Jack Archer (Book 3): Year Zero

by Taylor, Keith

  He waved a hand, sensing he was losing his audience. “Well, maybe that’s a story for another time. Anyway… a couple of months ago I was called out to Travis AFB to investigate a number of outgoing payments the local staff couldn’t explain. Mostly just small stuff, random invoices issued in the thousands of dollars, small enough to go unnoticed unless you were auditing the accounts. It looked like someone at the base was trying to set themselves up with a nice unofficial retirement fund.”

  He set down his mug. “So what, you might ask. There must be a ton of theft and fraud going on in the military, and you’d be right to think that. People skim millions of dollars from the military every year. Tens of millions, in fact, but the kind of people who try to rip off the government usually understand the massive risks involved, and they tend not to half ass it. They don’t just write themselves a check from a military account and hope nobody will notice. Most of them are smart enough to bury what they’re doing so deep that nobody ever find out.”

  Krasinski tapped the sheaf of papers that sat in front of him. “These transfers, though, didn’t fit the usual pattern at all. They were just brazen theft. Someone was skimming money from base operational accounts, the same accounts they use to pay the utility bills and keep the bathrooms stocked with toilet paper, and as far as I could tell they barely made even a token effort to hide it. The transfers were right there, plain as day in the account statements, as obvious as stealing a six pack of beer from a grocery store, strolling past the security guard and then coming back five minutes later to grab a bag of nuts. As far as theft goes this was just next level stupid.”

  He took a sip of his coffee, shaking his head. “OK, so far so dumb. If you were just a regular base accountant you’d probably figure some dumbass was trying to skim cash without really knowing what he was doing. You’d cancel the payments, report it to your superior and forget about it. But here’s the thing that struck me as odd.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “This wasn’t going on at just one base. As soon as I reported the Travis accounts I started to hear reports about similar things happening at bases right across the country, in every branch. Air Force bases here in California. A Navy shipyard out in Maine. Even a National Guard recruiting station in Wisconsin. There were more than two dozen bases involved, each of them sending out regular small payments, and all of them were going to the same recipient.”

  Ramos leaned in, lowering his voice to match Krasinski’s. “Where was the money going?”

  “That’s the weird thing,” Krasinski replied. “The paper trail told us the payments were being made to a consulting firm in Maryland by the name of Reagan Wilkes Global, but when I tracked it down I found it was just three college grads working out of a strip mall a few miles outside Annapolis. They had no clue about any payments coming from the military. They didn’t even have any connections to the military, and they had no idea they had millions of dollars sitting in the bank in their name. They barely had enough money to buy breakfast at the Taco Bell next door.”

  “What, you just took them at their word?” Karen interjected, skeptically raising her eyebrows.

  “Their word?” Krasinski laughed. “Lord, no. I’m an accountant. When it comes to money I wouldn’t take my own mother at her word. No, I came down on those kids like a ton of bricks. I went through their books with a fine toothed comb, and by the time I was done I was absolutely certain they were on the level. They genuinely had no idea the account existed. As far as I could make out someone had set it up in their name, all legit, all apparently legal, but with no real connection to the company or its owners. They probably just picked the name out of the Yellow Pages and maybe stole some ID and mail to set up the account, just so there was a legitimate business connected to the invoices.”

  “So,” he continued, “it looked like I was dealing with someone who was either mind meltingly dumb or, and this is where it gets interesting, someone who wasn’t all that worried about getting caught. That’s what I figured at first. This theft was so obvious, so easy to detect, that I figured maybe it was someone who knew he only had a few months to live. You know, maybe some accounts clerk with access to base funds who wanted to treat himself to a fancy vacation before the cancer finished him off. But that’s not the most interesting part.”

  Ramos nodded, urging him to get on with it. “So what was the most interesting part?”

