by HN Wake
He asked, “Is it fair to assume you won’t name your source?”
“Agent, it’s fair to assume I don’t know my source.”
“A deep throat?”
“Something like that.”
“How did you get the evidence?”
“It came in a white courier bag from Philadelphia”
“Addressed to you?”
“Yes. We’re assuming it’s because of the articles that went out earlier.”
He nodded. “I would have concluded the same thing. You’ve been writing quite a lot about the SFG. A bit controversial, actually.”
“The new legislation requires we examine the issue. And the players.”
“And when you say ‘we’, you mean the New York News?”
“Of course.”
He read from his notebook. “What came in the package, actually?”
“A thumb drive.”
“What was on the thumb drive?”
She opened the laptop and started up a program. “I figured you’d ask that.” She turned the laptop toward him.
The audio of Neil Koen and Congressman Peter played while the slideshow lapped the three photos of the two men in the restaurant. Cal leaned in, listening. He jotted down a few notes.
When the audio finished, he asked, “Can we play it again?”
She hit play.
When it finished a second time he asked, “Who do you think the donor is?”
“We don’t know.”
“And the donor’s assistant that went to see Koen?”
“Again, we didn’t look into that.”
“A million bucks is a lot of money.”
She shrugged.
“So. That’s it, just the audio and the photos?”
Stacia turned the laptop toward her, clicked on the keyboard, and turned the laptop back toward Cal. “This was also on the USB stick.”
On the screen he read the email from Neil Koen to Charles Osbourne and whistled. “Wow. That’s going to be quite a scoop.”
“I’m writing a piece for tomorrow’s front page.”
“You’re really on a roll.”
She shrugged again, genuinely nonchalant.
He said, “It’s quite something that someone is leaking all this to the New York News. You ever wonder why?”
“We have to assume they want the SFG's influence diminished in the lead up to the Congressional vote on the new gun legislation.”
“Exactly.” He watched her. She stared at him, unflinching. “Don’t you think all these revelations and these leaks - Scimitar investigation and indictment, Congressman Peter and Koen colluding, this SFG internal email - coming out now is a bit too convenient?”
Cal realized, when her face cracked for just an instant, that this Stacia had come to the same conclusion but she would jeopardize her position at the newspaper if she expressed this. He changed the subject. “Do you have the envelope from the courier service?”
She stood. “Sure. And just so you know, I’ve been instructed by my superiors to cooperate with the authorities.” She turned on her heel. “I’ll be right back.”
Ten minutes later, she handed him the white Tyvek envelope. It was wrinkled from having been balled into the trash. He took out his cell phone and snapped a photo of the mailing label, making sure he had a good image of the bar code. “I’m going to assume there are no fingerprints.” He handed it back to her. “And you really aren’t naming your source?”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know who it is.”
“But, with that email you were sent - it’s gotta be someone in Neil Koen’s office.”
She held his gaze.
He conceded. “Ok. No need to answer. One last question. Who gave you the instructions to write the first article on the SFG two weeks ago? The one about them kowtowing to the gun industry?”
“My boss, Freda Browne. She’s a managing editor.”
“Right.” He wrote down the name then handed her his card. “Ok, well that’s all I need. If you think of anything, give me call.”
“Probably not, under the First Amendment.”
He smiled wryly. “I appreciate the sentiment. Stand up for what you believe. Well, keep my card handy anyway. You never know.”
Back at her desk, Stacia breathed in deeply. Looking down, she flipped the ATF agent’s business card through her fingers. Cal Bertrand. Agent. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
She set it gently, face up by her keyboard, and turned back toward her screen, returning to the draft of tomorrow’s front page article.
She felt someone standing over her and turned, glancing up. Jack Diamonte was looking down at her. He reached down and picked up the business card and said softly, “You’re a rising star at this paper. Let’s keep it that way.”
He walked off.
Across town, the summer sun beamed down on Penny’s head from a cloudless sky as she walked along 7th Street toward Central Park. The return trip - 12 blocks up and then back - would take about an hour, but she liked to clear her head during lunch.
Halfway to Central Park, she started to feel damp from the heat and decided to circle back.
Walking down 53rd Street, a one-way street, she noticed how unusually quiet it had become. There were no people out on lunch breaks. There were no cars. Only her footfalls on the sidewalk made noise. In fact, it was so quiet that up ahead a lone squirrel had decided to sit in the middle of the street.
As she got closer, she became increasingly curious about the squirrel. He was still as a statue. When she was within ten feet of the squirrel, she noticed his features with clarity. He faced her, sitting on his back haunches with his two front paws curled tight up against his chest. His fur was a mix of brown and grey except his belly which was stark white. The hair all traveled in one direction. His black eyes stared straight ahead. His tail, with it’s slightly tattered edges, stood erect behind his back.
From behind her at the beginning of the block, she heard a car approaching. The squirrel did not move.
She continued to close in on him; she was now only six feet away. He remained motionless. From behind her, the car was getting closer.
The car, a taxi, rushed past her. She stopped. A strand of her hair whispered against her cheek in the taxi’s slipstream.
