“You will let me know when you have more information, won’t you?” She asked Miller.
“Of course.” Miller replied with a smile, a subtle attempt at flirtation that Nikki filed in the back of her mind as something she could use later if need be.
“Thank you, detective Miller.” She replied.
They turned from the apartment and she studied the men a moment as they walked away, before finally closing the door.
She turned her back towards the door and leaned against it.
She looked at Miller’s card. She would stay on him, she thought. And when they had Alex Luthecker behind bars, she wanted to meet him, she told herself. Yes, she wanted to meet the man whose eyes haunted her. She wanted to ask the son of a bitch, face to face, if he was in any way behind the accident that nearly killed her brother.
• • •
“I know what you’re thinking, and it’s a bad idea.” Castillo said to his partner, as the two officers exited the apartment.
“You saw how she looked at me.” Miller replied.
“That’s ‘cause she wants something from you pal, and it isn’t what you think.”
Miller led the way out of the glass doors that made up the entrance to the apartment complex.
“I can handle it.” Miller replied, as they approached their black unmarked Police Interceptor, parked directly in front of the building.
“Famous last words.” Castillo replied. “Look, the fugitive case isn’t our problem.” He continued. “The DUI case is. And it’s pretty much closed. We’ll report back that she saw him, like we were asked, and let Homeland Security, or whoever the fuck is running that show, take it from there.”
Miller watched as Castillo made his way to the passenger side of the vehicle.
“We’ll fill out the report on the fugitive. I don’t want to get caught on the wrong side of those guys. But we won’t close out the DUI file. Not yet.” He stated.
Castillo looked at him.
“That one’s still our jurisdiction. Just give me another day or two to work this.”
“You’re going to pay her another visit?”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Yes it is.”
“Just two days. They’re never going to know. As the senior officer, it’s on me if anything happens, and I’ll just paper the thing anyway.”
“You are never gonna tap that ass, my friend.”
“Two days.”
Castillo looked at his partner a moment before answering.
“Fine. But you’re on your own. And you owe me.”
“Whatever you want.” Miller replied with a smile, as both men climbed inside the car.
FOURTEEN
RECONNASAINCE
“I wish they’d tell us what the hell is going on.” Marcus Stern told his partner, as he sunk deeper into the plush leather lobby chair of the Coalition Towers West Building.
“We’ll be lucky if we still have a job.” Vincent Wolfe replied, never taking his eyes up from the People magazine he skimmed through while he sat waiting next to his partner.
“We could have tracked him down and brought him in. I don’t understand why Brown didn’t just lock down the whole damn city.”
Stern looked over at Wolfe, who preferred the contents of the magazine to the attempt at conversation from his partner.
“They let him walk, not us. I mean, if he was so damn dangerous, why’d they just let him go?”
“Don’t worry, I checked my contract- I’m still entitled to my bonus.” Wolfe finally answered, again without looking up from his magazine.
“That’s not the point. All I’m saying, is we had him cornered, and they told us to back off. And I just want to know why.”
Wolfe went back to ignoring his partner, and flipped a page.
At seventy-five stories above ground, Coalition Towers West was the tallest building in California. An intimidating black structure with white trim and no signage, it was located right in the heart of the business district of downtown Los Angeles. Built in 1999, it originally housed several investment banking firms and insurance companies, but after the credit implosion of 2008 several tenants walked away in default, allowing Coalition Properties to step in and purchase the building at a market corrected discount of 400 million dollars. It had several unique features that made it attractive to the firm. It already had a high capacity power grid, with back up generators that could theoretically supply enough wattage to power the entire city for a month. Being in an active seismic region, it was built to withstand an earthquake of 8.5 magnitude on the Richter scale. And local building codes required it to have one of the few active rooftop heliports in the area. It made for a perfect west coast base of operations, and although several firms had returned to the lower floors, the top twenty were now occupied by The Coalition.
Marcus kicked Vincent’s foot to get his attention as he spotted an attractive but sterile looking woman approaching them from across the enormous marble-floored expanse of the building’s ground floor lobby. Wolfe looked up from his magazine and saw her immediately, noting to himself that she was in her thirties, wore a black Armani skirt suit, and had a Coalition Properties security badge pinned to the lapel of her suit jacket.
“Mr. Wolfe? Mr. Stern?” She asked when she finally stood across from them.
“Yes. That would be us.” Stern replied.
“This way.” She stated before wheeling about and walking towards the elevator banks that made up the central pillars of the lobby.
Wolfe and Stern looked at one another a moment before getting to their feet and following her. She led them to the elevator banks, eight doors that faced across each other in sets of four, with numbered markers above each set indicating the range of floors each elevator car had access to. She swiped an access card that opened the doors that led exclusively to Coalition Properties, floors fifty-six to seventy-five. After several seconds a pleasant chime rang as the elevator doors opened. The woman stepped into the car, waited for Wolfe and Stern to follow her inside before swiping the card in front of a sensor again, simultaneously pushing the button for the seventy-third floor. The doors shut, and the car quickly began its ascent, the three of them standing respectfully equidistant from one another.
