by Lou Dobbs
As usual, the phone was answered promptly in two rings. They never used names. Just because the phone couldn’t be traced didn’t mean it couldn’t be listened to. Herrera understood that the process to screen the massive number of calls made over cell phones, even using key phrases and special algorithms, took time. He hoped that most of his immediate concerns could be handled before anyone noticed the conversation.
Herrera was calling the head of the Technology and Research Center, a cautious American named Richard Haben. The man seemed competent enough in the drab business community of computers but never seemed to understand what was involved in other aspects of this complicated world.
His American partner said, “Nice to hear from you.”
“Really? It shouldn’t be. I only call when there is a problem.” He couldn’t keep a smile from creeping across his face as he heard the hesitation on the other end of the line and knew the CEO of TARC was scared out of his wits.
“What’s the problem?” asked Haben.
Herrera liked how Haben was trying to sound natural and make believe he was calm. Usually his man Pablo Piña would deal with issues like this, but Herrera felt it was important to get more involved in the businesses that had potential to grow. Especially the ones inside the borders of the United States. The partnership they had developed with the Technology and Research Center had many avenues for profit.
He didn’t want to waste this opportunity to speak with a wealthy and influential American.
“Your politicians do nothing but criticize us, your citizens shun our tourist attractions, and I can’t get your people to pick up even one load of our product for delivery to your factory. Do you have the right man on the job?”
Haben stammered and stuttered, finally saying, “I’ve been sidetracked by petty criminals who’ve been trying to blackmail the company.”
“Events in real life are usually played out by petty criminals. Men like us work to bend the world to our will only to worry about the minor, ignorant common man who confounds our plans. This is a lesson I learned in my early years and understand all too well now. A random act of violence, a greedy, low-level employee, or an overzealous police officer can wreck any empire, no matter how big. But you should focus on one thing at a time.”
“You’re saying I should focus on this one load we have left in Mexico.”
“Exactly. Perhaps you need a shakeup in your organization and different people in different management positions. I want your computer company to work and survive. Then our trust in you will show benefits in the long term.” Herrera took a moment to let that sink in, then added, “Handle this task better than your attempt to smuggle workers across the border without our knowledge.”
Now Haben sounded really flustered. “We did that for other reasons as well. Reasons that helped business. Reasons I didn’t think you wanted to be associated with.”
“We’ll discuss that later. Get this shipment moving now and ensure it is safe or our next conversation will be in person.”
* * *
Cash found Ari in the little off-site office they sometimes used. It was a convenient place to keep messages and had no connection to the main corporation. The place was only one room with three desks and phones. Cash’s desk was always empty because he had nothing to keep there. Ari was sitting at his desk and apparently working on something. It made Cash think of a little kid pretending to have a job.
Cash said, “Let’s go out and look for Eric tonight.”
Ari kept his head down, focusing on the page he was writing on, saying, “Can’t do it tonight. Sorry.”
“Why not? You got a date or something?”
“Nope. Ari got another assignment.”
“What? What assignment?” He let the frustration stream out in his voice as he stepped next to the desk so Ari had to look up at him. “What the hell are you talking about, you little turd?”
Ari gave him a smug smile as he leaned back in the chair. He knew it would do him no good to stand up because his head would still be four inches lower than Cash’s. “I’m supposed to escort a load from the port of entry to the main building tonight at dusk.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Does Ari have to explain everything again?”
“He does unless he wants Cash to choke the living shit out of him.”
Ari sighed like a teacher trying to get a point across to an adult student. “Mr. Haben told me to wait for the truck to cross through the port of entry, then follow it all the way to the main building and make sure nothing happens to it. I think he’s worried about the driver making an unscheduled stop and losing a couple of the packages.”
Cash turned to gaze out the window, mainly to hide his astonishment that he had not been told about the assignment. Traditionally this had been his job and his job alone. It was the most secretive of all of the company’s activities. It was also one of the most lucrative and ingenious. Semitrailers carrying computers came from Mexico to the factory in El Paso virtually every day. The Customs inspectors became used to the huge trucks and never gave them more than a cursory look. One truck every few weeks carried two thousand computers, and each contained two kilos of cocaine. It was an extra $40 million of untaxed profit that could be increased to every other truck if need be. The biggest risk in any narcotics venture was the distribution, and the company only used two big distributors, which had no links to the company. Those distributors cut the high-grade cocaine into four kilos each, then distributed each kilo individually for an additional giant profit.
The money was one of several revenue streams that kept the company afloat while it tried to expand its market share. It also provided ready cash to keep the lines of communication open with both the Mexican and U.S. authorities.
Now Cash turned back to Ari and summoned the strength to simply say, “Good luck tonight. It would be nice if you let me know about other assignments before they just pop up.”
Ari nodded his head and said, “Fair enough. They gave me a heads-up about a couple of loose ends they want me to take care of. I’ll let you know if it interferes with anything you and I are doing.”
