by Jim Magwood
“Well, I don’t think I’m going to go too far from this little ol’ chair for a while, so, yeah, I’ll probably be hanging okay.”
“Then I think we shall be gone for now. But we shall return posthaste.”
“Okay, now which one of you is responsible for bringing in that big college boy word?”
“It’s him, Syl,” Jake replied. “College boy there is rubbing off on me. I promise…”
“Get out of here, you two.”
CHAPTER 84
The soldier was lying quietly, his norm. When not exercising or carrying out a mission, he rested. Any combat veteran knew you took your rest when given any opportunity, otherwise you wouldn’t likely get it later. His weapons were clean and ready. He had eaten recently. Now he rested—and waited.
The phone rang and the voice said, “Cobra seven?” Even while resting, the code name calmed him further and he responded simply, “I here.”
“Are you set up okay with everything?”
“Yes, I okay.”
“This is a throwaway phone, right?”
“Yes, it’s clear for now and I throw it away. I give you
my new number first.”
“Good. I have another job for you if you’re okay. Can you
do it?”
“Yes, I okay. I safe here and I can go in and out.” “Okay, then here’s what I need.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Paul was just approaching his street that night when once again his car was rocked by a hammer blow. This time, his mind immediately registered, shot. He stomped on the gas pedal but the car didn’t register. The engine had died and the car was slowing. Through the engine, he thought. Then the car was rocked again, this time apparently from the side with the bullet going into the interior and smashing through the dash inches from him.
He slammed down on the brakes and as the car almost stopped, dove through the open door and rolled out. He rolled over several times, then jumped to his feet and ran to a car parked on the street and behind it. It also was rocked by a shot, but he was down and out of the way, so he stayed put.
He had no pocket radio with him and before he could reach for his cell phone to call in, he heard a neighbor call out, “What’s going on out here?”
Paul shouted back, “Police officer. Call 9-1-1 and report a policeman under attack. Shots fired.”
The man called back, “Okay,” and was then gone. Moments later, Paul heard the first of several sirens wind up and knew help was on the way.
Suddenly, before anyone arrived, he remembered the previous shots having come from the office building just a few blocks away and got on his cell to send people there immediately. The dispatcher got his name and exact location, then Paul heard him broadcasting the news to the troops. Paul heard a siren, then a couple of them, seem to peel off and head a different direction.
As he waited for his people to arrive, his thoughts turned again to Why me? and then to Somebody’s just been sitting up there waiting for me to come up this piece of road. How long have they been waiting?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The next day, he was ribbed again by Jake about putting so many cars in harms way and that he was likely going to get reassigned to crosswalk patrol. The joking was over soon, though, and the questions flew, none of which he could answer. His only reasonable comment was to wait for ballistics to see if they got any cartridge matching.
That happened before noon, but the answer was they only recovered a fragment able to do any match on. With the fragment, the best they could say was that it did have the appearance and a few small grooves that looked like the previous weapon. Paul and Jake knew, though, as did everyone else, that the situation and the location demanded that it was the same guy. No doubt in their minds.
This time, however, there were only a few small scrape marks on the roof of the building that indicated someone had been there. There was an old packing box that had been pulled to the building edge giving the appearance someone had used it to sit on for some period of time. But, again, no casings, fingerprints, footprints. Nothing.
Which simply confirmed what they were already thinking: Totally professional job. They were chasing some real experts. Very persistent experts.
CHAPTER 85
Paul didn’t sleep at all the night after the shooting. It wasn’t so much the fear of the shots, but the dark that crept in on him again. He had had several days of peacefulness recently, but this night he was very wide awake. He read for hours, prayed, wandered the house, watched some late night tube, and looked at the bedroom ceiling for hours.
Yet the dark was like a thick humidity, settling in on him like a blanket, worse than ever. He showered twice, but the heat and sweat continued to engulf him. He had gotten home at a reasonable 7:30, but finally just after four in the morning got up, showered again and drove back to the office. The patrol officer stationed across from his house followed him in and then waved off. Paul spent the next three hours doing reports before Jake and the others started to arrive.
He was kidded again about his car, a new one this time. “They just didn’t have any more old ones to give me, guys. This was all they had. Honest.”
He and Jake spent more hours trying to match anything in the reports to the shootings Paul had experienced, but nothing came up. Their only conclusions were that someone knew who he was and was concerned with his closeness to the investigations. Somebody didn’t want him around.
“Why not me, though?” Jake asked. “Sylvia was kind of an accident. You were deliberate. But nothing toward me?” They had no answer.
Later in the afternoon, they took Sylvia’s laptop out to her. Paul didn’t even ask how Jake had rescued it. On their way, they stopped and loaded up on donuts, fresh, hot, cinnamon and with lots of thingys on them and a large container of pralines-n-cream ice cream. Sylvia met them at the door, tried to take the goodies out of their arms and shoo them away, but was soundly rebuffed.
“But, you know those aren’t good for you,” she protested lamely.
