Allies

by Wolf Riedel

  “That’s good to hear,” he said, “even if you don’t get much time to come down here.”

  “I’m hoping for a week—maybe two—before school next year. I’ll grab a long weekend or two before school finishes too.”

  “Maybe I can work in a trip to see you up in Meaford as well.”

  “I don’t know, dad. Having your father The Colonel visit you on course . . . that’s a good way to get marked for a blading.”

  Kurt smiled and turned to his Blackberry on the side table which had changed from its occasional discrete vibrations every time an email came in to a loud buzz signaling an incoming phone call.

  “Colonel Richter,”

  “Good morning, Sir. And how are you this glorious Sunday morning, Sir?” said the voice on the phone.

  “I was fine Sergeant Major until your call. I presume my expectations of a quiet Sunday at home with my daughter are about to go down the tubes, aren’t they?” An early morning call from Devon Jackson, Phil’s Command Sergeant Major, generally meant a summons for a meeting of some type or other.

  “Nothing of the kind, Sir,” Jackson replied. “How is the young’un. Is she a qualified snake eater and arctic warrior yet?”

  “Still a snake eater in training, Sergeant Major. She’s just advised me she’ll be fully qualified to consume large quantities of Snow Snakes by the end of the summer.”

  “Good for her,” Jackson chuckled. “The army needs more Richters.”

  “Hey! I work at SOCCENT. I know bullshit when I hear it,” laughed Kurt. “But I’ll tell her you said hello and wished her well.”

  “You bet, Sir,” said Jackson. “The boss wants to see you today but not until later this afternoon. We need some more time to gather some facts before we need to meet. He said you could drop Tara off at his place for the barbecue and then pop in here for fifteen hundred hours. We should be done in an hour or less.”

  “Anything I need to read up on?” asked Kurt.

  “No Sir. This is new stuff. We got a murder of one of our guys up in Ocala and we’re tracking something going on up in Nangarhar with the MARSOC folks,” said Jackson. “We’re looking for some clarification.”

  “Problems up there?” asked Kurt.

  “Could be,” said Jackson. “You know what they say: The H in MARSOC stands for Humble. Oh wait. There is no H in MARSOC. We’ll see you this afternoon, Sir.”

  Richter clicked End and placed his Blackberry back onto the side table.

  “Gotta go to work?” Tara asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, “but not before we go to Phil’s this afternoon. Heather and Marie will be over there. I’ll take you up to their place and then head over to SOCCENT for an hour or so.”

  “Heather’s here?” Tara’s eyebrows rose in pleasure. Heather was Phil’s sister who worked for the Department of State, had a permanent home in Washington but had spent a considerable time in Paris on a long term attachment to the US embassy there. More importantly, there had been a fairly significant relationship developing between Kurt and Heather for the last year. In fact during the week prior to Tara’s arrival Heather had stayed at Kurt’s house. The two had decided that, while Tara both understood and approved of the relationship—in fact, Kurt and Tara had stayed at Heather’s apartment in Paris a few times—prudence dictated that it was perhaps a tad too early to be blatant about it. Besides, Heather wanted to spend some time with her brother as well.

  Marie was Marie Lamoureux, a French-Canadian Lieutenant-Commander with the Office of the Judge Advocate General who had been assigned as Kurt’s legal advisor. Coincidentally Marie was currently the significant other to Phil who was a widower. Her current assignment was, in large part, Kurt’s doing. Prior to Phil’s promotion he and Marie had been debating as to which of the two of them would retire and join the other at his or her place of duty. Phil’s promotion had skewed that in favor of Marie seeking her release and moving to Florida. Kurt thought he could kill two birds with one stone by having her move onto his staff in Tampa and thereby bringing her close to Phil while also getting a few more years of service out of someone whom he considered to be one of Canada’s foremost experts on the law of special operations. Canada’s Judge Advocate General easily bought into that; gaining an additional legal officer position on his establishment on someone else’s budget was a no-brainer.

