Purely by Accident

by Jim Beegle

  Even after the whole thing was up and running, Jack had never been far away. He picked up the drives from the bugs and taps twice a day and carried them to the people who had hired them for the job. Not much to hear and, most of the time the guy was outside and out of range of the devices. So far it had been a pretty standard operation.

  They had a brief scare when the guy’s car conked out on the way back home last night and he had taken off in a cab for the airport. They had lost him for a while, but not for long. They picked him up again when he showed up at his home a few hours later. In fact, Jack was so sure the guy was just having car trouble that he didn’t bother reporting the loss of contact, biding his time until the target showed up at home.

  It now appeared, in hindsight, that his assumption about the car trouble had been wrong. Now Jack was going to have to call his temporary bosses and tell them about an even bigger problem.

  He gave it fifteen more minutes and then got out of his car, locked the door, and headed into the lobby of the hotel. He moved in the general direction of the bathrooms but walked slowly, allowing himself plenty of time to look over everyone within visual range.

  When he got to the bathroom it appeared to be empty, but he made sure by opening the doors to all five stalls and peering in to see that no one was hiding. He looked at the windows but they were high and barred on the outside. Leaving the men’s room, and without knowing it, he followed Mark’s path out of the hotel and onto the loading dock.

  Jack surveyed the remote location in relation to the front door and then saw the strip mall and the Enterprise rental agency. He was mad at himself but not overly so; it was something he could follow. A predictable move, but it still showed the guy was thinking. Jack liked that. The ones that were thinking were easy to catch.

  Twenty bucks and five minutes later he confirmed that Mark Vogel had rented a car for a week, to be returned the following Monday to the same rental location.

  The thinkers tended to do things that were logical and predictable. In most cases, what seemed reasonable to one man usually seemed reasonable to another, including, and especially, to Jack. It was when the subject panicked and did things based on emotion or feeling that he had trouble. There was no way to predict moves based in emotions of the moment. Those were always the messy ones.

  This guy, a smart one no doubt, had been doing things that were easy to follow and predict. It was not going to be that hard to re-acquire him. Jack briefly considered that his target might have planned this to the point of predicting his, Jack would be following him; however, Jack quickly dismissed the idea.

  Most people didn’t think. They just reacted. If they planned at all it was usually only as far ahead as the next turn from the highway or their next meal. Chances were this guy was at the ticket counter at American Airlines already. He would still have to call it in though, and the client paying the bills wasn’t going to like it.

  He had told his client on Wednesday, when they set the job up, that they should put someone on the guy. Get someone close to him in a supermarket or something. Maybe a girl or two just to see if they could get closer to him. Girls could always get close. He used several that were pretty good at just hanging around and looking nice. This client wouldn’t hear anything of it. He wanted to do everything at arm’s length, no chance of spooking the guy. Use the taps and the bugs, but nothing up close.

  Jack, on the other hand, liked up close. He had been doing this long enough to know the value of looking into someone’s eyes when they talked. He had learned that when he was still a cop. That kind of knowledge could save your life. You get a crazy with half a bottle of cheap bourbon in him in a corner and he will tell you with his eyes when he’s going to go for his gun long before his hand moves.

  Most people these days were in love with the gadgets and the high tech stuff. God, they couldn’t get enough of the toys. Made them feel like James Bond, he guessed.

  He went back through the lobby on his way out just to have one more look, already not expecting to find his man, but he would look just in case. When he reached his car he got and started it, before taking his phone from his jacket pocket. He dialed a number he had programmed into the phone.

  “541-8969” was how the male voice on the other end of the line chose to greet his callers. Jack was not unaccustomed to having phones he called answered in this manner and therefore didn’t pause before he started speaking.

  “This is Walker. We lost him.” Jack said trying to keep his voice matter-of-fact.

  “When? Where?” These immediate questions barked at him from the other end of the phone.

  “I would guess about forty-five minutes ago. He stopped at a hotel a few miles from DFW for breakfast at a hotel and literally slipped out the back door. You want me to cover the airport?” There was a pause while the male voice on the other end of the phone considered this. He was several long seconds making up his mind.

  “Yes,” The man said. “But just the flights going to Miami. No, on second thought, have someone cover the flights to Atlanta and Houston too. He might go to one of them and try to connect to Miami.” There was a pause and Jack could tell the man on the other end of the line was thinking.

  “Send someone to Love Field too,” the voice said, catching his breath. “I can see now that we may have to use other methods to motivate him.” The voice on the line spoke more to himself than to Jack. Jack knew better than to ask about the other methods.

  “Yes sir, sorry about letting him get away.” More sorry for the money he was going to lose. “Don’t worry; we’ll find him. I’ll get people covering the airports right away.” There was no reply to Jack’s last statement; the line just clicked dead.

