“I have the financial crimes guys doing some digging, but right now, it looks like all of those different accounts belong to Everett Cooper and John Abrams. They were trying to hide their association with Executive Strategies and JIE Associates, the Venezuelan firm we found earlier. But Swiss accounts aren’t what they used to be.”
Sam pondered for a moment. “Why would Abrams and Cooper create a box full of evidence against themselves?”
“Because you have to have some way of keeping track of all of your accounts. Otherwise, the money is as good as lost. They probably created the file, then hid the file and destroyed the computer they used to create it. That’s what I would do, anyway.”
“So it was bad luck that Abrams happened to get killed while holding the key to the music box?”
“I think it was a message,” Dan said. “Somebody got wise, found the box, and smoked Abrams in a pretty spectacular way, as a warning. Like Henry the Eighth hanging skulls on posts outside London.”
That sounded reasonable to Sam. “So what does that mean for us?”
“Strange you should ask,” Dan said. “Are you sitting down?”
Sam rolled her eyes. Dan had a dramatic flair at times. It was occasionally humorous, but often tiresome. “Yes, Dan. Out with it.”
“Executive Strategies is owned, in part, by Edward Minton.”
Sam was momentarily disoriented. Minton was a familiar name. . . Then it came to her: “Fatso?”
“Yep. Fatso Minton is part owner of Executive Strategies.”
“How do you know Fatso Minton?” Sam asked, still confused.
“I don’t. I hacked into the system and read your lie detector transcript.”
“Jesus, Dan.”
“I know, right? But Ekman and Jarvis have a seriously strange air about them these days, and I was tired of being in the dark. Anyway, not only is Minton part owner of Executive Strategies, he’s actually one of the founders. They started out in 1998, and they’re still based in Dayton, Ohio. He registered the company while he was still on active duty in the Air Force, right before he got out. Does Brock know him?”
Sam thought back to the lie detector technician’s strange line of questioning during Sunday’s test, which she had volunteered to take in the hopes that it would demonstrate to Ekman and Jarvis that she wasn’t mixed up in whatever they thought she was mixed up in.
The technician had become a little too insistent that Sam provide an accurate date about when Brock and Fatso had met each other. She obviously couldn’t, since that era in Brock’s life predated their relationship by more than a decade, and it was never a topic of detailed conversation between them.
The technician had pressed for a precise answer, which meant that Jarvis and Ekman were looking into Brock’s past. Or Minton’s. Either way, it was a strong indication that she needed to investigate the connection, too.
Unfortunately, events had conspired against her since then, and she hadn’t been able to look into it. Looks like that particular answer found me, she thought. Usually it worked the other way around.
“Brock does know Minton,” Sam said, feeling heaviness as she spoke the words. If there’s a Dibiaso connection that Brock was keeping from her, it was likely the Minton thing was equally important.
What the hell did you drag me into, Brock?
“I hear Dayton is nice this time of year,” Dan said.
“Dayton is like Siberia this time of year.”
“Maybe your new burka will keep you warm.”
Part III
31
Sam woke up feeling remarkably peaceful. She’d had the first good night’s sleep in four days, since Ekman’s Saturday night call dispatching her to the scene of John Abrams’ bloody demise.
Life had roundly kicked her ass over the ensuing four days. Biology had finally taken over, leaving her too exhausted to lay awake worrying, and she had slept dreamlessly for nine straight hours.
And then, daylight, and a flood of recollection, and her stomach was soon awash in adrenaline as she pondered her next move.
It was important to prioritize her efforts, she realized. Priority one: figure out who the hell was trying to kill her, and why.
Priority two: figure out how to stop them.
Easy. A short to-do list for a run-of-the-mill Wednesday.
Except that both tasks seemed nearly insurmountable.
But, she realized for the thousandth time in her life, the best way to accomplish anything at all was to first begin, and then to keep going until finished. Thanks, grandpa. It was a piece of Zen pith, a non-financial inheritance from her mom’s dad, that had proven annoyingly prescient and remarkably useful.
She turned on all three burner phones, which she’d been using chiefly to communicate with Dan since she had bought them in a shop around the corner from the scene of Philip Quartermain’s murder.
As the phones powered up and began communicating with their various cell networks, Sam turned the situation over in her head again. Abrams. Cooper. Brock. Arturo Dibiaso. Phil Quartermain. Fatso Minton and Executive Strategies. JIE Associates. Ekman. Jarvis. They were all linked. But how?
Her next step was pretty clear. She had to travel to Dayton, Ohio, and have a chat with Fatso Minton. A phone call or email was out of the question – because Homeland was interested in Fatso, there wouldn’t be a safe way to communicate with him except in person, and even that would be tricky.
There was also the small problem of Jarvis and Ekman. They’d asked about her repeatedly since the weekend’s events, and Dan had so far been able to put them off, but that wasn’t going to last forever.
Reluctantly, she called and left a message on Dan’s phone at work, asking him to leave a note on Frank Ekman’s desk, to the effect that Sam would call with an update at 9 a.m.
How screwed up is it that I have to play cloak and dagger with my own boss?
