by Noah Rea
Deb had already made vacation plans, and we were going to the Mediterranean but didn’t leave for a few days. She informed me we were going to a motel in Phoenix that night and we would fly to Florida the next day. We would be in a motel there for about three days and then we would go on the cruise. She had plans for me, which included shopping for some new clothes. I told Otis I guessed it meant she was happy, and he agreed.
We were still afraid, but fun sometimes helps, and it certainly did then. We took what we wanted out of the truck, and I gave Otis my set of truck keys. One of the guys took a box out there with our name on it and cleaned out everything else and put our rifles in their safe. Otis suggested we take our handguns with us, and when we left, we could almost certainly leave them in the motel safe until we got back, especially if we made reservations to stay there for a night or more coming back.
We were all set as best we knew and took off for Phoenix. We had a great evening, had a good flight, and got to Florida. We checked our guns with our luggage so we had them with us when we got to Florida. We were able to really relax for the first time in a long time. We did a lot of snuggling and playing. Just before we got on the cruise ship we checked our guns at the motel so they could put them in their safe until we got back. Then we got on the cruise ship with no drama. Once we settled in, we took a deep breath. We couldn’t believe how our lives had changed so soon. But we intended to enjoy this cruise, and so we did.
Chapter 12
Detective Work
Deb and I were beginning to relax, but we were still vigilant. We felt we were in a safe location, but we didn’t want any new trouble, so we talked about security regularly now. I had a fanny pack with me. In it were a copy of our passports, a small amount of cash, and a small taser-type device that looked like a pack of cigarettes, Jim’s phone and my new truck stop credit card.
Deb was carrying a purse that looked more like a small backpack or hydration unit. There were straps over both shoulders, and the pack was small for a backpack but larger than my fanny pack. I told her I could carry more if she wanted to haul less weight, but she said no. She had what she wanted, and it wasn’t heavy. She had copies of our passports, a small amount of cash, her version of the taser cigarettes, her credit card, and some “girl stuff” as she called it.
Later I added Band-Aids in case we got a blister on our feet or whatever. We left nothing of value in our room when we were out. Our room keys were in our respective packs or in a secure pants pocket. If she was concerned about someone getting her backpack, she would wear it in front.
Jim called and I was a little surprised to be able to get his call out at sea.
“How far offshore should I be able to talk to you?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure you can use the phone in Europe. You should be OK regarding fingerprints, and the Raines’s house has been cleaned up, wiped down, and repainted where necessary. The flooring in the den had been taken up, and the subfloor was showing. But the house had been put on the market as Ben’s parents had asked, and when sold, the money would be sent to them. So there will be no new fingerprints showing up anywhere around there belonging to Bentley Raines.”
Ben was fading into history.
“What about the substituted fingerprints, and where did they come from?”
“As long as you keep your mouth shut it won’t matter. A body washed ashore above Miami twenty years ago, and atypical for the era, there were several sets of fingerprints. All of them were poor quality except one. We left all the sets in the John Doe file except the better set. We cleaned it up a little and made it a little more modern and then scanned it into a digital file. Then we burned the original.”
“Wow! So the fingerprints belonging to Bentley Raines are not my fingerprints!”
“That’s right. So the next trip up would be a facial recognition or dental.”
“The phone number of the other Seth who had called had been redirected from Deb, and an elderly black man was now answering her old number. The real Seth didn’t know her name or phone number, so she should be home free as well.”
“Except someone got Deb’s phone number,” I said. “How did they do that and what else did they know?”
I could feel the weight roll off my shoulders as he was talking and the stress flow out of me. I asked if he wanted to know where we were.
“Absolutely not, but I hope you’re having fun.”
“Does the FBI have anything new on the Phoenix shooting?”
“There wasn’t much new about it on the east coast or even in headquarters, but the Phoenix branch of the FBI is not happy with Otis. He’d told them they worked for him, and he didn’t have to take orders from them. It riled them a little.”
We laughed at Otis’s brashness.
“Do you have any more information about who hired the men in black or who owned any of the equipment?”
“Everybody is clammed up tight on that stuff. Mostly everybody says they have moved on, and Phoenix is old news. Those who do wonder out loud speculated about whoever owned the stuff not being happy and scared to show it. Everyone is acting very nonchalant.”
Jim thought they were a little too much so. “But I would be too if I had lost what was probably a $25 million bird. Can you imagine strolling into your office and saying, “Oh, by the way, boss, we had a little trouble yesterday morning. We lost a $25 million helicopter, and some of our best operatives are dead. Also there are some high-definition pictures of the newest high-tech airplane all over the internet. Want to go to lunch? …Yikes!”
“It was a brand new prototype, top speed, climb, avionics, engines, frame, you name it. It was invisible to radar or nearly so in stealth mode. The boys came in there with guns blazing instead of asking questions first. They had to have been totally taken by surprise. They were a sharp outfit with lots of experience. They probably saw satellite images of this rusty-looking, forlorn, and small-time truck stop and could not imagine in their wildest dreams anyone would be ready for them.”