  While Marie was technically not in Phil’s chain of command—she remained under the command and control of the Canadian JAG while assigned to Kurt—the two had determined that this fine point would probably be lost on all the busy bodies that inhabited the military community who would be exercising their sharp tongues if the general commanding SOCCENT was cohabiting with a Lieutenant Commander who worked in his office. A wise old man had once said: there’s nothing wrong with crossing the line a little, it’s jumping over it buck naked that gets you in trouble. Marie had therefore found an apartment near the base and, while she and Phil socialized frequently in private, they never attended public events as a couple.

  “It will be nice to see Marie again,” Tara said. “How’s it going with her and Uncle Phil.” Phil and Kurt had been uncle to each other’s kids for several years even though they weren’t related. The whole thing had started when Brian was having trouble constantly calling Kurt Mister Richter and Kurt had glibly suggested that since he and Phil had been brothers-in-arms for several years that Brian could just call him Uncle Kurt. The kids had immediately taken up the joke and started calling everyone uncle or aunt. It had just stuck.

  “They’re doing fine. For the time being Marie is quite happy that she can be here with Phil and still be doing operational law. On the other hand she’s just gotten her call as a lawyer with the Florida Bar. That opens up her options. I think they’ll have at least another year together before they move Phil on to something else. There are a lot of folks standing in line who want to get their ticket punched as the commander of SOCCENT.”

  “What about you?” she asked. “What’s next for you?”

  Good question, thought Kurt.

  Kurt had passed twenty years service and could retire with a pension. The pension didn’t really matter much to Kurt as he was also the president of the North American branch of Richter Breweries while his cousin Wilhelm ran the company’s European operations. Money wasn’t the issue and neither was workload as the business was in the hands of extremely efficient managers who ran the day-to-day operations. Kurt’s role was big-picture strategic direction which took up a moderate amount of his time.

  His greatest challenge with the military, and, thereby the resulting uncertainty about his career, came from having been wounded and therefore bearing the stigma of being damaged goods. Prior to the wounding, he’d led an active life, first in the infantry and then the special forces and had been considered a rising star. The opportunities for advancement at the Colonel and above rank, however, were very few and heavily contested and there was already a malicious whisper campaign that he simply wouldn’t be able to physically handle a brigade or a more senior Army command. He didn’t relish life as a staff weenie relegated to managing one of the plethora of mind numbing, inconsequential directorates in Ottawa.

  “I don’t know, honey,” he said. “We’ll just see what opportunities come up.”

  “Maybe you could come and teach at the Defence Academy in Kingston?” she said hopefully.

  “I think they want someone with an education for that; a master’s as a minimum,” he smiled ruefully. “I’m old army; I’m not even a ring knocker.”

  “Well then get one. You’re young yet.”

  “Thanks a lot,” he laughed. “Let’s talk about more immediate things. What do you have to do for school while you’re here?”

  Tara threw herself back into her lounge with an aw crap attitude.

  “I guess the first thing that I’ve got to do is watch some video’s for Skinner’s class,” she said.

  “Videos?” Kurt asked.

  “Yup. It’s a history electi
ve called Politics and Propaganda in the Cinema,” she said. We watch several select films and analyze how they reflect or promote certain public attitudes. We did one on the sinking of the Lusitania and right now we’re doing D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.”

  “I remember that one,” said Kurt. “An old silent movie about the Civil War and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “That’s the one. Did you know that when Griffith made the movie in 1915, the Klan had been pretty much extinct for dozens of years? At the time though there had been major immigration into America from Europe with many of the immigrants being Catholic or Jewish. The movie created a mythology about the Klan being protectors of the home and family and created a resurgence of membership that was primarily anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-immigration. By 1924, when the population of the USA was only one hundred and sixteen million, some six million of them were members of the Klan. That’s five percent of the population, twenty percent of the adult white male population. It wasn’t just a southern thing; they were big everywhere and particularly in the mid-west; everywhere where people were worried about losing their jobs to immigrants.”

