A Vicious Balance: A Mystery Thriller

by Jolyon Hallows

  “That sounds pretty sophisticated.”

  “It is. This kind of device is rare, but it ensures that when it goes off, someone, probably the target, is driving.”

  “Wait. How did you guys find out about it?”

  MacIlhenny said, “The clerk was prepping the car. When he opened the hood, he saw the bomb. He called us, and we called the agency. We have the car in impound, and our lab guys are going over it now, but other than your prints, there’s nothing else we were able to find.”

  Kagan said, “Gord, this is way out of hand. I don’t know what we’ve stirred up, but it’s gone far beyond what I’m used to.”

  “I’m with you. Getting blown up isn’t part of my life plan, either. Agent Meyer, do you have any leads or any information on how the bomb got there?”

  “Not yet. We’re tracking down the components, but so far, there’s nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Travathan turned to MacIlhenny. “So, detective, what’s next?”

  “What’s next is we need to get the three of you to a safe house.”

  Meyer said, “And then I need to interrogate you. I have some background digging to do first, but whatever hornet’s nest you three have stirred up is fighting back, which is why I need to know what’s going on.”

  “And you think that whatever we’ve gotten involved with includes terrorism?”

  “These are not garden variety thugs.”

  “Which terrorist group?”

  “Well, now, that’s what we’re hoping to figure out from what you can tell us.”

  Travathan and Kagan sat on a couch in a room in a safe house. Janner slumped in an easy chair. MacIlhenny had checked the perimeter of the building, posted an unmarked car across the street, and left by a rear entrance to return to the police station.

  Kagan said, “I don’t know about either of you, but I’m scared. I never even conceived we’d be up against this kind of violence.” His voice was quavering and even a drink from the bottle of scotch Travathan had found in a cupboard hadn’t been able to settle him down. Janner had refused a drink, even though she looked as if she could use one. “Ruth, I guess we should have taken it more seriously when you were threatened, but terrorism? I promise you I’ll do my best to find a way out. Gord, do you have a take on what’s been happening?”

  Travathan nodded. “Yeah. That threat that was delivered to Ruth? It’s becoming obvious it’s part of the pattern we’ve started to unravel. As for my take on all of this, it seems to me whoever was protected by this dead letter drop scheme, the supplier, is feeling threatened. My guess is that this terrorist group wanted to crack the system, and the only way for the suppliers to protect themselves was to get rid of the drops before the terrorists could track them down and probably torture them. What we still don’t know is what the scheme was. Drugs, weapons, human smuggling, even child porn. Whatever it was, the people who were behind it figured they had to kill to protect themselves.”

  “That makes these guys as cold-blooded as the terrorists themselves.”

  Travathan nodded. “Or desperate.” He sat for a minute, sipping on his scotch. “The Galina killing is part of all this, but we don’t know how. What is clear is that the more we find out, the closer we seem to come to this illicit operation. We have to dig deeper into this dead letter drop. Our only choice is to figure out what’s going on and put an end to it if we can.”

  “Are you nuts?” Kagan exploded. “These terrorists have already killed three people, and they tried to kill either you or Kevin Winters or both of you. I think our only choice is to get the hell out of here. Let them keep whatever secret they’re trying to protect. I’m sure not going to confront monsters who are willing to use automatic weapons and C-4. How can you even think about doing anything other than just getting the hell away?”

  “Because, old friend, I can’t.”

  “Can’t?” Janner yelled. “You mean, won’t. You may have some macho notion of taking on these madmen, but don’t pretend it’s because of anything other than some masculine head-butting game, and you can count me out.”

  “You’re both wrong. I said I can’t because that’s what I mean. You want to back out? Fine. Just tell me how. Do we take out an ad in the paper? ‘To the homicidal maniacs who have been trying to kill us, you win. We quit.’ Do you think that would do it? Or maybe we go our separate ways and return to our normal routines as if nothing had happened. Would they now say okay, we scared them off? Let’s go for a beer?”

