Misled

by Anderson Harp

  He waited for more, but she fell silent.

  “Sounds like there’s something more to it.” He sensed she had something else to say, but was hesitant.

  “This is a very virulent strain of the virus.”

  “So, the foxes are screwed?”

  “It’s more than that.”

  “What?”

  “Well,” she began, “like I said back at the lake, animals can catch the virus from eating infected flesh. They don’t necessarily have to be bitten.”

  He nodded, picturing the wolves in Snag and near his cabin.

  “Think about the Yukon. It may be the last place in the world where the people are so connected to their food.” She took a sip of the coffee and sat it back down on the table. Then Karen did something unusual: She looked off in space as if considering the weight of her words. “They live off of the land.”

  “So?”

  “So, if an Inuit kills a diseased animal and then eats it, he’s got rabies.”

  “Oh, shit!”

  He was impressed how seriously she took her work.

  “I can fly you up there.” Will expected a no and he got it.

  “No, the CDC helicopter’s going to run me up. I have some traps I need to carry, and they can load them up here at Stevens.”

  “I had a visitor last night.”

  “Really?”

  “Someone I knew in the Marines.”

  “A friend?”

  “Not really.” Will paused. It wasn’t the time or place to go into Newton’s history. “He may have lost his son and he blames himself.”

  “Can you help?”

  “I don’t know if there’s much I can do.” Will wasn’t expecting to get involved. As the father told it, he assumed his son was dead. At the very least, Todd Newton was absent without leave and probably would face charges when he resurfaced. The Marines had told his father that Todd was last known to have been talking to another woman Marine about a computer conference. They had been ordered not to go. Todd’s car had been found not far from the location of the convention, his computer notebook still in the backseat. Both Marines held top-secret clearances, which may or may not have had something to do with their sudden disappearance.

  “Oh.”

  “He got the idea from Moncrief that I could be of help.”

  Karen shook her head and smiled despite herself. She knew Kevin Moncrief as a member of Will’s team that had rescued her from captivity in Somalia. “With friends like that…huh?”

  “Apparently, the gunny has me as the go-to guy for hopeless missions.” Will said it with a grin, but he really did intend to have a talk with the retired gunnery sergeant.

  Will’s cell phone rang. “I need to take this.” It was, of all things, a call from Kevin Moncrief.

  She nodded. “No problem. I’m going to get back to my work. I’ll be in Snag starting tomorrow,” she told Will as he turned to leave. “For some time.”

  * * * *

  “Gunny?”

  “Can you talk?”

  “Hold on.” He strode quickly through the halls, past the guard, and out of the CDC complex to his truck. “What’s up?”

  “Did you talk to Newton?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t want to criticize Moncrief for siccing Newton on him. At least not right now. Better to tell his old friend in person. “I told him I couldn’t help.”

  “How’d he take it?” asked Moncrief.

  “Not well, but he knows I’m no miracle worker.”

  In truth, Wade Newton had been devastated. Clearly, he had viewed Will Parker as his son’s last chance.

  “Well, there’s something he may not have told you.”

  “Oh, yeah? How do you know?”

  “Because otherwise you might have said yes.”

  Will held the phone away from his face and stared at it for a second. “What didn’t he tell me?”

  “That Lance Corporal Todd Newton has a friend from his MOS school who’s hot on the national radar.”

  “In what way?”

  “Did you follow the news story a year or so ago about Michael Ridges?”

  “The computer guy that worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency?” Will leaned against the tailgate of his pickup. The weather had cleared and suddenly Alaska was going into a warm spell. It wouldn’t last, of course. Moreover, a “warm period” in Alaska meant the mercury might climb slightly above zero degrees.

  “That’s the one. Apparently, the two missing Marines may have kept in contact with Ridges after he defected.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know, but you can bet they’re in deeper trouble than just ‘missing’.”

  Moncrief was right, but for the wrong reasons.

  Chapter 19

  The Casa on the Coast

  The sound of feet on the steps alone had become enough to make Todd Newton nauseated. A harbinger of what was to come.

  The larger man came through the door, walked up to Todd huddled on the bed, and grabbed him by his blood-soaked shirt. The slap came down hard on the side of Todd’s head. It caused a louder ringing than usual in his ears. Stars flashed in front of his eyes as he tried to pull away from the blow.

  “Time’s running out,” the man said in his now-familiar Hispanic accent.

  The other man joined him and unlocked the chains, and they proceeded to drag Todd upstairs to the room with the bright lights. Todd tried to hold back, but the nauseous feeling overcame him. He started to throw up blood, gagging as he gasped for air, made difficult by the repeated bludgeoning that had crushed his nose. He gasped for air in short bursts through his mouth, sounding like a waterboarded prisoner.

  “Mierda!” The man dropped Newton as the spit-up blood covered his boots.

  As Todd lay helpless on the floor next to the chair, he realized that the cold tile floor had a black, sticky substance covering it.

