Wrecker

by Mark Parragh

  “Working fine,” Josh replied. “Downloaded a new batch of numbers this morning, and João’s running them through DMV.” He gestured toward the whiteboard. “You got anything on this?”

  “Yeah,” Georges said, “yeah. It’s odd.” He pointed out photos of circuit boards that Crane had taken and block diagrams he’d drawn himself to figure out how the transceiver worked. “You can buy a unit off the shelf to do this, you know. Tested and design optimized, burned in, and ready to install,” he explained. “But they didn’t do that. They cobbled it together out of parts that don’t really want to work together. Right here, these two boards don’t even agree on clock speed. They would have had to hand code some custom middleware just to get them to talk to each other.”

  Georges was impressed. Josh could hear it in his voice.

  It’s the kind of stuff he used to build himself back in Cameroon, when he had to scrounge whatever parts he could find and improvise. But he did that because he didn’t have any money. That’s no problem for these guys. Why didn’t they just buy a box?

  “There any technical reason to do it this way?”

  Georges shrugged. “Not that I can think of. It must have been a real pain to debug.”

  “There’s got to be some reason that makes sense to a cartel,” said Josh. “Maybe the market for equipment like this is small enough that people watch it. Maybe if you buy a bunch of them off the shelf and you’re not a telephone company, somebody takes notice. Is there a believable way to break it?”

  “Oh sure,” said Georges, as if that was a foregone conclusion and the only interesting question was how he’d done it. “Breaking it’s no problem, believe me. But getting a signal back out to us is going to be tricky.” He pointed out elements on his block diagram.

  “There’s a software-defined radio, controlled from an embedded processor, here, so that’s no problem. But look at this radiation plot.”

  Josh wasn’t especially well versed in radio electronics, but he could see that the transceiver’s antenna was extremely directional. It was a point-to-point link, after all. By focusing all its energy in one narrow beam, it was able to transmit more effectively at lower power, and was also harder to detect and intercept. But that also made it more difficult for them to hijack the system and send their own signals out.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Georges said after letting it sink in for a moment. “But it’s going to mean putting our own hardware out in the field to pick up low-power transmissions and relay them back. It’ll mean more work for Crane and Ms. Diamond.”

  “Eh, they’re used to that. When can you have it ready?”

  Georges considered this for a moment, and then said, “Tomorrow morning?”

  Josh nodded. “Good, let’s get it done.”

  He left Georges happily noodling around with circuit models, and headed back upstairs. When he reached the war room, he discovered Perry Holland busily rebuilding the climbing wall. As Josh entered, he was ten feet up, limbs splayed across the wall, screwing a chunk of blue rubber into a hole with his free hand.

  “Is that really necessary, Perry?” he asked.

  “I have to move to think,” Perry called back. “It’s meditative, opens up the imagination and the intuitive faculties. You should try it!”

  “Yeah, I’m not going to do that.”

  Across the room, he noticed João in a huddle with Don Finney and Laura Berdoza. Berdoza glanced over at him, and then they pulled closer together and argued in hushed whispers. Josh decided they looked like people who had something to tell him. He walked over to their table.

  “Good news?”

  They all stood, traded looks, and turned to face him. “Yes … some of that,” João said after a moment’s hesitation, “and some bad news too.”

  Josh sighed. “Give me that first.”

  “The business card Crane sent up is another dead end,” said Berdoza. “So far, at least. The company exists, but it’s like all the others. You try to figure out who owns it, and you’re in quicksand again. Trusts, holding companies, trusts holding holding companies. These guys are really good at hiding.”

  Josh could hear the frustration in her voice. “What about the phone number?”

  “Goes to an automated conference bridge,” said João. “They’re using it like a proxy server. You dial in, and it completes a call to them and hooks you together, but you don’t know where you’re really calling. They could be in Siberia. And that’s only if the bridge likes you. It didn’t like us.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Josh.

