DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3)

by T. J. Brearton

  “Hi, John,” she said, putting it to her ear.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Rascher sounded furious and afraid at the same time.

  She glanced at Bostrom. “I’ve gotten more information this afternoon than in the past seven months.”

  “Jennifer, this is insane.”

  “I agree.”

  Rascher didn’t know what else to say. He wasn’t used to this. She felt a perverse twinge of pride. No, he wasn’t used to it at all. He was used to her being tractable. But that had started to end the day she was taken up into a skyscraper and poisoned. And what little remained of her pliancy, was circling the drain now after watching cops shoot members of her security detail, turn a weapon on a defenseless woman, and have her supervisor dismiss a possible 911 record of it all.

  Bostrom gave her a quick glance. They bounced down the old logging roads, at times so hard she was lifted right up out of her seat. If it hadn’t been such a dire situation, it might’ve even been fun.

  “I’ve gotta go, John,” she said, and ended the call. Then she lowered the window, and threw her phone out into a blur of pine needles. Bostrom glanced over again.

  “I hunt out here,” he explained after a moment. “Some of the other guys know this area. A few. But I think we’re going to be in the clear.”

  True to his words, a few minutes later they emerged from the woods and were on a dirt road alongside an old cow pasture. There were two large boulders and a grove of small fir trees, huddled together like an oasis. They came to the end of the dirt way and the truck jumped onto the hard surface of a more major route where Bostrom cut a right turn. They got up to speed and were on their way again. No cops in sight, no one behind them. And nothing above.

  “Bostrom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  He piloted the big truck along at a sane speed of sixty miles an hour. The road was wet from the afternoon storm, the puddles evaporating, a mist in the air.

  “Alexander Heilshorn saw multiple opportunities in XList,” Bostrom said.

  She took one of the water bottles he had stashed in his duffel bag and drank. “Such as?”

  “Prostitutes gathering information, prostitutes causing scandals, even prostitutes committing murder.” Bostrom raised his eyebrows. “You made it your career to investigate this stuff.”

  “I did and I didn’t. I’m interested in the common denominator. In big black market busts, it’s always the money that leads to the big players, never the product. That’s what you follow. And, occasionally, you see that money go to the top, somewhere it really shouldn’t. But when that happens, you’re dealing with something dangerous; you have to tread very carefully.”

  Bostrom nodded. She sounded like she was convincing herself as much as him.

  Jennifer amended, “But, in the end, it’s about the people. The women involved, the children involved. You’re right. That’s my job.”

  “Argon was worried about them, too. I think baby Sloane triggered that for him, for sure. Really brought it home. As I’m sure you know, the more the FBI has been coming after black markets, organizations like XList go deeper underground.”

  They took an on-ramp and merged with the flow of traffic on an interstate. Jennifer was about to question the use of a major route, but Bostrom spoke first. “Plus, you have the money side, like you said. Only, bitcoin gets hacked, people lose millions, bitcoin gets tracked, people get arrested, what happens? That goes deeper, too. The way of transacting business online goes into total stealth mode.”

  Nonsystem, she thought. Hackers. People managing newer and more sophisticated ways to conceal the path of the money — the path which so often led to the answers. But who was Nonsystem? Libertarians paving the way for more ways to purchase drugs, guns, and humans outside the spotlight of government? If that was all there was to them, theirs was a dark crusade.

  “The authorities make busts,” Bostrom said, driving, “and you’ve got people who’ve invested millions into these black markets, and then are taken down. Drug kingpins arrested, accused of running illicit online businesses worth billions.”

  She ran a shaky hand through her still-wet hair and took a deep breath. “You’re taking me to meet them.”

  “Philomena had compiled one of the most comprehensive lists of corruption, money-laundering, bribery, and black market scheming. A civilian’s NSA, turned on the government. Seamus knew he had something valuable, but what do you do with that? He was either going to get it into the right hands, or he was just going to take things into his own hands when the time was right.” He gave her a quick glance. “Yes, I am taking you to meet a few people in the Nonsystem group.”

