by A. J Tata
Interesting.
Misha ran toward the camera at the same time a car entered the picture from behind them. Out of the car stepped a man with a beard. Mahegan recognized him from a file photo as Colonel Francisco Franco. He stopped Misha and tossed her in the car. From the passenger side of the car stepped Layne Constance.
Again, interesting.
Layne ran around the car to check on Misha and then dashed into the warehouse, where Franco and one of the original men from inside the warehouse were carrying two bodies from the warehouse to a boat tied off at a nearby cleat on a small pier in the river. Both men appeared lifeless, but it was impossible to tell from the camera distance. Certainly at those ranges, gunshots would have been more accurate and more lethal.
Franco picked up the bag, presumably filled with money, and put it in the car. He pulled out a handkerchief and a small bottle, poured some liquid on the cloth, and held it against Misha’s face. Soon Misha was limp in the backseat. Layne was running toward the boat, but it took off, with the man from the warehouse driving it south. She returned to the car and screamed at Franco, who slapped her in the face and, for good measure, knocked her out, as well, with the cloth.
Franco drove away, and that ended the video.
“So there you have it,” Patterson said.
“Have you brought Franco in?” Mahegan asked.
“Diplomatic immunity. He’s here as an emissary of the Cuban government. I can’t touch him.”
“I can. What about Layne Constance? She was there.”
“I talked to her. You saw she was a late arrival to the action. She didn’t have much to add that we didn’t see.”
“What was she doing with Franco?”
“She heard about the exchange of the code for the payment, she said, and asked Franco to take her there when she learned that Misha was with her father. Why Misha was there, we don’t know.”
“Misha goes where she wants to,” Mahegan said. “She’s got a mind of her own.”
“So we’ve got all the evidence that Roger Constance was shot and killed by someone.”
“No. What we have is evidence that he was wounded or killed and then transported somewhere. Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s not.”
“He’s dead. Too much blood for it not to be the case. DNA shows it was his blood.”
“Who would benefit from him being dead?” Mahegan asked.
“Whoever wanted that five hundred grand that was supposed to be in the bag. Franco. Layne. The two guys doing the exchange. For starters.”
“Franco doesn’t care about half a million dollars. Layne gets just two hundred grand from the life insurance. So none of that makes sense,” Mahegan said.
“Seven hundred grand has a whole different ring to it than two hundred,” Patterson said.
McCarthy was listening intently, one hand rubbing his goatee, taking it all in.
“So you think Roger Constance may still be alive?” McCarthy asked.
“I’m saying it’s a possibility. Perhaps someone wanted to fake his death,” Mahegan said.
The room fell silent for a moment.
“I hadn’t really come at it from that angle,” Patterson said.
“What was all that action with Misha and her father? I mean, why would an eleven-year-old go for her father’s gun right away?” Mahegan asked.
“Good question,” McCarthy said. “I’ve got guns all over this house but wouldn’t let my kids near them until I had trained them.”
“Well, maybe they had a plan,” Mahegan said. “Misha’s a resourceful girl. If she felt her father was in danger, maybe they would have hatched something where they could fake his death and keep him hidden until whatever they believed was going down had passed.”
Another silence fell over the room, this one more uncomfortable.
McCarthy looked at Mahegan. “Where did you get that thought?” he asked.
“Well, I’ve spent some time with Misha, and one thing she’s taught me is that she pretty damn well does what she wants to do. She’s a problem solver. If she thought her father was facing a problem, she would do whatever she could to solve it. She’s been talking like she killed him, almost protesting too much, in my view. Sort of over the top. Almost. If she really did shoot and kill him, then I take back what I’m saying, but I’m just considering the possibility.”
“What problem would they solve by taking him out of the equation?” Patterson asked.
“Well, for starters, if he was dead, they couldn’t blackmail an eleven-year-old girl into writing more code, could they? They could threaten her outright, which they’ve done, but they couldn’t use the father to get to the girl.”
“Hadn’t thought of that, either,” said Patterson.
Nor had Mahegan, until the past few hours. It seemed that Misha had gone to extreme lengths to make sure Mahegan believed that she had killed her father. But she was smart enough to run a cover for him, also. She had seen her mother and Franco supposedly having an illicit affair, which would have only strengthened the bond between father and daughter. Misha had admitted to hacking into the Cefiro database and seeing that they were planning something beyond just selling cars. Mahegan got the sense that Misha was leading them away from her father with every step she took, and he believed now that there was a fifty-fifty chance that Roger Constance was alive.
“Did you question Misha?” he asked Patterson.
“Of course. We had a child psychiatrist there. Dr. Hallowell. Steve’s neighbor.”
As soon as he mentioned Tess Hallowell, Mahegan felt a buzz in his veins: things were coming together. Misha’s role was central not only to her father’s disappearance but also to the Cefiro Code and the Iranian attack on America.
