish was pulled super tight just before the carabiner blew up and just like that the sonar went overboard and disappeared into the sinkhole.”
“Aaron?” Larry said. Aaron just nodded in response.
James suddenly realized that he was in the company of men who probably knew things about El Pliegue that no amount if internet research could turn up. He turned to the Coast Guard men and asked, “What exactly is down there?”
Gibson responded. “It's just a sinkhole, sir. It's much deeper than the surrounding sea floor, but besides that, there's nothing unusual about it.”
“Are you doing some kind of experiments there? Have you positioned equipment of some kind in the sinkhole?” Ortiz asked Larry.
&
nbsp; “Absolutely not. All of our work happens inside our lab here on the island. The sinkhole out there is just a geological feature that has nothing to do with our work.”
“Really?” Eli said. “Then what's with the buoys out there? These guys,” he waved his hands towards Aaron and Carl, “have been out there every day fiddling with some equipment on these buoys. Why would you do that if you don't have something out there?”
“We told you,” Larry said. “We are doing GPS research. We are monitoring GPS signals over a wide area that happens to include the water, which is why we have buoys out there. But there is nothing under the water. All of our equipment is attached to those buoys.”
“Sir,” Chief Baker said, “What equipment do you have on the buoys? And where exactly are these buoys?”
Carl answered for his boss. “The buoys happen to be located right over the closest edge of the sinkhole.” He pointed out over the water in the direction of El Pliegue. “It's just a coincidence that the sinkhole is there. We have laid out a network of GPS receivers on a grid throughout the island and four of our grid positions are in the water, and they happen to be on the edge of the sinkhole.” Larry affirmed Carl's description with a slight nod.
Baker continued, “What equipment do you have on the buoys?”
This time, Larry answered. “Over our whole network, as Carl described it, we have deployed an array of GPS receivers. It just so happens we are using cell phones with special software, since they each have portable GPS receivers that we can easily monitor wirelessly. So we have a couple dozen of these phones deployed all over the island. The four we initially put on the buoys have been replaced with a more precise instrument.” Larry had chosen his words carefully in effort to allay suspicion.
“Wait a minute,” Ortiz said. “Are you saying you have a network of these GPS monitoring stations with cell phones in them, but you upgraded the equipment in the buoys?”
“That's right.”
“Only the equipment in the buoys? The cell phones were good enough for a 'couple dozen,' as you said, other monitoring stations. But for some reason you needed to put a, um, 'more precise instrument', in the buoys. Is that right?”
“Yes,” Duncan said, realizing it sounded pretty suspicious when Ortiz laid it out.
“When?”
“Excuse me?” Larry said.
Ortiz clarified, “When, exactly, did you upgrade to these precise instruments, as you put it?”
“We upgraded those stations yesterday,” Duncan said.
“When did you first set up this grid?”
“Monday.”
Some pieces were falling into place for Ray Ortiz. “Why? Why Monday. What happened Monday that prompted you to put out a few dozen GPS monitoring stations?”
“We just needed them for our research.”
“How long have you been here, Mr. Duncan? Not you, specifically, but Thermion, with this facility. Doing this 'GPS research?' What, ten, twelve years? And only Monday, two days ago, did you begin to monitor GPS, what did you call it earlier today? GPS timing errors? Only Monday did you think it was worth it to monitor these GPS timing errors, after nearly a decade of research. Is that right? Am I getting the time line right?”
“Mr. Ortiz, I am sorry, but I can't—” Larry began to deliver his line about sharing trade secrets when Melissa interrupted.
“Something happened, didn't it?” she said gravely. “On Monday. When my son went missing, you knew something happened, so you had to put out special equipment to monitor it. But you knew, didn't you?”
“Mrs. Grady, I can assure you that our testing has nothing—”
Chief Baker interrupted Larry again. “Mr. Duncan, sir. We need to know exactly what these 'precision instruments' are on the buoys.”
