Cold Glory

by B. Kent Anderson

  Voss wouldn’t do an off-the-books inquiry for just anyone. She’d worked for the government long enough to know where such things could lead. The law enforcement people in the office made fun of the “career bureaucrats,” but the truth was, the word bureaucrat didn’t have to be an insult. It meant a sense of loyalty to the organization, an understanding that the government ran on procedures, and that without those procedures, the infrastructure could break down and nothing would ever get done.

  But Voss liked Meg Tolman, as Tolman was a bit of an enigma. Voss smiled at that—she knew she presented her own set of paradoxes to RIO, as the newest member of the staff, and that suited her quite well. So Voss found AC/DC’s “Back in Black” on her iTunes and went fishing in her databases to see what she could find out about the possibly deceased Sergeants Standridge and Lane.

  She first used the Social Security database to find the numbers for both names, checking the dates of issue to make sure the ages were right. Once she had them, she went into the Department of Defense’s section for active duty personnel. Voss had backdoor passwords into DOD that no one else in RIO had, though no one here—not even Deputy Director Hudson—knew it. Even more important, Voss still possessed the clearance to use those passwords.

  Still, once she was inside the massive database, she couldn’t access anything having to do with Lane and Standridge. Electronic walls blocked her at every turn.

  “Well, that’s not very nice,” she said, in the same sort of tone she would have used with her nine-year-old.

  She found all the same information Tolman had found, and it matched, the dates of death in Taji in 2006, the units to which the soldiers had been assigned, their hometowns.

  Voss stretched, went to the lounge area, and bought a Diet Coke from the machine. Tina, the receptionist, was gone, but lights were still on in offices down the hall, and the TV was still on HNC.

  Back in her office, she started digging, first for Michael Standridge of Moscow, Idaho. His parents had been paid the standard benefit of one hundred thousand dollars within two days of their son’s death. There was another lump-sum payment of twenty thousand dollars that she tracked to an insurance company.

  Kevin Lane of Pineville, Louisiana, was married at the time of his death, and he and his wife, Brianna Hailey Lane, had shared a joint checking account. They had a daughter, Skyler Marie Lane.

  Voss confirmed that Brianna Lane had received the immediate death benefit payment from DOD. Sergeant Lane’s wife was also entitled to Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC), and her daughter received a monthly benefit as well. Brianna Lane had set up a savings account for her daughter in the fall of 2006, and the regular payments had been deposited like clockwork ever since.

  Voss checked the numbers for both accounts, then stopped, her finger tracing a line on her computer monitor.

  She scrolled down through the account transactions until she came to the previous month.

  There it is again.

  The number leapt out at her—$7,500.00 had been deposited in this account beginning in September 2006 and continuing monthly, right up through the last month.

  So what? she asked herself. Maybe Brianna Lane was a lawyer or an investment banker or …

  Not making that kind of money in a town the size of Pineville, Louisiana. It was way out of proportion for an army widow in her twenties in a very small town.

  “Let’s just see about this,” Voss said.

  She began tracing the deposits, following the digital footprints deeper and deeper. No money was completely clean—all transactions left a trail, no matter how hard certain parties might try to cover it. Voss had been down that road before as well, and with numbers much, much larger than this.

  Voss kept following the trail. Lights clicked off in the offices around her. She called her ex-husband’s house, said good night to each of the kids as she always did, and turned back to her monitor.

  The funds were transferred to Brianna Lane’s account in Pineville each month from a bank in Dallas, Texas. The account was registered to a company called Beasley Holdings. Its address was a post office box. The account was nothing more than a pass-through. The funds arrived in the Beasley account on the same day each month, and were automatically transferred out to Brianna Lane within one hour.

  Voss took it back another step, which led to a New York bank and an account registered to Eastern Investments. Same thing as the Dallas account—funds arrived and left within one hour. It took Voss a little longer to find that the money came to New York through an offshore account in Aruba.

