by Jim Magwood
Hi, Jacob. On a project here studying ghosts and goblins, spooks and demons, a little more than Halloween-ish, from war years. Maybe even current. Wondered if you might shed any light on the subject from your travels. Sam says hello and wonders when the next moose soup will be available. Best, Roger.
He was surprised to get a message back within just a few minutes and surmised that he must have caught Jacob on the computer at the university.
It was elk, Roger. Elk. Say hello back for me. You’re working on an interesting project. Didn’t know you were so interested in fables and children’s stories. You never know, though, when there might be a lot of truth behind the stories. Be very careful to get all your facts and figures in order, and beware of things that go bump in the night. Do you have any authorities you can work with on this? Looking forward to seeing you soon. Call me if the ghosts keep you awake at night. Jacob.
Roger read the message several times, trying to read between lines and determine what Jacob was trying to tell him. The reference to Sam and the moose soup was just a running joke about Roger’s beautiful shepherd/wolf dog that traveled with him on his wilderness trips, and the food that was always a blessing whenever Roger met Jacob at the lodge east of his own cabin. The subtle references to safety and authorities were quite different, though.
Jacob appeared to be confirming the reality of the mysterious army seeming to plague Paul in Washington, and telling him to be very careful. Was he saying they were real? And implying they were active in modern days? Was he saying to not do this on his own, but work only with some protection from authorities? And the last statement. Could he mean that the ghosts might be able to follow him, track him, come after him?
He quickly composed another message to Jacob. Jacob. Wondered if your comments meant you were about to turn in for some dream time. Do you believe in ghosts at your age? Roger.
The answer came back almost immediately.
Yes! My dreams still bother me. Jacob.
With that, Roger decided to get in touch with Paul in Washington to see just how far he was moving on this thing. Which direction was his investigation going, and how deeply? He needed to know a lot more about what was going on before he got much further involved.
Now, he thought, to get with a certain detective in a certain large city in the United States and see what was really going on.
CHAPTER 50
Paul hung up the phone and turned to the team members. “Well, I’ve got a new car. New being a subjective word. They promise me it won’t be more than ten years old, and definitely under 100,000 miles. That’s wonderful.”
Sylvia replied, “Do you hear someone sniveling, Jake?”
“No. Not in the D.C. detective bureau. Definitely not. No!”
“Hmm. Must have been a fly buzzing in my ear.”
“You two want to go look at the holes?”
“Those little things? Is that what you’re sniveling about? Hmmm. I like that word, Sylvia. I really do. Sniveling.”
“Okay, you two. Is this you show me your scars, I’ll show you mine day?”
“Well, Paul. I didn’t know you had any to show. I suppose we could show some sympathy, though, right Jake?”
“Oh, well. To a comrade in arms, I suppose.”
The trio sat there for a few moments, deep in thought, not knowing how to begin broaching the subject. Then Jake said, “So, how about them Redskins, huh?”
Then there was another silence.
Finally, Paul said, “I’m okay, guys. It’s okay.”
Both Jake and Sylvia said, “Yeah.”
Then Jake added, “So you’ve got another car. Where do we go now?”
Sylvia said, “Well, I’ve got the initial ballistics report here. Says the slugs were probably the same size as the other shooters we’ve got, but they’re too smashed to get any kind of a good match. Likelihood is, though, that we’ve got the same guy, or guys, as before. Question is, though, Why? Why would they be coming directly after you, Paul?”
“Another question: Was it Sarge or one of his buddies? Awful close circumstances to just be a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think it’s Sarge, Jake. Maybe he can get around at his age. Seemed pretty spry when I was talking to him. But, why? And could he get all the way across town, find out who I was, set up in advance of me arriving and so on? I don’t like it.”
“No, I don’t either. But, maybe he made a phone call?”
“But if he was in on the things, plus this shooting, why would he even talk to me the way he did? He told me a lot of stuff when he could have just disappeared, or at least stop talking, or tell other stories.”
Sylvia said, “Paul, I’d really like for Jake and me to put you under some intense questioning, an interrogation. See if we can drag anything out of you from your talk with Sarge that your mind isn’t focusing on now. Would you be willing? And what do you think, Jake?”
“Can we use the rubber hoses, Syl? I haven’t used one for so long.”
“Oh, Jake. So old fashioned. I’ve got this drawer full of chemicals and needles I’ve been dying to try out. Forgive the dying reference, okay, Paul? Let’s do it my way, Jake. You’ll get almost the same thrill watching him squirm.”
“I knew you were both really good friends the minute I walked in here today.”
“Ah, that’s sweet of you, Paulie. We really appreciate your willingness, right Sylvia?”
“Right.”
“Okay, guys. Here I am. Take the gloves off. Or, put them on, whichever. Where do we start?”
“Well, let’s start right at the beginning. I mean your talk with Hernandez downstairs. What did you think about that? What did you feel about his references to these army guys, and about this Sarge guy?”
