With a Vengeance

by Marcus Wynne

  But what wasn’t here? It’s not what’s in place, it’s what’s out of place that’s important.

  Raven would have said that. Mismatch. What isn’t here?

  How did Torkay know the two pornographers would be at the airport? Either someone told him, or else he’d been surveilling them…

  Or had he picked them at random?

  No.

  There was nothing random about this. Faint and far off, Hunter sensed the delicate touch of a deceiver. A master class deception artist.

  “Do we have the phone logs yet for this place?” Hunter called out to the technicians in the front.

  One yelled back, “On the way, Agent James! I’ll download them on my laptop for you.”

  “Thanks!” Hunter shouted back.

  See who called the phone, that would be a start. What about a cell phone? Hunter looked for a charger plugged in, an empty phone package. Nothing. He went into the kitchen and rummaged through the drawers looking for past bills. Nothing.

  How else would he communicate? Internet required a computer, and there wasn’t one here. No sign of a laptop, either. But public libraries had Internet access, and there were no shortage of cyber cafes in the greater Chicago metro area. So that might be one way.

  If he’d done his surveillance, there should be cameras -- digital stills or more likely a digital cam-corder. No signs of that, either, in the usual places.

  Hunter stood still in the bedroom, turned slowly round, let his gaze roam over the room, linger on the bed. A pair of worn black oxfords, the wrinkled leather gleaming with polish. Hunter knelt and looked under the bed.

  Bingo.

  A box for a Canon Elura digital cam-corder. Empty. Behind that, a Pelican load-out case, basic black in color. Hunter hooked one gloved finger around the edge of the handle and eased it out. Before he even attempted to open it, he ran a business card around the edge as far as he could go, but the rubber seal prevented him getting into it.

  “Hey!” he called out.

  A technician stuck his head in. “What’s up?”

  “Got this case. You guys have a mobile x-ray out in the van of wonders?”

  “No, but I can get one here pretty quick.”

  “Let’s do that.”

  2

  “Something hinky here, boss,” Special Agent Ed Rollins said to Basalisa Coronas. “His data file is incomplete.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, turning to him and propping her small fists on her hips.

  “I mean there’s big chunks missing. All that’s there is his basic service record and photograph. His detailed record, specifics as to assignment, next of kin, all of that -- it’s not there. I can’t tell if it was never entered or if it was deleted.”

  “Get with the office of military records and find out.”

  “Will do, boss.”

  “A hand check,” she said. “I want a clerk to walk down and pull the actual microfiche; go into storage and pull the actual file. Everything. And the records of anyone with access to it, any requests for record summaries, all of it.”

  Ed Rollins sighed as the prospect of getting off early enough tonight to take an attractive and single forensic technicians to dinner evaporated.

  “Will do, boss,” he said. “I’m on it.”

  3

  There was a little wait till the bomb squad was able to bring their x-ray unit over, but they ran the Pelican case through and saw only the camera and battery pack inside. An explosives canine sniffed it and indicated clear. Hunter took the camera out of the case, careful to avoid smudging any latent prints. Then he pressed the on button and turned the dial to PLAY.

  The screen flickered into life, and then the already rewound tape began to play. Footage of an American Airlines ticket counter, then a Northwest counter, then a Delta counter…Hunter was looking at the ticket area at Midway Airport in Chicago. Footage of the ticket counters, then of the line in front of the passenger screening point.

  Individual shots of the police officers walking the terminal.

  Then blue screen, and then again in an airport: this time O’Hare. Right in front of the ticket counter where Torkay had died, zooming in on the profilers, and then leaning back and covering the barely concealed camera arrays mounted in the ceiling.

  Hunter jotted a note to himself to check with the security operations at O’Hare; there would be tape of Torkay shooting this, if in fact Torkay had been the one who shot it.

  But it disturbed him. At least two airports had been looked at on this tape…were there others?

  Hunter took out his Treo and tapped out an access code, then sent a message to his old pal Mason Little, who ran the Intelligence Unit for the Federal Air Marshal Service.

  “Call me, dude.”

  One thing Hunter liked about Mason was his promptness. His cell phone rang exactly 7 minutes later.

  “That was fast,” Hunter said.

  “You calleth, I cometh, Lord Hunter,” Mason said. His voice was breathy and high and sounded like it belonged to a fat teenager hunched over a role playing game, which wasn’t far off the mark for Mason Little.

  “Mason, I’m working this thing in Chicago…”

  “I know all about it, brother mine. You got your own server up here, we’re real time data sharing with the Feebs on this. That’s setting some precedent, huh?”

  Hunter laughed. “Nothing like a national crisis and every bureaucrat running to cover his ass to get things to happen, huh?”

  “You are a cruel and cynical man, Agent James,” Mason said archly. “Of course we federal agents cooperate fully with each other at all times.”

  “Tell that shit to somebody who buys it,” Hunter said.

  Mason laughed. “You’re the man, Hunter.” He paused, and asked more seriously, “How are you? You all right?”

  “I’m good,” Hunter said, irritation in his voice.

  Mason picked up on that, and changed the subject. “What do you need, brother mine?”