  As she expected, the trail ended there, at least temporarily. Even RACER wasn’t able to immediately access foreign accounts. The account information was encrypted, and without some more sophisticated hacking, she’d never be able to break through the labyrinth and find where the money came from before it went to Aruba.

  In her past life, she’d known just the person for such a job. He had the tools, he was a professional hacker, and he owed her several favors. Not wanting to use the office computer, she sent him a text message from her phone and asked him to call her. When he did, she told him what she wanted. He didn’t hesitate, just said, “Sweet!” and told her he’d get on it.

  Voss’s eyes were blurry. She was hungry, and her butt hurt from sitting in the chair for so long. She reached for the phone, then pulled her hand back. She didn’t know where Meg Tolman was, just that she had left town quickly.

  Voss didn’t have all the information Tolman might need, either. This was more than just a favor for an office colleague. With any luck, in the morning, Voss would know where that money had come from. Then she would call Meg Tolman.

  CHAPTER

  39

  The Clarksville, Indiana, police unit came from behind Tolman, where Riverside Drive diverged from the state park and wound into residential suburbia. Tolman’s car was still in the middle of the road. Journey’s sat with its nose crumpled against the base of the railroad trestle.

  Tolman turned as the police car approached. Her gun was gone, taken by the Glory Warrior with the black shoes, but she wanted the city cop to see that she had nothing in her hands. She spread them apart, palms out.

  “Federal officer!” she called. “I’m unarmed!”

  The back of her head throbbed with no mercy. She was sure she looked frightening, with blood in her hair and running down one side of her face. She heard running footsteps from the direction the black Suburban had gone, and saw an old African American man carrying a cell phone and a fishing pole.

  “They were shooting!’” he shouted toward the police car. “I saw it. The ones that shot went the other way.”

  The police officer, who was younger than Tolman and smelled of cigarettes, got slowly out of his car, keeping one hand on the butt of his pistol.

  “Ma’am, are you all right?” he said. His eyes moved over the entire area.

  Tolman nodded, which made her head hurt more. “Yes, I’m all right. It’s a bump on the head. But there’s a man in the river. Do you have rescue units? The man who’s with me went into the river.”

  “They shot him,” said the man with the fishing pole. “They drove off that way. It was a black girl and an older white guy. They were in a big car, a big new Suburban or something like that. Kentucky plates. I saw them.” He looked at Tolman. “You shot back at them.”

  The police officer looked at the witness, then at Tolman. “You identified yourself as a federal officer, ma’am.”

  “Did you hear me?” Tolman said, her voice rising. “There’s a man in the fucking river! My ID is in the car.” She turned away from the car, toward the river, fighting dizziness.

  “Fire and rescue and ambulance are on the way, ma’am. Tell me what happened here.”

  The dizziness intensified. Tolman stumbled.

  “Maybe she ought to sit down,” the man with the fishing pole said.

  “No,” Tolman said. She stretched her arms out to steady herself. Her head throbbed. She
ran toward the river.

  “Hey!” the cop yelled. “Freeze!”

  God, spare me from suburban cops who watched too many episodes of Law & Order, she thought.

  “Nick!” she shouted. “Nick Journey! Can you hear me? Nick!”

  Two more police units arrived, one stopping by Journey’s car, the other nose-to-nose with Tolman’s. The rescue unit was next. Tolman pointed to where Journey had disappeared onto the steps. Radio calls were made and more units arrived. Within four minutes, two boats were patrolling the river, spotlights shining on the Indiana shoreline in the fading light.

  Tolman heard steps behind her and turned to see the same cop, holding her ID case. “I’ve never heard of the Research and Investigations Office,” he said. He looked more closely. “Justice, Treasury, and Homeland Security? You can’t be under all three.”

  Tolman kicked at a stray piece of gravel. “Officer, you see that card next to my official ID? You’re going to call that number in Washington, and you’re going to talk to a man named Russell Hudson. I don’t have time for you to write your report.”

