by Jim Magwood
Ted, the main jailer answered and Paul said, “Ted, this is Paul Corbin. Can I get in to see that guy Jake and I talked to a week or so ago? Hernandez, I think? Okay, I’ll be down in a few. Set him up, okay? Thanks.”
He walked down to the Detention unit and passed through the screens. Ted had put Hernandez in an interrogation room and showed Paul down the hall. Paul entered the room slowly, looked at the man for a moment, then sat down. Hernandez just looked at him without saying a word.
“Mr. Hernandez, I wonder if you would talk with me a bit? You don’t have to. This isn’t official. Just wondering if you would?”
A puzzled look swept across the prisoner’s face, then was quickly gone. He just nodded slightly at Paul and sat quietly.
Paul continued, “I was thinking about the last time we talked…”
“Yeah, where’s the big dude?”
“He’s off looking at something. It’s just me this time. Okay?”
“It’s your dime. I got nothing else to do.”
“Okay. I think you know I’m working on those school fires that have been going around. They’re hurting a lot of people, especially the kids who keep getting bounced out because of them. None of them have been hurt yet, but it’s only a matter of time. I remember you said something when we were here last, maybe something referencing the schools or something. I wondered if you would talk some more about that?”
“Why should I do that?”
“No reason. Maybe because you’re a good guy? Maybe you care a little? Not about me. Maybe the kids?”
Reggie Hernandez smiled slightly, maybe laughing at him, maybe cynical, definitely appearing uncaring.
“Yeah, right. I should care?”
“Maybe you should, Reggie.”
“Reggie this time, huh? No ‘Froggie’ this time?”
Paul didn’t respond. Just waited.
“So, just in case I care, what was it was so important?”
“Two things, maybe. One, you said a friend sent me a warning. Next time I’d be dead, or something like that. Care to talk about that?”
“Nothing to talk about. Just a message. Said to pass it on if I ever got the chance. So I passed it.”
“The friend?”
“Got no idea. Maybe wasn’t nobody. Maybe was nobody.”
Paul sat quietly again, then said, “Another question?”
“Like I says, your dime.”
“Why the schools, Reggie?”
Hernandez just sat looking at Paul with maybe a reflective thought on his face. The silence dragged on for a minute and Paul was ready to simply get up and leave.
Then, “Don’t know why. Guess he don’t like them. Maybe lost his lunch money some day back. Maybe got all con-fused tryin’ to find his way to class. Maybe got all tight havin’ to do all that his-to-ree, yuh think?”
Paul asked slowly, “Is it a kid, Reggie? A kid doing these things?” His mind was feeling little daggers shooting, little disjointed thoughts and questions. Something trying to find it’s way through, but not quite getting there. Something Reggie was saying, but not really saying. Something…
“Nah. Ain’t gonna be no kid. Too bad for a kid. Too big.” Then he laughed and said, “Maybe wasn’t nobody.”
And Paul’s mind clicked. “Nobody,” he said quietly. He paused for a long moment. “Was it nobody, Reggie? Nobody?”
Reggie grinned. And sat without speaking.
“Do you know him, Reggie?”
“Nah. Don’t know nobody. Not me.” Then he suddenly screamed, “Don’t know nobody,” and Paul jumped out of his chair and bounced off the wall.
He stood there for a second, then the door crashed open and Ted and another guard rushed in. Paul put up his hand to stop them, then said, “It might help a lot of people, Reggie. Might even help you.”
The prisoner snarled back, “Don’t know nuthin’. Jes watch yur back, whitebread. You got the warning last time.”
Paul’s mind was whirling as he watched Hernandez get led away. What had Reggie just told him?
CHAPTER 24
Jeff Sheldon sat at his desk with his lunch on one hand and his paperwork still in front of him. He usually arrived at work before seven every morning and almost never left until sometime after six in the evening. He either brought lunch that he picked up at a vendor on his way in or sent out for it. He had wondered many times whether “workaholic” was a good description, but finally cast off that thought. He actually enjoyed his work and really couldn’t think of anything else he’d rather be doing. Unmarried, no kids around, not much interest in friends of either sex, no distractions. But he liked making the money.
His corner office on the eleventh floor of the National Press Building gave a beautiful view of the city to the west and over the buildings a few blocks to The Ellipse just south of The White House and to Lafayette Park to the north of it. Looking southeast, he was able to see the sunrise if he got to the office early. He could see some of the beautiful buildings of the city; The White House, the Old Executive Office Building, the Willard Hotel, and the Capital Building. The view was part of the reason he almost never left the office. He never could figure out how his employer managed to get space in the Press building, but he certainly didn’t refuse the office when he was shown into it.
Jeff was an accounting and banking specialist for the Treasury Department and his job was to track things. He got directives from different departments regularly asking him to run a trail on certain bank deposits and to use his accounting skills to analyze the business dealings of companies worldwide. He often worked for the FBI, but usually for no-name groups that walked in, dropped a request on his desk, then left without saying a word. He never inquired as to who these nonames were, just got on the computer and started tracking and analyzing.