  Travathan held up a hand to quell the protests. “They have gone way beyond intimidation. They are no longer trying to scare us, they’re trying to kill us. Why? I suspect it’s because we already know too much, and even if we can’t make sense of it all yet, what information we have right now is a threat to whatever they’re up to. Our only hope is to stop them and that means continuing to dig. If you two want to pull out, I won’t try to stop you, but I don’t think it’ll protect you. For myself, I repeat, I can’t walk away because I can’t accept being a permanent target.”

  There was a silence. Janner asked, “Okay, brilliant investigator. What do you think we should do next?”

  “I think I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.” He walked into one of the bedrooms and closed the door behind him.

  The following morning, before the others had risen, Travathan slipped out of the safe house eluding scrutiny from the police guard. He found a coffee shop and began to make notes when he remembered the other message he’d received. He called the coroner’s office.

  A man said, “Mr. Travathan, I’m Harry Wong. I’d like you to come down to the office to see if you can identify a body.”

  “Who is it?”

  “We don’t know. That’s why we’d like you to identify it if you can.”

  “What makes you think I’d know who it was?”

  “We found your business card on the body.”

  Kevin Winters. Travathan held his head in his hands. Winters’s attackers had finally gotten to him and he, Gord Travathan, had been their bloodhound. “I’ll be right there.”

  The body lying in the morgue was Kevin Winters. Other than a hole in his skull and a blood stain on the side of his head, the man could have been sleeping. Travathan said, “I’m a private investigator, and this man was part of my case. What can you tell me about how he was killed?”

  “A single gunshot to the head. A .38. When we found him, he had been stripped of all identification. We found your card in a watch pocket in his pants. The killer overlooked it.”

  “When was he killed?”

  “A couple of nights ago. Between ten and midnight.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “In the Starburst Motel. The housekeeper found him when she went in to clean up. He’d registered under the name Don Duck. We figured that was an alias.”

  Travathan nodded. The Starburst Motel was where he had left Winters after they had returned to the city.

  “Any clues about who did it?”

  “No. The room was clean of prints, even the victim’s. He was killed no more than a couple of hours after he checked in.”

  “Did the police find the gun?”

  “Yeah. In the trash. The serial numbers had been filed off, and it had been wiped clean of prints. There was one odd thing. There have been a few break-ins at the Starburst, so the cops figured it was some street punk trying to steal money. But there were no signs of forced entry. It was as if this guy knew his killer and let him in.” Wong noted Travathan’s expression and asked, “Was he important to you?”

  “Important? You mean other than that I led his killer to him?”

  Travathan returned to the coffee shop and called Doris MacIlhenny. Her first response was, “Travathan, where the hell are you?”

  “Thinking. Look, I need you to set up a meeting this afternoon. You, Max, Ruth, and Agent Meyer.”

  “What for?”

  “I think I’ve got some answers, and I need to discuss them with you and the ot
hers.”

  She paused. “Okay, I’ll set it up, but you get back to the safe house. You’re a target, remember?”

  “All in good time.” He disconnected the call, turned off the phone, and returned to his notes.

  That afternoon, Travathan faced Kagan, MacIlhenny, and Agent Meyer in an interview room at the police station. “Where’s Ruth?”

  Kagan said, “She called me. She’ll be here later.”

  Travathan frowned and said, “Doris, do your notes show if Galina had a tattoo on her shoulder?”

  “Tattoo?” MacIlhenny studied the file. “The coroner noted a hammer and sickle tattoo. Is that what you mean?”

  “Like this one?” He handed her the photo of Julia Dennison relaxing in her mother’s back yard. “This is Sherry Galina, a.k.a. Julia Dennison. You can see the tattoo on her left shoulder.”