Another of her grandfather’s many epigrams came to mind: no use wishing a thing was what it wasn’t. The gamesmanship was necessary because the moment Ekman had a phone number, he would soon have her location. That was unacceptable, because she still wasn’t sure whose team Ekman and Jarvis were on. If they were indeed on her team, they sure had a funny way of showing it.
Her mind next turned back to Fatso. Sam had to get to Dayton, as soon as humanly possible.
That wasn’t a pleasant prospect, because Dayton wasn’t like most other places. It had summer, which sucked, and winter, which sucked more. There wasn’t much in the way of an interstitial period, what other parts of the country referred to as spring and fall. While she was still perspiring in DC’s late fall warmth, folks in Dayton were already shivering and shoveling snow.
That was inconvenient, because it meant that she’d have to invest in winter clothing before traveling to Ohio. She sure as hell wasn’t going home any time soon to pick up any of her own things.
Getting to Ohio meant leaving a trail. One decade after 9/11, it was possible to pay cash for airfare, but only if one wanted the Transportation Security Administration, adjunct office of the Department of Homeland Security, to crawl up one’s ass. Sam didn’t want that.
She had broken out her Jennifer Garman legend to check in to both of her hotels over the past two nights. Unlike her other legends, which came complete with credit cards, birth certificates, passports, drivers’ licenses, and registration in the DHS database, her Garman legend was “off the books.” It didn’t officially exist, mostly because it was highly illegal – Sam had purchased the legend herself, using the Tor online anonymity network and a website called “Silk Road.”
At the time, it had been a huge risk, but one that Sam thought was worth taking. Nobody could destroy you like the US Federal Government, and Sam knew there might be a time when she found herself on the receiving end of all that nastiness.
Like now, for instance.
She fished the Jennifer Garman credit card out of her purse, made her way down the hotel’s dank, dark hallway to the �
�business center” – though what kind of business people might care to conduct in a cramped closet with an ages-old computer and an even older printer, Sam wasn’t certain – and booked herself on the next available flight to Dayton.
She knew that a same-day booking automatically invited extra screening by the bovine TSA people, and she groaned at the thought. Traveling was unpleasant enough, and she wasn’t in the mood for extra bullshit.
She stopped by the lobby, grabbed a donut and a cup of coffee, and asked to visit the lost and found, where she found a jacket heavy enough to stave off death in frigid Dayton.
Then she packed, checked out of the hotel, and hopped on the dilapidated airport shuttle for the thirty-minute commute to Reagan International.
On the way, she made small talk with the driver, a refugee from Ethiopia who lamented what his homeland had become, lamented having to live in an apartment with eleven other adults and three kids, lamented the large skim that the informal currency network took from the payments he sent back to his family in the old country.
But the driver never stopped smiling. “At least, in this country, I am free,” he said.
He memorized the brochure, she thought. It brought to mind that old quote, something about no one being more thoroughly enslaved than those who falsely think they’re free.
At least I know I’m screwed, she thought grimly.
Sam managed to keep her phone appointment with Ekman, calling from Reagan International to let him know that she was going to work swing shifts for a couple of days to allow her time to oversee reconstruction of her bombed-out house.
She was pretty sure Ekman didn’t buy her lie, and was pretty sure that an airport announcement in the background gave her whereabouts away, but he didn’t press her on either issue.
She thought that Ekman and Jarvis maybe preferred that she not hang around the office. It would be much more difficult for them to snoop around in her life if she were there, looking over their shoulders. But they wouldn’t dare place her on administrative leave, because they thought, correctly, that she would eviscerate them with an IG complaint.
So the conversation had amounted to an uneasy and momentary truce. But Sam knew it would be of limited duration. She hoped her discussion with Fatso Minton would be productive.
The airport hassle was annoying but tolerable, as was the flight, the rental car counter, and the traffic from the Dayton airport to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, home of Fatso Minton’s Executive Strategies Corporation.
She had thrown her three burner phones away at Reagan, and bought two more at a Verizon store in Dayton. She used one of them to ask Dan to arrange a visitor pass at the Wright Patterson gate for Jennifer Garman.
It was a huge risk – Dan now knew of her off-the-grid alias, and while she trusted him more than anyone else in the world at the moment, she generally trusted no one further than she could throw them.
But Sam knew that she would soon have to discard the legend, anyway. She had broken the seal and created a trail, and she would no longer be able to use her Jennifer Garman identity for a completely anonymous getaway if she needed one in the future. So, if Dan did dime her out for some reason, she would certainly lose a brief tactical advantage, but little more.
Sam exited the highway, grateful for the change in direction so she could stop staring into the setting sun. She followed the wide curve to the access road that led to Wright Patterson’s main gate. The road skirted the perimeter of the base for a couple of miles, taking Sam past the largest aircraft hangars she’d ever seen.
Her visitor’s pass was waiting for her, and the process of gaining admittance to the base caused her surprisingly little aggravation.
Being careful to obey the posted speed limit, which seemed ludicrously slow, she made her way past the main part of the base and toward the older, disused buildings on the other side of the runway. Checking the building numbers, which were arranged in no logical order that Sam could discern, she finally found the Executive Strategies address.
