Yuck.
Reluctantly he pulled out a pocket clerk and scanned his task list. A lot of it was trivial nonsense sent by unknown cogs in the bureaucracy. Review new benefits package. Again? Well, check that one off; nobody could prove he hadn’t read it. Return employee satisfaction survey. They’d never even look at it. Who came up with all this nonsense? Prepare a written summary of depositions in the Mendelssohn case. That was one he couldn’t ignore, and it would take hours. He leaned back and tried to summon the focus for a coherent dictation, but it wouldn’t come.
Gloomily his eyes flitted over to his inbox. The AI in his clerk filtered incoming messages pretty well, killing spam, filing announcements and general information, and forwarding urgent items. He hadn’t been buzzed in several days, but maybe it had missed something that really would provide a hot clue to stave off death by boredom.
Maybe.
Mostly it was unremarkable, but one item from a Julie Orosco caught his eye. Wasn’t she the wife of that guy he’d nailed a few months ago? He leaned forward and played the message, his fingers drumming the desk. At the end his eyebrows went up. How could Orosco have been an agent? No way could they have missed that on his background. No way.
Frowning, he hunted up the files on the case and re-read them slowly, his fingertips pressed together, pausing to nod or knit his brows periodically. He was looking for gaps, spots where he’d slipped up, places where the investigation had stopped short of due diligence.
He found nothing. It was a classic open-and-shut case that could have been lifted straight from a criminology textbook at the academy—so tidy, in fact, that it made him a bit uncomfortable, now that he thought about it. Years of interviewing witnesses and piecing together the most tenuous chains of reasoning had taught him that real life was never as straightforward as the books.
If Mrs. Orosco could be believed, this case was no exception. But it simply didn’t add up. They had looked for evidence of a double life at the time; it would have bolstered their conception of motive at the trial. And they’d found shadowy financial transactions, nasty phone calls—but not a whisper of a connection to the bureau. Why not?
Gregory reactivated the digital bloodhound that had sniffed out the generic details of Orosco’s past before. The subject template was still filled in: name, social security number, birth date. He added “FBI” as a key word and requeried. No new hits. How about “David Rosales” as an alias? Still nothing. He tried removing the social security number, using a range instead of an exact birth date. That returned some new possibilities, but he could tell at a glance they were spurious. Orosco had never been an obese bartender in Calgary or an actor in New York City.
He took out everything but the fingerprints and was back to a single match again. Rafael Orosco. He stared at the screen, nonplussed. “So where is this Rosales identity?”
He re-ran the fingerprint scan with the broadest possible matching tolerance.
Still one hit. Maybe the wife was just making it all up. But she’d seemed sincere, and he remembered pegging her as a level-headed if upset woman during their interviews.
He cleared the screen and pulled up the FBI Academy’s intranet. After a couple minutes of digging he was looking at graduation records. Almost immediately he found the name, staring at him in plain type. David Rosales. Score one point for Julie, anyway.
He switched to the personnel register, again got a hit. Rosales had graduated with an enviable record all the way around, from scholastics to marksmanship, had been assigned to Miami, worked for a couple years, then died in a tragic apartment fire. No living relatives.
Could they be the same person? He was about the age of Orosco, looked somewhat similar, though it was hard to tell from an old photo—especially if cosmetic surgery entered into the equation. He downloaded Rosales’ fingerprints and compared them to Orosco’s.
Different. So Julie didn’t quite have it right. But she said her husband’s archives had video of Rosales graduating at Quantico. Could Rosales and Orosco have been friends? Relatives?
Maybe he needed to use DNA. At the time of the original background search Gregory only had fingerprints, and they’d provided an unambiguous identification. He’d taken a DNA sample later, to ID cells on Oberling’s sheets, but not revisited the question of who Rafa was.
It couldn’t hurt to check. Besides diagnosing genealogy, it would be a sure way to prove the two men were different. Someone could conceivably substitute prints in a file, but not DNA; it was too easy to compare known physical characteristics against a genome and find the fake.
The Rosales file didn’t have a sample.
But that was impossible. Law enforcement had been storing profiles on all its personnel for decades. It helped rule out spurious traces at a crime scene and provided iron-clad positive ID when an assignment went wrong. He vividly remembered the prick of a needle in his own arm on the day he signed up. Part of the little red vial had gone to a drug test, and part into the database that now claimed no trace of Rosales.
Now he was genuinely puzzled.
Well, if he couldn’t rule out a Rosales/Orosco connection by DNA, maybe simpler methods would suffice. The powerful intra-agency research cloud had archives of trillions of financial transactions, traffic tickets, vehicle and driver registrations, rental agreements, medical bills, loan applications, school files. With coaxing they could perform wonders by weaving together a handful of disparate threads into a coherent picture. It was how they’d found the meager traces of Orosco’s shadowy alter-ego months before.
He had the bloodhound reconstruct a timeline for each man, using every scrap of data that seemed even remotely relevant. For Rosales, the picture was studded with detail all the way back to preschool. Here was the day he’d been immunized for tooth decay; the first day of kindergarten; his bout with chicken pox; his expenses on the night of Senior Prom; his scuba certification just before he started college.