Cash noticed that when Ari wanted to, he could be deadly serious. When he dropped talking in the third person he also sounded much smarter. This could be a problem.
* * *
Tom Eriksen couldn’t refuse when the detective on John Houghton’s case said he had some time and would go by the apartment right then. It would take a few minutes to get some equipment together and recruit a crime scene technician, but Eriksen felt some satisfaction at having John’s case looked at a little more closely.
It was obvious the detective had personally selected a crime scene technician he was trying to impress. The plump, pretty, but new technician made the detective look like a puppy dog. Anytime she walked into his line of sight his eyes followed her. She had been all business and very professional, but the detective looked like his heart ached to ask her out. Eriksen hoped he didn’t look so obvious around Kat Gleason.
The apartment was no longer marked as a crime scene, but the manager of the building said no one had been inside. There was still time on John’s lease, and his wife hadn’t felt strong enough to look through his personal effects.
The place was a little stuffy after having been closed up, but with the front door open and the sliding door locked back and sunshine flooding the living room, it didn’t seem quite so gloomy. In the big scheme of things the apartment wasn’t messy at all. It was a testament to John’s Spartan living conditions; he ate most meals out and essentially lived out of a suitcase. It was obvious he never intended this to be a permanent residence and was expecting to get back with his wife soon. One more argument against a possible suicide.
The detective tried to find clever places for the crime scene tech to look for fingerprints. Most of the places the detective found were low to the ground and forced the technician to either bend over or squat low. Eriksen could see the detective had a thin
g for large, shapely butts. Fingerprints were really their only hope, because unlike how forensics were portrayed on TV, DNA testing was extremely expensive, and on a marginal investigation like this, without any real evidence to point toward the location of the DNA sample, the forensic possibilities were limited.
Eriksen took his own survey of the apartment, slowly walking through the single bedroom, then the hallway, and stopping in the small bathroom with only a toilet, sink, and shower. His eyes settled on the handle to the toilet. He would ask the technician to check it for fingerprints because of an old Burt Reynolds movie he’d seen called Sharky’s Machine. In the movie, one of the detectives thinks to lift a hit man’s fingerprint from the toilet handle because, he says, no one wants to take a leak with rubber gloves on. It was as good advice as any he had heard in the FBI Academy.
As Eriksen moved through the rest of the apartment he found three places he wanted checked for fingerprints: the refrigerator handle, the various prescription bottles sitting on the counter, and the metal on-and-off button on the TV.
Maybe they would get lucky.
* * *
Ari stood on the loading dock of a warehouse owned by TARC. The open-air dock allowed up to three semis to back up at one time, but for the moment he had only been trusted with one. The diesel fumes from the big Mack truck were enough to choke him. He hated to think what three would be like. Ari considered himself a valuable employee wherever he worked. His strongest quality was his loyalty. The fact that Mr. Haben had seen fit to put him in charge of bringing this truck from the border to the warehouse made him feel important, and there was no way he would let his boss down.
He’d made sure that one of the older guys loading the truck, who already knew the secrets of the corporation, had heard the story that Ari had been in the Israeli military and was a certified badass. Ari spent a lot of time in the gym to give himself good arms and shoulders to back that story up. He was, in fact, an Israeli citizen, but he had never been in any country’s military.
Ari had been smart to stick to the exact same story every time he met someone. He always used the Israeli military instead of the U.S. Marines or Army Rangers. It was much more difficult to check out someone’s story from a country halfway around the world that was always hesitant to give out information. The closest he’d come to actual military life was that his family lived near a small base outside Tel Aviv when he was a kid and he was able to pick up a few key terms. Just hanging out with soldiers who called the new recruits basar tari, or fresh meat, shaped his view of the Israel Defense Forces. Ari realized that when he dropped the term “IDF” into everyday conversation in the U.S., all he got was pleasant smiles and nods. No one had any idea what sort of questions to ask about his history.
He would throw in comments about Merkava tanks and how a chopel, or medic, had stitched up his left shoulder after a mortar fragment had sliced through his uniform. The truth was slightly less heroic. He had fallen off a swing when he was nine and caught his shoulder on its rusty chain. He really did have thirty-one stitches, and they were less than plastic-surgery grade, but the operation was conducted at a civilian clinic in Tel Aviv by a very pleasant Swiss doctor working off some ancestral guilt about the country’s lack of interest in the Jews’ plight in World War II.
When Ari was twelve, his parents moved to Toronto so his father could work in an electronics shop. Ari spent a very comfortable adolescence in and around a suburb, basking in his local celebrity at a small Jewish school. He was their first and only Israeli student and often used his upbringing in a dangerous and uncertain country as a reason he didn’t read on the same grade level as the other kids.
He had gotten into a community college but lost interest when he failed both English and beginning Spanish in the same semester. Starting in and around Toronto he worked in phone-scam boiler rooms, cold-calling people to sell them everything from water-softening devices to penny stocks. He found his lack of conscience a huge bonus in the industry, and his ability to speak with slight accents as the situation dictated made him a top seller.
