by Harper Lin
“Don’t say ‘footage.’ That’s an old term from the days of film. Everything is electronic now.”
“Har har. You want to be filled in on this case or not?”
I did. But I wasn’t sure why he was telling me anything. I thought he wanted me as far away from the case as possible.
“All right. Fill me in.”
“We had a computer expert look at it and at the surveillance recordings at SerMart. Both were deleted and replaced with earlier footage via an external server. What server we don’t know, because they masked that with something called a VPN. That stands for…” I heard a rustle of papers on the other end of the line. “… a virtual proxy network. Apparently, you can run your Internet access through a bunch of servers in various countries, making it almost impossible to trace you. Whoever did this used a secure wiping program that makes it impossible to recover the deleted video.”
“Do you have any idea who did it?”
“That’s where you come in.”
“Well, I didn’t do it. I didn’t even know what a VPN was until you told me.”
I could practically hear the eye roll on the other end of the line. A wet, squishy sound of utter exasperation. I love that sound.
“Of course you didn’t. I mean, I want you to use your, um, connections to find out who did. We think it happened via the security company that monitors the video. Both SerMart and Montalbion’s mansion were covered by Escudo Security. We can get a warrant, but it will take time, and they might still be trying to cover their tracks. Your… friends… in government can get into their system quicker.”
“All right. I’ll make a few calls.”
“Thanks.”
I blinked. That thank-you sounded genuine.
“That will be all I’ll need you for at the moment,” Grimal said with an officious tone.
Well, he just ruined that, didn’t he?
He hung up without saying goodbye.
Humph. Well, at least it was an interesting lead.
Then a little bell went off in my head. “Escudo” means “shield” in Spanish. I checked Escudo Security’s website. Besides the usual sales pitches and details of services, there was a page with employee names and photos. All the senior positions, and most of the junior ones, were taken by Hispanics. The bio of the company president, Ricardo Morales, said he was born in Mexico and immigrated to the United States at an early age. Similar statements were made by several other employees.
I wondered about that. They all had a distinctive look to them—broad faces, flat and wide noses, straight black hair cropped close. They looked like they all had a large amount of Native American blood in them. Of course, that’s true of many people in Mexico, but it tends to be more common in southern Mexico. That look is much more common in the Central American countries further south.
Like Panama.
And the only gemstone missing from Sir Edmund’s vast and priceless collection was the Volcano Stone of Panama.
Well, wasn’t that an interesting coincidence?
CIA operatives don’t believe in coincidence.
And back in the 1980s, my late husband, James, and I had been assigned to several missions in Panama. Manuel Noriega, once a U.S. ally and one of the only Latin American leaders not to have ties to the Soviet Union, had gotten his hands dirty with drug trafficking and had been making overtures to the Soviets. We had gone on several missions to break up his drug network and recruit military officers to overthrow him. I was probably the only person in Cheerville who had been in Panama during those tense days, and whose shopping cart did Sir Edmund Montalbion fall into?
That made two coincidences I didn’t believe in.
I put in a call to the CIA. Yes, I had retired a few years ago, but like the Mafia, no one leaves the Company. I still occasionally got calls asking for advice, and as a professional courtesy, I could do the same.
The person I was looking for was Gary Wycliff. Gary had been a cub agent back in the eighties, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Nearly got killed on his first mission with us, which dulled his eyes and drooped his tail somewhat. He learned, though, and survived a lot of hard assignments until a bit of Taliban shrapnel gave him a permanent limp and a desk job in Langley, Virginia.
He also had undying loyalty to me because James saved his life once. He saved James’s life once, too, but that didn’t make it even. That’s not how it works.
“Barbara Gold! How are you? It’s been too long.”
“Oh, things are going about the same as usual”—yes, witnessing a murder was the “same as usual” for me—“and how are you, Junior?”
Gary laughed. “I turned fifty-six last month! I guess I’ll never get rid of that nickname, will I?”
“When you started with us, you only had to shave once a week.”
“Ah, the good old days.”
After a bit more chatter, we got down to business. Soon I could hear him tapping away on the CIA’s computer database.
“Ah, here we go. Escudo Security. Yep, it’s just as you suspected. The company is co-owned by the president, vice president, and accountant. All three of them came in on Mexican passports but are in fact Panamanian. They are now all green-card holders.”
“If we know that their passports were fake, why did we let them in?”
“Because we gave them to them.”
“Oh. May I ask why?”
“That’s classified.”
“Come on now, Junior. I explained the situation. I might be a target here.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. It’s above your level. You know how it works.”
I did. A CIA agent didn’t have free access to every bit of information the agency had. We operated on a need-to-know basis. I’d been out for a while, and while my service was respected and got me a lot of perks, it did not give me a look at everything they were doing.
Especially if it had to do with an ongoing project or something that occurred after my retirement.