  Krasinski once again set down his mug, and a sly smile spread across his face. “Surprise twist. Up until now I’d only been looking at one side of the books. I was focused on the debits, because that’s where the problem was. It never occurred to me to look at the credit column, but as soon as I took a look I realized this thing went a lot deeper than I’d suspected. See, the funds were always returned in full exactly three days after they were deposited. Every penny of every last payment, like clockwork.” He brought his fists to his temples and then spread them out, mimicking the sound of an explosion. “Mind blown, right? Right?”

  “Ted,” Karen said in a slow, patient tone, “remember you’re not speaking at a convention of forensic accountants here, OK? We have no idea what this means.”

  “Don’t you see?” Krasinski narrowed his eyes and spoke in a hushed, excited whisper. “Nobody was actually stealing the money. They never actually stole a single cent. Someone was orchestrating a massive transfer of funds into this secret account, but they weren’t spending any of it. They weren’t even keeping it. I found payments going back eight months, thousands of them, and every last cent was returned to the base from whence it came. After three days the money landed right back in the operational accounts as if it had never left. Whoever was in charge of this thing set it up to make it look like the payments were automatically bounced, as if the transfers had failed.”

  “OK,” Karen nodded, too exhausted to try to make sense of what Ted was saying. “But why is any of this important?”

  “I’m getting to it,” Krasinski assured her. “Trust me, this will all make sense when you hear about the ship.”

  Valerie narrowed her eyes. “Wait a second,” she slowly muttered, and everyone jumped in their seats as she slapped her hand on the table and cried out. “The ship! I knew I’d heard your voice somewhere. You’re the guy on the radio!”

  “I’m sorry?” Krasinski shook his head, confused. “What radio?”

  “Last night! That was you on the VHF band, right? You were calling from Travis, asking to speak to… what’s his name? Colonel MacAuliffe! You said you had evidence that the nukes were dropped by Americans!”

  “Quiet!” Krasinski leaned in and whispered harshly as the color drained from his face. “That’s classified information. Jesus. You were eavesdropping on me?”

  “Damn right I was eavesdropping. There’s no law against it.”

  “Of course there’s a law against it!” Krasinski hissed, but his indignant tone evaporated in the face of Valerie’s confidence. “Seriously? Are… are you sure? Seems like there should be.”

  “Nope. As long as you don’t interfere you can listen in on any radio signal you can pick up. If you don’t want people listening you shouldn’t broadcast in the clear. You should know better. Military comms are supposed to be encrypted.”

  “I had no choice!” insisted Krasinski, his tone suddenly defensive. “The blasts knocked out our satellite comms, so we’re down to VHF line-of-sight until we can get the system back on its feet.”

  “Hey, it’s not my ass that’ll get court-martialed for broadcasting classified material on a frequency truckers can pick up.” She glared at Krasinski for a moment, watching him fall to pieces before her eyes, and then she shot him a wink as a mischievous grin spread across her face. “Oh, unbunch your panties, Ted. I’m just screwing with you. If even half of what you said was true, we have bigger things to worry about right now.”

  “Half of what?” Karen demanded, trying to keep up. “What’s this about a ship?”

  Krasinski took a moment to gather himself, but it was clear
the wind had been taken out of his sails. Until now he’d been enjoying telling the story, but now he looked like he had a rod down the back of his shirt, speaking as if he were on the witness stand.

  “Yes, the ship,” he continued, coughing awkwardly. “Or ships, plural, to be precise. For weeks I struggled to understand what might be the purpose of the Reagan Wilkes account. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would go to all this trouble just to move some money around, especially when I learned that this particular account accrued no interest. There didn’t seem to be any obvious rhyme or reason to the thing, and it was only when I secured a warrant for the account records that it started to make sense.”

  He glanced around the mess, making sure there was nobody within earshot. “See, the people behind this weren’t interested in the money at all. At any one time there was always at least two million dollars resting in the account, but since the day the account was opened nobody had made a single withdrawal. What I finally figured out was that they only wanted the balance itself. They were using it as collateral to secure lines of credit. They wanted to make it appear as if they had enough funds to cover purchases of a few hundred grand, and they were doing it without technically stealing a single cent from the government.”