Orosco also had plenty of detail in the recent past. But farther back, the picture was more sketchy. The computer noted that his parents had crossed the border illegally when he was a child, and had made efforts to minimize their traceability until they finally became permanent residents.
It was not an unusual profile. Gregory remembered most of it from his earlier digging. He drilled down into the month Rosales died, stubbornly ignoring the nag of duty that urged a return to his report-writing, instead of wasting time on a criminal he’d caught long ago.
There were a few scattered details on Orosco—he’d purchased a condo in California, a few weeks after fire burned the other man’s apartment to the ground on the opposite side of the country. He’d gotten a job with a marine salvage outfit out of L.A. And he’d renewed a library card. Otherwise nothing—not even a bank deposit.
Rosales had left far more tracks on the virtual landscape. He’d emerged from some sort of undercover assignment to testify at the trial of some prominent politicos indicted for collusion and money laundering and various flavors of conspiracy. His name was sprinkled through the news, right along with Samantha Oberling and her partner, who’d orchestrated the sting.
Gregory’s fingers froze in mid-drum. Rosales knew Oberling. How well? A year earlier, the computer showed a shuttle trip to Martha’s Vineyard on Thanksgiving weekend, and noted helpfully that the island was home to Oberling’s parents.
The world wasn’t so small that a Rosales-Oberling-Orosco connection could be happenstance. How did Orosco get a job as a diver? His timeline provided no clue about when he might have picked up such a skill. And how about the condo purchase? There was no financing institution, so where had he come up with that much cash—from his darker financial connections?
A little coincidence counter in Gregory’s subconscious was beginning to prick uncomfortably. He still felt confident that he’d nabbed the right culprit, but loose ends and unresolved questions were unacceptable. The Mendelssohn review would have to wait.
Frowning, he keyed a request to reactiv
ate and checkout Orosco’s complete file, then headed off to the bathroom, wondering how he could sell this detour to an irate manager. When he came back, his clerk was beeping patiently. He lit the screen with a thumb and glanced at the message, then read the words again with a frown.
“The Orosco file is already active and locked. Checkout is denied.”
30
On the far side of the park, Julie’s red hair was just visible above a line of shrubs. She was leaning over a picnic table, deep in conversation with Satler.
The man who had tracked her there looked bored and just a shade sleepy, slumping behind sunglasses on a cedar-strip bench. He wore a nondescript tee shirt and knee-length denim shorts, new running shoes, and an old-fashioned but extremely expensive platinum-plated wrist watch. He was of medium height, well muscled, bronzed. But there was a hardness to his face, behind the slack mask of rehearsed inattention.
The headphones he was wearing buzzed intermittently. A passerby with keen ears would have guessed he was listening to a bubbly DJ or maybe talk radio—and that was just the assumption observers were intended to make.
Julie’s voice, picked up by ultra-sensitive directional mic, came in with only minimal distortion. “Of course the FBI can decrypt it. Geire said they’d get right on it. But I want to see the broadcast myself.”
Satler, seated across from her, sighed in frustration. “I know. But all the locksmiths want proof of ownership before they go to work. And the code of origin can’t be faked.”
“You try using your MEEGO ID?”
“I’m not on the list of authorized signers. As soon as a decryption service ran a check, they’d know I was up to something. And MEEGO would find out.”
“That’s not an option, then.”
Satler shook his head.
“How about the other broadcasts? Couldn’t we take a look at those?”
“Yeah. Most are little bursts that last a few seconds. They probably aren’t worth our time. But there are a few longer ones we could check.”
“How many?”
“Oh, maybe a couple dozen.”
“Encrypted?”
“Unfortunately. They didn’t compress all that well in the cache.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, mainly it’s a bother. Since they’re not from MEEGO, we don’t have to get permission. But it’s going to look a bit suspicious to ring up a decrypter and say, ‘Here’s a whole wad of transmissions. I know nothing about them, and they’re not mine, but I need you to crack the code and tell me if they say anything interesting.’ I guess we could hire a private investigator. They’d look more legitimate snooping, anyway.”
“Maybe I could try Madison,” Julie mused.
“Madison?”
“A friend at one of the translation bureaus I do business with. She gets documents all the time from clients and translators. Almost all of them are encrypted, and I’ve had to call her a few times when a client forgets to pass along their public key. She’s got to have a standard procedure for this sort of thing.”
“Why don’t you call right now?”
Julie glanced at the time on her phone and shook her head. “She’s on the east coast; they’re closed for the day. Besides, I have to catch the ten o’clock shuttle back to Milwaukee.”
The picnic table creaked as Satler stood up.
“Come on, then, I’ll give you a ride to the terminal.”
“I can catch a taxi.”
“Don’t bother. It’ll cost you an arm and a leg, and I can get you there faster anyway. It’s the least I can do, since you flew all the way down here to Houston.”
Julie nodded a bit uncertainly, and they turned to walk to the parking pad. Her voice faded, but was still audible over the headphones. “I’ll get Madison tomorrow morning and let you know what she says.”
