Fiduciary Duty

by Tim Michaels

  I saw him mouth “Follow me.” I’m sure he actually said it, but I couldn’t hear a thing.

  As we got to the stairwell, I could see flames coming from the room we had just left. Whatever Marco had rigged up in that room would leave nothing to chance.

  We walked swiftly up the stairs to the next floor, entered another room, and then exited through the window onto the balcony of the next building over. Moments later, we were a block away, walking down a busy street. By now my hearing was returning.

  “What about the security cameras?” I asked, “There were two in the lobby. They have us on film.”

  “I had people in the building,” Marco said, “The videotapes were removed from the recorder an hour ago.”

  A moment later, he added, “And don’t worry about other casualties. We rented all the rooms for the week.”

  Ten minutes later, we caught a helicopter from a rooftop helipad to a small airfield outside Lima; from there we took a small jet back to the farm in Argentina.

  When we arrived, I found my bags were already packed in my room.

  “You’ll be going back tonight,” Marco said.

  “You’re not coming with me?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve got work to do around here,” he replied, “But I’ve got some parting gifts for you.”

  He grinned when he said it, knowing he sounded almost like a game show host.

  “You mean like two suitcases full of clothes I didn’t buy?” I asked.

  “More than that,” he said.

  He had me memorize the address of a farm just outside of Barberton, Ohio, about twenty minutes from where I lived. He also had me memorize a name and a phone number.

  “The farm is owned by a Belgian company, which in turn is a subsidiary of a Nigerian company. The ultimate ownership of the farm is very opaque, but you can consider the farm yours to use for as long as necessary,” he said, “On the farm you’ll find a cinderblock shed which contains a lot of the same toys you practiced with over here, plus a strongbox with $150,000 in ten and twenty dollar bills.”

  I nodded.

  Marco continued, “There’s also a van similar to the one you already have. The van is owned by one Vladislav Czernikow, one of several fake identities Mr. Smith’s security team has been building for ten years. By coincidence, the picture we’ve been using for Czernikow looks a lot like you as you’ll see from the driver’s license and other documents left at the farm. Czernikow rents an apartment in Salt Lake City but the van is registered in Ohio.”

  Then he went on, “The phone number, on the other hand, is to be used sparingly. If you absolutely need something, or if it is an emergency, call. Someone from Mr. Smith’s team will be available to answer it 24 hours a day.”

  “And speaking of phones, you’ll find ten cell-phones at the farm. Take one with you at all times, but switch them out often. Leave the ones you aren’t carrying off. If we need to get in touch with you, if we learn something you need to know, we will call each of the phones until we reach you,” he said.

  After a pause, he continued.

  “Those gifts are from Mr. Smith. But I got you something too,” he said.

  I opened a small box. Inside were two soccer jerseys, one each from the Argentine and Peruvian national teams. Both were a little large for a boy of Jeremy’s age, but he would grow into them. There was also a silver lady’s comb and brush set, a little too gaudy for H’s taste, but with a very provincial Argentine look.

  I thanked Marco for the gifts and for the training. Then we wished each other luck.

  He walked out the front door and into a black SUV. I’m not sure where he went, but it wasn’t in the direction of the airfield. A few minutes later my stuff was packed into a sedan and the caretaker, a friendly but quiet fellow bearing the surprising name of Juan Valdez drove me to the airfield. The plane was waiting for me on the tarmac.

  Chapter 9. Bringer of Death

  Sixteen hours later, I was home. The weather had improved considerably since I had last been in the US. Summer was almost around the corner. During the seven and a half months a year when it isn’t cold, Northeast Ohio can be very pleasant. It never gets too hot and humidity is rarely a problem.

  After going through almost two months worth of mail, I decided I should reconnect with my family. I spent the afternoon calling my parents and my sister. Everyone was doing well. I heard positive reports about the cats as well. After that, I went for a long jog.

  At night I dreamed again of H and Jeremy. They were still changing in my dreams. H had always talked about going back to law school, and in my dream she had, or at least would be in the near future. She had been accepted in the first year class at the U of Akron, about half an hour away. H being H, she was already getting prepared, having slogged through the first half of a book on constitutional law. Jeremy was riding his tricycle, a little metal Radio Flyer I had found at a garage sale. A dog, a mid-sized half-German shepherd half-something else mutt Jeremy kept calling “Bingo” was running along with him, nipping at the tassels on the handle of the trike. I always thought a boy should have a dog. H, on the other hand, had been reluctant – she didn’t want us to take on the responsibility of a creature that needed constant walking and cleaning up. But it looked like she had been won over. I was glad, because Jeremy clearly loved his dog.

  The next day I drove out to Barberton. Czernikow’s property – at least that’s how I thought of it – was well maintained. Clearly Smith’s team had people come by periodically to mow the lawn, clear the gutters, and the like.

  The house had a fairly sophisticated security system especially considering its market value, given its location, was probably under $150,000. From the driveway, I counted four security cameras watching the door and the windows, and that was just along the front of the house.