“Is the FBI still upset about not getting the helicopter?”
“I am glad you brought it up. The FBI wants the black box real bad. It would tell them where the bird had been. Are you sure you can’t get it for me? It could help me out around here with my rep, and it might help us put together a lot of information that looks random. I will tell you this. There’s some funny business with old people dying. We can’t connect the dots right now, but more info is coming in all the time. Anyway, the box would really help. The Phoenix bunch is still trying to figure out how to scare Otis into giving it up. I don’t think that will work. By the way did I say please?”
“I’ll try. And you are right it won’t work. How are the dead guys’ next of kin being notified and by whom?”
“It probably will not happen for a while because no one wants to claim to know them right now. And these guys commonly are on assignment for months at a time so no one will start missing them for quite a while.”
“OK, thanks for all the updates. It’s good to hear from you.”
I hung up and called Otis to tell him about the black box.
“We’re just about through with the box ourselves,” he said. “We’re making other copies, which are sorted and rearranged so we can make sense of it. It hasn’t been our highest priority, but we’re close enough. It shouldn’t be long.”
“How much will you want the FBI to pay for the box?”
“You mean with the information on it or not?”
I told him to give it to me either way if he knew.
He laughed. “Of course I know. How can I sell something if I don’t know what it’s worth? With the info on it, the value is probably about a mill. Without the data it’s probably worth about a hundred thousand.”
“I’m pretty sure my contact at the FBI could get the latter amount out of his budget, but they would want the info more than the box, and that will cost them a lot more. Do you want to talk to Jim?”
“Absolutely not. H
e probably doesn’t care for me all that much and it would be against my ability to negotiate. The FBI believes you, or they would not have worked so hard to clear your name. You are the one to haggle with them. They aren’t very good judges of character because they like you.”
“Ha-ha!” I replied. “Ok, then help me with my selling points and how we want to be paid. Getting money from the government might not work as well as getting money from someone who asked no questions and gave no answers.”
“You got that right!”
We talked it through a bit, and then I went looking for Deb. She wasn’t far, but I wanted to keep her up to date and in the loop, and she thanked me.
When I finished telling her everything I had learned from Jim and then about the conversation with Otis, I was almost out of breath. But I asked her opinion, especially about talking to Jim.
“Few people would care about the info on the box,” she said. “The ones who did would be law enforcement or the would-be killers. The latter we wanted nothing to do with, so we needed to sell to Jim. If Otis is correct and the box with memory wiped clean was worth about a hundred thousand, it should be worth more than that to the FBI. But we couldn’t expect them to pay top dollar for it.”
I agreed and got a kiss to boot.
Jim winced when I told him we needed money for the box. “They have an offer for just under a million, but they don’t want to sell to those people. They’re willing to come down a lot to do the right thing.”
“I have an idea,” Jim said. “Maybe we could get the bad guys to buy the box. Then we could catch the bad guys with the box and take it away from them.”
I was not comfortable with being part of his new plan and told him it sounded as if someone might get hurt or killed.
“I know what you’re saying. With what you told me, you have given me a lot to work on. I’ll have to raise funds. Only another FBI agent would understand how hard it can be. I’ll see if there’s any interest in trying a little extra maneuvering to catch some bad guys and maybe save some money in the process. But most important of all, we cannot lose track of the box.”
He would let me know and said I should have fun until he heard from me. I texted Otis and told him not to lose the box because we had an interested buyer.
We went to the hot tub almost every day. Watching Deb put on that bikini or take it off was always one of the highlights of my day. It usually put me to sleep for a short nap.
We had drinks on deck looking out over the ocean and the islands we passed every now and then. It was beautiful and relaxing, and we were having a good time. Just about the time we thought we would get a little bored, we were in the Mediterranean. One of our stops was on the French Riviera. There were some beautiful women there. Deb got a little mad at me for taking in too much of the scenery as she called it. I told her she was the only thing on my menu.
She was mad at me and that explanation didn’t help enough.
“Why would you gawk at those women and act like I’m nothing?”
“I didn’t act like you were nothing. I didn’t do anything to you good or bad.”
“You did. You stared at them like you hadn’t seen a woman’s breasts before or like mine weren’t enough for you. You acted like you couldn’t get enough. And that is insulting to me.”
“My looking at them had nothing to do with you. I wasn’t comparing or wishing for them or anything.”
“Why do you need to look at them? I will show you mine anytime you want. I am very good to you and love you and give you what you want just about any time.”
“It wasn’t about us. They are pretty and I am a man who enjoys the female figure and they were out in the open and maybe showing off or not but I wasn’t trying to talk to them or get close to them. I was just appreciating how good they looked.”