Maybe she had “killed” her father to hide him from the very people who would actually kill him.
“Any identification on the man who drove the boat away? The one from the warehouse?” Mahegan asked.
“Nothing,” Patterson said. “We printed the boat, but it had been wiped down, except for Constance’s blood and the blood of the John Doe from the warehouse.”
“But who were those guys? Did Layne know?”
“She said she had never seen either of them before.” Mahegan’s mind immediately went to Misha. Did she know either of the men or both? Had she and her father staged the entire event to prevent the final code from getting to the Iranians?
Possibly.
“So, what do you think?” Patterson asked.
“We need to talk to Misha,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because our country is about to be attacked, and she knows exactly what is happening and precisely how to stop it.”
CHAPTER 27
MISHA CONSTANCE
MISHA WAS FRUSTRATED. HER PLAN HAD ALMOST WORKED, AND she thought that maybe there was still time to save it. After all, it had been her idea to kill her father.
Killing him had been the only way to save him.
The nurse, Ms. Hallowell, and Misha were sitting in a small room, one that Mr. McCarthy called a safe room, presumably because it was locked up tight and no one could get to them in there. Misha had to admit that she had been scared when the boat slammed into the beach and a man grabbed her and carried her over the sand dunes. She had wanted to scream but had been screaming only in her mind. She hadn’t been able to get her voice to work, and part of her had been too proud to scream out of fear. She considered herself a brave girl and wanted to live up to her own standards.
Her mother was lying on a sofa, with a clear bag hanging above her that fed a tube into her arm. Dr. Hallowell had said it was water and antibiotics. The water was to help replenish the blood she had lost, and the antibiotics were to help her fight off the infection. Staring at her mother right now, Misha didn’t feel any particular emotion. Misha had been mad at her; that much she knew.
The room was big, about the size of the den in her house but smaller than the basement, where she spent most of her time. This safe
room had two computers and monitors, and Misha was eager to get to work, because she thought she could help.
But first she wanted to know about her father. Part of the reason she had known she needed to kill him was that they were going to torture him in front of her to get her to write the code that could allow for all forms of autonomous vehicles to swarm and mass at the same time. Her father had said that there was no good purpose for this formula other than to be used in a terrorist attack. She hadn’t even been born yet when the attacks on 9/11 had occurred, but she knew that her country was at war with people in the Middle East who didn’t like America.
At school she recited the pledge of allegiance to the United States of America. She had tried to be a Girl Scout to do something for her country, but she couldn’t communicate well enough to really fit in. They had wanted her to stay, but she’d known it was out of sympathy and not due to her own competence at scouting, so she’d decided not to continue. Still, she had learned to love her country and believed that the American way—democracy, anyway−seemed to be the best way to live. In one of the hundreds of books she had already read, Winston Churchill was quoted as having once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Watching her father follow politics and make comments on blogs and attend local county commissioner and city council meetings had gotten her interested, as well. Everything he did, she wanted to do. Civic action and being involved in making her city or state or country a better, safer place to live were part of being a good citizen, her father had told her.
He had ingrained in her the need to appreciate the freedom that Americans enjoyed, because it was very different in so many places across the world, a world that she really had not—and perhaps could not—experience. Would she ever get the chance to go to Africa or Asia or Europe? And if she did, would she be able to comprehend the differences between American society and theirs? She thought that she would. She considered herself a pretty smart girl, but her inability to communicate—or maybe a better word was interact—would limit her ability to absorb the culture fully.
So she had taken her father’s word that America was the freest and best place to live in the world. Her mother’s National Geographic magazines had also helped her explore the world through pictures and stories. And, of course, there was the Web and the Deep Web, where she could learn all about the impurity of life that no eleven-year-old kid should ever see, or adults, for that matter.
When she’d first explored the Cefiro database and found links to the Deep Web, or Dark Web, she had been scared to see the ugliness available to those who knew how to write code: the sex slave trade, the how-to assassination guides for killing people, the open market for drugs, and the safe place it offered for terrorists to communicate, among other things.
Misha knew that the Deep Web was like a maze with a lot of dead ends and trapdoors, but she had learned through trial and error and had begun to navigate her way through it successfully. When she finally was able to navigate her way from Cefiro to the Deep Web and from the Deep Web back to Cefiro, she had found the links the terrorists were using.
Every night her father had been coming home more and more worried, more and more not himself. If there were three things someone on the autism spectrum cherished, they were routine, familiarity, and normalcy. She had noticed right away when her father’s behavior changed, and all their routines and normalcy with it, about two weeks before she had to kill him.