  “Okay,” Kurt smiled and held up his hands in mock surrender. “I guess if it’s done right then you can learn history from the movies.”

  “Sure,” she said. “As long as you don’t believe that the movie portrays the reality of the situation. As far as a history of the Reconstruction era, Birth of a Nation is at best a flawed interpretation and at worst blatantly racist and a gross misrepresentation of the truth. It was, however, technically a great film and probably one of the most socially influential ever made in the States.”

  “And? You have an essay to do.”

  “And, I have an essay to do.” She slid down a bit more into her lounge and sighed as the sun and the warming breeze washed over her. “But not just right this second.”

  CHAPTER 4

  NE 2nd Ave, Ocala, Florida

  Sunday 04 Mar 07 0830 hrs EST

  Sal bumped the Suburban over a rough curb and into a vast and empty parking lot. “You sure we got the right place?” he asked. “This joint looks like an abandoned supermarket. Sometimes you trust this Garmin too much.”

  “This is the right address and there are a few cars in the lot,” said Mark. He pointed to a spot next to several handicap slots in front of a porched entry fronting a long grey stuccoed single-story building devoid of all signs of windows. “Pull up over there where the rest of them are and I’ll see if our guy’s here.”

  Two sets of glass doors under the porch roof provided entry into the building; neither was unlocked but a buzzer to the right side provided hope that someone inside would respond to a summons. A long five minutes and several additional buzzes later someone did. A rumpled figure; maybe five foot six and at least two hundred pounds sporting rumpled jeans, a tee shirt and a short pony tail.

  “Hi,” he said. “You the army guys?”

  “That would be us,” said Mark. “Are you Bill Embers?”

  “Yup. C’mon in.” Embers held the door for them and pointed them down a jumble of aisles and workspaces located throughout a large open-concept warehouse structure.

  “What is this place?” asked Sal instinctively ducking under several water pipes barely clearing his head.

  “If you mean the building itself, then it was built as a supermarket,” said Embers. “If you are asking: what is it now? then it’s the offices of Taylor, Bean & Whitacker. We’re a wholesale mortgage lending firm. We’re the nation’s fifth largest issuer of GNMAs.”

  “What’s a GNMA?” asked Mark.

  “It stands for Government National Mortgage Association,” said Embers somewhat dumbfounded that someone didn’t know what a GNMA was. The blank look on Mark and Sal’s faces took him further. “GNMAs . . . You know . . . Ginnie Maes . . . Government backed guarantees to mortgage lenders designed to make it easier for people to get mortgage financing. They reduce lenders’ risk so that they are more encouraged to lend money at lower rates. They’ve been keeping our home ownership system perking along since the Great Depression. We’ve got almost two thousand employees here and we expect to issue over thirty billion in securities this year. It’s a big shop. Don’t get fooled by the condition of the facilities.”

  He brought them into an area consisting of one long partition wall with long shelves providing desks and workspaces. There were no partitions between the workspaces but long plexi-glass sheets separated the aisles so that the person working at one side had a hazy face-on view of the person working on the other side of the divider. The floorspace was filled with many such rows and partitions.

  Bill noticed them viewing the arrangements and pointed to the other side. “That’s the call-center on that side. My outfit, IT is on this side. We work a twenty-four, seven operation here. The other departments not so much.”

  “And Lewis?” asked Sal.

  Bill pointed to a chair some five spaces down the line. “That’s his workstation over there. Listen. When you called this morning you said this was about a homicide investigation; whose homicide is it anyway?”

  Mark looked at Embers carefully. “I regret to tell you that James Lewis was murdered last night.”

  Embers recoiled in shock. “No way. No way! What happened?”

  Mark sensed genuine surprise and shock. He watched Embers again.

  “He and his wife were both shot and killed at their home,” Mark continued.

  Embers collapsed into a chair. “Carlie too. Aw Gawd. No . . .” His head snapped up. “They had two girls. Them too?”