“So, how long have you been working here?” Stern asked the woman, trying to make conversation.
She didn’t move.
They waited in a slightly more awkward silence for a moment longer before the elevator glided to a stop, the doors quietly opening onto the seventy-third floor. She exited the elevator without a word or a glance back, and after a moment, both men took their cue and followed.
The seventy third-floor lobby was small and unmarked, with polished grey marble floors and walls painted a pristine white. There was no Coalition signage visible, signage not necessary as nothing was being sold here. A small security desk was neatly partitioned off in the left corner, and a set of opaque glass double doors sat next to the desk and directly across from the elevator.
Stern and Wolfe watched as their escort nodded to the armed guard behind the security desk, and the man picked up a phone receiver, hit a speed dial button.
“Have a good day, gentlemen.” The woman in Armani said to them, before turning around and getting back in the elevator. Stern watched her as she turned around towards the front of the elevator, facing them, hands carefully clasped behind her back. He locked his eyes on hers, trying to get her to look at him. She continued to stare straight ahead, never making eye contact, until the elevator doors silently shut her from view.
Stern looked at his partner.
“Friendly around here, aren’t they?”
“Just pay attention.”
“They’re ready for you. You can go in now.” The guard behind the desk interrupted.
Wolfe went first as both men pushed through the glass double doors. They were immediately hit with a cacophonic wall of multiple conversations. They stopped and looked over what appeared to be a fiv
e thousand square foot Wall Street-style boiler room crowded with men and technology, with carbon copy analysts donning ties and rolled up sleeves seated uniformly equidistance from one another along a half dozen long rows of HD color computer screens. Several other analyst-looking types, some wearing jackets to go along with their ties, stood in small clusters on the perimeter of the tech-men grid-work, locked in discussion with one another, occasionally breaking free to look over the shoulder of a tech bound analyst seated at an information feed, carefully listening to explanations of exactly what it is that they were looking at.
Stern observed that there was an enormous Atlas-style two-dimensional map of the continents and that a dozen 60-inch HDTV flat screen monitors showing various world events were mounted on three of the four walls, and that a small row of windowed offices lined the bottom floor.
“This reminds me of Doctor Strangelove, but with better tech.” Wolfe commented to his partner as they both took in the room.
“Doctor what?” Stern asked.
“Doctor Strangelove. You’ve never seen Doctor Strangelove?”
“No. I’m not old as fuck.”
“Good afternoon, gentleman. Welcome to the Coalition Properties West Information Center.” A silver-haired man in his fifties interrupted.
“I’m Tomas Stephens, Managing Director of these offices. Congratulations on tracking down one of the more elusive threats to National Security.” He said as he shook the other men’s hands.
“You mean Luthecker?” Stern asked.
“Yes.” Stephens replied.
“But you let him walk.”
“No we didn’t.” Stephens answered with a grin.
“Mr. Brown informed me that he is running a little bit late for the call. In the mean time, would you like a little tour of our operation?” He offered.
“That would be great.” Wolfe replied.
“Follow me then.” Stephens said, walking and talking.
“Are you gentlemen familiar with the Echelon Program?” He began, as they approached the first row of analyst observed monitors.
“That’s the N.S.A.’s spy Op, isn’t it?” Stern answered.
Stephens gave him a slightly condescending smile.
“Echelon is a signals intelligence collection system. Coalition Technologies development team was behind its design, and therefore it was a very natural extension that its operation be outsourced to us.”
“So you run the spy program for the U.S. Government?” Stern continued to simplify.
“No. That would be illegal. We simply design and operate information gathering systems for the various intelligence agencies.”
“Got it.” Stern acknowledged. Corporations really did game the government, he thought. And they keep it legal on a technicality.
Stern and Wolfe looked at one another as they kept walking.
They stopped behind an analyst whose eyes were locked on the monitor in front of him.
“This is Victor Peagler. He’s our number one “hash-man.” Stephens announced.
Peagler, a dark haired twenty-something whose skin tone implied that he could use more time in the sun, kept his eyes glued to the monitor in front of him as he held up a pair of fingers in greeting, never taking his attention from the alphanumeric string of symbols scrolling across his computer screen.
“Hash man?” Wolfe asked.
“He runs an S.H.A. program, which, a bit oversimplified, designs and implements cryptographic hash functions.” Stephens answered.
“What are “cryptographic hash functions”?” Stern asked.
“Cryptographic hash functions are designed to take a string of any length as input and produce a fixed length “hash value”, that essentially encodes any data you want transmitted.” Peagler answered, without looking up from his screen.
“String?” Stern asked.
“A finite sequence of symbols.”
“Try again.”
Peagler swiveled in his chair towards Stern.
“The alphabet.” He replied, with a smile that implied a combination of both impatience and arrogance.
