by Fiona Quinn
“Maria, you have to cooperate here, or we can’t help you.” Suddenly, Axel transformed into Papa Bear. His voice growled in warning. You don’t mess with Papa Bear. Maria’s body jerked when she heard the tone; she knew there was danger there.
“I will tell you what I know. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I don’t know how you can reach Brody. He’s underground.”
“What’s his involvement?” Dalton asked from behind Axel somewhere.
“Brody gets five hundred dollars a week to show up, memorize the code, and type it in on the computer.”
“How do you know he will follow through?” Dalton asked.
“If anything were to happen to Julio or me, then he doesn’t have a paycheck anymore, see? He’s doing it for the easy money.”
“Who’s paying him?” Dalton asked.
“I am. It’s set up with an accountant.”
“That’s a whole lot of money, Maria. You were living a frugal life. How are you getting the money to pay Brody?” Axel stood up and leaned into the wall. The angle of his glasses made Maria catty-corner on my screen. I tilted my head so she’d be upright, and I wouldn’t get seasick.
“The Man gave me a lot of money. I thought it would be enough to last until I could exchange Lexi for Julio. When Julio was free, then we could get to our money.”
“How long do you think that will hold out?” Axel sat back down and I was able to hold my head up again. I rubbed my neck.
“I only have a few weeks of money left. After that, Brody won’t put the codes in,” Maria said.
“What happens when Brody doesn’t put the codes in?” Axel asked.
“The computer will release the documentation that Julio has collected for the last decade and send it to the government agencies. Then Julio and I will be killed.” Maria’s cadence was like a dirge.
“Like I said, we know how to create the code. I can put the code in for you. Protect you. How do I do that?” Axel was back to his hypnotic tone.
Maria leaned forward and gestured towards the pen Dalton was tapping on his knee. Maria wrote a web address on a piece of paper that lay on the table. “On Sunday afternoon, and only on Sunday afternoon, you can pull this up; otherwise it will give you an error code. When it comes up, there will be a box and no instructions. Type the code into the box and press enter. You will see a smiling face if you did it right. If it is wrong, you have two more tries. That’s so if I type wrong, I have a chance to make it better.”
“And if four codes go in incorrectly?” Dalton asked.
“The computer sends the documentation to everyone from the President of the United States, to the presidents of Colombia and Honduras, Iniquus, the media, everyone Julio could think of.”
“How do you think they could kill you in prison?” Axel asked.
“These prisons in Florida are filled with CQ2. They will have no problem killing us.”
“Is this someone with Sylanos who will give the kill order? We need to know who’s in charge so we can stop them.”
Maria nodded, all seriousness. She was at the edge of her chair, her feet planted wide for stability. Her gaze lasered in on Axel. He was the man with the life vest. Axel might be able to save her. “I think it is a man with the politicos. A group named Omega.”
Omega? Omega. Holy cow. I felt the blood drain from my face. I was completely lost now about what was happening. I sat forward in my chair, leaning hungrily towards the screen. I held my breath and waited for what would come next.
“Maria, go back. You said ‘a man with the politicos’ and you have also said ‘The Man’ who gave you money – are they one and the same?”
She looked up at the ceiling, processing. Maria bobbled her head. “Yes. Yes, they must be. . .”
“Maria, you will start at the beginning and explain your connection to The Man and Omega.” Dalton was using a captain-in-command voice. Quiet authority. No other choice but to comply.
Maria nodded. “Julio was arrested. He was on the news all the time. I had to move from our apartment and change my name to Consuela Hervas to hide from the reporters. I was afraid that the border police would come and make me go back to Honduras. I thought that I had hidden pretty well. One night, when I was asleep in my apartment, a man broke in. He came to my bed. I woke up with his hand over my mouth.”
“Did you ever see him?” Axel was on his feet again.
“No. The lights were off, and he was behind me.”
“Accent?” Axel asked.
“Anglo.”
“How big?”
“Average height, heavy set – you know middle-aged kind of heavy.”