  She felt excited and fearful at the same time, a paradoxical mixture that cycled through her system, jittering her nerves. “When Argon visited Brendan Healy in the middle of the Heilshorn investigation, he didn’t tell him any of this? Why?”

  “That’s when I met Argon. That same time. Argon knew Brendan was being watched — figured he could’ve been bugged. So he was cautious. Plus, Heilshorn stayed deep behind the curtain until Rebecca’s murder. That’s when it all started to come out.”

  “How and why did Heilshorn push his business into this region? Proximity to Albany?”

  “That’s part of it. Here’s the other: there’s heat on XList in the beginning, the Feds are too close. There are a couple of busts, nothing that ties Heilshorn to XList, but they lose some of the girls. They need fresh recruits. So, Lawrence Taber is the key.”

  Taber, she thought. “You know about Taber and—?”

  “Sloane, yes. Argon told me. Not that it’s public information, far from it. Heilshorn has been using it against Taber for years, using it to manipulate the man and his department once XList moved into the region.”

  Jennifer was familiar with parts of the background story. She’d shared it with fifty people in the Robert F. Kennedy building just a few mornings previously, before Rascher had picked her up and this whole thing had started going crazy. Argon and Taber had been friends as young men — Argon the older and more cynical one. Taber had made the mistake of falling for a girl who was trying to escape her pimp, a man named Jerry Brown. Brown had big plans, and he’d just gotten in with a financial backer willing to give his organization the cash to expand, but to also provide a very unorthodox service — Heilshorn would become the in-house obstetrician. It made even more sense now, darker sense; everything with the girls would be controlled, including pregnancies.

  The whole thing had been sparked by a young woman Taber had become smitten with: Lana Mazursky, a Russian immigrant inducted into the sex trade by Jerry Brown. She and Taber were Sloane’s biological parents. Argon had tried to help Taber, to find Lana when she went missing, but he’d ended up getting to her too late. He’d found her giving birth to the baby in an alleyway in a derelict section of the city. An intentional baby, a pregnancy she’d wanted with Taber, nearly destroyed by Jerry Brown, who’d tried to abort it with his fists.

  Taber hadn’t known, not for years. Argon had kept it from him. Taber was on his way to do good things, he’d already met someone new. But Alexander Heilshorn had known; it was what had given him the idea for XList. And when the time came to infiltrate Albany, he’d blackmailed Lawrence Taber with Sloane.

  Sloane Dewan had been the birth of an idea for Heilshorn. A way of doing business, of ensuring his investments, using humans as collateral.

  “Rebecca was really the beta phase,” Bostrom said. “The Heilshorns are a twisted family. Probably she’d been abused growing up. Heilshorn sets her on Philip Largo when the assemblyman finds out about the data center. After that, Rebecca gets in deeper. But, willingly. Almost like an act of defiance. If she can’t get out, she’ll make an even bigger mess of things, who knows? Maybe she liked it, too. Eventually Reginald Forrester is called in to handle it, to put a scare on her. But Jane . . . Olivia Jane took it the extra step. I was the OSO on the murder.”
/>   “And now you’re the one telling me all of this. Would you be willing to testify?”

  “Testify?” Bostrom tossed her another look. Then he patted his sidearm. “That’s the only testifying I’m gonna do.”

  She allowed the macho talk to stand for now, but all this bluster about Wild West justice — that was where she took issue, she realized. That was her sticking point. “Alright. Tell me why Gerard Healy trusted Philomena enough to furnish her with what he had on Heilshorn.”

  “She didn’t ask. The woman was born to be a spy, I’m telling you. She raided Gerard’s laptop, copied the hard drive.”

  “And?”

  “Gerard had published a paper on processed foods causing inflammation of the arteries, for one. It flew in the face of the popular opinion that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. That this is just money-making BS from the opinion-makers in bed with Big Agribusiness and Big Pharma who want to sell low-fat food and pills. His paper gets some reactions, stakeholders in companies who have been highly profitable for years making money off human disease. And it gets him booted from The Foundation which is advising private equity firms and multinational corporations on things related to medicine and technology, like you said.”