  The officer folded his arms. “I don’t have the authority to make that decision, and I sure won’t walk away from this crime scene.”

  Tolman pointed at the card. “Then have your lieutenant or your captain—hell, your chief of police—call Deputy Director Hudson. That gets you off the hook. But I’m not going to stand here and dance around with you and get bogged down in a jurisdictional pissing match.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but I can’t—”

  “Call the fucking number, Officer!” Tolman shouted.

  The young officer took aside a sergeant who had arrived in the second car and talked at length. One of the paramedics looked at Tolman’s head. “It doesn’t look serious, but we’ll need to take you in and take a closer look at it. You should have X-rays.”

  “No,” Tolman said.

  “But you should—”

  “My pupils are responsive, right? I’m on balance, I’m coherent. Clean it up and put a bandage on it. I’m not going to the hospital.”

  “But—”

  The sergeant and his officer were looking at Tolman. Around them, rescue teams had fanned out all the way to the interpretive center. The sergeant took Tolman’s card and went back to his car. In a moment, he was on the phone.

  * * *

  The spotlight from one of the patrol boats played across Journey’s back, and it was followed by an amplified voice: “Don’t move! We’ll get you out of there!”

  Within a few seconds, rescuers from above scrambled down the rocks. Four sets of hands moved Journey onto a gurney without wheels, strapped him in, and attached cables to it. They made the cables fast, and Journey felt himself being pulled.

  In two minutes, he was on the deck. “Tell me where it hurts,” a man’s voice said. Journey thought about it. He wasn’t really in pain, except for his chest from holding his breath. He shook his head.

  A light—small, not like the huge light from the boat—shone in his eyes. He squinted. “Wiggle your fingers,” the voice said.

  Journey wiggled his fingers.

  “And your toes.”

  Journey wiggled his toes, and his left foot screamed. He sucked in air.

  “Which foot?”

  “Left,” Journey said.

  “Okay.”

  Then there were hands on his foot, then more than one set of hands. After a few minutes, a second voice: “I don’t think it’s broken, but it’s a bad sprain.”

  He felt another hand near his shoulder, feeling his soaked shirtsleeve, palpitating his upper arm. The first voice said, “What’s this?”

  Journey remembered the gunshot. He remembered how his backpack had snagged on the railing, how he hadn’t been able to keep his balance. “They shot me,” he said.

  There was silence for a while; then the first voice said, “You’re damn lucky, mister. That shot barely touched you, just creased the skin. A quarter of an inch the other way, and you would’ve been in a world of hurt.”

  Another silence, then more hands felt his arm. It stung a little, but not too much.

  “Very damn lucky,” the first voice said again. “What’s your name?”

  Another voice, above his head: “His name is Dr. Nick Journey.”

  Tolman.

  Journey twisted his neck to look at her.

  She knelt beside the stretcher. “Hey,” she said. “How you doing?”

  Journey shrugged. Tolman smiled.

  “They got the pages,” Journey said. “They got all of it.”

  Tolman nodded. “I know.”

  “We have to—”

  “I know,” Tolman repeated, and Journey knew by her tone not to say more with all these people around.

  Journey looked around at his rescuers. The stretcher was in a corner of the interpretive center’s observation deck. The mother and son were hovering at the back of the crowd. Journey winked at the little boy, and the boy grinned.

  “I can sit up,” Journey said.

  The straps holding him were unsnapped, and he sat up slowly. Water ran off him and onto the wooden planking of the deck. He swung his legs off the side. The left one hurt, and he grimaced.

  “We’ll wrap that,” the first paramedic said, “and get you to the hospital for—”

  Journey shook his head.

  The paramedics looked at each other. “What is it with you people?”

  “Just wrap it and give me something for the swelling,” Journey said.

  “But you might—”

  “Do it,” Tolman said.

