Green Dreams

by Gary W Ritter

  Nice people, huh?

  Posted by Smiley at 12:16 AM. - Comments [0]

  Chapter 12

  Jason Ruger leaned back from the keyboard and rubbed his eyes. It was well after midnight and his first day back at the office would come in only a few hours. At that point the clock started. He’d been given the first week of the New Year to do what his abductors demanded.

  Jason had returned this morning—really yesterday morning he realized—to his home in the Chicago suburbs. He’d reached the point of no return with his relatives and left several days ago. With vacation time remaining, he’d eschewed a direct flight and instead had looped to the Atlantic coast in his rental car and swung back along a northern route by Lake Erie. He’d seen no benefit in torturing himself or his parents with his continued presence. He was perplexed over Lizzy’s behavior. More to the point, he needed time to think. The many hours alone in the car gave him that luxury.

  What occupied his mind for the bulk of his extended drive was what to do about Marcy, the demands placed upon him by the kidnappers, and how to deal with Lizzy. Despite his best efforts, he’d come up empty handed in finding any leads to his daughter or to the location he’d been taken. He simply had nothing he could pin down to work with. It left him with a simple decision. Should he do what Hugo and Tenor instructed in order to passively protect Marcy, or should he risk endangering her to ferret out the men and motives behind the ultimatums? And was Lizzy friend or foe?

  Whatever the answers, Jason knew he’d have to live with the outcome. For the time being, despite the angst engendered by the situation, he knew he’d make a more informed choice with better information. He’d gone this far in life without his daughter. Hard as it was, he could deal with it a while longer. See how it plays out, he counseled himself, then do the right thing. As far as Lizzy was concerned, he knew he had to learn more about her. There were layers of secrets she wasn’t revealing, and that was most dangerous of all. With that warning ringing in his head, the remainder of his long drive passed uneventfully.

  Jason reread what he’d posted on his weblog moments ago and thought about its evolution. Like so many ordinary people who had discovered blogging, he slept too little and invested way too much of himself in the hobby. Jason had found a means of pursuing a passion, one in which he could say anything he wanted or convey any truth he believed. People surfing the web and looking for points of view either liked what he wrote or they didn’t.

  Weblogs had grown over the last decade into a social and political force. Bloggers were nothing if not passionate. They spanned the political spectrum. If there was a point of view to be had, someone represented it in a blog. It went without saying that the blogosphere community was highly diverse. Bloggers spoke and listened, agreed or disagreed. They linked to each other’s websites or, in a pique, delinked them. Readers came and went. The more successful blogs attracted tens of thousands of hits per day by people stopping at their sites, reading or not, and moving on. Blogs were dynamic and influential, an alternative—a substitute for many—to news obtained from major media sources. Weblogs acted as checks and balances on media bias. In numerous instances, bloggers had caught the media outlets in outright lies, forcing them to amend their stories and issue corrections. They were the bane of the New York Times, bloggers having followed Times errors and opinion reporting with healthy doses of skepticism, pointing out the hypocrisy and liberal predisposition inherent in so many of its stories. The downfall of its two top editors and favored novice reporter when they sought to fabricate truths several years ago was in no small way attributable to the blogosphere. Blogging was the purest form of the First Amendment in action, a healthy antidote to what passed as truthful reporting in the country.

  Typically, bloggers trolled the Internet for news and information relating to their subject of interest. In finding it, they often linked to the article or commentary and commented upon it themselves. Usually readers could post their own observations in a message board and an entire chain of new dialogue began.

  Jason’s blog was small but had garnered significant interest of late because of his focus on the issue of missing and abducted children. It moved people. That, as much as anything, was what attracted them to a particular site and made it successful.

  What Jason was very careful to maintain was a separation between his blog and his job. As a special agent in the Criminal Investigation Division, he dealt primarily with money laundering activities and often investigated high profile individuals. The IRS wasn’t known as a tolerant employer when it came to outside initiatives. Because Jason had access to classified material in his position as a CID operative, any hint that he might be using that data for other than official purposes would be more than frowned upon. It could result in his arrest and conviction. This was the primary reason his blog was anonymous. As a child, he’d liked the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Wonderland because it was so mysterious, always smiling with hidden knowledge, and it faded away leaving only its grin. That naturally led to his pseudonym on the blog. It tied in nicely to his practice of keeping his statements more cryptic than not.

  ***

  Jason reached the office on time, exhausted from his late night. On this first morning back from holiday break, he’d barely settled at his desk with a first cup of coffee when the phone rang.

  “Good, you’re there. I want to see you and Bennett in my office now.” The line went dead.

  Jason eyed the receiver with a mixture of resignation and disgust. It was his boss’s boss, the Branch Chief, summoning him and his partner. Charlie Bennett was a younger agent for whom the bloom of idealism hadn’t yet worn off. Always eager, he often forgot he worked for a massive government bureaucracy and a royal jerk of a boss.

  Jason picked up his cup and tapped Bennett on the shoulder. “Drennan wants to see us.”