Duncan was backed into a corner. He would prefer to talk to the Coast Guard guys about this in private, but here he was standing out on the dock for the world to see, and to ask them to retreat to his office would only raise Ortiz's suspicions, and he didn't need that. What he needed was for Carlton Lee to get here and call in favors with whomever he needed so he could get all of these people off of his island.
“Mr. ...” Duncan began.
“Baker. Chief Petty Officer Baker, sir.”
“Mr. Baker. Chief. Do you know what an atomic clock is? We put portable atomic clocks in the equipment boxes in those four buoys.”
“Atomic?”
“Atomic clocks. Not radioactive or anything. They are just very precise clocks that remain accurate for a very long time. They allow us to take more precise measurements in this location. More precise than the phones we had there before.”
“I thought you said this was GPS research?” Ortiz butted in.
“It is!” Larry said. “And like I said this morning, Mr. Ortiz, the GPS errors we are looking for are caused by tiny time errors. So we need equipment that can be used to measure tiny time errors.”
“Why do you need—” Eli jumped in, but Chief Baker interrupted again.
“Mr. Duncan, we will need you to cease this GPS testing in order for us to conduct our search.”
“Of course. We have already shut down our testing for the day.”
“And,” Chief Baker continued, “We need you to power down your network of monitoring devices, including these atomic clocks. You can resume your monitoring once our search pattern is done. That's a lot of potential interference. We won't take long to finish our search. We'll be searching overnight. Hopefully we will not delay your testing too much.”
“Okay,” Larry relented, weary of fighting. “I'll have to go back up to my office and call in some of our people to go out and power down the phones out on the island. Aaron and Carl will go out and shut down the atomic clocks in the buoys.”
“Good,” Gibson said. “Mr. Ortiz, here are the cell phone numbers you can use to contact myself and Lieutenant Fox. We will update you on what we find in our search effort. Meanwhile, besides the trip to go turn off the atomic clocks, we need you guys to stay off of the water while we conduct our search.” Gibson handed a card to Ray Ortiz.
Ortiz interrupted Gibson and Baker as they began to retreat to their boat. “I'd like you to take Special Agents Casas and Miller with you. Maybe one can go with you on the inflatable and the other can join with your patrol boat. Then they can keep us apprised of the search.”
“Sir, I would have to clear that with Lieutenant Fox,” Gibson responded. “But I guarantee you he is going to say 'no'. I suggest you contact him yourself so we can get on with the search.”
Ortiz let out an exasperated sigh but he knew this was probably right and not a fight he'd win standing on this dock. He'd have other things for Miller and Casas to do anyway in the meantime. “Okay, Mr. Gibson. I'll make the call to your Lieutenant.”
“If that's all?” Gibson said, and then after the briefest of pauses he and Baker turned and boarded their boat. They departed promptly from the dock and Ortiz could hear Gibson making a radio call to his patrol boat skipper as they pulled away.
Ortiz turned to Larry Duncan and said, “We'll all follow you back up to the facility. You said you can set up a command post for us. I expect more people to be joining us here soon and we'll need a place to set up.”
Great, Duncan thought. Just what we need: more FBI. The entire entourage began walking up the way to the building. “Okay, we have a conference room located near the lobby. I can give you that room.”
“We are going to also need unlimited access. I noticed your staff carrying badges, and your security man I talked to earlier said that you have a guard at the desk and all of the doors are badge-operated. We'll need you to issue us badges so we can move freely.”
“How about if we disable the card readers on the main door and conference room? That would be much quicker than programming a bunch of badges.”
“That will work,” Ortiz conceded. “And one other thing. The family,” he started.
“We can set them up in one of our dorms
.”
“Thanks.” Ortiz took his phone from his pocket and composed a quick text message to Special Agent Morales that read, “get everyone to roca stat. incl otero”. Within seconds the response came back, “k”. Here comes the cavalry.