  About the same time that Jack Walker was beginning to feel uneasy about Mark’s whereabouts, Mark was approaching the Bergstrom International Airport west of Austin. He had stopped for coffee at a Starbucks a few miles before the airport at a payphone where he booked a one-way ticket, not to Miami, but to Fort Lauderdale.

  His thought process was simple; catch the first flight going to Florida and figure out how to get to Nassau from there. He had chosen Austin because, as the capital of Texas, there were a lot of direct flights to a lot of different places.

  The idea was to travel in a manner that no one would connect to him. His hope was no one knew about Nassau, but if they did, they would figure that he would take the most direct route out of Dallas, straight to the Bahamas. It was his plan to get there using the mostly direct but, illogical path he could.

  The first rule of trying to run—this he had figured out from Cecil—is to take the most direct line to your destination. But that only worked if people didn’t know you were running. By breaking the rules, Mark hoped to send his pursuers in one direction while he went in another.

  He knew by instinct that assuming things would function as designed always caught you looking in the wrong direction. That’s why he went to all the effort to travel almost all the way to DFW before giving his tail, whom he only assumed was there, the slip.

  The tail would logically presume he was trying to get to DFW and on to Nassau, likely through Miami. No one in his right mind, trying to get from Dallas to Nassau, drove to Austin and then flew to Nassau through Ft. Lauderdale. Or so he hoped everyone was thinking. Ft. Lauderdale is a city just a hundred miles up the Atlantic coast from Miami, but large enough to have it’s own scheduled flights to Nassau.

  The second rule was to leave his phone off. Technology, he knew, could allow anyone with some basic equipment to pretty much pinpoint where he was. He had turned his phone off when he entered the hotel in Dallas. He would have to pick up a disposable phone somewhere along the way.

  He felt a wave of relief wash over him as he picked up his briefcase on the far side of the metal detectors. It would be hard for someone with a gun to get to him in here. While it wasn’t a big worry, it was still worthy of consideration. There was still the concern that the people tapping his line
s and bugging his houses were working with the blessing of law enforcement, but if that were the case, then no place was safe anyway.

  Then again, someone might try to attack him with one of those deadly laptop computers the TSA agents at the security checkpoint seemed to be so worried about.

  While he waited to board his flight, he went to the American Airlines Admiral’s Club, presented his membership card and was admitted. He emailed Sandy from one of the various computers set up for customers in the business area of the club. He apologized for the short notice but, something of an urgent and personal nature had come up over the weekend that he needed to attend to. He promised to keep in touch.

  In few moments, to his surprised, she replied: I know a whole lot of people who aren’t going to be happy about this. Kirstin call twice, Mr. Milton called once, and Mr. Ness called once.”

  “A regular circling of the vultures,” he said to himself as he read.

  She ended her email with a PS: “This is going to cost you ya know?” she informed him. “Bring me something chocolate”.

  He smiled at her joke as he logged out of the computer.

  Once the plane had gotten above ten thousand feet, Mark took his yellow legal pad out and began to make notes of the things he still needed to do. When he got to Ft. Lauderdale, he would first have to find a phone and call Mr. Roddy to give him a heads-up that he was on his way. He would also call Amy and see how she was holding up. Clothes were the next thing he wrote on the list. He would have to buy them somewhere; if he had the time he would get them in Ft. Lauderdale. If not, then he would buy some in Nassau.

  He had purposely left the house that morning without a bag or change of clothes. His reasoning was simple. If anyone was going to try to figure out where he was going, the first thing he would do is bug the suitcases. That had been foremost on his mind; however there was another part of him that also did not want to give whoever he assumed was watching and following any indication that he was planning on traveling. That was like sending up a flare on a dark night; everyone for miles around would see it.

  He paused making his list as he considered something else. He would have to find a computer in the hotel and access the files that held all the critical information as to the whereabouts of the money. He knew the banks and which countries the money was in, but he had not bothered to try to learn the individual account numbers. He would have to have those numbers first thing. He assumed it would be easier to move all the money to IBC so after then arrangements were made it could all be moved in one transfer. This was an added step in the process he knew but, by having the Commonwealth International Bank move the money for him, he would continue to control the funds right up to the point when he had to turn over the funds.

  If he allowed IBC to move the money, he would have to provide them with the account information before the money could be moved. That option did not appeal to him much. Besides, the other reason for allowing the Commonwealth International Bank to move the money was that it would allow Mr. Roddy to extract a fee from the transfer. That was the least he could do for the man who had been so kind first to Cecil and then to him. Especially when he was about to drain away such a large amount of money from the Commonwealth International Bank too.

  Either because of the strain the adrenalin from his body had put on him as he moved from airport to airport that day, or the fact that he had not slept much in the last thirty-six hours, Mark’s body finally overwhelmed his active mind. He drifted off to sleep long before he had finished his list.

  When he got off the plane, it was 4:30 in the afternoon in Florida. That would make it 3:30 in Dallas. He, promised to call Amy later, but he had also told her to leave a message on his phone if she needed something before he called. After a long search, he finally found a pay phone and dialed his own phone.

