The Manuscript

by Russell Blake

  “And it was the shock of being slammed that gave him the heart attack. That’s where the coroner went with it as well. The corpse had several dislocated fingers and a pretty messed up face, but that looks like it happened when he hit the floor. But it was the blow that started it all. So we’re changing this to a 187,” Ken finished.

  “Shit.” Michael didn’t have anything to say beyond the expletive.

  “I’ll second that. We’re going back and getting CSI to do a once over on his flat, but after the EMTs stomped around there for half an hour getting the body out, I’m not optimistic,” Ken said.

  “No, I can see that would make it tough,” Michael said, from a million miles away.

  Ken was all business on this call.

  “Since we’re now sure this was a murder, or at the very least aggravated assault, why don’t you take a few minutes from your busy schedule and tell me everything you know about it?” Not so much a question as an order.

  Michael told him the whole story, omitting only that he was in possession of the manuscript that was deleted from the e-mail. And that every lethal organization in the world was implicated in Abe’s death. He didn’t see how his suspicions after reading the mystery document would alter the course of the investigation into Abe’s murder.

  “And you have no idea who sent the communication, or who planted the listening devices?” Ken asked, for the record.

  “Not a clue. But Ken, Abe told me the e-mail attachment was the most important book of his career and would implicate a lot of government and powerful interests in widespread criminal activity,” Michael offered. He chose the words very carefully, to give Ken maximum possible info without actually revealing he was now up to his neck in something that seemed to be turning into his worst nightmare come true.

  There was no way he could say anything more without divulging he was the man who knew too much – and that guy usually wound up dead. He had to assume that if the rot went as high as the manuscript claimed, every detail in the police report would be known by the black hats within hours of it being filed.

  “Powerful interests, you say – well that’s nice and non-specific,” Ken observed.

  “I wish I had something more I could tell you,” Michael said. And he really did. The problem was that telling Ken he suspected covert U.S. Government hit squads, or the Mob, or Iran, or terrorists, didn’t really narrow things down in a helpful way.

  “Lemme know if anything pops up in your memory that you forgot,” Ken ventured. He smelled the odor of rat but couldn’t be sure Michael was holding out on him, or if it was something else.

  “You’re at the top of my speed dial list. Ken, thanks a million for pushing this. I had a bad feeling when I found the wiretaps and Abe turned up dead. Are you going to hit his office too, and jerk the bugs? Maybe those will give you a lead,” Michael suggested but immediately regretted the condescending flavor. Ken was good at what he did, just as Michael was.

  There was a significant silence.

  “Never occurred to me,” Ken said drily. “Anything else?”

  “Sorry Ken. I…I know you’ll cover all the bases. No offense intended.”

  “None taken.”

  After terminating the call, Michael stared at the handset still gripped in his now sweaty hand as he calculated the variables. His eyes slowly drifted across the room and fell on the manuscript. Fucking thing might as well be made out of plutonium – being exposed to it was just as fatal.

  He looked at his watch. Assuming the worst, a crew had been in Abe’s office last night, dusting for prints to see if anyone new had shown up once Abe had expired. That would put Michael and Jim at the scene the following day.

  Only it was likely worse than that. They’d probably dusted the night before as well, when they inserted the bugs, just to identify everyone who’d been in Abe’s inner sanctum, and then wiped everything so only new prints would appear on the next night’s scan. That would put Michael there both before and after. The leader of any team looking for information or leads on where the disappearing manuscript had gone would already have run those prints to get names in preparation for a little chat. And Michael would be the first appointment, he was sure of that.

  His instinct to lay low once he sensed he was being watched turned out to be prescient – the intuition that had saved his ass in combat was thankfully still fully operational.

  That was the only silver lining so far.

  Michael’s gaze returned to the sheaf of papers. What had he been doing before Ken called?

  The e-mail address. Right.

  He logged onto his e-mail and sent Koshi a message asking how best to contact a blind address without it being traceable – assuming the inbound address might be compromised, or a red herring or even a bad guy. Michael knew it wasn’t prudent to divulge his sending address when he contacted the manuscript’s author – if it was the author’s e-mail.

  That done, he needed to formulate a strategy.

  If he believed in miracles, he could delete the document from his hard drive, burn the manuscript and pretend he’d never seen it.

  That was fine, except he ran the considerable risk that he’d soon be on the receiving end of an interrogation that would get ugly quickly. He had to assume they knew Abe had printed the document if they’d been able to get into his computer to erase all the tracks, which meant they wouldn’t start a discussion unless they planned to end it with a bang, so to speak, whatever he told them, most probably.

  Putting himself in their position, he wouldn’t stop until he’d located the document and neutralized it, along with anyone who’d seen it. If they were thorough, that would mean everyone Abe had been with since he’d downloaded and printed it. There was just no other way they could be sure.

