Poisonfeather (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 2)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Gibson stared over at the Stingray and did some mental calculations. “Morning or afternoon?”

  “Afternoon. Between two and four. Can you be ready?”

  It would be cutting things close, very close, but it was feasible. It had to be done, so it would be done. Although it meant letting certain basics, such as eating and sleeping, go by the wayside.

  “Then I won’t delay you any further. If I can be of any further assistance, hang a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on room 103.”

  The door had hardly closed when there came a second knock at the door. Gibson expected the fisherman had forgotten something, but it was Lea with a paper sack of burgers and fries. His stomach rumbled at the sight of it. He hoped she was just dropping it off—he had no time for social calls—but she seemed intent on staying. They sat on the open back of the van and ate while he talked her through his progress.

  “I should be ready to go by tomorrow, so I think we’re in good shape,” he said.

  “I saw Jimmy Temple drinking at the bar in the Toproll.”

  “So?”

  “Jimmy never comes in. Never. No one went anywhere near him, like he was contagious. Looked like he’d stopped eating. Suit didn’t fit. Lost ten, maybe twenty pounds,” Lea said. “I asked him, was he okay. He said they just keep checking in. He didn’t sound happy about it either. He knows something bad is coming down. The whole town does.”

  “And they’re right.”

  “I think someone got to the sheriff. Margo said he’s been in and out of the hotel the last few days. It’s getting tense out there.”

  “I know, Lea. I know. What’s your point?”

  “Last night can’t happen again,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of deal you have with Swonger, but don’t play hero with my life again. You want me to back you again, don’t leave me in the dark like that. Does my hundred thousand buy me at least that much?”

  “Is that why you did it?”

  “Does it?”

  “It won’t happen again.”

  She studied his face, a picture of sincerity. “All right, then. I’ll leave you to it.”

  After Lea left, he realized it hadn’t even occurred to him to tell her about the fisherman.

  The third knock didn’t come for another few hours—this time it really was Swonger. Gibson opened the door for him and went back to work. Neither man spoke. Swonger dragged a Thule roof box into the garage and laid it out on the floor. He worked diligently on his solution to the antennae problem, cutting four slots into the roof box that the antennae would fit inside. Gibson helped secure it to the roof, and then the two men stood back and admired it. The only question it might raise was why a van would need rooftop storage; otherwise it worked well. Gibson was impressed.

  “Nice work.” He held out the .45 to Swonger.

  “Thanks.”

  Gibson put a hand in his back pocket and touched the firing pin and stop. “I have another job for you.”

  “Yeah?” Swonger sounded surprised, maybe even a little hopeful. His default cockiness hadn’t returned since Truck Noble had almost used him as a croquet ball. Gibson didn’t mind that at all.

  “You seen the fisherman staying at the hotel?” Gibson asked.

  “Asian dude? Yeah, once or twice.”

  “I need to know how he’s spending his days.”

  “You mean besides fishing?”

  “Yeah,” Gibson snapped back. “Besides fishing.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  While a Stingray could mimic a cell tower, it wasn’t one. So once a phone connected, it would take only a few seconds for the phone to realize it couldn’t make contact with its service provider, disconnect, and move on to the next strongest signal. But that was all the time it took for the Stingray to capture a phone number. It was an outstanding if highly controversial law-enforcement tool for tracking down a suspect’s phone. In earlier generations, that was as far as it went. Police hadn’t been able to listen in on conversations, because cell-phone data was encrypted at the source and could be decrypted only by the intended recipient.

  That was no longer an issue.

  With FishHawk and Porpoise, the latest generations of Stingray software, during the brief connection, the Stingray would record a phone’s unique encryption key. Later, when that phone connected to a real cell tower and placed a call, the Stingray could listen in to calls or read outgoing texts. After the complications at the junkyard, Gibson hoped that capturing Merrick’s cell-phone number would be exactly that simple. Or at the very least, that no one would point a gun at them. That would be nice. He hadn’t had nearly enough sleep for more of that.