“Anything else you can tell me about him?” Axel moved in front of Maria and crouched down eye-to-eye with her. His voice was flat and barely audible. I could see Maria’s pores, her sweat, her twitching right eyelid. Maria was used to being hit. Axel could see what I saw. With his psych background, he would interpret her body language the way I was interpreting it. He must have wanted to pressure her with a physical threat.
I would have done this differently, but I looked a lot different than Axel. Before all of this, I looked like a young happy-go-lucky piece of girly fluff. It was my planned and practiced disguise. Now? Well, it was going to take a while to put my disguise back in place. And Axel’s strategy seemed to be working. Maria was revealing her secrets.
Twenty-Three
Maria swallowed visibly.
“What did he want?” Axel asked.
“He had a job for me to do. He knew that I had money problems, that Julio had been stingy with the money. He said if I cooperated, he would make sure I had everything I needed and help me get to Julio’s off shore accounts.”
“And if you didn’t work for him?” Axel asked.
“He never said. I never asked. I needed the money. I was okay working with him. He left two thousand dollars on my bed when he left.”
“Why you?” Dalton said.
“Because I had a connection with Lexi Rueben.”
Rueben, my maiden name.
“Okay, let’s focus there. Tell us about your connection,” Dalton said.
“My best friend, Beth Sylanos, used to live in Washington DC under the name Jenny Agnew. I wasn’t supposed to know that, because she was a federal informant and is in their protection program. But Beth contacted me and kept in touch with me. Lexi used to babysit Beth’s kids while she worked at the hospital laundry. The Man knew all about Beth. He knew everything about everything. He needed me to make friends with Lexi.”
“Why?” Dalton asked.
“He never said,” Maria replied.
“Did Lexi know Jenny Agnew went by another name?” Axel asked.
“I don’t have a clue what Lexi knew or didn’t know. I would seriously doubt she thought anything about Beth at all. Lexi was a girl when she babysat – a young teen.”
“The Man thought that you had a foot in the door even though you knew a woman named Beth, and Lexi knew her as Jenny Agnew?” Dalton sounded confused. He should stop talking. Maria needed someone with authority to confront her one on one. Sharing a leadership role with Axel weakened Axel’s position and helped Maria gain power. She needed to be powerless.
“The place Beth was living was like this little apartment village. All of the families shared with each other and helped each other. It was a very important place to Beth. The neighbors there were like family. Beth thought of Lexi like a niece.”
A niece? Huh. Mrs. Agnew must treat her family like shit. She was mean, surly, and sometimes even vicious.
“There was a fire at the complex,” Maria continued. “The whole building burned down. Everyone lost everything.”
“Where did Beth move after the fire?”
“Beth had to move before the fire happened. She thought that someone had found out about her, so she ran away. I haven’t heard from her for years. Not since she lived in the DC apartment building. The Man said that Lexi got married, moved to a house after the fire, and t
hat she would be missing her life at the apartments now that everyone was living in different places. Lexi’s parents were dead. Her husband died in Afghanistan, and she was alone. He said that my having a connection to Beth, well Jenny Agnew, would feel comforting and since I knew about Spyder McGraw, we could talk about him.”
“Do you know Spyder McGraw?” Now that Maria was doing well, Axel leaned on the edge of the desk in front of Maria instead of crouching – good thing. He had been making me cross-eyed.
“No, I know enough about him from Beth to fake it, though. And The Man left me pictures of him.”
“How did you buy your house on Silver Lake?” Axel asked.
“The Man arranged for it. He put money into an account, and I bought it under the Consuela Hervas name.”
“You moved into the house at the end of December. You reached out to Lexi. Did you become her friend?” Dalton’s disembodied voice came from behind Axel’s head.
“I’ve never met a more unfriendly person in my life. The Man was getting mad at me. Threatened me. I was trying. I made friends with the people in the neighborhood. I invited my niece Tammy to come over. Tammy and Lexi are nearer to the same age. I thought that would help. It didn’t. I lied to The Man though, and made it seem as if we were getting closer.”