  Then again, maybe he was over-thinking this. Perhaps they’d be more cautious and wait to see if anything else surfaced. That was a strong possibility as well.

  Reality was, there was no way of knowing how conservatively they would react. Which meant he had to assume the worst.

  He went through his mental checklist.

  He’d need to take effective countermeasures and become untraceable. Fine. He removed the battery from his cell phone, knowing that doing so wouldn’t make it invisible to someone like the National Security Agency – but it would make it impossible to trace for anyone but the NSA. He’d need to pick up several clean phones to communicate with – this one was history. Ditto for his credit cards. They all had a chip in them which could be read in a multiplicity of ways. Of course, he couldn’t use them anyway, as he had to believe his pursuers could access most databases. So time for the cards to go missing, too.

  His American passport also had a chip, but he kept it in a sleeve that disabled any ability to track it. He could always stuff the cards in with it, he supposed. That would probably wind up being the way to go until things were better defined.

  He checked his new e-mail account. Koshi had responded with instructions on the best mechanism to create a new e-mail for the specific purpose of contacting a potentially compromised url. It was pretty straightforward as long as Michael hid his IP address when creating it and checking it – something easily done with any of a dozen IP-masking programs. He quickly followed Koshi’s instructions then logged into the new account, choosing his words with precision for the outbound message he sent to the mystery address: [A is dead.]

  There was no harm in pinging the address with that to see what came back, and the message didn’t really reveal a lot that wouldn’t be in the newspaper obituary section. And anyway, lots of people beginning or ending with A had died all over the world. He wasn’t worried about the address itself belonging to the surveillance team because Abe had printed the document the night he’d gotten it and appar
ently the pursuers hadn’t known about it till the next day – no doubt because someone Abe had called to fact-check had sounded an alarm. There was only one way the chronology worked: e-mail received; Abe reads and prints it; takes it home. If somehow the boogie men had learned about it that night, Abe would have been immediately dispatched to go sleep with the fishes and Michael would have never gotten a call in the first place. So it had to be someone Abe telephoned the morning he contacted Michael who had set everything in motion; the e-mail destruction must have happened in a matter of minutes thereafter because it was gone by the time Abe had checked his e-mail that morning.

  The internet phone rang again and Michael leapt to grab it. It was Samantha.

  “Okay, lover boy, what have you gotten yourself into?” she asked by way of greeting.

  “What are you talking about?” Michael parried.

  “I ran searches for the terms you gave me and ran into dead ends. But there was one term that had a twelve page article from a French-Canadian investigative reporter, written about six years ago, that came up when I searched on ‘Delphi Squad’ – and Michael, it’s some scary shit,” Samantha warned.

  “Scary as in how?” Michael asked.

  “Scary as in, allegations of an ex-CIA spook in Central America who claims to have been part of a U.S. death squad that carried out assassinations in the region for over a decade,” Samantha told him.

  That was consistent with the manuscript’s claims. One of many, but still, a key one.

  “I’m sensing that’s not all…” Michael prodded.

  “No, it isn’t. I did a search on the reporter, and he died a few days after it was published. And you’re going to love this. He committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head,” Samantha deadpanned.

  “Come again?”

  “The police found him in his apartment, where he’d apparently shot himself in the base of the rear of his skull with an untraceable pistol he happened to have lying around. No note, and it only took the cops an hour to determine it was a regrettable example of self-destruction,” she explained.

  “Isn’t it pretty unusual to shoot yourself in the back of the head and not leave a note?” Michael asked, already knowing the answer.

  “I can tell you how unusual, actually, because that was my next search. Of the roughly seventeen hundred or more folks who decide to end it all with a gun every year in Canada, tracking data back ten years, can you guess how many shot themselves in the back of the head?”

  “One?”

  “We have a winnah! Our boy was one in almost twenty thousand.” Samantha paused, possibly for effect.

  “Tell me there isn’t more,” Michael said.

  “The reporter was scheduled to come out with part two of his investigative report a few days after he killed himself. That obviously never got published. He’d apparently decided to destroy his hard disk before going to meet his maker, per the police report – another quirky bit of mischief you don’t see too often. Are you starting to see any problems with this?” Samantha wondered aloud.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Here, write down this url – it’s to the first article,” Samantha said, and dictated a web address to Michael.

  “Wait a second. That’s a wayback machine article, not a current site,” Michael observed after reading the info.

  “Correct. Seems the original article no longer exists. I had to use a little trickery to find this – it’s as though every trace of it had been expunged,” Samantha finished.

  “Samantha, I don’t want to scare you, but how cautious were you when you were rooting around?” Michael asked.

  “I’m way ahead of you. I always mask my IP address out of habit and use a software program that bounces it all over the world every few minutes, so I’m clean. Professional paranoia. But I was going to warn you to do the same before you pull up the site. It’s a little freaky how the guy kills himself and his files go missing almost immediately after publishing his article. Makes you kind of go, hmm,” Samantha said.