  “So he’s upset? What? Wants to get back at them?”

  “He’s just a freedom fighter. I mean, Gerard Healy is a sophisticated guy, you know, liked his wine, spoke a couple languages, but a rebel at heart. They pushed him out so he started an anti-Foundation campaign, talking about how the government is run by corporations. Specifically, Titan’s relationship to the government.”

  “Then he succumbs to a grand mal seizure.”

  Bostrom looked over at her as he slowed the car at a red light. “That’s right. Titan is flexing its power.”

  “Can you prove they’re responsible?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not until years later, not until Rebecca’s murder, that Argon makes the connection. He starts to put it together at the same time Brendan Healy is working the case, like I said. I mean, Healy’s the reason we’re talking right now.”

  She scowled and peered out into the rain. “Right, because when Argon died, it drew Healy back in. The whole thing comes full circle.”

  “Taber really lassoed him.”

  Taber, she thought. On permanent vacation.

  And: They’re all dead and buried somewhere.

  Jennifer took another deep breath. She glanced in the side-view mirror and saw headlights coming up behind fast them. It made her heart jump, until she realized it was a civilian vehicle, jockeying for position on the interstate. Traffic was thickening now as they drove southeast, towards more populated areas, and commuters headed home from a day at the office. The storm was moving off ahead of them. It felt like they were chasing it.

  “Does Philomena still have the data?”

  “No. We do.”

  “Where are we going, exactly?”

  He wore a skeptical expression.

  “Come on,” she said. “I threw my phone out the window for God’s sake. You can trust me.”

  His mouth twitched into a smile. “Cape Cod,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN / THURSDAY, 6:09 PM

  After the storm, the late afternoon was sun-splashed, cooler than before, the wind calm, as Staryles rode the Oak Bluffs Ferry over to Nantucket Island. Two Black Hawk helicopters appeared in the sky above a distant ridge of receding clouds. Staryles looked over the top of his newspaper and watched. Ferry passengers oohed and aahed as the choppers hammered the air. They were Air National Guard helicopters, equipped like ambulances. They could each carry as many as six patients and were able to fly speeds up to two hundred and fifteen miles per hour.

  A young boy, held aloft by his father, pointed over the water. Cutting across the surface in the distance were two Coast Guard skiffs. Staryles knew they carried divers.

  The whole rescue drill operation consisted of multiple parties: Barnstable County Regional Emergency Planning Committee; the towns of Sandwich, Mashpee and Dennis; Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, Coast Guard, National Guard and private organizations such as Cape Air and MedFlight emergency air services. It would last into dark, simulating conditions that provided for a challenging environment for the rescuers to work in.

  “Federal, state, and local partnerships are the key to preparedness,” Geoff Tambour had told the press earlier that morning. Indeed, thought Staryles, watching the skiffs cruise smoothly over the Nantucket Sound. The key to preparedness.

  There were three soldiers on the skiffs, divers who had a different agenda from the rest. No doubt those three were donning their gear at that moment, readying their Halligans — a mean-looking tool that firefighters also used, with a sharp ax-end and a crowbar end — for the trip underwater. They would plan to be there all night, ostensibly part of the salvage crew.

  But not really.

  The drill was a simulation of an airplane crash with one person seriously injured and a dozen more wounded. Airlifting the wounded was part of it, as was underwater searching for the two people who were launched out of the plane during the faux crash, and extricating the materials put in place ahead of time which would serve as the wreckage of the non-existent crash. The drill had been designed months ago, and called Operation Hopeful Lift. The Black Hawks would act as MedFlight and airlift the injured safely to Joint Base Cape Cod. From there they’d be taken to Falmouth Hospital by ambulances. Nantucket had been the chosen site of the drill because of its remote location. It was difficult to get to the island quickly, and presented a formidable challenge.

