by C. W. Saari
“I’m sure we have. I asked Personnel to pull all terminations and resignations from the corporate office for the past two years. I’ll have that information in the morning. You’ve got to let me know when you find out what’s in that vial.”
“I’ll call you right away,” Bannister reassured him.
“Right now, I think we’ll follow the extortionist’s instructions and count on the FBI to do two things: catch whoever’s responsible, and recover any tampered products. We’d also like to make sure our payoff money doesn’t get lost if it gets that far.”
“The letter said not to contact the authorities. Most of the bad guys say that, but just in case they’ve got someone on the inside, let’s keep this thing on a need-to-know.”
“Absolutely,” Kush said.
“I’d like to tell my boss you’re prepared to place the ad tomorrow.”
“Go ahead. I’ll have it ready along with a phone number the extortionist can call.”
“What about the money?” Bannister asked.
“I know the FBI doesn’t front ransom money. We have emergency arrangements and can have the five million here within twelve hours.”
“I’d like to go with your person to the newspaper.”
“No problem,” Kush said.
“I’ll give you a call when I get the CDC results and check with you in the morning. I think that’s it for right now.” Bannister stood up. They shook hands, and Bannister gave Kush one of his cards with his cell phone number.
On his way out of the office, Bannister walked by Robin’s desk. She was still there, sitting with her chin cupped in her hand, her elbow on her desk.
“Thanks for your time and for answering my questions,” he said.
“Sure. Anything else you’d like to ask me?” She looked up at him with a saucy expression.
Bannister paused for a moment. “Just one. After this case is resolved, will you go to dinner with me?”
“The answer is yes. I’d love that.”
“I’ll bet you have a few questions for me, too. About the Academy.”
“Lots of questions. So many, in fact, that it might take longer than one dinner.”
Tonight, as he did every Monday, Terry Hines was enjoying the Irish pub scene. He wasn’t actually in Ireland, but in the Old Crom Pub on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, which was as close as he could get to the real thing. At least this year. He was quietly celebrating his plan, and so far everything was clicking. Global Waters had received his FedEx earlier that day.
The owners of Old Crom had spent two million dollars creating a bar with five different sections, including an old cottage and a museum room offering a history of Irish pub culture. This was Hines’s favorite place to have a beer. It was early, and he took an empty seat at the end of the bar.
“Start you off with the regular?” the bartender asked.
“You got it, Jason,” Hines said.
It took Jason a careful minute of pouring to build him a pint of Guinness with a solid inch of head.
Hines wanted to be financially independent by the time he turned forty. That was why he had changed his major from electrical engineering to business. Six years out of graduate school he had no debt. With eight years to reach his goal, he’d only saved twenty-two thousand dollars. At that pace, he knew he’d never make it. As he waited for his beer, Hines thought back to that day a year ago when he had brewed his scheme.
It had been his first trip abroad. As an international marketing manager, he was in Vienna representing Global Waters at a three-day joint ventures business symposium. He’d attended the essential breakout sessions as well as meet-and-greets. His corporate requirements were covered in the first twenty-four hours, and he was bored. Fortunately, during one of the initial breaks, he’d run into Andre Neff. Andre, a reporter for a Russian trade journal, had just completed an analysis of the Russian market for mineral water. He was intrigued with Hines’s questions and his interest in Russian investment opportunities. During their last break, the two talked shop some more and had a few laughs. It was Andre’s idea they get together that night for drinks.
Andre lived in Vienna and suggested they meet at the bar at the Hotel Bristol, a landmark where the elite had been meeting for drinks since 1892. After Andre and Hines had a few cocktails, their conversation turned serious. Hines confided in Andre that he had access to his company’s technology and strategies. It was then that Andre asked him if he could line up venture capitalists willing to invest an initial three million dollars for a plant to produce bottled water for distribution in St. Petersburg. Andre’s research had convinced him the return on investment would be at least ten million dollars a year. He said the only Russian company currently developing the mineral water market was Narzan, but they were only in a few smaller cities and could not satisfy the thirst of millions of Russians who desired clean water and were willing to pay for it.
Andre said the untapped market was enormous, and that he had connections inside the foreign ministry who could facilitate all the paperwork. For a price, of course. All he needed for a partnership was someone with industry knowledge and financial backing. Hines remembered telling Andre that when the Bristol Hotel was built, the Rockefellers and Carnegies were using family inheritances in the United States to take risks and seize opportunities. Hines didn’t have an inheritance to give him a head start, but he assured Andre that, like the Rockefellers, he wasn’t afraid of risk and would seize an opportunity to build his own fortune. Maybe it was the alcohol talking, but Andre said the two of them had that opportunity in Russia and with proper timing, they could, in the words of the Wall Street gurus, be the gorilla on the block.
After a couple of drinks later and a few back slaps, the two exchanged information and agreed to stay in touch. It was during the walk back to his hotel room that Hines decided to make a daring move to fulfill his dream.
