Old Growth & Ivy (The Spook Hills Trilogy Book 1)

by Menard, Jayne

  “The operations are veiled in secrecy. We only know what we have found from two places here in the States that local police shut down. We think the operation is big and runs on an international scale. That’s why I have the case. My teams and I only pursue complex, high-impact multinational matters.”

  “Are there really that many men who are so twisted they want,” she hesitated to say it.

  “Children. Yeah. And not only men. Women can be twisted in that way too. There are likely many of these places in major cities in the U.S. and in Europe. We have inquiries out to all our counterparts around the world and to local police in the U.S., searching for more information – anything that will lead us to the perps who supply the children.”

  He leaned closer to her again, his eyes fastened on hers. “Ms. Littleton, we have to stop this travesty. We need your help. So if your team has found anything at all that could move this case along faster and help us to identify the perps, we want it. We will find the information anyway, but you might be able to speed this process along.”

  She moved back behind her desk, turned her back to the agent and gazed out her window at the sunny October day. Way down below, the Willamette River reflected the morning light, forming a silvery blue strip that flowed serenely, cutting the city down the middle and crossed by the many bridges of Portland. All around the city, children were on their way to school, living in relative safety and freedom. The very thought of children enslaved as Agent Nielsen described was chillingly disturbing. Her priorities were always clear – do what is in the best interests of the Company, their clients, and their employees and do it in a legal and ethical manner. They would have to comply with the court order, sooner or later. However, what Agent Nielsen was asking for now went beyond that. Still the disclosure of her team’s preliminary findings would cause no direct harm to her Company or its employees, even if any issues were there to be found. At some point, any problems that surfaced would have to be disclosed to the bank owning the data or documents. Despite her misgivings, she felt she had an obligation to act in a way that was best for the larger community. She turned to face the big agent.

  “If you find anything based on my staff’s notes or work papers, I want to review it.”

  “And you won’t tip the banks off.”

  “If we find something suspicious, we have to include it in our report.”

  “How long can you give us?”

  “The reports are due out in November on a staggered basis, however for any major finding, we typically give a heads-up as we go along.”

  “Look, we’re not after the banks here, not unless their involvement is egregious. Let me know a few days before any issues related to this case are disclosed to the banks. Agreed?”

  “Yes, but Agent Nielsen,” Ivy began.

  “Call me Steve.”

  She regarded at him for a moment, uncertain if she wanted to drop formality in their communications. The aggressive posturing was no longer in his body language or in his expression. “Okay Steve, I still do not understand why you are here and not going directly to the banks.”

  “We think someone at one or more banks may be involved in the money movement from the child brothels to the mastermind behind this operation. A person in some position of authority at each bank is doing the approvals and keeping the transactions of sizeable amounts of cash from coming under scrutiny. We don’t want to sound any alarms that could tip off the perps.”

  “How do you know it is these banks that we have as clients?”

  “Certain records from the two operations in the U.S. that were shut down indicated doing business with those three banks.”

  “How did you find out about us?” Ivy knew she was grilling the big agent, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “You can thank another agent on my team, Harvard, er, Mathew Heylen for that. He searched for other companies that could have access to bank data. He found your website and then made a few calls.”

  “Why not go to the Federal Reserve? That data is in their Fed Wire System, right? Or in the private banking CHIPS system?”

  Steve shook his head. “They each move with the speed of a dung beetle. We have the requests out. Our pace of haste is not in their vocabulary. We have been shaking them up, but no results so far. Besides they only have the electronic files. You have copies of the supporting documents.”

  “My clients can’t learn that we are the source of your findings. It will end our business. If you go after the banks in addition to this perp, you must get the data from another source.”

  “Understand. We can handle it without reference to your company.”

  Her assistant interrupted with a call from their internal counsel. Ivy smiled at Steve, who for the first time that morning smiled back, just a little smile that curled up the edges of his lips. Ivy noticed that his eyes had lost that piercing hard gray-blue. She liked the changes.

  ***

  That evening at home, Ivy Littleton reclined on a couch in her living room for a few minutes, enjoying a cold glass of spring water with a translucently thin slice of lemon. While it was already dark outside, the air was unseasonably warm for October in Portland, and Ivy was enjoying a little breeze that came in through the long casement windows. Her two corgis were nearby, with her tri-colored Harry dog stretched out flat on his side. The other corgi, Cleo, had tucked her plump yet still elegant body up against the couch to enjoy having Ivy reach down and cuddle her ears. Druid, her aging grey-striped cat, was taking his after dinner bath on the corner of the dining room carpet. Her pets were her guardians -- little fluffs of soldiers faithfully on duty, even at rest.

  Ivy felt tiredness hovering over her like a specter pressing on her chest, weighing her down. She breathed deeply and concentrated on thinking about her life and her future. Sometimes Ivy viewed her world as a farce -- all gilded success and happiness on the outside; parched and barren within. If she had to pick a color for her life, it would be a dull brown, the color of dried mud, at least as she saw it these days. While retirement would be a welcome change for her after all the stress at the office, she worried about filling the hours. She needed to dramatically change her life, regain a sound degree of physical fitness, find some fascinating new challenges and soar off the cliff that marked retirement. Most importantly, she wanted to avoid the safe path down to obscurity.