  They dragged him up and into the chair.

  Todd could barely hold his head upright.

  “You’ve talked to Ridges. We know this.” The big man hovered over Newton.

  “No.” One of Todd’s eyes was now completely shut. With the other, he looked at his captor.

  “Your friend said the same thing.” Todd noted the killer’s use of the past tense. “But you both were in VPN networks.”

  “We just did that. Nothing to do with Ridges.” Todd babbled the words. He had played with the virtual private networks such as Tor, but never really connected with Ridges. That was not what he wanted to hear.

  Whatever Ridges had done with the whole deep web system, he’d left his two classmates out of it. The problem was, Todd’s captors didn’t believe him when he said it.

  “We don’t know! Please believe me.” Todd’s efforts were more a plea than a confession. He gasped for air between the words and tried to make himself intelligible to the two men.

  “Your friend said the same thing.”

  Todd knew then that she was gone. He slumped down and fell into himself. It mattered little what his captors thought. He couldn’t give them what didn’t exist. He’d be following his friend shortly.

  “Fuck you!” he spat at the man.

  The blow came instantly and sent him reeling over the chair and into pitch-black darkness.

  Chapter 20

  FinCen Headquarters

  Virginia Peoples had the answer.

  “I need to print this out.” She pushed the print button and waited while the machine spit out the paper. She grabbed the hard copy and headed upstairs. Her boss worked two floors above, though he spent most of his days in meetings. It was one reason that she didn’t want a promotion. She enjoyed being in the trenches. It was the puzzle needing to be solved, not the administration of paperwork, which she enjoyed.

  Virgini
a sat outside the boss’s closed office door, waiting for the chance to grab him for just a second. She played with her cell phone while waiting.

  Need some cat food, she thought. She pulled up the Safeway app on her phone and looked at her notes. With the cut-and-paste feature, Virginia was able to list everything she needed and have it delivered to her apartment in Arlington by the time she got back from work later that night.

  Just gotta get home in time.

  Last week she’d arrived home after the grocery delivery, which had been left with her neighbor. Her neighbor, in turn, had locked the groceries away and she hadn’t been able to get them until the next morning. And there was no supper in her refrigerator tonight. The neighbor meant well, but not everything was refrigerated.

  She was working her way through dairy when she heard the door open. Several analysts were leaving his office. She knew them all.

  “Hey,” she said to each until the last one left, then turned to her still-seated boss. Darrel Byrd was not the boss she had wanted. He wore starched button-down shirts with sharp creases in his khaki pants. And his personality was just as rigid. She would watch him make efforts with anyone who was perceived to help his career and the others were to be ignored. She was to be ignored.

  “You got a minute?” She could tell from his facial expression that the next answer would be a lie.

  “Sure.” He didn’t sound very excited.

  “This Cayman bank is dirty.” She put the printout on his desk in front of him.

  “Why?”

  “The flow of money goes to the UAE, but it also goes elsewhere.”

  “Okay. So?”

  She knew that this wouldn’t be a surprise to him. It always goes elsewhere. And it invariably led to evil.

  “They’re using the deep web, but the screen sizes match someone I ran across months ago.”

  Communications and transactions on the deep web could not be broken into, but they did leave certain traces or tracks that could give hunters insight in who was communicating. The tracks were certain varieties of data, and these could be collected and compared to data relating to other communications. Commonalities between data could, in theory, give Virginia clues as to who was using the deep web to make the deposits and withdrawals in question.

  One such datum was the screen size of the inputting computer. Comparing such small clues required a lot of legwork, but sometimes they led to big discoveries.

  “Let me run this by the other agencies.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’ll see what we turn up.”

  Neither Virginia nor her boss realized that what they turned up would be more than they wanted to know.

  Chapter 21

  Off of the East Coast of Baja

  Despite the season, the waters of Bahia Agua Verde were both warm and calm. The bay was a part of the Gulf of California, or Sea of Cortez as some called it, that separated Baja California from the mainland of Mexico.

  The fishing vessel El Volante worked its way north up the inner coastline from La Paz. To the east, the Baja coast remained dark at night, with only a few houses dotting the remote, desert coastline. The full moon lit the water as if it were midday.

  “What’s that?” The captain pointed to a white object that glowed on the surface of the water just off of the port bow.

  “It’s not moving.” The first mate grabbed a hook.

  The El Volante slowed as it approached the object. It bobbed up and down in the water as the fishing boat’s wake passed by the slowing object and overtook it.

  “Slow down.” The first mate stuck his pole out over the gunwales and felt the hook stick into the object. From a distance, it felt a little like the remains of a sea mammal. He began pulling the object in.

  “What is it?” the captain hollered down to the main deck.

  The first hand was on his knees, on the deck, throwing up.

  * * * *

  “Can you tell with the photograph?” The detective from the La Paz police department looked at the photo.

  “Yeah.” The photographer held the computer up and pressed the enlargement key. The photograph filled out the screen.

