Jake Caldwell Thrillers

by Weaver, James

  “What about Jerry Hart? He a member of this SVR group, too?”

  “I don’t think so.” Plastic rattled through the speaker followed by crunching sounds as Cat talked. “As far as I can tell, he’s a red-blooded American boy. Both parents live in Phoenix, and he’s got a sister who lives two miles from him and works at Hallmark Cards. He lives in a downtown condo but a fairly crappy one.”

  “Chill with the Cheetos, dude. You’re making me nauseous. So, Hart may be American, but he’s working for the Russians. Give me some leverage on him.”

  “Come on, Jake,” Cat said. “You’re a smart guy. Check the guy’s bank account.”

  “Which I’m assuming you did?”

  “Of course. Hart’s been skating by this side of broke by the hairs on his nut sack. His charges for insufficient funds at his bank are his second biggest expense.”

  “What’s his first?” Jake asked.

  “ATM withdrawals. The majority of them at the Hollywood Casino.”

  Jake and Bear exchanged raised eyebrows. “Interesting. Jerry has a bit of a gambling bug.”

  “Yeah, one of those giant Japanese radioactive bugs from those cheesy movies. He owes a lot of people a lot of money.”

  “And I bet Keats is one of them,” Jake said.

  Bear whistled. “Son of a bitch. There’s our leverage.”

  “Anything else on the other names, Cat?”

  “You want me to dig into the dead people?”

  Jake scratched the conference table with his fingernail, drawing dollar signs. One of the few good pieces of advice his father ever gave him was when in doubt, follow the money. “Yeah, see if you can find how wide this net goes. I want connection points with Hart and MedFire. Somebody’s pulling the strings, and I want to know who.”

  Silence crackled from the other end. “Jake, you’re going to umm…pay me for this research, right? As much as I’d love to do it so Bear doesn’t beat the crap out of me, I do have bills to pay.”

  “Keep digging and I’ll make it worth your while. Call me back if you get anything.” Jake disconnected the call.

  “What are you thinkin’?” Bear asked.

  “The picture’s getting a little clearer.”

  “If it’s a picture of a giant clusterfuck, then you’re right.”

  Jake jumped to his feet and slapped Bear on his oversized shoulder. “We have some leverage to go after Hart at least.”

  “What leverage?”

  “He’s in debt up to his ass, and I’m guessing he’s doing what he’s doing for the money because he’s going to get his face bashed in by a leg breaker like me. Keats lied, and I’m wondering if it’s because he’s holding his marker. Maybe giving him a little grace for a piece of whatever action Hart is working on.”

  “Interesting theory.”

  Jake opened the door. “Let’s go find out if I’m right.”

  * * *

  “The FBI has Androv,” Minsky said. Minsky was a fat and sweaty assistant to one of the members of the Russian government who pulled Sokolov’s strings. He was a pompous and detestable creature.

  Sokolov sat upright in his chair. “How in the hell did that happen?”

  “You tell us, Borya. Our question is whether he was captured or went in voluntarily.”

  Sokolov thought back to the conversation about Androv wanting to abandon the Blackbird plan. He supposed either scenario was plausible. If Androv spilled his guts, the Blackbird was dead in the water. If he kept his mouth shut, they could still pull it off, but to do so would require another programmer. Regardless, he had to move fast.

  “I’ll call you back,” Sokolov said. He knew what he had to do but didn’t want to do it. He could see little alternative if the Blackbird was to be executed, so took a deep breath and dialed the number. “Keats, we need to talk.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Jake briefed the team on what he’d found out. Both Foster and Stone seemed impressed and wanted to know where he gained this wealth of information, but Jake wouldn’t give them Cat. Good hacking resources were hard to find.

  “I’m getting kind of hungry,” Hart said as Jake and Bear entered the room. “Your guys grabbed me before I could get any lunch.”

  “We’ll scare you up some grub.” Jake took a seat. “After we talk.”

  Bear assumed a post in the corner behind Hart, jabbing his teeth with a toothpick from his pocket. Hart jerked a peek over his shoulder, and Bear did his best to look dangerous. They planned to turn up the heat and make Hart nervous. Nervous people tended to make mental mistakes and talk too much.