  “I assume the bridge checks your number against a whitelist before it connects. Call from an unapproved phone, and you just get kicked out.”

  “That’s what happened when we tried calling them,” Berdoza interjected.

  “Now I can try hacking the bridge,” said João. “I’m not ready to give up. But I haven’t had time yet. I’ve been focusing on the good news.”

  “Well, don’t be shy,” said Josh. “What have you got?”

  “Numbers from the plate reader at the hospital,” João explained. As they’d expected, most of the plates traced to local addresses, usually apartments. They belonged to hospital staffers, and Marin County wasn’t cheap. A couple belonged to doctors, but there was nothing suspicious about any of them.

  “But there was one this morning that isn’t registered to a person at all,” João said. “It’s a Cadillac CTS registered to a Rockridge Medical Group. I figured it’s some guy with an incorporated practice, and he has it buy his car for the taxes. But I tried to figure out who it was, and this Rockridge has no website, no listed phone number, no public presence at all. That’s when I brought it to Don and Laura.”

  “We tracked down their articles of organization with the Secretary of State’s office,” said Berdoza. “They have the same registered agent and official address as another company called Firesta. Firesta is a limited partnership that funds medical and pharmaceutical research. Among its partners of record is an investment trust called KMAC Strategies.”

  Josh had brought the team in precisely so he wouldn’t have to figure out things like this. “Where is this chain taking us?” he asked.

  Finney stepped in. “Alexander Tate’s trustees have sold significant assets to KMAC in the last two years. Three months ago, KMAC loaned Tate twenty-five million dollars with other Tate assets listed as collateral. The people we’re trying to track down, whomever they may be, are connected to a very shadowy medical research group that appears to be providing medical care to Alexander Tate at Fallon Landing.”

  “We still can’t identify them,” said Berdoza, “but we can identify the doctor.”

  “How?” Josh asked.

  João grinned. He picked up an iPad and opened a window. “Five months ago, the Cadillac got pulled over in San Rafael for failure to stop. Ticket was issued to a Vincent Dabrowski.”

  He flipped to another tab. “Doctor Vincent Dabrowski, age forty-two, graduate Duke Medical School.” And another tab. “Address in Bel Marin Keys.”

  Josh let it sink in. It all added up. It was too much of a coincidence that a doctor at Fallon Landing would be connected to the same shadowy circle of holding companies and blind partnerships that had ensnared Alex’s financial empire. This Dabrowski had to be Alex’s doctor. Even if he could tell them nothing about the legal and financial labyrinth they were trying to untangle, at least he could provide information about Alex’s medical condition.

  “Good,” he said quietly. “Very good, all of you. That’s excellent work.”

  I just want to tell you both good luck. We’re all counting on you.

  He turned and started walking slowly over to his own desk.

  “So we’ll keep chasing it down?” Berdoza said, uncertainty in her voice.

  “Absolutely,” Josh answered. But his mind was already racing ahead to grapple with the equally thorny question of what to do with the knowledge now that he had it.

  Chapter 23

>   “I don’t think this airstrip’s seen this much traffic in years,” said Crane.

  Jessie made a vague sound of acknowledgement. “You should set up a B&B.”

  They were sitting in her Raptor with the engine on and the AC running, parked beside Jessie’s Short 330. Ahead of them, a small plane descended. It touched down and taxied to a stop on the parking area.

  Georges Benly Akema climbed out and slung a canvas satchel over his shoulder. He shielded his eyes against the glaring sun as Crane and Jessie came to meet him.

  “Georges! It’s good to see you again,” said Crane. “Have you met Jessie Diamond?”

  “I’ve not,” said Georges, and offered her his hand. “A pleasure, Ms. Diamond.”

  While they made polite small talk, the pilot removed a wheeled road case from the cargo compartment and rolled it over. Crane had been expecting something smaller.

  “Okay, here’s the job,” Georges said. He opened his satchel and showed them a photo Crane had taken of the interior of the transceiver. It showed several circuit boards stacked like dominos beside a row of status lights. One of the boards was circled in red marker.

