“Yes,” she replied. “I pulled it out of the envelope. My finger prints will be on the top, near the center.”
Binkowski placed a briefcase on her desk and opened it. From inside, he removed two clear plastic evidence bags and a felt-tip marker. Before doing anything else, he recorded the date and time on the appropriate lines on the back of the evidence bags.
Taking a small digital camera from his briefcase, Binkowski photographed the letter, the envelope and the desk itself, with the two evidence bags on it. Using tweezers, he first picked up the envelope the letter came in and turned it over, showing the address label.
“How many people handled this envelope?” Binkowski asked.
Delores thought for a moment. “At least five since it arrived here. Unscheduled deliveries go through a security screening before being delivered to the recipient.”
Glancing at the label, Binkowski said, “It’s addressed specifically to you. By name.” He picked the envelope up again and placed it in one of the evidence bags before turning his attention to the letter itself. “You’re sure that you’re the only one to touch the letter itself?”
“Yes, I opened it right here at my desk and when I took it out, I called Agent Parsons immediately. He told me to not touch it and wait for you.”
“That’s good,” Binkowski said. “We might be able to get something off of this. I assume your prints are on file with your security department?”
“They are,” Delores replied. “As are all our employees’.”
“Will you be able to get the two and a half million together on such short notice?”
“You think we should pay the ransom?” Delores asked.
Straightening, Binkowski looked at her. “That wasn’t what I asked, ma’am. Two and a half million dollars is a lot of money, and a pretty specific amount. The sender may know how much money your company has available on short notice.”
“Oh,” Delores said. “Yes, we can put together that amount of cash in short order.”
“More than that?”
“Not much more,” she replied. Crossing her arms, Delores moved toward the window and looked out. “Very few people know that.”
“Who does?”
Delores turned back to Binkowski. “Myself, and the Minniches, of course. Our head of security, Captain Waldrup, knows everything there is to know at CephaloTech. Then, maybe two people in our financial office.”
Glancing at the UPS envelope, Binkowski said, “This was picked up at a drop box yesterday evening, in Coconut Grove. I was with Waldrup since about three in the afternoon. Those boxes have pickups every four hours, so that rules him out. Obviously, the kidnapped couple is out, too.”
“I’ve been here since yesterday morning,” Delores said. “Security records will show that.”
“Can I examine the employee records of the two people in financial, along with their time cards or whatever?”
“Of course,” Delores replied. “But they’re not cards. Access to the plant is through scanned security cards and a fingerprint scanner, all records stored electronically. I’ll send for the files.”
Crossing the Gulf Stream, I told Kim to drop down under five hundred. The last thing I wanted was to get picked up on Cuban radar and have some trigger-happy radar operator scramble a couple of MiG fighters. Way in the distance, I could just make out the color change of the water at the northern edge of Cay Sal Bank.
Parsons pulled his sat phone from his jacket pocket. “Hey, I need to take this call. Any way to make the engine noise quieter?”
I turned to Kim and said, “Throttle back and go into a slight descent to maintain speed.”
The result was quieter, but still loud, as Parsons answered the phone. He told the caller he was in a plane and then listened for a minute, before saying, “A ransom letter? Look, I can barely hear you, can you scan or photograph it and send it to me?”
Parsons ended the call, and a moment later, he checked the screen on his phone. He studied it for a minute before typing with his thumbs on the tiny keyboard.
“Take a look at this,” Parsons said, handing his phone to Deuce. “What do you make of it?”
Leaning forward, Deuce held Parsons’s phone so I could see it. Someone had cut individual letters from magazines to create a ransom demand.
“Guess that answers the question of whether or not they were kidnapped,” I said.
“Not really,” Parsons muttered. “And this compounds things.” I was confused, and I guess it showed on my face. “Anyone who knows the Minniches are missing could have sent that. I need to send Agent Binkowski over to the CephaloTech office.”
“Already on it,” Deuce said, his fingers flying on his phone’s keypad.