  Her mind wandered on the breeze in the way it did these days, scuttling away from serious thoughts. Her days at work had so many demands that her ability to concentrate had waned. While she still loved her career and its challenges, her nervous system was sidling towards breakdown territory.

  A few years before, Ivy sublimated all her energies into work, putting up walls of no interest with prospective suitors. Two failed marriages, along with too many affairs and dates, had led her to that decision. Now with retirement looming, she would have time for a relationship. How would she find someone different and yet suitable? She used to be attracted to the delusionary charms of dreamers. Now more mature and independent, she wanted a man who would make good on his dreams. She thought then about Agent Nielsen. He was a man of action and she was attracted to him. At the same time, he was at the extreme end of the spectrum. She could not imagine how any romantic liaison could work with him, given his demanding nature. She needed to find a middle ground between a man like him and men who were dreamers.

  He had woken something in her. She had to acknowledge that. While annoyed with his manner and demands, she had been challenged in good ways too. She found herself disappointed when he told her late in the afternoon that he was flying out that night to work on a different case, leaving the other two agents there – Brian with the nice manners and smile and the offbeat agent called Moll. Steve’s eyes lingered on hers when he added that he would return at the end of the week for a briefing.

  With her retirement date set, Ivy wanted to consider dating again, although dating at 62 sounded ridiculous. How would she have the patience to sift through all the misfits, the
losers, the bores, the men with peculiar habits, or the fellows who only wanted a share of her comfortable retirement? At a gathering last week after work, one woman talked about having 85 Internet first dates, which seemed like an excessive number of cups of coffee to find one man. Ivy doubted she would have the patience, much less the fortitude.

  The timing was premature anyway. The overload of her nervous system made her question her ability to handle the complexities of a relationship. Ivy was a driven achiever and a leader, pulling away from a mediocre upbringing to define herself and her life. Her ambition gave her success. On the flip side, it also over-stressed her. Meeting client expectations, the financial pressures from Corporate and the demands of her staff combined to leave her spirit sapped of its characteristic spunk. Without a balanced personal life, not enough tipped the scales in her favor. The root problem went on with each passing week, month and year, leaving her less and less of herself.

  Her work cell rang. Years of habit had her check who was calling. It was her boss at Corporate. If he was calling at this hour, it could not be good.

  "Hello, David," she said, trying to inject some cheer into her voice.

  "Hi, Ivy," he said in a voice shaky with fatigue. “I heard you had an interesting day. Were you able to meet the FBI’s demands and comply with the Court Order?”

  “Yes, though likely they will be on-site all week.”

  "Lucky you. Let us know if they become unreasonably demanding. Well, I have yet another favor to ask of you. The guy we tagged as your replacement took another job where he lives in Chicago."

  She listened, her mouth turning down at the corners while her shoulders rose another inch as the muscles tightened in self-defense.

  "He what?" Long years of practice allowed Ivy to keep her voice level, even when she wanted to scream the words out.

  "Yeah. Just called me. Claims he got more money. Wouldn't listen to a counter offer from us. Between you and me, I think our job was going to be a filler. He needed income and never planned to move to Portland."

  "That just sucks." Ivy tried not to swear very often, but sometimes cursing was the best shorthand around.

  "Almost my precise words. Look, I appreciate that you want to retire but we need you to stay on. We have no one we can patch in until we find a new replacement.

  "Let me think about it," Ivy said. "I really was planning to retire."

  They talked a little longer and then Ivy clicked her cell phone off. The calm she maintained on the call vanished. She fought the urge to scream out her frustration. She imagined herself chained to a boat that was pulled deeper and deeper into a wide, bottomless vortex. She bowed her head and let out a low moan. Her Harry dog came over to lick her hand out of concern. Cleo stirred near her feet and pressed against her legs. Old Druid jumped up on her lap, instantly purring when she stroked his back. Each of her little protectors rallied to comfort her.

  She felt she had no reserves left to continue working. She could feel an all too familiar clutch of hot pain at the top of her throat, spreading from her jaw down into the muscles of her neck, tensing the already tight ligaments into bowstrings. She raised her head, swallowing to relieve the grip her muscles had on her windpipe. The room around her jumped the way her surroundings did sometimes, giving her a feeling of unreality as if for a few seconds, she had not been there and the world had moved on without her. Ivy grappled for the glass beside her, desperate for a drink of water, which she learned could calm these episodes.

  She sipped some water and pulled Druid closer, holding him the way a child might hold onto a teddy bear for security. She thought about all the people at the office who were dependent on her company for their livelihoods, their careers and even their self-respect. She could not leave them adrift. They would function well for a month or two. Then the lack of local leadership would allow the painstakingly built bonds between them to erode. Jealousies, resentments and ambitions, never far from the surface, would break loose and the business she had single-mindedly worked to foster would start to crack and crumble.