  “This is the board you’re looking for,” he said. “It’s socketed into the bus. No problem. Just pull it out.” He pointed out one of the status lights. “This light will go out.”

  Then he took another circuit board wrapped in anti-static cloth from his bag and handed it to Crane. “Then you just plug this one in. When it’s seated properly, the light will come back on. That’s it.”

  “Then what happens?” Jessie asked.

  “The transceiver will start to randomly fail,” said Georges. “We’re hoping the cartel will come get it and take it to their kidnapped engineers to be fixed. Any decent technician will trace the problem right away to this board and this chip. When they dump the ROM, they’ll find a message from us. It tells them to reprogram the radio to send their location on a particular frequency every night at midnight.”

  “You make it sound simple,” said Crane. “There’s a lot that can go wrong there.”

  Georges acknowledged the point. “If it doesn’t work, we try something else.”

  Jessie nodded toward the case. “I’m thinking there’s more to this.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Georges. “That antenna’s very directional. To send the location, it’s going to have to transmit omnidirectional at pretty low power. So we’ll need our own receiver pretty close by to pick up their signal and relay it back.”

  Georges opened the case. Nestled in the foam were a box and a small dish antenna. Inside the top was a topographic map of the area with marked points and notes in thick red ink.

  “We need you to install it here,” Georges said, pointing out a spot on the map. “A little over half a mile away. Close enough to pick up the signal, far enough so they won’t spot it.”

  “No solar panels?” said Jessie.

  Georges shook his head. “Internal power cell. It will wake up each night at midnight, listen for a signal, and then go back to sleep. It’ll last for weeks, if it has to. Let me walk you through the setup process.”

  After Georges’ plane was airborne and headed north again, Crane and Jessie sat in her truck with the replacement circuit board in the center console and the black case with the relay in the bed.

  “Was really hoping we could just fly back out and get this done,” said Jessie.

  But they clearly couldn’t carry the relay in the autogyro. They were going to have to drive it out to the site. They stopped in town to top off the gas and pick up some bottled water. Then they headed back out of town on the main highway. The first ten miles or so were paved. But then the pavement gave way to packed dirt that followed the contours of the landscape with no fills. The truck rattled and bounced over the washboarded surface until Crane began to reconsider the autogyro.

  They rode through a landscape of rocky hillsides, scrub trees and cacti, and salt flats. Occasionally they passed a windblown house or a dirt road leading back to some remote farm. They passed the time trading bad jokes and recommending decent restaurants in various foreign cities. Crane was telling Jessie about his favorite barbecue place in Peshawar when her GPS pinged, and she veered off the road into the desert. The Raptor bounced through a dry stream bed and climbed the slope on the far side, throwing up dirt. Jessie powered up the hillside and stopped at the top of the low ridge.

  According to Georges’ map, this was where they were meant to set up their relay. They got out, and Jessie swept the hills with a pair of binoculars. “There’s the other one,” she announced. She handed Crane the binoculars, and he found the cartel transceiver on the next ridge about a half mile away.

  Crane hefted the case out of the back of the truck, and they placed the relay and its antenna amid some clumps of dried brown grass. Packed beneath it in the case was a square of netting with what looked like tufts of grass and brown foliage woven into it. It looked like a tiny ghillie suit. They draped it over the relay, and from twenty feet away, it was practically invisible. Crane decided it would do.

  Now all that remained was to install the board in the cartel’s transceiver. Crane and Jessie both looked across the ridge at the antenna. “We shouldn’t drive over,” said Jessie. “We don’t want to leave tracks.”

  Crane agreed, so they set off on foot across the narrow basin and up the far slope. When they reached the transceiver, Crane picked the cabinet lock. They found the right board and pulled it out of its socket. Then Jessie installed the new board, and the status light came back on. They locked the cabinet and cleaned the site.