  “Mason, I’ll be sending you some footage, but I’m looking for something else. I need you to go into Incident Reporting, and run some pattern analysis for me.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Possible assessments, tests, videotaping of procedures at airports Cat 1 and X,” Hunter said.

  “What have you got, Hunter?” Mason said. Hunter could see in his mind’s eye the pudgy analyst leaning forward in his ergonomic chair as though to bore into the phone.

  “I want to see if there’s any pattern of reported possible incidents…the guy out here? He was videotaping procedures at the ticket counters and security checkpoints at both Midway and O’Hare…at O’Hare, he was reconning the counter where he…did his thing.”

  “I’m on it,” Mason said. “You’ve got top priority any way, and I’ll work keyboard magic on it. I’ll send you a secure data dump to your PDA, and follow up with a phone call.”

  “Thanks, Mason.”

  “It’ll be fun,” Mason said. “Be careful, Hunter. I think it might be getting a little hot out there.”

  Chapter Two

  Melissa Adoy was confused. Though she was fairly new at the Military Records Center, she was very good at her job, and had the performance appraisals to prove it. Her supervisor thought highly enough of her to give her this special assignment.

  “This is a top priority investigation,” her supervisor said. “They said to put my best on it and that’s you, Melissa.”

  Melissa had swelled with pride, and brushed at the front of her floral patterned blouse and tugged at her black polyester pants and marched off to do her duty.

  The first thing she’d checked was the computer files. And the note she’d received was exactly right: the computer file of Master Sergeant Alvin B. Torkay was most definitely incomplete. But the computer audit files didn’t show that anyone had accessed it the file except for the recent pull for the CIRG investigation. She scrolled through the audit record, and other than a periodic check from the Vetera
n’s Administration for health benefits and a notation regarding his retirement check, nothing.

  So had his records gone in wrong?

  She checked records first entered at about the same time, and found no discrepancies in those files -- his was the only one with any holes in it.

  But there was no trace of when or how that had happened.

  Melissa was frustrated and stymied. Her supervisor was looking to her to shine on this, and so far nothing good was coming of her looking into this records discrepancy. She checked the routing file for the actual hard copy of the records, the microfiche and the catalog index for the hard copy files, archived until a certain date and then destroyed.

  She picked up the phone and put on her sweetest cajoling voice. “Hello, Herbie?”

  Herbie Dubois was a cranky 60 year old black man who ran the records storage facility where the actual paper records were kept. Mean as hell because of the low grade pain he lived with from a crushed vertebrae sustained when he fell out of a helicopter in Viet Nam while a young air cavalryman, Herbie prided himself on being the terror of all the clerks in the Record Section.

  “Whaddya want!” he shouted into the phone. “Who the hell is this?”

  “Herbie, it’s Melissa, Melissa Adoy? I need a big favor, honey, you’re just the man to do it for me…”

  “Don’t be talking that kind of trash to a mean old black man, Lissa!” Herbie bellowed with delight. “I got a big, big favor for you!”

  “Oh, you!” Melissa said in mock delight. “I don’t know if I could, well, squeeze that in….”

  Herbie laughed till he started coughing the deep phlegmatic hack of a life time smoker. “Shit, white girl, you know how to make me laugh. What do you want? Why you bothering me?”

  “Herbie, I got a missing record. Like, really missing…the computer record is incomplete, and we can’t find the microfiche, so we need the hard copy….”

  “You damn records weenies!” Herb shouted. “Screw up and lose things and then you want old Herbie to bail your asses out? Is that it? Need me to cover your ass?”

  “It’s a great ass, Herbie,” Melissa said.

  Herbie laughed again. “Keep teasing an old man, little girl. I still got enough to put a hurting on your bottom! I think you be sexual harassing me any way!”

  “Please, Herbie…”

  “Just give me the damn number!”

  Armed with Alvin Torkay’s service number and a cross reference, Herbie walked chuckling down the aisles and got into his private electric golf cart, then tooled out across the gleaming concrete floor that held acres of fixtures loaded with file boxes. The cavernous physical records storage facility held millions of paper documents to back up the microfiches and electronic copies of records held in the computer banks just for instances like this. Ever since the disastrous fire at the St. Louis facility that had wiped out whole decades worth of records, multiple redundancy had been built in -- electronic document files, microfiches, and actual hard copies protected by the best climate control equipment and fire suppressing gear that money could buy.

  Herbie whipped past one of his subordinates and treated him to an ear blasting beep from his air horn illegally mounted next to the steering wheel of his golf cart. Hooting with glee, he turned down one aisle and slowed to check off the reference numbers till he found the unit he wanted.

  Groaning with effort, he levered himself out of his cart and gimped over to the unit, checking the slip of paper in his hand.

  “Torkay, Torkay,” Herbie muttered to himself. “What the fuck kind of name is Torkay? Sounds like some cheap motherfucking wine, that’s what it sounds like.”

  He ran his fingers along the worn boxes, double checked the number on his routing slip, and then tugged a box off the shelf. He opened it up and flipped through the worn brown folders.