  Together they wound their way through the corridors to the opposite end of the building while chatting about their respective holiday vacations. Bennett had remained in town seeing his new girlfriend. Jason felt vaguely envious at the thought as an image of Lizzy flashed through his mind. He shook it away.

  Steve Drennan glanced up from paperwork when Jason knocked on the door and entered. “There’s been a change in your current assignment.” Drennan was a florid-faced man with glasses and a perpetually worried expression.

  Jason sat opposite the desk and pursed his lips. He took a sip from his cooling coffee before setting the cup down. “Happy New Year to you, too, Steve.”

  Bennett remained standing at the door, uncertainty written on his face. Jason figured he was waiting for an invitation to enter. Forget that formality, he thought

  Drennan waved away the cynical greeting. He unlocked a drawer and removed a folder. Upside down Jason could read the name of the file on the tab: Gaiatic Charities. It was the file he’d left in his own locked drawer prior to vacation.

  “You going to stand there all day, Bennett?” Drennan said.

  “Well, uh…” The younger man stumbled into the room and took the chair beside Jason.

  He wondered if the kid would ever get past the stage of subordinate prostration.

  The fingers of Drennan’s left hand took on a life of their own, doing an interpretive dance over the file. “When you initiated this investigation, we let you run with it because it looked like it had potential,” Drennan said. “You’ve been at it for several months and the consensus is that it’s a dead end.”

  “Several months? Consensus?” Jason turned to Bennett. “Did we agree it’s a dead end?”

  Confusion entered Bennett’s eyes. “I, uh, thought it was pretty promising. Sir.” He directed the “sir” to Drennan.

  Bennett might as well not have spoken. Drennan said, “You know your work isn’t done in a vacuum. After our last review, I passed a summary of your caseload up the line, along with one for all the other agents working for me. You also know that management makes suggestions and occasionally halts an investigation for their own reasons. T
his is one of those instances.”

  Jason was seething inside. “Management must have had a busy New Year’s Day. Does anybody up there have a clue how long it takes to conduct an investigation? Several months? Try a couple years.” He and Bennett had uncovered solid evidence of illicit activities at the charity. Investigations weren’t an overnight activity. They were painstaking and time consuming. He couldn’t help but think this must be related to his abduction in North Carolina.

  “Do exactly as instructed,” Tenor had said in that concrete room. “Do not question your orders. If there’s any deviation in your activity, we’ll know about it.”

  Jason studied his hands in his lap. He didn’t have much choice, did he? Tenor had gone on to detail the explicit threat to Marcy and the children. Jason hated ultimatums.

  “So the case becomes inactive?” Jason asked Drennan.

  “No, it’s completely dead.”

  “What if new information surfaces to revive it?”

  Drennan hesitated. Lines of worry appeared on the mottled flesh of his forehead. “I don’t have any say in the matter. It’s not a local decision.”

  “Who made it?”

  “It’s above my head,” was all Drennan would say.

  Must be pretty high, Jason concluded. “You tell Malony?” Norris Malony was Bennett’s and Jason’s direct supervisor. It was odd that he hadn’t been in this meeting.

  “I’ll let him know. Don’t worry about it.”

  Jason stood and held out his hand. “I’ll send the file to the morgue.” This was the archive facility the IRS used for all records. It was standard procedure for agents to initiate the transfer into long-term storage of case files no longer being worked.

  “That’s all right; I’ll take care of it.” Drennan leaned forward and protectively covered the file with his forearms. In a moment he seemed to have second thoughts about the gesture. With an air of self-consciousness, he pulled back from his defensive posture and placed the thick accordion folder back into his desk drawer, which he locked. “You two should have plenty of other cases to keep you busy. You’re working on, what, five other active investigations?”

  “Yeah, but Gaiatic Charities was the most promising.”

  Drennan wiped the sweat from his upper lip. “Forget about it. Your computerized notes have also been deleted. This office never had the case in the first place.”

  Chapter 13

  “Son-of-a-gun! I can’t believe he did that,” Jason said. He slapped his desk with the palm of his hand. Around him startled heads popped up to eye him over cubicle walls. It was like standing in a field of prairie dogs.

  Charlie Bennett said, “There must be a good reason.”

  “Oh, yeah, there’s a good reason all right, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the case being a dead end.”

  Bennett frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Jason shook his head. “Nothing. Say, you need a cup of coffee? Let’s hit Gambles. I could use a change of scenery.”

  The CID office was in downtown Chicago, which gave them plenty of culinary choices, but for coffee, Gambles served their drug of choice. Not least among the reasons Jason liked the place was that it wasn’t Starbucks. Inside the intimate restaurant with its mahogany walls and heavy oak tables the two of them instinctively made their way to the rear where they could watch their backs.

  A cute black waitress with hair piled high on the back of her head sashayed over. “What’ll it be, fellas?”

  When she brought their coffee, Jason said, “Thanks.”

  The woman flashed a dazzling smile that would have made the teeth whitening companies proud. There was little doubt in Jason’s mind that he wasn’t the primary recipient of all that wonderful dentistry.