Jake replied, “Not only are these great sick-bed recovery foods, but they are excellent sources of energy for gentlemen needing large amounts of said energy to conduct their strenuous activities.”
“Siddown,” she ordered, “and lets eat.”
They did, with gusto.
As the conversation drifted far and wide, Sylvia finally said, “I have a feeling there’s one major guy, probably a local guy, behind all this school and shooting stuff. Just a feeling, but I can’t pull my mind away from it.
“I think there are too many intricately related events to be put together by separate people or some kind of a loose gang. I feel that there’s one guy somewhere controlling everything. He might be controlling several other guys who are doing most of the outside work, but there has to be one main guy with his finger on the trigger of all these events.”
Jake said, “A feeling.”
“Yeah, I know, but I just can’t get away from it.”
“Actually, I agree with you.”
“You, Jake?”
“Yeah, so what’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing, but I thought with just my feelings doing this and all…”
Paul jumped in with, “Well, I feel the same way, so looks like it’s unanimous.”
They sat silently for a moment, then Jake said, “Okay, so who is it?”
They sat quietly again, then Paul said, “Well, back to the drawing board?”
“Okay, so ideas then. What kind of person could it be? Probably male? If it has to do with kids and the schools, a parent or teacher?”
“Wait, Syl. If it had to do with kids, would it need to be male? Maybe the mother of a kid, or a female teacher?”
“Yeah, I agree in the long shot. But you know like me that women don’t usually get involved in this kind of violence, especially long-term.”
Jake said, “Wait a minute, though. Which kids? Why would someone get disturbed about something enough to do these things? It appears we’
ve got kids involved, politicians, news people, school fires, the Smithsonian, that ex-DA. Are we narrowing in on the incident with those kids getting shot?”
Sylvia replied, “I am,” and Paul nodded in agreement. Then he added, “I can’t see any other events that’ve come up in any of our searches that link all these things, and we know they are linked, and that leaves me wondering what the key is from that shooting thing.”
“Yeah, I agree in general,” Jake said. “But, I can’t get a handle on who or what the key is either. I would think it has to be either a parent or teacher of those kids that’s looking for some revenge or something, but who? We’ve already had a look at most of those people, haven’t we?”
“Yeah, and we put in other relatives, too. Nobody came up anything but clean. Where they live now; travel during the times of these events; weapons owned. Even the neighbors of some of them who had possibilities said they were clean. Not that that’s for sure positive, but nobody came up even a little dirty.”
“Paul, you did that search with the teachers and administers, too?”
“Yeah. As soon as we got the inkling of that direction, we had Sammie run searches on everyone from those dates and forward. Everybody’s been looked at.”
“So, what can that tell us?”
Jake answered with a question. “Some outsider? A dogooder? Some kind of vigilante taking up the cause?”
They thought for a moment, then Paul put in, “That would be weird. Some complete stranger? But from where? Their hometown? Or from here? Man, that could put us back to a huge number of people. How would we even start?”
Jake said, “I wonder if Sammie put in any searches for anything related to that specific event, like news articles about it or letters to the editor or any threats we got?”
Sylvia immediately said, “You guys keep talking. I’ll call Sammie right now.”
“Yeah, tell him to start zeroing in on anything at all to do with that event—and fast.”
“Got it. But you leave some of those donuts while I’m on the phone. Hear?”
“Grinch.”
CHAPTER 86
“What do you have, Jacob?”
“I just got a message from one of my old contacts with some possible partners of that hotel room bomber from Washington. If that person really is this Joseph Concorde, then we now have the names of a few of his old Army associates. There were originally about thirteen in the basic group he was attached to, but apparently all but three are now deceased.”
“Do we have hard leads on the three. And were the others deceased some time ago or just recently?”
“No the others have been dead for at least a few years, so no links to them for anything current. The three, though, we do have some fairly current information on. I can read off the names and you can enter them into the system and start it searching.“
“Good. I’m ready when you are.”
“Okay. The first one is a James Kevin Samuels, spelled with an ‘e’. The second is Franklin Ross Daniels. The third is Ronnie Sage Honda. They were all sergeants in the Army at the time Mr. Concorde was there, and they were also all involved in so-called demon activity. Infiltration, sniping, bombing and so forth. Here are their Army ID numbers and Social Security numbers.”
As Jacob read off the numbers, Roger entered them in the system and started the wheels turning.
He asked Jacob, “Dare I ask where you were able to get this information when even the Army apparently is not releasing it all to the detectives?”
“I can’t give you details, Roger, but you know I’ve had close contacts with Israeli military and investigative services, and they have the ability to tap deeply into almost any data sources in the world. They are willing to do me some favors on occasion.”
Roger had a very good idea that Jacob had had more than just close contacts with the services and that he had likely been highly placed in the IDF and the Mossad. He had known Jacob to speak directly to the Israeli prime minister on occasion and in a very close, personal manner. He also had far too many deeply placed information sources to just be an exdiplomat or something. Roger guessed some high level Mossad relations, but Jacob had never confirmed, or denied, the possibilities.