As soon as he got back to the US, he obtained a false identity in the name of Sean O’Brien. He used that identity to register the name of a new company with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office: US Euro Trans-Consultants. The name meant nothing. The company was fictitious. The president and only officer listed was Sean O’Brien. It took Hines several months to open charge accounts and establish credit for Sean O’Brien. Hines had the credit card bills sent to a mail drop box; he paid the bills immediately with money orders. What he was waiting for was a foolproof opportunity to make a one-time financial killing. It was while sitting in the Old Crom Pub that he had come up with the key to his future.
It took him two weekends of scouting dozens of mini-marts around Atlanta before he found what he was looking for. The small commercial office space at the end of an L-shaped strip mall had a “For Lease” sign in the window. Next to the vacant office, across the alley, was Mike’s Mini-Mart. The Mini-Mart’s hours were perfect—7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Its large steel trash dumpster may have seemed like a paint-splattered, foul-smelling eyesore to some prospective tenants. To Hines, it was the one feature that had sold him on the lease.
Hines still had the wig, mustache, and glasses he’d worn when he got his O’Brien driver’s license. Donning his disguise and wearing a blue-denim shirt over torn, faded blue jeans, Hines had felt confident posing as a foreign graduate student from Emory University. He felt a rush reliving the lease transaction.
“Good morning, Mr. O’Brien,” Candace Miller, the leasing agent, had chirped when she first met Mr. O’Brien to show him the vacant office.
“Good morning, Miss Miller,” Hines said, and waited as she opened the door to the empty space.
“As you can see, it’s a basic office. The walls and ceiling have all been repainted in an off-white tone. This carpeting was installed by the last tenant and is in excellent condition. The office’s wiring has been updated to handle multiple pieces of office equipment and is cable-ready with six phone jacks. What do you think? Anything missing?”
“It looks perfect. I like the window treatments.”
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sp; “The wooden blinds were custom-made. They let in the morning sun, but when shut will give you total privacy.”
“I’m ready to sign the papers.”
Hines had followed Miller to her office and backed his white rental car into a space at the far end of the lot to keep anyone from seeing its license plate. As he walked through the front door, Miller directed him to her small glass-walled office in the back of Best Atlanta’s one-story, gray-brick building.
“I’m assuming you have everything I need to sign.”
“I think so. You told me you and your partner were setting up a business arranging international home exchanges and vacation property swaps for Atlanta area residents.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you want him to be a co-signer on the lease?” Miller asked.
“No, I think it’s easier to deal with just one person.”
“I like the name of your business—US Euro Trans-Consultants. It has a modern ring to it,” Miller remarked as she laid out the lease papers on her desk.
Hines paid two months of the lease in addition to a thousand dollar security deposit. He gave her $3,600 in cash, explaining that he was still in the process of setting up commercial bank accounts, business cards, a business phone, and the like. He was careful to keep his fingers off the original documents. After giving him a receipt for his payment and copies of the documents, Miller said everything was in order and he could take possession by the end of the week.
Jason the bartender checked back with Hines. “So what’s the big grin for?” he asked, interrupting Hines’s train of thought.
Hines had been smiling to himself as he went over his plan. “Oh, I was just thinking about a girl that was here last week and how close I came to hooking up with her.”
“Well, I’d save the smiling practice until someone’s sitting next to you. You want another pint?”
“Yeah, I feel I could use one more tonight,” Hines said. He was enjoying rehashing all the details he had so carefully worked out.
Once he had the office keys, Hines had set about renting equipment. To give the impression of a business office, he rented two office desks, chairs, and a floor lamp. Later, black landscaping plastic was tacked across the entire length of the wooden blinds to block anyone from seeing inside.
The first weekend he had used his SUV to bring down from North Carolina a ground penetrating radar unit he had rented for a week. After midnight, he wheeled the unit up and down the empty alley by the office. It surveyed everything below the alley’s asphalt surface to a depth of sixteen feet and plotted all the information into a digital control unit. Once the images were downloaded to his laptop, Hines saw there would be no problem with sewer lines, gas lines, or electrical conduits.
From a Georgia company he’d bought a portable auger, PVC casing pipes, hydraulic pipe supports and plates, and burlap bags. Everything was pre-paid with money orders and shipped to the storefront. He tracked the delivery date and took a vacation day from his regular job to ensure he was at his new office when the carrier arrived with his supplies.
The second weekend, Hines rented a concrete cutting saw. Along the back wall of the office were numerous boxes containing the equipment delivered earlier from Georgia. He covered the desks and chairs with plastic and spent four hours cutting out a four-by-four foot section of the office floor. He rested frequently, not being big on muscles. Although he was six foot, he only weighed one forty-five. Dust was everywhere. It took six cuts to remove four seventy-pound sections. With difficulty, he carried out the slabs, one at a time, and loaded them into a panel truck he’d leased. After sweeping up inside, he placed a sheet of plywood over the hole in the floor. Pleased with his work, Hines headed back to his apartment, stopping alongside a steep ravine where he slid each of the concrete blocks down the embankment.