“Tell me again, why did the man want you to befriend Lexi? What did he want?” Axel asked.
“He told me nothing. He was always asking about Spyder. Had I seen him? Did I know where he had gone? Did I know when he would be back from his assignment?”
“What did you say?” Axel asked.
“I lied. I said he would be gone for a long time. He wasn’t planning on coming back. I didn’t know what else to say. He had me bug Lexi, and then bug her house to listen to her private life.”
“What did you find out?” Axel focused up on the door. A guard was looking in the window. He nodded at Axel and moved on.
“She washed the first bugs that I planted on her and her boyfriend, Gater. Then one night, I went with another neighbor, Manny and his boys, over to Lexi’s for dinner. I wasn’t invited; I just went. I had to get inside to put the bugs in her house. I don’t think anyone saw me plant them, but Gater discovered them and destroyed them.”
“How did Gater know to look for bugs?” Dalton asked.
“I have no idea.” Maria shoved her hair back from her forehead. It was damp with sweat and stuck up from her head, making her look crazed.
“You moved away suddenly,” Axel said.
“I guessed Gater figured out I was the one who planted the bugs in Lexi’s house. He must have planted bugs in mine to understand why I wanted to listen to her. But they were found.”
“How did you get the equipment and training to find bugs?” Dalton asked.
“The Man found them when I was out shopping. I came home, tried to turn on the lights, and everything was out.” Maria reached under her cuffs and rubbed at her wrists, where red marks had formed. “I could see that the neighbors all had their porch lights on. I thought maybe that a breaker tripped. I went to go fix it, and there was The Man sitting at my kitchen table.”
“You said you didn’t know what he looked like,” Axel reminded her.
“I don’t. It was dark; I only saw that someone was there. I recognized his voice, though. He said someone had discovered me somehow. I believed he would go ahead and kill me. I told him that Gater was a paranoid soldier type; he must have that PTSD. I said how it doesn’t matter if my house was bugged. No one could have gotten any information from me. Gater had bugs in my landline, my computer and my walls. It didn’t matter, though. I was smart; I was careful. I contacted no one but Tammy. The only thing Gater would have heard was me watching TV.”
“Then what happened?” This time it was Dalton pushing the story along.
“The Man wanted to know what information I had. Wanted to know if Lexi and me were friends now. I said how I was getting to know Lexi that I had had dinner at her house the other day. He knew about the dinner and said that that was good. After he left, I got to thinking. If he knew about the dinner, then he’d know that the bugs got messed up. The game was over. I was afraid if I stuck around, The Man would kill me. I packed up and moved down to Nelson, Florida.”
“If The Man was set on killing you, you don’t think he would find you in Nelson?” Axel asked patiently.
“Why would he look for me in Nelson?” Maria sounded genuinely confused.
“That’s where Julio is imprisoned,” Axel said.
“The Man knew me as Consuela Hervas or Maria Rodriguez. When I moved to Florida, I called myself my maiden name Maria Castillo. He wouldn’t know to find me under that name. He’d look under Hervas. I was safe using Castillo.”
“If he knew everything about you,” Axel said, “surely he knew that you flew to Florida every Sunday to see Julio. The Man could watch the prison on visitor days and see if you showed up – or he could have just paid a PI to do it for him. They’d simply follow you home.”
Maria’s eyes stretched wide. “Oh, I didn’t think of that. I guess The Man didn’t think of it either, because I’m still breathing.” Maria stilled, her focus moved to her knotted fingers. “Not for long though,” she muttered. Maria raised her eyes to meet Axel’s gaze. “If you decide not to put the codes into the computer, Brody will only come a few more times. I hope Sylanos will hurry up, and get Julio and me out.”
“How will Sylanos do that?” Axel asked.
“Sylanos will talk to the bigwig politicos. They make sure that everyone looks the other way when Sylanos wants something done.”