As the information on the three men started to come in, Roger placed a call to Paul Corbin in Washington.
“Good morning, Paul—or I guess it’s afternoon for you. We’ve got some information for you on your hotel bomber. Do you have paper and pen?”
“Sure do, Roger. This will be very highly appreciated. We’re still staggering around here with almost nothing to get us started. Go ahead.”
Roger read off the names and basic information, then started to give the data that had started flowing back into his system.
“You can likely get all this yourself, but I can save you some time there and maybe get you going a little faster. I’ll send all this to you as soon as we finish here.
“First, Mr. Samuels. Born in 1945 so he’s a little older than your Mr. Concorde. He did serve through Vietnam, especially in the demon squads, and then in several conflicts since, but by the time of the Gulf wars and since, he was a little too old and had retired. We did not find anything that specifically said he hired out as a hired gun as a civilian. Present address is in Portland, Oregon and he appears to have been there for several years, since retirement. We weren’t able to find anything on him that suggested he did a lot of travelling, especially to Washington, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t. No actual relation to Concorde that we could find, just that they served together in several conflicts. You should certainly try to research any phone information you can to see if there’s a possibility he was in contact with Concorde, but I’ll leave that to you. Got all that?”
Paul said yes, so Roger went on.
“The second is the Franklin Daniels. Born a few years later, in 1952, so he was closer to Concorde in age. He also served in Vietnam, in the later demon squads, but didn’t really meet up with Concorde until the Gulf conflicts. Concorde, of course, didn’t serve in Vietnam but got lots of service during the later conflicts. And he was in with the demon squads in those later years.
“At one point there, Daniels served as Concorde’s direct commander. They did a lot of combat and infiltration missions together, and both the men pulled fairly early retirement soon after those conflicts wound down.
“Interestingly, Daniels does have a record of hiring himself out as a private soldier, and it appears he dragged Concorde with him. We came across a note in Concorde’s personnel file that said Concorde appeared to be easily led or swayed and that he was not leadership material. It was carefully written, but basically said he was a follower, not a leader. It’s apparently why he never got further up the military ladder and why he retired early.
“Daniels lives in Kansas City, Kansas, and it looks as if he has settled down in recent years. A couple of marriages, presently single, no children, a fairly substantial bank account in KC plus an account offshore in the Bahamas. That account has a present balance of about 2.7-million dollars.”
“Wow. That likely came from his hired-gun activities?”
“We think so. There’s nothing else in his data that shows where the money might have come from, and nothing in his bank or income tax records that even suggests receiving that kind of money. He gets a military pension, smaller that usual because of leaving early, and that’s all that shows.”
“So could he have been working with Concorde on some of this stuff, or maybe directing him?”
“We didn’t get anything that showed anything to do with your cases. Not that they weren’t connected, but simply nothing that directly links them. There are a lot of possible links that have the two working together a few years back, just nothing really current.”
“Okay, what about the third guy?”
“Well, here I maybe saved the best for last. Our Mr. Ronnie Sage Honda actually resides in your fair city, and has for several years. And it appears he has been actively empl
oyed in dark and dangerous activities all those years.”
Paul jerked erect at that and his “lead” antennae started tingling. “Like what kind of activities?” Jake was looking at him intently.
“We only have suspicious links on this, but if they’re right, he’s served as a behind-the-scenes man, off payroll, with the CIA, and maybe with the Army before that.”
“Behind-the-scenes, as in black bag stuff?”
“That’s what it looks like. Here’s his basic info. Born in 1950, so he was a couple years older than Daniels and eight more than Concorde.”
“So Concorde does appear to be the youngest in the group and maybe still a follower?”
“Very well could be. Honda received a lot of military training, plus extensive training in computers and systems. Was in on a lot of planning activities. He also met Concorde during the Gulf conflicts but as another soldier, not as a superior or commander. It appears they worked some missions together. He stayed in longer than Daniels or Concorde, and retired with almost thirty years in. Served in the end of Vietnam, then a lot of action since then. He also was a demon for the Army in those years.
“We found a lot of pretty good links showing him relating to the CIA after he got out, and even up to the last few years. Not on the direct payroll or anything, but being seen going into their headquarters, a few letters from them to him acknowledging his presence, one that actually thanked him for a job well done, though it didn’t mention what the job was. Enough stuff to say that, yes, he was working for them behindthe-scenes.
“We have copies of some college records from both before and during his military time that showed he was very intelligent, and there is a letter from him to a college that showed excellent grammar and word usage. From what we’ve seen, we would have expected him to rise up in the Army, but it appears something soured him and he left. Nothing in his Army records to give any information why, just the final note that he suddenly retired.”
“Does he have money?”
“Oh, yes. He has a good bank account there in Washington, with a large six figures in a few different accounts. Plus he has just a little over ten million we found offshore, mostly in the Caymans. He has been a busy, and well paid, little beaver.”