  Their conversation turned to the heart of the matter. Bennett may have been young and inexperienced but he wasn’t stupid. “It was like, well…like Drennan was nervous about taking the case away from us.” He brushed a hand over his short, spiky hair and massaged the back of his neck. “I don’t get it. He said he was following orders from above. What’s that mean? Why was he uneasy about it? And what were you talking about saying there was good reason for what happened?”

  Their waitress greeted two men and a woman who came in and sat a couple of tables away. One of the men was familiar, and Jason tried to remember where he’d seen him.

  He couldn’t tell Bennett about his personal stake in all this. To do that would not only jeopardize Marcy and the kids, but Bennett as well. Plus, at this instant, Jason didn’t know how to play it. Could he simply walk away? He’d not reacted well at one other crossroad in his life, and he’d paid for it ever since. When Mary Sue disappeared with Marcy, he’d not pursued them. The reason why was something his mind blocked whenever he tried to go there. This situation had all the earmarks of another such turning point. Don’t mess it up this time, he thought. Do what’s right.

  Recognition came. He’d observed the man testifying in court as an expert FBI witness. The impression he’d had was of someone completely dedicated to truth and honesty. Jason had liked the man a lot in that venue. He didn’t often get such positive gut-level feelings. They were usually more tempered in their intensity.

  He lowered his voice. “Drennan was nervous because he knew it was the wrong thing to do. I can’t see him being part of whatever’s going on. He may not dislike it as much as us, but he’s not going to upset the apple cart. He’s an obedient little bureaucrat who’s deathly afraid of losing his pension, so he does what he’s told—all presumably within the rules.”

  Bennett took Jason’s cue and spoke as softly as he had. “I’m not so sure of that, but it still doesn’t tell me why they’re killing the case.”

  “What’s our infallible guideline?”

  “Follow the money?”

  Jason smiled. “You’re coming along, kid. We might make a decent agent out of you yet. What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

  Bennett’s tone held a tinge of bitterness. “I may not get to be around very long if we disobey orders, but I think Drennan is hiding something.”

  “What gives you that idea? You think I’m a maverick who goes around behind the G’s back, like I’m going to break in to check Drennan out?”

  “Isn’t that where this conversation’s taking us?”

  Jason began playing with his coffee spoon. The young agent was perceptive. Balancing half of a tightly crumpled sugar packet on the end of the handle, Jason flipped it by tapping the tip of the bowl. On the third try the paper flew into his cup. He made a face after Bennett said, “Nice shot.”

  Once he’d fished out the soggy spitball, Jason said, “I’m not going to ask you to do anything that’ll put you in danger of losing your job. I would appreciate if you’ll tell me whether or not I’m crazy, however. Is what we’ve found on Gaiatic Charities solid? I mean, I’m not imagining that, am I?”

  Bennett drank the last of his coffee and set it down. He tapped his fingers before answering. “No, I’ve seen what you have. We’re not there yet, but it’s definitely leading down that path.”

  Chairs shuffled around them. The FBI agent and his companions walked out of Gambles having left money under a saucer on the table. He might not have seen Jason, or if he had, he might not have recognized him. Jason had simply been one of many faces in that courtroom day after day.

  The waitress glided over, made the dollars disappear, and cleaned up. Bennett signaled her for more coffee, and she winked at him.

  “Up and coming conquest?” Jason queried.

  “Worth thinking about.”

  “All right,” Jason said after getting a refill as well and collecting his thoughts. “We’ve got a charity taking out life insurance on its donors; the classic CHOLI technique. It’s legal, although the near-term return of such a scheme is usually questionable. We have money flowing into the charity’s coffers that we can’t account for. Why is that? There are promising avenues of investigation that we’re on the verge of pursuing, but
we’re relieved of the case. Told it’s a dead end. In fact, told it never existed as a case in the first place. Stinks, doesn’t it?”

  CHOLI stood for charity-owned life insurance. It was a cousin of an older money-making ploy in the business world known as COLI, or corporate-owned life insurance. With COLI, companies would take out policies on a wide range of employees from boardroom executives (key man insurance) to managers (managers insurance) to hourly workers (janitors insurance), often without their knowledge and frequently maintaining the coverage even after the employee left the company. The firm would list itself as the beneficiary. When the covered individual died, the tax-sheltered insurance proceeds passed to the corporation, while the deceased’s family didn’t receive a dime. The payoff to firms engaged in the practice was enormous, amounting to millions of dollars. Its use had become so egregious that Congress had passed a series of laws to regulate it.

  Learning that Gaiatic Charities used CHOLI wasn’t much of a revelation. It was in common use among charities and not yet addressed by Congressional oversight. An organization such as Gaiatic would insure thousands of its donors and other “well-wishers,” then essentially sit back to wait for the insured to die. The problem most charities faced was that the insured generally didn’t die rapidly. It was a solution in search of a problem. As a result, money didn’t flow into the coffers as anticipated.

  In Gaiatic’s case Jason and Bennett had determined from the data they’d obtained that the charity had dispersed more CHOLI funds than they’d expected. Nothing illegal about that, but highly curious. In addition, they hadn’t been able to rationalize where all the money went. The books the charity maintained were definitely suspect.