“Oh,” Parsons said, looking up from his phone at Deuce. Then he continued explaining his thought to me. “Anyway, Binkowski will likely start digging to find out how many people know of their disappearance. Usually a letter like that, with stuff cut from magazines, that’s the sign of an amateur. These days, you can write the letter on your phone, duck into an Internet café just about anywhere in the country and send it wirelessly to a cheap laser printer to make a hard copy for just a buck, that’d be almost untraceable. I don’t think that letter came from the people that took the yacht down at sea. That was done by pros.”
“How many do you think know about the kidnapping?” I asked. “Are all of them suspect?”
“Less than half a dozen,” Waldrup cut in.
Parsons nodded at the big man. “I told your COO up there to not let it out as public knowledge. Binkowski will find out, I’m sure. And he’ll probably start immediately on eliminating suspects. But if my hunch is right, the letter wasn’t sent by the people who have the Minniches.”
“Can I throttle up and climb now, Dad?”
I turned and looked forward, seeing we were below three hundred feet. I gently increased throttle for her and said, “Drop on down to about two fifty and keep the speed about a hundred knots.” Pointing ahead and to the left, I added, “There’s the old Elbow Cay lighthouse. Turn left and follow the edge of the bank.”
“Whoa!” Kim said. “It’s beautiful. How deep’s the water?”
“The bank is shallow. Ten feet or so, most of it. The deepest parts are only forty or fifty feet. Outside the ring of cays and shoals, it drops fast to over three hundred, then eighteen hundred a little further out.”
We flew low and slow, two hundred and fifty feet above the waves and a few hundred feet out from the shallows. A few dilapidated shells of old houses could be seen on Elbow Cay, along with the ruins of the old lighthouse. Stunted palm trees and dwarf pines tried to gain a foothold on the rocky ground.
“People used to live there?” Linda asked as we all watched out the starboard windows, looking for any sign of life.
“The light keeper and a few others,” I replied. “It’d be a really hard life, though, being so far from anywhere.”
“You make it look easy on your island,” Linda said.
“That’s different. My island’s only a ten-minute boat ride, across calm water, to a store on Big Pine. Out here, it’s thirty miles to Cuba, sixty miles to the Keys, and seventy-five miles to the nearest Bahamian island. All across very deep water, with treacherous shoals and currents.”
We continued flying along the chain of mostly submerged islands for twenty minutes, until we reached the Dog Rocks on the northeast corner of the triangular atoll.
“Turn and follow the string south,” I told Kim. “Are you comfortable flying lower? I don’t want the Cubans to get all excited. We’ll be near their radar range soon.”
“A hundred feet?”
“That’s my girl,” I replied. Then I turned in my seat and said to the others, “Keep your eyes peeled. We’re dropping down to the wave tops. The islands along this side are really small for a while, most not even big enough for a gull to stand one-legged on.”
Kim was very steady on the controls, watching the horizon ahead and keepi
ng a close eye on the altimeter, as the big radial engine droned on and on toward the Cuban coast, just over the horizon.
Passing Dangerous Shoals and Bellows Cay, Waldrup said he thought he saw someone on the tiny cay. “Circle left,” I said to Kim. “Then come across the island east–west and finish a figure eight to the right, if we don’t see anything.”
As we passed directly over the tiny rock outcropping, flying low, Waldrup said, “No, it’s just a dead tree.”
Kim began the turn to the right to circle around and line back up with the eastern edge of the bank. “There’s something unusual,” Meg said from the back. I looked where she was pointing but didn’t see anything.
“What was it?” I asked.
“I’m not entirely certain,” Meg replied. “To the right of that next group of islands, it looked like a boat or something. In close to the trees, but obscured by them.”
“That’s Anguilla Cay,” I said. “The west side is mostly a tidal flat, with a couple of sand beaches, but mostly rocks.” To Kim, I added, “It’s the southern tip of Cay Sal Bank. When we get past it, turn northwest and keep following the edge of the bank. We’ll be able to see the whole western shore of Anguilla Cay as we head up to the last few islands on the west side.”