  Agent Meyer studied the photo with a magnifying glass. He whistled and said, “Wow. When you guys get involved, you don’t do it by halves. This tattoo. It’s a hammer, but not a sickle. See, there’s no handle. This curved shape that the hammer crosses is a crescent. The symbol of Islam. The hammer and crescent is a matter of intense interest to the world’s security agencies because it’s the symbol of a new and nasty terrorist group that calls itself the Hammer of Vengeance.”

  Kagan snorted. “Hammer of Vengeance? Where do these guys come up with these B-class names?”

  “Well, from the Department of Defense.”

  “Come again?”

  “After the September 11 attacks, the Department of Defense promised to strike back at the terrorists with a hammer of vengeance. A bunch of psychopathic wackos decided to adopt that as their name and B-class though it may be, make no mistake. They’re serious and they’re deadly. Their only goal is to kill anyone who gets in their way. Even people who just happen to be convenient.”

  “That’s true of all terrorist groups.”

  Meyer shook his head. “No. Most terrorist organizations have some political goal. They want to create their own state or abolish aspects of culture—usually Western culture—that offend them. Their scope is limited to the countries in which they’re based, and their terrorist activities are directed toward their goal of national political and cultural change. Say what you will about them, they have a larger purpose for which they use terror as a tool. These guys in the Hammer of Vengeance are more like al-Qaeda. They don’t have a national base, and they’re not interested in changing local cultures. They’re thugs. They kill just for the fun of it. Oh, they mouth the slogans of Islam, but even terrorist groups like Hezbollah or Hamas are afraid of them.”

  Kagan pointed at the picture of Julia Dennison, a young woman in a bathing suit relaxing in her back yard. “How would someone like this get involved with a group like that?”

  “They recruit on campuses. They look for the most disaffected, isolated, hate-filled people they can find. People who are capable of the most terrible violence for no reason other than that it creates despair and pain.”

  “They sound lovely. But what are they doing here, and what’s their role in all of this?”

  Meyer shrugged. “I don’t know. But I do know that if you’ve stirred them up, you’re in a lot of trouble.”

  Travathan said, “I’ve never heard of this group, but it fits in nicely with what I’ve figured out.” He pulled out his binder. “Max, last night, I said that whoever is trying to kill us believes we know too much. We had information, but no conclusions, so this morning, I did some thinking about what we know and tried to make sense of it.”

  MacIlhenny said, “Is that why you risked yourself by leaving the safe house?”

  “I needed the time and space to think.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to tell you a story. Some of it consists of the facts we’ve been able to uncover, and some of it is speculation, but it’s informed speculation. In brief, I have changed my opinion of why the individuals in the letter drop were killed. I now believe they were killed by members of the terrorist group that we seem to have become involved with. Far from being killers, the suppliers in this drop were victims.”

  “Why were they killed?” Kagan asked

  “Let me tell you what I think happened, then we can discuss it. The story starts with an unhappy college kid named Julia Dennison.”

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  Travathan said, “Julia Dennison tried to commit suicide. She failed, but at about that time, she became involved with another student, a Muslim woman called Mujaahida. Somehow, Dennison was drawn into Mujaahida’s Islamic group and became radicalized. I don’t know the details, but recruiting and radicalization are standard tools for groups like this.”

  Kagan said, “You’re saying this Mujaahida was a terrorist?”

  “That’s not clear. She was a member of the group that recruited Dennison—I assume that was this Hammer of Vengeance—but whether she carried out terrorist acts herself or was limited to some sort of support role, I can’t say. What I can say is that Dennison took on the Islamic name Faiza, and at the end of her university year, went with Mujaahida to a training camp, probably in the Middle East. At the end of the summer, she returned here with the name Sherry Trepanier. Because she presented herself as a westerner rather than as a devout Muslim, I suspect she was sent here as a sleeper.”

  Meyer said, “A sleeper? That’s a demanding role. The organization must have had a lot of confidence in her.”