But was it? While the CIA kept agents in every country in the world, Panama wasn’t as hot as it used to be. Noriega was in prison, the Soviet threat was long gone, and the Panama Canal was running smoothly. While the country was more or less stable now, and stably in the orbit of the United States, it still needed watching. All of Latin America did. Now it wasn’t Communist insurgents. Instead it was potential coups by generals who would be hostile to the United States and its interests or the rising power of drug barons. The drug barons were the worst. While dictators always created enemies and rivals and were thus fairly straightforward to topple, drug barons were harder targets. They didn’t have a presidential palace to storm or a regiment of troops you could turn to your side. They moved in the shadows and had secret and always-changing distribution networks, and even if you nabbed them, there was always someone eager to take their place.
So what was I dealing with here? Not drug kingpins. Despite the rumors, the CIA didn’t deal in drugs. We did occasionally get intel from people in the drug trade so we could take out rivals or people higher up the food chain. Could the people of Escudo Security be some mid-level narcos who informed on their boss and got granted a new life in the United States? If so, they were picking an odd way to lay low. Their pictures were right there on their website.
So this must be more of a government thing. What it was, I couldn’t say. None of the faces I’d seen on the Escudo Security website looked over fifty, making them teens or kids during the tumultuous years of the eighties. They wouldn’t have been important enough to pull out of the country.
Unless they were the sons of important people.
Gary, bless his heart, kept quiet as all this whirred through my mind. I bet he could hear the wheels turning over the line.
“Could you at least tell me how much danger I’m in?” I asked at last.
Pause. “None if you walk away now. A lot if you keep sticking your nose in it, which I know you will. It’s best to let some things lie, Barbara.”
“Did
I mention the dead body of a multimillionaire falling from a tall height and nearly crushing me?”
“You did. I don’t know why they did that. I suppose it was to send a message.”
“You mean a warning?”
“No, more of a message. They didn’t want to kill you. At least I’m pretty sure they didn’t. They obviously wanted you to take notice, though.”
“I do wish you would stop being so cryptic, Junior.”
“I’m a spy. You’re a spy. Cryptic is what we do.”
I had to laugh at that. He always was fun to be around.
Something occurred to me.
“I didn’t tell anyone I was going to SerMart. I was going for a… surprise present.”
I had almost slipped and said it was for Martin. Best to keep him out of it.
“You may not have told your friends or family, but I bet you told SerMart,” Gary said.
I blinked. “Why yes, yes, I did. I called the evening before to ask their hours.”
“At what time?”
“Around five-thirty.”
“And when did you say the murder was?”
“Hours later.” Long enough to plan. “So Escudo Security has tapped their phones?”
“Not tapped. It’s part of their contract to monitor phone calls to head off any threats. Serengeti.com has a lot of enemies. That’s why they bought that service.”
I leaned back in my chair, my heart racing. You might think that my heart was racing as a nervous reaction to having my phone conversation listened to and traced by some mysterious Panamanians (later Mexicans, now Americans, really who-knows-whats), but that wasn’t quite correct. My heart was racing because I was feeling it again—that old thrill of being in the game.
James once compared it to gambling, a vice neither of us had ever indulged in. Civilians went in for hollow thrills. If you want a real thrill, act undercover in some third world dictatorship that would just love to throw you into some dank dungeon and torture you for a few years before dumping your mangled body into the sea. Why bet on horses when you can bet on your life, with the stakes not only being that you get to see another sunrise but that you can make a real difference in geopolitics? Why get a vicarious thrill off of television when real action is happening all around you?
And this case had all the real action I had loved in my working years—CIA involvement, shadowy figures, a mysterious death, missing loot, and a chance for me to make a difference.
The question was, a difference with what?
“So are you saying the good folks at Escudo Security wouldn’t have involved me at all if I hadn’t announced that I was coming to SerMart?”
“I’m not saying anything, Barbara.”
And that was that. I didn’t get another tidbit of information from him.
I did a little online checking on Escudo Security and found little, just a few mentions of contracts with major companies in the state and some photos of the president, Ricardo Morales, at various functions. Some of the other employees were in the background. The photos on their website were genuine. Whatever they had fled from in Central America, they felt safe enough to be out in public these days.
And why not? They’d been let in by the CIA, after all.
My phone rang again. It was Grimal.
“To what rare circumstance do I owe the honor of receiving not one but two phone calls from you today?” I asked.
“Can it. The fingerprints came back,” he said.
“And?”
“The bedroom and bathroom had the fingerprints of the butler and maid all over them, but that proves nothing. It’s their job to be in there. None from the cook, which lessens the chance of at least her direct involvement although she could have still been an accessory. And no fingerprints on that label Florence Nightingale yanked off the catwalk. Except hers, of course.”
“The way she mangled it, I’m not surprised.”
“Yeah, that made me cringe. But here’s the kicker.”
“What?”