  “Here’s the deal, Jerry,” Jake continued, resting his elbows on the table. “We talked to the powers that be and immunity is off the table.”

  Hart slammed back in his chair, slouching. “Then I don’t have anything to say.”

  “Listen, they want to, but by law they literally can’t do it. What they are willing to do is, depending on the information you provide, give serious examination of the potential charges and be very, very lenient with you.”

  Hart’s lip twitched. “I want no charges, or I don’t talk.”

  “And people in hell want ice water,” Bear said. “You gotta give them something or you’re looking at some serious ass-pounding time in the big house. Judging from your delicate frame and those dimples, you’ll end up wearing a dress and lipstick by the end of your first day.”

  Hart shifted, as nervous as a whore in church, but he wasn’t talking. They needed to grease the skids with the little truths to let the heavy-duty ones come rolling out.

  “What’s your game of choice at the casino?” Jake asked. Hart’s eyes shot up. “I like poker myself. No limit hold ’em. What’s yours?”

  “How do you know I gamble?”

  “We know a lot of shit. What’s your game of choice?”

  “A little poker, a little blackjack.” Hart’s face blushed with shame. “Mostly craps.”

  “You can lose a lot of money playing craps. Enough to get in trouble.”

  “I guess.”

  Jake clasped his hands and leaned forward. “How much do you owe Keats?” Hart’s lips disappeared to a line. His subconscious shut his mouth so he wouldn’t spill the truth. “That much, huh? Has he sent anyone after you yet? Let me guess, a bald guy with a scar, a little thinner than me, but plenty bigger than you.”

  “What’s he have to do with anything?”

  Jake rapped his knuckles on the table. “I used to do that job for Keats, Jerry. Yeah, I was his muscle man, but I grew a conscious and got out. This guy working for Keats now doesn’t have my kind of conscious. It’ll get painful for you, and if they can’t get to you, they can get to your old girlfriend or maybe even your sister.”

  Hart winced. “He said he won’t hurt her.”

  “How much do you owe him?”

  “Forty thousand.”

  “Jesus,” Jake whispered. With the juice Keats charged, there wasn’t a chance this guy would be able to ever pay him back outside of hitting the lottery. “How’d he let you get that deep?”

  Hart buried his face in his hands. “I think he bought my debt from a few other guys.”

  It began to make sense. “He wanted leverage on you. Let me guess, Keats gave you a way to work your way out of that monstrous hole in exchange for what?”

  “You think he’d hurt Melanie or my sister?”

  “What do you think? What did he want you to do?”

  Hart drove his hands into his hair, fists closing like he wanted to rip it out at the roots. Jake nodded to Bear who stepped forward and clamped his giant paws on Hart’s shoulders, digging his fingers under the collarbone. A painful yet effective way to get the reluctant to talk. Hart jumped in his seat and groaned.

  “He hasn’t even applied any real pressure yet. I’ve seen him snap a man’s collarbone like a chicken wing. You want some help? You want us to protect you? Your girlfriend? Maybe even your sweet little mom and dad in Phoenix? Start talking because they�
�re in the danger zone.”

  “Okay, okay,” Hart moaned. Bear released him and stepped around the table to Jake’s side. “A year ago, this goon came to my front door and told me Keats bought my debt, like you said. He wanted a down payment, or he would break my fingers.”

  “Did he?”

  Hart winced. “Just my pinky. I can still hear the snap. I gave him the thousand I won that afternoon playing craps, and he said he’d be back in two weeks for five thousand more or he’d take care of the other nine fingers.”

  Jake knew damn well what the snapping of bones sounded like. He must have broken dozens of fingers in his time working for Keats, in addition to some arms, legs, and knees depending on Keats’s mood when he gave Jake his marching orders. Those echoes of snapping bones drove Jake to get out from under Keats in the first place.

  “When the guy showed up, I didn’t answer the door because all I had was a couple hundred bucks I borrowed from a friend, telling him my car broke down. The guy kicks in my front door and finds me hiding in the bedroom. But, instead of breaking anything, he said Keats had a proposition for me.”

