The three men shared a brief look. Not one of shock, since for that much cash they’d have no qualms about the eight dead bodies. That was barely a single week’s death toll for violent Chicago street gangs recently.
The middle-aged man asked, “How are you going to get the money in the first place, and who will handle the eight van loaders when they finish their work?”
“That’s none of your business. I didn’t tell you how I managed that contract award last month, which I was hired to arrange, and you don't need to know how I’ll do this. You obtain the vans, and I’ll provide you what size and type are needed to hold all the pallets, and you must also hire the expendable van loaders and position them and their vans where I tell you to, with a cell phone number for me to reach the thug in charge.
“When the cash is ready for your people to drive away, I’ll call your drivers on another number you provide to me, and they can come arrive inside the truck I’ll need for the bodies, and they will promptly drive off with the vans loaded with the money. We will not meet. They don’t even need to know what’s inside the vans if that’s your preference, to increase security. For the style of the vehicles I’ve picked, they can’t see what’s locked in the rear of them from the front seat. I don't care what you tell them is inside.
“I won’t get paid by you until you inspect and confirm the contents. You can sell the money to offshore banks to put it back into circulation, or you can save that fee and distribute it yourself. I understand that you typically pay as much as a twenty-five percent laundering fee for stolen or other illegal money, even though this cash is much safer to move. I want twenty-five percent of that remaining seventy-five percent of the one hundred forty-three million dollars I’ll deliver. Let’s call it twenty-six million dollars, payable to an offshore account number I’ll furnish to you, due within two weeks of you taking possession of the goods. You will know by then that your share is worth over eighty-one million dollars. More if you distribute it yourself.
“I brought along copies of the Federal Reserve’s invoices for the expected contents of each of the four armored trucks.” He passed over four folded sheets to the older man.
“If you don’t trust the Feds to accurately count the money to be shredded, count the shit yourself, but do it fast. I expect prompt and full payment two weeks after I make the delivery, regardless.”
“You’re an arrogant and overconfident bastard ain’t ya?” That was from the youngest of the three middle management types sent to hear what Stiles had to offer. Perhaps he was still on the way up in the Outfit and felt the need to show his toughness to the others.
Stiles smirked and appeared to be considering. “Let’s see; I’m going to walk into the Federal Reserve, make them give me four truckloads of old cash and have it delivered to a warehouse without their massive security interfering. Then I’ll eliminate, all by myself, the eight punks you send to me with the vans I’ll have them load. Could your entire Outfit pull this heist off Frankie boy? Could you take care of the van drivers alone? I assume they’ll come armed, and will be distrustful of me. When they see those stacks of cash, I’d think they would want more money for their share. Perhaps all the money. Could you handle them alone? I doubt that.”
“Screw you, Stiles.” He suddenly stopped as he realized the tall skinny man had called him Frankie.
Stiles looked at the two older men. “Eddy, Charley, if you want to send him along as one of the eight van loaders, I’ll help you get rid of one of your dumber young lieutenants.”
Frankie, angry, started to rise when “Eddy” leaned forward and pushed him back into his seat. “Stay there, Frankie, and keep your hand out of your coat. Your old man would get pissed at me if I let you get yourself killed. Mr. Stiles here has a reputation back where he works. Using his skill is how I’m sure he learned our first names, and a lot more I’d imagine. You’d do well to learn more about the background of the people your Pop wants you to learn how to negotiate deals with. You need to recognize when there are nearly risk-free deals that can make us easy money. If Stiles can’t deliver the money, we haven’t lost shit. If he does deliver, we can make a shit load.”
Nodding to Stiles, he rendered the decision that was his to make all along. “We’ll be in touch with you about the vans and their loaders. I can see from the invoices the armored trucks will arrive forty minutes apart next Wednesday morning. Call me later today at the same number you used before with the description of the vans you want. I know a small, ambitious street gang that needs a big score to buy guns. Their leader was just shot down by a rival gang, and they want to buy better weapons to take revenge. They tried to buy assault rifles from an associate of ours but didn’t have the money. I think they’ll be your loaders. If not them, there are others.”
Eddy rose and shook hands with Stiles. The meeting was over and the deal made.
As Stiles walked out, he was already thinking about the property he was going to agree to lease tomorrow for the lab, and how he’d spend much of his remaining six million dollars over the next two and a half weeks, before his next cash influx. It was going to be an exciting couple of months. Stanton told him the device Stiles wanted should be ready for an initial test in under two months, because of the shortcut provided by the prototype device and plans he’d obtained from Sanjay Passang, at the DARPA lab.
Chapter 10: Amplified Control
It was a difficult four weeks for both Stacy and her father. Barb’s body had not been found, nor was there a report of a woman treated for a head wound at any nearby hospital. The same, however, was true for the known wound Stiles had suffered to his left butt cheek, based on blood smears in the car he left behind. With his mental ability, a doctor could treat him and be ordered to forget.