  “Where the fuck are you, Torkay?” Herbie muttered to himself. He looked at the requisition slip, then back at the files. There was a gap in the numerical sequence.

  There was no file for Albert Torkay, Master Sergeant US Army, retired.

  1

  Maciej Szaminsky shifted uncomfortably in his seat. This was a routine patrol flight from DC to New York, one of the endless rounds of flights that Air Marshals made every hour and every day of the year, 24/7. The butt of his P-229 dug into his hip, and he cursed himself silently for not listening in class when the instructors preached to him about the false cost benefit of buying cheap holsters. This damn nylon knock-off he’d bought at the gunship shifted and turned worse than a cranky 4 year old in a car seat, something Maciej was intimately familiar with, having three kids 4, 2 ½ and 10 months old. His overtime seemed to disappear just as fast as he made it, and his wife never let up about the amount of time he was gone and how fast the money went.

  But hey, his not to reason why, his was just to fly and die.

  Or so went the grim motto he and the other Air Marshals went by.

  It didn’t help that he had to sit up here in First Class in an off the rack blazer from Sears (on sale, $35) that he was massively uncomfortable in. The other passengers in First Class, even though some of them were dressed casually, seemed so much more relaxed.

  It just made him itchy.

  Plus everybody on the team was edgy. Since the shooting at O’Hare, the AVSEC security level had shot up, and the operational tempo for the Marshals, already heavy and committing too few resources to too many obligations, crossed the line from barely manageable to completely unrealistic. Lot of the routine dog legs, like this mission leg, were being run with a short team instead of a full complement, and that was something that Maciej, despite his limited tactical experience, just knew in his gut was a problem.

  Like this guy sitting across the aisle from him. Pudgy businessman in a pretty good suit (Maciej had an eye for those things…though he couldn’t afford it, his father had been a tailor and he knew good clothing when he saw it), Joe Average…but he kept looking at Maciej strangely, and kept looking at the waistline of his cheap blazer where the material bunched above the constantly shifting butt of his pistol. And now the guy leaned across the aisle and nodded to Maciej, lowered his voice and said, “I want to thank you…for your service.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Maciej said. He cut his eyes over to his partner a few seats behind the pudgy businessman.

  “I know, I know,” the businessman said in a confiding fashion. “I know you can’t say anything. I just want you to know I’m glad you’re here and grateful for your service. Thank you.”

  With that he sat back in his seat and nodded to Maciej, then took out an expensive PDA and began fiddling with it.

  Maciej looked back at his partner, who shrugged.

  Strange.

  2

  In the warehouse headquarters of Ahmer Said, a computer terminal pinged, and a message came up: Flight 422, Washington DC to New York, Air Marshal in Seat 2B, back up somewhere behind on right side of plane.

  3

  In the long crowded hallway leading from the jet ways at La Guardia, Maciej conferred with his team leader.

  “I don’t think it’s anything,” Maciej said. “He’s just some grateful civilian.”

  His Team Leader, a dour blonde woman who’d been a cop in Seattle named Lori April, said, “Standing orders are to report any incidents where our identities may have been compromised….it’s kind of weird. Just do a little Incident Report on it.”

  And so that found it’s way into the stream of data that flowed into the computers of the Intelligence Section of the Federal Air Marshal Service.

  4

  Patrolman Jerry Thomas chatted with one of the contract security guards moving traffic along at the drop-off lane at Midway Airport. He noticed a yellow Ryder van easing to a stop. The driver, a short skinny red head who looked surprisingly like one of the actors who played hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, jumped out and darted into the terminal.

  “Ah, these fucking guys can’t read anymore, now can th
ey?” he said.

  “Go get him,” the cute blond he was hitting on said.

  Jerry hitched up his belt and went to do just that. He looked into the empty cab of the rental truck, then walked towards the terminal. The hobbit-looking fella darted back out.

  “Don’t leave your vehicle unattended, sir,” Jerry said. “Or I’ll have to ticket you. See the sign?”

  “Sorry, officer,” the red head said, smiling brightly. “Was just seeing if my mom was in there yet or not.”

  “Think you’ll have to pull around again,” Jerry said.

  “Will do, officer. Just a tick!”

  The red headed man darted behind the truck, and leaned in the passenger window of a Honda Accord parked right behind him. He exchanged words with the driver, then went around to the driver side of his truck.

  Something read wrong here to Jerry; he’d been a cop long enough to know that his intuition was probably the most important thing when it came to doing his job and keeping him alive in a world full of nut jobs looking to do harm.

  “Hold up,” he said. “Let’s take a look in the back of the van.”

  The driver nodded meekly. “Yes, sir. No problem.”

  Jerry stood back in the interview position while the red head opened up the roll up gate.

  Nothing.

  The truck was completely empty.

  “I’m just on the way to the storage locker,” the red headed driver said. “Just picked up the truck.”

  “All right then, move along,” Jerry said. He stepped away and let the driver lower the rear gate, then get in his truck and drive away. The Honda Accord pulled out close behind the truck, the Accord driver glancing over at Jerry curiously as he sped away.