The squirrel did not move.
The taxi rushed on.
Time slowed. She was mesmerized.
The taxi, at full speed, was now a foot from the squirrel. Penny held her breath.
Suddenly, the squirrel jumped to the sidewalk, shimmying out of view.
45
Washington, DC
Late in the afternoon, Odom noiselessly slipped through the front door of Cal’s apartment. A humid heat pressed against his face and he let his eyes adjust to the interior darkness. He gently shut the door with his gloved hands.
He inhaled deeply through his nostrils, taking in the measure of the home. There were no pets, no recent cooking, no smoking. There was an undercurrent of pine. The ATF agent must have a cleaner; few professionals clean their homes mid-week.
He concentrated next on noises. Cars passed in the front and a cat’s howl echoed from an open window in the rear. There were no human sounds inside the apartment.
He surveyed the spacious living room. His line of sight led directly to the desk by the front window. An old, high-back leather office chair, its tan leather wearing thin, rested a few feet from the desk as if the owner, getting up quickly, had set it rolling on its five casters. The ATF agent spent considerable time here.
Odom settled into the warm, worn leather. Feeling a powerful, yet fleeting sense of sexual invasion, the corners of his mouth turned up.
His feet tugged the chair up to the desk as he studied the montage.
The two clipped New York News articles by Stacia DeVries were intentionally placed next to each other. Odom's heart sunk; the ATF agent had connected the two operations within a larger plot.
Next to them was
a yellow pad. The top page had been doodled on endlessly, hundreds of blue ink loops haphazardly filled the margins. In the center of the page was a list:
- Personally involved w/ Malhotra
- Top clearances (CIA, DOD, DNI, NSA, State?)
- Professional techniques ??? This last line had been underlined five times.
It appeared the ATF agent later had added two items to the list - afterthoughts perhaps - that appeared to be hastily written, in red:
- A woman!
- Acting alone?
Odom blinked. It was the last line that was an interesting twist; Odom had not considered that Mac may be working with others. She had always been such a loner. Who could she possibly be working with?
The cat in the back alley howled again as Odom entered the kitchen. Noticing the half empty bottle of scotch on the kitchen counter, he lifted the highball glass from the drying rack and sniffed its contents. Nothing. He systematically opened and closed cabinets.
Heavy drinkers had reserves. The ATF agent had no other bottles anywhere in the kitchen.
Through the screened window, the faintest smell of rot rode a warm breeze, prickling his nose.
In the bathroom, mismatched towels dangled from the shower rod. The toilet rim stood upright.
Odom unzipped his khakis and relieved himself, looking around. One gloved hand flushed while the other reached toward the medicine cabinet. Ibuprofen. Non-prescription sleeping pills. Colgate. Men’s deodorant. Shaving cream.
An expensive grey robe hung on a hook on the back of the door. With both hands he folded the soft robe around his face, breathing deeply, smelling dryer sheets and ivory soap. Its terrycloth did not harbor the perfumed scent of a woman. He rubbed its softness against his five o’clock shadow.
In the darkened bedroom, he laid down on the unmade bed. With crossed ankles and gloved hands behind his head, he slowly surveyed the room. There were no frames on the walls or pictures. There wasn't a television. In the dark closet, blue suits hung evenly across a pole below a bare light bulb. A chain dangled from the bulb.
He closed his eyes, hearing only the street noises. The sheets smelled of male sweat; there was no hint of sexual musk.
This was a solitary, quiet man with nothing obvious to lose.
A few minutes later, Odom was scowling as he silently let himself out.
Manayunk, PA
The blades whirled with a soft buzz as the fan slowly oscillated left and right. Every ten-count the fan dispatched a brief breeze on her face, sending hair dancing across her forehead. She sat with her back up against the cement loft wall, her legs stretched out before her on the white sheets. Her bare unpolished toes pointed toward the ceiling.
A bright green Ipod Shuffle rested next to her. The song ended and she hit repeat for the fifth time.
Her lips began silently mouthing the song’s words. Through the wires and the earphones, the music released long buried memories.
It reminded her of a moment with Joe. They were on his balcony overlooking a dark San Francisco Bay. She remembered the salt air, the seagulls' culls, and his bright blue eyes as he laughed. The moment was the strongest memory she owned.
She wiped tears from her cheeks as she took the earplugs out and rolled down onto her back. She stretched her calves and thighs. She let her mind creep back into the present.
She held her hands to her face, examining them. They looked different to her today, not old exactly, just aged and unrecognizable. They reminded her of her mother's hands.
Through the window, the layer of rippled cloud-cover resembled the underside of an ocean's surface. She felt safe, hidden far below the imaginary whitecaps and for a moment, wanted to stay on this bed forever, gazing up at a sky turning pink.
She sat up and took stock of the loft. Everything of value was arranged on the architect’s desk: her laptop, the hard drive, her burner phones, her leather case of alias documents. In the corner, by the bed, her few clothes were folded on a cardboard box. Her Dora alias clothes were in a travel bag in the Alfa down the street in the garage. On the kitchen counter was a box of cereal and some V8 juice boxes. The cleaning products were in a supermarket box on the floor.