  The cell tower nearest the prison sat on a hillside at the northern edge of town. The prison lay at the outer edge of its effective range, accounting for the generally piss-poor reception. The clearing that Gibson and Lea had scoped out on their hike was only a quarter mile from the prison, ensuring that the Stingray’s signal would be by far the more powerful. Cell phones always hunted for the strongest signal as a way to conserve battery life, so every phone at the prison would jump at the Stingray as soon as it came online.

  Gibson managed to get them set up in the clearing in plenty of time for the fisherman’s window of opportunity in the afternoon. That allowed him to practice using the Stingray’s software to capture calls. Really, it was a one-person job, but trust was at a premium since the junkyard, and Lea had insisted on spectating. Since he still had not told Lea about the visit from the fisherman, Gibson went through the charade of Parker shadowing Merrick to alert them if Merrick went anywhere near the library to make a call.

  “Where’s Swonger anyway?” Lea asked.

  Swonger had made himself scarce since Gibson had tasked him with keeping tabs on the fisherman.

  “Running errands.”

  “Is he all right? Hasn’t seemed himself.”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  Lea shook her head. “What’s your deal? You two friends?”

  Gibson realized that Lea had no idea of the nature of his relationship with Swonger.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Including today? Three weeks.”

  “That’s it? Would have gotten that one wrong.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You act like brothers.”

  “Brothers? Are you incredibly high right now?”

  “Oh, come on. The guy worships you.”

  “Now I know you’re high.”

  “He’d wear a Gibson Vaughn mask on Halloween if they sold them.”

  “Is that why he keeps pulling a gun on me?”

  “Keeps? That wasn’t the first time?” Lea pondered that tidbit. “Well, sometimes bad attention is better than no attention at all. Trust me. Maybe pointing a gun at you is the only way he knows to get it.”

  “Well, it’s not working.”

  Swonger’s Scion pulled into the clearing alongside the van, which brought a welcome end to the conversation and allowed Gibson to get back to work.

  A few minutes after three, Parker texted that Merrick was on his way to the library. Lea let out a scream, and Swonger’s feet came pounding back to the van. There was general high-fiving while Gibson pretended to be surprised that they’d gotten lucky on their first day. He powered on the Stingray and watched numbers scroll down the laptop as phones within range began connecting. The fisherman hadn’t been wrong—close to five hundred phones attempted to connect within the first sixty seconds. Not all could be from the prison, of course, but the Stingray couldn’t differentiate, so Gibson started by eliminating all the numbers that had connected so far, narrowing his search parameters to more easily spot Merrick when he inserted his SIM card into the guard’s phone.

  “He’s in the library now,” Lea relayed from her phone.

  They crowded around the screen. Over the next few minutes, seventy-two new phone numbers connected and then disconnected from the Stingray. O
n a second window, Gibson watched to see if any of them made calls. One did to a West Virginia number, which was a very good sign. It was a text:

  5616.kl B10K@MKT;4398.kl B50K@MKT;3675.kl S150K@LMT160;2212.kl B100K@MKT;4536.kl B200K@MKT;2301.kl S75K@MKT;1320.kl H100K;1102 H250K;2424.kl H50K;6676.kl H75K;1506.kl H210K

  It went on and on like that, line after line, fifty-six texts in all. The Stingray enabled them to read only Merrick’s outgoing texts, so any replies were lost.

  “What is that? Some kind of code?” Swonger said.

  “No,” Lea said with a grin. “It’s stock notation—‘.kl’ means he’s trading on the Bursa Malaysia. Those are buy and sell orders. The four numbers is the stock. B is buy. S is sell. Not sure about H. MKT is market price; LMT is a limit order. Ten thousand shares at the market price. And so on.”