Just a few hours at the range had taught him enough to feel good with his little .380 caliber pistol. It was easy to slip into the United States from Canada, and he never bothered to officially establish himself. As he slowly moved west, Ari promoted himself as more and more of a tough guy until now he was the veteran IDF soldier.
He liked the persona he’d built. Now, with the experience he’d gotten in a couple of gunfights and having shot someone up close, he was more confident, which translated into his everyday life. That’s why the boss had trusted him with this load of computers stuffed with cocaine.
He liked being the enforcer for a company as big as TARC.
THIRTY
Tom Eriksen knocked on the door to Kat Gleason’s orderly office and waited for the bolt to slide back and the heavy door to swing open. Like all the other NSA analysts in the building, she worked behind an extra layer of security, in a private office where she could conduct whatever high-level eavesdropping she was supposed to. He hated to admit it, but on some level, not having the clearance to even get a hint about what she was working on bothered Eriksen.
It wasn’t like the FBI just hired him off the street. He’d gone through a series of interviews, a polygraph examination, and a battery of psychological and physical tests, and the Bureau had conducted a thorough background investigation, even finding his neighbors from when he was in college. The federal government trusted him with information about Russian spies, but he couldn’t know anything about what another federal agency was doing. Sometimes he wondered how the country ran at all.
All that fled from his mind as he saw how Kat’s face lit up when she saw him. Her eyes darted from side to side to make certain they were alone as she drew him into the office and gave him a hug and a long, lingering kiss. He felt his own heart rate start to increase as he marveled at the perfection of her smile. It lifted her cheeks slightly, and her teeth were white and straight.
Eriksen said, “What’re you doing?”
She groaned in frustration and just tilted her head toward a giant computer screen with a spreadsheet opened. “I can’t establish a link between two communication devices we’ve been monitoring.”
He stepped closer, his eyes taking in the spreadsheet. It looked just like a financial ledger, and he interpreted it the way he had been taught. He stepped closer as the spreadsheet became crystal clear.
Kat made a brief attempt to stop him and said, “I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to let anyone see my work product and the material I examine.”
He turned away from the screen and gave her a smile as he said, “The second device is communicating with the device in the sixth column.”
She moved to the computer and took almost a minute to verify what he was saying, then plopped down into her swivel chair and spun around to look at him. “How on earth did you ever figure that out so fast?”
He shrugged and said, “It’s a gift. That looks exactly like a giant bank statement. You just have to look for the common factors.” He tried to look humble when he said, “I’m around for any of your harder problems. Don’t hesitate to give me a call.”
When Kat was through rolling her eyes at this, she said, “Is there a reason you breached security and came into my office?”
“Other than to save you a day of agony looking at a spreadsheet?”
“Yes, other than that.”
He dug in his front pocket and pulled out the thumb drive the El Paso homicide detective had given him. “We’re not able to figure out the encryption on this thumb drive and look at its contents. Is that something you or one of your coworkers could do?”
She gave him a sly smile. “We might be able to work something out since I have a little free time thanks to you. What case is it?”
He hesitated. He’d never been a good liar. Now Eriksen had to decide if he should invent a story or make Kat decide if she wanted to help on an unsanctioned investigation. Aft
er a moment of consideration he knew it had to be her choice.
Eriksen said, “It has to do with the shooting at the market. Since the FBI has no role in it, I was hoping this favor could be done quietly and unofficially. But I’ll respect whatever decision you make. I know you guys have incredibly strict guidelines.”
She didn’t say a word. Instead she reached out and plucked the small thumb drive from his hand and kissed him again.
* * *
Cash tooled around the streets of El Paso in his Cadillac listening to some Springsteen on the radio. He had visited three places looking for Eric with no luck but still had a few ideas. The fact that the computer engineer didn’t mix with anyone from the corporation made it difficult to come up with the definite location.
It was early evening, and he was getting anxious to see Carol DiMetti. He’d seen the pretty widow virtually every night for the past week. Now she was like a drug to him. He needed to be around her more and more to satisfy his craving. Between that and his annoyance at Ari’s assignment to a job that was traditionally his own, he could hardly concentrate on finding Eric.
The third place he stopped was a small Internet café near downtown. Eric had sent some e-mails from its IP address. Cash stepped inside and immediately saw someone slip out of the rear booth and dart through the back door.
Cash hurried through the café and banged out the back door to see an empty alley in both directions. He hadn’t gotten a clear look at whoever left and couldn’t be sure it was Eric. Besides, the guy could have run in either direction and made one of a dozen turns. There was no point in trying to follow whoever it was. Instead, Cash came back through the same rear door into the now empty café. He gave a hard look at the scrawny kid behind the counter. He was about twenty-three with dozens of piercings and a tattoo running up his neck and onto his face that looked like a crawling vine.