Two weeks previously there was an incident in Chicago that suggested Stiles might be there. There also were counter suggestions that organized crime was likely involved in the major theft from a Federal Reserve Bank, with extensive insider help. A local street gang was also rumored to have participated in some fashion after the robbery, in exchange for automatic weapons as their payment, but the eight gang members had reputedly vanished.
It was a confusing story, and the insider help involved so many people that it seemed unlikely that all of them had cooperated. Even the Armored truck drivers and guards, and the escorting security appeared to be complicit. There were unlikely outsiders involved, with no serious criminal pasts, such as warehouse forklift operators, and four moving company truck drivers who, per security recordings, had participated in transferring the large cubes of cash from four armored cars to their moving company trucks. It was a robbery that took just under three hours to complete in the very bowels of the Federal Reserve Bank building itself. The cash weighed tons and was transferred to low-clearance household style moving trucks using forklifts in that time span.
Authorities refused to reveal how much money was involved, but rumors claimed it well exceeded a hundred million dollars and was all but untraceable. News pundits and uninvolved former police officials speculated that the theft involved old cash removed from circulation, which was slated to be shredded.
Grayson knew Brogan believed Stiles was involved. It had happened soon after the official announcement by a White House Spokesperson that scientists had discovered a handful of people that bore a rare genetic mutation, which permitted them to exert short range mind control. For a WH that was so antagonistic to other scientific claims, such as Global Warming, species extinction, and GMO food benefits, the story hadn’t stirred the level of public concern expected, sounding like a political distraction from other stories plaguing the administration. The President was known for repeating conspiracy theories from the fringe.
On the same weekend as the robbery, North Korea renewed their threats to launch nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles at mainland US cities and conducted an internationally condemned missile test. An intercontinental ballistic missile, minus an operational warhead, was launched high over Japan, for
a re-entry and splashdown in the southern Pacific, two thousand miles south of Hawaii. The high arc, had it been flatter, suggested it could have had the range to reach as far as the US east coast, if that were it’s target. That renewed public concern and outrage diverted attention from the Mind Control story.
The public lost those details in the politically charged reporting over the threat of an implied nuclear first strike on Pyongyang, which the President implied might happen in a series of Tweets. The threat against the North Korean Capitol, accompanied by insults for Kim Jong-un in response to his belittling of the US president, hinted at such an attack via confusing Tweets by the predictably bellicose new leader of the Free World. He characteristically refused to clarify or retract his public pronouncements, and only offered conflicting Tweets on the subject within the same weekend. The worry over nuclear exchanges that could wipe out entire cities was of greater concern to the media and the public than mind control of people within a few block radius of one foreign city.
Then unexpectedly, there was a one-hour Seoul-like event that definitively demonstrated there was someone in Chicago with a mind control amplifier and transmitter. Because of the power that signal contained, the user could either be a Compeller or a Controller like Stiles, although Grayson’s bet was on the latter, because it was a mercenary use of mental control rather than an attempt to generate chaos, although some chaos resulted.
****
Grayson and Gorka were the obvious go-to guys to rush to Chicago, along with two other Immunes, Orville Madison, and Ally Sheridan. Because Compellers were at risk, and only Grayson had demonstrated the capability to protect anyone against a strong mind control transmission, Mike would stay close to him.
Gorka was skeptical of their success in finding the individual responsible, whether it was Stiles or not. “This will be a wild goose chase. It’s obvious the hour was devoted to theft, and again not from stacks of new cash in bank vaults. We’ll never even know how much he took. By the time we learn where the cash went, that money will be gone, and it’s just as untraceable as the other heist. It frankly seems like a low profit, strange thing for him to do, compared to the previous bank robbery.”
The center of the affected area was roughly the Loop, the central business district of the downtown area, which included the commercial core, City Hall, and the Cook County Seat. It holds the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and many major corporations. However, it wasn’t the corporations or banks that got robbed. It was the personal funds in the pockets and pocketbooks of the people there, including the politicians, and employees of those corporations.
It was also money from small businesses, hotels, their guests, shoppers, and people on the street in the downtown area, who had emptied their registers and wallets. They marched to the street and tossed their money into plastic bins resting on the seats inside each of perhaps five hundred, of the nearly seven thousand Chicago taxis. Stiles had prepared for this a day earlier when he sent select drivers to collect three each of fifteen hundred plastic bins he’d made a shipping company “donate.” The cabs roamed the downtown streets with open windows to collect the cash, only bills of tens and higher denominations, as the victims tossed the wads into the bins.
After about forty-five minutes, the taxis drove out of the city, all other traffic pulling to the sides of the roads for them, following their Pied Piper with the transmitter. The taxis had gone to an industrial area where everyone else had been ordered to vacate or to go to sleep. There, the drivers unloaded their cash-filled bins inside a long drive-through structure, open at each end, where other controlled people emptied the bins into several larger trucks, with thousands of loose bills found after the fact. Because everyone was forced to forget what they had done, and ordered to scatter, it was hours before the authorities discovered the now abandoned central collection station and the empty bins.