  “Wait,” Gibson said, the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. “So he’s selling one hundred fifty thousand shares of whatever LB is at a hundred sixty dollars a share? How much is that?”

  “Twenty-four million,” Lea said quickly.

  “Holy shit,” Gibson said. “How much money does he have?”

  “If it’s dollars,” Lea cautioned.

  “Been saving his pennies like a boss,” Swonger said in an awed whisper.

  “Why Malaysia?” Gibson asked.

  “Malaysia went dark,” Lea explained. “It doesn’t share financial information with the United States. Perfect for someone who needs to invest without our government interfering.”

  “Gangster,” Swonger said.

  “Can you send all that to me?” Lea asked. “I want to figure something out.”

  Gibson nodded as Merrick sent a final text:

  Confirmed. This will be our final communication prior to my release. When I reach secure location, I’ll send for you. Sit tight but be ready. Stick to the plan. You’ve done well.

  And that was it. Merrick’s number vanished from the Stingray’s list. They all sat back in relief and disbelief.

  “Is that it?” Swonger asked. “We’ve got it?”

  Gibson nodded that they did. The question was what to do with it.

  “West Virginia ain’t Texas, but it ain’t your backyard either.”

  Swonger had been arguing about the relative size of West Virginia for a while now. After their success at the prison, they’d returned to Lea’s apartment above the Toproll, where a debate raged about what to do now. All three had strong opinions about next steps, and with no one willing to roll over, they were at the stage of an argument where they simply reiterated earlier points at ever-increasing volume. This is how her parents had always fought, neither budging an inch, and it made Lea uncomfortable to be a part of it. She looked over the table of empty beer bottles that pointed to the growing futility of continued discussion.

  In the bathroom, she splashed water on her face. This was getting them nowhere.

  It boiled down to this: Charles Merrick’s contact used a West Virginia cell phone, but that didn’t mean he was in West Virginia. The phone could be in Barcelona for all any of them knew. But why get a West Virginia cell phone if you weren’t local? And hadn’t the last text said to “sit tight”? Didn’t that suggest that whoever it was had to be close? Most likely, but it might also mean they were meeting somewhere else—like Barcelona. And so the debate raged on regarding whether or not to call the number. Gibson agreed it might be possible to social-engineer the person at the other end, perhaps get them to give them something that would narrow their search. But he also cautioned it could go the other way, that they could spook their targets and cause them to shut down for good. They’d get only one shot at it.

  Swonger ran out of steam, which meant it was Gibson’s turn again. For what seemed like the thousandth time, he argued that the safest solution was to play the odds that the phone was in state, create a grid map, and comb West Virginia with the Stingray until it registered a hit for the phone number that Merrick had texted. Then the Stingray could triangulate the signal and lead them to its owner. But that led Swonger back to his argument about the relative size of West Virginia.

  “Dog, there are seventy thousand miles of road in West Virginia.” Swonger had Googled that figure and felt committed to his research. “If it’s even in West Virginia.”

  Lea listened to them bicker from the bathroom. A thought occurred to her.

  “Will the Stingray work if the target phone is off?” she called into the other room. She heard silence in return and went out to find Swonger staring at Gibson expectantly.

  “Does it?” she asked.

  “No,” Gibson said. “The phone would need to be on.”

  “Well, what if whoever it is keeps the phone off except when Merrick is scheduled to make contact?”

  Gibson made a face that said it hadn’t occurred to him.

  “So shouldn’t we make sure it’s on? It’s a pretty state, but we have better things to do than sightsee for the nine days. Don’t you think?”

  Gibson nodded.

  “See?” Swonger said as though he’d won the argument. “That’s what I was saying.”

  Once Gibson was on board, she watched him snap into action. He laid out a pretense for the call and started crafting a script to get something useful out of whoever was at the other end of the phone. Again she was impressed at how his mind worked.

  “Is it a man or a woman?” Gibson wondered aloud.

  “A man,” Lea said without hesitation.