  Travathan said, “They must have, because they called upon her a few months after she got back. One of the members of the group, a man going by the name Tony Galina, received an assignment which I believe was to crack the dead letter drop. I don’t know if Tony Galina was another sleeper or a core group member dispatched for the mission, but he needed help to complete it. That was Sherry Trepanier. Their cover required them to be married, so Trepanier became Sherry Galina.”

  Kagan said, “I’m getting lost. How many names did this woman have?”

  “There won’t be any more, because Galina is the one she died with. Okay, how do you break a letter drop? The starting point was the address on the letters. These were addressed to a Leslie Charters at 5967 Roseway Crescent, so they needed to buy that house. Tony Galina tried, but the owners refused to sell. They’d fitted out the house for their handicapped daughter.”

  Kagan said, “Is this the daughter who killed herself?”

  “That’s the daughter, but I don’t buy that she killed herself. Think about it. The Galinas needed that house, but the family, the Cramers, wouldn’t sell because the house was modified for their daughter. Solution? Kill the girl. The parents wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that house after that.”

  “Whoa. You’re saying Tony Galina killed the girl?”

  “That’s possible, but I think it’s more likely Sherry Galina did. She was a radical determined to prove herself worthy, plus she was angry at the culture, and she was probably bitter at the girl who received the love and attention she never did. My money’s on her.”

  Agent Meyer said, “I agree. From what we know of terrorist clandestine operations, the person running it lets the drones do the dirty work. In the case you’re describing, Tony Galina would be in charge. She would be following his orders.”

  Travathan nodded. “Okay, now they have the house.”

  “Hold on,” Kagan said. “Why did that need that particular house?”

  “Two reasons. First, they didn’t know if the letters were being diverted. That address could have been the final one, in which case there was no letter drop at all, and the Cramers were the suppliers of whatever was involved. It’s unlikely, but the Galinas couldn’t overlook that possibility. The best way to check that out was to get the Cramers to move. If the address of the letters changed, their job was done.”

  “I see. The new address would have been wherever the Cramers moved to. But wait. The letters weren’t delivered to the Cramers. The letter carrier diverted them.”

  “Yes, we know that, but Tony Galina couldn’t have. After a
ll, he was just starting his investigation.”

  “Let me be clear. If the Cramers ran this dead letter drop, then when they moved, the address for these letters would have changed. But that didn’t happen.”

  “Right. So the Galinas knew that the Cramers weren’t involved. Once they moved in and they didn’t receive any of the letters, they knew that the letter carrier, Kevin Winters, had to have been intercepting them. By living in that house, Sherry Galina could try to figure out how.”

  Kagan said, “Isn’t that obvious? Winters had to have pulled it out from the packets of mail and not delivered it.”

  “Sure, but what did he do with it? In particular, did he dispose of the letter before or after he reached that house? Figuring that out was Galina’s next step, and the most direct way was the one she was best equipped to handle. She seduced him.”

  “She was hoping to get him to talk?”

  Travathan snorted. “Hardly. That would have given her away. No, seducing him meant she could check his pouch while he was in her bed and find out if he had one of these letters on him. If not, he would have already disposed of it.”

  Kagan said, “But that means there would have to be a letter for her to find. These letters didn’t come every day.”

  “You’re right. My guess is that when she was ready, in this case when her bed had become a stopover for Winters, she requested a letter from the Hammer. One thing Winters said was that the frequency of these letters increased. That’s probably because Galina was requesting them. When a letter was due, she would check his pouch. If she found the letter, she would know he was disposing of them after he delivered to her house.”

  “Hold on. How could she check his pouch without him knowing about it?”

  Travathan frowned. “Max, if a woman you’re having sex with says she has to go to the bathroom, do you follow her?”

  “I see your point. And if she didn’t find the letter in his pouch, he would have passed it on before he reached her place.”

  “Yes, although that’s unlikely. One of the principles of a letter drop is that none of the drops knows where the letter goes. Delivering it to another address or handing it off to someone else in person violates that principle.”