Over the next three months, working mostly at night during the week and early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, Hines dug a tunnel from his rented office space, underneath the alley, and out to a point directly below the steel dumpster by Mike’s Mini-Mart. The dumpster, which stayed in the same location, was emptied by a blue trash truck like clockwork every Wednesday afternoon. Hines had filled and dumped each of the three-dozen burlap bags at least ten times with soil and rocks from the tunnel.
During this same period, using the alias Sean O’Brien, Hines completed a correspondence course in welding. He had reviewed the DVDs on cutting-torch basics and techniques numerous times. He had no doubt that when it was time, he would be able to handle a real oxyacetylene torch.
From the Internet, Hines ordered castor beans from two different seed retailers. He’d followed the instructions from an “underground” manual to make the specific toxin he wanted. He used extreme care when grinding the beans to obtain the oil. When the process and curing were finished, he had a vial of poison.
From a college contact, he was put in touch with a man who sold him a stolen cell phone with a cloned subscriber number. The stolen numbers entered into the phones were only good for the current billing cycle. For another hundred dollars, his seller said he could bring the phone back and have it re-programmed with another stolen number the next month. The phone Hines had bought the previous week could be used for another eighteen days before the subscriber even got the bill. Hines knew he’d only need it for a few calls.
His second purchase was for five yards of Flectron material. This discovery, via the Internet, was his answer to the problem of how to thwart law enforcement’s tracking devices. He had researched methods the government and military used to prevent interception of signals from computers and other sensitive electronic equipment. Flectron was a copper-plated nylon rip-stop fabric used to make protective clothing for people working with electromagnetic power line transmissions and microwave radiation. Flectron was designed to keep electrical waves or radio frequency beams from entering into anything covered with the material. Hines reasoned that it would also keep any transmitting device, such as a cell phone, pager, or tracking device, from letting its signal escape from inside a covered item.
Once the roll of Flectron material arrived, Hines only needed three hours to hand-sew a six-foot by three-foot duffel bag. He attached a four-foot Velcro strip along one side to seal the opening.
While he nursed his beer, Hines reached into his wallet and pulled out a card on which he had written his five remaining “to do” items. The first item was “buy oxy.” He was picking up the portable cutting torch this weekend. The second item was “car rental.” Next Tuesday evening he’d rent a car from the airport for three days. The third item was “plate.” He would drive the rental to the long-term parking lot at Atlanta’s airport that same night where he would steal an out-of-state license plate. The fourth and fifth items were “cruise-pack” and “offshore.” Friday he was leaving on a one week’s cruise to Costa Rica, Cozumel, and Grand Cayman. Grand Cayman was where he’d open his new “offshore” account. When he returned to Atlanta, he’d contact Andre Neff and get specifics about investment opportunities in Russia. In the meantime, he’d have an entire cruise to bask in the sun and think about the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Hines reflected for a final minute, trying to think if there was anything he’d overlooked. There wasn’t. He knew that. The excitement grew each time he went over his plan. He put the card back in his wallet when he heard Old Crom’s house band, The Charms, singing their first set from the room around the corner. He waited until they finished their rendition of the ballad Lakes of Coolfin and drained his glass.
As Hines got up to leave, Jason said, “See you same time, next week?”
“Nah, I’m going to be out of town, but you can go to the bank on my being here the week after.” Hines enjoyed the subtlety of his parting comment.
When Bannister left Global Waters, traffic was still sluggish. By the time he got back to the office, Stu and the rest of the task force had left. He called the Assistant United States Attorney on duty and read the letter to h
er. She authorized prosecution and gave him an okay for a trap and trace on the telephone number Global would put in its ad. After calling the Bureau’s operations center, he went to the breakroom where the vending machine still had one beef-and-cheese burrito. He heated it in the microwave and brewed a pot of coffee.
Just as Bannister finished writing up the interviews of Robin Mikkonen and Adam Kush, Ford Campbell stuck his head in the door.
“I guess we’re the only ones left. The film’s at the photo lab. The tech was still there doing a bank robbery photo spread. She said no problem doing our prints tonight. She’s on approved overtime.”
“Any hitches at the CDC?”
“No. One of the scientists doing the testing used to work with Mercedes.”
“Hopefully they got along. Did they give you any idea how long it would take?”
“Within twenty-four hours. They’re making this a priority and want to be exact in case this ends up in court,” Campbell said.
“In that event, there’s no use in your hanging around the office.” Bannister’s cell phone rang and he recognized Ramirez’s number. “It’s Mercedes now,” he said.
“It’s ricin!” Mercedes was almost shouting. “They ran a time-resolved fluorescence immunoassay test and—”
“Whoa! Take a breath.”
“Sorry. One of the standard tests they conducted is for ricin. It came back positive. The CDC is going to run a polymerase chain reaction or PCR test tomorrow. They’re the only lab that does a PCR test since it involves looking for the DNA of the ricin protein.”
Bannister turned to Campbell and said, “Ricin.”
Ramirez went on, “She told me that a five-hundred microgram dose, about the amount that could fit on the head of a pin, could kill the average person.”
“Good work. Take a statement from whoever is doing the testing. I don’t know when Witt’s going to order us to circle the wagons, but I’ll call you if there’s any change.”