“What’s that?” Linda asked excitedly.
“Looks like a shack of some kind,” Waldrup said as I heard the clicking of Deuce’s high-speed camera.
Sure enough, back among the low trees and brush in the middle of South Anguilla Cay, I could just make out a low structure. It looked like someone had taken great pains to conceal it, but they didn’t do a very good job on the metal roof, which reflected sunlight through the palm fronds on top of it.
As the Hopper banked steeply around the south end of the island, Meg shouted excitedly, “There! It is a boat!”
In a small cove, just west of where the shack was, a good-sized commercial fishing boat was stranded on the sand and laying over slightly on its port side. It wasn’t unusual to see derelict vessels on Cay Sal Bank, but this one didn’t look like it’d been there long. Nor did it look like it was abandoned. The rifle barrel sticking out of the pilothouse window told me there was at least one person aboard.
“My aircraft!” I shouted, grabbing the wheel.
Kim released hers instantly. “Your aircraft.”
I jammed the throttle to the stop and banked sharply left while putting the Hopper into a steep dive, gaining speed.
The big radial protested as I pulled back on the yoke and banked hard right, putting us into a steep, climbing turn. Someone yelled something, but I was too busy taking evasive action. At four hundred feet, I put Island Hopper back over on her left side, diving once more for the water’s surface. At the last second, I leveled off, the pontoons just a few feet off the water.
“What the hell are you doing?” Deuce shouted.
Looking out the window and back toward the island, I saw that we were now a good mile away and started a slow climb, banking to a northerly heading.
“That wasn’t a derelict vessel,” I said. “Take the controls, Kim. Make your course three one five degrees. We’re headed home.”
When Kim took the yoke, I turned around in my seat. “Is anyone hit?”
“Hit?” Parsons asked.
“Yeah,” Waldrup said. “You got a hole in your plane and I got a hole in my leg. Fortunately, it’s the one that’s replaceable.”
“Someone was shooting at us?” Deuce asked. “I didn’t see anyone.”
“He was in the pilothouse,” I said. “Leaning out a porthole with a rifle.”
Waldrup pointed just in front of where Deuce was sitting. “Missed you by just a few inches, Agent Livingston.” Then he pulled up the cuff of his trousers, extending his right leg out into the narrow aisle between the seats. “If I’d been wearing my old plastic prosthetic, you guys would be helping me outta this plane when we land. Titanium ain’t cheap.”
Imbedded in the gray titanium rod just above the articulated ankle joint was what looked like the mushroomed remains of a bullet. “Linda,” I said. “There’s a small toolbox strapped under your seat. Hand Deuce the needlenose pliers.”
When she passed them up, Deuce bent over and, with some effort, extracted the bullet from Waldrup’s fake leg. He held it up so I could get a better look.
“Small caliber,” Deuce said. “Probably five-point-five-six.”
I reached out and turned his hand for a better look. “Looks a bit smaller than that.”
“Smaller?” Deuce asked.
“I’ve shot a lot of M16 rounds, brother.”
Parsons reached forward with a small plastic bag he held open. Deuce dropped the bullet in and Parsons sealed it, then wrote something on the white label before holding it up to examine it more closely.
“What did the weapon look like?” Parsons asked me, as if making small talk, while stuffing the little evidence bag in his jacket pocket.
I thought for a moment. “Black or gray assault rifle,” I replied. “Probably composite. Definitely not wood, like an AK. But it didn’t look like an American AR type either. It had a forward-curving magazine, and the gas block was forward of the grip.”
“You have a good eye, Jesse,” Parsons said. “The Russians began manufacturing a low-recoil assault rifle more than ten years ago. It’s chambered for their five-point-four-five round. It was supposed to replace the AK74, but due to the high cost of production, Nikonov shut down production of the AN94 just last year.”
“How many were manufactured?” Deuce asked.
“Several thousand,” Parsons replied. “Not all are still with the police and military, though.”