  “What was it?” Jake asked.

  “I can’t tell you; he’ll kill me.”

  Bear stepped forward, raising his hands like claws. “Keats is the least of your worries, right now.”

  Hart blinked away tears. “Jesus. How did I get myself into this?”

  “What did he propose?” Bear asked, lip curled in a snarl, each word a question by itself.

  “He didn’t actually. This good-looking woman shows, and she makes the pitch. Nice lady who explained they needed a little work for a lot of money and my problems would go away.”

  “Let me guess,” Jake said. “Her name was Marta.”

  Hart’s jaw dropped, and he nodded. “I freaked out when they showed her picture on the news this weekend. But what could I do?”

  “What did they want?”

  “A back door into the system.” Hart raised his shaking hands. “A little coding. I swear, that’s all I did. I don’t know what it was for. They wanted me to work with this guy and write the code for something they called Blackbird.”

  Jake squinted. “A back door into what system?”

  “I don’t know. Some software system supported by Trajor’s network. They barely gave me any information to work with.”

  “What for?” Bear asked, palming the table and relaxing the claws.

  “I don’t know. I swear to God I don’t know. I met with some guy and Marta a couple of times, and we worked out the logistics of it. Don’t even know his name. I delivered my part to him and haven’t heard from anyone until you showed up.”

  “What guy?”

  “I don’t know, haven’t seen him before.”

  Jake gazed at the observation window, staring at his own reflection off the silver glass. Why would Keats buy a bunch of debt to gain access to a medical system? That was way out of his standard fare of crooked shit.

  “When did you finish your little project, Jerry?” Jake asked.

  “Took me five months to figure out how to do it and a month building the code to execute it. I delivered to the guy last week. Friday, I think. Right before someone strangled Marta.”

  Jake reached into his pocket and pulled out the photos from Connelly’s basement. He thumbed through a couple before selecting the one of Sokolov and laying it on the table in front of Hart. If his hunch was right, Hart would get at least one of these.

  “You seen this guy before?”

  “No,” Hart said with a quick response. “Doesn’t look familiar.”

  Jake pulled out the next photo and placed it on top of Sokolov’s. “This is the guy you met with, isn’t it?”

  Hart took one glance at the photo, his face lighting up, jabbing at the picture with his index finger. “Yeah, that’s him. That’s the guy.”

  Sean Mack. Hart just identified Sean Mack.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Foster led the way out of the interrogation watch room to a conference room down the hall, a few doors from where they left Jerry Hart to ponder his precarious future. Jake and Bear took seats at the table while Foster and Stone thumbed through pages of notes, trying to figure out where to begin.

  “We gonna talk, or sit here with our thumbs up our asses and look at each other?” Bear asked after a full minute of silence passed.

  “What are you thinking, Foster?” Jake asked.

  Foster opened and closed her thin lips a couple of times then searched for answers in the ceiling. After a minute, she plopped in a chair and tossed her notepad on the table, while Stone leaned against a wipe board mounted on the wall.

  “I’m thinking this shit is getting complicated,” she said.

  “Let’s draw it out,” Stone suggested, snagging a dry erase marker from the tray at the bottom of the wipe board. “I’m a visual person anyway. Let’s start with dumbass in the interrogation room from Trajor and his buddy Sean Mack at MedFire. We know they were in cahoots on some project called the Blackbird.” Stone drew two circles with their names inside and connected it with a hard line. “We now know Hart is an American boy who shouldn’t gamble but has some telecom engineering skills. What about his partner, Mack?”

  “According to my informant,” Jake said, “Mack is or was with the SVR in Moscow. A spy working in the US for MedFire. I know they are into the medical field, but I don’t know much else.”

  Bear read off the Wikipedia page on his phone. “MedFire Corporation is an American supplier of IT solutions software. Their products network fourteen thousand facilities around the world with eighteen thousand global employees.”

  “IT solutions software.” Stone rolled his eyes. “At least that narrows it down.”