“Because?” asked Dalton.
“Sylanos funds them. Funds their yachts, funds their European vacations, funds their political campaigns. So as soon as Sylanos says they should let us go – when the media forgets about Julio — then they will set us free.”
“Why didn’t Julio play his Sylanos card to stay out of jail?” Axel swung his head around to watch Dalton tap a tired-of-being here pencil on the table, making pinging noises. Was this a technique of some kind? Like Chinese water torture? I sure wished he’d stop already.
“Like I said, Julio went to jail because the wrong guy got involved. Once Julio was part of the system, they had a hard time making it go away because it got media attention. Too many eyes involved. They told him he had to sit in jail, and when things cooled off then they would get him out.”
“That’s your whole plan? Wait for Sylanos?” Dalton’s tone was derisive.
“Shut up, Dalton,” I yelled at the screen.
Maria glared at him.
“When you say politicos, do you know whom you’re talking about?” Axel was back to his hypnotic voice, trying to soothe Maria into complacency, like an Indian snake charmer with his flute.
“Different people. No, I don’t know each one. I just know from what Julio said. And I know the name Omega.”
“Omega. Anything more?”
Maria shrugged and played with folds of her tan prison uniform. “Julio told me that there were actually two groups working to take Sylanos down. There was Omega, and there was Iniquus. Spyder McGraw works for Iniquus and Lexi’s boyfriend, Gater, works for Iniquus. But Omega was never a threat to Sylanos.”
“Come again?” Dalton said.
“The politicos got their money from Sylanos to begin with. So, do you see? If Omega took down Sylanos, Sylanos could no longer give money to the politicos. If the politicos had no money, they would not have funding to win their elections. Once they are elected, the politicos order the agencies to hire Omega to do their agency support work. Omega has fat government paychecks because of this chain that starts with Sylanos. Julio says that Omega knows not to bite the hand that feeds them. In this case, it’s Sylanos feeding the politicos who in turn feed Omega with contracts. Julio says that’s why Sylanos is safe. Omega will make sure of it, and the politicos know this and depend on it.”
“Omega was not a threat to Julio. Omega was protecting Julio?” D
alton asked. Axel turned the camera toward Dalton. This piece of information seemed to sharpen Dalton’s focus — at the very least it stopped his pen from pinging and seeding a new migraine behind my right eye.
“This is right. Julio didn’t worry about Omega at all. Iniquus was the threat. Iniquus could not be bought with money. And Sylanos had no mole, though he tried to plant Julio.”
“What does that mean, Maria?” Axel asked gently.
“Julio tried to get a job up at Iniquus, so he could plant software onto the computer systems. He was not hired. He didn’t pass the security clearance. He tried to plant spyware and send viruses, but they were not successful with that, either. Julio said he would like to meet the head of Iniquus IT.”
“Was Julio mining for something specific?” Dalton asked.
“Yes. Sylanos wants to take down Spyder McGraw.”
A guard unlocked the door, and Dalton asked the direction of the john. Speaking of bathrooms, I needed a break, too. I paused the video. “Intermission,” I said, using my walker for balance as I pushed to my feet.
***
As I waited for my teammates to get back, I scanned my notes from Maria’s interrogation. Randy was in the air, headed for California. He had a federal search warrant in his hand. I couldn’t wait to go through the data on the computer he would bring back with him – maybe as early as tomorrow.
“Okay. I’m here.” Deep stalked through the door, the last one in. He held a peanut butter smoothie out to me. I stared at it with my hands in my lap.
“Come on, Lynx, it’ll make a man of you.” He wiggled the glass at me.
“Just what every girl wants,” I sighed dramatically and reached out.
Deep tapped the computer button as he sat down, and the screen filled with Maria again.
Axel was alone in the room with her. “You said The Man was interested in Spyder. Was he interested in Iniquus, or just Spyder?”
“I don’t know.” She lifted her shoulders and let them drop despondently.
“But you think The Man was associated with Omega?”