Paul thought for a long moment, then answered, “I didn’t have any feeling about reality, or whether he was putting me on or anything. Just had a feeling, was all. I mean, he had no reason to tell me anything. He called for me, right? Maybe to get some points. Maybe to just throw some distraction. Who knows? But I just had a feeling that he was being straight. He didn’t sound rehearsed. Didn’t stumble as if he was making it all up. In fact, I think I said before, it maybe sounded as if he even knew some of these guys himself, or one of them or something. And when he was about finished, it sounded like he had some fear. Maybe that he realized what he had just done. Maybe setting himself up for some big trouble?”
“Yeah, but I’ve seen a lot of good actors downstairs before,” Jake said. “Lots of reasons for them to tell stories.”
“Yeah, I know Jake. It’s just that I didn’t get any feelings like that. It sounded pretty real. I’ve seen them trying hard to get out of the tank, too. This just didn’t feel like that.”
“Okay, so Froggie just happens to come up with a name, and a place. How does he know?”
“I’ve asked myself that question, too, and don’t have an answer. And, I don’t think he’ll give us an answer. He seemed to really be shutting up when we finished. Seemed to be saying, Don’t even be thinking of asking any questions. Right now, at least, I think that would be a dead end.”
“Sylvia? If I can say such a thing in our modern, enlightened age, any of that good old woman’s intuition?”
“That’s okay, Jake. Just knock off the old stuff.”
“Ah, yes, there is that. So, feelings?”
“None. Though I guess I do feel somewhat like Paul that the guy was maybe telling the truth.”
“Yeah, I’m about the same. So, Paul, let’s shift to Sarge. What was your first impression of him?”
“Pretty much an old guy riding the rails like a lot of the old guys down there. Surprised that he looked pretty healthy and decently dressed. Pretty clean. His clothes were old, what I could see of them, but not ragged or real grubby. I would peg his age at 50s, 60s. He was probably in or around the Vietnam War, maybe even over there, which would put him about the 60 bracket.
“And, like Hernandez, he didn’t have
any problem dragging up memories of those bad guys, the demons or whatever. Didn’t sound like he was making it up, like maybe he knew really well. I would think, though, if he was still actually one of them he wouldn’t be living like a tramp down at the tracks. Would likely have money or something. Maybe not still in the business, but at least pretty well off from his previous work.”
The team bantered and badgered back and forth for three hours before running out of questions and needing to look at some other things. The end result: Sarge likely had real information, but probably wasn’t directly involved; the hit squads were likely real, but they had no idea whether they were involved in the current situations; they were still without a viable clue to get them started searching. Paul had said that Sarge may have been open to meeting again and that he should probably try to see him. To which both the others replied, “Not without us around, you won’t.”
CHAPTER 51
From his work with several government agencies in the past, Jeff Sheldon had acquired codes and passwords to get into many places. Not only government agencies themselves, but banks, prisons, mortgage companies, savings and loans, phone companies and so on. Mostly from tracking down people and events for the agencies, but also as side ventures for his own plans. Now he was working on putting together another event in his plan to crash the government.
He really had no concern about getting caught. He knew he could always be a little careless and leave a track behind— not erase signs of being in a system well enough or something. But, he also knew he had so many layers of protection that no small mistake could likely lead anyone close to him. Too many cutouts and false trails for people to follow. His own computer systems, hardware and software, that he used on these ventures wasn’t registered to him in any way; never had been. And his Internet systems were all stolen, or borrowed from others that had no relation to him.
Jeff had been working for months on developing a list of mortgages, everything from people with simple homes coast to coast, to commercial businesses—malls, office buildings, apartment complexes and the like. He had tapped into banks, mortgage companies and private lenders all across the country, even in several foreign countries, and had put together a list that now totaled millions of mortgages in every dollar level. His plan was to simply erase them. Make them be gone. Poof.
He had tracked many of the mortgages from the initial lending offices to the main branches of the companies where the digital data was stored. He wouldn’t be able to do anything about the ultimate paper records, but the digital data was going to disappear.
Like his other efforts, someone would eventually be able to put much of the systems and data back together, but it would take months and even years. In the meantime, some very happy homeowners would not be making payments, as well as mall owners and others.
As part of his efforts, he had composed mail-merge messages to be mailed automatically from the mortgage holders themselves direct to the property owners saying that payments should be held off. In the case of homeowners, for an extended time period while the mortgage holders were going through internal changes. There would be no interest charges during the duration and no catch-up payments would be required. The mortgage holders would let them know when to renew their payments. For commercial properties, the letters would specify that payments should be sent to a new address or direct deposit routing since the mortgage holder had changed their systems. The new payments would, of course, funnel discreetly into one of Jeff’s banking systems and get shuffled to offshore accounts.