“It made me feel that I am not enough for you. That you want something more than me. That who I am and what I mean to you are no more than what they are.”
“That isn’t true. They don’t mean anything to me except that I recognize their beauty. I don’t want them. I don’t want to meet them or talk to them or anything. I don’t want to get any closer than I was then. Do you not want me to be inspired by the female figure?”
“Yes, but by mine and only mine. I don’t appreciate it. I feel put down. I feel like you put me down to a level equal to them or maybe even less.”
“You can’t be serious. What I appreciate and love about you cannot be demonstrated by a few seconds of looking. I didn’t want any more than a look.”
She was upset and my logic was not winning the day. I sat down on one of the deck chairs and pulled her to me. She let me pull her closer but not too close. I pulled her down on my lap and hugged her.
“I am really, really sorry I hurt your feelings. I wouldn’t trade you for the entire beach full of them. I didn’t intend to slight you even a little.”
I apologized for looking so long. She said emphatically I had my hands full keeping up with her, and I agreed.
I said I would be more careful next time. She was ready to move on, but she was not happy about it.
…
We met other couples from all over the place. Several were from Texas, a few from Florida, a few from the Northeast, maybe New Jersey, New York or New England. One guy commented on Deb’s Cherry Hill attire, and she admitted she had lived there. We mostly avoided talking about the Northeast. I kept up my tan and the highlights in my hair and my close-cut beard. I was always aware someone would think I looked like the guy from Virginia that killed his wife even though he was not a suspect any longer. And the age-adjusted picture out there of him didn’t look like me at all. We were having a good time, but we knew better than to take that for granted.
Our Mediterranean stops came and went all too quickly, and then we were headed out over the ocean to the coast of Florida. I hadn’t heard from Otis or Jim in a while and didn’t know if it was because they couldn’t reach me or they had no news yet.
Once we were closing in on the Caribbean, I called Jim to see if he had been trying to get a hold of me. He hadn’t, but he did have some news. The bureau would pay $200,000 for the box, but that was top dollar. They were still talking about trying to catch the other buyer. It would be complicated. The buyers would want to power it up and see if it worked and was readable and if the data were on it. Then there would be the matter of getting the funds without them running off with the box and of wanting to kill the messenger rather than put out that much money. A lot of people had been killed for less.
I had an idea. Why didn’t the FBI buy the box from an Otis alias because he certainly would not be seen by law enforcement with the box in hand? They could work a deal themselves and see if they could get their money back. The plan had several advantages to my thinking, one of the most important being that they could read the thing, so if they lost it, they would still have the data. It was going to be a hard sell because the buyer would probably want to know for sure that no one else had read it. That was a pretty tall order, so Jim said we would wait to see if there was any agency agreement in that direction or at least some amount of consensus.
I discussed the latest information with Otis, and he agreed with my assessment.
“The key would be the seller,” he said. “They would have to be well protected but not appearing bright enough to know what they had. They could advertise they had something the FBI was trying to get. That it came off a crashed helicopter in the Phoenix area. That should be about all they would need to do. The people that would be looking for it wouldn’t need more information, and those that did need more information were not the buyers they’d be looking for. Considering that these people were likely killing with impunity, they would probably want to find an option cheaper than paying.”
It would be scary stuff for the seller, which would not be me. Fort Knox didn’t have enough gold for me to be the seller or even be in the same state when the deal went down if I had any prior knowledge. I wanted
some years of peace with my bride, and there was not enough money anywhere to tempt me from wanting that.
The rhythm weeks came and went, and they were OK after I got used to them. It wasn’t hard to make up for them before or after the fact. Deb and I were doing great, and we were really beginning to hope for a future. And I only had eyes for her.
We hit shore midmorning and got all our stuff out of customs. Deb found the motel shuttle. We’d be flying out early the next morning. While checking in we got our guns back, and it worked as well as Otis said it would. We didn’t want to be unarmed because only God knew what was coming. We got into our room, and we had quite a bit of time to spend.
We went to the hot tub first. Watching her at the hot tub or putting on or taking of that swim suit is so inspiring and nearly always a prelude to what concludes with a short nap. Did I mention that already?
Well After that we decided to explore. I got my fanny pack and she the backpack and off we went. We were supposed to be in a safe part of town, but we didn’t want to take any chances, so we stayed on the main streets.
We went to some gift shops and an art gallery and were more impressed with the prices people were actually paying than we were in the art itself. My taste in art is more realism and sometimes romanticism. And whatever “Thomas Kincaid” is works for me. Deb’s tastes were a little different, but they overlapped enough. We found things we both liked, but nothing we couldn’t live without. So after several hours we made it back to the motel intact and without buying anything, which surprised me, but we were glad.
I was tired so I grabbed her and dropped us onto the bed. Then I just lay there holding her. When she could tell what I was doing she relaxed. I held her for a long time and eventually went to sleep. When I woke up she was sleeping in my arms.