  “The girls are missing.”

  “Aw Shit.”

  Mark watched Embers carefully but there was no sign of deception or pretension. Embers’s shock and distress appeared genuine.

  Mark discretely directed Sal over to Lewis’s workstation to start examining whatever documents were there. They’d need a password to get into the system. Time for that. He pulled another chair over and sat facing Embers.

  “What can you tell me about Lewis?” Mark asked.

  Embers shook. “I don’t know what to say. He was a great guy. Worked hard. Was here on time every day. Was well trained. Knew his shit. Did mostly server upkeep and maintenance here. I could give him any task and he’d be able to take care of it. Had a great family life. I met them at the various firm and section functions we had . . . saw his wife and children maybe every second month or so.”

  “Any idea who his friends were?”

  “He was friends with all the guys and gals in the section but no one that I’d call a best friend or buddy. I know he was in the National Guard but can’t say I know any of those guys.”

  “Other than the Guard was a he a member of any club or association that you knew of?”

  Embers shook his head. “Nothing that I can recall. He did like doing gun shows and buying and selling rifles and handguns. I’ve got no idea if he had a collection or not but he frequently talked about going to this show or another around the State and what he bought and sold; mostly handguns and semi automatic rifles”

  “How about his wife?” asked Mark.

  “Other than that she worked for E-One, I‘ve got no idea.”

  Sal came back from Lewis’s workstation with a brief shake of his head.

  “We’re going to need access to his computer.”

  “Yeah I can give you that but I’ll need to be with you while you’re looking into it. He didn’t have access into the financial side of the system but he’d have email and management software for the server systems. I can’t let you into the latter but the emails and his file directories I’ve got no problem with.”

  “Now that looked more like a corporate headquarters,” said Sal as they made the turn onto NW 13th St. E-One was both a corporate headquarters and a manufacturing facility for fire rescue vehicles of all classes. The business was located in several large buildings on the west side of Ocala on a side road immediately adjacent to the I-75. Both from the o
utside and the inside the place just looked more purpose-built than Taylor, Bean and for that matter looked better maintained. “Can you believe the outfit that the husband worked at is planning on handling thirty billion dollars of government securities.”

  “It’s not like they have thirty billion in assets,” said Mark. “They’re just writing paper to guarantee debt using the government’s money.”

  “Yeah,” said Sal. “My money and yours.”

  “What are you worried about? It’s all covered by real estate. It’s not like it’s going to come out of your pocket or mine.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Sal sat in silence for a minute while Mark contemplated their interview with Carlie Lewis’s supervisor.

  The Interview had gone quickly.

  Carlie had worked in corporate purchasing as a parts replenishment specialist. Her duties had involved completing routine processes so that various vehicle components flowed smoothly and in a timely manner from suppliers to the production line and the parts warehouse for just-in-time replenishment of individual stocks. The job involved monitoring computerized stock levels of specific inventory and then generating appropriate purchase orders to maintain benchmark amounts; a job which she did well while dealing with short timelines which, unsurprisingly, generated a fair amount of pressure. Despite that there was no indication that the job had generated any friction with anyone in a way that might have resulted in violence. By all indications she got on well with her coworkers and managers and was well thought of both by the manufacturing and warehouse managers and the suppliers.

  There was less knowledge about Carlie’s family life at E-One than there had been at Taylor, Bean about Jim Lewis. Mark attributed that to the two companies’ workplace environments; Taylor Bean’s IT section was open and rough and tumbledown while Carlie’s cubicle was well-ordered and well screened off from her—mostly male—coworkers. In addition, Carlie’s supervisor was more reserved and stand-offish than Embers had been. While Embers had been affable and genuinely upset by the Lewises’ deaths this one had a more business like reaction to the news as a result of what appeared to be a more businesslike relationship. He did have one new piece of information: Carlie had planned on taking the girls to Disney World that past Saturday.