  “Well, that really was simple,” said Jessie as they walked back to the truck.

  “Now we see if it works,” Crane answered. “Let’s get back to town, and I’ll buy us a couple Pacificos.”

  As they drove back to Bahia Tortugas, Crane sat back in his seat and glanced over at Jessie from time to time. She was beautiful—there was no denying that. He was especially taken by the way a loose tendril of hair curled around her ear and the way she bit her lip when she was thinking. But even so, he knew things weren’t going to go beyond the odd bit of flirting they’d been doing. Even that wasn’t with intent. It was as if they flirted with each other precisely to tell each other that they both got that that was all it meant.

  Crane had had platonic friendships with women before; it wasn’t as though he couldn’t grasp the concept. But this was different somehow. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.

  He was still thinking about it when he spotted a black open-topped Jeep parked beside the road on top of the next rise. A figure was standing up in the back, leaning on the rollbar, and scanning the road with binoculars.

  “Birdwatchers?” said Jessie.

  “Yeah, that’s probably it,” Crane said. He took the MHS pistol from his belt and set it in his lap.

  They flew past the Jeep, and Crane saw two more men in the front seats, and the driver starting up the engine. The Jeep kicked up dust as it wheeled around onto the road and came up fast behind them.

  “Okay, not birdwatchers,” said Jessie. She floored it, and the Raptor jumped as if kicked.

  But the Jeep was still closing. It came up behind them and rammed the Raptor’s rear bumper. Jessie swore and pushed the truck faster. Then Crane heard the crack of gunfire, and bullets ricocheted off the bed and tailgate. One hit the rear window with a loud whack that left a white impact scar on the bullet-resistant glass.

  The Raptor’s rear window couldn’t be opened, and Crane couldn’t get a shot at the Jeep out his door window. The only way he could return fire was to pull himself up and out of the window to sit on the doorframe and fire over the roof. And he had no intention of trying that at ninety miles an hour the way the truck was bouncing around on this terrible road.

  He looked out the back again and saw nothing but the cloud of dust they were kicking up. Then the Jeep materialized out of it, right on their bumper, and slammed them forward again. Jessie fought to k
eep control of the Raptor. They pulled ahead, and the Jeep was lost in the dust cloud again.

  It can’t be very pleasant driving through that, Crane thought. Especially in an open vehicle. Then the Jeep appeared out of the dust on Jessie’s side. Crane saw a figure in the passenger seat, hanging on to the windshield frame. The one standing in the rear had the gun, some kind of automatic rifle. He wore goggles and a bandanna around his mouth and nose.

  Jessie lowered her window as the Jeep came up on her side. “Give me that!” she shouted over the wind and engine noise, and she grabbed Crane’s pistol.

  “I thought you had a gun!” Crane shouted back.

  “Can’t really get to it and drive the truck!” Jessie answered. “Here. Use this.” She hit a switch under the dash, and a drawer slid out from beneath his seat. He looked down and saw a Tavor CTAR-21 rifle nestled in gray foam.

  “You drive around with an Israeli military assault rifle under the seat?” Crane said.

  “In situations like this, I find some of my passengers like to actually shoot back!” she snapped.

  “Okay, okay.” Crane grabbed the bullpup weapon and turned around in his seat just as the gunner in the Jeep opened up and the rear window splintered and cracked. Jessie held the wheel in one hand and fired the MHS out the window with the other.

  Crane punched out the shattered safety glass with the muzzle, and as the Jeep reappeared through the dust, he opened up with a long burst. His shots went wild as the truck bounced, but he put a couple rounds into the hood and a couple more into the windshield. The Jeep veered off and fell back.

  “Where are they?” Jessie said as she steered back and forth across the road to keep them from pulling alongside.

  All Crane could see behind them was the roiling dust. “I don’t have them!”

  She turned to take quick glances over her shoulder as Crane peered through the dust, looking for the Jeep’s boxy outline.