  “And they were buying ships?” Karen asked.

  “Yes. Freighters, in fact. Outdated, rusty cargo ships earmarked for scrap. From the evidence I pieced together I learned that they bought eight small freighters in the last six months, all of them from operators in countries such as Azerbaijan and Côte d’Ivoire, where financial regulations are treated more like polite suggestions, and all of them on credit using the misappropriated funds as collateral.”

  “But why? Why would someone go to so much trouble just to buy some rusty old ships?”

  Krasinski threw up his hands. “That’s where I hit a dead end. I’m an accountant, not a cop. My job was only to follow the money and see where it led, but for me that was the end of it. I’m not paid to worry about motives. As soon as I’d canceled the outgoing payments and confirmed that every penny had been accounted for I cracked open a beer and slapped myself on the back. I’d solved my part of the mystery. It was a job well done.”

  He fell silent for a moment, a haunted look suddenly flitting across his face. “Or at least it was, until I turned on the TV yesterday and watched General Reynolds give his briefing from the Pentagon. As soon as I heard the name of the ship I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention.”

  “You mean the ship that blew up out in the Pacific? That was—”

  “The MC Nakharov,” Krasinski nodded solemnly. “It was an old cargo ship that spent twenty years crossing the Black Sea between Trabzon and Sevastopol. It was decommissioned after its keel was damaged last year, and it was due to be tugged to the Aliaga breaking yard in Turkey when a mystery buyer snapped it up with a loan note for a couple hundred thousand dollars. It fell off the radar for a few months, and then yesterday it popped up out of the clear blue sky off the west coast, sailing under a Panamanian flag and registered to a shell company in Karachi, which was in turn owned by another shell based out of Moscow.”

  “The Russians?” Ramos scratched his stubble. “You mean they had a hand in this?”

  Krasinski shook his head. “No, not at all. Or at least I don’t think they did. Someone just wanted to make it look as if they were involved, and it was the same story with the other half dozen ships that arrived off the coast along with the Nakharov. They were registered to companies everywhere from Riyadh to Damascus to Dalian, China, a stone’s throw from the North Korean border, but the trails all led back to Moscow.”

  He grabbed his mug and held it close to his chest, as if comforting himself with the warmth. “Someone went to a hell of a lot of trouble to send us chasing our tails. They threw out what a cop would call an orgy of evidence, a dozen different threads that lead everywhere but the real culprit. The way I see it someone desperately wants us to believe that this attack came from Moscow, or Pyongyang, or the Saudis. They want us confused and paranoid. If I hadn’t stumbled on the Reagan Wilkes account I would have fallen for it.” He poked a finger at the papers. “But thanks to this evidence I can prove that the money trail leads right back here. Right to our doorstep. I can prove that those ships were bought by someone connected to our own military.”

  “So it was really us? We really did this to ourselves?”

  Krasinski nodded. “It looks that way, yeah, though I’ve no idea why.”

  “You said there were eight ships, but only seven of them showed up on the coast. What happened to the other one?”

  “Well,” Krasinski replied, “one of them was lost in a storm somewhere off the coast of Mauritania late last year. I guess if you’re buying junk you run the risk of losing them.”

  Ramos listlessly poked at the ice cream with a spoon, deep in thought. “What about the nukes?” he asked. “Anyone can buy a bunch of old boats, but I’m guessing you need more than a shady bank account to get your hands on nuclear weapons.”

  “Yeah,” Krasinski agreed. “That’s where I have to admit defeat. The Reagan Wilkes account is just part of the puzzle, I’m sure. I don’t know anything about nuclear weapons, or how anyone could get hold of them. All I know is that I need to get this evidence to someone higher up the chain of command before we go and do something stupid.”

  “Stupid like what?” Ramos asked.