  His call immediately went to his voicemail and he punched the star button to let the system know he was checking his voicemail from a phone other than his own. Once in the system, he entered his passcode. The automated computer attendant told him he had three new messages.

  He started listening to the first one.

  “Mark,” he heard his wife say, “I need you to call me. It’s urgent” His mind was suddenly on the alert. As a rule, his wife was calm and collected even in stressful times. Even to the extreme of being cold and calculating. That was not the case this time.

  He quickly listened to the other two messages. They were both from Amy and each was more frantic than the one before. Mark hung up the phone even before the last message had finished playing, and then dialed his wife’s phone from memory.

  There was a longer than usual pause before the phone started ringing, but finally, it did, and was answered in two rings.

  “Hello” He thought he heard his wife say.

  “Amy?” Mark asked.

  “Oh Mark, thank God it’s you… .” Before he could say anything else to her, she began to cry.

  “Amy, Amy honey what’s wrong?” But instead of Amy’s voice, Mark heard a noise as if the phone was being swapped between users. These sounds were followed by a loud clank as the mouthpiece of the phone came in contact with something solid at the other end of the conversation. Instead of the voice of his wife, a distorted and electronic voice came back through the earpiece.

  “Mr. Vogel?” The voice was male as best he could tell. While he was trying to attach a gender to the sound, he realized he was hearing that whoever was speaking to him was speaking through an electronic device that had been attached to the phone in order to disguise the speaker’s voice. Alarms went off in his head as every muscle in his body snapped taut.

  “Who is this? Where is my wife?” he said, almost shouting into the mouthpiece.

  “Mr. Vogel,” the electronic voice said again. “I am going to make this very simple and very quick. We have your wife. We want the money.”

  Chapter Nine

  The human mind is a wonderful machine. It can process data at a speed that approaches twice the speed of light. It is also capable of handling several different and complex tasks at one time. It operates and monitors the basic life-support system of the body while at the same time handling things like driving a car or using a telephone. In fact, the human mind is without a doubt the perfect computer; except for one thing; it is influenced and in some cases controlled by human emotions. Add emotions to the thought-processing matrix and the human-computer is unable to function nearly as well and because of emotions most humans never use more than ten percent of their brains. The near-perfect computing power of the human mind is drained by the demands that emotions make on the system.

  Emotions are one of the things that set the human race apart from not only the rest of the animal world, but from each other as well. At times, those things, which can be man’s greatest weaknesses, are one of the many things that make him the unique being that he is.

  Professionals who deal with the emotional health of human beings will admit the human system is able to absorb and process huge amounts of sometimes conflicting data. They often describe this ability as “reactions,” instead of using a more technical term like “processing data.” They do warn however, that while the human system is able to react to any number of things at once, it does not have an unlimited capacity and can be overloaded.

  Major life issues should only be tackled one at a time and followed by a period of rest and recovery before attempting to cope with another issue of equal or greater complexity. Things like marriage and divorce, birth and death, starting school and graduating, buying and selling a home, taking leaving an old job to start a new one should be taken on one at a time or it is likely that the human system will overload.

  In mild cases, the overload will cause loss of appetite, loss of sleep, and disorientation. In more severe cases the overload can be so overwhelming imaginable way out is the unreasonable choice of suicide.

  Mark had been close to emotional overload for several weeks now. The loss
of his friend Cecil, the discovery that Cecil was really David Cameron, the realization of the sad and declining state of his marriage, the discovery of the money, his frustration in the way DECCO was handling the new software upgrade, the job offer from Pat, and his conflicting about Marin. All had hit his system and hammered his ability to analyze and process like repeated blows to the mid-section of a professional boxer who is trying to protect his face.

  Each new crisis made it harder to both cope with the current ones and to juggle the new one being added to the stack. He not aware of it, but his system was already in a serious state of overload and was starting to fail by the time he called Amy.

  Now Amy was in danger. This was the last card in his emotional house of cards that had been teetering on the edge of collapse. The realization that the actions, or lack of actions, he had taken regarding the money had placed his wife in harm’s way caused his head to spin and the surrounding terminal to turn a hazy, milky white as he began to lose consciousness. He would have passed out if it had not been for the voice in his ear, yanking him back to awareness.

  “Mr. Vogel, are you paying attention?” The electronic voice asked in his ear.

  “What?” He snapped his head up, trying to orient himself. “Yes, I am here.”

  “Listen to me very carefully. We do not recommend that you continue your travels to the Bahamas tonight. We suggest you leave the airport and find a place that will allow you some privacy, a location that will allow you to receive an incoming phone call. At that point, we will then give you your instructions regarding the exchange of the money for your wife. Mr. Vogel, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” he said. His tongue was thick and his mouth dry. It was all he could do to get the words out of his mouth. “Find a place to receive a call, in private.”