“When we took the body out of your shopping cart, we found another bar-code sticker stuck to the bottom of it, the bar code facing up. And get this—it was for the exact same product.”
“Another coincidence. This case seems full of them.”
“Yeah, but what does it mean?” His voice came out whiny, pleading. He wanted my help but was too proud to ask.
I wish I knew how to help him. I had no idea of the significance of the stickers either.
I had to hope Albert would come up with something on his night shift. I called him just before he went to work to remind him of his duties and fill him in on all the details of the case so he would know what to look for. He had forgotten everything I had told him earlier, of course, but at least he seemed sober now.
“How did you ever pass the drug test?” I asked him. “Surely a company as security conscious and controlling as SerMart would have made you take a drug test.”
Albert laughed. “Those are easy to fool! There’s a drink you can get at smoke shops that takes it right out of your system. Chug a bottle of that a couple of days before your test and you’re home free.”
“I see,” I said, nettled that he knew something about the darker side of life that I didn’t. “How does it work?”
“Some sort of chemical thing. How should I know? Makes you pee like a Russian racehorse. I was going to the john like three, four times a—”
“That’s quite all right. I don’t need to know the details. Just remember to keep your eyes open at work, all right?”
“Sure, grandma. I’ll call you if I see anything weird.”
And he did. He woke me up at one o’clock in the morning, but he was good to his promise.
Nine
His voice came at such a low whisper I could barely hear what he was saying.
“Hey, grandma. There’s, like, something weird going down at SerMart.”
I rubbed my eyes and turned on the bedside lamp. My back twinged in protest of being forced to move after a few hours of lying still.
“What’s that?” I asked, keeping my voice low so it wouldn’t carry too far on his end.
“There’s some people who came up from the loading dock I haven’t seen before. Usually, nobody comes up on the freight elevator, but these three Mexican dudes came up, and they’ve been doing stuff around where you said the body fell from.”
“What are they doing?” I shifted in bed, propping a pillow under me to try to relieve my back.
“Dunno. They’ve been moving boxes, but I don’t think they’re actually working. It’s, like, two of them keep moving stuff, but they seem to be doing that to keep anyone from seeing what the third one is doing.”
“How long have they been there?”
“Only a couple of minutes. I ducked out and got away to call you. Oh, gotta go. Manager’s coming.”
The phone cut off.
I was in my car and driving to SerMart in less than five minutes.
It doesn’t take long to get ready when you sleep with your clothes on. I didn’t sleep with my shoes on, though. I am retired, after all.
I had even left a bottle of painkillers in the glove compartment. I popped one. It reminded me of the time when I had typhoid in the Western Sahara and I had to march twenty miles through the desert. I just dealt with the pain and soldiered on.
Cheerville is a sleepy town, and it’s even sleepier at night. The empty streets gave me a chance to calm my quick breathing and take stock of the situation.
We had three “Mexicans” coming into the building and doing something right where the body had been lying. Obviously, these were my Panamanian friends. They probably got access to the loading dock by showing their Escudo Security badges. No one would have questioned that. But what were they doing? Cleaning up the scene? Shouldn’t they have done that already?
They must have left something there. Something they didn’t want us to find.
The question was, had we already found it or not?
I felt that prickly little thrill I always got when I was hot on the trail of a case. This time, though, it was ten times as strong. This time, it wasn’t some local mafia or jealous rival crossing the line into violence. This time, it was international. This time, the CIA was involved somehow.
Which brought back something that had nagged me ever since I had spoken with Gary Wycliff. He hadn’t warned me off the case. Well, he had said I’d be in danger if I pursued it and safe if I didn’t, but he knew me well enough to know that was like waving a red flag at a bull. He was assistant head of the Latin American desk now. He ranked me. He could have ordered me to steer clear, and I would have had no choice but to grumble and salute. He hadn’t ordered me.
So in effect, he asked me to pursue the case.
But he hadn’t told me what it was all about.
There’s government work for you.
Parking at SerMart proved to be a problem, not because there weren’t enough spots but because there were too many. SerMart was a huge building with an equally huge parking lot. The twenty or so vehicles of the night-shift workers looked forlorn sitting under the harsh lamps in that vast space. If I drove in there, I would stick out like a sore thumb, and the people watching the surveillance cameras were the very people I was trying to spy on.
So I drove past. I had remembered from my one and only visit to the store that another street passed behind it. That street was also a commercial district but was much less built up and had only a few stand-alone shops. If I drove along there, I’d get a glimpse between the buildings of my target.
Yes, I notice these things when I’m out shopping for my grandson. It’s called situational awareness, and it’s saved my life on a number of occasions.
So I drove around the block and took the street behind SerMart at a much slower speed. Here, the stores were much smaller and stood alone. Some looked like they were old converted homes. All were shut, and I ignored their signs as I peeked through the space between the buildings, past a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, and into the back lot of SerMart.