  “Why?”

  “Women at Merrick Capital only answered the phones. And after the divorce, I don’t think trusting women is high on his list.”

  Gibson smiled at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’ll make the call. You used to act, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but why me? Isn’t this what you do?”

  “If it’s someone Merrick trusts, then it’s someone who thinks like him. Someone who doesn’t take women seriously. All you have to do is play the sweet girl. Lull them. Can you do sweet?”

  She held up her middle finger.

  “Perfect. You’re a natural.”

  Together, they honed Gibson’s script until Lea felt comfortable with it. Then he had her practice with him until she knew it backward and forward.

  “I’m ready.”

  Gibson checked the time.

  “No, too soon. These guys always call at dinnertime.”

  They got something to eat themselves and reconvened in Lea’s apartment at seven o’clock. When she was ready, Gibson played a recording of the background noise of a busy call center. The burbling sound of ringing phones and dozens of voices filled her apartment. She dialed the number. It rang six times and went to voice mail—a mechanical voice recited the number and gave instructions for leaving a message. She hung up, and Gibson killed the soundtrack.

  “Should I call back?”

  “Wait an hour. We don’t want to be too eager.”

  The time passed in silence, heavy like they were waiting for news on a loved one in surgery. Swonger turned on the TV and found an old Simpsons episode. She went to the bathroom and threw up her dinner. The way she always had before an audition. It settled her down, and she felt better. She called again at eight. This time someone picked up but didn’t speak. Lea listened to the hypnotic static until Gibson’s snapping fingers spurred her to speak.

  “Hello. Good evening. I’m calling on behalf of the governor’s office. How are you this evening?”

  Silence on the other end. She made a frightened face at Gibson, afraid whoever it was had hung up. Gibson made an exaggerated smile and spun his finger for her to keep going.

  “Hello?” she said cheerfully. “Is anyone there?”

  “Who is this?” A young adult male voice, wary and soft.

  “Oh, I do apologize, sir. This is my first day. My name is Annie Silver. I work in the governor’s office here in Charleston, and we’re taking an informal survey on a proposed bill to fund West Virginia public schools
—”

  “Wait, who is this?”

  “Annie Silver from the governor’s office?”

  “Oh, yeah, look, I don’t vote.”

  “But you are a resident of West Virginia, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yeah, but I’m . . .”

  Gibson pumped his fist and began tapping the list of questions that they’d written to help narrow their search area.

  “Still, we’re interested in all our citizens’ opinions. May I ask you our survey questions? How do you feel about the redistricting that’s—”

  “I told you I don’t want to answer any questions.” His voice hardened, but he didn’t hang up. Gibson pointed to a different question on the list, but Lea knew if she asked it, he’d be gone.

  Instead, she said, “That’s okay. I don’t really like asking them, to tell you the truth.”

  She was completely off script now. Gibson mouthed, “What are you doing?” She held up her hand and turned away so she could concentrate on the voice at the other end of the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, only my third call. I’m not really good at it.”

  “Oh, no, you were okay.”

  “Really?” she said, allowing her voice to brighten.

  “Definitely. Politics just isn’t my thing.”

  “I appreciate that so much. I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing here. I just moved to Charleston for this job, and I don’t know anybody.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know how that is. But maybe it’ll get better?”

  “You’re really nice. Do you live in Charleston?” She held her breath.

  “No, I’m about two hours away.”

  “That’s not so far. Maybe you could drive in some time?”

  “Wish I could, but . . . how did you get this number?” Changing topics on a dime’s edge. He sounded completely different, paranoid and unhinged, like a madman had snatched the phone away.

  “Oh, uh, I don’t know. They just give us a call sheet, and we’re supposed to go down the list.”

  “What’s my name?”

  Lea didn’t expect the question and drew a hard blank, almost said “Gibson Vaughn” because he was in her line of sight, and spluttered out the author of the book she was reading.