  Krasinski frowned. “Stupid like launching our nuclear arsenal at Moscow or Riyadh in retaliation for an attack that had nothing to do with them. I don’t know what’s going on in Washington right now, but you can bet they’re looking for someone to bomb. The entire country will be baying for blood. The government needs a villain, and with all the evidence I’m sure they won’t have any trouble finding one. We could be looking at the outbreak of World War Three.”

  “Jesus,” Karen whispered, staring at the sheaf of papers in front of Krasinski. It was hard to believe that the future of humanity could rest on a bunch of bank statements. “Wait. If you need to get this up the chain of command how come you’re just sitting around here with us? Haven’t you shown this to the base commander?”

  “Here at Beale?” Krasinski nodded. “I tried, but most of the base personnel have been sent to Truckee to manage the safe zone. Right now the most senior officer at Beale is a twenty five year old first lieutenant, and he’s so out of his depth he hasn’t left his office since this morning. I tried to reach Colonel MacAuliffe on the radio last night, but they wouldn’t put me through. By the time I arrived he’d already left for Truckee.”

  “They wouldn’t put you through to him for this?” Karen scoffed. “You should have insisted!”

  “I should have insisted?” Krasinski gave her a withering look. “I’m not sure what you know about the military chain of command, but it goes a little something like this.” He raised his hand as high as he could reach. “Right up here you’ve got your generals, colonels and majors, OK?” He lowered his hand an inch. “And here you’ve got your captains, lieutenants and your enlisted men. Now all the way down here,” he dropped his hand slowly beneath the table, “you’ve got your janitors and mess hall staff, and just beneath them you’ll find the accountants. I’m a civilian attached to the DoD. I don’t even have a rank. Someone like me doesn’t just insist on speaking to a colonel.”

  “OK, I take your point,” Karen grudgingly conceded. “So where do you go from here?”

  “Well, all I can do now is try to find an officer with half a brain.” He tapped the pages in front of him. “I'm waiting for a spot on a transport out to Truckee. I need someone who can understand what all of this means, and has the ability to relay the information higher up the chain. We need to get this stuff to Washington, but until we can reestablish the satellite link all we have is line of sight comms and limited cell phone reception. It’s not like we can—”

  His voice trailed off when he noticed a low hum from his pocket. “Sorry, I have to take this,”
he said, pulling out his cell phone. “I’ll just be—”

  “Hang on,” Karen interrupted. “You have cell phone reception?”

  ‘Well, yeah. Beale has its own cell tower. Only local calls. It’s a little hit and miss because most of the west coast network is down, but if you manage to connect to a working base station you might get lucky.”

  Karen turned to Ramos and grabbed him by the arm. “Doc, do you still have my phone?”

  Ramos frowned, digging around in his pockets. “Ummm… yeah, I think you put it in with the meds when you got in the car, right?” He pulled out the plastic bag and sifted through the contents. “Yeah, here it is.”

  Karen snatched the phone from his hand, and her eyes lit up as she activated the screen and saw three bars showing in the signal indicator, though her excitement was tempered a little by the sight of the battery indicator. 6% remaining.

  “Ted,” she said, waving her hand in front of his face. “Sorry, Ted, please, just a second.”

  Krasinski cupped his hand over the microphone and shot her an impatient glare. “I’m on the phone.”

  “I’m sorry, I just need to know if we’ll be allowed to leave here. We need to get to the safe zone in Truckee.”

  Krasinski nodded. “Of course. You’re civilians, you can’t stay here. As soon as your daughter gets back they’ll drive you out to highway 20 and cut you loose. In fact, if you try to come back they’ll shoot you.” He pointed at his phone. “Is it OK if I get back to my call now?”

  “Sure. Sorry.” Karen narrowed her eyes, wondering if he was joking about the shooting thing, but she was too excited to worry about it. She tapped the screen, brought up Jack’s number and pressed the phone against her ear as the call tried to connect.

  Sorry, we are unable to connect your call at this time. Please try again.

  “Damn,” she hissed tapping the screen to redial. “It’s not going through.”

  Sorry, we are unable to—