  I walked up to the front door. I counted three more cameras and several motion sensors. The door looked extremely solid, as did the walls. Next to the front door was a hand-sized plastic hinge. I raised the hinge and put my hand on the glass panel underneath it. The front door unlocked.

  Inside, there were more cameras and motion detectors. The house itself was neat as a pin. I walked around. The basement pantry contained enough canned food and water to last one person at least a year. In addition, there were sacks of pasta, rice, beans and lentils. There was a freezer in the garage which was similarly well stocked. There was one more surprise: sitting on the dining room table were ten cell-phones and eighteen fat three-ring binders.

  I picked up one cell-phone and turned it on. It was fully powered. I stuck in my pocket.

  Then I picked up a binder. Its cover said “Becky Cedan.” Cedan was on my list. As was Victor DiAngeles, the name on the cover of the second binder.

  I flipped through the binders. Each of them contained a thorough dossier on one of the remaining individuals on my list. Company officers, members of the board, big shareholders, and people who controlled large voting blocks. Each of them had done his or her utmost to make the merger happen, to lay off large numbers of employees, and whether they knew it or not, to kill my wife and son.

  The dossiers included addresses, security and forecasted schedules. At the back of each binder were two to five pages of typed comments and suggestions, including sketched drawings, suggesting ways that each target could be killed. I recognized Marco’s thought process and way of speaking in the analysis.

  There was also one more file with a dossier for Vladislav Czernikow. He was an ethnic Russian from the Ukraine. His family had been forcibly resettled near Kiev by Stalin. However, like many other ethnic Russians, he was unwelcome in the country where he was born after the fall of the Soviet Union. So he had scraped together what he could and left. In the US, he had supported himself with some programming work.

  Other than that, and the fact that he
lived in Salt Lake City and owned a van, he was mine to fill in since he had maintained a low profile and left few tracks. I decided that at heart he was a nice guy, a little too effusive with praise, but a big worrywart. I also thought I’d learn more about him over time, and it was best not to attribute tendencies to him that wouldn’t be there later.

  After checking out the house, I walked to the shed. The shed had the same security as the house. I put my hand on the scanner and the door opened. I flipped on the lights and stepped inside.

  “Holy moly,” I exclaimed.

  There was enough firepower in that shed to take over two, perhaps three small Central American countries, including at least two of almost every weapon I had trained on in Argentina. The shed also contained a fair amount of surveillance equipment as well as a variety of poisons and acids.

  I locked the shed and looked around the rest of the property. Inside the barn, I found a van, similar to my own but several years newer. There was also a gasoline pump and a generator that could power the farm. There was even a well and a cistern.

  The farm was a survivalist’s dream. Clearly, Czernikow was equipped with food, water and supplies to make him self-sufficient for a long time, thus allowing him to only venture out on missions. And sooner or later, John Reynolds would be a hunted man. When that happened I would have to take over Czernikow’s identity. But it was best not to jump the gun. The rational thing to do was to move quickly, before the targets and law enforcement knew there was a threat, and now I had the training, equipment and knowledge to do just that.

  I locked the shed and walked back to Czernikow’s house. I flipped on the lights, grabbed the dossier for Becky Cedan, sat on the couch and started to read. For the rest of the day, I read file after file. When it got dark, I went out for some chicken. Somehow – don’t ask me how – the small town of Barberton has developed its own dish: deep fried, artery clogging chicken. After a very, very greasy dinner, I drove home exhausted.

  The following day I came back and reread several of the files, paying particular attention to Marco’s suggestions and taking careful notes. Then I went home and went to sleep early.

  I dreamed I walked into Jeremy’s room – he and H were reading a Doctor Seuss book. I was impressed, because Jeremy was doing at least half of the reading. I watched until they finished.

  “Good job, Jeremy,” I said.

  My son beamed, and reached for another book on the shelf. Meanwhile, H got up and walked over to me.

  “Be careful,” she said, giving me a hug.

  Then she looked me in the eye for a long moment and said, “Just remember, we’re proud of you.”

  In the morning, I got up early and went for a long jog. Then I drove to Cedan’s home in Providence, Rhode Island. I wasn’t sure yet how I was going to approach the problem so I brought along a variety of tools. I had a handgun, a cross-bow, a sniper rifle, a dart gun, a spear-gun, a couple grenades and a claymore mine in the van. I drove very, very carefully as I really, really did not want to be pulled over by the cops. I scouted her home in the afternoon and spent the night in my van.

  Cedan, a sixty-year-old hedge fund manager, had her own lake where she swam for an hour each morning. I was submerged at the far end of the lake when she dove in. I shot her from below with the spear-gun and then pulled her body under. I had added a little touch – the spear itself was tipped with a glass ampoule full of ricin. I was out of the water and over the fence by the time her husband walked over to the edge of the lake wondering where she was.