  “So, what do we know?”

  “Female, Caucasian, probably in her twenties, but no head, no hands.”

  “Probably CJNG. I understand they’ve been moving to the north.”

  The detective wasn’t surprised. The violence had been increasing in the Baja for years now. It was, at one time, the sleepy desert where Americans would go to pitch their tents or set up their RVs and eat lobsters for three bucks. The Jalisco cartel, known as CJING, was a result of the merger of the remains of several other cartels that had lost their leadership in several bloody battles over the splits. It had grown from a small operation in the Mexican states of Jalisco and Colima to other states and even found its way into Mexico City. They were most famous for gunning down the politicians that had the nerve to run on any platform calling for the elimination of the cartels.

  “Look at this.” The photographer had enlarged the upper back of the torso.

  “A bull?”

  “The words… I can barely make them out.”

  “Thundering Third?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.” The detective hit the expand button again. “But I know what that means.” Another part of the tattoo came into focus.

  * * * *

  Wade Newton caught the news article on his Bing cell phone summary while waiting for the final unloading clearance of his FedEx Boeing 777 at JFK. His aircraft had just returned from a run to Moscow and Wade was ready for a few days off. The trip to Alaska had been a waste of time and he was exhausted.

  Body found in Sea of Cortez. He hit the button to expand the story. The police theorized the body was of a woman in her early to mid-twenties. Newton went into the crew office of FedEx and started making some phone calls. The FedEx network of pilots reached deep into Mexico, as well as around the world.

  La Paz had three FedEx offices and a small crew at the airport. Shortly, he was on the phone with the detective. He was lucky. The detective’s brother worked for FedEx in La Paz. Newton needed a lucky break and finally got one. Because the police were willing to follow any leads, Newton received the photograph of the tattoo in a matter of minutes.

  Newton also knew what the Thundering Third meant. He placed another call to a retired Marine gunnery sergeant. It didn’t take a Marine to know what the other tattoo said with the letters USMC imprinted on the body, but both together said who the woman on the slab was.

  “I need his help.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Gunny Moncrief wasn’t going to make any promises. He knew when Will Parker chose a course, it was hard to steer him in any other direction. It required a good reason. He caught Karen Stewart just as she was getting ready to return to the Yukon, packing her gear for another long stay in Snag.

  “Is he going with you?”

  “Not on this one,” she said.

  This was key information for the gunny. It meant that Will would have no excuse when he was pushed to help.

  His next call caught Will Parker at the Whitehorse airport, setting up the retrieval of the crashed Otter.

  “They found a body in Mexico.”

  Will didn’t immediately react.

  “Newton called.” Moncrief waited for a reaction. He knew that Will and Newton had some history, but not enough to trump the man’s son being in danger.

  “Okay, so was it Newton’s son?”

  “No, it was a WM. She had tats with 3/1. It has to be the lance corporal with Newton.” The 3d Battalion of the 1st Regiment was the same unit that Will and Moncrief had supported with air and artillery fire in the Storm.

  “Not sure it changes anything.”

  “Well, her other tat was the
Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. There was no head or hands.”

  The head and hands missing was brutal but also practical—it made it much more difficult to trace the body. Except for one thing: Her killer had stupidly left intact the one identifying trait that ensured an immediate identification with the right people.

  “If the boy is alive,” said Will, “he will need some help.”

  The gunny smiled. Will was in.

  Chapter 22

  Dulles, Virginia

  “I need you to check on something.” Alexander Paul hadn’t talked to Caldwell since he had returned from ITD headquarters on the West Coast. “Get in.”

  “Yes, sir.” Caldwell climbed into Paul’s black Escalade as it pulled out of the garage. The vehicle had been custom-built, perhaps a carryover from Paul’s days as director of the DIA: The chassis, window, and tires were bulletproof, and the backseats were separated from the front by a soundproof panel. The oversized 6.2-liter V8 engine effectively transformed the armored SUV into the equivalent of a speedy tank.

  “Two Marines have been missing from Camp Pendleton for a couple of days,” said Paul. He wore an Augusta green polo shirt, tan slacks, and a blue blazer over the polo shirt. He rarely looked so casual, but it was a Palm Beach–relaxed look. He had that smell of an expensive aftershave that would cost someone like Caldwell a day’s wages for the bottle.

  Caldwell nodded and waited for him to continue.

  “The Marines worked with an IT man that was my assistant when I was at DIA.”

  “Ridges?” Caldwell knew about the incident that had destroyed Alexander Paul’s DIA career. And he suspected that he was striking very close to a nerve by even speaking the name.

  “That’s right.” Paul didn’t seem to care to comment about Ridges, the ghost from his past who would never go away. “You’re well informed.”

  “Yes, sir.” It might have been a mistake for Frank to answer so quickly. He was learning that Paul needed to be the one who filled up the pause in conversations.

  “My assistant will text you the information on the two. I want you to go to Camp Pendleton and see what you can find out.”