A careful analysis of the couple of hundred thousand people that were affected, and the boundaries of where the fringe of those under control existed, it revealed that the center of control was a mobile transmitter that was in the Loop district when it was activated. Surveillance cameras revealed an omni style antenna mounted next to the extendable dish antenna on a stolen television station van, which was left behind at the central collection point for the cash, minus the mind control transmitter and its associated antenna.
As the BII team investigated, in cooperation with local police and the FBI, Grayson reached a conclusion that wasn’t well received by the other investigative organizations. “This was too petty a use of this technology. I think it’s a deliberate distraction.”
The FBI Special Agent in Charge and the Superintendent of Police disagreed, and his opinion provoked outrage from the Mayor.
“Petty! Petty?” The mayor wasn’t having any of that from an investigator for a small Federal Bureau he’d never heard of before today.
“The son of a bitch stole tens of millions of dollars from the people that happened to be in the Loop. Some of it from my Goddamned pocket! That isn’t petty theft.” That embarrassing fact surely accounted for some of his vitriol.
Grayson calmly provided his reasoning. “Sir, none of us knows how much he took, but you just used an estimate of tens of millions of dollars. The Federal Reserve theft last month was over a hundred forty million, and I guarantee you the same individual did that job. He may not need this money, but he wanted to test his new transmitter, and to make a statement. He could take as much as he wanted with this new transmitter, and widen his control range over people. The money he gathered this morning needs to be sorted and counted, and it isn’t neatly stacked as the other cash was. It honestly must be a big mess for him to get sorted.
“I’m confident that forcing secret electronic money transfers of billions of dollars to various secret offshore and foreign accounts would be more profitable, and frankly easier for him to arrange, and then to move the funds. With this newly expanded capability, I don't believe it’s just money he wants. I think he craves power and control over all those around him.”
“Yeah? What makes you such a Goddamned expert?”
The mayor’s tone irritated Grayson. “The person that made this happen inherited a rare gene mutation that gave him an unusual mental ability. These three agents and I each have inherited a similar rare gene mujtation. That makes the four of us Goddamned experts, Mister Mayor.”
The mayor shut his mouth and looked a bit apprehensive, unaware that Grayson hadn’t told him of the two gene types, nor which benign version Grayson sported. The nods of the Police Chief and the special agent in charge of the Chicago FBI Office demonstrated they knew this. Brogan had contacted them before his team arrived.
“Mayor, the Bureau of International Intelligence agents are all people with mental abilities that are related to what was displayed here today. Except the person here has a transmitter that amplifies a natural ability to mentally control people, giving him a far greater range than his natural ability allows. Our team here consists of four BII agents of two types, and there are probably no more than sixty-five people in the entire US population with our abilities, divided evenly between two unique capabilities. A White House science advisory spokesman described this ability last month when they publicly announced our existence.
“It’s why we’re here, and why we have taken the lead in the effort to capture the criminal mind that perpetrated these thefts. Anyone else, including police officers and FBI agents, are subject to his complete control unless they wear one of the protective insulating suits we brought with us. There are two hundred of these lightweight foil coated suits, folded in the ten cases that came with us on our military transport. The suits will be shared among the investigative teams, as protection from the transmitted mind control commands the criminal used to make you, and all the thousands of people around you obey his orders. I will leave one with you if you wish, but it’s only useful if it is worn and fully sealed before he takes control of your mind. You can’t live inside these suits e
very day.”
“You’re one of these people who can mind control others aren’t you?” He sounded cautious.
“No, Sir. I have the Immune variation of the gene, which means a person with the controling gene version can’t control or compell me the way you were. Two of my fellow agents have the same gene. One of the agents with us has the Compeller gene, but that agent is subject to being controlled by a strong enough signal, unless he wears a foil suit, or employs a different method for resistance.”
“Which agent is that?”
“Sir, that isn’t something anyone outside of our team needs to know.”
His sour looking expression when he looked at the three agents across the room, calmly looking back at him with smiles, proved none of them now had the mayor’s complete trust. His vulnerability today had left him unsettled.
Grayson attempted to reassure him. “Sir, we’re the good guys. We carry guns, as do the police officers in your department, and I hope you trust them not to shoot you. We also protect the President and ranking members of Congress.”
“My officers can’t make me help rob banks or steal from individuals.”
There was no point in arguing the issue with someone that had just found it entirely reasonable to throw his money through the window of a taxi. As did his aides, and several commissioners, and his bodyguard, who all threw in their money.
The investigation into the second Chicago incident continued, but there was no trail leading directly to Stiles, or to an unknown new Compeller. Unlike the Seoul event, this one was not ignored by the press, and Brogan used his influence with the President and the National Security Council to keep his BII agents out of the limelight. There were no televised interviews allowed, or professional information shared, to maintain their public anonymity.
Controller: Controller Trilogy, Book 1 Page 32