  Behind her, a police officer wearing a sergeant’s stripes approached. “Ms. Tolman,” he said. His expression wasn’t friendly. “Our chief of police has spoken with a Mr. Hudson in Washington.”

  Tolman waited.

  “And we did verify independently that your Research and Investigations Office exists. You seem to be one of those departments no one knows about, but that has a lot of pull.”

  “We’re all just doing our jobs, Sergeant,” Tolman said.

  The sergeant smiled and spit on the deck. “Don’t patronize me, Ms. Tolman.” The smile, which wasn’t very genuine in the first place, faded. “I’m told we need to offer you whatever assistance you may need.”

  Tolman nodded. “You can take care of Dr. Journey’s car. He rented it at the Louisville airport.”

  “And the people who shot at you? We have witnesses.” The sergeant gestured back at the old man with the fishing pole, and a crowd of a dozen or so people along the road.

  “Dr. Journey and I have to go,” Tolman said.

  “And he’s a part of this RIO, too?”

  “No, he’s a—” Tolman hesitated. “—he’s a witness.”

  “A witness.” The sergeant spit again. He and Tolman stared at each other for a moment more; then he looked at the young officer who’d been first on the scene. “Release the scene,” the sergeant said. “Call a wrecker to get this other car out of here. These people are free to go.”

  “Do I need to get—?” the young cop said.

  “You don’t need to get shit,” the sergeant said, and started back to his patrol car.

  CHAPTER

  40

  “Take stock,” Tolman said to Journey as they got into her Focus.

  Thanks to a neighborhood resident from just up the hill, who had come onto her porch to watch the rescue of the man from the river, Journey had dry clothes. They were a little large, but the “carpenter” jeans and a soft button-down shirt were clean and dry.

  “Lost my wallet in the river,” Journey said. “My driver’s license, credit cards, insurance card, everything. All my cash. My keys.” He leaned against the headrest. “I left my phone in the rental car, though.”

  Without a word, Tolman walked to Journey’s car, retrieved his phone and his overnight bag, and brought them back. “Anything else in the rental?”

  “No, that’s it. I travel light.”

  Tolman
started the car and drove out of the park. In five minutes, they were on Interstate 65 headed south back into Kentucky.

  “I want to go back to Oklahoma,” Journey said. “I need to get Andrew.”

  “Look, Nick—I’m calling you Nick because after what just happened here, I think it’s a little silly for me to keep calling you Dr. Journey—I’m sorry.”

  Journey looked sideways at her as Louisville slipped past outside the window. “What do you mean?”

  “Lots of things, actually. I let that guy sneak up on me from behind while I was focusing on the woman. I’m out of practice.” Journey saw the determined set to her mouth. “But it won’t happen again, I’ll promise you that. Look, we can’t get anywhere near Oklahoma. Not just yet.”

  “What?”

  “They’ll be looking for you to go back there. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  “They’re not going to kill me now,” Journey said.

  Tolman nodded. “When they figure out that the signature page isn’t there, they’ll be pissed off. Then they’ll figure that either you’re holding out on them … or, just like with page two, that you’ll lead them to it.”

  Journey closed his eyes. “Then they’ll try to kill me again. I need to see Andrew.”

  “He’s with his mother, so he should be safe, right?”

  Journey hesitated a moment too long. “He should be.”

  “You don’t have a choice right now,” Tolman said. “And if we don’t get on top of this, I don’t think anyone’s going to be safe.”

  The lights of the city and its suburbs faded behind them. Journey didn’t speak for a time. “I need to at least call.”

  “Not yet,” Tolman said. “Everything’s changed, Nick. My boss told me not to talk to him over an open cell line, and I think the same applies to you. We have to get somewhere secure.”

  “You have somewhere in mind?”

  “Yes. Somewhere the Glory Warriors won’t look. We need time to put it together. We’re going to get rid of this car first. Planes, trains, buses—no good. We have to drive and stay anonymous. I hate driving, but there you have it.”