Immediately, her heart sank. Video surveillance cameras surrounded the facility, and a guard was posted at a shack at the entrance to the complex. There were no signs to identify the building, which was another bad sign. All of the surveillance – the fortress-within-a-fortress of extra security on an already-secure Air Force base – meant that Executive Strategies was involved in something very sensitive.
It also meant that nothing happened at Executive Strategies that the whiz kids at Homeland couldn’t observe, in real-time, just by hacking into the security servers.
If Fatso Minton were under surveillance, which he undoubtedly was, then a couple of pimply-faced hackers were surely watching him right now. Ekman and Jarvis would know within minutes if she set foot on the Executive Strategies campus. She had nothing to hide, but they had expressed a keen interest in any sort of connection that she and Brock might have had with Fatso. She wasn’t anxious to fuel the fire.
The gate guard spotted her, and walked toward her car. He motioned for her to roll down the window, and asked to see her identification.
“I’m very sorry, sir,” she said, putting on a respectable Southern accent. “I was looking for the base library, and I seem to have gotten myself lost.” She gave him a slightly pathetic smile, and he dutifully described the route back across the base to the library.
She thanked him, turned the car around, and drove away. Time for Plan B. Whatever the hell that might be.
Sam did in fact drive to the Wright Patterson Air Force Base library. She used a library computer to access the Deep Web, which comprised ninety-six percent of the Internet, but was accessed by fewer than one percent of Internet users. It was mostly comprised of junk web pages that nobody needed to access, but there were certainly gems buried among them.
The Deep Web also contained some frighteningly efficient tools to ferret out some frighteningly personal information about almost anyone in the Western world. She had needed to install some temporary software, which she accomplished by faking a printer driver problem and watching the computer administrator’s fingers as he typed in his password. Then she replicated the password to give permission to the Tor browser’s installer program.
Once inside the Deep Web, Sam began surfing through mountains of account information, the subterranean raw material of modern commerce. It hadn’t taken her long to discover that, unlike the vast majority of Americans, Fatso Minton had an extremely small digital signature.
Most of his account information was contained offline, and she wasn’t able to employ any of her usual tricks to access bank account numbers, credit cards, mortgages, or anything else that might also come with an address. Someone very good had hidden Fatso’s records from prying eyes.
But very good was rarely good enough, and Sam got what she needed by going about things a different way. She searched the records of common service providers, such as cable television, utilities, and the like, for accounts belonging or relating to Edward Minton.
Those obvious places yielded no results, but she only had to widen her search a little bit to get what she needed.
She tracked down Fatso Minton by, of all things, his automotive service records. She found an invoice from just two weeks earlier, something about a torque converter for his BMW X5, which also contained Fatso’s telephone number and address.
She wrote down the address and phone number, printed a map and directions to Fatso’s place, erased the Tor application she had illegally installed on the library’s computer a few minutes earlier, and walked out into the frigid Ohio evening.
The chill was startlingly earnest, and she hunkered down into the slightly-oversized coat she had liberated hours earlier from the DC flop house’s lost-and-found.
If I lived here, I would move, she thought as she started her rental car.
Fatso Minton’s house wasn’t a fortress, but it was a reasonably well-secured private residence, set back in the woods on the outskirts of town. There were motion detectors arou
nd the perimeter of the yard, but no video surveillance that Sam could detect. She was something of an expert in the field, having installed a state-of-the-art Israeli system in her own home during a paranoid episode following a particularly nasty case.
It was clear that Fatso had done well for himself. So well, in fact, that he didn’t really live in a neighborhood, but on something of an estate. It was well north of conspicuous consumption but just shy of ostentation.
More importantly for Sam, his castle didn’t include a moat, wall, or fence, and she simply circled around to the backyard on foot, and waited.
It wasn’t so much that careful people made mistakes. It was more that life was such a messy and entangled business that it was impossible to live an airtight existence. The Minton’s security situation was compromised by their beloved pug, who wandered out into the backyard through a doggy door. If the back yard motion detectors were on, Sam reasoned, they were certainly ignored.
She simply walked across the lawn to the back door. It was locked, but the doggy door was large enough for her to reach an arm through, and her arm was long enough to unlock the door from the inside. If the Mintons had teenagers, Sam thought, they would undoubtedly have discovered the same technique to sneak back in the house after an evening on the prowl.
Sam calmly walked into the Minton’s house, noting the two beeps of the security system that announced the opening and closing of the back door, and also noting the utter lack of response the beeps produced. The human mind has an impressive intrinsic capacity to ignore repeated stimuli, even those it shouldn’t ignore.
She found Fatso’s rail-thin frame hunched over a computer keyboard, his face scrunched into a scowl as he tried to make out some small detail on the computer display.
“Need glasses?” Sam asked by way of introduction.
Fatso jumped out of his chair, then reached awkwardly for a desk drawer – clearly it contained a gun, Sam noted – but he soon recognized Sam’s face and smile, and his panic subsided. “Holy sweet baby Jesus, you scared the piss out of me!”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 18