  “Then there’s Sokolov,” Foster said. “Ex-KGB, also a member of the SVR, and on Connelly’s dead pool list. Keats indicated Sokolov was working on something called Blackbird. I’m guessing it had to be whatever Hart and Mack worked on.”

  “A backdoor into what system, and what’s it supposed to do once it’s in there?” Stone drew a bigger circle around Mack and Hart and wrote Sokolov’s name at the top.

  “Add Marta up there. She was a handler for Russian spies on the ground in the US,” Jake said. “Hart corroborates that with his story, though I don’t think he’s a Russian spy any more than Bear is going to get back to his high school fighting weight.”

  “Dickhead,” Bear grumbled.

  Stone drew a circle for Marta inside Sokolov’s circle next to Hart and Mack. “Can we assume she’s part of Sokolov’s ring?”

  “I think that’s safe given her ties to Russia,” Jake said. “Where does our arms dealer, Fisher, and your dead FBI agent in Iowa fit into it?”

  Stone wrote the two names to the side with question marks for each. “I’m not sure. Whatever Sokolov is working on sounds computer based, software and back doors. Fisher was a gunrunner, pure and simple. Agent Blake investigated the Russian mafia. Maybe the two are related, maybe not.”

  “Doesn’t smell like they are,” Bear said. “I mean, Fisher could have been supplying guns to Sokolov and his crew, but I’d be scared as hell if numbnuts Hart waved a gun around. I’d bet dollars to donuts the kid hasn’t fired one in his life.”

  “Then there’s Keats,” Jake said. “Keats buys Hart’s gambling debts to control him, to direct him. In my years with Keats, only one other guy got that deep with him.”

  “What happened to him?” Foster asked.

  “You don’t want to know, and I’m glad I wasn’t the one who dished out the punishment. I heard it was fucking medieval. But, if Keats paid out that much money, he’s expecting a giant payoff. He’s gotta be working with Sokolov on this deal.”

  Stone wrote Keats name above the Sokolov circle and drew a line connecting the two. He wrote two more names outside the circle. “And we can’t forget your girl Angela Connelly and her son. How does she tie into this?”

  “What’s to tie in?” Bear asked. “She�
��s married to Connelly.”

  “Yeah, but Connelly killed her,” Foster said.

  “But Peter Pickering placed Sokolov leaving the area of the crime.” Jake raised an eyebrow. “Doesn’t sound like Connelly killed Angela after all. Maybe Sokolov did it to get to Connelly.”

  “And took Connelly’s kid.” Bear pressed to his feet and strode to the board, tracing the threads with his finger. “Did anyone ever look at Angela Connelly?”

  Jake shrugged. “Cursory review, but nothing in depth. Why?”

  “What did she do? She work?”

  “My guy said she was a schoolteacher at one point, but I don’t know if that’s current. She didn’t talk about it.”

  Foster jumped up. “I’ll check the file.” She disappeared from the room, and the remaining crew threw around ideas, but nothing stuck. Fifteen minutes later, Foster burst back in the room. “Angela Connelly quit teaching after a year and went to work at MedFire. Guess the name of her boss.”

  Jake cranked his head to the side. “No way. Sean Mack?”

  Foster winked. “You got it.”

  “Holy bat balls,” Bear said. “That’s a game changer.”

  Jake’s finger danced in the air as he worked through the puzzle. “She worked for Sean Mack and is married to Andrew Connelly who has photos of these players in his basement. That is one hell of a coincidence.”

  “Shit,” Foster said. “Could Connelly have hooked up with her because she worked for Mack?”

  “That and maybe Sokolov killed her because she found out something she shouldn’t have.” Bear rubbed his temples. “This is making my headache.”

  “I think Andrew Connelly is killing these people off.” Jake focused on the circles and lines on the wipe board. “He had the names in the red notebook and their photos in the basement. Both Angela and Christopher said he’s spoken in a foreign language, and the writing in the notebook was Russian. He has a fake birth certificate and his college degree is bogus. I think it’s safe to assume Sokolov is on Connelly’s kill list too. And, based on those gruesome pictures, we know he’s capable of doing it.”