She stood, walked to the kitchen, and grabbed a disinfectant spray and a sponge.
She started at the sink. She sprayed and scrubbed, then repeated.
In the bathroom, she threw cleaner across all the porcelain and scrubbed in small rotations, creating green, sandy circles. After, the stream from the shower washed everything down the drains.
Across the wooden floor, she leaned into forceful strokes, her biceps burning as the sponge swept the splintered planks.
An hour later, she dropped down into a sitting position on the mattress, her legs stretched out before her. The breeze from the fan hit her sweat-soaked face. She felt the dry roughness of her hands.
46
Manayunk, PA
A vivid nightmare jarred Mac awake before 5 a.m.
In the dream, she had been hauling luggage through a Chinese park, finally on her way home. She had needed a toilet before her flight and was searching for a luggage locker for the wheelie bag full of precious documents. Time was running out.
Desperate, she had set the wheelie in a sea of other bags and had run toward the toilet. A crowd of Chinese tourists had surged around the bathroom entrance and she had found herself behind 100 prattling women. Their voices had aggravated her, building her anxiety about the flight leaving in ten minutes and the wheelie bag sitting vulnerable among hundreds on the other side of the park. Her need for the toilet had been extreme, but instead, she had turned, ran through the park to the bag making mental contingency plans if the passport, the plane ticket were stolen.
Racing around the last corner, she had woken up in a panic.
The loft was dark and humid. The only noise was the whirring fan.
There was depth in the surrounding silence, as if the loft was connected to the Chinese park.
On cobblestones below, the wheels of a lone truck thudded past and pulled to a stop at the corner. There was a loud thump as a block of plastic wrapped newspapers hit the pavement.
She stood, pulled on sweats, and stumbled down the three flights of stairs.
SFG Manipulates Members, Stokes Fear After Newtown
By STACIA DeVries
New York News
Three days before a Senate vote to nationally ban assault weapons, the New York News is releasing evidence today of a second scandal rocking the Society for Guns. A leaked internal email between the SFG’s chief strategist, Neil Koen, and CEO, Charles Osbourne, outlines a strategy in response to the Newtown massacre that purposefully manipulates members’ fear.
In the email, Neil Koen clearly sets out the points for an initiative to increase falling membership and donations based on systematic fear-mongering and misinformation. Koen lays out willfully misleading tactics that dramatize and inflate potential ’threats’ to the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. Koen writes,“Our research shows that our key demographic is activated (read donations) through the emotions of fear, anger and pride (read patriotism.)” In short hand, Koen summarizes the new strategy: “To Sum: Misinformation > Fear > Increased SFG Donations.” Charles Osbourne replied to Koen’s suggested strategy with two words: “Agreed. Approved.”
Senator Martha Payne, the author of the assault weapons ban legislation, responded swiftly. “At the very least, the SFG’s top two leaders reek of contempt for their own members. How anyone still gives them a cent is a complete mystery to me.”
Gun rights activists and SFG stalwarts have been hit hard by this latest scandal. Many long-term SFG members have tried to discount the brewing investigation into arms trafficking by a top SFG corporate sponsor. One SFG lifetime member commented, “We joined the SFG because we believe in our constitutional rights. To learn that our most revered leaders literally tread on us - well - the irony is rich.”
Many both within and outside one of the large
st nonprofits in America, are beginning to question how much the SFG Board of Directors knew about this calculated approach.
New York, NY
Cal was standing in the morning sun at the same bank of windows in the New York News building when his cell phone vibrated. Checking his phone, he ignored the five missed calls from headquarters and opened the text from Sheriff Soloman. “Scimitar receptionist ID’ed your gal immediately. Turns out she stopped up the office toilet. They had to call a plumber.”
A striking woman in her early 40s with a pretty face, shoulder length hair, slim jeans, and heels walked toward him across the cafeteria floor.
Her hand was outstretched. “Freda Browne.”
“Agent Cal Bertrand. Thanks for seeing me on such short notice. I’m grateful you could make the time before I head back to DC.”
She motioned him to sit, looking him over. “I know you, don’t I, Agent?”
“I had some notoriety last year.”
She examined his face with alluring eyes. “Ahhh yes. Fast and Frenzied. You’re the whistleblower that gave shit to Congress. And caught some heat in the Bureau. Tough to be such a baller, am I right?”
He grinned but gave nothing away.
She said, “I would have thought you’d be staying away from guns these days. As I understand from Stacia DeVries that you’re interested in our SFG scoop.”
“I’m with the ATF. Guns come with the job.”
She mocked chagrin. “Of course. So, I understand you’d like some information on our confidential source.”
Opening up his notebook, Cal told her, “Well, I’ve seen a few stories on the SFG in the last few weeks. And two-in-a-row just this morning.”
“Right. Exactly. As Stacia informed you yesterday, we’re not going to give that source up. This paper has withstood many an official attempt to divulge the identity of sources. We’re certainly not going to start now over a very clear criminal case involving leadership at the SFG”
“Stacia implied that you may not even know your source.”