  Ivy could see that she owed the people six months to see them through the executive transition. She had to leave knowing she fulfilled her duty. Somewhere she had the grit to hold herself together until the end of March 2013. Her depleted reserves had sunk below strength, resilience and fortitude. She only had the elemental grit that she envisioned as a layer under the marrow in her bones. She leaned back on the couch, drained the glass of spring water and made of mental list of how to handle the delay in her retirement. After all she was Ivy Littleton. She had pulled herself up by her bootstraps her whole life. She could and would scrape together enough vestiges of herself to struggle through.

  Resolutely she stood up and for about the tenth time that day, squared her shoulders, forcing them down and into place. She sent a quick text to her boss, telling him she would sign on for another six months so they could find a new replacement. Now it was time to make a late dinner, have a glass of calming wine and sink into whatever degree of sleep would come to her.

  Chapter 2

  Much further south in Guadalajara at 3.00 a.m. on Thursday, Steve was already showered, shaved and dressed for the day. He was reviewing his team's plans for the arrest of a major Colombian drug lord. He went over the evidence again from the FBI's money laundering case that led them to this perpetrator, along with their proof of drug-related activities from the Drug Enforcement Agency. Steve’s team had the meaty evidence, although it bugged him that they lacked a real name for this drug lord. All they uncovered was a nickname and a number of fictitious names. El Zorro Astuto, or the Sly Fox, was his self-given designation. The DEA claimed on Monday to have located him proceeding on his yacht to Manzanillo, less than 200 miles to the south on the western coast of Mexico. Steve had flown into Guadalajara via Mexico City, meeting up with his agent Mathew Heylen on the way. They planned to fly down to Manzanillo by helicopter if all was ready for the sting.

  Other than having to trust another agency's work, their evidence was reasonable. Steve already knew that it was. However before each sting, he had a punch down list that he methodically went through. Thus far in his 35-year career, he had never an issue over insufficient or faulty evidence when he brought perpetrators, or perps as they called them, to justice. He expected that record to remain unbroken.

  He shifted his six and a half foot frame uneasily in the undersized hotel desk chair, and proceeded to review their plans for the sting operation, including each identified scenario of how it could go down. This process took nearly an hour, even though he had all the details in his head. He wanted to be certain that the action would go as smoothly as possible.

  With that step done, he stood up, stretched, straightened the creases in his trousers, walked over to his nightstand, took a long drink from a bottle of water and checked the time -- just after four in the morning. He stepped out on the small balcony overlooking an internal courtyard filled with plush plantings in many shades of green and scented with aromatic tropical flowers. He breathed in deeply and leaned against the railing. The air floated against his cheeks like a whispered caress, bringing the scents of the small city laced with a whiff of flowered perfume. He inhaled to draw the early morning air deep into his lungs. Five years ago the subtle scents would have been lost on him. Outside of his work for the FBI, he failed to notice much of anything back then.

  Beyond the hotel, it sounded as if the city lay in predawn tranquility below him. He wanted to learn more about the places he flew into and their histories, but he wanted that knowledge to come from experiencing it and not as it did now, from books or websites. Even though he was committed to his work at the Bureau, he found as he grew older he wanted more in his life and he wanted to stop living it alone.

  That Ivy Littleton was sure a firecracker – full of fight yet alluring too. She was intelligent and capable, and she was simply lovely to look at. On the other hand, he bet life with her would be a roller coaster ride. If he was going to risk his heart at
this late date, he wanted someone level-headed, didn’t he?

  He shook his head at himself. He had to stay focused on the upcoming operation. This was not the time to let his thoughts wander. He inhaled the scented air once more, pushed the dreamy thoughts away and went back to the desk. For the next hour, Steve reviewed the details of logistics, equipment and schedule, and then he closed his laptop. He checked his watch. It was nearly 5:15. He tapped his forefinger on the desk as he quickly ran through the preparations once more in his mind. Then he unplugged his cell phone from the charger and pressed a shorthand number to call his second in command.

  "Harvard?" Although Steve spoke quietly into the phone, his low voice carried authority and a sense of urgency. "Get the team ready. Be in the lobby before six. We are going in now. Can't risk having this perp sail out of here. Next call is to the DEA."

  As abruptly as he had dialed Senior Special Agent Mathew Heylen who Steve nicknamed "Harvard" after where he earned his law degree, he dialed the head of the DEA team.

  "You up? We're going in now. Get your guys ready." He listened to some grumbling, but he was used to hearing himself called various names. Steve cared about results -- ending crime, catching perps, making charges stick and keeping his teams and the public as safe as possible. "Six at the heliport. Get the lead out."

  Steve hung up, checked his gear and pulled on his lightweight suit jacket. No matter what the temperature was, Steve had his standards for how an FBI agent should appear just as the Bureau did. He checked his appearance in the mirror, straightened his tie, smoothed down his white shirt and shook out the creases in his trousers. While not a vain man, he did believe he should be presentable and in his mind that meant crisp, neat and clean. He rechecked his gun, or roscoe in FBI lingo, felt for his cell phone in his pocket, grabbed his protective vest and exited the hotel room, striding down to the elevator to meet his team in the lobby. From there, they would jump into a waiting car and head to the heliport. He had that familiar tightening in his abs that always happened before an operation. Everything checked out. It was time.