She had seen in the Deep Web the communications between the Cubans and the Iranians. There had been a lot of chatter about how stupid the American government was, but that was just bragging. They were planning. She had seen that they had created fake Facebook pages with fake families and were sending codes by posting fake pictures and talking about picnics and family reunions. While she couldn’t know the names of everyone, she could determine what their overall plan was going to be. For example, she had seen the name Bouseh mentioned several times and had learned that this person was already in the United States, but she had had no way of knowing that Bouseh was Ximena De La Cruz until the woman had whispered into her ear that she was sending her to the Iranians. It all made sense now.
But what made even more sense was that the plan called for her father to write the code that connected flying systems to ground-based systems. Everything operated off of one satellite, the Fasr, the newest Iranian satellite. But because of how fast the flying systems moved, the ground-based system algorithm did not work. So they needed a comprehensive code, as they called it, to allow all systems to communicate and swarm simultaneously. Misha imagined it might be like bees and fire ants attacking you all at the same time.
That was what they had been talking about.
When she’d shown the Deep Web information to her father, he’d seemed to already know that something was wrong. The more worried he’d seemed, the more research Misha had done. What she’d found was that when the United States signed a peace treaty with Iran, the Dark Web showed that a lot of money began flowing from Iran to Cuba. Suddenly, Cuba had this great new idea for autonomous cars, and they wanted the manufacturing plant to be in rural North Carolina, near a port. Wilmington had always been known as the Port City, because of the Cape Fear River’s deep water, which ran all the way up from the Atlantic Ocean to the bend in the river where it narrowed. Wilmington had been important in the Revolutionary War and the War Between the States. And it was important nowadays. Misha had read all of this in books. She supposed that the terrorists had selected the Port of Wilmington because it was not so busy with commercial ships, and there was a lot of land for a car manufacturing plant right next to the country’s largest ammunition storage depot. She had seen all of this outlined in the Deep Web. Communications between Cuba and Iran had begun three years ago. Cefiro had begun building its plant two years ago. And now the terrorists were here in country.
About the time she figured all of this out, her father had come home with one of the Cefiro security men, whom he had brought into the basement.
The man had pulled out a pistol, had held it against her father’s head, and had said to her, “Sweetheart, you and your dad here need to finish the code and deliver it in twenty-four hours.”
He had pulled the trigger and it had made an empty clicking sound, but it had scared her. She had never seen her father so helpless or scared. The man had dropped a duffel bag at her father’s feet and had walked out the back door. They’d opened the duffel bag and Misha had seen that there was a lot of money in it.
“Should be two hundred fifty thousand dollars,” her father had said. “Half the payment.”
She had never seen that much money before. Her mother always carried a few twenty-dollar bills in her purse, and her father sometimes had some tens and ones, but nothing of this size.
“The payment for the new code? The one that makes ground and air talk at the same time?” she asked.
“Yes. The new code. I don’t understand why they can’t do it, do you?”
“I do, Daddy.” She stood there, looking up at him, the bag of money between them like a divider. She walked over and hugged him. He lifted her up into one of his tight bear hugs. Even though she could do all these things with her mind, she still loved the embrace of her father, who loved her with all his heart. There was no better feeling in the world than to be loved regardless of who you were or how dysfunctional you might be in society. Her father loved her for who she was. She could tell that sometimes she embarrassed her mother.
The bad man coming in and scaring them had frustrated Misha. So she wiggled her fingers, the sign she needed to type to him. He put her down, and they walked to what her father called their command center in the basement.
They can’t do it, because of two reasons, Daddy. First, if they started playing around within the United States on the bandwidth spectrum, they would be discovered pretty quickly. Second, from what I’ve seen in the Deep Web, our government monitors the Iranian and Cuban governments
pretty closely.
“Iranian?” he asked.
Yes. The Iranians are asking the Cubans to get this code developed for some plot that they have against our country.
“You saw all this in the Deep Web? Show me.”
So she did. She took him to places all the way at the bottom of the Web, the darkest places, where the biggest secrets were hidden. She showed her father everything she knew. And then she developed their plan. Misha made her father sit down and tell her what was happening at Cefiro. She listened intently. He told her that the first code he had given them for the cars was perfect. It worked not only for cars, he said, but also for these small planes that they flew, but it didn’t yet work for both at the same time. He needed something that worked for both at the same time.
“We have to do something,” he said.
They will kill you, Daddy. That’s the first thing we have to do something about.
She researched the city’s security cameras, parking garages, warehouses, tall buildings, airport, port, and everywhere that she could set up the exchange of the code for the money and kill her father in the process. It needed to be captured on film.
One of the services offered on the Deep Web was faking someone’s death with such certainty that a death certificate would be issued. The price depended on how famous the potential “victim” was. The less famous, the less expensive. Even so, it was fifty to one hundred thousand dollars for people who weren’t famous. But Misha eyed the bag of money as her mind whirred with potential solutions.