  As the ferry neared the central part of the island, on the north shore, the Coast Guard skiffs began slipping out of sight behind the land. The site of the faux crash was on the south side, chosen because it presented just that much more of a challenge.

  It also happened to be where a critical branch of the Mid-Atlantic Cable came into the United States, carrying the information from countries all over the world into the US. The cable island-skipped from the south side of Nantucket over to Tuckmuck, across the sound to Chappaquiddick, then banked north and shot beneath the waters of Cotuit Bay before making landfall in Falmouth. But, after today, the information it carried would be lost, thanks to those three rogue divers.

  He turned his attention to the Black Hawks as they circled Nantucket, watching them through his sunglasses, listening to the rapid chop of the tail rotors. The newspaper still in his hands, the article on the massive drill there on the front page: “This can be replicated anywhere,” Deputy Fire Chief Brett Mason was quoted. “Heaven forbid, this was to ever to happen on the Islands. And if Route 6 ever got flooded, turning Provincetown into an island, we would be ready.”

  There was no mention of the cable. People rarely thought about such things. Most didn’t know how the internet worked, how they were able to email an expat relative, play an online game with someone on another continent, or send money across the ocean.

  Publicly-held companies that powered huge sections of the US stock market and world economies depended on international trade. The modern economy was global, and the cables linking the World Wide Web were its arteries, its nerves. The internet, in its physical form, was akin to the squid wrapped around the ship in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Cut off one of its tentacles and you could isolate America from the world and cripple the international economy.

  The divers would work all night.

  Staryles folded up the paper and wedged it under his arm. He and the other fifty or so passengers aboard the Oak Bluffs Ferry watched as the choppers descended. The divers would be throwing themselves over the bow and into the sea, holding onto their breathing regulators with one hand, clutching their Halligans in another, tools to extricate the imaginary people from imaginary wreckage.

  The axe blades glinting in the bright sunlight as they splashed into the cool blue waters.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT / THURSDAY, 6:31 PM

  The first rosy fingers of dusk pa
inted the Eastern sky as the sun set behind them. Billowing clouds sat on the horizon, flat-bottomed, tinged salmon by the light. They were less than an hour from Cape Cod.

  Jennifer’s father had been a district court judge in Rockland County. He’d bought a small home in Cotuit years ago. She remembered her father telling her the story of how the town was settled. In fact, he’d told her more than once - he’d been getting to the age when men told the same story again and again and didn’t know it. Cotuit was purchased by Miles Standish in the mid-1600s for a large brass kettle and a broad hoe. It had a ring to it, like a nursery rhyme.

  “Why Cape Cod?”

  “That’s where Argon’s place is,” Bostrom said. “For one thing.”

  The 600 square miles of island cape jutting out from Massachusetts didn’t seem the likeliest place a beat cop would vacation. But, maybe that was the point. “Who knows about it?”

  “Nobody. His lawyer. Maybe Brendan Healy, who saw Argon’s will, I think.”

  “No one looking to shut you down knows? Why risk it?”

  “Argon’s dead,” Bostrom said. “He left the house to his sister in the will. Where is a seventy-something stroke victim going to go? As long as she’s alive, the place just sits there. We watched it for months, swept it; it’s clean.”

  He made an abrupt lane change. She checked his speed and saw the needling climbing to ninety.

  “We’re going to get pulled over . . .”

  “How much do you know about the military installation there?”

  “What my father told me, what I’ve learned on the job. Camp Cotuit trained units that eventually stormed the Pacific beaches in World War II, including New Guinea. But Cotuit was really a satellite camp for Edwards.”

  “Tell me about Edwards.”

  “Edwards is the largest part of Joint Base Cape Cod. Home to the National Guard and the Air National Guard; 3rd Battalion and 126th Aviation unit. It was deactivated after the Korean War. They faced a complete shut-down in the 90s but stayed open; there were strong objections from the military community to its closure. Now it’s home to two training centers.”