His skill with a computer was much more than his employers or the agencies he worked with had any idea. He had every bit of encryption software and virus/spyware protection anyone could have. He had found satellites to work through, cutout servers around the world, and phone systems he could break into and use, then drop out of, with no one ever knowing he had been there. He both wrote and broke codes with little effort, and he could, and did, hack into secure systems of any type with ease. His mind just worked that way. He didn’t consider himself necessarily any kind of genius. He just saw angles and answers and paths without having to think about them. They were just there, in front of his eyes whenever he needed to find data or put it in logical order and sequence. If his employers or the agencies he worked with knew of his real abilities or where he used them, they would likely have had him sitting in a director’s chair in one of those no-name places—or in Leavenworth.
Jeff had served twenty-one years, almost to the day, in the Army, first in the Rangers learning everything there was to know about how to do nasty things without getting caught and then as an officer plotting nasty things for Rangers to do. He had learned everything they could teach him about overt and covert actions, had become a multi-weapons and explosives expert, and most importantly, had learned how to find secrets—dark and deeply hidden secrets. He recognized his skills with computers at that time and started building his electronic contacts around the world. He knew a lot of people he could tap when he needed, but considered computers and databases much more reliable. And, as people began to rely more and more on those computers and databases to search, record, manipulate and analyze things of importance, he found those deposits of information and worksheets so much more friendly than trying to work with the people. If you used the right codes and asked the right questions, the computers simply answered “Yes”, and gave him the information he asked for—and never asked questions when he told them to forget he was ever there.
Now he was on the eleventh floor, in an office most everyone had forgotten about, doing research projects he loved for people who didn’t care about anything except getting the information, and he lived a life of anonymity. Nobody really knew him; nobody really cared abou
t him; he wasn’t in a position where he got lie detector-ed every year; everybody thought he must be as secure as could be because, of course, everyone else used him.
Jeff looked out the window and caught a little flash of light from somebody’s window down the block. He blinked quickly because it seemed to cut through his eyes and caused an instant headache. He quickly grabbed three aspirin tablets and chewed them while he got up to get some water. He had received some shrapnel wounds while in the Rangers, nothing major, but enough to cause some pain at times. He received lifetime prescriptions when he retired for some pain medications and aspirin, so he had all he needed. But, he recognized he was being affected more in the last couple of years and was taking more medication. Nobody in the military cared; they just gave him what he needed—especially when he hacked into the base pharmacies and wrote his own prescriptions, then erased them when he picked them up. It didn’t take much now, though, to cause some pretty heavy headaches, and he knew he had some short blackout sessions. Didn’t stop him on his projects, though, just slowed him down a little at times.
The bank had received his paycheck that day. He had it direct-deposited so no one really had a record of where he lived. That check went into his regular, everyday account, and he used it frugally. Nobody would ever see any suspicious trends by following the money. But then nobody knew anything about the other accounts and would never find them. Every once in a while, Jeff came across a source of funds that simply needed to be tapped, and those funds went into one of eight secure accounts he had around the world. It might be the bank account of a major drug dealer someone had him researching. It was simply too easy to tap into that account and transfer a goodly portion to one of his own accounts. After all, who was the gangster going to complain to?
Sometimes it was the working account of some agency he was doing a project for. It was easy to compute a phony work order in their system, get them to send some huge payments to one of his accounts for a few months, then erase all the activity. One time he had found a bank he was researching that had offered a $600,000 finder’s fee for helping get back a multimillion dollar loss in a drug and weapons scam. Jeff had simply hacked into their system, entered codes showing the materials had been recovered, and then directed the reward to one of his accounts. He knew that when people didn’t know a theft was taking place, they didn’t have the ability to put tracers or tags on the funds, so they became invisible the moment they left the subjects accounts. In addition, as soon as they reached his offshore accounts, the funds were immediately broken into smaller lots and transferred several times to his other accounts. Gone. Invisible.
Yes, Jeff enjoyed his work. He enjoyed helping the agencies get the information they needed and knew he was responsible for many people of ill repute spending long stretches of time in government sponsored housing. He enjoyed helping agencies work out snags and kinks in their best-laid plans and enabling them to work together to solve major problems for the country.
He really enjoyed, though, having the time to work on his own, setting up contacts and resources he could use for his own benefit. He had not paid a phone bill in fifteen years; he sent computer codes instead of money. He bought most of his groceries on a credit card that somehow never showed a balance owing; his Mercedes and apartment payments were made direct from a brokerage account where he manipulated the funds so they never decreased. That was the good part of what he did.
However, what spurred him at least as much as the money was his hatred for things “government.” While he loved helping certain government agencies and people do their jobs better, he hated overall the way the government was being run. The idiotic and immoral leaders who were always trying to make people believe they had the truth and knew the way. The direction the country seemed to be going—down, down, down. At the present rate of decline, he knew they didn’t even have a generation of time left before the country would simply self-destruct and become irrecoverable. The American people were sheep, that was the best that could be said, and sheep eventually went to the slaughterhouse—and he knew it was coming. You didn’t need food to lead sheep into the slaughterhouse, just pictures of food, and that’s what the government had been giving them for years—pictures of prosperity and the good life without any substance behind the pictures.