Satler rumbled something unintelligible. There was the sound of doors opening and shutting, then the crescendoing hum of a skimmer’s engines.
The man on the park bench reseated his sunglasses, then shut off the listening equipment in his tote bag with a casual flick of the wrist. In a minute a shadow flitted across his shoulders as the skimmer lifted off and shot across the park, disappearing behind a nearby line of trees.
Without looking, he felt around in the bag until his fingers closed on the thumb-sized plastic case of a triggering device. He raised the cover and depressed the smooth circular button, his features expressionless.
The receding hum of the skimmer faltered, coughed, then died. A moment later a chaotic thud and the welter of rending metal echoed over the park. On the pond, some ducks flapped their wings uneasily, then settled back to the water again.
* * *
Satler had been shaving a hilltop by the narrowest of margins when the engine died. The lack of altitude saved their lives.
They dropped like a stone, with not even enough warning to grit their teeth, and ploughed into the rounded dome of grass in an impact that battered their ear drums. Air bags and restrainers deployed instantly, cushioning them from the worst effects of the chassis’s deformation and pinning them so they wouldn’t hurtle forward.
The smashed remnant of the skimmer rolled twice down the lee of the hill, trailing plumes of greasy smoke in its wake and gouging an ugly earthen scar on the turf, and finally rocked to a stop. After several heartbeats Julie managed to release her death grip on the door handle and stop shaking.
Satler had a bloody gash on his forehead, but he looked surprisingly calm. He leaned over, unsnapped his belt, and then did the same for Julie.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice oddly loud in the hush that had descended.
“I think so.” Her shoulder was numb from a particularly vicious thud during the rollover, but it didn’t feel broken. “Whoever invented seat belts and air bags deserves a serious pat on the back. How about you?”
For a moment he appeared not to hear her. His eyes scanned through the shattered windshield and side windows, his lips intent and thin. What was he looking for?
“I’ll phone for help,” Julie said, realizing with surprise that her purse was still lying at her feet. How had it stayed put in the tumble? She leaned down and fumbled at the clasp, her fingers trembling slightly.
“Don’t. We’ve got to get out of here.” He tried to open his door, but even an intense thrust with his hulking shoulders would not make it budge. The acrid smoke was mostly billowing up and away, but tendrils stung her eyes and throat.
“Because of fire?”
Satler shook his head and leaned across to smash a beefy palm against her door. It clicked, sagged promisingly, and caught again. Julie twisted and kicked with her feet to help him. For a moment they both strained. At last the obstruction gave way, and the door creaked open on skewed hinges. Julie rolled onto the new-mowed grass, clutching her purse, and sat up to brush off the clippings. Satler emerged a moment later. He flopped awkwardly onto the ground belly-first, like a muscle-bound fish.
She had the phone to her ear when his thick fingers closed around her wrist. “Come on,” he hissed urgently. He hauled her, first indignant, then puzzled, down the hill, her legs stretching to match his stride.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, but he only held a finger to his lips and stalked on. Fifty meters from the wreck was a high hedge that bordered a jogging trail. He ducked behind it furtively, then swung around to face her.
“We can talk here, but keep it down and make it fast.”
“Why, so we don’t wake up all the sunbathers? Our crash made plenty of racket. Why are you skulking around, and what are you afraid of? We have to call the police or a wrecker or somebody, at least. For that matter, we ought to be seeing a doctor right now. We’re lucky the accident didn’t kill us.”
Satler shook his head impatiently. “Lucky for sure, but that was no accident, Julie. Skimmers don’t have internal combustion engines. There’s no flammable fuel on board.”
She looked at him in puzzlement, her mind rac
ing. Why did she need a lesson in remedial mechanics? She knew how a skimmer worked, but the fact was that there had been an explosion from the engine. “So what’s your point?”
“I’m saying that whatever caused that explosion will never be traced to a faulty piece of the engine or a mechanical failure. I’m always tinkering and tuning, and my skimmer runs like a top.”
Finally the daze from the crash receded enough for the light to dawn, and the jittery after-shocks in her stomach deepened to full-blown nausea. “You think someone tried to kill us? But why?”
Satler pursed his lips. “Geire warned you MEEGO would play for keeps.”
“But murder? We don’t even know anything. And how could they find us so easily?”
“If we’re right about the logs, we know they as good as killed some of their crew the other day. Who knows what else we might dig up? Obviously there’s something going on. I just can’t believe I worked for them!”
“So what do we do now?”
“I think we hide. Whoever sabotaged the skimmer is sure to review their handiwork, and when they find empty seats they’ll come after us again.”
“Hide where?”
Satler’s face cracked into a weary semi-smile. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t have a good answer yet, but I know a place where we can at least sit and think and grab a band-aid. I have a fussy old aunt who lives in a high-rise a few blocks from here.” He crossed the path and disappeared into thick bushes on the other side.
Julie followed, her mind whirling with images of malevolent stalkers. She had gotten into this to rescue Rafa, never thinking where it might lead. Now maybe she needed rescuing. Was it all a stupid mistake?
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