  “I owe you a great big one, Samantha,” Michael responded.

  “Surprise me with something. I like fast, red and Italian.”

  Michael hung up and signed onto an IP masking site, then went to the internet archive to read the reporter’s work. He quickly scanned the article, noting that it confirmed some of the claims in the manuscript. What was particularly troubling was the attention to detail in the article and the matter-of-fact way events were described. To Michael’s ear, it had the ring of truth.

  The suspicious circumstances surrounding the reporter’s death lent considerable weight to the likelihood the article was factual. He’d been around the block long enough to understand that when a death that was so obviously a murder was resolved as a suicide, something besides a pursuit of the truth had been in play during the investigation. That it had occurred in Canada and yet was still swept under the carpet, underscored the power and reach of whoever had wanted the reporter silenced. That was consistent with the article’s contention of CIA involvement.

  Michael now knew for sure that he had a real problem. This was shaping up in an ugly way, and he had to assume it would get uglier. But he still had too little data to make a reliable decision as to how to proceed. Sure, the article made a compelling case for a black ops team run amok, as well as a shadow government action of gargantuan implications. However, it was just a single article – which wasn’t exactly the ideal broad support he needed. He hoped Samantha would be able to dig up some more dirt, but the problem was that if the manuscript was accurate, the chances were there was no news coverage of any of it.

  So how to proceed?

  Michael re-read the web page and noted the name of the man who claimed he’d been a CIA wet operative for decades in Central America. John Stubens, who, as of the date of the article, resided in Nevada. Doing some quick math in his head, Michael computed the man would have to be in his sixties, assuming he was still alive and the name used for the reporter’s sake was his real one.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained. It wasn’t as if Michael had a lot of other leads to pursue. He typed in the name of the online service he used to investigate skip tracing and entered his password. The familiar screen came up and he completed the form with the slim information he had. Michael hit enter and waited as the computer elves did whatever they did, scouring thousands of databases for relevant data.

  After a few minutes, a screen appeared.

  Bingo.

  There were eight men with the name John Stubens in Nevada, but only one who had ever served in the military.

  John Carlton Stubens, age 64, living in Henderson, Nevada. Single. No kids. Owned his home, had a modest mortgage he’d been paying down for twelve years. One car registered to him: Toyota 4Runner, 2007. Retired. Army pension. Not much else. One credit card, paid current, zero balance, ten thousand dollar limit. A few creditors – the gas and electric company, the phone company, cable TV.

  Which was strange. It was almost impossible to go six decades on the planet and not leave larger tracks. The system Michael used would show everything – credit cards, recent medical bills, any internet sites he’d posted a message on, employment history. The works. This basically showed a house, car and associated bills, and that was it. He’d served in the army from 1966, achieving the rank of lieutenant, until 1979, when he had received an honorable discharge. Which was also odd, given that most who stayed in the service for over a decade tended to stay in as lifers. But that fitted with the reporter’s story, which had represented him as a covert operative throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

  So Michael now had an address and a phone number. It was a start. On impulse, he lifted the handset of the internet telephone and dialed the
Nevada phone number. He listened as it rang, and then heard the distinctive click of an answering machine picking up. A gruff male voice advised callers to leave a message. Michael hung up. He realized his pulse was racing and took a few deep breaths to get himself under control.

  There was no imminent threat, now that he had ditched his apartment. For the moment, he had options, but they would quickly be reduced if something happened to put him back on the radar. One thing he was dreading was Ken escalating his murder investigation and asking Michael to come in and leave a formal statement – it was probably just a matter of time before that happened, and he didn’t like his odds once he was at the police station; there was no telling how much reach the surveillance team had or how much information they had access to. He knew that the CIA was barred from doing anything operationally in the U.S. but also was pragmatic enough to understand that in ‘special’ circumstances, the prohibition was likely ignored. It wasn’t like he could ring Abe up and ask him who had been the last person he’d seen, and inquire as to whether he’d shown his ID before slamming him in the back.

  All he could realistically do was wait for more information to come in so he could better understand his predicament.

  It was the classic wait and see scenario, and while he had the discipline to be patient, his temperament was more geared towards taking action. He sighed and returned to the computer, resigned to a long day of research.

  Chapter 7

  Ken leaned back in his worn chair and studied the mottled ceiling of the squad room. It looked like he’d need to follow up on the Abe investigation and speak with the man’s co-workers and friends. The crime team had quickly gone through Abe’s flat with no breakthrough results. As he’d feared, any promising evidence had been contaminated by the paramedics moving through the hallway and removing the corpse. CSI had taped off the scene and was going over the office and remaining rooms, but he knew that was a long shot, at best. These kinds of crime were always the worst. No obvious motive, no suspicious next of kin, no real suspects to speak of. Just an old man who’d reached the end of the line, helped by a blow from an unknown assailant or assailants.