“Oh. You’re a code breaker. Got it. You know what I do? I shoot guns for a living. For my Country. Most of the time I shoot at people. That’s what I do.” Stern replied, smiling back at the analyst.
Peagler slowly turned back towards his monitor.
“Why don’t I show you something a little bit more tactical,” Stephens suggested, before he lead Wolfe and Stern to the other side of the room.
They stopped in front of a semicircle of monitors, a dozen of them, each with a different view of the city.
Some were stationary views of intersections, parking lots, and storefronts, benign black and white images of motion that looked as if they could be from any of a number of recognizable and socially accepted security cameras. Some were overhead views of Los Angeles, large-scale pictures of the city grid itself, originating from various satellites.
Stern and Wolfe took note of two monitor screens with different images from the rest, that looked more like fast track mobile video, the viewpoint literally racing around street corners at a far greater speed than the cars that were located a mere five feet below them, before heading directly at a building-side and abruptly turning skyward, parallel to the building side, eventually leveling off, doing panoramic passes of top floor skyscraper office windows, spying on people as they sat at their desks, drank coffee, conversed with one another. Sometimes one of the cameras would stop for a moment on a window and focus on different elements in the room, revealing in detail someone sitting at a desk talking on the telephone, the focus moving from facial features to filing cabinets to the nameplate on the desk, before abruptly moving on. Both videos eventually soared towards the sky, only to dive back down and weave between the buildings and even people at dizzying speed.
Stern and Wolfe looked at one another, before looking at Stephens.
“Hummingbird drones.” Stephens answered the question with pride before being asked.
“Technically they’re still a beta program, but the government just ordered ten thousand of them, so Mr. Brown wants them operational and ready for delivery by the second quarter of next year.”
“How much do they cost?” Wolfe asked.
“That’s what’s great about them. They are ultra functional and dirt-cheap. About ten thousand a piece.” Stephens answered.
“That’s a hundred million bucks.” Stern added.
“A military C-note, as upper management is so fond of saying. An insignificant amount, really, in the grand scheme of things.” Stephens shrugged.
He checked his watch.
“It’s almost time. Let’s go to my office.” He continued.
“The conference call should commence in about ten minutes. Mr. Brown is very eager to speak with the both of you.” He added, before he wheeled about and headed for the corner office.
“I’ll bet.” Wolfe said under his breath, before he and Stern followed the director.
FIFTEEN
NEW PLAN
“You can’t be visible from overhead, whatsoever, for any length of time.” Master Winn stated, as they all huddled together in the cramped studio, looking at a map of the United States. The map had a route highlighted that zigzagged across the southern part of the nation before veering north towards New York.
“What about at night?” Chris asked, as they looked at highway routes.
“Doesn’t matter.” Yaw answered. “The eyes in the sky can see twenty-four-seven.”
“Correct.” Winn added.
“What about transpo?” Camila asked.
“You’ll have two vehicles. A scout car and a van. Both twenty years old, but clean, registered, and in top condition.”
“Why that old?” Chris asked.
“No GPS.” Alex answered.
“Who are they registered to?” Yaw asked.
“It’s best that you don’t know. The owner is aware that they are being used, but does not know by w
hom or why, other than it is not illegal. Be warned, if you get stopped, he will claim them stolen from storage. Understand, that for everyone’s safety, this must begin and end with you.”
“If we get stopped, we’re cooked anyway.” Camila commented.
“We won’t get stopped.” Chris added, determination in his voice.
“The course laid out avoids toll roads. You will travel through several towns with established underground communities.”
Winn handed Alex a piece of paper.
“What’s that?” Camila asked.
Alex skimmed over the information it contained, and handed it back to Master Winn.
“Names and addresses of courier friendly individuals and locations.” Alex answered.
“All former students of mine. They will be your stop points.” Winn added.
“The journey east is scheduled to take you five days.” He continued. “There is enough food and water in the van to last twice that. Stop only when you have to. Speak with as few people as possible. When you arrive in New York, contact Sam from a landline. He will give you instructions from there.” Winn continued.
He folded up the map and handed it to Chris.
“I will be in Watts awaiting your return.”
There was a knock at the front door.
Chris and Yaw instinctively took each side of the door.
“That should be your transportation.” Winn clarified.
Yaw checked the peephole, and opened the door. Joey Nguyen stepped into the apartment, and closed the door behind him. He held two large wool blankets rolled up under his arm. He tossed one to Yaw, one to Alex.
“The van is parked just outside. Keys are on the seat. The scout car is a black ninety-eight Honda Prelude right in front of it. My cousin’s standing right next to the Honda.”
“What are the blankets for?” Camila asked.
“To cover yourselves.” Nguyen said, before pointing a finger to the sky.
“Once you’re in the van, you should be fine. There is tint on the windows. Sunglasses and hats are on the dash. Whatever you do, don’t step out of the car without them on.” He continued.
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