And so, besides helping agencies that truly needed and used his help, and collecting the money it was so easy for him to find, Jeff now had another plan that stirred him just as much as the others. He was going to bring these government leaders down. Like pushing the first domino and watching them all tumble into each other, or, as in Aikido, using your opponents own motions to gently pull him into his collapse, Jeff would use the idiots’ own actions to bring them down. Whether gently or forcefully, they would come down. And all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put them together again.
Yes, Jeff was enjoying his work.
CHAPTER 25
Commander Carver had called Paul and Jake into his office shortly after noon, and when they entered, stood and said, “I want you to meet the newest member of your squad, Silvia Shandon.”
The two men looked at each other, then back to Carver. Jake said, “I didn’t know we were a squad, Cap’n. And I didn’t know we needed a new partner.”
“Well, you are and you do. Sylvia came on board today from the First District and has had a lot of experience lately working with the businesses and political centers through the District, so she should be of help working the schools and if we get more involved with political stuff. You will, of course, welcome her with huge smiles and open arms, right?”
Sylvia had stood and reached out to shake hands with the men, both of whom reached out in return, though appearing to have some reluctance. She was a good-looking woman, fairly tall and with a strong handshake. Carver went on to give a rough rundown of her past assignments, several of which gave credibility to a career she had built on her own. She had had several scrapes where she had to get down and dirty with suspects, but also several where she obviously used her brains and wits to talk situations down without violence. She had been forced to use her weapon twice, once at a bank holdup scene where deadly force had been needed.
After the preliminaries, Jake looked at Carver and asked, “Well, Cap’n, are you changing any of our assignments?”
Carver relied, “Nope. You keep on with the school investigations, the senator and the relations with the White House. If we get overloaded, I’ll maybe give you something else, but for now stick to them.”
Shandon’s eyes had opened wider when she heard the reference to the White House, but didn’t say anything. After a few more minutes, the Commander sent them back to work and the three walked over to Paul and Jake’s desk. Jake looked for a moment at the double desk and asked, “Where’s she gonna sit?”
Paul looked around the room and said, “Well, maybe we could drag another desk over here and make this a three-way. Since we’re now an expanded squad and all, and are supposed to work together.” Then he turned and said, “So, Sylvia, do you type?”
“Yep. My own reports. I might be inclined to help you on one of yours occasionally if we get swamped. I buy my own lunches, I don’t go drinking after work, and I don’t date cops. I might occasionally make coffee—if I want some”
Jake and Paul looked at each other and said, almost together, “Oh, oh.”
“But,” she added, “I brought a bag of donuts.”
Both the men jerked around and Jake blurted, “What kind?”
Sylvia walked over to the door into the room and picked up a bag sitting beside it. Paul noticed it was greasy from the obviously fresh donuts inside and he almost began drooling. She pulled a thick wad of napkins from the bag and started putting the donuts on them.
“Here’s some maple bars and a few glazed. They’re even still a little warm. And here’s a couple of…”
Jake broke in. “Is that one of them cinnamon thingys I see, with little crunchies on top?”
“Yeah, it mig
ht be. Would you like that one?”
“Paul, why are you just standing there with a lady present? When are you gonna get her a chair? And, if you’ll excuse us for a minute, Ms. Shandon, I’ll see if this here rookie will give some assist in lifting that unoccupied desk over there and put it here so we have us a real squad. You coming, rookie? And when we finish that, rookie, suppose you go into the break room and fetch us all some nice hot coffee, seeing as how the lady would probably like some with her donuts. Hmm, cinnamon thingys, huh? My, oh my.”
Paul stood shaking his head and almost laughing, until Sylvia said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. If you gentlemen would move that desk for little ol' me, I’ll just go get that coffee for all of us.” As she turned to leave the room, both the men looked at each other and said as one, “Donuts!”
Half an hour later, after the introductions (and donuts) were finished, Paul and Jake were filling Sylvia in on what they had been involved in so far and were trying to determine how best to divide the work load.
“Well,” Sylvia said, “I’m good on computers and I’ve got a knack of talking with people and getting them to talk with me. I’m not afraid to work alone, although I know when to call for backup. There were many nights I was one of only two or three working the street after midnight, even though we were supposed to be in teams. Just didn’t have enough personnel to have two-man cars all the time.”
“Think we could send her out and you and me stay here and do the paperwork, Jake?”
“I guess you’re forgetting that’s why I hired you, rookie, to do my paperwork and let me rest.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot. Sorry.”
“Sure are. Supposed to be partners, and I gotta do all the work. Ms. Shandon, just what do you think about a rookie like you see here?”
“I maybe don’t have enough experience to make any judgement calls like that yet, but I’ll certainly keep my mind open.”