“Ties in with your black marketers,” I told Deuce.
“Anyone see anything else?” Parsons asked.
“I’ll know more when I can plug my camera’s memory card into a computer,” Deuce said.
“He shot my damned plane,” I said, barely audibly. With my daughter and girlfriend aboard, I thought. Somebody’s gonna pay.
Darius had a backdoor into his company’s computer system that only he knew about. “Do we have an agreement?” he asked Dobrovska, as he sat at the small table, ready to access the company’s mainframe.
Ilya stared at Darius for a moment. “Cut her down, as well, Oleg.” He then put the pistol away and squatted down in front of Darius. “Do you realize what you’re bargaining away?”
“I’m not stupid, Mister Dobrovska. Once I give you what you want, I’m a traitor to my country and there’s nothing to stop you from killing us. But there are a few other things your clients might be interested in. Things that could have made me a very rich man in America. Better a slightly rich man living as a traitor in exile, than dead.”
A smile slowly spread across Ilya’s face. “What you are offering will indeed make you a traitor to your country.”
“All I ask is that my wife and I be allowed to live. I don’t see that I have much choice. You have nothing to gain by releasing us after you get what you want.”
“What exactly are you offering?” Ilya asked as Celia came over to stand behind her husband, tying her shirttail into a knot below her bosom.
“The technology you want was designed to be thwarted, just in case one of the suits fell into the wrong hands,” Darius replied. “Your clients can probably produce a working model within a month or two, using the technology I will give you. It will work flawlessly and they will be very appreciative. Until the Pentagon finds out that it’s been stolen. Once your client builds it, you can then sell them additional information, along with the location in the millions of lines of code where the disable command is buried.”
“And why should I trust that this disable command even exists or that you will deliver it?” Ilya asked.
“We have nothing to lose but our lives,” Darius replied. “You sell them the technology and let them build it. I’ll already be a traitor then and wanted by my government. We can never go back to America. But you can take
us somewhere where we can live comfortably. Once your client builds the suit, they’ll see that it’s worth far more than they paid for it and will gladly pay for the coding. That information, I’ll keep to myself until we’re set up safe somewhere. What you sell the information for, I get half.”
Dobrovska considered it a moment. “What’s to stop Oleg from turning your wife into a one-armed whore, if you don’t give it to me now?”
“Nothing but the knowledge that I could give you the wrong information, and with us dead, you’ll never get the correct coding. It would take your clients years to locate the single line of code, if they could find it at all. When the American military makes their suit useless, your clients will want to talk to you. Look, I’m a businessman, just like you. Once they manufacture the first suit and test it, they’ll gladly pay ten times more for the coding to make it invulnerable.”
Ilya rose quickly. “You must be hungry. You have not eaten in two days. Thirsty, as well, I suspect. Oleg, bring the computer. We will go to the boat, where our new business partners will be more comfortable.”
As Ilya walked toward the door, Oleg closed the laptop and put it in the bag. Darius could hardly believe that his ploy was working. The coding was there—that was a stipulation the Pentagon had insisted on. Without knowing what to look for or where to look, whoever was buying the technology would never find it. Darius had had his doubts about whether his plan would work, but dangling more dollars in front of the man seemed to do the trick.
Rising from the now-empty desk, Darius put an arm around Celia and they followed Ilya to the door, where he stopped and turned around. “I am a businessman, just as you said, Mister Minnich. However, if you double-cross me, or back out, I will force you to witness a tremendous amount of savagery visited upon your beautiful wife. And it will continue for days, until you give me what I want. If what you say is true, we will both become very rich and you will live out your days in Turkmenistan.”
Opening the door, Ilya stepped out into the light of early dawn. Darius had no way of knowing how long it had been since the men had boarded his yacht and killed his crew, aside from what Ilya had just told him. He stumbled up two stone steps and through the door, realizing that he was both very hungry and thirsty.
Fallen Tide: A Jesse McDermitt Novel (Caribbean Adventure Series Book 8) Page 13