Jeff had planted the phony letters into the programs of all the mortgage holders and when he said Go, they would be automatically generated and mailed, the costs being paid for by the mortgage companies themselves. It was likely several of them would notice the mailings being processed and might get them stopped. However, most of the mailings would go out since each company only had a few hundred or thousand and it wouldn’t distort the normal mailing flow a great degree. In any case, even if the mailings were noticed and stopped, the data would disappear. The mortgages themselves would disappear. Those would simply take forever to re-create and, in the meantime, the money flow would stop. In addition, the cost to do the re-creation work would be horrendous.
Jeff hadn’t been selective on which mortgages to go after. He had simply gone after the mortgage holders themselves and said, All. If a bank in China only had large commercial mortgages, so be it. Gone. If a lender in Michigan only held million dollar loans and above, gone. And if a large bank specialized in lower cost homes that were funneled to it from their subbranches across the country, oh well. Gone. He knew a lot of the people paying the mortgages would call the companies and argue with them about what was going on, and those companies would be the first to raise the cry. But, he also knew that the vast majority of the payers would just accept the letters and be none the wiser. Look, Martha, we get to save some money for Christmas.
Jeff also knew his own bank accounts would swell by millions. All the commercial mortgages would be quite large, and the payments would also be large. He had already programmed his offshore accounts to immediately forward all payments received, after the normal one-day delay, to other accounts, and then for them to be sent on again. All the funds would be transferred at least four times and would end up resting in about a dozen accounts scattered from Dubai to the Cayman Islands to Geneva.
To further cut down the possibilities of the mailings being noticed and stopped, he had programmed the letters to come out in a random alphabetical sort and at twenty percent of the holders accounts per day over one week. As each letter would go out, the data file would be destroyed. The destroyed files wouldn’t be enough in any one day for a company to take notice, but would happen over one week and would be far ahead of anyone catching wind of what was happening, determining what was actually happening, and then moving to stop the systems. No one would be able to keep up with the process— even if they noticed in the first place.
He had also set up a recorded message from each of the mortgage holders, and had instructed the banks phone system to call each of the property owners and “read” the recorded message to them. It was a very simple message saying the name of the mortgage holder and that the person would be receiving a very important piece of mail in a day or so. The message said there was no problem and to not be alarmed, but to hold their current mortgage payment until they had received the message.
Jeff had toyed with the idea of issuing internal memos at each company for file clerks to retrieve the physical files of each deleted account and send them for destruction, but realized that someone would definitely take notice of hundreds and thousands of files being pulled. That would bring the plan down, or at least into view, very quickly, and the stoppage of the system for periods of months and years was what he had in mind, so he gave up that scheme.
His system had checked with each of the mortgage holders to be sure the coded instructions were in place and had reported back positively in all cases. As today was Friday, the thirteenth, he thought with a chuckle that today would be an ideal day to set everything in motion. However, that would give someone over the weekend to spot something going wrong and get things halted, so he programmed the starting date to be the coming Monday. That way, the plan would be rolling at the opening bell of the week, and be finished in the normal five banking workdays before most people would even see it happening.
As Jeff closed down the office for the night and headed out for home, he pushed the final GO button on his computer and set all the plans in motion. Then he sighed deeply, turned off the computer, turned out the lights and started planning dinner. It had been a good week.
CHAPTER 52
The computer went, “beep,” and Roger jerked awake, startled. He had fallen asleep lying back in his chair after a day of cross-country skiing between computer bouts and having a hearty meal to end the day. Nothing better than a steak cooked over an outdoor fire, even when it was almost too cold to be outside, and except when y
ou were going to work afterward. Or, maybe it was the potato and corn. Or maybe it was the pie to finish. He chuckled. It was worth it, though. Except maybe when the computer wanted to work and you wanted to sleep. Okay, so what did the infernal machine want to tell him?
As he scrolled through the pages of data, he at first didn’t see anything important. Just columns of numbers and a lot of names, but nothing that immediately grabbed his mind. After scrolling through about twenty pages, he thought, What am I looking at here? What is this? He went back to the first page and started through again, this time trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
It still didn’t make sense until suddenly he realized he was seeing the same format of four columns of numbers over and over. Then he realized the first column of numbers was actually five sets of numbers running down the page, and they looked like they corresponded to dates. 0516, 0517, 0518, 0519, 0520. He looked quickly at the desk calendar and realized the number/dates matched the past Monday through Friday, hundreds of one number, then hundreds of the next, and so on down through the pages, all in perfect order.
Okay , he thought, did this mean some kind of events that happened on these dates? But what did the rest of the data mean?
Then it struck him: the next column of numbers could be phone numbers. The great majority of them were eleven digit numbers. Long distance numbers across the US or Canada? he thought. There were a very few that were seven digits. Maybe local calls? And then several dozen, it looked like, that appeared to be international numbers. International access numbers, then country codes, then local codes and local phone numbers. But there were dozens and dozens of duplicate numbers, apparently each number being called several times on the same day. And it seemed like all the numbers had a suffix after the main number, separated by a dash.
He grabbed a phone book and looked quickly at the international pages for country codes and, sure enough, the book codes matched the list, and matched some of the country names in the text column. They are, he thought. They’re phone numbers. But what for?