  It took three days before her body was discovered at the bottom of the lake. The story was treated in a sensational manner. It wasn’t just that Cedan was a former beauty queen – a Miss America runner-up – who had parlayed her good looks into a fortune. It was the ricin. In 1978, a Bulgarian dissident called Georgi Markov had been shot in broad daylight at a London bus-stop by a dart tipped with ricin fired from a spring-loaded umbrella. He had died four days later. The KGB had been suspected.

  Despite the distance in time and space, several reporters breathlessly tried to tie the two events together. One conspiracy-theory peddler even tied her death to that of the Prince in Ternos several months earlier, but nobody mentioned Frangulyan, Zhou or Field. Or the falling tree guy, for that matter.

  But I wasn’t waiting for news reports. By the time Cedan’s death was broadcasted, I had already killed Frank Miller (knife to the jugular, made to look like a random mugging) in Charlotte, North Carolina and was on my way to Virginia Beach for the next hit. Over the next three weeks, I cut a swath of destruction through the country. I used a grenade, a flame thrower, the dart gun, a garrote and a pistol. I also booby trapped the ignition of Honus T. Fendley III’s prize Ferrari 250 GTO in Atlanta. That was a pity, and not just because of the car. From what I read about Honus T., he could be an affable, generous and larger-than-life character, but whatever his public persona, my wife and son were dead and that was partly his doing.

  By this point, the press was openly speculating about the fact that so many shareholders of M & O were dying in violent ways. Ironically, the first to notice the trend was an almost-always-wrong stock prognosticator with his own show on basic cable. Local and national law enforcement weren’t commenting, but three days later CBS broke the story that there was some sort of a task force led by the FBI. At a service station just outside Lincoln, Nebraska I picked up a copy of Time Magazine, which had put the story on its cover with the title “Class Warfare?” I was amused to see they too had tallied up Jacob Feingold, the falling tree guy, as part of the death toll though Feingold didn’t own more than a few thousand shares of the company.

  Once the M & O connection had been made, the company’s stock price tanked. The price per share dropped 55% in a day and a half. Even small share-holders of M & O were running for the hills. Shares of its competitors were mostly unchanged but trading volume was way up. According to analysts, on the plus side, other telecom companies were considered safe havens from the “M & O killers” but there were fears the trend might spread.

  I was at the supermarket buying some fruits and veggies when the phone rang. It was one of the ten left at Czernikow’s farm for me to use. The call came from a number which, when I looked it up later, turned out to come from a pay phone in Emeryville, California.

  “Hi, Bruce. Don’t forget about dinner tomorrow,” a computer generated voice said.

  That meant Smith’s people had learned, somehow, that the authorities could connect me to the killings.

  “Um, yes. Of course. At eight. See you then,” I said.

  It was time to hide. Now. I turned off the phone and pulled out its batteries.

  When I looked up, a woman was staring straight at me. She was pushing a shopping cart with a little blond boy, perhaps a year younger than Jeremy, seated in it.

  It took me a beat or two to place her. She had worked on my floor at M & O and last I had heard was still there.

  “Um, hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” she responded.

  After a pause, she continued, “I heard about your family. I am so sorry.”

  I nodded, acknowledging her sympathy. But to be honest, I didn’t need it or much care for it.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m still alive,” I said.

  She smiled, uncertain what to do with that response.

  After an awkward silence, she went on, “Well, it was nice seeing you.”

  I nodded again, already turning away to the check-out counter. I paid for my groceries in cash and left the store.

  Chapter 10. Rumors and Lies

  When I got to Czernikow’s farm I pulled into the barn. John Reynolds was iced, and from now on I was going to have to take on the persona of Vladislav Czernikow, at least when I was away from the farm. That hit me in a way I hadn’t expected. I had come t
o enjoy playing other people, but it had never been permanent. Maybe Czernikow was a nice guy, but he didn’t feel like me. And he certainly didn’t feel like he had much to do with H and Jeremy. Still, I had little choice in the matter.

  I flipped on the TV and kept it on the news. The story didn’t break until 10 PM. H and Jeremy weren’t mentioned until the next morning, at which point the wrongful death lawsuit I had filed came up. However, in the classic “both sides are equally at fault” style of the American media, an M & O spokeswoman was quoted as saying the “tragic accident” occurred while H was trespassing and in the process of assaulting M & O security personnel who were just doing their job.

  My job, of course, was going to get harder. Investors certainly seemed to think so. Once my name became public, shares of the company rallied a bit, but they were still down 50% from their previous peak.

  I set out once more, this time as Vladislav Czernikow. Czernikow was grumpier than I had expected, perhaps because he was left with the toughest parts of the job, the long-distance work against targets that were forewarned. He shot his first target with a sniper rifle from a distance of 120 yards. A second one was sailing his catamaran just north of Milwaukee when the projectile from the MATADOR hit. The MATADOR, a descendant of the World War II bazooka, is officially designated “a man-portable anti-armor weapon system.” The thing fires a 90mm rocket propelled shell. The MATADOR’s effect on a decidedly unarmored Bimare Zero A-Cat turned out to be overkill, and then some.

  “Good riddance,” Czernikow mumbled at the wreckage.